Social organisations are inherently small-c conservative, in that over time, they tend to become more cautious, more inclined to stick with what has gone before, and less open to radical change. This applies all the way from small community organisations to the governments of countries and leadership of huge businesses. But why?
The leaders of those organisations perceive that their own role as leaders will be less threatened by “more of the same” than by the attempted implementation of radical change. There is rarely any cusp point upon which to denounce an established leader for pursuing the same policies which are perceived (by the “received wisdom”) to have worked in the past.
If the perquisites of the leadership role are sufficiently compelling, there will be an overwhelming incentive to choose to preserve the “status quo” rather than adopt radical measures which carry a measurable risk of failure, and thus possible loss of status for the leader. The perks of leadership might include a generously paid position, access to the levers of control and power, deference from others due that control and power, staunching of accurate information flow, and protection from negative consequences of bad decisions. As they say, “It’s good to be King”.
Unless there is some overwhelming new external factor at hand (the “barbarians at the gate”) it will always feel safer for the incumbents to continue with previous policies, perhaps with only a few small adjustments which can be publicised as addressing any issues raised by internal opponents. More radical change is always off the table: the “Overton window” remains constrained, and any compromise solution is the one which maintains the perks of every faction.
Once duly protected by the perks of power, the incumbents find little resistance to policies which increase their perks still further. More money. Less accountability. Sexual favours. Jobs for relatives and lovers.
In organisations with weak or non-existent democratic feedback, the self-serving nature of the leadership can reach grotesque levels: the resistance of the Catholic establishment to addressing child abuse among its priests; the ongoing persecution of journalists by the US government for truthfully reporting the crimes of that government; the oblivious disdain of Louis XVI of France or Tsar Nicholas of Russia before the revolutions that swept away their monarchies.
It is almost impossibly hard for those at the apex of power to empathise with those at the bottom who are the victims of their self-serving decisions: they live in different worlds, they don’t attend the same social gatherings, their kids don’t attend the same schools. It’s still comfortable at the top, even when those at the bottom are starving or dying.
The layer of people just underneath the apex are given just enough of the perks to buy their loyalty: some “pork barrel” payments to secure their loyalty, in each case a decision made not because it is the best option for the mission of the organisation or country as a whole, but merely because it helps secure the power base of the incumbents.
Once the organisation is routinely making its decisions based on maintaining the dominance of the leadership cadre, the actual mission of the organisation will suffer. When true, but politically inconvenient, facts are suppressed, the lower level functionaries will start making wrong decisions, as their decisions are based on leadership propaganda rather than reality (eg Lysenkoism). The pork barrel investment will rarely be the economically most optimal investment. Over time, an increasing share of the organisational resources will go to enrich the internal power bases, rather than further the mission of the organisation. Anyone of integrity or honesty within the organisation will either speak out and be ejected (cf Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr) or else become dishonest in order to prosper within the system. The cancer of self-serving decision-making will propagate its way down the organisation, until almost no one has loyalty to the mission of the organisation, and everyone is now solely focussed on how much they can wring out of the organisation for themselves. The organisation itself may stagger on for a while, but the mission of the organisation will fail.
The quintessential modern example is the government of the USA.
The un-elected part of the US Government is full of the usual set of managers concerned with winning a promotion or a bigger budget for their department. But unlike most businesses, any poor decision-making will not lead to a loss of customers or income: citizens cannot choose a different government and cannot choose not to pay their taxes. Because there are no profitability incentives, any decision whether to retain, promote or fire a particular manager is more likely to be made on political or cultural grounds: are they “one of us”, do they “toe the line”? The safe decisions will always be the decisions to protect the incumbents, and not rock the boat.
In contrast, the elected parts of the US government are inevitably responsive to the desires of the US elite, because it requires so much money to get elected. Once you have been elected, you need to do what your donors want, or else you won’t get funded for your re-election campaign (never more than 4 years away). The famous Princeton study found that most of the time, US government decision-making and funding was in the interests of the US economic elite, and this remained true regardless of which party nominally controlled the government.
Unlike in the UK, where each government proposal (bill) is about a single subject and gets adopted or denied based on its own merits, the standard practice in the USA is now for “omnibus” bills which are huge, cover a vast range of subjects, and are packed with pork-barrel “earmarks”. Typically they are compiled by the party bosses, far too long to read, and implemented on one “Yes or No” vote, with no time for amendments. The congress-people and senators can either support the omnibus bill or else go against their own party (and the pork of their colleagues). Unsurprisingly these bills get voted for along party lines, pretty much regardless of what’s actually in them.
It should be no surprise that this process fails to deliver for the vast majority of the population. While it is the party bosses who compile the omnibus bills, the detailed text is often supplied by the special economic interest groups whose funding is supporting the elected members of the majority party: pharma companies writing the healthcare paragraphs, etc. Even were the congress-people to want to defend the interests of their voters, they have no viable mechanism to do so.
But it gets better (or worse!): the special interest groups (pharma companies, military manufacturers, etc) fund the campaigns of their preferred politicians, and pay them for consultancy services; while in office those funded politicians vote for bills which direct a larger proportion of government expenditure to those same companies; and those companies in turn use that larger income stream to increase their funding of their loyal politicians. Everyone inside this circle wins. Public government money is laundered through large companies and then funnelled back into the private hands of politicians.
The only losers here are the taxpayers who give their money to the government, and see little in return if they don’t have a politician on their payroll. It explains why the physical infrastructure of the USA is crumbling while the US gives billions to other countries. It explains why healthcare is twice as expensive in the USA as anywhere else, with health outcomes are worse then other rich countries. It explains why the USA spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined, despite not having had to defend its own borders for over 100 years.
So when you read that the US Government has given another $10billion to Ukraine for its war with Russia, you should not imagine someone giving Zelensky a big cheque, or pallets full of dollar bills. Instead you should envisage the US Government giving another $10billion worth of purchase orders to its own weapons manufacturers. And those weapons manufacturers will now be able to maintain, or perhaps increase, their donations to the election campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats who support the Ukraine war. Everyone in this circle wins. The losers are the million people dead in Ukraine.
One of the reasons why Trump is such a threat to the US establishment, is that he is already wealthy on his own account, and therefore has no need to be in the pocket of the elite donor class. Unfettered by any financial patrons, he can actually do things which are in the interests of the general population, even where those things go against the interests of the established political classes. So in Ukraine for example, he is likely to insist on a partition, where everyone who wants to be part of Russia (such as the Russian majority in the Donbass) can have their lands join Russia, and everyone who wants to be part of Ukraine, can stay part of Ukraine. The war ends. Missiles stop flying. People stop dying. The US government doesn’t need to give away any more $10billion’s to foreigners, and can spend it on US citizens instead. The only losers here are the politicians and the shareholders of the military manufacturers.
To be clear, this is not a narrative in favour of the Republicans over the Democrats. 60% of the US population would like to see the stranglehold of the two-party system broken. But as noted above, there is no chance of that happening, as the incumbents will not allow it. These turkeys will not vote for Christmas.