Ignore real power at your own peril
During the holidays I re-read “Coup D’Etat – A Practical Handbook” from Edward Luttwak. Published in 1968, and revised in 2016, it is still an insightful and entertaining read. It is also practical to a degree that it has been verifiably used for coups, as well as for preventing them. In a kind of “Learning from the worst”-approach, parts of it are also instructive for political intrapreneurs.
Key questions that Luttwak raises are “What is power?”, and further, “Where is power?” In a state, and similarly in a party, power is always distributed (which we show in our spherical model of political parties).?
But there are conditions where the formal centre of power is not the same as the real centre of power. In such a situation, to paraphrase Luttwak, it is impossible to seize power within a party “if the major source of political power is not there to be seized”. In consequence, “the seizure of the supposed political centre will not win the battle”.
A present example is the crisis of the US House Republicans, and their problems with their right-wing Freedom Caucus that for now blocks the elections of a Speaker to extort far-reaching concessions–and basically has brought US democracy to a halt. They are, for the time being, the real centre of power. Under such conditions, Luttwak writes, a coup, or really any kind of transformation, can only work "with the approval of the greater ally".
It is clear that “greater” does not necessarily mean bigger, but more powerful–in fact, the greater ally may sometimes even be just one person. More generally, there are three types of potential “real power centres” to be reckoned with; two of those amount to a “party within a party”:
In federalised systems like Germany or Austria, regional branches are sometimes so powerful that they control their national parties.?
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Particularly in two-party systems with thin majorities, small sub-sections like the Freedom Caucus mentioned above can become the real centres of power.
Sometimes the real centre of power is located outside the party altogether–e.g. a union for leftist parties, or an association or religious organisation for rightist parties.
Political intrapreneurs ignore real power at their own peril. If the real centre of power gets ignored, the transformation is doomed to fail. The only two enabling conditions are either their consent, or their neutrality. The political intrapreneur, then, must win them over as ally, or neutralise them.?
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