Who's Next & Why?

That's "A million dollar question" an idiom or a form of colloquial speech in many parts of the English speaking world. As is "first things first" used to tell someone that more important things should be prioritized before less important matters.

That said, a Kingmaker is a person or group that has great influence on a royal or political succession, without themselves being a viable candidate. Kingmakers may use political, monetary, religious, and military means to influence the succession.

Kingmaker is also often applied to people who while exercising a degree of influence, and being in a position to help a person to power, are not able or do not attempt to exercise a significant level of control over the picked King or ruling leader.

Leaders of a nation play a great role in deciding the future of the nation and are responsible for the nation’s progress. A nation can progress only through decisions of learned and educated leaders. Many nations fail because they have leaders with less knowledge and intellect to make the right decisions for the country.

Whereas, succession, in general, means following another. In legal parlance it means succeeding to the rights of another. An order of succession or right of succession is the sequence of those entitled to hold a high office such as head of state or an honor such as a title of nobility in the order in which they stand in line to it when it becomes vacated. This sequence may be regulated through descent or by statute.

Unless of-course Salic law, a form of agnatic succession, restricted the pool of potential heirs to males of the patrilineage, altogether excluding from the succession females of the dynasty and their descendants, is stipulated. Salic law was applied to the former royal or imperial houses of Albania, France, Italy, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Prussia/German Empire. It currently applies to the house of Liechtenstein, and the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan.

That said, in republics, the requirement to ensure continuity of operations at all times has resulted in most offices having some formalized order of succession. In a country with fixed-term elections, the head of state (president) is sometimes succeeded following death or resignation by the vice president, chancellor, or prime minister, in turn followed by various office holders of the legislative assembly or other government ministers.

In many republics, a new election takes place sometime after the "presidency" becomes unexpectedly vacant. In states or provinces within a country, frequently a lieutenant governor or deputy governor is elected to fill a vacancy in the office of the governor.

Although, Hereditary succession in modern Autocracies is described by some as a hereditary dictatorship, or family dictatorship, in political science terms a personalistic regime, is a form of dictatorship that occurs in a nominally or formally republican or socialist regime, but operates in practice like an absolute monarchy or despotate, in that political power passes within the dictator's family.

Thus, although the key leader is often called president or prime minister rather than a king or emperor, power is transmitted between members of the same family due to the overwhelming authority of the leader. Sometimes the leader has been declared president for life and uses this power to nominate one of his or her family as successor.

A family dictatorship is however different from a monarchy (where the descent is required by general constitutional law), or a political family (where members of the family possess informal, rather than formal and overwhelming political authority).

Leadership succession holds yet another proposition that the father–son imagery adds an element of elective familial lineage ties in domestic succession.

Personalist leaders are political leaders who rely on charisma and their ability to mobilize and direct the masses of citizens outside the authority of constitutions and laws. Personalist rule is just one distinct mould of autocracy. Other types of authoritarian systems include single-party regimes and military autocracies.

Forms of government in recent years have fallen into authoritarianism, a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime, individual freedoms are subordinate to the state, and there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law. Authoritarian regimes can be autocratic, with power concentrated in one person, or can be a committee, with power shared among officials and government institutions. The political scientist Juan Linz synthesized authoritarian political systems as possessing four qualities:

Limited political pluralism, realized with legalistic constraints on the legislature, political parties, and interest groups;

• Political legitimacy based upon appeals to emotion, and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat enemies of the people, socio-economic underdevelopment, and guerrilla insurgency;
• Minimal social mobilization consequent to legalistic constraints, such as political suppression of all anti-regime activities;
• Informally defined executive powers, which extend and allow government authority into every sphere of life.

An authoritarian revival some may say! From 2005 to 2015 observers noted what some called a "democratic recession" (although some, like Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have disputed this theory).

In 2018 Freedom House declared that from 2006 to 2018, "113 countries" around the world showed "a net decline" in "political rights and civil liberties" while "only 62" experienced "a net improvement."

Writing in 2018, U.S. political journalist David Frum stated: “The hopeful world of the very late 20th century, the world of NAFTA and an expanding NATO; of the World Wide Web 1.0 and liberal interventionism; of the global spread of democracy under leaders such as Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela, now looks battered and delusive."

Former Member of the Canadian House of Commons, Michael Ignatieff wrote that American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama's idea of liberalism vanquishing authoritarianism "now looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar moment".

By 2018 only one Arab Spring uprising in Tunisia resulted in a transition to constitutional democratic governance, and a "resurgence of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism" in the region was dubbed the "Arab Winter".

Explanations offered for the new spread of authoritarianism by supporters include excessive immigration into European and Western countries, and the "primary and existential fear" of the "surrender" by liberal democracy of "national sovereignty and independence".

Others credit the downside of globalization, and the success of the Beijing Consensus, i.e. the authoritarian model of the People's Republic of China.

In at least one country, (the U.S.) factors blamed for the growth of authoritarianism include the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and slower real wage growth; and social media's elimination of "gatekeepers" of knowledge, so that a large fraction of the population considers to be opinion what were once "viewed as verifiable facts” – everything from the danger of global warming to the preventing the spread of disease through vaccination.

All said and done, on the comeback is Totalitarianism, a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. Political power in totalitarian states has often been held by rule by one leader which employ all-encompassing propaganda campaigns broadcast by state-controlled mass media. Totalitarian regimes are often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, restriction of speech, mass surveillance and widespread use of state terrorism. Historian Robert Conquest describes a "totalitarian" state as one recognizing no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and which extends that authority to whatever length feasible.

The concept was first developed in the 1920s by both Weimar jurist (and later Nazi academic) Carl Schmitt and, concurrently, by the Italian fascists. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini said "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". Schmitt used the term Totalstaat in his influential 1927 work on the legal basis of an all-powerful state, The Concept of the Political. The term gained prominence in Western anti-communist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-war anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.

Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian ones. The latter denotes a state in which the single power holder, an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite, monopolizes political power.

Political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were primarily responsible for expanding the usage of the term in university social science and professional research, reformulating it as a paradigm for the Soviet Union as well as fascist regimes. Friedrich and Brzezinski argue in that a totalitarian system has the following six, mutually supportive, defining characteristics:

• Elaborate guiding ideology.
• Single mass party, typically led by a dictator.
• System of terror, using such instruments as violence and secret police.
• Monopoly on weapons.
• Monopoly on the means of communication.
• Central direction and control of the economy through state planning.

Political philosopher Sheldon Wolin coined the term inverted totalitarianism in 2003 to describe what he saw as the emerging form of government of the United States. He analysed the United States as increasingly turning into a managed democracy (similar to an illiberal democracy). He uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to draw attention to the totalitarian aspects of the American political system while emphasizing its differences from proper totalitarianism, such as Nazi and Stalinist regimes.

Wolin argued that the United States is increasingly totalitarian as a result of repeated military mobilizations: to fight the Axis powers in the 1940s, to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War and to fight the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks.

Wolin described this development toward inverted totalitarianism in terms of two conflicting political power centers, namely the constitutional imaginary and the power imaginary. He speaks of imaginaries to include political tendencies as well as existing political conditions. He explains:

A political imaginary involves going beyond and challenging current capabilities, inhibitions, and constraints regarding power and its proper limits and improper uses. It envisions an organization of resources, ideal as well as material, in which a potential attributed to them becomes a challenge to realize it.

Wolin explains that the constitutional imaginary "prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable and constrained". Referring to Thomas Hobbes, he understands the power imaginary as a quest for power that is rationalized by a fear of collective mortality. The power imaginary may "undermine or override the boundaries mandated in the constitutional imaginary" through fears of a dangerous enemy:

A power imaginary is usually accompanied by a justifying mission ("to defeat communism" or "to hunt out terrorists wherever they may hide") that requires capabilities measured against an enemy whose powers are dynamic but whose exact location indeterminate.

The power imaginary does not only reduce democracy within the United States, it also promotes the United States as "Superpower" that develops and expands its current position as the only global superpower:

While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, "inverted totalitarianism." While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a "master race" (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the "ideal."

Food for thought!