How to Create a Low-Legitimacy Government

Or, "The country formerly known as Britain"

Nobody agrees about anything these days, but we all agree that our governments have extremely low legitimacy. In America, just ask Democrats what they think about Trump or Republicans what they think about Biden. In Britain, talk to the working-class men who are cutting down surveillance cameras all over London, or people on either side of the Brexit/Remain debate.

This does not mean we’re merely upset at the current Prime Minister, or in America that “Trump is not my president.” It means something far worse than that.

So you should probably stop whatever you’re doing — not at your leisure, but right now — and take 90 minutes to listen and absorb what this means: The UK government is following its own textbook example of how to create a low-legitimacy government.

Because if David Betz is right, it means we all have about five years to prepare for the fallout of the coming British civil war.

Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London, and I wish he was joking. Reach your own conclusions about what he says, but he’s not joking.

Legitimacy is a kind of magic that makes the government work. It is THE key variable that determines whether your cost of government is high or low. If you have high legitimacy, then your cost of government is very low. People tend to do the correct thing voluntarily and your symbols of power are in fact powerful. So, coats of arms, flags, policemen’s badges, these things have a kind of material power in a high legitimacy system because that magic is working.

When legitimacy collapses, then your government costs are very high. You have to police everything, you have to watch people because they won’t do the right thing. Indeed, if people are really pissed off, as soon as they’re unobserved they’ll do the wrong thing. They’ll do things to further kludge up the system because they’re angry.

The government’s response to the London camera vandals has been, “All vandalised cameras are replaced as soon as possible.” Kludge fixed, right?

Wrong. Because no one is addressing the reason for the vandalism. Which only makes the government even less legitimate in the eyes of the vandals.

Once things get really serious, you switch off the electricity … I feel it is very likely, if not inevitable, that enough people are going to ... start breaking the surveillance architecture on a rather large scale, and so that isn’t just going to be cutting down cameras … but rather larger than that.

Oooh. You mean my home will lose power for a couple hours? That sounds scary!

Uh. No. It means turning off power to an entire city by vandalizing the electrical grid (here in U.S., we have seen dress rehearsals of that very thing) or gas pipelines.

To collapse the major cities through physical infrastructure attack, with a view to causing cascading crisis in those cities which will lead to systemic failure and a period of mass chaos.

Oooh. You mean white supremacists are going to collapse major cities?

If your city collapses, and all you care about is the skin color of the perpetrators, then maybe you deserve what happens after that even if your neighbors don’t.

For too long, citizens of the West have been told by our governments that a) we must care about other cultures more than our own; and b) we’re racist if we don’t. By this rhetoric, immigrants understand their new host country is racist, and people born there are divided against each other. The result is ever-dwindling legitimacy for the government of said country.

What you should care about is how to begin restoring legitimacy to the government you live under, because people don’t try to collapse governments they see as legitimate. And yes, I mean that as many people as possible — regardless of their skin color, ethnicity, religion, or anything else — must feel like their lives matter to their government.

Yeah, that’s a tall order. The alternative is, well, civil war. Do you want civil war?

For Britain, Professor Betz says, buckle up. You’ll have a second chance if the civil war doesn’t happen within five years. But your government waited too long to fix its mistakes, and now the people will pay.

There’s no way out for the government. Either they restore their perception of legitimacy somehow, and that’s going to be very difficult, it will take a generation to accomplish if they start today, which they show no sign of doing. Or their costs of government are going to climb very substantially while their wealth goes down. You can work out the mathematics of this. It will become a very much more heavily policed society, which is very much poorer than it is. And those are the conditions that give rise to rapid, potentially highly violent social rupture.