Journalists like me spend a lot of time focusing on the leaders of countries. Fair enough \u2014 they set the agenda and need to be held accountable. But it\u2019s the people below them who carry out that agenda. And in the case of autocracies, where carrying out the work of the state can involve tasks like intimidation or even torture, there have long been questions about why anyone would sign up to be, in effect, a sinister bureaucrat.<\/p>\n
Today my colleague Amanda Taub writes about some fascinating research that points to a surprising answer.<\/p>\n
Even the most capable autocrats cannot rule alone. Vladimir Putin has his loyal Russian oligarchs. Iran has the Revolutionary Guards. Viktor Orban built Hungary\u2019s \u201celectoral autocracy\u201d with help from a handful of judges, enforcers and tycoons.<\/p>\n
But the day-to-day work of consolidating power \u2014 perhaps surveilling neighbors, intimidating judges or disappearing dissidents \u2014 falls to a much larger group of midlevel officials. Until recently, researchers assumed those people cooperated out of ideology or fear.<\/p>\n
New research points to a more banal explanation. The same desire for career advancement that motivates employees everywhere turns out to be enough to convince some bureaucrats to enable torture, murder and the slow strangulation of democratic institutions.<\/p>\n
The people who do this dirty work don\u2019t have to be extremists. Often, they are mediocre workers looking for a way to get ahead.<\/p>\n
The mediocrity of evil<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking a Career in Dictatorship,\u201d a new book by the German political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads as if you crossed Hannah Arendt\u2019s ideas about the \u201cbanality of evil\u201d with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.<\/p>\n
The authors built their case on an unusual archive: data from Argentina\u2019s \u201cDirty War\u201d in the \u201970s and \u201980s, when the military published the graduation ranks, promotions and retirements of every officer. That included the members of Battalion 601, an army unit that carried out the regime\u2019s brutal secret police work, including torture and extrajudicial executions.<\/p>\n
Most Argentine military officers who underperformed fell behind their peers and were forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a chance for a do-over. Low performers could transfer in, collect promotions by doing the regime\u2019s most horrific work, and then return to the regular army, leapfrogging the peers who stayed clean. They retired with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar performers who hadn\u2019t taken the career detour.<\/p>\n
The worse an officer\u2019s academic record, the more likely he was to join the unit. The lowest performers were assigned to the most brutal squads, where the career rewards were the greatest. A tour as a torturer could rehabilitate the most disastrous underperformer.<\/p>\n
A common pattern<\/p>\n
Comparable data sets do not exist for most regimes, but the pattern recurs. Scharpf and Glassel found that the Nazis recruited men with disciplinary records, questionable \u201cracial purity\u201d or a lack of military experience for its mobile killing squads, known as the Einsatzgruppen. Stalin\u2019s NKVD, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, \u201cdeliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge\u201d who often had no more than a primary-school education.<\/p>\n
Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State, calls such foot soldiers \u201cloyal losers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don\u2019t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For autocrats who win at the ballot box and then dismantle checks and balances from inside, the mechanics may be less violent, but the staffing logic is the same. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban relied on a few handpicked loyalists at the top, plus a small percentage of ambitious strivers at the midlevel who saw politics as the route to success.<\/p>\n
Attila Vincze, a researcher at Masaryk University, estimates that 5 to 10 percent of Hungary\u2019s Orban-era judges \u2014 \u201cthe careerists\u201d \u2014 were doing \u201cthe \u2018dirty job\u2019 to get along with their career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Venezuela took a more violent path. Hugo Ch\u00e1vez and his successor, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, leaned on the National Guard, which Alejandro Velasco of N.Y.U. called \u201cthe lowest rung of the armed forces,\u201d and on the armed gangs of civilians known as \u201ccolectivos.\u201d After Maduro stole the 2024 election, those units killed dozens of opposition supporters and detained thousands, according to Human Rights Watch.<\/p>\n
The American case<\/p>\n
Frantz sees the Trump administration in its second term staffing security forces like ICE and the F.B.I. with loyalists whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9s would be unlikely to land them such roles under any other president. That \u201ctends to be something that we see once a system has already transitioned to authoritarianism,\u201d rather than one like the United States that is still undergoing democratic backsliding, she said.<\/p>\n
The autocratic playbook, Scharpf and Glassel say, is to set up a \u201csecond ladder\u201d for promotions, resource it generously, signal impunity for those who climb it and lower the bar for entry.<\/p>\n
The administration seems to tick those boxes, even if Trump\u2019s intentions are obscure. ICE is focused on immigration, but Scharpf and Glassel see concerning similarities between the playbook and ICE\u2019s recent history. Its budget will soon dwarf other federal law-enforcement agencies, and the administration publicly promised immunity after officers killed a protester in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n
At the same time, it has become easier than ever to become an ICE agent. A former training academy instructor testified<\/a> that new cadets are graduating despite widespread concerns among training staff that they \u201ccannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Ra\u00fal Castro was indicted in the U.S.<\/p>\n The U.S. Justice Department yesterday announced charges against Ra\u00fal Castro<\/a>, the former president of Cuba and brother of Fidel Castro, increasing pressure on the government in Havana. The charges stem from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes operated by a humanitarian aid group.<\/p>\n Cuba accused the United States of \u201cbuilding different pretexts for military aggression<\/a>.\u201d A U.S. aircraft carrier entered the southern Caribbean Sea<\/a> yesterday in what an American official called a show of force. <\/p>\n Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, is ramping up pressure with an appeal to Cubans to align with the Trump administration, my colleague Michael Crowley reports. Watch the video<\/a>.<\/p>\n A 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar with a deep hole was found in southern Siberia a decade ago. A recent study suggests that the tooth\u2019s owner most likely received a torturous, anesthesia-free root canal with a stone drill to treat a bad toothache. The discovery pushes back the earliest evidence of dentistry by more than 40,000 years.<\/p>\n Politics isn\u2019t supposed to influence the glitzy Eurovision Song Contest, but the competition has long been tinged with it. Indeed, some people wanted the relationships between countries to play a bigger role in voting this year. <\/p>\n This week, after Bulgaria\u2019s surprising win, the director of Moldova\u2019s public broadcaster resigned after backlash to his country\u2019s jury awarding neighboring Romania just three points out of a maximum of 12. And in Poland, two lawmakers complained that their country\u2019s act had not received any points from Ukraine, which they said suggested a lack of gratitude from an ally. Read more<\/a>. <\/p>\n World Cup fever in New York<\/p>\n It\u2019s the summer of football in New York City. With the World Cup set to sweep the region, the city is racing to address a longstanding shortage of places for regular New Yorkers to play.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a million-dollar rooftop pitch in Brooklyn and four restored fields on Randall\u2019s Island. There\u2019s even a man wondering how he can build a field on a ferry. \u201cOnce the World Cup is gone and all the excitement is over, we want to leave a lasting legacy,\u201d said Jennifer O\u2019Sullivan, who works at the New York City Football Club. \u201cYou never know where the next Messi or Ronaldo is going to come from until you put a ball at their feet.\u201d See where the next star might come from<\/a>.<\/p>\n RECOMMENDATIONS<\/p>\n Watch: The comedian Martin Short talks about finding joy while surviving tragedy<\/a> in a new documentary.<\/p>\n Discover: They call Ava Pickett \u201cthe Charli XCX of young playwrights.\u201d Here\u2019s why<\/a>.<\/p>\n Listen: This week\u2019s playlist has new songs from a Danish punk band, the former Beastie Boy Mike D and more<\/a>.<\/p>\n RECIPE<\/p>\n