The rise of the "loyal losers"

Fascinating new research on who serves autocrats (actual and aspiring) and why.

There are few sensations more pleasurable than having one’s prior assumptions confirmed with new evidence. It has always seemed to me that a prime imperative behind revolutionary regimes is the desire of marginalized individuals who were not succeeding in the ancien regime to find better career prospects by defenestrating the old elites (sometimes literally so).

I certainly felt vindicated reading a New York Times article with the infelicitous headline: “Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.” It reports primarily on research by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, who studied the military officers who carried out repression on behalf of the Argentinean military junta in the 1970s-1980s. I’m not particularly interested in the Argentinean regime, per se, but these findings apply to many autocracies, actual or aspiring—including more recent regimes such as Trump’s America, Chavez’s Venezuela, Putin’s Russia, and Orban’s Hungary (before Orban lost office).

In brief, Scharpf and Glassel studied one particular Argentinean secret police unit—Battalion 601 of Army Intelligence—which did much of the dirty work in the “Dirty War” against liberals, leftists, socialists, trade unionists, and a few actual Communists. (The generals claimed all of their critics were “terrorists”—sound familiar?) Because the Argentinian army kept meticulous personnel records, it was possible to determine the graduation ranks and other data of the battalion’s personnel.

The Times sums up the findings:

“For the most part, the Argentine military operated under a meritocratic ‘up or out’ system. Officers who underperformed early would fall behind their peers, and eventually be forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a detour around that meritocracy: Low performers could transfer into the secret police, spend a few years earning promotions there and then return to the regular army, often leapfrogging over peers who had stayed with the regular forces. Men who took the detour ended up with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar individuals who stayed in the mainstream military units.

“The worse an officer’s academic record had been at the military academy, the more likely he was to join Battalion 601. And once inside, the lowest performers were assigned to the most brutal units, carrying out the day-to-day tasks of torture and murder, work that was so morally repugnant that it carried a serious risk of both social stigma and psychological trauma. But that meant that the career rewards for doing it were the most valuable. A stint as a monster could rehabilitate the most disastrous underperformer.”

The article quotes another political scientist, Erica Frantz of Michigan State University, who describes these individuals as “loyal losers.” What a perfect label! These were people who were not necessarily fanatics. They were simply interested in getting ahead, and had no scruples or compunctions about how to do so. Actually they might have had a few scruples to begin with, but their qualms disappeared as they got deeper and deeper into the dirty work—the assassinations, the torture—they were committing. Before long, they were too complicit to stop and had convinced themselves that whatever they were doing was exactly the right thing to do to save the country from some secret threat.

This resonates with what I have read about regimes such as Soviet Russia, Communist China and Nazi Germany. Even their leaders—Stalin, Mao, and Hitler—were outcasts under the old regime. But the overthrow of the previous political system allowed them, and countless henchmen, to gain power and to reap the rewards—as well as to often suffer the dire consequences of losing a power struggle or a war.

We are seeing a milder version of the same phenomenon in MAGA America. While the first Trump administration had a number of well-qualified appointees, they soon fell out of favor with Trump and either left or were fired. In the second Trump term, the president has been careful to appoint people who are chosen not on merit but on willingness to do whatever he wants, no matter how unwise or even illegal. In other words, “loyal losers.”

Few of the individuals in senior positions in this administration would have had comparable jobs—or any jobs—in any prior administration. Kash Patel, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Seb Gorka, Peter Navarro, et al., would never have gotten close to power under any normal president. (The most obvious exceptions—Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—are, relatively speaking, moderating forces.) But obviously we are not living in normal times.

The Trump administration is very bad for America and for the world, but it’s very good for its loyalists—until, of course the president tires of them and they find themselves out of a job. (Where are Kristi Noem, Cory Lewandowski or Greg Bovino today?) Often having the president turn against them involves being on the receiving end of his social media abuse—or even facing criminal investigation (as with, e.g., Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who was one of those well-qualified first-term appointees). But for those who are willing to take the risk, the rewards are high. Some of his supporters who engaged in outright illegality, such as storming the Capitol, might even be rewarded under a brazenly corrupt $1.776 billion fund designed to compensate supposed victims of weaponized justice.

No doubt some of Trump’s aides are sincere in their beliefs, however crackpot they may be, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that many of them are opportunists who are taking advantage of the MAGA movement to advance themselves and to line their own pockets. That cynical generalization, incidentally, may apply to Trump himself.

The president has repeatedly shown that he is bound by very few fixed convictions other than a desire to massage his ego and enrich himself and his family. (Exhibit A: Trump, after campaigning against more Middle East wars, started a Middle East war.) Trump was wealthy before he ran for president, but he was a marginal figure—the gauche developer from Queens—who was not taken seriously by mainstream New York-DC elites. In the 1980s, the late, lamented Spy magazine mocked him as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” and President Obama even, notoriously, cracked some jokes at Trump’s expense at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner while Trump sat there apparently seething. Many speculate that a desire for revenge was part of Trump’s impetus for his initial presidential campaign.

Trump, in short, may turn out to be the ultimate example of the self-interested imperatives that are often the true driving forces of political revolutions, regardless of what platform they espouse.