By now, many of us have probably seen the footage of North Koreans weeping over Kim Jong-Il’s death. I don’t have any particular insight into the situation in North Korea, nor do very many people in the West.
What strikes me, though, is how little curiosity most people seem to have about how something like that can happen. The level of analysis we get generally stays at a comic book level: there are countries that are not free, where evil dictators oppress people. But how? Where does their power come from?
Okay, they control the army — but why should the army obey them? They control the country’s wealth — why doesn’t someone just kill them and take the wealth for themselves? It’s not like these dictators walk around in full body armor all day long. If everyone supposedly hates them, why don’t their servants or bodyguards just murder them as a public service?
I’m not saying that such analysis doesn’t exist anywhere — but in the general public sphere of the liberal-democratic West, there’s just no room to talk about such things. We know where power comes from in our countries: people fill out the proper forms, etc. Outside of that legitimating process we call democracy, there’s only sheer violence (as though Stalin could have personally beaten the shit out of everyone who disobeyed, for instance).
In a way, the analysis of “oppressive regimes” is similar to the liberal-democratic vision of religion. Since religious forms of reasoning don’t follow the norms of liberal-democratic deliberation, they must be nothing but sheer oppressive authoritarianism. And indeed, a “personality cult” like the North Korean regime seems to unite both into one seamless package.
But why should people submit to such a regime? To say that it’s rule by fear is to beg the question, because no single ruler or ruling cadre is personally able to threaten an entire nation with violence — they already must have legitimacy of some kind among the people with the weapons, i.e., the people who would presumably have the least reason to be fearful.
The reason the liberal-democratic public sphere cannot admit such questions is that doing so would mean admitting that liberal-democratic forms of legitimation are not the very definition of legitimation. Kim Jong-Il and Qaddafi and whoever else must have had some form of legitimation, as shown by the very fact that they were able to exercise power. Their regimes may have used “hard power” more than your average liberal democracy (though perhaps we should ask some of our vast number of prisoners what they think about that), but no system of rule can persist for long without some form of “soft power.”