Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma When Dealing with a Charismatic Autocrat

The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma When Dealing with a Charismatic Autocrat

A single pawn separated from a group of pawns.

Canva Images

Excerpt from To Stop a Tyrant by Ira Chaleff

In my book To Stop a Tyrant, I identify five types of a political leader’s followers. Given the importance of access in politics, I range these from the more distant to the closest. In the middle are bureaucrats. No political leader can accomplish anything without a cadre of bureaucrats to implement their vision and policies. Custom, culture and law establish boundaries for a bureaucrat’s freedom of action. At times, these constraints must be balanced with moral considerations. The following excerpt discusses ways in which bureaucrats need to thread this needle.


The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma When Dealing with a Charismatic Autocrat

There is a dilemma the bureaucrat dealing with an autocrat may face. Leaders and followers always interact within a specific context. In democratic societies, the strongman or autocrat is typically elevated to office in periods when the populace is experiencing social anxiety, economic uncertainty or external threat. They are primed for the message of a charismatic autocrat who promises them easy answers to difficult problems and targets the existing government as the problem for inaction.

While the charismatic populist is using and inflating the existing anxieties, there is often an element of truth to what they are saying. The people may be wondering why the government can’t do something to ease their anxieties or deprivations. The government can in fact do so, but it rarely moves quickly and dramatically. Its established processes, some mandated by law, some by rules and regulations, others by custom, often require the input of many constituencies and coordination between a number of different agencies and layers of government. This requires meetings, hearings, comment periods, collaboration, compromise and documentation, all of which take time.

A short-term value of the populist autocrat is that they do not hold themselves to these protracted processes. With little respect for diverse perspectives or conventional norms, they tear through the maze of obstacles and seek to ram through solutions. This is a two-edged sword. On one side of the blade, this cuts through cumbersome process and accelerates muscular responses to the conditions creating anxiety, earning the support of the populace. On the other side of the blade, ramming through solutions weakens the institutions designed to equitably assign resources to programs and populations, and opens the process to large scale corruption that is difficult to document.

The principled bureaucrat is committed to preventing the latter, but must be politically astute about not thwarting the former, which has the support of the populace. This is not a task that responds well to purists. The bureaucrat will need to walk the line to support rapidly easing the burdens of the populace while maintaining the integrity of the institution and its processes.

Refusing orders that violate human rights

The greatest responsibility for correct followership to political leaders resides in a special class of bureaucratic followers — the military, law enforcement, and intelligence services. There is a conundrum here. Those who serve in these authorized vehicles of State power must be willing to use force, and at times lethal force, at the command of legitimate political leadership, yet also need to be the most willing to disobey if the order is illegitimate.

In liberal democracies, the oath taken is to defend against all enemies of the constitution, internal and external. But in the case of a de facto or actual coup, both sides will claim legitimacy regardless of objective reality. How will military personnel, intelligence, or law enforcement officers recognize the true defender from the usurper?

The usurper of political power violates the essential values that protect individual freedoms and collective decision making, supposedly in defense of the State, while undermining their very core. The classical meaning of the term “liberal values” must be understood and differentiated from attempts to distort and degrade its meaning. Classical liberal values are the sacrosanct protections of individual freedom to think, speak, write, associate, congregate and live free of arbitrary government coercion. The only legitimate constraints on these rights are where their use denies or abrogates the same rights for others.

Interestingly, these rights conferred upon all human beings living within a society are not fully given to the bureaucrats themselves, or to the armed enforcers of the law and protectors of national defense. In those capacities, individual rights are subordinated to the constraints and responsibilities of the role they are serving. It would be chaotic if everyone in a government agency were freely giving their opinion to the media of the correct interpretation of events, policies and preferred strategies. Or enforcing their own interpretation of laws and regulations. There is merit to norms and rules that require government policy positions to be systematically developed, communicated and executed.

To thwart or support?

Bureaucrats know there are a variety of tools that can be used to thwart policy changes or implementations. Morally, this is again a two-edged blade. If being used to delay or block patently immoral policies one can argue the justifications for these tactics. But in a liberal democracy this is also a problem. The government is elected to formulate policies. If this is done in reasonably fair, transparent and lawful ways, it is not the place of the bureaucracy to thwart those policies.

But what about when the elected government operates in deceitful, secretive and unlawful ways — in other words as a proto-tyrannical government? What is the bureaucrat’s responsibility?

If the politics are still largely democratic, the offending government can be turned out of office in the next election cycle. Bureaucrats aware of this, may choose to slow walk, stall and delay policy approval or implementation to mitigate damage. The ethics of this can be argued, but the use of procedural power is part of the politically savvy tool kit. If the government retains power in a fair election, bureaucrats are faced with complying or, in egregious situations, resigning on principle. Continuing to sabotage the government undermines the representative government they are seeking to defend.

If the democratic political process has been eviscerated by an autocratic regime, reducing it to a mere fig leaf, how does the ethical equation change? It is in this situation that “just following orders” is a crime and followership is tested at its moral core.

Pull quote on the military trials that followed the defeat of Nazi Germany

It is in the window where the abuse of power is evident and documented, but before power is consolidated, that the bureaucrat needs to act. Once power is consolidated, senior positions will be filled with cronies, adjudication processes will be nullified or packed with lackeys, media channels will be suborned or shuttered, political opposition will be silenced.

The bureaucrat who has played it safe in their career is thrust into a moral role that is anything but safe. Their core principles tightly interwoven with political awareness, are needed if they are to walk with head held high (and still attached), through the minefield being lain by the proto-tyrant.

Taking the liberty to degenderize the words of the great playwright, political dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, they remain highly salient:

Vaclav Havel quote


Ira Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “ To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.

Read More

elections
Report: Party control over election certification poses risks to the future of elections
Brett Deering/Getty Images

The Trump Administration’s Efforts To Undermine Election Integrity

The administration’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., on a limited basis tests using the military to overthrow a loss in the midterm elections. A big loss will stymie Project 2025, and impeachment may perhaps loom.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the president have said L.A. is “prelude to what is planned across the country,” according to U.C. Berkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Chemerinsky reports that on June 8, “Trump said, ‘Well, we’re gonna have troops everywhere.’” The Secretary of Homeland Security recently announced that in L.A., “Federal authorities were not going away but planned to stay and increase operations to ‘liberate’ the city from its ‘socialist’ leadership.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Is Trump the Wizard of Oz? Behind the Curtain of Power, Illusion, and a Constitutional Crisis
Getty Images, bbsferrari

Is Trump the Wizard of Oz? Behind the Curtain of Power, Illusion, and a Constitutional Crisis

“He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”

In February 2025, Donald Trump posted a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte on Truth Social, generating alarm among constitutional experts.

Keep ReadingShow less
A Wealthy Congress Doesn’t Reflect American Constituents

US Capitol

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

A Wealthy Congress Doesn’t Reflect American Constituents

Imagine being told from a young age that your life is already written: the jobs you’ll hold, the obstacles you’ll face, the limits you’ll never cross. What you’re born into is what your life will be. For millions of Americans making a low wage, that’s the reality. Democracy, in theory, is supposed to offer a way out — a chance to shape your own future. That’s the “American dream.” But for too many, it remains just a promise, out of reach. When children grow up believing their circumstances are permanent, they inherit a cycle instead of a chance.

I know this tension firsthand. On paper, I might look like I fit the mold of opportunity: white-passing, educated, and building a career. But beneath the surface, my story goes beyond that. I grew up in a low-income, mixed-race household with a Hispanic father and a white American mother. In my family, the paths laid out were often blue-collar jobs, teen pregnancy, addiction, incarceration, or worse. None of my three sisters graduated from high school, and no one in my immediate family attended college. I became the exception — not because the system was designed for me but because I found a way through it.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump’s Imperial Presidency: Putting Local Democracy at Risk

U.S. President Donald Trump visits the U.S. Park Police Anacostia Operations Facility on August 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker

Trump’s Imperial Presidency: Putting Local Democracy at Risk

Trump says his deployment of federal law enforcement is about restoring order in Washington, D.C. But the real message isn’t about crime—it’s about power. By federalizing the District’s police, activating the National Guard, and bulldozing homeless encampments with just a day’s notice, Trump is flexing a new kind of presidential muscle: the authority to override local governments at will—a move that raises serious constitutional concerns.

And now, he promises that D.C. won’t be the last. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia—cities he derides as “crime-ridden”—could be next. Noticeably absent from his list are red-state cities with higher homicide rates, like New Orleans. The pattern is clear: Trump’s law-and-order agenda is less about public safety and more about partisan punishment.

Keep ReadingShow less