I’ve had some miscellaneous thoughts about political legitimacy rattling around in my head lately. Nothing coherent enough to set down here, apart from a vague bleg to my readers to point me in the right direction.
At the most basic level, my question is why Stalin ever bothered with show trials. Why even bother with the pretense that this person is confessing, if no one is fooled into thinking that he did it of his own free will? If everyone is aware that his confession was elicited under torture, what’s the point?
Am I misunderstanding the point of the torture, or of the confession? It seems like modern democratic (small-d) society has created a need for at least the appearance of formal legitimacy — the appearance of the rule of law without the actual rule of law. But why? Why can’t totalitarian states just ‘disappear’ their enemies?
Oddly, the nomination of Merrick Garland to take the late Justice Scalia’s seat is reminding me of this. Everyone, I think, acknowledges that “we can’t confirm a nominee in the last year of a presidency” is a garbage reason. It’s fake legitimacy. But why even bother with the simulacrum? Why not just come out and say the truth? The truth is that they hope the next president is a Republican, and they’re willing to wait for Obama to leave.
Of course that question, such as it was, answers itself: no one could be this nakedly cynical in modern democratic America. We need to go through the kabuki theatre of legitimacy.
When Soviet political prisoners confessed under torture, hours before their execution, were there earnest quasi-debates about the honesty of the confession? That is, were there in fact some people who were fooled? Or is this all a grand, depressing, society-wide exercise in motivated reasoning, where the answer (Yuri will be hanged after a fair trial) comes first and the reasoning (he was a traitor to the state who confessed his sins) is enlisted to justify it?
So that’s my first question: is there a term for this fake legitimacy? Is there a term for the change in a political system that requires fake legitimacy?
My second question comes from having just listened to the English Civil War season of the Revolutions podcast (which I’d recommend in the strongest terms). At one point Charles I was compelled to summon 12 lords of the realm (maybe this was the Great Council) to pay for his army. My question is just: what compels him to summon it? What compels a king to do anything, basically? Why can’t the king just act arbitrarily?
The obvious answer is: because Parliament (or the landed aristocracy, or whoever) has its own independent source of strength. The king can’t force them to do anything, because they have guns as well.
My question is: how stable is this equilibrium? The short, simple answer would seem to be: “So long as the Parliament has its own independent source of power, the equilibrium is stable.” How, then, do you build institutions such that it’s a stable equilibrium? How do you guarantee that Parliament remains on roughly equal footing with the king?
The answer might be entirely boring and straightforward: Parliament remains on roughly equal footing with the king so long as people believe it’s so. When legitimacy goes away, it goes away quickly. The only thing, perhaps, keeping the U.S. military from turning its guns on Congress is legitimacy that’s baked very deeply into our society, but there’s no reason that legitimacy has to last forever.
No real conclusions from this. I think I just want to read more about legitimacy in democratic states, as a starting point.
Steve Reads 
Maybe it’s too theoretical but to your second point, I think Pettit talks about legitimacy. Basically, if a state is legitimate, then you’re obliged to work within the rules to change things. But if it’s not legitimate, then you may have leave to work outside the rules. I think for Pettit, a state is legitimate if decisions/actions that don’t benefit somebody are taken as tough luck outcomes from due process, as opposed to just outright domination (i.e. arbitrary exercise of power).
So, in that frame Stalin’s state wasn’t legitimate, because Yuri going to the gallows was an exercise of domination, not any real due process. Stalin may have *wanted* the veneer of legitimacy and thus the veneer of due process was shown to the public. But maybe your first question was more like, “who was the audience for the veneer?” You seem to think it was only the Soviet public, but it might have been aimed at lots of audiences with lots of messages. Like, maybe having the veneer of legitimacy gave plausible deniability for the regime in international relations, etc. Maybe Stalin and the party functionaries were just fooling themselves. Who knows.
In the second question, the legitimacy is more like “Who is going to rule”. The King rules because he has enough guns and power and maybe his friends backing him also have guns/power. As long as the King has enough people on his side, he’s king. If the friends get together behind his back, and they together have more guns/power than he does, then they get to set the agenda.
As to the third point, the US government is still seen as pretty much legitimate because enough people probably buy into a Pettitian-type of line or, more weakly, are just following custom since the status quo is not bad for their day to day lives (basically, why upset the apple cart?).
I guess maybe the over arching question is when is the “tipping point” reached where enough people feel a current regime is no longer legitimate and the system falls into some kind of revolution/coup. The answer there probably: When enough of the right people think so. Where “right people” is people who have the means to do so.
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