Deep in the human heart lies the longing for a dictator. Someone to straighten out the mess the politicians have made. Someone to round up the chisellers and the thieves. Someone to end all the bickering and cut through the red tape. A Caesar. A good czar. A man on horseback.
Even in modern, democratic societies, there is a grudging admiration for the efficiency of the autocrat. Mussolini made the trains run on time, didn't he? And Hitler got Germans working again. They may have been monsters, we tell ourselves, but by golly they got things done.
Vladimir Putin, for all his faults, is making Russia shape up in ways that the crapulous Boris Yeltsin never could. The authoritarian Chinese seem to build superhighways overnight, while the democratic Indians merely talk (and talk and talk) about building them.
But take a look at the record, and the claims made for the efficiency of autocrats quickly fall apart. Most of them are terrible bumblers.
Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf had a firm grip on power until he fired the chief of the Supreme Court last spring, an act of breathtaking hubris that angered fair-minded Pakistanis and set off the democratic movement that led to the return, then assassination, of Benazir Bhutto.
Iraq's "wily" Saddam Hussein turned out to be the Inspector Clouseau of tyrants. He plunged his country into a futile war with Iran that took eight years and cost a million lives, invaded Kuwait only to be tossed out by the countries he had counted on not to respond and then concealed the fact that he did not, in fact, possess weapons of mass destruction — a revelation that would surely have forestalled the invasion that robbed him of his power and eventually his life.
Fatally prone to disastrous miscalculation — think of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, or Hitler's on the Soviet Union — authoritarian regimes are often inept at the day-to-day business of government too. Whether Mussolini really made the trains run on time is a matter of dispute (some historians say that upgrades to the rail system by previous, democratic government deserve the credit). What is clear is that his boasts about the rapid progress of the muscular new Fascist Italy were mostly empty bravado. "In reality, behind the scenery of modernization and industrial investments, millions of Italians still lived a life of prehistoric squalor, and most of the fundamental problems of the country had been left practically untouched," the great journalist Luigi Barzini wrote later.
INEPT LEFT, INEPT RIGHT
Hitler's Germany was much the same. Behind the image of jackbooted efficiency, the Third Reich was a bit of a shambles. With his disdain for bureaucracy and faith in the power of personal will, Hitler overrode the ordinary machinery of government and appointed favourites like Hermann Goering to key economic and political posts. A welter of competing power centres emerged, often working at cross-purposes. What looked from the outside like a highly organized and centralized state under a single, all-powerful leader was in fact a species of "authoritarian anarchy."
Partly as a result, Germany failed to achieve the massive feat of economic organization that was needed to win a long war. The supposedly feeble and poorly organized democracies, notably Britain and the United States, were far better at reordering their economies for sustained conflict.
Totalitarian regimes of the left proved to be equally ham-handed, if not more so. In its early years, the Soviet Union looked like a marvel of economic efficiency, producing new dams, canals and factories that seemed to prove the dynamism of a system in which every enterprise was planned and controlled by the state. "I have seen the future and it works," the American journalist Lincoln Steffens exclaimed after a visit to Russia in the 1920s.
