Welcome everyone to the Mona Charn Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I am delighted to welcome my friend

Jonathan Rouch today for a timely discussion of corruption. John, thank you so much for joining me. I forgot to say you write for

the Atlantic, and you are an author of a number of excellent books, which I have learned so

much from and touted endlessly. And a senior fellow at Brookings. And a senior fellow at Brookings. There we go.

Okay. We've got your whole CV. You wrote a piece back in February that was one of the more

important pieces, I think, that has been written in the second Trump era.

And you set out to describe what we're in, and I'm going to let you spell that out for our

listeners. What kind of a regime are we in?

The word for it, a multisolabic nightmare, is patrimonialism. So the genesis of this

article is that we have been trying to figure out for a long time. Is Trump an authoritarian?

Well, he seems awfully disorganized if he's an authoritarian and he doesn't seem all that interested in some of the

authoritarian hallmarks. He's certainly some kind of populist, illiberal populist, but we were trying to figure out.

So what is this we were seeing? Because it's on the one hand, extremely familiar and on the other hand didn't fit our standard 20th century boxes.

That problem was solved for me by a book published middle of last year by a couple of political scientists named Steve Hansen.

And forget the first name, but Copstein is the second.

It's called the Assault on the State.

And they draw on the work of the famous early 20th century sociologist Max Weber.

And he said that before you had modern democracies and modern countries with their big bureaucratic expert governments,

the standard form of government was patrimonialism. Weber called it that because patrimonialism

gets its legitimacy, not from elections, for example, but from the head of the state being

kind of the symbolic father of the country.

But what Weber noticed about patrimonialism is its defining element is that its principle is that the government, the state, is the personal property

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