Rebuilding from the Outside

It is to be expected that the astute reform-minded statesmen and stateswomen inevitably try their trade outside their borders/countries. They become interventionists, eager to control progress.

Desire to control is natural, but difficult to practice in a well functioning society, so they engage in rebuilding of another state. Their ideals duly take them in the direction of total reform. With a stated goal of liberation of so and so, they advocate, even mandate, a better government over there than they could ever effect here, in their own countries. Such outside reformers are called political consultants*; they can be hired or are imposed (there is no clear line between the two), and are triggered by failed or excessively tribal regimes.

Consultants are human and have their own interests (as do their home countries), but they are supposed to have good intentions. They come from well established democratic republics** with imperialist past or present, and get paid well for consultations. They are as universal as suicide: a fact of life. Their respective home countries have enormous influence through money and accrued street credit of modern democracy. This influence cannot be contested or negotiated, because otherwise there would be no money coming in for the said reforms, which a wannabe recipient needs to do in order to regain respect and future money. Consultants stand to gain potentially enormous additional money through positioning themselves to be the first to a big slice of a service or an industry of the rebuilding state. The new regime of which owes them, or thinks it owes them this opportunity, to ensure continued support.

Control that the consultants and their home states can exercise in rebuilding a country whose regime they just helped topple can never be exercised in their own states. They effectively become top managers. The problem is that such managerial control has neither a positive outcome nor is true to the reformers’ ideals. Their nihilism is carefully concealed even from themselves. Lenin and Trotsky*** share the same part of the spectrum: morally righteous, but politically destructive because it unwittingly invites thuggery as a reaction.

[see related post Klintonova: CG primer za ceo region below: "Prava veština je, naravno, imati demokratiju, a ne skinuti gaće."]

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[*] They have  political clout, or so they claim; if there is any clout, it is short-term, dependent on the party in power to which they have allegiance in their home countries.

[**] No one hires fascist consultants, although that could make for a good skit.

[***] James Burnham's character arc is a good mirror - from a Trotskyite and Trotsky's personal friend to writing The Managerial Revolution (which opens with a quote from the [sic] April 1, 1537 letter by Machiavelli), and later Suicide of the West.