Similarities Between Organized Crime and Authoritarian/Totalitarian Governments

Donald Trump has been compared to a gangster many times, both in how he operates and how he thinks, including here on the Establishment Bar.

In many ways, he has the traits of a gangster as well: egotistical, selfish, short-tempered, and cruel.

Although Trump undoubtedly has some cunning when it comes to riling up a mob, tapping into his supporters ugliest emotions, and intimidating people, he is remarkably shortsighted and impulsive. Trump is someone who thinks in the short term, lacks discipline and focus, and has a history of doing quite badly in school.

Traits common to those who enter the world of organized crime.

To be fair, for gangsters, those who make it to the top are legitimately good at managing complex operations, knowing how to keep heat off of them, and having some control over their worst impulses—in addition to being willing to employ extreme violence.

The Trump administration was in many ways what having a gangster as president would be like: incompetence, chaos, vindictiveness, and, most of all, corruption reigning supreme.

This would be especially apparent when that leader also lacked the knowledge, experience, and judgment to navigate complex commercial and governmental spaces.

I am of the opinion that organized crime in all forms is a scourge that must be destroyed whenever possible. Unlike how they portray themselves, gangsters are not people who are rough around the edges with hearts of gold; they are instead vicious criminals who both exacerbate and cause certain systemic problems, like corruption.

Organized Crime as a Symptom and System

But today I am looking at organized crime in two ways: a symptom and a system.

In a way, most organized crime organizations, from minor street gangs all the way to powerful crime syndicates like the Sinaloa cartel and La Cosa Nostra, operate like authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

The foundation of their power is entirely controlled violence, and their ethical codes are set up to ensure the well-being of the organization, not their members.

For example, personal drug use and sleeping with the wives of other members are frowned upon in organizations like the Mafia or Yakuza—not because these organizations care about the effects of drug abuse or the dignity of women, but because they care about their members operating effectively and keeping social discord under control.

Putin offers us another example. Ways that organized crime operates like Putin’s regime include running territories into the ground by ruthlessly extracting value from business and other enterprises, having no respect for the territory’s people, and having similar cycles of downfalls.

Most critically, crime bosses will prioritize loyalty over competence to protect themselves, just as Trump and other authoritarian leaders have done.

But more importantly, if organized crime is thriving, that often means far bigger problems are at play.

For a crime syndicate to reach the levels of power that the Mafia reached in New
York in the mid-twentieth century or drug cartels have done in Latin America, several conditions are ideally present: a highly corrupt or otherwise ineffective law enforcement and legal system apparatus (oftentimes both), extreme stratification, fairly limited social mobility, a culture where violence is acceptable as a casual way to solve problems, a reliable illegal revenue source, and, most importantly, a vacuum of legitimacy.

Ideally, you will want intelligence, law enforcement, and military professionals out of work because their employer collapsed or is in freefall, along with a deeply ingrained culture of misogyny.

Now, these vacuums can happen for a variety of reasons, such as deep institutional problems like corruption and overall weakness of the government, or the government can straight up collapse, as the Soviet Union did.

The point is that if a region is at the mercy of any type of organized crime, there are deeper and more systematic problems afoot that need to be addressed, such as corruption or a government that is otherwise ineffective.

The Point

Anyone remember the Trump presidency?

The constant chaos, corruption, incompetence, and constitutional crises?

Well, that is the reality of having a gangster in charge of your government.

But just as how Trump and what he represents is an aggravating symptom, so is organized crime.

Ultimately, both scourges require systematic solutions involving waging a war on poverty, badly needed fixes to the criminal justice system, and strengthening trust in our political institutions.

However, it should be noted, as Victor the Crab did a while ago, that there is a vital difference.

If a mob boss ran his organization into the ground like Trump did, there is a good chance he would be sleeping with the fishes.

Yet the Republican party is still loyal to him.

So Trump, in many ways, is more like a cult leader than a gangster.

Stay frosty, everyone.