📢 ECPS Interview 🌏Prof. Jeffrey Kopstein: Trumpism, Better Understood in Patrimonial Terms, Treats the State as a Family Business ✍️ Interview by Selcuk Gultasli In this incisive ECPS conversation, Professor Jeffrey Kopstein (@JeffreyKopstein -- University of California, Irvine) argues that Trumpism is best understood not simply as #Populism but as #Patrimonialism — a system in which “the state itself becomes an extension of the ruler’s household.” ⚖️ Rather than merely manipulating electoral competition, patrimonial leaders seek “not simply to tilt the playing field, but to own the entire field.” 🏢 Public office becomes monetizable. 🤝 Loyalty replaces expertise. 💼 Governance turns into what he calls “a family business.” 📉 Drawing on Max Weber, Professor Kopstein explains how institutional hollowing begins when career survival depends on pleasing a patron rather than serving an impersonal office. The critical threshold arrives when the distinction between public and private interest starts to seem “quaint.” 💰 In such systems, proximity to power outweighs market entrepreneurship. 🛡️ Scandals may reinforce authority rather than weaken it. ⚖️ Courts persist but become conditionally autonomous in political cases. 🚨 Coercion becomes personalized rather than bureaucratic. 🌍 Even foreign policy can function as regime maintenance by other means — transactional, theatrical, and loyalty-driven. 🔎 Professor Kopstein's conclusion is clear: democratic resistance cannot rely on scandal, courts, or collapse. It must instead target structural vulnerabilities — succession anxiety, elite fragmentation, and governance failure. A sharp theoretical intervention into the study of #Authoritarianism, #DemocraticBacksliding, and the transformation of modern governance. 📕 Read the interview: 🔗 populismstudies.org/prof-kop… #Trumpism #StrongmanPolitics #InstitutionalHollowing #Democracy #PatrimonialRule #Patrimonialism #StateCapture #EliteControl #SelectiveImpunity #PersonalizedPower #MonetizationOfOffice #ConditionalJudiciary #EliteFragmentation #MaxWeber #ECPS

Hmmm, in addition to #MayorMokatsane, who recklessly uses the ‘k’ word, and gets away with a limp apology, there are a string of thuma mina/New Dawn mayors in the Free State who are immune to stepping aside. Is that what the #NewDawn stands for: #SelectiveImpunity??