Chrystia Freeland

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” That’s a line from “Game of Thrones,” the new HBO television series that is conquering American popular culture.

But it could just as easily refer to the no-holds-barred battles we are watching in Libya and Syria. What is hardest to grasp is how these regimes are both strong and brittle. Their rulers are ruthless dictators prepared to do whatever it takes to stay in power — and for decades that can work. Until, suddenly, it does not.

We are not very good at understanding the win-or-die dynamic of these sorts of political systems: Not so long ago, everyone from the U.S. State Department, to Harvard, to the London School of Economics, to Vogue magazine, to blue-chip Wall Street money managers treated the Assads and the Qaddafis like rulers capable of gradual liberalization and even democratization.

Part of the problem is that the Cold War habit of mind, with its division of the world into two rival, ideologically cohesive camps, dies hard. Its legacy today is our tendency to look for a new, black-and-white division, this time into democracies and dictatorships. (Remember the axis of evil.) But modern dictatorships come in many different varieties. The ones that are collapsing in the Middle East are examples of what political scientists call “sultanistic” dictatorships.

According to Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University in Virginia, the defining characteristic of a sultanistic regime is that it has no purpose apart from maintaining the leader’s personal authority. “A sultanistic regime is one in which the leader of a country has managed to gain control of all the levers of state power,” Mr. Goldstone said. “No one has any secure rights, and the leader rules with absolute authority.”

Richard Snyder, a professor of political science at Brown University in Rhode Island, said sultanistic regimes, which he prefers to call personalistic dictatorships or neo-patrimonial dictatorships, are all about the guy on top. “People get goodies for being close to the ruler. That’s the essence of it,” he told me.

Sultans establish their power by making sure no one else has any — or at least any that is independent of the sultan himself. That means that sultans intentionally hollow out their own government institutions.

“Autocrats in these cases consciously weaken the state, both by filling it with cronies picked more for loyalty than competence and by starving those parts of it not controlled by close allies,” said Lucan Way, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “Thus, in Libya, Muammar Qaddafi severely under-funded the military while ensuring that his sons commanded the most highly trained and best-equipped militias.”

Successful sultans, Mr. Goldstone said, also work to make and to keep their societies divided: “The ideal arrangement is to be supported by many elite groups, none of which are inclined to support one another.”

All of which makes sultanistic regimes particularly awful places to live. The bitter and corrosive sense of personal humiliation that inspired so many participants in the Arab Spring was not accidental — it is central to how sultanism works. “Under a sultanistic regime, because nobody has any rights they all feel humiliated and subject to the whims of the ruler,” Mr. Goldstone said.

But modern-day sultans have an Achilles’ heel. The techniques they use to establish and maintain power make them very, very strong when they are in charge — Mr. Goldstone said that sultans have more personal authority than medieval monarchs did — but they also make their regimes extremely brittle. If a revolution starts, it can succeed swiftly.

“The regime’s supporters are not motivated by any real animating or guiding philosophy,” Mr. Snyder said. “It is not like fundamentalist Islam or communism.”

“The armed forces need to decide: How many of our own people do we need to shoot to keep the boss in power,” Mr. Goldstone said. “If the boss looks strong, the whole regime looks strong. But if the boss starts to look weak, it crumples fairly quickly.”

That is the good news. The bad news is that the brittleness of sultanistic regimes is a mixed blessing — it helps the revolutionaries when they are in the streets, but it complicates the task of nation-building after they win.

A smart dictator of a sultanistic regime eviscerates his country’s institutions; rules by personal fiat, not by law; and creates a divided society in which sycophancy and corruption are the paths to prosperity. Citizens of such societies lack even a shared set of values — they live in what Mr. Snyder called “a belief vacuum.”

That is why it will be neither a failure nor a betrayal if the best the Libyan rebels manage to establish is a weak democracy that is unstable, divided and inefficient. Effective democracies take generations to build. They are the opposite of sultanistic regimes: hard to establish, internally complex and querulous, but enduring.

You do not need a degree in political science to figure that out. Daenerys, one of the heroines of the George Martin fantasy series on which HBO’s TV serial is based, discovers that overthrowing the cruel, slave-owning oligarchies that run a troika of city-states is surprisingly easy. But she despairs when the regimes that replace them turn out to be little better.

It is easy to cheer the fall of the sultanistic dictatorships. Now is the moment to remember to be patient when their humiliated and divided people find it is a struggle to build a government that is not quite so bad.

Maybe we are all thinking too much like Bolsheviks and not enough like Googlers. For Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries, the big question was “Kto kogo?” — essentially, “Who has the upper hand?”

Kto kogo remains the paradigm at the center of the fiscal battles roiling the Western world: young vs. old; rich taxpayers vs. poor welfare beneficiaries; public sector workers vs. private sector ones; wealthy Northern Europe vs. bankrupt Southern Europe; small government conservatives vs. big government liberals.

But a few people — writers, activists, even politicians — are examining the current woes of the Western state through a very different prism. You could call it the Government 2.0 approach, and its fundamental thesis is that the biggest question is not how much to spend and how much to tax, it is how to adapt the state to the information age.

One of the first thinkers to articulate this view was the best-selling author Don Tapscott. Tapscott, who has been arguing for decades that the knowledge economy requires a new style of government, thinks the time for his idea may have finally come.

“If you look at the current crisis, we have the irresistible force for reducing the cost of government meeting up with the immovable rock of public expectation that government should be better, not worse,” Tapscott told me. “Tinkering with this will not work. When you are talking about cutting trillions of dollars, that’s not trimming fat, that is tearing out organs, and we don’t need to do that, and we don’t want to do that.”

“We need to fundamentally rethink how we orchestrate and create government value,” he said. “And now we have a burning platform, which could help us do it.”

Tapscott’s latest book, Macrowikinomics, co-written with Anthony D. Williams, suggests some ways to do that. One of his favorites is releasing government data. That information, he said, can then “become a platform on which private companies, civil society, other government organizations and, crucially, individuals, can self-organize to create value.”

As an example, Tapscott cited a recent conversation with the chief executive of Melbourne. He suggested to her that one way to apply his open-government approach would be to make public all of the city’s information on bicycle accidents and where they happen.

“I said to her, ‘If you release all that data, within 24 hours someone will do a mash-up and you will be saving lives within weeks, and it won’t cost you a penny,”’ Mr. Tapscott said.

Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, a two-year-old not-for-profit group that gives technologists the chance to work in local government around the United States, shares Tapscott’s view. She believes the rising generation of digitally native twentysomethings is creating both a demand for and the tools for transforming how government works.

“There is a certain generation who have grown up being able to mash up, to tinker with, every system they’ve ever encountered,” she said, speaking on the phone from her Bay Area office. “So they are meeting their relationship with government in a new way, with a new assumption: We can fix it. It really signals a new relationship between government and the technology community, but it is also about the government being useful to you in your daily life and engaging you in your daily life.”

Code for America’s fellows — 362 people applied for 20 places last year — bring “user-centered design and agile technology methods” to city governments accustomed to more top-down and more bureaucratic ways of approaching civic jobs.

Like Tapscott, Pahlka believes the key to Government 2.0 is creating data platforms that people can build on — as well as use. It is a redefinition of the relationship between citizen and government that mirrors the way many technology companies have changed the relationship between business and consumer: Just as much of Facebook’s or FourSquare’s value comes from content that users generate, proponents of Government 2.0 want us to participate in creating the government services we use.

“I think there is a big disjuncture between what we are served up as consumers and what we are served up as citizens,” Pahlka said. “As a society, we haven’t spent as much time building the citizen Internet.”

Pahlka’s focus is on citizens and finding ways to help government serve us better. For political leaders, Government 2.0 offers a further benefit: citizens who are more deeply engaged in how government works are more willing to pay for it.

That has been the experience of Naheed Nenshi, mayor of the western Canadian city of Calgary, traditionally the most politically conservative metropolis in the country. Nenshi has been called the Canadian Obama — he was a political outsider elected on a wave of grass-roots Internet activism — and he has brought that enthusiasm for social media into City Hall.

One example is the city’s budget, which Nenshi built from the bottom up, asking Calgarians what they wanted to spend their money on before coming up with his plan.

“I still have a job, I’m not creating a budget by plebiscite,” Nenshi told me. “But I need to have the best possible data, and that includes the best possible data on the preferences of Calgarians.” He added, “Most people in Calgary said: ‘Maintain my taxes, or increase them, but keep my services.”’

Nenshi said his enthusiasm for crowd-sourcing and for data-driven decision-making had frustrated some of his city’s journalists, who preferred simpler black-and-white narratives of one political ideology clashing with another.

Which brings us back to the debate between the Bolsheviks and the Googlers. The technorati can take things too far: Even in the age of crowd-sourcing and monster databases, vested interests still exist, and so do ideological differences. But if we could figure out how to make government as effective as Google, those differences and those disputes would matter a lot less.

We all know there are three important things about real estate: location, location, location. That double repetition, which the late and great word sleuth William Safire traced back to a 1926 Chicago Tribune classified ad, is still with us because it is succinct and true.

You can think about the economic and political woes of the Western world today in the same way. It’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs.

But over the past two weeks the political battles over government debt in Washington and Frankfurt, the street battles in Britain, and the volatility of markets everywhere have obscured that reality. The talk instead has been about share prices, credit ratings, police tactics and political dysfunction.

That’s why Pinched, a book about unemployment published this week by the American journalist Don Peck is so timely and important. Mr. Peck’s central message is that all recessions are not the same. Prolonged slowdowns, like the one the Western world is experiencing today, make their mark not only through the pain they cause while we are in the middle of them. They have a permanent, and largely malignant, impact.

As Mr. Peck argues: “When jobs are scarce, incomes flat, and debts heavy for protracted periods, people, communities and even whole generations can be left permanently scarred.”

Mr. Peck’s warning, which is based on the lingering effects of previous deep recessions, runs counter to the intuitions of the postwar generations in Western Europe and North America whose lives have been a story of fairly steady economic growth.

“The problems that we face are even bigger than we think right now,” Mr. Peck told me. “People assume that, ‘Well, it will be bad for a while, but then it will get better.”’

The sort of metaphors we tend to reach for, to borrow one from the White House, are of the car that was driven into the ditch. It is unpleasant to be stuck in the mud, and pushing it out is hard work, but once we are back on the road it will be full speed ahead.

The better, but grimmer, comparison is to infant malnutrition. Even if that child grows into a well-fed adult, her early experience of deprivation will do lasting damage.

That ugly image is particularly apt because the hardest hit will probably be young people. Mr. Peck spoke to Lisa Kahn, a Yale economist, who found that getting your first job during a deep recession meant a starting salary 25 percent lower than during a boom, and an income 10 percent less 17 years later. Even mid-career, the recession generation not only takes home a thinner paycheck, it is lower down the corporate hierarchy and more professionally timorous.

Mr. Peck’s second key point is that deep downturns don’t just — though no human life is a “just” — blight individual lives or even the lifetime job prospects of a single generation. Living through a lot of lean years changes the entire culture, and not for the best.

Most of his book was written last year and it is largely about the United States, but Mr. Peck’s prediction of societies turned nasty and brutish by hard times will have particular resonance this week in Britain.

“What we know for sure is that politics will become more contentious and life will become more mean-spirited,” Mr. Peck said. “The great risk, I think, is a poisoning of politics, which will create a foreshortening of political action, where any sort of bold plan simply becomes impossible.”

What is important about Mr. Peck’s analysis is that he puts what happens in people’s lives — their job prospects, their lifetime earnings, the shift in family dynamics when one parent is unemployed — at the center of his thinking about economic policy. He really does think the urgent issue today is jobs, jobs, jobs, because the personal catastrophe of unemployment, multiplied a millionfold, becomes a national catastrophe.

All of which may make you assume that Mr. Peck is a deficit dove. While it is true that in the short term he is worried that premature austerity is the greatest danger, he thinks that too much government debt matters as well: “To restore confidence in the federal government without undermining the recovery, we must tie current deficits to binding measures that will close the budget gap and stabilize the national debt in the near future.”

That is the real tragedy of the poisoned political debate Mr. Peck predicts — and which is already paralyzing so much of the developed world. We argue bitterly about jobs versus deficits. But the best — and probably only — way to solve both problems is with a double-barreled strategic approach.

Robert E. Rubin, a former secretary of the Treasury and currently the co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me: “A lot of the commentary distinguishes between addressing the deficit and addressing jobs. I think they are actually one issue.”

Like Mr. Peck, Mr. Rubin believes that an agreed plan to close the deficit in the medium term would actually make a job-creating stimulus program in the short term both more feasible and more effective.

“You can put in place a serious fiscal program, which would generate job-creating confidence, but defer the implementation date,” he said. “In that context you could do a fiscal stimulus, and at much less risk of it being materially offset by an adverse effect on confidence.”

We need to create jobs today — and commit to tightening our belts when the economy starts to recover. It is a simple plan that makes sense to a lot of us. But in the scared, beggar-thy-neighbor world Mr. Peck describes, the public-spirited middle ground this approach embodies may no longer exist.

Tolstoy thought unhappy families were unique in their unhappiness.

But when it comes to countries, these days the world’s gloomy ones have a lot in common. From Fukushima to Athens, and from Washington to Wenzhou, China, the collective refrain is that government doesn’t work.

“2011 will be the year of distrust in government,” said Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations firm.

For the past decade, Mr. Edelman has conducted a global survey of which institutions we have confidence in and which ones are in the doghouse. In 2010, the villains were in the private sector — from BP, to Toyota, to Goldman Sachs, corporations and their executives were the ones behaving badly.

But this year, Mr. Edelman said, we are losing faith in the state: “From the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, to the government’s response to the earthquake in Japan, from the high-speed rail crash in China, to the debt ceiling fight in Washington, people around the world are losing faith in their governments.”

Even the Arab Spring, Mr. Edelman mused, was an extreme expression of the same breakdown in the people’s support for those who rule them.

After that, though, the global parallels start to break down. In our kitchens, on Facebook, and in our public squares, a lot of us, in a lot of places, are talking about how we long to kick the bastards out. But how we act on that angry impulse varies widely. Figuring out when and how our private anger translates into public action, and of what kind, is one of the big questions in the world today.

One answer comes from Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist. One of Mr. Krastev’s special interests is in the resilience of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century. To understand why they endure, Mr. Krastev has turned to the thinking of the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who was born in Berlin in 1915 and eventually became one of America’s seminal thinkers.

In 1970, while at Harvard, Mr. Hirschman wrote an influential meditation on how people respond to the decline of firms, organizations and states. He concluded that there are two options: exit — stop shopping at the store, quit your job, leave your country; and voice — speak to the manager, complain to your boss, or join the political opposition.

For Mr. Krastev, this idea — the trade-off between exit and voice — is the key to understanding what he describes as the “perverse” stability of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. For all the prime minister’s bare-chested public displays of machismo, his version of authoritarianism, in Mr. Krastev’s view, is “vegetarian.”

“It is fair to say that most Russians today are freer than in any other period of their history,” he wrote in an essay published this spring. But Mr. Krastev argues that it is precisely this “user-friendly” character of Mr. Putin’s authoritarianism that makes Russia stable. That is because Russia’s relatively porous dictatorship effectively encourages those people who dislike the regime most, and have the most capacity to resist it, to leave the country. They choose exit rather than voice, and the result is the death of political opposition: “Leaving the country in which they live is easier than reforming it.”

Nowadays, the Chinese find little to emulate in Russia. That includes flavors of authoritarianism: Theirs is the more carnivorous variety, including locking up dissidents, rather than encouraging them to leave, and censoring the Internet, rather than allowing the intelligentsia to be free but ignored.

Mr. Krastev’s thinking suggests a perverse possibility — that Mr. Putin’s slacker authoritarianism, while less able to deliver effective governance than the stricter Chinese version, may actually prove to be more enduring. The recent outburst of public rage in China over the high-speed rail crash is one piece of supporting evidence.

Mr. Hirschman came up with his theory of exit and voice in the United States, and he believed that exit had been accorded “an extraordinarily privileged position in the American political tradition.” That was partly because the United States was populated by exiters and their descendants — immigrants who chose to leave home rather than reform it — and partly because for much of American history the frontier made it possible to choose exit without even leaving the country.

For Americans, that sort of internal exit is no longer an option. Whatever you may think of the political agenda of the Tea Party, or of its wealthy supporters and media facilitators, it is at heart an ardent grass-roots movement whose angry and engaged participants have chosen voice over exit or apathy.

But when you look at what they are using that voice to advocate, you may decide that Mr. Hirschman was right after all about the American national romance with exit. The Tea Party’s engaged citizens aren’t so much trying to reform government as to get rid of it — the only possible version of exit when the frontier is gone and you already live in the best country on earth.

There is something, as Mr. Hirschman understood, particularly American about that impulse. But it may also be rooted in a theory about how to reform government that has been popular on both sides of the Atlantic in recent decades. That is the idea that creating competing, private-sector-operated alternatives to the public sector is a good way to force the state to raise its game. The charter school movement in the United States is one example. Prime Minister David Cameron’s advocacy of the Big Society is another.

Looked at through Mr. Hirschman’s lens, however, these private providers of formerly state services may have quite a different effect. If they allow the best and the most disgruntled citizens to exit the state, they might make the state-supplied option worse, rather than better. As Mr. Hirschman argued: “This may be the reason public enterprise … has strangely been at its weakest in sectors such as transportation and education where it is subjected to competition: The presence of a ready and satisfactory substitute for the services public enterprise offers merely deprives it of a precious feedback mechanism that operates at its best when the customers are securely locked in.”

The 21st century is the era of mass travel, open borders, instant communication and the affluent citizen-consumer. Russian oligarchs aren’t the only ones who can exit — a lot of us can. It is no wonder so many of us distrust our governments. But in this age of exit, do we have much chance of reforming them?