Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.

Submission statement: this article explores how authoritarian regimes exploit the ambitions of the mediocre and the incompetent to enforce their will. Offering promotions and benefits to the otherwise undeserving acts as an incentive to commit crimes and atrocities.

While large parts of the article discuss authoritarian regimes generally (including the growing power of ICE under DJT in the US), the argument revolves around hard data from Argentina published by two German researchers.

"Making a Career in Dictatorship", a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

A very good article and if you are able to pick up a copy of the book as well, I'm planning to. "Meal Team Six" is not just a meme, but a measurable phenomenon.