Why there’s a difference between power and influence

For what he has changed about his nation is that he has brought third-world practicality to an unnatural but exquisite ideal—that no one is above the law, not even if most of the nation endorses one man to be above it.

An odd thing about democracy is that its best parts are meant to counter the will of the people in case the collective will turns out to be morally corrupt. This is the role of institutions like the judiciary.

Democracy is wary of the fact that voters can come under the sway of popular leaders. And the majority need not always be right, at least not more right than the dead people who founded democracy.

What Trump has done, and what we thought could never happen in America, is that he has made institutions submit to a president. He has done this through threats against those who do not toe his line.

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Not only Elon Musk, but several American billionaires have backed Trump in the probable hope of benefiting from aligning with an authoritarian. Some may feel his policies are good for them and the country, even if democratic values get battered.

But they have no idea what is going to hit them. They risk losing their true power, which may lead them to realize that influence is just a henchman of power.

The whims of an authoritarian, as Musk has discovered, can change fast. Maybe Trump’s billionaires assume that if things go wrong, they can cut their losses. After all, they are powerful too and could try to fight back even if key institutions are compromised.

The irony is that they have been spoilt by a true democracy for so long that they seem to take their fortunes for granted. They should learn from third-world countries that a billionaire is no match for a popular authoritarian.

In backing Trump’s transformation of America, the super-rich have sacrificed their true power for mere influence.

Influence is a kind of currency. It can be bought, and it buys. It is an investment, and can increase in value. Gains can be made by acquiring assets like media vehicles or funding political campaigns.

Once, influence meant a force so independent that the political class had to woo it. Consider the New York Times. Now, influence chiefly means something that has submitted to politics. The influential today are interchangeable.

Power is very different. It comes directly from people. Power arises from the misconceptions of millions vested in one person. Misconceptions are important in mass movements.

Through these, people build the myth of a leader in their own image. That is why some people can’t be mass leaders—they are too clear to be misunderstood.

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The larger the number of people from whom one’s power comes, the more powerful one is. A hugely popular politician’s power comes from hundreds of millions of people. A billionaire’s power comes from one person or a few in the hierarchy.

Even in proper democracies, most politicians themselves do not have power. What they have is influence. They are not popular enough to have true power and frequently have to depend on people misunderstood as legends.

A hallmark of a mature democracy is that extreme popularity is not concentrated in a single person. A society where no one has amassed political power but some have amassed vast wealth is a paradise for the latter. This is what the West is and what America was until Trump.

Outside a mature democracy, a billionaire is vulnerable. The world is full of authoritarian regimes that have shown how billionaires seem powerful until the day when suddenly they are not.

Consider Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba. A way of the world is that if a man has a billion dollars, everything he says is taken as wisdom. And Jack Ma was full of that. He was an articulate Chinese entrepreneur. Until suddenly he went missing. When he re-appeared, he seemed transformed and restrained.

China might be filled with billionaires, but the world is in no doubt who holds power there. In Russia, oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who mistook their influence for power and tried to take on Vladimir Putin, were ruined.

In Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman detained billionaires, including some members of royalty, at the Ritz-Carlton in 2017 until they pledged their loyalty and wealth to him.

In backing a non-Western regime in America, its rich have set in motion a process that the third world knows well. In an autocracy, wealth must choose a side. It cannot remain neutral.

America is not there yet, but a path has been charted. Several billionaires seem to have fallen in line. You may argue that they had no choice. But the disenchantment and resistance of the wealthy is the very foundation of political revolutions.

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Political reform occurs in a society not because good triumphs over evil, but when an old elite is relegated to the second rung and fights back by sponsoring the rise of more convenient morals.

The third world offers proof that when the second rung doesn’t manufacture a revolution, and a strongman wins, society begins to decay.

In contrast, good things happen when aristocrats bring down the ruling class. The foundations of European democracy are about that—wealthy merchants asking a rogue king to follow the rules.

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The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His book, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’, will release in August.