Central-Power Orientation
— a proposal for terminological clarification

I. The Wrong Question

Anyone wanting to diagnose politically today reaches for labels that no longer carry. Fascist is the loudest, but it misses in both directions: too much, because it invokes the specific historical experience of 1922 to 1945 with its paramilitary street militias, its palingenetic ultranationalism and its glorification of purifying violence, where those features are absent; too little, because it does not precisely capture the specific shape of present claims to rule — the takeover of the governmental apparatus from within, media direct-communication bypassing institutions, the instrumentalisation of economic and technological power. Whoever throws Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salman into one pot with Mussolini confuses the matter with the historical connotation of the word.

Anti-democratic is more precise, but it presupposes a dichotomy that never existed historically. Democracies have always carried central-power vectors within them. Athenian democracy knew ostracism and the demagogic careers. The Weimar Republic had Article 48, the Reich President's power to issue emergency decrees, as a firmly institutionalised feature. The French Fifth Republic under de Gaulle was consciously constructed as a plebiscitary presidential democracy. The American presidential system, from the Federalist Papers onwards, was designed as a calculated central-power compromise — Hamilton wanted considerably more, Jefferson considerably less. Democracy is not a structure without central power. It is a structure that limits central power through electoral periods, separation of powers, intermediate institutions and public sphere — with variable success. Whoever says anti-democratic acts as if those described rejected democracy. Most do not. They stand for election, accept election results if pressed, use democratic forms. What they do is shift the centre of decision-making within these forms. That is not a rejection of the framework. It is a reconfiguration of its internal architecture.

Illiberal is sharper and closer to the target. The term, coined by Fareed Zakaria in 1997 and claimed by Viktor Orbán in 2014, describes the hollowing out of liberal fundamental rights while formally retaining democratic procedures — the press, judiciary, NGOs, universities are weakened without elections being abolished. The term has the advantage that Orbán calls himself so. It has the disadvantage that it pushes the political debate immediately into a position: whoever is illiberal is condemned in Western discourse before he can argue. That is sometimes correct, but it is not an analytical sorting.

Populist is the weakest of the four. It describes only the rhetorical trait — the appeal to the people against the elites — and leaves the structural preference untouched. A populist can favour more decentralised structures (as in the Swiss citizens' initiative tradition) or more centralised ones (as in Caesarism). The term sorts a manner of speech, not a structure.

What all four labels lack is the capacity to name the structural preference they attempt to describe. This preference is graspable in a single German word: Zentralmacht-Orientierung. In English: central-power orientation. The term is descriptive, not evaluative. It names a preference, not a position. It leaves the person's self-location open. It sorts by structural features, not by ideological content. And it is robust for the cases where the four classic labels fail — for Musk, who on no conventional scale is a fascist and yet structurally tends to central power; for Thiel, who argues libertarianly and considers every democratic intermediate institution an obstacle; for Vance, who as a Catholic convert argues theologically and whose position is rejected by the Vatican itself. For the cases in which the classic labels do apply, the new term does the same thing more precisely: it separates structural observation from moral pre-condemnation.

II. What Orientation Means

The methodological heart of the term is the suffix. Orientation describes an observable preference, not a placement into a category. Whoever is central-power-oriented can stand in that orientation weakly or strongly, consistently or occasionally, reflectedly or unreflectedly. The position is left to the person; the orientation is what one observes.

This cuts off the moral pre-condemnation always already inscribed in the labels fascist or anti-democratic. Whoever is thus labelled is condemned in the discourse before he can argue. Central-power-oriented, by contrast, is descriptive. It designates what someone prefers, without in the same word claiming that this preference is wrong. That permits a discussion which does not stop at the question of whether the other is a decent person. It may proceed to the actual question: whether the preference is compatible with what the person otherwise holds to be right.

And it opens the door to self-examination. Anti-democratic is a reproach that always targets the other — no one considers himself anti-democratic. Central-power-oriented can be said honestly of oneself first: I am so at this point, less so at that. The diagnosis remains speakable without immediately triggering defensive reactions. That is the tone we have been trying to maintain in this series since the Michels essay: structural, not moralising.

Finally, the formulation opens the space for degrees and transitions. There are weakly central-power-oriented democrats who consider central power sensible in certain emergencies but do not want it as the rule. There are strongly central-power-oriented democrats who perceive intermediate institutions as an obstacle but seek to dismantle them within the democratic form. There are consistently central-power-oriented non-democrats who consider democratic form a transitional phenomenon. All three can be distinguished, all three sit on the same scale, all three can speak with themselves and with one another without the diagnosis collapsing into a fight over labels.

That is the both-and pull inherent in the term itself. German discourse tends to sort into two drawers — democrat or anti-democrat, friend of freedom or enemy of freedom, constitutional patriot or constitutional enemy. The orientation term says: both at once is possible. In the same person one can find dispositions towards central power and towards subsidiarity; one can be oriented differently in different policy fields; one can shift over the course of a lifetime. Self-location remains the person's business; orientation is an observable preference structure.

III. What Central Power Means

Central-power orientation means the preference for concentrated decision-making power, for the relocation of the centre of decision from intermediate institutions to the central executive, for deliberation as impediment and controls as blockade. That is the abstract definition. It fills out when we test it against concrete features.

The central-power-oriented exercise of power shows itself in six observable traits. First: the fusion of the power-bearer with the concept she represents. The self-and-world fusion which makes the ruler identical with the state, the people, the cause, so that criticism of him becomes criticism of the order itself. We described this phenomenologically in The Omnipotence Fantasies of the Small Boys — Trump has his name written on the Kennedy Center, Putin fuses his self with the Russian state, Xi has his thought inscribed in the constitution, Erdoğan has a sixteen-year-old prosecuted for personal insult. It is the same impulse developmental psychology diagnoses in the six-year-old in the sandpit: mine, because I say so.

Second: the compulsive tendency towards ostentation and pomp, mostly in citation form from earlier epochs of strong central power. Erdoğan's 1150-room palace reaches back to Ottoman scale; MBS's NEOM to pharaonic architectural size; Trump's golden kitsch to Louis Quatorze citation; Putin's palace on the Black Sea to the era of the Tsars; Xi's military parades to the imperial processions. This is no fashion; it is structural signal. The central-power-oriented ruler needs the cultural authority of past central-power periods because the present does not deliver legitimation. So he quotes.

Third: the management of the many for the benefit of the few, in a language that presents the appropriation as legitimate possession. The case of Giordano Bruno and the credibility of the Catholic Church described the pure form of this pattern: the deathbed economy of the Church, in which the institution generates the fear (hell), monopolises the way out (sacraments), provides the personnel (priests in the dying room), executes the contractual arrangements (testament). Four functions in one hand, at the most sensitive moment of a human life. This is not marginal, it is core business, and it has only changed its packaging, as the Bruno essay shows. The central-power-oriented structure does something analogous in every field — it creates the conditions under which the many are appropriated by it, and it defines the appropriation itself as legitimate because it monopolises the definition of legitimate.

Fourth: the combination of peace rhetoric and expansive warfare. The central-power-oriented position believes it can manage war — that it can dose the violence such that it serves the end without endangering it. Historically, that has never worked. But the preference renews itself in every generation. Augustine supplied the theological formula: the compelle intrare, the compulsion to conversion as service to eternal salvation. From this formula grew the Crusades, the Reconquista, the Albigensian extermination, the conversion campaigns in the Americas. Today the same structure runs in secular form: Putin wages war in the name of peace (of de-Nazification), Trump threatens military force to end bad deals, MBS wages the Yemen war as defence of Arab civilisation. Always the same movement: central power means well, defends the higher good, doses the evil — and produces the opposite.

Fifth: cruelty as a linking feature. It is not collateral damage but a component. Bruno was burned alive at the Campo de' Fiori in 1600, with his tongue bound so he could no longer speak. The burning was a didactic spectacle — the onlookers were to see what awaits the deviant. That is the pure form. In attenuated but structurally identical form: Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate, Navalny in the penal camp, the Uyghur re-education camps, the Iranian executions of demonstrators, the Russian filtration camps in Ukraine. Cruelty is the enforcement form of self-and-world fusion. It proves that the power is real, that it commands life and death, that it accepts no argument other than submission.

Sixth: the double façade. The central-power-oriented institution presents itself as mild and remains implacable in questions of power. The Catholic Church supplies the classic example: in self-presentation guardian of peace, in questions of power two thousand years of continuity from the Reichskirche to the present. As The Founders of the Christian Leviathan traces, it delivered the political formula (Paul, Romans 13), the theological grounding (Augustine, original sin and compelle intrare), the institutional embodiment (Constantine, Nicaea, imperial church) and the enforcement system (Inquisition, brachium saeculare). Regret for the method was formulated in the year 2000; the verdict has not been rescinded, because the verdict is bound up with the doctrine still defended today.

These six features do not always all appear together. Central-power orientation can be expressed in degrees, and it shows itself in different variants. But where several of these features occur jointly, the diagnosis is reliable. And it has, what the classical labels lack, an ancient paradigm that clearly identifies the two poles.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was appointed dictator by the Roman Senate in 458 BCE in a wartime crisis — for six months, with full authority. He defeated the Aequi in sixteen days, laid down the dictatorship and returned to his farm on the Tiber. Twenty-two years later he was again called to the dictatorship and withdrew after a short time. He could have kept the power; he did not want it. Julius Caesar, four hundred years later, is the inversion. To him the dictatorship was granted first for a limited term, then extended, then for ten years, then dictator perpetuo. He had himself venerated like a god, sat on a golden throne, wore purple. He was murdered in 44 BCE, and from the civil war his adoptive son Augustus emerged victorious, who then finally established the central-power structure.

Cincinnatus and Caesar are the two poles at which central-power orientation is structurally decided. Is the entrusted power returned when its purpose is fulfilled — or does it become the person exercising it? This question is timeless. It faced Merkel, it faces Merz, it faced every emperor, every pope, every corporate CEO. The Cincinnatus mode requires the capacity to consider one's own power as a function of a cause and not as an extension of the self. The Caesar mode treats power as a natural extension of the person and always finds new reasons to retain it. And the Caesar mode does this, as we shall show, not only from his own need but because a mass sustains him in doing so.

IV. Why It Works — Demand and Supply

Here the deepest layer of the term takes hold. Central-power orientation is not merely a preference of the rulers, whom the ruled would have to be tricked into accepting. It is a market — with supply and demand, with structural properties that stabilise the market.

The demand side has been described most sharply by Étienne de La Boétie, in a precision unsurpassed four hundred and seventy-five years later. His Discours de la servitude volontaire (1548) poses the one question that has remained without a satisfactory answer to this day: Why do many submit to one, when they need not? La Boétie's answer is disturbingly simple: because they want to. Tyranny is a pyramid of voluntary complicity. Five or six around the tyrant, under each of them six hundred, under each of these six thousand — each rung is servant of the higher one and master of the lower. Each passes on pressure that no one exerts on him. Each reproduces the system he endures, because he simultaneously enjoys it.

Four hundred years later Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom (1941) supplied the psychoanalytic explanation. The submissive person enjoys submission because through belonging he shares in the strength of the whole. He marches, as we described more precisely in On the Road of the Victors, on the road of the victors. He belongs. The humiliation of obedience is compensated by the elevation of belonging. Flight into unfreedom is experienced as freedom.

The word congruent captures the structure of the mass precisely. The mass that carries the central power is itself central-power-structured. Each in the pyramid reproduces on a small scale what runs above on a large scale. The block warden is a small Caesar. The department head is a small Caesar. The paterfamilias reflex that treats the family as a little kingdom is a small Caesar. Congruence is not accident, it is precondition. Whoever serves upwards because he experiences service as a source of meaning must be allowed to rule downwards, otherwise he ends up empty-handed. That is why the pyramid is stable — not because it is coerced, but because it is symmetric. Every position contains the same pattern, with the same inner assent.

Kant saw it soberly in the Anthropology: the German fits himself "most easily and most lastingly among all civilised peoples to the government under which he lives" and pedantically arranges the ladder "on which each rung is designated with the degree of respect due to it." The ladder is congruence in its purest form. Everyone knows where he stands. Everyone accepts his position because it guarantees him belonging upwards and small rulership downwards.

The supply side of this market constellation, in terms of primordial human needs, has been analysed structurally in On the Sense and Nonsense of Religious Organisations. Man is the only creature who knows he will die. He seeks meaning, community, ritual, consolation, moral orientation. These needs are human, not irrational. Whoever dismisses them because he rejects the metaphysical answer has not made them disappear — he has only changed the address. The needs seek other addressees: political movements, wellness industries, self-optimisation sects, national movements. The form changes, the function remains.

Why the management of these needs becomes one of the most powerful forms of binding is structurally explicable. Three features together yield the most complete binding that an institution can develop over people. Demand is inelastic — whoever fears death fears it always; whoever seeks meaning does not stop seeking. Bad supply does not displace demand; it is just accepted in default. Quality verification is impossible — whether the soul was saved, whether the leader really embodies the will of the people, whether the nation really will be great again, no one can verify. Interpretive knowledge is not falsifiable. And switching costs are high — whoever exits often loses at once his social network, his identity, his place in the world.

Under these conditions the central-power-oriented institution — whether church, leader cult, corporation, or national movement — cannot be replaced by better arguments. It can absorb any falsification, because falsification concerns interpretive knowledge, not verifiable factual knowledge. Whoever doubts does not understand the cause; whoever exits was seduced; whoever contradicts is an enemy. The structure immunises itself by reinterpreting falsification as confirmation.

If we place congruent mass and primordial-needs management side by side, we see the complete economy of central power. On the demand side: the human being who experiences freedom as a burden, who seeks belonging, who needs small rulership downwards in order to bear submission upwards. On the supply side: the central-power-oriented institution that serves precisely this need — with meaning, belonging, small places of rulership, ritual, enemy-image, promise of order. That is why the concept works everywhere. Central power is not imposed. It is demanded.

And that sharpens the Cincinnatus test. Cincinnatus could return the power because he was not central-power-dependent in his person. He had a farm, an existence beyond the power. His need for meaning was met by family, work, earth and the concrete contexts. Caesar could not return the power, because he had defined himself over the power — he was the addict from the La Boétie/Fromm picture, whose need for the position at the top had shaped the self. And this need was not private — it was congruence with a mass that needed a Caesar in order to stabilise its own position in the pyramid.

V. Examples as Examples

We are now in a position to sort concrete cases without them having to stand in the foreground. The examples document the structure; they do not lead it.

Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salman are the fully personalised cases whose features we described phenomenologically in The Omnipotence Fantasies of the Small Boys. All five show self-and-world fusion in mature form; all five practise ostentation with historical citation; all five manage the congruent mass with different ideological wrappings (Christian nationalism, Russian sovereignism, Confucian order, neo-Ottoman grandeur, Arab modernisation); all five wage wars they believe they can manage; all five reach for cruelty, dosed differently in their respective systems; all five maintain the double façade between mild-staged appearance and hard exercise of power. They are not the exceptions of international politics, they are its rule.

Musk and Thiel are the cases the classical labels do not reach. Musk is on no conventional scale a fascist. He does not argue with folk and purification and leader principle. He builds companies and networks — and treats them as his own realm. Twitter/X was personalised like a princely court after the takeover. Eighty percent of employees were dismissed. The renaming was baptismal, in sandpit mode. Thiel argues libertarianly and declared openly in 2009 that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible — which makes him not anti-libertarian, but anti-democratic in a way the classical categories no longer capture. Both fit precisely into the observation: structurally central-power-oriented, ideologically shifting between technological, libertarian, conservative, opportunistic positions. The term of central-power orientation orders them without assigning them to an ideology they themselves do not carry.

The German case is documented by the personnel series this text need not repeat. The People Have Become a Nuisance described the mode of government in which the citizen becomes a nuisance — accountability inversion as the operative form of central-power orientation within the democratic framework. When Will Spahn Be Chancellor? described the three loops of personnel reproduction, showing the same structure at the level of selection and media carriage. The case of Spahn himself is within the personnel series the Catholic self-labelling central-power-oriented figure, whose Catholicism is worn outwardly but in practice stands at a distance from his church's social ethics. Merz is the operative central-power-oriented figure in the practice of government. Merkel was gradually shifted — in her European basic stance rather subsidiary (European integration as a process of negotiation), in her chancellorial practice central-power-oriented (Corona minister-president rounds without parliament, refugee decision of 2015 without a governmental statement).

Vance in Washington is the theologically grounded central-power-oriented figure whose reasoning has been rejected by the Vatican itself. Pope Francis rejected in February 2025, in an open letter to the US bishops, Vance's invocation of the ordo amoris as justification for mass deportations, as an inversion of Christian love of neighbour. Pope Leo XIV reinforced the position with his Lampedusa symbolism on 4 July 2026. That is the interesting point: when admiration for central power refers to the Catholic institution as a structural model, while the social ethics of that institution rejects the admiration, the self-contradiction becomes openly visible. Vance and Vermeule admire the form, they refuse the content.

What links these cases is not ideology, but structure. The term of central-power orientation sorts them into a category without denying their differences. Trump and Putin, Merz and Xi, Musk and Vance do not stand on the same level. They carry the same preference structure, in different degrees of expression and with different political consequences. That is the diagnostic power of the new term. It does not compel us to throw them all into one pot. It permits us to name the pattern that runs through them.

VI. The Subsidiary-Democratic Response

If central-power orientation is a market constellation with a demand side and a supply side, then the answer cannot consist merely in criticising the supply. It must direct the demand into other forms and provide other institutions that meet human needs for meaning, belonging, order and ritual differently.

The term which received this answer at the end of the nineteenth century, and which received its Catholic-social-ethical formulation in 1931 in Quadragesimo Anno by Pius XI, is subsidiarity. In its core formula: the lower level decides where it can; the higher may only intervene where the lower is overtaxed. That is the Catholic self-commitment against central power in matter — although the institution itself is centrally structured. Precisely in this self-contradiction of the Catholic Church lies the friction that makes the Vance-Vermeule position visible: they admire the structure, they refuse the social ethics.

The philosophical foundation of freedom for a subsidiary-democratic response we sketched in Freedom and Prosperity for All as a four-freedoms canon. All four — Berlin's negative freedom against positive freedom as paternalism, Kant's call to maturity against self-inflicted immaturity, Erhard's principle of competition against cartels as private central powers, Oppenheimer's critique of land monopoly as the oldest central power — are, in this formulation, anti-central-power-oriented concepts of freedom. They aim at decisions being taken decentrally, maturely, in negotiated form, subsidiarily. The canon is the freedom-philosophical counter-programme to central-power orientation.

The institutional translation of this canon into reform-capable proposals stands in two concept papers of this series. Representatives Without Party (February 2026) addresses the selection side. A voters' association that bypasses intra-party candidate selection; candidates determined by citizens in an open, AI-supported, transparent procedure; a foundation as backbone, providing the infrastructure. In this way central power is not abolished — it is complemented by a channel that breaks the intra-party recursion. The Transparency Council (March 2026) addresses the accountability side. A fifth constitutional organ with four core tasks: mandate tracking, lobby transparency, legislative impact assessment, financial transparency. It does not sanction, it makes visible. Citizens decide what happens with the visibility.

Both concept papers are Cincinnatus institutions. They demand that power be returned when its purpose is fulfilled. The Representative Without Party has no interest in his own career within the apparatus, because he does not use the apparatus as a career location. The Transparency Council creates the conditions under which the durable exercise of power without public examination is no longer possible. Both instruments address not the ideology of the central-power-oriented actors, but the structures in which their preference runs free.

What they do not address is the demand side. The concept papers do not dissolve the demand for meaning, belonging, ritual and consolation. They propose other structures in which these needs might be met differently — subsidiary intermediate institutions instead of central-power administration, local communities instead of media offerings of belonging, public scrutiny instead of interpretive monopoly. But they cannot replace the needs themselves. Whoever reaches for the leader cult because meaning has slipped from him will not find in a Transparency Council an answer to the question of meaning. He will only find the prevention of what would harm him. That is a modest but necessary contribution.

That is the point at which self-examination begins. Whoever introduces the term of central-power orientation must also apply it to himself.

VII. Self-Examination

We close the text with three questions to ourselves, because a term that only strikes the others is not a good term. It becomes an instrument only when we can also use it on ourselves.

The Cincinnatus test. Where do I hold power that I ought to give back? In family, in profession, in associations, in institutions, in roles I have long practised. Have I taken up these roles as functions of a cause to be fulfilled — or have they extended into my person, so that I can no longer think myself without them? Cincinnatus could go back to his farm because his self did not hang on the dictatorship. Caesar could not. The question is not whether I have power. The question is whether I could give it back in the same movement if the cause demands it.

The La Boétie test. Where am I in the pyramid of voluntary complicity? Whom do I serve preemptively without anyone having asked me to? Where do I rule downwards because I serve upwards? La Boétie's most radical insight was that the tyrants are not themselves the actual problem. The actual problem is the five or six people around them who serve them willingly. And the six hundred under those. And the six thousand under those. In every pyramid there is a place for everyone. The question is whether I accept this place or question it.

The Fromm test. Which of my needs for belonging, meaning or order do I make the payment for what I could otherwise not bear? Where do I seek in the fusion with something greater — a party, an association, a nation, a movement, an institution, a firm — release from the burden of having to be an autonomous self? Fromm said: flight into unfreedom is experienced as freedom. That is not reproach, but diagnosis. We all know the pull. The question is how to notice it before we yield to it.

These three questions are the price of the term. Whoever poses them has understood the term. Whoever does not want to pose them should better stick to the classical labels — they do not hit the matter, but they hit only the others. That is more comfortable.

We propose the term of central-power orientation because we believe that the political landscape can no longer be precisely sorted with the classical labels. We do not claim that the new term solves all problems. We claim that it improves the sorting without foreclosing the discussion. It is a proposal. The reader decides whether to follow it.