It’s not obvious to me that selection for loyalty over competence is necessarily more likely in fascism or bad. A competent figure who is opposed to democracy would be a considerably worse electoral candidate than a less competent one who is loyal to democracy assuming that democracy is your optimization target.
Loyalty in general is more important in a centralised system built essentially on violence than a pluralist one built on legitimacy. In a democracy usually you’ll have competing forces all holding some weight, and the worst that betrayal can cause is a lost election. In a dictatorship there’s only one master to obey and the stakes are quite higher (consider how many “accidents” keep happening to members of the Russian upper echelon these days).
Democracies aren’t immune from this phenomenon, but it tends to happen more at the party level. For example, in Italy, back in the early 2000s Berlusconi did this, building his own party essentially as an extension of himself and filling it only with incompetent yes men who wouldn’t threaten his position. Brexit has done something like it to the Tory party in UK, distilling only the most loyal ones even if it meant purging competent politicians in favour of mindless demagogues. But things like the military, the judiciary and the civil service at least are slow changing enough that they carry the signs of the balance of power throughout the years.
Loyalty in general is more important in a centralised system built essentially on violence than a pluralist one built on legitimacy. In a democracy usually you’ll have competing forces all holding some weight, and the worst that betrayal can cause is a lost election. In a dictatorship there’s only one master to obey and the stakes are quite higher (consider how many “accidents” keep happening to members of the Russian upper echelon these days).
Democracies aren’t immune from this phenomenon, but it tends to happen more at the party level. For example, in Italy, back in the early 2000s Berlusconi did this, building his own party essentially as an extension of himself and filling it only with incompetent yes men who wouldn’t threaten his position. Brexit has done something like it to the Tory party in UK, distilling only the most loyal ones even if it meant purging competent politicians in favour of mindless demagogues. But things like the military, the judiciary and the civil service at least are slow changing enough that they carry the signs of the balance of power throughout the years.