[dragonwriter]

> The bad guys in David Weber's Honor Harrington novels are based on this idea.

Pedantically, the obvious “bad guys” in the earliest few, not the (so far, at least) principal bad guys of the whole series, who it turns out were also manipulating those obvious, early ones.

> It's an interesting take on what might happen.

It's kind of a shallow throwaway regurgitation of a standard argument without deep exploration or novel insight (which is okay, because it's not like Havenite society under the People's Republic is all that central a focus of any of the books, so shallow cartoonish broad strokes are fine.)