IMHO , no-the great mass of people would not accept the ideologies that come along with such people…plus, most 1st world countries have experience with wars, and (usually) want no part of them.
So, have people become sufficiently skeptical, that dictators like these would never come again?
Hmm, in my pessimistic mood, I do sort of fear that they might. You know, if they arrive and progress slowly, slowly carefully. Like boiling a frog. 
UKIP in the UK, and the Tory party pandering to them rather, is a bit worrying. Then again, I hope they are really just a bad joke.
Well, this time it’s the homosexuals, and the location has sifted eastward, but the KGB has fillled in the gap:
Well, Michael Bolton has been quiet for a while…
History doesn’t exactly repeat itself. So, no.
Misery tends to be associated with dictatorship, which helps explain today’s news from Egypt.
We’ve had a remarkably long run without a nuclear war. When it ends, the resultant misery will pose a supreme test for democratic institutions. But it’s utterly impossible to predict what will happen.
A “no” answer would presuppose that a) people have become smarter and/or more sophisticated and b) democracy, human rights, and rule of law are on the ascendant in the world. Since, in fact, people are getting much dumber, and human rights and democracy are slowly dying all over the world, I’d say, yes, we’ll get Hitler II very soon somewhere.
Our country is the only nation on earth that purports to believe in democratic values to the extent that we’re willing to expend blood and treasure to support them, and even we have been doing a piss-poor job of that lately (for example, we still trade with China). The government of the future is a single individual, maintaining his hold on the populace through technologically driven surveillance and terror (thanks, Google!).
I don’t believe that people are getting dumber…I believe that people are just as marvellously dumb as they ever were, and that is plenty enough dumb for 20 Hitlers to emerge.
Well, my evaluation was based on the fact that we now have science, logic, learning, mass communication, and so forth, and just as great a percentage of us believe in superstition, religion, magical thinking, and fuzzy logic as before. We could perhaps excuse 13th century ignorance because very few people had the opportunity to become educated, and concepts such as causality and the scientific method hadn’t been invented yet, except in a few exceptional minds. The ignorance of today can’t be similarly excused–95% of people in the US believing in the Man In The Sky despite the fact that they have received an education, for example, is unforgivable. So if we have all this knowledge and are still just as ignorant, that means to me that we’ve actually become dumber. The analogy would be that you put premium gas in a car that’s been running on 82 octane Pemex, and it, surprisingly, doesn’t run any better. Before, you could blame the lousy gas. Now, you have to blame the car itself for the fact that it runs so crappily.
I’d say it’s much less likely to happen in a modern liberal democracy, not because people are necessarily smarter in that sense, but because people are generally happy with that system, making it harder for anyone to convince them to go back.
It’s not impossible, however. The country would have to be doing really poorly economically. And, of course, not every country is a modern liberal democracy.
I do think it is rather unlikely that a Hitler will emerge again in the first world, though. The consensus morality has just changed too much for that to happen.
Sure. But IQ tests only measure one aspect of intelligence. Knowledge is useless if its implications are ignored. Those implications often include that your cherished and comforting beliefs are a steaming heap o’ garbage.
If the IQ test consisted of one question: Is there a God?,
A. Almost certainly not
B. Of course
C. My mommy and daddy say there is, so I must believe, too
D. The idea of dying and ceasing to exist terrifies me, so I must believe, too
Humanity’s score wouldn’t have exhibited the Flynn effect over the last eight decades, except perhaps in reverse.
Edit: Dictators thrive in part because they provide the same benefits that religion does: a sense of security, absolute answers to difficult questions, etc. People crave those things.
The tinpot strongman brand has degraded too much for another Hitler or Mussolini. That Napoleonic sheen never loses the tarnish after Italian houswives pee on the corpse or a Lybian shoves a utility knife up the rectum.
Stalin, however, never goes out of style. All the same fear and paranoia and purging and denunciation is done every day in corporate culture, but at least the victims are only fired instead of shot.
The slightest acquaintance with history will tell you that there were plenty of oppressive dictatorships and horrific wars before the era of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. The terminology may have been different (they may have been called tyrants or emperors or usurpers rather than dictators) but they popped up every so often all throughout history. There are periods when people are less susceptible to allowing this sort of thing to happen, often after some particularly nasty episode, but memories fade and circumstances change, and tyranny finds new ways to disguise itself and make itself look acceptable (or revives old ways that people have forgotten to be wary of). The notion that this can never happen again is laughable.
Any number of exogenous factors could lead to another totalitarian dictatorship:
War: What if China decideds to annex, say India and Russia backs them?
Disease: What if some pandemic spreads across the world and kills 20, 30, 40% of all people?
Economic collapse: What if the economic crisis had deepened? What if 50% of all Americans had no job?
And that’s just three potential scenarios. I don’t see one emerging in the forseeable future, but crazy shit happens all the time.
I worry about it, but not all that much. As a basic fact, democracy has been on the increase since the end of WWII, while totalitarian ideology has been on the decrease. When one sees a major economic disaster hit a country, it’s easy to imagine the people turning to wannabe Hitler who promises to fix the mess, but the fact is that several democracies have gone through an economic disaster without suffering that fate.
You’re argument is flawed for several reasons. You claim that believing in religion is a sing of being dumb, but it’s not. You claim that education ought to make people less religious, but in fact there’s a consistent positive correlation between education and religiosity. You claim that dictatorship and religion are fellow travelers. In fact, the USA, which has always been known as a very religious nation, created democracy and then exported it to the rest of the world.
Look to Africa and Central and South America, particularly Venezuela for counter-examples. Chavez comes immediately to mind, and there are any number of African warlords trying to make it to the big time.
I think ralph was interested in discussing whether dictators could re-emerge in prosperous, western countries. Obviously there are dictators in third-world $%&#holes, but even there we see far fewer than a generation ago.
Quetion: Could Putin become one in Russia?
I don’t know enough about the recent goings on in that country. (My interests have always been with the 1930’s and '40s.)
Are there going to be authoritarian strongmen in the future? Of course. Putin is one such person. It just suits the strongmen to hold elections and have the people ratify their rule. Half the planet is ruled by authoritarian government.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. “Another Hitler” doesn’t just mean an asshole who rules autocratically. It means totalitarianism. Your average dictator doesn’t give a shit about the daily lives of the peasants and nobodies he rules over. He just likes living on top of the heap. That makes him a regular garden variety asshole.
It takes a special brand of asshole to want to remake society from top to bottom into a shape more pleasing to him. That requires some sort of ideological fixation. And people around the globe have soured on transformative ideologies. They look at the disasters of Chinese communism, Russian communism, Fascism, and so on, and then look at the success of normal countries, and most people can do the math.
Incremental improvements to make your country slightly less shitty add up if you keep making them. And this is how first world countries work in the first place, liberal democracy was only implemented in fits and starts. But rich countries that abandoned such ideas tended to end up smoking ruins, while ones that didn’t tended to muddle through.
The only global ideology that might compare is Islamism. But even then a thousand years of Islamic tradition tends to blunt the radicalism of an Islamist dictatorship. Saudi Arabia and Iran are pretty thoroughly Islamist, but the Mullahs and Saudi royal family aren’t trying to remake their countries, they are trying to prevent the remaking of their countries.
I think there are a number of potential Stalins or Hitlers around, but fortunately none of them runs a country big and strong enough to matter. Although I’m not so sure about Putin. But could it happen in a major country? I don’t see why not. Let the economy stay moribund long enough and just watch.