To add to what Little Nemo and others said above, one reason religious conservatives like tyrants is because that’s entirely how the good guys of the Bible are portrayed.
Most good leaders in the Bible were tyrants/dictators. Nobody was democratically elected. David was a king. Hezekiah was a king. Josiah and Asa were not only kings, but were praised for using force against those who worshiped the wrong gods. Moses wasn’t quite a king or dictator, but God stepped in to kill those who defied him. Furthermore, the OT said nothing about religious freedom. In fact, the Israelites were ordered by God to report anyone who tried to promote worship of other gods - even if it were wife, child, or other relative - so they could be stoned.
When many MAGA Christians have grown up reading this diet their whole lives, it’s not surprising at all that they’d long for a modern-day version of an Old Testament king who’d forcefully stomp out the heathen non-Christians in America. They want a modern-day King Josiah. They want someone who has the power to execute or otherwise punish those who won’t toe the line.
Leftists aren’t really “fans” of dictators the same way right-wingers are. The exception that proves the rule is Che Guevara: he’s the only leftist you see plastered on T-shirts and coffee-mugs like MAGA does with Trump. Why? He was never actually a dictator. He was a permanent revolutionary, a pure ideologue and chaos agent, with no plans or interest whatsoever in governing. He left no enduring policies to criticize or tarnish, only successful action after successful action. Tear it all down, build nothing, the truest paragon of the form. Che is the leftist’s leftist.
Leftists’ true heroes are revolutionaries. Their true enemy is liberals. Dictators, whether right or left wing, aren’t praised, they’re merely instrumentalized. (never forget Hitler was an instrument and partner to the Soviets, via the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, up until he wasn’t. we now see this same dynamic emerging with Putin and Trump).
Watching leftists on Twitter the past couple of years is what made me realize that I’m a thoroughly dyed-in the wool liberal. Though they don’t actually idolize Mao or Stalin, they’ll minimize those failures to no end. And likewise they deflect on Putin or Xi. Those men are clearly corrupt capitalist gangsters, not a leftist in any sense we understand. But they are heirs to the ideology, and avatars of anti-colonial hate (read: America/Europe-bashing), so they are to be defended and instrumentalized, never praised or criticized.
This is where conservatism is breaking right now. Their path to power runs through the red-brown alliance (extreme left and extreme right). The only alternative off-ramp is alliance with liberalism, but that’s unthinkable because Republicans have spent the past 40+ years smearing liberalism as a form of toxic leftism. That means their only future is dictatorship or disintegration, and they’re pressing as hard as they can in both directions at once.
It’s not a stretch to think that conservatives are increasingly comfortable with using a tilted rulebook to govern with a minority of support. Furthermore, I think they believe that the defeated majority should simply accept the results of an unfair game without complaint.
Not exactly dictatorship, far enough removed so that they can say, “see, democracy!”
A dictator is someone who goes around the mechanisms of government to do what he wants to do. The sane among us realize that those mechanisms are there to protect us from exactly that.
Conservatives, almost by definition at this point, believe that those mechanisms are the problem. So it’s not hard to see how that puts them on the side of dictators now and then.
I think it goes beyond that. A lot of modern Republicans, I think, don’t just dislike democracy because it sometimes goes against them. A lot of them seem to prefer undemocratic power to democratic power. The oppression is the point. There’s no power, in their view, in other people doing what they want, even if it’s also what you want. It’s only power if you’re forcing them to do it, regardless of what they want.
Nor I, with the caveat that modern Republicans aren’t conservatives. Modern Republicans love Xi and Kim.
That’s a good point. People who praise dictators are generally praising the image of the dictator and what he promised rather than the reality of the dictator and what he actually did while in power. So Che’s a prefect icon because he failed; he never achieved power so he’s all image and promise.
Right, and to an extent also see Lenin and Trotsky for this.
Lenin actually was head of the CP for the first 7 or so years of the USSR, but it didn’t become a dictatorship until after his death. Result: glorified to the extent that an entire branch of political theory is named after him, and his body remains embalmed in the Kremlin a century after his death.
Trotsky was head of the Red Army. He wasn’t a dictator though he clearly would have gone that direction, had he not been squeezed out by internal political struggles and shifted his focus toward formenting revolution internationally. Result: he’s revered as a martyr to the cause of permanent international revolution, Trotskyism still has a number of international followers and organizations despite never really achieving anything. it’s the leftist dream.
Contrast with Stalin, whom even diehards seldom praise. At turns his image has been retroactively rehabilitated, burying his more hideous acts and elevating his heroism. But even now he’s loved and admired only by the fringiest of fringe groups, and certainly not during his lifetime. Stalin was a dictator and has a dictator’s rap sheet, so nobody’s going to put him on a coffee mug except in an ironic sense.
Conservatives admire dictators for the same reason everyone admires dictators: because they think, “Strong leader = strong country”. The king and the land are one. This belief is a primal aspect of human nature, dating back to our tribal origins: if the leader is big and strong, we’re big and strong, even if I personally am weak.
They’re wrong, of course. First of all, because strong isn’t the same as good or competent - just because people aren’t arguing with you, that doesn’t mean you’re making the right decisions. Quite the opposite, of course. Second of all, because “strong leaders” always get strong at the expense of their country, draining its power and weakening it to reinforce their own position at the top. They’re short men in a land of dwarfs who think themselves giants.
So yes, everyone wants a strong leader. It’s in our nature. But some of us - hopefully, most of us - know that the price just isn’t worth it.
I disagree with this. The Soviet Union was very much a dictatorship under Lenin. The main difference was that Lenin appeared to actually believe in communism and apparently felt that he needed to become a dictator in order to advance communism. Whereas Stalin’s main priority was having personal power and whatever degree that advanced communism was secondary. But Lenin was the one who created a Soviet dictatorship and Stalin only took over what Lenin had created.
Under Lenin, yes the USSR was a single-party socialist state, Lenin was the head of that party. But Lenin himself wasn’t a dictator or autocrat, he had a cabinet and deferred to them, and also deferred to the Union of Soviets (always on paper and at least sometimes in reality). Not a pluralist democracy by any stretch, but certainly preferable to the Tsarist regime, and the best that could be achieved while still prosecuting that war.
Moreover most of his tenure happened between the October revolution and the end of the Russian civil war, so you can’t really apply the normal standards of democracy to a country that was still actively beating back a different antidemocratic faction (feudalist monarchy). At the time it was entirely likely that the autocracy was a temporary wartime measure, and the USSR would become the intended worker’s union of worker’s unions at the conclusion of the civil war, as Lenin intended.
Lenin absolutely did create the power structure for what followed. While I don’t think the outcome after his death was anything he wanted or foresaw, if he’d lived, he would’ve faced exactly the same set of challenges and incentives as Stalin. Lenin likely would have taken a similar road to Stalin. But Stalin was the one who survived and got his hands dirty, so he gets the dictator’s rap sheet, and Lenin gets beatified (speaking to my earlier point).
I still disagree although I acknowledge it’s a matter of perspective.
I feel Lenin chose to defer to his colleagues; he wasn’t subject to them. There were occasions when Lenin disagreed with the consensus and on most of those occasions, Lenin overruled the consensus and did things the way he wanted. Admittedly there were also occasions when Lenin followed the decision of the majority even if he disagreed with it but I feel those where still examples of Lenin ultimately making the choice rather than having it imposed on him.
I also agree that the circumstances Lenin was governing over would have made a more collective government difficult. But Lenin was largely the person who created those circumstances. The February Revolution had started without Lenin but as soon as he arrived on the scene he initiated the October Revolution and began the process of consolidating all power into the hands of the Bolsheviks. And as I said above, Lenin effectively was the power in the Bolsheviks.
Maybe the current rise of populist autocracies is due, in part, because unlike us older people, the memory of autocracy isn’t the same.
To left-leaning Baby Boomers, an authoritarian was that evil loser Hitler or that clown Mussolini. Or the host of Mussolinis in silly uniforms: Latin American tinpots, Idi Amin, Mobutu etc. in Africa, Sukarno/Suharto, Markos, and Park in Asia. The USSR and Eastern Europe was someplace where you didn’t step out of line either. But that was the world fifty years ago. When Alice Cooper played Manila, crowd control was the Philippine army in front of the stage with machine guns pointed into the audience.
China was an exception. The Cultural Revolution made it look like a nuthouse. That took a hard turn in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. And that hard turn was the direction we’ve been taking ever since.
Africa to Gen X and after isn’t some dictator in a funny leopard fur hat. It’s Rwanda and the Congo and Kony 2012. The Middle East isn’t the Ba’athist tinpots; it’s the chaos of post-Arab Spring. Latin America isn’t el Presidente with his bullet-gouged prison wall: it’s the cartels and headless bodies in the streets.
Who’s fault? We were happy to see the USSR fall, but sat back expecting a world of happy consumerism to organically rise in its place. We stopped supporting dictators who’d repressed leftists, but left them all to their own devices afterwards. Or we did what the leftists had been accusing us of doing all along: swept in to make a quick buck, their domestic situation be damned.
Too many Americans like that status quo, and too many outside America see it as the lesser of two evils. Repression or chaos and thems your only choices.
I may have mentioned her before, but I used to have a co-worker/deskmate from Moldova, who was a big Putin fan. Her first husband had been in the army and was killed by a Chechen separatist. She was very much of the “we used to have an empire and now the west humiliates us” philosophy. When I’d press her on things like Putin’s killing of journalists, she’d barely hedge at all, just say that you need to defend your country. She also streamed RT at her desk and was a fount of conspiracy theories (you heard the one about Israel and the CIA poisoning the water in Munich so that all the men became emasculated and didn’t fight back when the Arab immigrants went on a raping rampage, right?)
You know, typing this all out, I make her sound like a raving loon. Yet oddly, she was otherwise pretty normal.
Except for the specifics of which country has been emasculated and humiliated and the specifics of which CTs she endorses, she sounds like about 50% of America right now.
So “normal” in the statistical sense, but a “raving loony” in the objective sense.
In slightly more general terms, almost everybody in the world had relations that went through one difficulty or another, and rightly or wrongly, blamed another group for that. This may have happened a short time ago or in the distant past, but is likely remembered in pejorative terms.
It may be important to remember such things, but it is often impossible to realistically properly restore or provide reparations for whatever, especially for alleged or actual misdeeds which occurred centuries ago. There are certainly times when that is appropriate, but there often needs to be a better balance between letting go, moving on, appropriate education and acknowledging and preventing repetition. Forgiveness may not always be possible, but a degree of acceptance and moving forward may be pragmatic.