Has everyone forgotten how to use analogies this week? The point is, once authoritarianism establishes itself in the US, there’s no one coming to your aid.
And you might think your religious nuts are a small part of your population, but they think the same about you. And they already have a strong influence on the Republican Party. But you go ahead and not worry about that, I’m sure you’ll be just fine.
There was always a point in the video game Civilization where I’d switch to an authoritarian government in order to accomplish some big goals without having to worry about how happy my people were. I know Civilization isn’t real life, but to answer your second question, if I’m in a leadership position and I’m happy, that’s all that really matters.
I don’t think the US would need external aid. The resistance to (theocratic, authoritarian) government here is domestic, traditional, and strong. I hope you’ll be just fine as well where you live.
I think that comparison falls apart because in real life, authoritarian leaders mostly don’t want to accomplish big goals. For the most part they just want to enrich themselves and oppress / kill their enemies. Granted, in the past when most of the world lived under an authoritarian system there would be the occasional benevolent authoritarian. But these days that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
The salient point I tried and failed to make is that the happiness of those in power is what matters sometimes not the happiness of the people as a whole. Look at North Korea.
I wonder about that part as well. I doubt that the average KGB agent or North Korean secret police officer and such are / were all that much happier than the average CIA or FBI agent.
I would suggest that authoritarianism coupled with nationalism (or religion) never ends well.
I think for short periods of time, authoritarianism can look preferable to democracy, especially compared to an immature democracy. Everyone always points to the spending & economic reforms that Hitler gave, as Germany’s Weimar Republic was cast aside in favor of a dictatorship. But that didn’t end so well, did it?
Over the longer run, Democracies will look better. And when compared to a mature democracy, authoritarians always seem to run into the same problems:
People are afraid to tell them the truth. So, they don’t hear things as they are, but as they would like them to be. This ultimately means that the people in these societies get walled off from reality, and that’s not a good thing. Democratic societies have a more natural way for people to become informed. Now, that doesn’t mean that they are informed. But it’s not the Democracy itself that walls someone off from reality.
There’s typically no way to replace an authoritarian that doesn’t involve violence or murder. Democracies have peaceful transfers of power, which allows the will of the people to be expressed.
So, authoritarianism really looks bad when compared to a mature democracy on those 2 things, and that cascades into so many areas of society.
Not nearly as strong as I think you posit. There is a very strong tradition of the authorities telling “those people” what to do and how to live, and a pretty sizable fraction of the population is fine with that. In days gone by, it was the government telling Native Americans where to live (you must live on that reservation over there; no, now you must move off the rez and into the city because we’re dissolving your reservation) and what to name their children (they must have Christian names); in other eras, it was blacks (slavery, redlining and restrictive covenants, now welfare “reform”), women (you’re not allowed to use birth control, you must dress modestly), and other groups who comprised “those people.”
Of course, the people traditionally in power never think that they will ever be perceived as part of “those people,” but the notion that there’s this strong resistance to anybody at all being controlled by the authorities is I think very wrong.
This needs context. The authorities mandate you wear a mask in the grocery store, most people will comply. If you tell people what they can buy, where they can live or what to worship, shit hits the fan.
People like stability and safety. They worry about crime in the streets and in their homes. They demand strong, even draconian, laws against drug dealers, anarchists, student protesters, minorities, and other organized disturbers of the peace. They don’t like economic crises, whether they’re depression or hyperinflation. In places that are between major other countries, they want a strong military so they don’t have to think about invasion. They don’t want to have spend time and attention on politics: they just want to live their lives in small, personal ways.
These are not the people in power, but just the People. Interviews with people in authoritarian countries almost always hit on one or many of these points when asked about democracy. What do they see in countries that tout democracy? Instability. Chaos. Cultural battles. Uncertainty.
Proverbially, Mussolini made the trains run on train. It doesn’t matter what the truth of the saying is, just that Italy was in chaos before him and stable with him. The USSR and its satellites after WWII didn’t have a drug problem. After the breakup, drugs flooded into all the countries. Think Americans are complaining about opioids and fentanyl killing communities? That’s nothing compared to the hysteria over drugs in the 1990s in Eastern Europe.
Just being able to ask a question like “Has authoritarianism ever done better than democracy?” speaks to an America that is spoiled rotten with privilege. Americans looked very closely at authoritarianism during the Great Depression because democracy was clearly failing. Numerous groups in the 20th century, from union members to racial minorities, touted communism because they saw that democracy protected other groups inequitably. This, in the richest, most powerful, most “democratic” country in all history. Look at the histories of poorer, weaker, less caught up in the culture of democracy nations and see what their choices were, not to have luxuries of free speech and free elections, but to have food and shelter and jobs.
Easy for me to say that democracy always wins. I can’t see the world from their perspective.
For generations, the authorities told black people in this country where they could live and what stores they could enter; the shit didn’t hit the fan in a serious way until after World War II, a good three centuries after race-based laws started.
“You will pray to a Christian God via an authorized and mandated prayer” was the common practice in the majority of American schools until the 1960s; a dozen or so states legally required all students to read the Bible in class. The shit hit the fan mostly because the Supreme Court said that was not constitutional, not because the majority of parents were outraged by the state telling their kids what and how to worship.
Of course people like safety, stability, and don’t want crime in their homes. But crime is crime, whether it’s committed by a street gang or the secret police, and from what it I can gather people living in authoritarian countries have more to fear from the secret police than people living in democracies have to fear from street gangs.
Same thing with drugs, whether alcohol in the 1920s or fentanyl in the 2020s. If we go authoritarian we get Al Capone or El Chapo and their street level dealers running around with guns. If we go with democracy we get Michel Doukeris (CEO Anhauser-Busch) and the nice person behind the counter at Spec’s.
Regarding the Great Depression, even back then I don’t see how it would have made sense to go with authoritarianism. It’s not like any authoritraian countries from that time or within their living memory provided any good examples. Yes, all the democracies at that time were flawed, even the US and UK. But Lenin’s Russia was worse, as were the continental European countries that were still ruled by monarchs of one sort or another.
That’s why I don’t get why the people who currently live in a democracy but support authoritarians think that their lives would be better under such a system. There’s very few examples of people doing better under an authoritarian regime than an elected leader. We probably have to go all the way back to Julius Caesar to find a dictator whose authoritarian system was better than the representative system he replaced. If we have to go that far back to find an example where the change to authoritarianism benefitted the people, why would those who want to do so in this day and age think that this time will be different?
How do you compute “better outcomes”? For instance, suppose that under an authoritarian government, 95% of the population is doing pretty well, while 5% is subjected to unspeakable horror. Compare to a democracy where 100% is doing kinda ok. Is that better? The average person (whether median or mean) might be doing better, but I suspect a lot of people here would look at the horrors and weight that as “negative infinity”; i.e., the better outcomes for everyone else couldn’t possibly outweigh what is inflicted on the minority.
Even trickier is that we seem to have the view that intentional horrors are worse than unintentional ones. An authoritarian might single out a minority group for oppression. In a democracy, minority groups might still be bad off–but it’s viewed as natural, or a side effect of freedom, or something else, so it’s not considered as bad. In America, we seem to have chosen a middle-ground when it comes to our prison system. Intentional or unintentional horror? It’s a little of each.
Those are interesting questions, which I admit I hadn’t considered in this context. In a way it’s a similar but orthogonal question to the authoritarian vs. democracy question, because a group that is oppressed to the degree that they are “subjected to unspeakable horror” likely have no say in the matter. The Black slaves of the Antebellum south, for example, had no say in whether the US was a democracy or not. The average white person, despite supporting it, didn’t benefit from that system. Given that, I suspect it wouldn’t be 95% doing pretty well vs. 5% unspeakable horror in a real life situation. More like the 1% benefiting a lot, the 94% being hurt a little, and the 5% being hurt a lot.
I don’t know how we quantify “a LOT,” and that’s one reason I wouldn’t say that myself.
There are indications that India is more corrupt than China. For example:
43% newly-elected Lok Sabha MPs have criminal record
But there’s corruption everywhere. And while more democratic India is now poorer than China, that hasn’t always been true during the past 75 years, and may not continue to be the case.
It may be that economic growth causes democracy growth as much or more than that democracy causes high per capita income.
Correct. The reality of existence is that every decision, especially the decision to do nothing or extend the status quo, benefits some people and disadvantages some people. How to decide with only partial information and no knowledge of the future plagues the political and social worlds. The world is not filled with extreme trolley problems but multitudes of smaller, narrow-vision acts of self-interest. The choice between authoritarianism and democracy seems like the most extreme decision possible, but few individual people ever make that choice. Throughout history it has been imposed on the People.
The ability to value one form of government over another is another example of privilege. Look at Russia today. Huge percentages of people there defend Putin and the Ukraine war. They are exposed constantly to Russian state propaganda, with outside sources banned. Dissenters are often condemned. Why should we smugly look down at their attitudes? I remember how majorities supported the government during Vietnam and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, even though they putatively had full access to free media.
Condemn them, sure. Condemn us first.
I would be interested to see the text of one of those laws.
I went to a Pennsylvania public elementary school where the teachers, not the students, read to us from the King James Bible. Almost all the students were Jewish, but teachers often were not (I recall a Miss Sullivan). No one asked us students to pray to the Christian God, or any God. We likely heard passages in the Bible advising such, just as there are passages advising things we often did and the teachers mostly did not (keeping Kosher). We were no more told to do what Jesus said than we were later taught to do whatever Shakespeare would have advised.
By contrast, supposedly neutral Bible classes in American schools today are clearly pro-Bible-messaging.
As for authoritarianism ever being better than democracy, I don’t think for long, but I also think that there are degrees of authoritarianism. China is authoritarian, but also freeer than under Mao. Also, it can be hard to judge at the edges, as in the case of deciding whether 1950’s U.S. school Bible readings were authoritarian.
I agree with both bolded statements. It is a privilege to be able to participate in making the decisions about the form of government. Which is why I don’t get why some people, including the Americans who have the advantages that the Russians you mention don’t, want to throw that privilege away.
-Be it enacted by the Legislature of Alabama:
Section 1. That all schools in this State that are supported in whole or in part by public funds be and the same are hereby required to have once every school day readings from the Holy Bible.
Section 2. That teachers in making monthly reports shall show on the same that they have complied with this act, and superintendents of city schools in drawing public funds shall certify that each teacher under their supervision has complied with this act.
Section 3. That schools in the State subject to the provisions of this act shall not be allowed to draw public funds unless the provisions of this act are complied with, and the State superintendent of education is charged with the enforcement of the provisions hereof.
Alabama School Code, 1919, p. 143
I’m not arguing that school Bible readings are necessarily authoritarian, but merely pushing back against @EastUmpqua’s assertion that the shit would hit the fan if the people in charge ever told people what they can worship. There’s a long history of dominant groups telling subordinate groups what to do, and very substantial pressure to conform. Look at another example, the American Indian boarding schools operated both by private groups (often religious) and various governments within living memory, where students were compelled to worship the Christian God, speak English, adopt “white” names, and otherwise conform to the dominant lifestyle. They were told exactly how to worship, and it went on for generations without the shit hitting the fan.
In your Pennsylvania account, there were multiple different religions represented in the classroom, and perhaps a substantial number of Jewish parents who had the power to be a problem if the school did try to compel prayer to an explicitly Christian God. I rather suspect that in interwar Alabama, particularly in rural areas, there weren’t so many, and when (almost) everybody in town with any influence is part of the same religious tradition, there’s a lot more explicit pressure to participate in that tradition.