I agree that there were Indian schools where missionaries were brought in to Christianize the children, and that this is a good example of your thesis.
I see a church-state issue with pollyanna Christmas gifting, and festive trees, since children are encouraged to participate in a positive appealing aspect of American Christianity. But the Bible doesn’t have a self-interpreting message (or where is does, said message is contradicted somewhere else). As a result, being read to from an Elizabethan Bible did not influence religion change. And it may have helped prepare us for Shakespeare.
P.S. I guess this got away from the great debate, other than my continuing point that democracy is hard to define.
If done well, dictatorship is a form of government that would deliver better results more powerfully and rapidly than any other known form of governance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of dictatorships aren’t good.
So, on average, democracies outperform regimes.
To answer the OP’s question 2#, it’s because everyone who yearns for dictatorship fancies themselves to be on the oppressing side, not on the being-oppressed side.
Serfdom was abolished in 1861. Timewise that’s like saying the average American improved economically under FDR compared to prior to the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery. Ignoring the sudden time jump, all it’s saying is that conditions for the average person living in an authoritarian totalitarian dictatorship were better than those living under an archaic authoritarian feudal monarchy; neither was remotely democratic. There’s also the important caveat that you’re only counting those living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, sidestepping the millions he killed, and sidestepping the gulag system, under which millions more lived economic lives far worse than serfdom.
Because they feel there are a lot of domestic and external threats, and they feel an authoritarian government would do a better job of dealing with those threats. Especially when those threats come from things like multiculturalism.
The south under Jim Crow was very authoritarian, but really only for black people (and women). if you were a white man you had a lot of rights. Thats the kind of authoritarianism that seems popular nowadays, one where the out groups live in a dictatorship but the in groups still have all their rights.
Nope, that doesn’t work any better. The American Indian boarding schools mentioned above generally disallowed worshiping non-Christian gods, while in the 21st century the forcible conversion of South Asian Indian Christians and Muslims to Hinduism remain ongoing problems in the world’s largest democracy. As long as the group being told what they can’t worship is viewed by the majority of the community as outliers, the ‘out’ group being told who/what they can’t worship is not a cause for concern in the ‘in’ group.
Sort of. I agree that the people in the out group, having no say on the matter, can’t be blamed for living under an authoritarian (for them) system. Of course even the people in the “in” group don’t really have all their rights. A white cis-male in the South in the 60s, for example, would likely be oppressed (admittedly to a lesser degree than a Black person or a Native American) for being a hippy.
The bigger point is that unless you were one of the very few white men at the very top of the ladder, you wouldn’t benefit any more than you would under a system that didn’t oppress minorities. There’s plenty of other examples as well. Does the average Han Chinese benefit from the oppression of the Uyghurs? Does the average Turkish person benefit from the oppression of the Kurds? Does the average Serb benefit from oppression of Kosovars? Does the average Christian benefit from oppression of LGBQT people? In all those cases I think the answer is no.
Do they actually benefit? I agree the answer is “no”.
Do they beleive they benefit? You bet they do. They are certain that a society that lacks e.g. LGBTQ people is a better society for themselves. And that’s all that matters to them; that it be better for themselves.
The mere presence of The Other is distressing to the hyper-conformist mindset that desires authoritarian rule.
The American Indian boarding schools were in North America (the US and Canada). For older examples, consider the forcible conversion of American Indians to Catholicism in the Spanish Empire, including Mexico and points north, or the old southern slave codes that prohibited slaves or free blacks from preaching to other slaves or free blacks “unless licensed by some regular body of professing Christians immediately in the neighborhood” (quoting the Alabama Slave Code of 1833, sec. 42), which meant of course that Muslim or other non-Christian preachers were subject to the lash.
I’ll say that authoritarianism has worked (by whatever metric of worked you use) better than many failed attempts at democracy. In many poor, unstable countries democracy seemed to be incapable of solving society’s problems, or competing against calls for communist revolutions. The Kerensky Republic and Weimar Germany are the uber examples.
I’m surprised this is the only mention of Iraq in the thread so far. Iraq may be the exception that proves the rule. Iraqis did not have a wonderful existence while Saddam was in charge but I would be willing to bet they vastly preferred it to what came after. Although on preview:
But support for theocratic, authoritarian government here in the US is also domestic, traditional, and strong. That’s been the case ever since colonial days, which included both the religious liberty of early Rhode Island and the rigid, dissenter-banishing Puritanism of Massachusetts colonies.
It’s true that active and committed anti-democracy advocates are still a minority among Americans. But they’re not a tiny or negligible minority, and I don’t think it would be a good idea to be complacent about their presumed harmlessness.