Lots of dictators who came to power were in group 2. They overthrew the previous dictator and took power.
My limited impression is as long as you control the military and secret police (and have multiple branches of each that all hate each other and compete with each other to stay in the dictator’s favor), you’ll probably stay in power. But if you lose them, then you’re fucked.
Agree w @Alessan’s taxonomy. From the POV of the populace, replacing one dictator with another is often no real change.
So the next question back at the OP was whether they were actually trying to ask “How can a subject populace hasten the end of their country’s dictatorship?”
No. Just the two questions in the initial post.
You have a Republican Guard (or whatever it’s called) which is personally loyal to you, and no-one else. They may be foreigners, so they won’t build relationships with anyone else, or mercenaries (but they might be bought off). If they become big enough to be a state actor in their own right (like Iran) they can effectively make you their captive.
I would reject the assumption that populations automatically want to reject dictators or need to be controlled with terror. Historically, people seem to tolerate, even celebrate kings and totalitarian leadership so long as they felt the country was strong and the trains ran on time.
I mean no one held a gun to millions of people and told them to show up at Hitler’s rallies waving swastika banners the size of football (or soccer) fields.
When I sit around the dinner table with my wife’s conservative parents or read conservative friend’s postings on Facebook, in their mind Trump is taking a much-needed hard line with groups they find threatening. And I don’t mean “oh I don’t like the way they talk funny” threatening. I mean “I can’t feel safe knowing that there might be murderers and rapists hiding among the population of millions of illegal immigrants” or “Democrats are going to confiscate all our property and distribute it to the poor in other countries leaving us penniless” threatening.
What I’ve also noticed with a lot of these sort of people is a high deference to authority and authority figures. They sort of brush off stuff with a mentality of “well, they shouldn’t have been here in the first place, they didn’t follow the rules, unfortunately bad things happened.”
Generally speaking, I think if you can galvanize the dumb middle of the bell curve, they largely don’t give two shits how you run things if you can blame everything on the sort of people they hate anyway.
Well put.
A huge fraction of the populace cheers both enthusiastically and sincerely when the dictator takes over. It’s only after a decade or two of economic stagnation, wildly growing corruption, and enough of their own friends and neighbors falling afoul of the ever-more-overweening secret police, that they begin to question the wisdom of their enthusiasm.
Of course the regime’s propaganda is pushing as hard as it can to forestall that questioning. But eventually the pot boils over. Usually a couple times ineffectively before finally there’s an eruption potent enough to sweep away not only the current Head Despot but also that system of government.
We are watching Iran probably having that final eruption now. Though this too may fizzle / be put down leaving their pot still simmering miserably. Note this is 46 years after they giddily welcomed the Ayatollahs as supreme rulers of all thought and all behavior.
This is a wildly inaccurate representation of how the average Iranian reacted to the ayatollahs’ ascent to power. A minority cheered; the majority looked around in a daze and wondered what just happened.
It started out with H being popular, but later the “enthusiasm” and attendance was mandatory. Germans found out that he wasnt a good choice, but it was nigh impossible to speak out.
As opposed to say the Stroessner regime, which indeed had opposition, but most people in Paraguay supported that dictator. Not to say there werent excesses, as in every Dictatorship, but mild compared to Germany. It helped that he modernized the country, and was relative benign- as Dictators go, and the economy did fairly well.
Some of the biggest factors in whether people accept a dictatorship is how wealthy a nation is, how educated a nation is, how safe a nation is, and how many infectious diseases a nation has.
In the past when nations were poor, uneducated and full of disease people accepted dictatorships. But as nations become wealthier, more educated and healthier, people tend to prefer democracy. That isn’t always the case (China is a good counterexample), but for the most part people start demanding democracy and human rights as material conditions improve.
Also at their peak, the nazis only won about 40% of the vote.
having said that, authoritarianism grows when ethnic nationalism is under threat, which it is under major threat in the US due to demographic changes.
Not to nitpick, but the Nazis won 40% in a parliamentary system in Germany, which is considerably broader and more powerful than 40% in, say, America’s system.
Fair enough. In March of 1933 authoritarian parties won 64% of the vote between the nazis, the monarchists and the communists. The non-authoritarian parties won the other ~36% of the vote.
Yes, in 1932, long before H was a dictator or had gone mad. And before the worst abuses. Kristallnacht was not until 1938.
Pretty sure Hitler (1) never “went mad” but rather (2) had been a raging anti-smite and fascist (just without the power he aspired to) for a solid decade at least by the time he became Chancellor. And while I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for many of the victims of the night of long knives… that was pretty bad on its own, and relatively early in his tenure as chancellor.
In short, Hitler wasn’t appreciably different in 1932 vs. 1938. Germany, however, was very much so.