Also, an aside, people have this vision that authoritarian regimes are wildly despised by their own people all the time, and that's not actually true. authoritarians work incredibly hard to become and stay popular, in large part because they are *more* dependent on popular opinion than democracies
I agree with every thing but the last part, which I guess depends on the meaning of “depends”. The relationship with popular opinion is different. Authoritarian regimes spend more effort directly influencing opinion. At the same time, popular opinion does not result in immediate regime change.
ran out of characters for further elaboration on my meaning
popular opinion is one of the few avenues to bolster the legitimacy of an authoritarian regime (bread & circuses, more or less), while a popular elected government can eat unpopular moves because of its election (can claim the people voted for {x})
It’s one way in which the Star Wars sequels actually improved on bad interpretations of the original: in the OG, everyone who wasn’t empire hated the empire, but in the sequel elites on the casino planet didn’t care who ran things.
People are unsurprisingly less worried about being unpopular when the penalty is having to find a new job instead of getting placed up against a wall by an ambitious young colonel
also a democratic regime can tank unpopular moves based off of electoral legitimacy "i just won this election" it does not work when elections don't really serve to establish legitimacy! even so a lot of the big name authoritarians would've won free and fair elections if they were held
(Glances at Suriname).
?
TL;DR: the President from 2010-2020 was previously the de facto military dictator from 1980-1987. Yes this was a stay out of jail play, but he did step down when his party lost the election; he died last year in exile.
when the public knows that worst comes to worst they can just vote the guy out, they are willing to wait out bad governance. but if there is no such release valve...you better make sure you have a deep base of popular support
Also, three and a half years is an awful long wait
Among other things, one reason the Chinese government was able to retain majority support after Tiananmen Square is that the presence of tanks on the streets that day was a rare exception, not an ongoing rule
They are also deploying the guard, federal police agents, etc., for literally no reason. There is no unrest to quell. They’re trying to create it, in a time when everything is on camera and everything is recorded. Incredibly stupid.
Live like a dictator, die like a dictator
If you continue turning up the heat and continue shutting off release valves, we have a word for that
also an election victory gives you a regular influx of legitimacy to "spend" while authoritarian regimes legitimacy does not have that regular renewal, so if it tanks, lol rip
And it's an iterative game, so when you lose you go lick your wounds and have a solid shot of coming back to power. There's a difference between losing government and the regime falling in a democracy, not in a dictatorship.
I really do think we need a fundamental shift in American democracy where these guys never have a chance again
I have been saying "Woke PRI" for a while now.
I am not opposed to that for the short term but one-party rule eventually falls apart
Doesn’t have to be for ever, but you can’t tell me that 12-24 years wouldn’t make a big difference
I guess there’s LDP in Japan if that’s your model
yes but the goal isn’t hold power forever, only hold it for long enough that when we’re done it’s impossible to go back to what it was before. The PRI was many things, but they successfully established the framework of modern Mexican politics in a way that it’s not possible to go back from
mexico has many, many problems, some of which are downstream of decades of one-party rule, but Mexico also has gone a century without a break in the legitimate civilian transition of power, and that alone is massive
when we say woke PRI the hope is for a latter-day version of that, not literally the PRI, but a period of transformational one-party rule that will break us out of a lot of historical, entrenched problems, even if it will ultimately give us other problems in its time
I’ve seen your calls for this. Can you explain what it would mean in more concrete terms? What are the policy preconditions for following a PRI model?
i think another way of thinking of its a Woke 4th Party System, where the rurals play the role of the solid south
I think that, end of the day, you need to burn the current constitution. That calls for something a bit more radical.
Yeah, democracy is a constant cycle, it's a game that never ends, but the important thing is elections sorta reset the government's credibility and legitimacy (particularly the latter), and authoritarians just... don't get that reset
Well, they do get the reset of a succession, especially if the new despot looks like a potential reformer. See Bashar al-Assad or MBS. But that's less frequent by design, so...
These guys don't want to rule like asshole jock bullies. They want to exact revenge like incel school shooters. Government by Alek Minasians.
Repression of dissent is an important part, but authoritarian regimes simply cannot survive everyone being mad at them all the time. And in particularly, authoritarian regimes can never afford to fuck over the factions it is dependent on for its stability and support without shit going haywire
Right, the point of suppressing dissent is to stop it from spreading
this is the part I'm counting on, especially since they seem to be treating actual military people like shit (MREs, no real accommodations, limiting deployment to a window where they won't get benefits, etc).
"we'll shoot [y faction] if they get uppity, and help grease the palms of [x faction]" is how most authoritarian regimes work, and they fall apart when you start fucking [x faction] and breaking "the deal"
they haven't shown any ability to realize they're getting fucked yet, they only double down
Isn’t it more we will destabilize, humiliate, marginalize [y faction] so they never reach the point of having to shoot them, but any rate we will threaten [y faction] with being attacked to intimidate them
i was thinking more of the south american dirty war examples of disappearing communists etc
it is very context specific
and breaking deals is all Trump has done his entire life
Authoritarian regimes can ride out a window of discontent, even if its unpopular, so long as they aren't *that* sustained, but they just simply can't hold to power if they burn their base
their base loves this chaos though
related to this is regime crediblity to its supporters and its opponents, which is a resource that is finite at any point, burns quickly, and can only be rebuilt painstakingly over time
And it is well on its way to collapse
Is it? I see courts, judges, congress, SCOTUS, the whole damn government (witness every employee who gave DOGE access rather than not doing that) doing everything they can do to enable this regime to do what it wants
If the Republicans are the Nazis, the Democrats have been Vichy France so far.
But the PEOPLE are saying no.
Then you are seeing selectively, or through Depression Glasses. Not every court. Not every judge. CERTAINLY not all of Congress. SO many people are working hard to prevent the worst wrongs, or to remember wrongs that will be redressed. They CAN’T just do what they want, and haven’t.
show me where someone has removed from them the power to enact more evil crap tomorrow and i'll buy your argument
lol depression glasses go ahead and make a serious diagnosis into a trendy phrase that's pretty cool of you but anyway -- if they do 20 bad things, are stopped from 15 of them, they still got away with 5, right? well they've been doing that every day, and nobody has kept them from repeating it
The stuff you’re seeing is what they’re able to get away with, and it’s a pale shadow of their tyrannical fantasies.
ok? they're still getting away with it people are still worse off for it i still don't see anyone stopping it
(And a pale shadow of the nightmares of the people who fear them. I was told confidently that SO MANY WORSE THINGS would have happened by now. They haven’t. And we still have agency and can see that they don’t.)
Also having that agent say, out in the open and publicly, "liberals already ruined this country" is telling and ominous.
"look what you made me do" DARVO ass statement
So why did the Chinese government’s repression in Tianmen Square work while other attempts didn’t?
China was a lot less freer to begin with for starters and the citizenry had been brutalized by out of control youth in living memory.
Yea and i commented on the regime being older and more consolidated
And they opened up the economy afterwards. Of course, they are still totalitarian but the increase in the standard of living has given them credibility.
i think the examples i'm thinking of are less PRC and more the fall of Pinochet and Fujimori
i think importantly with Tiananmen is neither the PRC nor the Party was delegitimized by the violence, unlike with say the August Coup in the USSR
The question is would Trump et al be delegitimized by violence
Undoubtedly his core supporters are horni for seeing libs get killed but how would everyone outside that circle react
This is a BIG topic and there's lots of debate on it, but "why regimes fall" vs not can be summarized as "public support among general populace falls below some crucial number" + "public unrest rises above a certain threshold" + "security forces identify more with protesters than with the regime."
So we’re seeing movement on maybe the first two and security forces are a black box
Honestly i don’t know if we can rule out something weird
Yeah. With China you actually *didn't* have the first two :protests were localized, not national or wide spread, most Chinese people still generally approved of their government, and the security forces very much identified with the regime. As far as ours, well, our odds are better.
Especially their capital cities. Putin and Xi placate Moscow and Beijing a lot more than than Tver Oblast or Henan Province
This brings up an interesting point. Where does MAGA see as their capital? Palm Beach since that’s where Mar-a-Lago is?
There isn't a solid GOP city And no village or exurb is important enough It would have to be a website or TV channel
Anyway, an American fully post constitutional regime will stop caring about Wyoming and North Dakota
This contrast explains a lot: Ukraine is facing forced mobilization and public dissent, while Moscow offers signing bonuses of around $50,000. This is possible because for most of the country, the war feels distant, which helps keep Putin's approval rating consistently above 70%.
Shit, even the Nazis had Strength Through Joy.
I’m glad you made this point. It’s remarkable to me that it isn’t more broadly understood.
They understand that real popularity in this political environment is unachievable, by Trump or by anybody else. There will never be Nuremberg style endless fields of saluting Nazis, and there will never be an American Maidan. Their plan is to keep the public atomized and to use precarity as a club.
They want a divided public and united elites, and they're doing a reasonably good job of achieving the latter. No, they'll never have enough soldiers and secret policemen. Instead they plan to co-opt privately held networks of surveillance and control.
No, they can't shoot everybody or lock them all up. But there are a lot of awful consequences they can deliver at scale. Denial of employment or education. Denial of credit. Denial of housing or medical care. Denial of access to vendors. Denial of access to public spaces, physical or online.
The question is if they can provide an alternative to precarity for enough favored constituents that people don't feel like they have nothign to lose?
Right. Trump is very unpopular, everything he is doing is very unpopular, and the revolt is limited to seething while waiting for midterms.
well unless shit really pops off
Which it very well could with some potentially brewing things in the background
I mean, we know america, its a coin toss of if we get a sufficiently awful video of police brutality. That's usually what does it.
I'm not sure, watching people getting kidnapped off the street into unmarked vehicles I think would be the catalyst.
good example of this is how much the press rolled over for trump II entirely because he won the popular vote (kinda)