Question for scholars and experts on countries that descended into authoritarianism or fascism: In the countries you study, how long did it take for the majority of citizens to recognize the path the country was on? (I'm not subtweeting the US, I'm curious about other experiences)
Lots of them never do. In a surprising number of instances it simply becomes the new system and set of circumstances. People can and will normalize and tolerate anything.
I don't know how long it will take but scholar Erica Chenoweth says it takes 3.5% of population to show up consistently to throw off the regime.
IDK but it turns out that democracies with winner-take-all legislators are the ones most likely to end in civil war. That's why countries like this - the US included - are so few and far between. So yeah, this ends in hell or with multi-member districts and proportional representation. That's it.
Not exactly the answer to your question, but Hungarians fought back (and lost) in 1956 and Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968.
The most direct Hungarian example is more recent. Hungarians had a horrific 20th Century, but were still on a much better path before Orban returned to office in 2010.
This isn’t apples to apples, but I’m not sure Elizabethan England ever really figured it out. Like in hindsight you can see Shakespeare obsessed with it, but, because he has to please the potential tyrant, it’s all blinking in code. Like to the point we don’t really count her as authoritarian.
I had Shakespeare as a believer in rank and authority: Take but degree away, untune that string / and hark what discord follows
The history plays are the thing that made him Shakespeare and they’re so much more critical of the monarchy than they get credit for. By H5, he’s gentling the condition of regular folks and establishing rights. That’s not the party line even a little.
My point is that Shakespeare’s ability to stay out jail is worth thinking about as an ability to maneuver around compelled speech and subjects. But part of what I’m taking about is also about removing the plays from the contexts of Elizabeth and James or even the world in which he bought rights.
Those lines were written for a monarch who made it illegal to stage plays that touched on matters of state or religion. The witches in Mackers are Divine Right. I mean they’re also witches, but the system gets a lot of shit if you know where to look.
I bow to expertise. I have contemplated his dilemma in R3; at one and the same time, rebellion against the monarch is completely unacceptable, and Henry Tudor was quite right to overthrow Richard. I was also thinking of Mark Antony's big speech, showing the crowd...
showing the crowd as fickle and easily swayed, and the populace angry with Coriolanus for not campaigning properly. I see MacB as directed at establishing the nobility of the deep lineage of James I and VI; will the line never end? I also thought that the witches reflected James' own fears
I just think him pleasing the Crown should be understood as the constant of admission and not a revelation of his politics. But part of staying out jail is also all of us can see out politics in Shax depending on what we focus on. He played the game. And I suspect thought it was bonkers.
This discussion went in a direction I didn't expect!
I really thought there’d be so many more obvious examples that this would just be a little weirdness in the background.
So sorry! I answered early and bard-jacked this.
It is. I mean it’s fan service to James for sure. But I think it’s notable what he does with the witches who use the rules of kingship (all die) that Richard II bemoans. I mean he absolutely tells the Crown what it wants to hear. I just buy arguments that he was part of a national project too.
Brutus is the protagonist for sure. And RIII is almost (but not quite) the Tudor propaganda version. He’s a tyrant and vice which undercuts the extent to which he’s divine justice for Bolingbroke’s regicide of Richard II. 4.2 is the place in Mackers he puts some cards on the table I think.
In West Germany, 12 years In East Germany, 57 years
One of the key problematics for social histories of, for e.g., Nazi Germany is exactly how you know what 'the majority' thought about anything - once the authoritarianism kicks in they're no longer being systematically asked what they think!
So, you get into long discussions about what constitutes consent/ resistance, support/dissent