Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government.
Ok, fair enough. But before we go any further with this line of inquiry, have you considered what the cost was for opposing the government from, say, Obama through the present administration? The controlled opposition did OK, of course, because they are part of the system of control: John McCain wasn't in any danger because they knew they could count on him to defect to their side when it really counted. Mitt Romney was never.
What about those who really wanted change?
UPDATE: To borrow a tack from a recent post, what are the costs of opposing the government in the UK, where thousands are being arrested for expressing 'offensive' opinions? Is the UK an authoritarian state? Is France? Is there any major power left in the West that is not?
What should be done about this problem?
8 comments:
How do we separate totalitarian from authoritarian? Because I would be inclined to think that Hungary (for example) leans authoritarian in that Orban seems unconcerned about uniformity of belief, just uniformity of public behavior. In contrast, England seems closer to trying to control thought, which to me is a totalitarian practice.
I'm not certain where the line between the two ideas lies, or if they shade into each other.
LittleRed1
"...seems closer to trying to control thought..."
Well, yes. And that is what the Biden administration wanted to do, through the gentler-but-more-secretive and also completely unconstitutional scheme of having the State Department's Global Engagement Center direct censorship efforts through academia and NGOs. In partnership, of course, with the tech companies, which would shadow ban you, demonetize your company or channel or feed, and generally eliminate you from the competition of ideas.
Or the way the IRS under Obama demanded vast disclosures from TEA-Party NGOs, and then audited them and everyone involved with them, while at the same time setting up all these NGOs that DOGE was finding funded by NED and USAID.
Controlling thought and its expression is very much at the heart of that program.
I did immediately think as I was reading the NYT section "I'll bet there was no article like this during any Democratic administration in my lifetime."
For what it's worth, I'm not sure Orban is nearly as authoritarian as accused, nor as corrupt (though he may be a little of both). My In laws emigrated here from Hungary and are on the left, and don't like him. Every time I've tried to research in any depth the complaints about him, they don't hold up (and I have an in house translator to help). But there is unquestionably a campaign waged against him to smear him, so take those accusations with a grain of salt, I humbly suggest.
Assuming projection rarely fails.
As to an actual distinction, I think that although corruption is endemic to pandemic in both systems, totalitarians lean much more to using economic levers of control such as inducing shortages and mandating economic activities. Often under the guise of enhancing 'progress'.
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