Are authoritarians having a harder time with the pandemic?

[Samson]

way more americans have died than that generally

since you are willing to include comorbidities and "covid deaths" might as well include them too

I am not sure what you mean by 'comorbidities and "covid deaths"' but many people believe the official death toll is an underestimate:

 

[Farm Boy]

Military deaths by source isn't broken down. I think a majority of those 500,000 in the civil war were coming down with respiratory infections after being crammed into tents with everyone else and marched around outside to shoot people. It was more efffective than the shooting people.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

others believe a lot more people died "with covid" than died "of covid"

speaking of excess deaths, there's a non-trivial chance governments have blood on their hands in causing more of those than doing nothing would have done

I think a majority of those 500,000 in the civil war were coming down with respiratory infections after being crammed into tents with everyone else and marched around outside to shoot people. It was more efffective than the shooting people.

warfare has a "proud" history of this, going back thousands of years, so it's a safe bet

 

[Joij21]

But hey.... every great war in recent history made humanity more mature and responsible and wiser, afterwards, did it not? I think so. Or like to think so.

Well in Africa they don't learn, they still be killing and genociding each other.

Also throughout a lot of history you just have periods where internecine warfare was endemic for centuries. No one really learned anything during these periods as warfare and raiding culture was a way of life.

Honestly people don't learn from conflict if the conflict becomes more about the thrill of the kill, or if one can gain sexual gratification through rape, or make personal wealth by pillaging and enslaving captives.

 

[Gorbles]

Well in Africa they don't learn, they still be killing and genociding each other.

Yeah, famously, no other continent contains nations which regularly kill (or enact genocide on) others

 

[TheMeInTeam]

africa is particularly bad lately, owing to the instability of governments there

but other governments are going more authoritarian, so maybe africa is ahead of the game rather than behind

not a game i want to play though

 

[Joij21]

Yeah, famously, no other continent contains nations which regularly kill (or enact genocide on) others

They are currently the worse off right now in the 21st century. Followed by Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and certain zones within Latin America.

I mean Papa New Guinea has those cannibalistic witch hunting tribes as well, so Oceania to a certain extent as well.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

africa's a big place. part of what counts as "middle east" is in africa, as are south africa, morocco, kongo, nigeria, uganda, ethiopia, and chad

there's a pretty big differential between those, even in terms of how well-off they are and how much they've been ruined by wars/authoritarian governments. some are probably better off than the worst in south america or SEA.

 

[Joij21]

africa's a big place. part of what counts as "middle east" is in africa, as are south africa, morocco, kongo, nigeria, uganda, ethiopia, and chad

Generally, the Middle East proper refers to the Near East. Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula. But colloquially yeah, the Middle East is just a catch all term for where majority Muslim people are (explicitly excluding Indonesia and the other predominantly Muslim parts of Southeast Asia).

there's a pretty big differential between those, even in terms of how well-off they are and how much they've been ruined by wars/authoritarian governments. some are probably better off than the worst in south america or SEA.

I mean yeah certain parts could be worse but overall, it's less endemic to the South American continent than it is to the African.

 

[innonimatu]

Funny how this dude keeps finding new ways to be wrong

Actually it's funny because he recognized the mistake of his end of history thing and now admits that history keeps changing and nothing can be taken for granted. Not many that acknowledge so openly they were wrong.

 

[innonimatu]

I can think of two fundamental differences:

The world was not fully globalized yet. Giving capitalism room to expand, postponing its IMO inevitable end.

There is little left to pillage, most is being pillaged already. Thus capitalism finally trampling on the relatively privileged workers in the central countries of the system also. Rentier capitalism in particular, which is what we have over much of the "west" and its dependencies, cannot survive on financial chicanery forever.

The escape for capitalism, if there was one, was into "virtual living", because space is too hard. But what is there to pillage there but attention? Cryptocrap was a last effort, we're entering autophagy of the capitalist classes. Starting on the lower strata as usual.

 

[Lexicus]

There is little left to pillage, most is being pillaged already.

And with crypto and NFTs when we run out of stuff to pillage we'll just make up more stuff to pillage!

 

[Moriarte]

I will take a moment to point out that democracy (pronounced with American accent) and authoritarianism are both represented on a scale. Every country on Earth, to a certain degree, is a democracy, likewise, every country is authoritarian. There are different degrees of political representation in societies and we can have a different mixture of democratic and authoritarian expressions and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It makes me smile when I read “western democracies”, as if outside of western world communities of people live in totalitarian hell. I understand it’s a widely accepted propaganda tool and it’s useful in dehumanising certain populations, gaining an upper hand and having moral justification to decide for them in the fields of economics and politics when it becomes advantageous to do so.

Anyway, before I venture too far with this: same with countries, same with people, there is a mixture - the complexity. What do you mean when you say authoritarians? 10% authoritarians? 19.9% authoritarians? What % should get one labeled true old school authoritarian? Which authority decides on how authoritarian anyone is? I find this labelling approach on display counterproductive, in general. It may work with cats, but people and our communities are more complex and deserve better.

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm not sure I accept the idea that democracy and authoritarianism are on a sliding scale, at least not straightforwardly. Democracy describes the rule of the majority, but it's quite possible to imagine a society in which majorities hold little decision-making power but which is also not authoritarian, if we imagine that the mechanisms for anyone to impose their decisions on others is limited. It would seem to follow that we can imagine a society that is both more democratic and more authoritarian, in which majorities hold strong decision-making powers. In this sense, both democracy and authoritarianism are pegged to state capacity, or more broadly to the capacity of a society for large-scale collective action: that a state is only democratic and/or authoritarian to the extent it can do stuff, that they describe the process by which the potential is acted upon rather than the potential itself.

tl;dr: whoops i reinvented the political compass with more obtuse labels.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not sure I accept the idea that democracy and authoritarianism are on a sliding scale

they are not

human behavior tends to correlate them somewhat, but only somewhat

democracy makes it harder to restrain people, since the restrainer can be replaced. but it is not impossible with enough financial incentive and information control

similarly, nothing forces a monarch or dictator to infringe on basic freedoms more than is necessary to sustain power. but in practice, few have ever stopped there for long

hunter-gatherers weren't too far from authoritarians that didn't influence most decisions, as a matter of practicality. but as we have observed repeatedly that setup does not continue functioning as it scales up in size

 

[Quintillus]

I would argue that the terminology here is confused. An "authoritarian" country is, in my understanding, one in which an individual or small group holds a vast majority of power, without an effective representative government (though there may be one with minor powers for appearance's sake). A representative government that is exercising a lot of powers, but is beholden to an electorate, is not authoritarian. Did the British government exercise a lot of power during WWII? Definitely. Was it authoritarian? No.

It may be argued that some actions it took were similar to ones an authoritarian regime would take, and indeed there were those who worried that in trying to defeat Hitlerism (to use Churchill's term), Britain would turn itself into something similar. But ultimately, those fears did not come to pass.

So with that said, yes, some measures to attempt to control covid fall into that, "are we imitating authoritarian regimes' practices too much to try to defeat the threat?" category. Although really, I'd only put mandatory lockdowns in this category, at least among what I've read about in the West. In all those cases however, it was with the consent of elected governments.

As for the headline topic, are authoritarians having a harder time? I agree with Gorbles that some, including Xi, are using it as an excuse to crack down on things (such as Hong Kong) that they've wanted to anyway. I think it's hard to say whether they're having a harder time overall, though. One could argue that in some cases, authoritarianism makes it easier to contain the virus; see China's continuing lockdowns and mass invasive testing (more invasive than anywhere else in the world). They also can legitimately deflect some of the blame for their problems to the virus. On the other hand, if the populace sees them as either ineffective (a concern for the likes of Putin), or excessively harsh (a concern for the likes of Xi), there's not a release valve in the form of voting for the opposition, as we saw in the U.S. when Trump's response was generally regarded as inept.

Thus I suppose my answer comes down to, the pandemic isn't inherently more difficult for authoritarian regimes, but their classic weakness of, "if they aren't doing well, there's not a good escape valve" is applicable, and the pandemic is a stressor that will cause a higher rate of "not doing well" than usual - for both authoritarian and representative governments.