How to build an autocracy

[thecrazyscot]

Not another Trump thread!

Actually, this isn't meant to be a Trump thread, but rather to use the current situation as a springboard for further discussion regarding the transition from democracies to autocracies/kleptocracies/etc.

I read a very interesting article in The Atlantic about how Trump could conceivably do more to transition the US towards an autocracy than anyone before him. It's a long article, but worth a read in its entirety. Here are a few snippets:

No society, not even one as rich and fortunate as the United States has been, is guaranteed a successful future. When early Americans wrote things like “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” they did not do so to provide bromides for future bumper stickers. They lived in a world in which authoritarian rule was the norm, in which rulers habitually claimed the powers and assets of the state as their own personal property.

The exercise of political power is different today than it was then—but perhaps not so different as we might imagine. Larry Diamond, a sociologist at Stanford, has described the past decade as a period of “democratic recession.” Worldwide, the number of democratic states has diminished. Within many of the remaining democracies, the quality of governance has deteriorated.

Outside the Islamic world, the 21st century is not an era of ideology. The grand utopian visions of the 19th century have passed out of fashion. The nightmare totalitarian projects of the 20th have been overthrown or have disintegrated, leaving behind only outdated remnants: North Korea, Cuba. What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

Yet the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency. A British prime minister can lose power in minutes if he or she forfeits the confidence of the majority in Parliament. The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?

Over the past generation, we have seen ominous indicators of a breakdown of the American political system: the willingness of congressional Republicans to push the United States to the brink of a default on its national obligations in 2013 in order to score a point in budget negotiations; Barack Obama’s assertion of a unilateral executive power to confer legal status upon millions of people illegally present in the United States—despite his own prior acknowledgment that no such power existed.

What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.

Donald Trump will not set out to build an authoritarian state. His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.

Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.

It is essential to recognize that Trump will use his position not only to enrich himself; he will enrich plenty of other people too, both the powerful and—sometimes, for public consumption—the relatively powerless. Venezuela, a stable democracy from the late 1950s through the 1990s, was corrupted by a politics of personal favoritism, as Hugo Chávez used state resources to bestow gifts on supporters. Venezuelan state TV even aired a regular program to showcase weeping recipients of new houses and free appliances. Americans recently got a preview of their own version of that show as grateful Carrier employees thanked then-President-elect Trump for keeping their jobs in Indiana.

Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption. That, over time, is what truly subverts the institutions of democracy and the rule of law.

Sorry, got carried away with the "snippets".

Did the 20th century end with the victory of Democracy and is the 21st destined to be the century of kleptocracy?

It would seem to me that Trump is not unique. Americans like to think we're somehow exceptional paragons of democracy (not that we're actually even in a real democracy), but it should be clear now that the "golden age" of democracy is over.

“Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.” Their observation was rooted in the experiences of countries ranging from the Philippines to Hungary. It could apply here too.

Thoughts?

 

[Lexicus]

The 20th century didn't end with the victory of Democracy, imo. It ended with the victory of capital.

 

[plarq]

It ended with a victory of capitalist democracy.

The 20th century didn't end with the victory of Democracy, imo. It ended with the victory of capital.

 

[Lexicus]

It ended with a victory of capitalist democracy.

No. It ended with the victory of capital, as evidenced by the technocratic, anti-democratic neoliberal governance that has defined the last three decades in the United States and elswhere.

Democracy spent about forty years being hollowed out by capital and the result is Trump. There is hardly any real small-d democracy in the United States today - just its trappings - elections between two parties which have few meaningful policy differences, elections where (in the United States anyway) you can get fewer votes than the other candidate and still win.

What happens in the next few years will tell the tale, though. Trump will either provoke a resurgence of true democracy or he will snuff out the candle and capital will rule unchallenged until things start to fall apart.

 

[thecrazyscot]

I would say that the US was no less a democracy at the end of the 20th century than it was throughout virtually its entire history. Cronyism and manipulation as well as the power of the wealthy have always been there. There are shocking examples of corruption in the past which surpass any of the scandals we've recently had.

I do agree that Trump is a turning point, though.

 

[plarq]

No. It ended with the victory of capital, as evidenced by the technocratic, anti-democratic neoliberal governance that has defined the last three decades in the United States and elswhere.

Democracy spent about forty years being hollowed out by capital and the result is Trump. There is hardly any real small-d democracy in the United States today - just its trappings - elections between two parties which have few meaningful policy differences, elections where (in the United States anyway) you can get fewer votes than the other candidate and still win.

What happens in the next few years will tell the tale, though. Trump will either provoke a resurgence of true democracy or he will snuff out the candle and capital will rule unchallenged until things start to fall apart.

Capitalism=Kleptocracy, which is antagonizing, but not the anti-thesis of democracy.

When capitalism and democracy, interwined together, fought off Soviet communism. The split begins. Neoliberalism or Washington consensus are just showing that when the arch enemy was defeated, there is no need for capitalist to act out good faith in democracy. There was no more opponent to capitalism.

So yes, history doesn't end as Fukuyama wrote optimistically in the 90s. But one thing is right, Fukuyama was proven wrong, because he extrapolated the result in the 80s and 90s to perpetuity. At the end of Cold War, it is indeed a double victory of capitalism and democracy, and we also saw the light of democracy not only falls on the former Soviet pact countries, but also on dictatorship sponsored by US: Taiwan, South Korea, Chile, to mention a few. If it was only a victory of capitalism, why those pro-western dictatorships were set free?

 

[Lexicus]

If it was only a victory of capitalism, why those pro-western dictatorships were set free?

In my view, they were not. And if this is what you think happened then our disagreement is pretty easily explained. But I don't really want to theorize anymore.

@topic

https://medium.com/@jakefuentes/the...d-were-falling-for-it-b8910e78f0c5#.k3u0225lc

 

[warpus]

Outside the Islamic world, the 21st century is not an era of ideology.

I disagree with this 100%. Ideology rules the Republican party for instance, as it does the Democrats to an extent as well. And that's just in one non-muslim country.

 

[Mise]

For the record/interest, the article was written by one of George W Bush's own speech writers, who famously coined the term "Axis of Evil". No liberal softie -- on the contrary, a massive neocon.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The first step in any revolution is to convince a significant majority that "what we are doing isn't really working anyway." Elections are shams. Your access to information is blocked, or swamped with false information so that it might as well be blocked. Your living conditions are deteriorating towards unbearable if they aren't already there. The existing government forms and institutions are powerless. What have you got to lose?

If you get most people saying that, and have a solid cadre of devoted followers who are either amoral, or even better convinced that you are moral, who will back you through the chaos, you have a very good shot.

 

[warpus]

Most people in the U.S. have it too good to really get out there and join any country-wide protests that might be unfolding in this hypothetical scenario, IMO. There's a reason such a thing hasn't happened yet, most people are happy enough to stay at home and safeguard what they have, instead of joining such a movement and potentially losing their jobs and livelihoods. Take away clean drinking water from most Americans, easy accessibility to reasonably priced food, take away the right to speak out against the government, maybe start some domestic secret prisons in Alaska where thousands of Americans would be shipped to, etc. and then you might have enough mass and momentum for a revolution that might have a non-zero chance of taking down the establishment.

Things would have to get a LOT worse for this to happen. It's easy enough to look at other countries where such revolutions have happened, but in all those cases the people there were pushed to the edge. People often lose sight of how good your average person has it in the U.S.

 

[AlpsStranger]

And then, of course, you have to pray against all reason that you wake up from the bloodshed to Washington, Lincoln, or at least Sanders. Maybe Castro in a pinch ( though I'd still consider him fairly evil ), instead of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao...

 

[EvaDK]

Nazi-Germany and Imperial Japan lost WWII, but Fascism survived. It was already established in the Soviet Union by 1945 and onwards and Fascism/elements of Fascist ideology was likewise adopted into what eventually became an Ultra Capitalist Plutocracy in the US. Not officially, of course.

 

[Bootstoots]

Illiberal quasi-democracy is the wave of the future, and liberal democracy itself is almost seeming like a quaint idea from the recent past. We're basically going to see a Hungary/Poland/Berlusconi's Italy type of erosion of democratic norms on corruption, the media, and so on without going full-scale authoritarian either.

 

[Lexicus]

It's also important to keep in mind that these people are not remotely competent enough to succeed at an authoritarian takeover. Fascists succeed by being good at governing first and foremost, and this administration is the exact opposite of that. When you roll out a Muslim ban, you want the response to be disproportionately quiet in regards to the odiousness of the order, not disproportionately loud because you totally bungled its implementation. The Nazis took over Germany by respecting the institutions of government and then slowly gaining complete control of them, not by trashing them in a very public and chaotic way.

I decided to respond to this here because it fits better in this thread than the thread where it was posted.
I disagree entirely with this. Like, literally every part of this is wrong.

Fascists do not succeed by being 'good at governing'. That is utterly ridiculous - real-life fascists have been among the most incompetent people at governing in history. They succeed, first and foremost, through violence - and not so much by means of actual violence, but by the shock effect of being willing to transgress the norms of civilized society.

The point of the Muslim ban, viz. fascism, is not the Muslim ban. The point is laid out in the article I posted upthread here. It's the intentionally sown chaos (which is why saying they 'bungled the implementation' misses the point- the bungling was all intentional), and the consolidation of executive power in the President's inner circle. While all the liberals predictably protest the thing that doesn't matter at all, you have quietly shown that at least parts of the executive branch will obey you and ignore the judicial branch.

Now moving to the final point, the historical example of the Nazis- No. Just, no. The Nazis had zero respect for any of the Weimar institutions and they demonstrated that repeatedly. They carried out campaigns of terroristic violence against their opponents, denounced the establishment as traitors, set up their own paramilitary force in defiance of the Army. When Hitler became the chancellor (after they won a minority in an election characterized by brutal suppression of their opponents) they wasted no time in using Clockwork Orange levels of violence to completely demolish any institutional resistance to their rule (probably) staging the Reichstag fire and then passing the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act (already having arrested much of the KPD delegation to the Reichstag). Then, bare months later, they turned on the elements of their own party they thought might be dangerous and murdered them all.

I mean, seriously, in a matter of months after Hitler was allowed to form a government the Nazis had complete control of the federal government, had demolished the autonomy of the state governments (and more importantly, of their police forces), and had millions of their political opponents imprisoned. This was all accomplished by 1934, by a party that had received less than 3% of the vote in the election of 1928. The fascist takeover is not accomplished by insidious corruption, it's accomplished by violence and audacity. And they are not competent - the whole notion of 'competent governance' falls by the wayside, the will and the power to inflict violence become supreme.

 

[Arwon]

For the record/interest, the article was written by one of George W Bush's own speech writers, who famously coined the term "Axis of Evil". No liberal softie -- on the contrary, a massive neocon.

Ah, this explains why his path to autocracy leans so heavily voters being dumb rather than talking much/at all about things he might be partially responsible for like concentration of executive power, politicising and reducing the independence of agencies, and the suite of disenfranchisement and voter suppression measures that have been underway for years and will now intensify.

 

[Gori the Grey]

1) Run a campaign based on the premise that the existing government is, top to bottom, ineffective and corrupt, a total disaster.
2) Win the election
3) Point to the fact that you won the election based on your claim that the government is ineffective and corrupt, so obviously the people want the country run on altogether different terms.

QED.

I'm already braced for "The American people didn't elect me to abide by the views of a totally corrupt Congress," should Republican lawmakers ever show any spine and not vote for one of Trump's proposals.

 

[plarq]

There is another factor, age factor, Hitler was in his 40s when he was appointed as chancellor, Trump is already 70, why would Trump try to consolidate power, knowing he will not live long enough to enjoy the fruition?

 

[Perfection]

Trump wants everyone to plaster his name over everything after he's gone. Trump Airport, Trump Elementary School (which would be more credible than Trump U), Trump Ave. That's his goal.

I would love to explain further his emotional drive, but disgusting sexual metaphors are against CFC rules.

 

[Kozmos]

I think ascribing long-term motivations to Trump beyond personal self-glorification is not a good way to go about it. It'd be more concerned about Bannon and other cronies of his level around Trump. If Trump somehow goes or fails reelection, most of his personal cadre will go too.