• The Path To Authoritarianism: Historian Timothy Snyder
    18 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ-bifYqK_Q&t=362s
nah dont worry, it can't happen here
Mass secession will occur following the institution of a dictatorship.
Dictatorship in the US won't be enacted in one day, it will be a long gradual decline that weakens every institution until they can't fight back
You mean like what's been happening since post ww2?
Rated marijuana for optimistic. People get accustomed to a slow regression of civilian political freedom, meaning that it is very possible to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. The Washington Post's "Democracy dies in darkness" moniker is disturbingly accurate, and is exactly why Trump targets the media so readily, well, except the state media channel known as Fox News.
Not if it comes from the public's preferred sports team political party they won't.
Don't the Americans yell about a specific amendment that's the very heart of the USA, based on the frequency of its use, that's essentially supposed to protect the people in case this type of a situation arises ? Something about protecting the country against a tyrannical government ? Causes a big stir every time something bad happens to the locals ? Gets used in protests against Arabs but not a lot against the government ?
Nazism didn't pop up in a day in Germany, it took over a decade and was a gradual development. The people do not know how to react to fascism being introduced.
Democrats would never stand for authoritarianism; Republicans however have demonstrated repeatedly that they would not only be willing to tolerate an authoritarian government, but would actively welcome it.
Some Democrats wouldn't, but even with the Republicans in power, the DNC as a whole doesn't seem to give a shit about the threat of authoritarianism, if the fact that they still continue to deliberately disregard progressive candidates in favor of limp-dick politicians even to this day is any indication.
The way he put things, it sounds like this has been coming for a long time now. He says institutions are good and I know many of them serve a purpose, but how should we support government institutions which keep turning against us and wronging us every day well before Trump was in office? The same thing goes for media institutions as well. It seems like more news agencies exist just to push a narrative for their political interests or generate revenue by playing into people’s fears to stay afloat. Mainstream media continues to fail at holding themselves accountable for getting the facts wrong or publishing outright lies. Even if you yourself are educated and scrutinize your sources, then good for you but it doesn’t really mean much when so much bad information is broadcast everyone else who just take everything they hear at face value. Once that happens, those same government institutions meant to protect us are all to happy to use the media’s fear mongering to expand their powers and funding via knee jerk legislation. And whenever things become relatively quiet, the mainstream media feels a need to manufacture outrage and controversy as a way to maintain profitability. Individual politicians then go on to use those controversies as a means to stay relevant and maintain their positions of power, by outspending their opponents on propaganda and advertising put out by who? You guessed it, the mainstream media. It’s the reason why in the majority of elections, whoever spends the most money on campaigning is usually the one who wins. Right now, politicians don’t even need to have a clear plan or set of standards to win elections as long as they have enough money to make the other person seem worse. We keep getting worse and worse candidates as a result of always having to choose between “the lesser of two evils” and now it allows for people with no redeeming qualities to become our leaders and representatives. I’d argue this perfect shitstorm we’re in right now was the result of or directly attributed to decades of media misinformation, corporate cronyism, and corruption all across the board. If all of these blatant lies and corrupt government entities were actually addressed in ANY capacity, maybe more people would have believed Trump was a horrible candidate; maybe it wouldn’t be so damn easy for foreign powers to sabotage our government institutions by simply holding up the dirty laundry of a political party for everyone to see, maybe people would believe actual fucking Nazis are stirring up shit. This guy says the relationship between institutions and the people required effort from both parties to make things work like a marriage, but his marriage analogy falls flat when our “spouses” turn out to be abusive and hand out daily beatings to us. Trump and his staff is trying to push the narrative that the media has become the enemy of the people, and people fucking believe them for all the reasons mentioned above. Nobody trusts the media or the government anymore because nobody is able to hold them accountable; and the ones who can aren’t willing to hold anyone accountable. So what are we supposed to do now? I know he said “do small things like supporting journalists” but clearly that isn’t going to cut it at this point.
Who would possibly secede? It's not like California is 100% anti-Trump, there is no unified state wholly ready to take such action.
DC would, it's the most liberal city in the nation.
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” — Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Bumping because this is in my opinion the single most important thread ever posted in Polidicks. Since watching the OP I’ve read two of Professor Snyder’s books (On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom) and watched over a dozen of his lectures. His work is insightful, instructive, and widely accessible. His concepts are useful not just in the context of understanding how we got here, but also understanding where we go from here. We are living in a crucial moment in history. This is a time when each of us should be asking what we can do, and should do, to confront the political threats of our time. To that end, I highly recommend reading On Tyranny. It's 120 pages long, about the size of a pocket constitution—something you can easily read in a single sitting. I also recommend watching Snyder's YouTube series, Timothy Snyder Speaks. For those who are interested, I've also transcribed a handful of excerpts from some of Professor Snyder's lectures, with emphasis added to his most important points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eydzJx_7jE The Politics of Inevitability The Soviet Union comes apart in 1991. The United States continues. We declare that the Cold War is over, that we won. We declare even more grandly, more metaphysically, more suicidally, that history itself has come to an end. We declare with a kind of mental and political anesthesia that there are no alternatives. And what we have done to the younger generation—the people under 30 who we raised in this environment—what we’ve done is establish something which I call the politics of inevitability: the idea that history doesn’t matter, that there are no alternatives, that we basically know the rules. And since we know the rules, we don’t have to know the details. History is a kind of machine where, for example, capitalism just produces democracy, and therefore you don’t have to know a whole lot about anything else. That’s just the way it’s going to be, and of course there’s no alternative to that democracy. There are a couple of problems with this, which you might have already anticipated. Obviously, history never does come to an end and obviously there always are alternatives. But more particularly than that, I want to notice that some of the specific claims that we made or that we absorbed or the axioms that we took for granted have come back to bite us, and that underneath the Russia story, or the thing which makes the whole Russia story possible, is our own politics of inevitability; the idea, for example, that capitalism must bring about democracy would lead you to the notion that you shouldn’t interfere with capitalism because there will be more democracy. But what if capitalism in the 21st century generates degrees of income and wealth inequality that make democracy seem implausible even in this country? Or, what if unregulated capitalism creates gray zones abroad where Russians and others can offshore money and where alliances are formed that are openly anti-democratic? A part of our politics of inevitability was the idea that technology in general, and the internet in particular, had to be enlightening. We now, I think, are beginning to see just how wrong that assumption was and had to be. And then the very idea that there are no alternatives, which we've been brainwashing ourselves with for quite a long time, that had the consequence that we didn't see alternatives. Alternatives have been emerging for some time, we only now begin to see them as they cross the shores and enter into our own country, but they've been emerging for a while. The Politics of Eternity The major alternative is something which I would call the politics of eternity. The politics of eternity doesn't say, "we know the rules of history, we know how the future's going to be." The politics of eternity says, "forget about the future. There isn't a future. Banish the future from your mind. We're not going to think about the future. We're going to loop back to the past. We're going to loop back to a time when we were great. We're going to loop back to the 1930s and 1940s for our inspirations. We're going to bring back philosophers and ideas and patterns of thought from the 1930s and from the 1940s." And the consequence that this has is that it forms a different sort of politics where all of a sudden, because we're not thinking about the future, everything is suddenly about us and them. If there's not a bigger, better future with more to share, then suddenly politics becomes tribal. It becomes only domestic politics, and the domestic politics becomes only about ideas of us and them. Understanding the Russia Story The case that I want to make is that to understand where we’re going, we have to start with Russia. The Russia story is not just some strange thing that erupted in 2016 to our surprise. It’s not that this exotic thing just happened by chance. It’s rather that, in certain ways, Russia got to where we are going first. The way to understand the so-called Russia story is Russia beckoning us to move to where they already are. Where I want to start is that this thing that I’m calling politics of eternity—the idea that there isn’t a future, but instead there is a nostalgic cycle back to the post and, day-to-day, a cycle of spectacle by way of television or internet which drives the future from your mind, drives the idea of policy from your mind—that Russia got there first; that this is Mr. Putin’s style of governance. Inequality & The Succession Problem We’re not used to thinking of inequality of wealth as a trend or as mattering, but it’s hugely important. There is only one country which has greater levels of wealth inequality than the United States, and that country is the Russian Federation. What Russia has managed to do is find a style of governance which works in conditions of extreme wealth inequality; where one oligarchical clan basically controls the politics. Russia has taken old ideas to address an even older problem, but used postmodern technology to do so. What’s the traditional problem that Russia faces? The central problem in political science is the problem of succession. How do you keep a state going? How do you separate a leader from a state? A very hard question, actually. And that problem of succession is ever more important as democracy fades and as authoritarianism comes back. We’re going to have, in the years to come, sparkling succession crises all around the world, precisely because democracy is weakening. That’s the good thing about democracy, by the way: it’s a succession principle. It allows you to see the future. Russia has a problem with succession. What Mr. Putin did in 2011 and 2012 was make it very clear that democracy was just a ritual, that it was fake, which means that nobody knows what’s going to happen when Mr. Putin dies. Ivan Ilyin’s Fascism There is a modern answer to the succession problem and that modern answer is called fascism. What fascists say is, “Forget about all those laws and institutions, forget about the future, because what we’re going to have is a leader”—a duce, a fuhrer—a leader who comes from somewhere outside of history, to whom the rules do not apply, who somehow physically or charismatically embodies the whole nation and does away with all of these annoying problems about time and the future and so on. It’s striking that Mr. Putin has, since 2012 in particular, revived a whole series of Russian fascist thinkers, Ivan Ilyin in particular, who help him to solve this problem, or at least pose it in a different way. Ivan Ilyin says three very useful things. The first thing he says is that democracy should be a ritual exercise, which, if you’re running an authoritarian state, is a very convenient view. The second thing he says is that there should be no social advancement. Like many fascists, he spoke of politics as being corporeal: we’re all part of a body, we’re like cells, so there’s no reason why we should move about. We have a fixed place, and freedom means knowing what our place is, realizing our role in a larger national body. This kind of idea is very convenient if you govern a place where social advancement is pretty much impossible. It’s also convenient if you’re one who’s making social advancement impossible because you control all the wealth. The third thing which Ilyin says is that there’s no such thing as factuality, that this whole world is false, that God created the world but he made a mistake. The actual facts of the world don’t matter, which has the interesting implication, which is very convenient for our postmodern sensibility, that you can’t lie. There’s nothing wrong with lying. This whole world is already fictional, says Ilyin, therefore you can’t lie. Which brings us to the post-modern. You have a conventional succession problem, you have a modern set of ideas about how to solve it—which are fascist—and you adapt them to a postmodern situation. You fake elections, you ritualize them, partly with the help of cyber at home and abroad, and you use cyber, especially abroad, to try to spread the idea that nothing is true, and to use that idea, this extreme relativism or this absolute skepticism, to try to undermine institutions in other countries. And this has a beautiful logic. It’s a new 21st-century form of nationalism which says, “Look, don’t trust me. Don’t trust your own leaders. We understand you don’t trust your own leaders. We understand you don’t believe our press is true – you think our media lies. We just want you to know that EVERYONE lies. Don’t trust ANYONE.” And if you don’t trust ANYONE, then the new form of nationalism is: you prefer your own lies to everybody else’s lies. If there’s no truth, you prefer your lies to other people’s lies. Which, let’s face it, is pretty much human. You DO prefer your lies to other people’s lies, don’t you? So, if you do away with factuality, then you can get to a politics which is that kind of negative nationalism. What this allows for is a kind of dark globalization. You’re able to weaponize your own anxieties, your own weaknesses, your own distrust, by spreading them out into the world.
Thank you for this.
Dictatorships that come from democracies either never were democracies or come with applauding citizens because the democratic government failed to perform its task of serving the people.
Some political experts believe a presidential system of government will eventually become authoritarian, directly electing the head of state increases polarization, along with bringing political gridlock and making it hard to remove the head of state if they fuck up (opposite of the problem Australia has lol) The Electoral College certainly doesn't help.
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