You write: “Stalinism is also very bad, but is not a major political force in 2023.”
Why do you think this? In western countries, the “left” has control of most of the levers of power and influence—eg, look at who gets censored by social media corporations, what sort of stuff academic job applicants have to write to get hired, how much money is spent by governments on left-oriented projects. And there are clear signs of increasing authoritarianism on the left—for example, the Canadian government reaction to the “Freedom Convoy”, invoking the Emergencies Act in response to an annoying, but peaceful, protest, and freezing bank accounts of people whose only crime was donating money to the protesters. Some left-wing policies seem almost designed to provoke the right, such as (in the US) giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness, and proposing to give away trillions of dollars in “reparations”. Such huge wealth transfers break the social compact, and are likely to trigger a conflict that might in the end result in right-wing authoritarians taking power, but presumably are seen by their advocates as more likely to result in a left-wing authoritarian regime.
Most highly educated people lean left, but there really are just very few Stalinists. I quoted a poll above showing that just 8% of Americans would support an AOC hard-left party, and actual Stalinists are a small fraction of that. There’s no developed country where tankies get a serious fraction of the vote. See Contrapoints for why communist revolutionaries are super unlikely to take power: https://youtu.be/t3Vah8sUFgI
There are many crazy professors of various stripes, but universities aren’t states. They can’t shoot you, can’t throw you in jail, can’t seize your house or business, and are ultimately dependent on government funding to even exist.
Stalin wasn’t a populist either. He got to power because of how he interact with other elites and not because he had popular support.
Being a populist is not required to be authoritarian. In an important sense it’s even worse if a leader uses authoritarian powers to pursue political projects that are widely unpopular than if the leader does what the majority of the population works.
If you care about the numbers, why should I do the searching for them?
In any case, they are irrelevant to the argument about authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is about abuse of power coming from authority and protestors don’t have power.
Death due to protestors and protests in general are bad, but they are a different kind of danger than abuse of government power.
I don’t think you can separate these phenomena like this. Thugs who aren’t official police can intimidate political opponents of the government, and then not be prosecuted by the government. Thugs can cause chaos that somehow goes away when an organization or community stops opposing the government, or pays money to associates of the thugs, with the government again not prosecuting the thugs for extortion. In fact, I find it hard to imagine a democratic government becoming authoritarian without it employing some extra-governmental coercion of this sort. Without it, it would be too easy for opponents of the government to organize, since governments (especially in the early stage of authoritarianism) have limited surveillance resources (though maybe that is changing with technology).
By the way, protests are not bad in general—only the violent or otherwise illegal (by democratic standards) ones.
The OP takes Hungary and Turkey as examples of countries that went through the problematic transition. Vox has a long article on Hungary and it doesn’t speak about thugs being used in a significant way. As far as my memories goes that wasn’t the case in Turkey either.
When governments coordinate with corporations they don’t need to surveil everyone themselves. If you look at China, they give the corporations a lot of responsibility to monitor their users to keep their internet licenses.
France is censoring Rumble. The “tiktok”-ban bill would have been essentially a move to allow the US government to shut down many internet companies it doesn’t like in a similar way that the Chinese can.
Extra-governmental violence is a factor in some states that transition to dictatorship but it’s not an universal factor.
In the US the FBI seems to be pretty good at fighting violent extremism on both sides of the spectrum.
and freezing bank accounts of people whose only crime was donating money to the protesters
Slightly off topic, but is this a thing that was actually verified to have happened? The only case I had heard of was the “Brianne from Chilliwack” one that seemed not to pan out as real as far as I can tell.
(Asking because at the time there was quite a bit of discussion about whether the overreach was “trying to punish protestors directly” or “deliberately trying to create a chilling effect on any support for protests”)
Note that there is no reason to take statements by government officials at face value.
Even if you believe that the government intended only to freeze accounts of people actually at the protests, this is still a dangerous expansion of government power, considering that there were no court hearings, where people would have the ability to challenge the order. And it certainly had a chilling effect for anyone in future thinking of protesting government actions.
Crucially, there was no actual need for any of this, if the goal was simply to restore order. The Ottawa protest was cleared in the end by ordinary police actions, with no need for the Emergency Act, or freezing bank accounts. The Emergency Act was imposed the day after the most economically damaging protest (that blocked a heavily-used bridge between Canada and the US) was peacefully resolved. One has to suspect that the government was hoping that that protest would turn violent, justifying use of the Emergency Act, and when it didn’t, they decided to go ahead and invoke it anyway. The precedent is now set for invoking it pretty much any time the government wants, though of course not against violent protestors whose cause the government is ideologically sympathetic to, such as this violent pipeline protest concurrent with the Freedom Convoy: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/surveillance-images-released-as-mounties-investigate-attack-at-b-c-pipeline-work-site-1.5788158
You write: “Stalinism is also very bad, but is not a major political force in 2023.”
Why do you think this? In western countries, the “left” has control of most of the levers of power and influence—eg, look at who gets censored by social media corporations, what sort of stuff academic job applicants have to write to get hired, how much money is spent by governments on left-oriented projects. And there are clear signs of increasing authoritarianism on the left—for example, the Canadian government reaction to the “Freedom Convoy”, invoking the Emergencies Act in response to an annoying, but peaceful, protest, and freezing bank accounts of people whose only crime was donating money to the protesters. Some left-wing policies seem almost designed to provoke the right, such as (in the US) giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness, and proposing to give away trillions of dollars in “reparations”. Such huge wealth transfers break the social compact, and are likely to trigger a conflict that might in the end result in right-wing authoritarians taking power, but presumably are seen by their advocates as more likely to result in a left-wing authoritarian regime.
Most highly educated people lean left, but there really are just very few Stalinists. I quoted a poll above showing that just 8% of Americans would support an AOC hard-left party, and actual Stalinists are a small fraction of that. There’s no developed country where tankies get a serious fraction of the vote. See Contrapoints for why communist revolutionaries are super unlikely to take power: https://youtu.be/t3Vah8sUFgI
There are many crazy professors of various stripes, but universities aren’t states. They can’t shoot you, can’t throw you in jail, can’t seize your house or business, and are ultimately dependent on government funding to even exist.
In terms of the parties, DNC has a track record of handling their populists, and GOP does not.
This comment reads like it’s coming from a world where Romney is running the GOP and AOC is running the DNC.
It simply is not viable to bothsides this.
Stalin wasn’t a populist either. He got to power because of how he interact with other elites and not because he had popular support.
Being a populist is not required to be authoritarian. In an important sense it’s even worse if a leader uses authoritarian powers to pursue political projects that are widely unpopular than if the leader does what the majority of the population works.
How many people have been killed in the US by right-wing protestors in the last four years? How many have been killed by left-wing protestors?
If you care about the numbers, why should I do the searching for them?
In any case, they are irrelevant to the argument about authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is about abuse of power coming from authority and protestors don’t have power.
Death due to protestors and protests in general are bad, but they are a different kind of danger than abuse of government power.
I don’t think you can separate these phenomena like this. Thugs who aren’t official police can intimidate political opponents of the government, and then not be prosecuted by the government. Thugs can cause chaos that somehow goes away when an organization or community stops opposing the government, or pays money to associates of the thugs, with the government again not prosecuting the thugs for extortion. In fact, I find it hard to imagine a democratic government becoming authoritarian without it employing some extra-governmental coercion of this sort. Without it, it would be too easy for opponents of the government to organize, since governments (especially in the early stage of authoritarianism) have limited surveillance resources (though maybe that is changing with technology).
By the way, protests are not bad in general—only the violent or otherwise illegal (by democratic standards) ones.
The OP takes Hungary and Turkey as examples of countries that went through the problematic transition. Vox has a long article on Hungary and it doesn’t speak about thugs being used in a significant way. As far as my memories goes that wasn’t the case in Turkey either.
When governments coordinate with corporations they don’t need to surveil everyone themselves. If you look at China, they give the corporations a lot of responsibility to monitor their users to keep their internet licenses.
France is censoring Rumble. The “tiktok”-ban bill would have been essentially a move to allow the US government to shut down many internet companies it doesn’t like in a similar way that the Chinese can.
Extra-governmental violence is a factor in some states that transition to dictatorship but it’s not an universal factor.
In the US the FBI seems to be pretty good at fighting violent extremism on both sides of the spectrum.
Slightly off topic, but is this a thing that was actually verified to have happened? The only case I had heard of was the “Brianne from Chilliwack” one that seemed not to pan out as real as far as I can tell.
(Asking because at the time there was quite a bit of discussion about whether the overreach was “trying to punish protestors directly” or “deliberately trying to create a chilling effect on any support for protests”)
I can’t say with any certainty what exactly happened. Neither, it seems, can anyone else, to judge by https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/02/23/canada-begins-to-release-frozen-bank-accounts-of-freedom-convoy-protestors/?sh=2745dbcc6364
Note that there is no reason to take statements by government officials at face value.
Even if you believe that the government intended only to freeze accounts of people actually at the protests, this is still a dangerous expansion of government power, considering that there were no court hearings, where people would have the ability to challenge the order. And it certainly had a chilling effect for anyone in future thinking of protesting government actions.
Crucially, there was no actual need for any of this, if the goal was simply to restore order. The Ottawa protest was cleared in the end by ordinary police actions, with no need for the Emergency Act, or freezing bank accounts. The Emergency Act was imposed the day after the most economically damaging protest (that blocked a heavily-used bridge between Canada and the US) was peacefully resolved. One has to suspect that the government was hoping that that protest would turn violent, justifying use of the Emergency Act, and when it didn’t, they decided to go ahead and invoke it anyway. The precedent is now set for invoking it pretty much any time the government wants, though of course not against violent protestors whose cause the government is ideologically sympathetic to, such as this violent pipeline protest concurrent with the Freedom Convoy: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/surveillance-images-released-as-mounties-investigate-attack-at-b-c-pipeline-work-site-1.5788158