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.
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.