This conversation might be better if we taboo Hitler and recent politics. On the askhistorians subreddit they have a 50 years rule, and here we say that politics is the mind killer.
In any case, it seems to me that this approach extrapolates current trends, but I suggest that it might be more reliable to look at history for priors. Extrapolation can lead us to predict wild swings, while history puts bounds on the swings and sometimes suggests a return to the mean.
There certainly have been a lot of dictatorships in history and not all of them fascist. But there have also lots of examples of swings from the left to the right, from centrist to extremism, peace to war, stability to inflation, and elitism to popularise, but democracy has survived many of them.
My favourite book on this subject is the very short “Lessons of History” by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I’d recommend it to anyone thinking about these issues in order to quickly develop priors.
This conversation might be better if we taboo Hitler and recent politics. On the askhistorians subreddit they have a 50 years rule, and here we say that politics is the mind killer.
In any case, it seems to me that this approach extrapolates current trends, but I suggest that it might be more reliable to look at history for priors. Extrapolation can lead us to predict wild swings, while history puts bounds on the swings and sometimes suggests a return to the mean.
There certainly have been a lot of dictatorships in history and not all of them fascist. But there have also lots of examples of swings from the left to the right, from centrist to extremism, peace to war, stability to inflation, and elitism to popularise, but democracy has survived many of them.
My favourite book on this subject is the very short “Lessons of History” by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I’d recommend it to anyone thinking about these issues in order to quickly develop priors.