since 1989 I think it has been appropriate to have a degree of knightian uncertainty in predicting the eternal dominance of this or that regime, on the basis that modern technology and secret police make resistance impossible.
This heavily revolves around the definition of “resistance”. Generally, opposition from elites (who are decentralized in the US) is what’s considered here, and those are very complicated dynamics.
I’m positing that public opinion is probably riding the current rather than driving it (still being an indicator as you said). The current post-WWII system is less than 8 decades old, while the War on Terror is more than 2 decades old, the end of the Cold War is more than 3 decades old, and ubiquitous smartphones are around 1 decade old. The world as we know it isn’t just changing faster, it’s just not very old to begin with; every passing decade is 10% of the distance from 100 years ago when everything was massively different.
In this specific case, democracy is not as intuitive to people as it was 20 years ago because millions of people now have a more nuanced understanding of corruption (long time coming over the last 60 years), how the military controls the military, etc and the old gentlemanly system where politicians step down for the sake of institution strength is not believable anymore, even if it was desired (which people don’t desire because of the intense political environment that everyone now has exposure to due to social media).
The idea of public opinion hacking is less than 8 years old in the public conscious (accusations of russian social media bots in the 2016 election), so that sticky situation is very much unfolding (if you ask people about russian bots being AI-powered, most people stumble, even EA adjacents, but that domino could fall at any time). But, at the same time, something that extreme is exactly the sort of thing that democracies and autocracies around the world look at and think “oh yeah, if anything could be the nail in the coffin for democracy, that would be it”. But at the same time, you can have the elections and public opinion twist inside and out, get inverted, etc, it doesn’t have to pull the rug out from under the elite networks and regime like in East Germany.
On a different note, a quote someone emailed me today shows the Ukraine war isn’t even 1.5 years and it’s still a new paradigm that’s unfolding:
Remarkable how seductive folks find the ‘tough guy’ rhetoric of authoritarians, which invariably posit liberal democracies as ‘weak,’ when a fair reading of modern history suggests the deep legitimacy of democracies makes them terrifying when they ‘go mad together’ as it were.
We don’t know which side will win the war, only that it’s a war of attrition, and many people are arguing that Russia was betting on the possibility of western unity dissolving in order for the invasion to be positive-EV (I have no idea whether they’re right). If true, then we have to wait to see the outcome of this specific war in order to know what’s going on with democracy, and the people running each side of the war probably know this.
This heavily revolves around the definition of “resistance”. Generally, opposition from elites (who are decentralized in the US) is what’s considered here, and those are very complicated dynamics.
I’m positing that public opinion is probably riding the current rather than driving it (still being an indicator as you said). The current post-WWII system is less than 8 decades old, while the War on Terror is more than 2 decades old, the end of the Cold War is more than 3 decades old, and ubiquitous smartphones are around 1 decade old. The world as we know it isn’t just changing faster, it’s just not very old to begin with; every passing decade is 10% of the distance from 100 years ago when everything was massively different.
In this specific case, democracy is not as intuitive to people as it was 20 years ago because millions of people now have a more nuanced understanding of corruption (long time coming over the last 60 years), how the military controls the military, etc and the old gentlemanly system where politicians step down for the sake of institution strength is not believable anymore, even if it was desired (which people don’t desire because of the intense political environment that everyone now has exposure to due to social media).
The idea of public opinion hacking is less than 8 years old in the public conscious (accusations of russian social media bots in the 2016 election), so that sticky situation is very much unfolding (if you ask people about russian bots being AI-powered, most people stumble, even EA adjacents, but that domino could fall at any time). But, at the same time, something that extreme is exactly the sort of thing that democracies and autocracies around the world look at and think “oh yeah, if anything could be the nail in the coffin for democracy, that would be it”. But at the same time, you can have the elections and public opinion twist inside and out, get inverted, etc, it doesn’t have to pull the rug out from under the elite networks and regime like in East Germany.
On a different note, a quote someone emailed me today shows the Ukraine war isn’t even 1.5 years and it’s still a new paradigm that’s unfolding:
We don’t know which side will win the war, only that it’s a war of attrition, and many people are arguing that Russia was betting on the possibility of western unity dissolving in order for the invasion to be positive-EV (I have no idea whether they’re right). If true, then we have to wait to see the outcome of this specific war in order to know what’s going on with democracy, and the people running each side of the war probably know this.