“You Control Information!” I: About Dictatorship, Research Time, 07/03/2018

We in the West are having a moment. It’s not an unusual moment, although we like to think it is. Democracy is a strange form of government. It’s more effective at a lot of what governments are for than dictatorships have traditionally been. But we shouldn’t take democracy for granted.

Donald Trump being the President of the United States has been quite a shock to a lot of people that way. It was a shock to me. I was a teenager when the World Trade Centre was destroyed and the George W Bush Administration went on a media blitz of paranoid jingo to amp public support to invade and occupy Iraq.

I feel like Trump's desire to be President-for-Life is so he can be
at the centre of a national personality cult. It's how he's always
thought of himself.

But even at the height of America’s popular patriotic panic attack,* W didn’t promote the greasy cult of personality that Trump has. Leftish and liberal people like I was at the time called Bush dictatorial at protests and out drinking with our friends.

* I like to date this period in American culture from about Mission Accomplished to You’re Doing a Great Job, Brownie.

His expansion of the federal government’s police forces were horrifyingly authoritarian. Folks like me were pretty pissed that he’d won re-election. But we knew he’d retire in 2009. Under Trump, that reliability is no longer a certainty. Very unlikely, because you’d need a constitutional amendment for it.** But he jokes about it. As the President.

** I hope we never end up seriously saying “Maybe.”

The crowd laughs.

What does dictatorship actually amount to? We know one when we see one. Take the really obvious examples – Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad.

What are some common features? Literal one-man rule – the leader’s directions give legislatures, security and military forces, bureaucrats their orders. That leader sits at the top of an organization that controls all other state institutions (and often large corporate institutions). Sometimes it’s a political party – the Bolsheviks, the National Socialists, the Ba’ath. Sometimes it’s the military.

And the cult of personality, the identification of the leader with the people themselves. The leader as the expression of the unified will of the people – his every action and word inspires loyalty and joy in everyone.

The sun around which turn the people of Korea.

It doesn’t matter that this is never actually true. But it’s implied and enforced that this should be – every time you get the chance to say so – what you say about the leader. No exceptions.

There are some weird cases. I think of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Institutionally, they function like a model dictator – absolutist political party leader promoted by a cult of personality. The cultural imagery surrounding the Kims reflects that of the emperors, who ruled Korea up to the Japanese occupation, just over 100 years ago.

But dictatorship is one species of authoritarianism. Remember all those surveillance and police institutions that became so much more powerful during the George W Bush years? Those institutions are authoritarian infrastructure that can – and do too often – exist alongside smoothly-running civic democratic government.

You know a dictator when you see one. But you might not always know authoritarianism when you see it. Here’s one way of telling the differences – and I do mean differences.

Look at the flow of information.

This prologue turned out to be too long. So I’ll get to the actual argument tomorrow.

A Problem That’s Gone Unsolved for 500 Years, Research Time, 10/05/2017

Thinking about democracy these days brings up its paradoxes. Try googling the phrase ‘paradox of democracy,’ and you’ll find a ton of different paradoxes. Social and institutional forces in a tension that threatened to pull the whole edifice of the country down around its knees.

Something essential will disappear from human civilization if democratic values and governance disappears again. There are good signs – Canada’s still robust multiculturalism, for example.

Look at South Korea’s election yesterday! Their democracy was under its greatest threat over this year, under Park Geun Hye’s corrupt administration. The daughter of the Republic of Korea’s most brutal dictator, in the thrall of the same family of demented gurus.

The new President of the Republic of Korea on the night of his election
victory. Moon Jae In's victory, to me, signalled the idealism that still
exists in South Korea's people for democracy, freedom, and peace,
despite the deathly serious problems the country faces. Hell, Korea
faces its literal near-extinction as a society and people through the
prospect of a short-range nuclear war. But they weren't so afraid of
this that they turned to authoritarian tactics in the name of security,
like the people of one of the world's oldest democratic societies.

Her impeachment and imprisonment led to an embrace of democratic idealism, a rejection of the ineffective steel eyes of the last ten years of hawkish leadership. Moon Jae In, and the new tradition of Korea’s Democratic Party, have the ideal of peace on the peninsula at heart. They’re pragmatists, but let that ideal govern their approach.

That stance earns the name ‘democratic.’

One paradox that jumped out at me reading Machiavelli is the paradox of tolerance. The snarkiest but sadly in-progress tension ripping at democratic values in the West. We’re facing a youth subculture of disaffected, resentful racist, sexist, gleefully disgusting punks who demand to scream their bile as an expression of absolute free speech.

Milo might have been fired, but taking out a figurehead won’t crush a whole cultural movement.

The question of tolerance is an old one. Must a democracy, in the name of universal freedom and tolerance, also tolerate the free expression of advocacy to end democracy?

Karl Popper’s answer was no. And we lean back on the idea in The Open Society and Its Enemies as a defence. But that reference alone doesn’t stop the subculture. That community continues to fester and grow.

It’s a serious threat to our optimism that this idea has existed since Machiavelli’s time. He deals with this when he talks about some of the reasons why democracies collapse.

A democratic government, even the city-states in Machiavelli’s time, were more vulnerable in some ways than the autocratic cities with their princes and military rulers. Democratic government is open – there is always free speech, freedom of association and thought.

The leaders and influencers in the world's older democracies, in
growing numbers, reject democratic methods and ideals in their
governance and missions. Most disturbing about reading the
Discourses on Livy is Machiavelli's idea that the erosion of
democracy and freedom is a natural process in the development
of human societies. For someone raised in an atmosphere of
modernist optimism, it's difficult to face the fatalism of a more
medieval mind.

So that includes the freedom to advocate the end of democracy, and plot to overthrow it. You will always find discontents with the order of things. Sometimes, those discontents are democrats themselves, wanting a more free society. Those are the good ones.

But you can definitely have discontents and malcontents enraged at the freedom of people around them. That was Machiavelli’s problem just as it seems now to be ours.

Yet Machiavelli’s problem was just a little different. Malcontents against democracy didn’t arise in isolation from wider events. The societies that developed anti-democratic movements arose when wealth and power consolidated enough to turn a government into a practical oligarchy. Only a few powerful people really had effective power over the state.

That betrayal of our institutions was the leading edge. There wasn’t yet enough free speech oppression to shut down all criticism. So a generation arises in the wake of democratic institutions having been corrupted, but which still has their personal freedoms.

But they’ve come to associate their institutions – still democratic in name – with corruption and opposition to the people’s freedom. That hypocrisy of the democratic name and its oligarchical control drives the hatred of democracy.

So, Niccolò, how do we combat this self-destructive social trend? . . . . . . . Oh, you mean we don’t? This is just part of the natural causes of a democratic society’s death?

Okay, you’re a very insightful doctor when it comes to diagnoses. But you’re no help at all with cures. Unless I really am asking to cure a natural cause of death.