Mostly agree, but I think it’s wrong to imagine that you need a popular ideology to get a dictatorship. In Mao’s or Pol Pot’s case for instance, it was really driven by a minority of “fanatics” at first. Then a larger number of people can (at least pretend to) join the rank, and even become enforcers, until a stable equilibrium is reached: you don’t know who is pretending and who is a true believer, and trying to guess can be very risky.
I don’t remember the details of the history, but if I’m not wrong Mao’s faction took power taking advantage of the chaos at the end of a long period of strife and civil war that originally was sparked by the overthrowing of the imperial government. I’d say having popular support isn’t the only way for a dictatorship to start, but it’s the main way to get there from a democracy. Other obvious ways are if a foreign power installs it somehow, or if, as in Mao’s case, it’s simply the result of the distillation process that takes place during a revolution, in which the most ruthless and fanatical bastards keep rising on top until they’re the only ones left, regardless of what was the original impetus behind the uprising. So I think for our current trajectory in western powers, popularity remains the main road to power.
Mostly agree, but I think it’s wrong to imagine that you need a popular ideology to get a dictatorship. In Mao’s or Pol Pot’s case for instance, it was really driven by a minority of “fanatics” at first. Then a larger number of people can (at least pretend to) join the rank, and even become enforcers, until a stable equilibrium is reached: you don’t know who is pretending and who is a true believer, and trying to guess can be very risky.
I don’t remember the details of the history, but if I’m not wrong Mao’s faction took power taking advantage of the chaos at the end of a long period of strife and civil war that originally was sparked by the overthrowing of the imperial government. I’d say having popular support isn’t the only way for a dictatorship to start, but it’s the main way to get there from a democracy. Other obvious ways are if a foreign power installs it somehow, or if, as in Mao’s case, it’s simply the result of the distillation process that takes place during a revolution, in which the most ruthless and fanatical bastards keep rising on top until they’re the only ones left, regardless of what was the original impetus behind the uprising. So I think for our current trajectory in western powers, popularity remains the main road to power.