only 8% who would vote for a “woke”, left-wing AOC party. American conservatives far outnumber liberals, and “woke” policies like defunding the police and affirmative action are very unpopular even in left-wing areas, with the latter being defeated by huge margins in deep-blue California. Hence, even though there are both left-wing and right-wing radicals, it is vastly easier to imagine fascist dictatorship than a “woke” dictatorship, especially as the latter movement now seems to be in decline.
Honestly I think anyone who seriously envisioned a “woke dictatorship” must have had listened way too much to right wing propaganda. The problem with the “woke” movement (which doesn’t want to be called that but also refuses to give itself any other name in a desperate and generally failed bid to market itself as the default) is instead exactly that it’s this unpopular. It elicits fanatical loyalty in a minority and leaves everyone else baffled or repulsed, dividing the left’s ability to push back against the right while offering the latter a perfect strawman to point at for all of left wing ideas. Worse, since lots of people don’t have the mental space to separate “this cause is quite important” from “the specific person who advocated it to me is a sneering, annoying git”, it’s probably actively harming support for fighting racism, sexism or homophobia. I would say there’s a decent chance it’s actually a concurrent cause in the rise of fascism you mention, because of this. In fact, hopefully, the left turning back to a more pragmatic discourse, focused on individuals and realism (in the philosophical sense) rather than group identity and idealism, might be a source of inversion of some of these trends.
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.
The problem with the “woke” movement (which doesn’t want to be called that but also refuses to give itself any other name in a desperate and generally failed bid to market itself as the default) is instead exactly that it’s this unpopular. It elicits fanatical loyalty in a minority and leaves everyone else baffled or repulsed...
I agree that a “woke dictatorship” (whatever that means) is unlikely to be established in most Western countries over the next ten years, but the unpopularity of the idea among the broader population is not very strong evidence that a dictatorship cannot be established on said principles. Just to provide one example, Bolshevik ideas were quite unpopular in Russia in February 1917, and yet Russia had become a dictatorship under the Bolsheviks by 1920.
Yes but as I said in another comment that requires special conditions, such as a previous revolution destabilising things so much that power is up for grabs, or some sway over the military. 1917 being in the middle of a very unpopular war probably played a huge role in creating the conditions for a relative minority to impose its will.
The unpopularity of the war in early 1917 is rather overstated. In fact; even after the fall of the Tsarist government, the war was so popular that before Lenin returned to Russia, Stalin felt it necessary to change the Bolshevik party line by endorsing Russia’s continued participation in the war.
I agree that the chaotic conditions in 1917 Russia were essential for a minority to seize power, but similarly chaotic conditions could come to exist in many Western countries as well, perhaps as the result of a world war or economic transformation driven by AI.
The question is how popular the war was with the soldiers, who had the weapons. The home front’s opinion gets relatively less important in the face of enough angry people with guns.
similarly chaotic conditions could come to exist in many Western countries as well, perhaps as the result of a world war or economic transformation driven by AI
Or climate change. True. But I honestly still expect right wing authoritarianism to emerge victorious from most of those scenarios. The leftist front just doesn’t have enough unity or enough of a project to turn even its worst impulses into actual policy. I think the only liberal-ish leaning regime I can imagine emerging is more of a moderate technocracy enforced by an alliance between politics and techno-capitalists bolstered in power by AI.
And of course, since we’re here, anyone who created an aligned ASI first would have a shot at shaping the world as they see fit, so that’s the ultimate pivot upon which even a very extreme minority might impose its views on everyone else. I wrote a whole post about this once. But those are very extreme scenarios (and I expect that if such an ASI is possible it’d just kill us, most likely).
AOC explicitly called for the executive branch to ignore the judicial branch because the judicial branch lacks the power to enforce laws. Calling for the government to ignore the courts is pretty far in the direction of dictatorship.
I don’t know the episode you’re referencing, but my general point was less “it’s ludicrous to imagine a dictatorship built around the current left’s principles” and more “it’s ludicrous to imagine the current left mustering enough support to enact any kind of successful coup”.
I mean, the presenter does his best to show this as the worst thing ever but it’s really nothing that serious. The issue it applies to matters, and this is a situation where there’s a conflict between duties; there’s the letter of the law and there’s the moral duty of care towards citizens. If you believe a grossly incompetent judiciary has ruled wrongly on a matter of healthcare, and following the ruling might endanger and harm the citizens, then her position, while still fairly radical, makes sense, and isn’t a symptom in itself of a greater push towards authoritarianism.
While I don’t think a minority should impose its will on a majority, I’m a lot more lenient when, like in this case, all someone is saying is “yeah, the State is trying to impose unreasonable limits on us about things that wouldn’t involve anyone else, don’t enforce that”. That’s not authoritarianism, if anything her position is funnily enough starkly libertarian on this, though she’s inviting the POTUS to back her up (which doesn’t mean he will, nor I think she would be so naive as to expect that her words would be enough to make him do it).
To be clear, I think sometimes the meta and the object level get mixed up (sometimes in bad faith) in political discourse, and this is one of those cases where I think you can’t avoid an opinion on the object level, not just the meta level. The executive shouldn’t generally override the judiciary, but if the judiciary is being unreasonably oppressive and authoritarian and the executive is the only organ with the power to stop it at that moment, then letting legality get in the way of that is missing the spirit for the letter. Similarly, if you did really have strong evidence that an election was rigged to the point that the wrong President was elected, I think storming the Capital would be quite an appropriate reaction! I think the events of Jan 6 2021 were ridiculous and shameless simply because I believe in that occasion, specifically, there was no rigging, just a very sore loser.
The issue it applies to matters, and this is a situation where there’s a conflict between duties
You can argue that there’s a conflict between duties in nearly every political conflict. If you take fighting terrorism, you can easily argue that there’s a duty of the state to do so. That doesn’t allow the state to do everything it wants in that goal.
In general, when it comes to new powers of the executive, once they are established in one case they are going to be used in other cases as well.
she’s inviting the POTUS to back her up (which doesn’t mean he will, nor I think she would be so naive as to expect that her words would be enough to make him do it).
Fortunately, she doesn’t have the power and her way of doing politics is still a minority position in the Democratic party. I was talking about what would happen if the winds shift into making her style of politics more powerful.
You can argue that there’s a conflict between duties in nearly every political conflict. If you take fighting terrorism, you can easily argue that there’s a duty of the state to do so. That doesn’t allow the state to do everything it wants in that goal.
Sure, but I’m sure most people would draw a line there too. If it was between breaking procedure to spy on someone illegally and letting a nuke detonate in NYC, well...
Fortunately, she doesn’t have the power and her way of doing politics is still a minority position in the Democratic party. I was talking about what would happen if the winds shift into making her style of politics more powerful.
You don’t know though that simply making a rhetoric statement that she knows won’t be followed up equates actually doing it if she was the POTUS. Many radicals on either side are more bark than bite, because barking is a very effective way of writing checks no one expects you to cash. In fact, that’s one decent source of hope concerning the fascist problem too (though one shouldn’t rely on it, obviously).
To a point, “radical asks outrageous thing, moderate concedes more reasonable one” is a kind of role play that is part and parcel of politics. Whether knowingly or not, if they’re in a healthy equilibrium, both roles serve a useful function.
The rules-based order works on following the law consistently and not when it suits you.
If it was between breaking procedure to spy on someone illegally and letting a nuke detonate in NYC
But that’s not how real-world policy decisions look like. The OP did point to Turkey and the Kurds. Fighting Kurdish terrorism is a valid interest of the Turkish state but the means they use to do so are problematic and it’s precisely the fact that they use illegitimate means that makes it sensible to describe the behavior as authoritarian.
You don’t know though that simply making a rhetoric statement that she knows won’t be followed up equates actually doing it if she was the POTUS.
When it comes to presidents claiming more executive powers, that’s usually that when they are in office presidents like to grab more power and not less.
More importantly, her speech pushes the Overton window toward being more authoritarian. Her calls for censorship of Tucker are similar at moving the window into a more authoritarian direction.
The fact that she sees it as good politics to call for Biden to be more authoritarian should be concerning as it tells you something about how she perceives the political winds.
To actually put it into policy, she would of course need to find people that think like her to put them into positions of power.
Hmm, this gets actually so complicated IMO that it might deserve its own post. Whether you take a deontological or utilitarian approach, “always follow the law” is almost never the actual policy you’ll get out of your ethical system, even though obviously “break the law whenever you feel like you know better” is also bad (the same way in which naive utilitarianism such as “defect whenever you think it’s for the greater good” is bad). We might call it Antigone’s Dilemma, since this tension between law abiding and personal virtue was pretty much the core theme of that tragedy and its heroine’s arc.
I do agree that in general normalizing too many authoritarian-ish behaviours is bad, and it’s especially bad when it comes from enough sides that the only thing all the political spectrum has in common is this sense of mild annoyance with procedure and rules, as if they were just a formality that hinders real action. When no one believes in the laws, the laws are bound to eventually fail. However that doesn’t mean that it’s unreasonable to not believe in the laws either; a State holds together by virtue of its citizens all sharing some kind of political and philosophical bedrock that they can use to cooperate and sort through conflicts without resorting to violence. Peaceful transition of power and graceful defeat are only possible if both sides agree that the other winning is still a much less bad fate than the chaos that would ensue from a violent conflict. It seems to me like, rightly or wrongly (more likely the latter, since people always severely underestimate what war actually means), this belief is coming apart in many countries, including the US, and on both sides of the aisle—which turns inevitably into a feedback loop. If the other side is willing to do anything to beat me, I have to step up my game or my defeat is guaranteed. Overall, in this sense, I still think in the US it’s the GOP that is pushing the accelerator pedal, and though there are people on the left that try to do so too, the Democrat side is overall way more divided on this and has some significant attempts at deescalation. Unfortunately trying to deescalate often looks like weakness and concession in the face of an opponent who likes to take advantage of that, and that in turn strengthens the support for further escalation instead. As I said, feedback loop.
Publically, AOC demanding that the Biden administration should engage in authoritarian behaviour provides very little use when she doesn’t think that Biden will actually engage in those behavior while at the same time eroding the standards. If a future Trump administration will call for ignoring court orders, you can count on Fox News to air AOC’s pronouncements that it’s an acceptable tactic.
Even when your ethical system says that sometimes it’s worthwhile to break rules because of utilitarian concerns, that doesn’t make cases where you call for rules to be broken when you don’t expect that actually happen okay. People who do find value in pushing the Overton window to allow for more authoritarian actions are rightfully seen as authoritarians.
Democrat side is overall way more divided on this and has some significant attempts at deescalation.
What do you see as notable attempts at deescalation?
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
When it comes to feedback, a Trump presidency that follows after Trump spending some time in prison is likely more unhinged and more dangerous than one where he enters office without having been in prison before.
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
Three points.
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Point two: the scale and severity if crimes is different. Clinton apparently stored emails on an unproperly secured server. Trump took secret documents at home, stored them in unsecured boxes, was repeatedly nicely asked to return them, lied that he had already, and showed the documents to his friends in order to brag like some twelve years old boy particularly proud of his porn stash. I don’t think things would have reached the point of indictment if he’d been a bit more compliant when things were still in the “asking nicely” stage. But at one point, an example must be made, or we’re just saying laws don’t exist at all.
Point three: there might be a bit of a “getting Al Capone for tax evasion” thing going on admittedly because I think the real escalation that Trump is suffering retaliation for, the thing where he truly broke precedent to a ridiculous extent and that everyone rightfully doesn’t want to repeat ever again but that’s apparently hard to nail him down for is his little 6 January stunt. Messing with peaceful transition of power that way is a big no-no, and while he wasn’t literally leading the mob he clearly did enough to purposefully inflame the situation instead of defusing it. I’d bet if he didn’t do that the judiciary would be less fixated on prosecuting him.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court. They had a chance to strategize when Obama was still President to hold control of it but didn’t do it, Trump packed it with friendly judges at every occasion, and now despite suggestions about how to retaliate against that existing they didn’t really do anything, despite this unelected organ having a disproportionate decisional power (which honestly from outside the US looks insane to me, as is to be fair the level of reliance on them).
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault? Lab leak was dismissed already back in 2020, and it was more ridiculed than censored, mostly by scientific authorities like the WHO. The world is larger than the US. Now do I think many scientists who made those appeals were probably biased, maybe because they thought the lab leak hypothesis dangerous, either geopolitically or to the funding of their field? Yes. But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process, let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party that to most of the rest of the planet means very little.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court.
Not doing something to push an advantage is not automatically de-escalation. They didn’t push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for similar reasons they aren’t doing it with Dianne Feinstein. The principle seems to be something along the lines of “it should be every politician’s right to decide when they have to resign because they are too old or ill”. While that isn’t escalation I also don’t see that as deescalation. political
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
If you care about the threat of fascism, power that’s wielded without being democratically accountable, isn’t less problematic. If you have people who are not democratically accountable using authoritarian power to eliminate their political opponents that’s problematic even if it’s not along Blue vs. Red lines.
I think you can make an argument that the Trump prosecution is justified, but I don’t think that changes the fact that it creates a precedent that moves the whole system in the direction of being more authoritarian.
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault?
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party
I agree that virologists were not driven by allegiance to a US political party but by their own interests and geopolitical considerations. Farrar’s self-description of not having slept enough might also account for part of why the thinking went poorly.
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I don’t think the extent of how those structures are currently utilized means that the US is an authoritarian government. On the other hand, Lula’s attempts to use those structures to fight his political opposition might be a move toward authoritarianism.
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
What’s that from?
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.
Honestly I think anyone who seriously envisioned a “woke dictatorship” must have had listened way too much to right wing propaganda. The problem with the “woke” movement (which doesn’t want to be called that but also refuses to give itself any other name in a desperate and generally failed bid to market itself as the default) is instead exactly that it’s this unpopular. It elicits fanatical loyalty in a minority and leaves everyone else baffled or repulsed, dividing the left’s ability to push back against the right while offering the latter a perfect strawman to point at for all of left wing ideas. Worse, since lots of people don’t have the mental space to separate “this cause is quite important” from “the specific person who advocated it to me is a sneering, annoying git”, it’s probably actively harming support for fighting racism, sexism or homophobia. I would say there’s a decent chance it’s actually a concurrent cause in the rise of fascism you mention, because of this. In fact, hopefully, the left turning back to a more pragmatic discourse, focused on individuals and realism (in the philosophical sense) rather than group identity and idealism, might be a source of inversion of some of these trends.
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.
I agree that a “woke dictatorship” (whatever that means) is unlikely to be established in most Western countries over the next ten years, but the unpopularity of the idea among the broader population is not very strong evidence that a dictatorship cannot be established on said principles. Just to provide one example, Bolshevik ideas were quite unpopular in Russia in February 1917, and yet Russia had become a dictatorship under the Bolsheviks by 1920.
Yes but as I said in another comment that requires special conditions, such as a previous revolution destabilising things so much that power is up for grabs, or some sway over the military. 1917 being in the middle of a very unpopular war probably played a huge role in creating the conditions for a relative minority to impose its will.
The unpopularity of the war in early 1917 is rather overstated. In fact; even after the fall of the Tsarist government, the war was so popular that before Lenin returned to Russia, Stalin felt it necessary to change the Bolshevik party line by endorsing Russia’s continued participation in the war.
I agree that the chaotic conditions in 1917 Russia were essential for a minority to seize power, but similarly chaotic conditions could come to exist in many Western countries as well, perhaps as the result of a world war or economic transformation driven by AI.
The question is how popular the war was with the soldiers, who had the weapons. The home front’s opinion gets relatively less important in the face of enough angry people with guns.
Or climate change. True. But I honestly still expect right wing authoritarianism to emerge victorious from most of those scenarios. The leftist front just doesn’t have enough unity or enough of a project to turn even its worst impulses into actual policy. I think the only liberal-ish leaning regime I can imagine emerging is more of a moderate technocracy enforced by an alliance between politics and techno-capitalists bolstered in power by AI.
And of course, since we’re here, anyone who created an aligned ASI first would have a shot at shaping the world as they see fit, so that’s the ultimate pivot upon which even a very extreme minority might impose its views on everyone else. I wrote a whole post about this once. But those are very extreme scenarios (and I expect that if such an ASI is possible it’d just kill us, most likely).
AOC explicitly called for the executive branch to ignore the judicial branch because the judicial branch lacks the power to enforce laws. Calling for the government to ignore the courts is pretty far in the direction of dictatorship.
I don’t know the episode you’re referencing, but my general point was less “it’s ludicrous to imagine a dictatorship built around the current left’s principles” and more “it’s ludicrous to imagine the current left mustering enough support to enact any kind of successful coup”.
This episode.
I mean, the presenter does his best to show this as the worst thing ever but it’s really nothing that serious. The issue it applies to matters, and this is a situation where there’s a conflict between duties; there’s the letter of the law and there’s the moral duty of care towards citizens. If you believe a grossly incompetent judiciary has ruled wrongly on a matter of healthcare, and following the ruling might endanger and harm the citizens, then her position, while still fairly radical, makes sense, and isn’t a symptom in itself of a greater push towards authoritarianism.
While I don’t think a minority should impose its will on a majority, I’m a lot more lenient when, like in this case, all someone is saying is “yeah, the State is trying to impose unreasonable limits on us about things that wouldn’t involve anyone else, don’t enforce that”. That’s not authoritarianism, if anything her position is funnily enough starkly libertarian on this, though she’s inviting the POTUS to back her up (which doesn’t mean he will, nor I think she would be so naive as to expect that her words would be enough to make him do it).
To be clear, I think sometimes the meta and the object level get mixed up (sometimes in bad faith) in political discourse, and this is one of those cases where I think you can’t avoid an opinion on the object level, not just the meta level. The executive shouldn’t generally override the judiciary, but if the judiciary is being unreasonably oppressive and authoritarian and the executive is the only organ with the power to stop it at that moment, then letting legality get in the way of that is missing the spirit for the letter. Similarly, if you did really have strong evidence that an election was rigged to the point that the wrong President was elected, I think storming the Capital would be quite an appropriate reaction! I think the events of Jan 6 2021 were ridiculous and shameless simply because I believe in that occasion, specifically, there was no rigging, just a very sore loser.
You can argue that there’s a conflict between duties in nearly every political conflict. If you take fighting terrorism, you can easily argue that there’s a duty of the state to do so. That doesn’t allow the state to do everything it wants in that goal.
In general, when it comes to new powers of the executive, once they are established in one case they are going to be used in other cases as well.
Fortunately, she doesn’t have the power and her way of doing politics is still a minority position in the Democratic party. I was talking about what would happen if the winds shift into making her style of politics more powerful.
Sure, but I’m sure most people would draw a line there too. If it was between breaking procedure to spy on someone illegally and letting a nuke detonate in NYC, well...
You don’t know though that simply making a rhetoric statement that she knows won’t be followed up equates actually doing it if she was the POTUS. Many radicals on either side are more bark than bite, because barking is a very effective way of writing checks no one expects you to cash. In fact, that’s one decent source of hope concerning the fascist problem too (though one shouldn’t rely on it, obviously).
To a point, “radical asks outrageous thing, moderate concedes more reasonable one” is a kind of role play that is part and parcel of politics. Whether knowingly or not, if they’re in a healthy equilibrium, both roles serve a useful function.
The rules-based order works on following the law consistently and not when it suits you.
But that’s not how real-world policy decisions look like. The OP did point to Turkey and the Kurds. Fighting Kurdish terrorism is a valid interest of the Turkish state but the means they use to do so are problematic and it’s precisely the fact that they use illegitimate means that makes it sensible to describe the behavior as authoritarian.
When it comes to presidents claiming more executive powers, that’s usually that when they are in office presidents like to grab more power and not less.
More importantly, her speech pushes the Overton window toward being more authoritarian. Her calls for censorship of Tucker are similar at moving the window into a more authoritarian direction.
The fact that she sees it as good politics to call for Biden to be more authoritarian should be concerning as it tells you something about how she perceives the political winds.
To actually put it into policy, she would of course need to find people that think like her to put them into positions of power.
Hmm, this gets actually so complicated IMO that it might deserve its own post. Whether you take a deontological or utilitarian approach, “always follow the law” is almost never the actual policy you’ll get out of your ethical system, even though obviously “break the law whenever you feel like you know better” is also bad (the same way in which naive utilitarianism such as “defect whenever you think it’s for the greater good” is bad). We might call it Antigone’s Dilemma, since this tension between law abiding and personal virtue was pretty much the core theme of that tragedy and its heroine’s arc.
I do agree that in general normalizing too many authoritarian-ish behaviours is bad, and it’s especially bad when it comes from enough sides that the only thing all the political spectrum has in common is this sense of mild annoyance with procedure and rules, as if they were just a formality that hinders real action. When no one believes in the laws, the laws are bound to eventually fail. However that doesn’t mean that it’s unreasonable to not believe in the laws either; a State holds together by virtue of its citizens all sharing some kind of political and philosophical bedrock that they can use to cooperate and sort through conflicts without resorting to violence. Peaceful transition of power and graceful defeat are only possible if both sides agree that the other winning is still a much less bad fate than the chaos that would ensue from a violent conflict. It seems to me like, rightly or wrongly (more likely the latter, since people always severely underestimate what war actually means), this belief is coming apart in many countries, including the US, and on both sides of the aisle—which turns inevitably into a feedback loop. If the other side is willing to do anything to beat me, I have to step up my game or my defeat is guaranteed. Overall, in this sense, I still think in the US it’s the GOP that is pushing the accelerator pedal, and though there are people on the left that try to do so too, the Democrat side is overall way more divided on this and has some significant attempts at deescalation. Unfortunately trying to deescalate often looks like weakness and concession in the face of an opponent who likes to take advantage of that, and that in turn strengthens the support for further escalation instead. As I said, feedback loop.
Publically, AOC demanding that the Biden administration should engage in authoritarian behaviour provides very little use when she doesn’t think that Biden will actually engage in those behavior while at the same time eroding the standards. If a future Trump administration will call for ignoring court orders, you can count on Fox News to air AOC’s pronouncements that it’s an acceptable tactic.
Even when your ethical system says that sometimes it’s worthwhile to break rules because of utilitarian concerns, that doesn’t make cases where you call for rules to be broken when you don’t expect that actually happen okay. People who do find value in pushing the Overton window to allow for more authoritarian actions are rightfully seen as authoritarians.
What do you see as notable attempts at deescalation?
When Trump spoke about putting Hillary in jail for mishandling classified documents, the left talked about it as a huge norm violation but Trump didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, Democracts are currently hoping pursuing a legal case against Trump for mishandling classified documents with the hope of putting him in jail. Even if you believe that politicians who mishandle classified documents should be prosecuted, that’s escalation.
When it comes to feedback, a Trump presidency that follows after Trump spending some time in prison is likely more unhinged and more dangerous than one where he enters office without having been in prison before.
Building up the censorship apparatus that managed to very effectively censor the lab leak hypothesis in 2021 and also other political speech was a strong move toward authoritarian opinion control.
Three points.
Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it’s not the government who’s prosecuting Trump, it’s the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that’s not the same thing.
Point two: the scale and severity if crimes is different. Clinton apparently stored emails on an unproperly secured server. Trump took secret documents at home, stored them in unsecured boxes, was repeatedly nicely asked to return them, lied that he had already, and showed the documents to his friends in order to brag like some twelve years old boy particularly proud of his porn stash. I don’t think things would have reached the point of indictment if he’d been a bit more compliant when things were still in the “asking nicely” stage. But at one point, an example must be made, or we’re just saying laws don’t exist at all.
Point three: there might be a bit of a “getting Al Capone for tax evasion” thing going on admittedly because I think the real escalation that Trump is suffering retaliation for, the thing where he truly broke precedent to a ridiculous extent and that everyone rightfully doesn’t want to repeat ever again but that’s apparently hard to nail him down for is his little 6 January stunt. Messing with peaceful transition of power that way is a big no-no, and while he wasn’t literally leading the mob he clearly did enough to purposefully inflame the situation instead of defusing it. I’d bet if he didn’t do that the judiciary would be less fixated on prosecuting him.
As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court. They had a chance to strategize when Obama was still President to hold control of it but didn’t do it, Trump packed it with friendly judges at every occasion, and now despite suggestions about how to retaliate against that existing they didn’t really do anything, despite this unelected organ having a disproportionate decisional power (which honestly from outside the US looks insane to me, as is to be fair the level of reliance on them).
I don’t like how the discourse around the possibility of a lab leak was handled, but how is that the Democrats’ fault? Lab leak was dismissed already back in 2020, and it was more ridiculed than censored, mostly by scientific authorities like the WHO. The world is larger than the US. Now do I think many scientists who made those appeals were probably biased, maybe because they thought the lab leak hypothesis dangerous, either geopolitically or to the funding of their field? Yes. But that doesn’t need to be even a conscious process, let alone one somehow motivated by allegiance to a specific US politics party that to most of the rest of the planet means very little.
Not doing something to push an advantage is not automatically de-escalation. They didn’t push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for similar reasons they aren’t doing it with Dianne Feinstein. The principle seems to be something along the lines of “it should be every politician’s right to decide when they have to resign because they are too old or ill”. While that isn’t escalation I also don’t see that as deescalation. political
Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
If you care about the threat of fascism, power that’s wielded without being democratically accountable, isn’t less problematic. If you have people who are not democratically accountable using authoritarian power to eliminate their political opponents that’s problematic even if it’s not along Blue vs. Red lines.
I think you can make an argument that the Trump prosecution is justified, but I don’t think that changes the fact that it creates a precedent that moves the whole system in the direction of being more authoritarian.
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
I agree that virologists were not driven by allegiance to a US political party but by their own interests and geopolitical considerations. Farrar’s self-description of not having slept enough might also account for part of why the thinking went poorly.
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I don’t think the extent of how those structures are currently utilized means that the US is an authoritarian government. On the other hand, Lula’s attempts to use those structures to fight his political opposition might be a move toward authoritarianism.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
What’s that from?
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Afterward, Farrar speaks more with Fauci and Farrar writes an email to Tedros who heads the WHO to propose how to move forward. That’s one of the bullet points from that email. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/ gives you a lot of details about what happened in that week.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.