There’s a bunch of grey areas there: leaders who technically keep winning elections but rig it somehow, or simply use their time in office to gerrymander and otherwise bias things in their favour, leaders who extend their term past its original length, and so on. Not every autocrat is declaredly such, or completely impossible to remove by nonviolent means.
Yes, that is why I would want the post to be more precise. What does it mean to say “over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships”? If we had to write a Metaculus question or a prediction market on this claim, what would it look like?
I understand that it’s not necessarily easy to do this, but especially when dealing with politics it’s important to exercise this kind of cognitive discipline. For example, we could say Russia is closer to being a fascist dictatorship than the US for many different reasons:
The same leader has been in power, in one form or another, for over twenty years.
There is no serious organized political opposition to the leader. Putin won the last presidential election in 2018 with 77% of the popular vote. (Contrast this with Erdogan, who won this year with a slim margin of 52% against 48% in the runoff elections.)
People are routinely prosecuted and fined or put in prison for political speech that the government does not approve of. (By this metric, even a country like Germany fails the test more often than we might like to admit, but the US is particularly good on this dimension.)
Feel free to expand this list with more items.
Essentially, I want the post to take the vague concept of “fascist dictatorship” and turn it into some more easily falsifiable properties of a government. For instance, I’m happy to bet that over the next 30 years, no politician in the US will be elected President for more than two terms and that all elections in the US will be reasonably close in the popular vote. Those are more objective facts about the government, while whether it’s a dictatorship or not is much more subjective.
I would be much more inclined to believe a moderate claim such as “it’s moderately likely that most countries in the Western world will be relatively more fascist and relatively more dictatorial by some measurement.” However, going from the present state of most Western countries to what I would consider a “fascist dictatorship” requires a huge effect size that I find extremely implausible over a ten-year period.
Russia isn’t just closer than the US to being a fascist dictatorship, Russia is a fascist dictatorship by most metrics. It’s an autocrat ruled country with a strongly reactionary culture waging a brutal war of conquest on vague bullshit Blood And Soil reasons, it hardly gets more fascist than that.
I don’t think 21st century fascism will be the same beat for beat as 1930s one, for example I expect more isolationism and less overt militarism. And yeah, I think it will be mostly “soft” takeovers, just degradation of democracy and possibly limitation of suffrage than actual coups, but even coups could happen (though in the US I would expect one to result in civil war, not a swift and unchallenged takeover).
I guess my objection is that if you want to know what a modern fascist dictatorship might look like, “something like Putin’s Russia” is probably a better answer than, say, 1930s Germany. About quantitative predictions, I’m not sure how to formalise the notion of electorate disempowerment, but more than “no elections” I would expect “a long string of elections won always by the same party with progressive disenfranchisement of those who would vote otherwise”.
I guess my objection is that if you want to know what a modern fascist dictatorship might look like, “something like Putin’s Russia” is probably a better answer than, say, 1930s Germany.
I agree that if most Western countries looked like today’s Russia in ten years in some vague sense, I would count that as Alyssa Vance’s prediction coming true. I’m not too sure which part of my comment this is meant to be an objection to.
About quantitative predictions, I’m not sure how to formalise the notion of electorate disempowerment, but more than “no elections” I would expect “a long string of elections won always by the same party with progressive disenfranchisement of those who would vote otherwise”.
That’s why I didn’t list “no elections” as part of my list, but elections that are won by the same person every time with more than 70% of the vote for 20 years is already something I don’t expect to happen in most Western countries in the medium-term future. I’m just not sure if this is what Alyssa Vance is actually referring to when she talks about a “fascist dictatorship”.
I can’t speak for Vance but my expectation would be even “softer” than that—more like a defanged democracy in which e.g. a combination of gerrymandering and obstacles put up to citizenship or voting means that only favored groups get to vote properly. This shifts the Overton window solidly on the right and then you get at best cosmetic competitions between who gets to be the fascist leader of the year. So perhaps more a sort of oligarchy than a dictatorship?
That said, I am also not necessarily sure that this is the only possible future or even the most likely one from here. This might be copium on my part, but I think it might as well be just a cycle which then eventually turns around when the right wing populists inevitably fail to deliver. In Britain, for example, the flirtation with UKIP and even the far less extreme Boris Johnson seems to have been rather contained, and despite leaving long lasting effects on the country, it also has on balance seemingly brought ruin to the British right, with the Tories polling disastrously and projected to be destroyed in the next GE. History isn’t as simple as extrapolating a few trends indefinitely and calling it a day.
There’s a bunch of grey areas there: leaders who technically keep winning elections but rig it somehow, or simply use their time in office to gerrymander and otherwise bias things in their favour, leaders who extend their term past its original length, and so on. Not every autocrat is declaredly such, or completely impossible to remove by nonviolent means.
Yes, that is why I would want the post to be more precise. What does it mean to say “over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships”? If we had to write a Metaculus question or a prediction market on this claim, what would it look like?
I understand that it’s not necessarily easy to do this, but especially when dealing with politics it’s important to exercise this kind of cognitive discipline. For example, we could say Russia is closer to being a fascist dictatorship than the US for many different reasons:
The same leader has been in power, in one form or another, for over twenty years.
There is no serious organized political opposition to the leader. Putin won the last presidential election in 2018 with 77% of the popular vote. (Contrast this with Erdogan, who won this year with a slim margin of 52% against 48% in the runoff elections.)
People are routinely prosecuted and fined or put in prison for political speech that the government does not approve of. (By this metric, even a country like Germany fails the test more often than we might like to admit, but the US is particularly good on this dimension.)
Feel free to expand this list with more items.
Essentially, I want the post to take the vague concept of “fascist dictatorship” and turn it into some more easily falsifiable properties of a government. For instance, I’m happy to bet that over the next 30 years, no politician in the US will be elected President for more than two terms and that all elections in the US will be reasonably close in the popular vote. Those are more objective facts about the government, while whether it’s a dictatorship or not is much more subjective.
I would be much more inclined to believe a moderate claim such as “it’s moderately likely that most countries in the Western world will be relatively more fascist and relatively more dictatorial by some measurement.” However, going from the present state of most Western countries to what I would consider a “fascist dictatorship” requires a huge effect size that I find extremely implausible over a ten-year period.
Russia isn’t just closer than the US to being a fascist dictatorship, Russia is a fascist dictatorship by most metrics. It’s an autocrat ruled country with a strongly reactionary culture waging a brutal war of conquest on vague bullshit Blood And Soil reasons, it hardly gets more fascist than that.
I don’t think 21st century fascism will be the same beat for beat as 1930s one, for example I expect more isolationism and less overt militarism. And yeah, I think it will be mostly “soft” takeovers, just degradation of democracy and possibly limitation of suffrage than actual coups, but even coups could happen (though in the US I would expect one to result in civil war, not a swift and unchallenged takeover).
Sorry, but I don’t think this comment addresses anything I’ve said. I don’t even know how to respond to it.
I guess my objection is that if you want to know what a modern fascist dictatorship might look like, “something like Putin’s Russia” is probably a better answer than, say, 1930s Germany. About quantitative predictions, I’m not sure how to formalise the notion of electorate disempowerment, but more than “no elections” I would expect “a long string of elections won always by the same party with progressive disenfranchisement of those who would vote otherwise”.
I agree that if most Western countries looked like today’s Russia in ten years in some vague sense, I would count that as Alyssa Vance’s prediction coming true. I’m not too sure which part of my comment this is meant to be an objection to.
That’s why I didn’t list “no elections” as part of my list, but elections that are won by the same person every time with more than 70% of the vote for 20 years is already something I don’t expect to happen in most Western countries in the medium-term future. I’m just not sure if this is what Alyssa Vance is actually referring to when she talks about a “fascist dictatorship”.
I can’t speak for Vance but my expectation would be even “softer” than that—more like a defanged democracy in which e.g. a combination of gerrymandering and obstacles put up to citizenship or voting means that only favored groups get to vote properly. This shifts the Overton window solidly on the right and then you get at best cosmetic competitions between who gets to be the fascist leader of the year. So perhaps more a sort of oligarchy than a dictatorship?
That said, I am also not necessarily sure that this is the only possible future or even the most likely one from here. This might be copium on my part, but I think it might as well be just a cycle which then eventually turns around when the right wing populists inevitably fail to deliver. In Britain, for example, the flirtation with UKIP and even the far less extreme Boris Johnson seems to have been rather contained, and despite leaving long lasting effects on the country, it also has on balance seemingly brought ruin to the British right, with the Tories polling disastrously and projected to be destroyed in the next GE. History isn’t as simple as extrapolating a few trends indefinitely and calling it a day.