In the sense that a diverse ecosystem is more robust, I think this is unironically true. Even if you firmly believe that democracy is on average the best way to decide things it's still better not to have every egg in the one basket.
USA is a much more complicated polity than Orban's Hungary. Expecting direct correspondence is silly. Biden does not need to appoint leaders of media companies, universities, corporations etc., as with a handful of exceptions they are all on the same page already. The exceptions, of course, stick out like sore thumbs, irritating people on the left to no end. If they become aware of the uniformly progressive environment around these exceptions at all, they tend to perceive it as simply normal and par for the course. It is indeed very different from a government centrally putting its people in positions of power. E.g. to take your school example, the federal government does not appoint public school teachers, but it does seem to exercise an awful amount of control over what public schools can and cannot do. Its powers of legal intimidation are so vast that DOE Dear Colleague letters which are neither laws nor, ostensibly, even regulations, seem to be taken not much differently from direct orders. "Nice school board you got there, shame if it got sued in federal court for Title IX violations." I'm sure Orban would love to be able to do this rather than mess with appointments directly.
I've felt for a while this works the opposite way, There is variety of opinions amoung people and institutes like the Hungarian one just hire the people that agree with them.
I think most people underestimate how much this is the traditional form of corruption. You don't affect people's opinions in a quid pro quo - you just promote the people that already agree with you. The net result is the same - a bunch of people with audiences or political seats who support your views. Except that you get true believers, rather than mercenaries who would split the instant someone else offered them a better deal.
Are you under the impression that liberal elites don't coordinate and hand out cushy jobs to insiders/friends? Spend some time looking into the connections between high level reporters, business leaders, and politicians. The Cuomo brothers were more obvious but far less insidious than many of the elite deals that happen every day between those groups.
That goes for high level Republicans as well, but I'm mentioning the left/liberals because there are a lot of people who seem to overlook when that happens in the US, as if Hungary is somehow beyond the pale when it looks awfully similar to what happens in the US daily.
WHAT US crusade against the Koch brothers? Kicking out the Soros-funded university was state action. What state action has been taken against the Koch Brothers?
And WRT to Facebook, where have you seen anyone talking about Zuck being Jewish? The comparison is ludicrous.
Very few instances of alleged anti-Semitism by public figures involve direct reference to someone being Jewish. The first link I found re: Orban vs Soros is this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/george-soros-upset-by-anti-semitic-campaign-against-him-in-hungary which is... incredibly vague about what the alleged anti-Semitism in the campaign consists of. It certainly doesn't involve any mention of Jewishness. It might be as little as "it treats this powerful, well-known Jewish person as a symbol / focus of social ills" which applies just as well to the Facebook coverage as to Soros.
That's true but you can kinda tell -- in a subtextual way that's hard to quantify -- when something is loathed for weird racist/antisemitic reasons, versus loathed for perfectly good reasons. Can't speak to Soros but Zuckerberg and Facebook are obviously loathed for all sorts of good reasons, and literally none of the criticism against them has ever rung of anti-semitism.
I am sure you have good grounds, internally, for knowing your criticism is good and pure. But from the outside a lot of the anti-Facebook stuff seems motivated by... not antisemitism, but social / cultural resentment of businesspeople and STEM types-- both demographics that happen to be disproportionately Jewish.
The point being, what evidence do you have that Hungarians' dislike of Soros feels less pure, from the inside, than your dislike of Facebook? "I know it when I see it" is not at all convincing to me, especially when applied to a foreign culture.
That crime in my hometown, 6000 miles from Budapest, is up since George Soros's candidate got elected District Attorney is a tribute to Mr. Soros' global influence.
According to the Los Angeles Times on November 3, 2020, Mr. Soros was the single biggest individual donor in the 2020 Los Angeles DA race against the anti-criminal incumbent black woman DA Jackie Lacey, under whom crime had fallen agreeably. Soros gave $2.25 million to anti-police candidate George Gascon, who garnered $12.4 million in donations to Lacey's $7.0 million. The biggest organizational donor to Gascon was Van Jones' group Color of Change with $3.4 million, which has received a half-million dollar donation from Soros.
I greatly admire Mr. Soros's energy and acumen. I just think, in accordance with Mr. Soros's own Popperian philosophy, that he deserves criticism for his role in the sizable exacerbation of the American murder rate since Ferguson and the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014.
Increasingly, however, the conventional wisdom has become that Mr. Soros is above criticism, precisely because his trans-national political influence is slightly reminiscent of that of earlier Jewish financial geniuses such as the Rothschilds.
It's an interesting conundrum. According to Mr. Soros' own well-articulated political philosophy, he deserves criticism for the role he has played in the unexpected rise in the American murder rate since 2014.
But because his own individual genius and weaknesses are somewhat ethnically stereotypical, it is now increasingly asserted that his sizable role in current events should be completely ignored and that anybody who criticizes Mr. Soros should be cancelled.
It would be interesting to ask Mr. Soros whether he should be above criticism. As an admirer of him, I believe he would disagree.
Attributing criticism of a specific individual's specific acts to hatred of an entire group s/he belongs to is such a common and toxic rhetorical dark art. When the bar for proving the bias is so low, it's a fully generic way to dismiss criticism, since everyone belongs to multiple groups that are hated by someone.
If you tell most people that some ultra-wealthy person is spending billions of dollars to influence elections all over the globe, they'd probably lean towards that being a bad thing. But then you tell them he's jewish, and they somehow update towards it being OK.
If anything, for a company owned by a Jewish person, Facebook has been remarkably reluctant to crack down on actual neo-nazis using its platform to spread their filth. It reminds me of the NYT deliberately downplaying the Holocaust during WW2 to avoid being accused of pursuing a Jewish agenda.
Yeah, there's not really a way I convince you with 'hard evidence', but I can say with confidence that if you went around asking people who dislike facebook why they do, and then probed as hard as you could, none of them would say anything about Jewishness, and if you mentioned that they would all look at you like you're crazy. It's a total non-issue. Nobody in America (outside of, I guess, anachronistic weirdos?) associates business people and STEM with Jewishness. Not even in the slightest.
I'll fully grant that there's a lot of social/cultural resentment of
a) businesspeople
b) STEM companies
c) corporate elites, and the like
I'm not aware of the resentment being targeted at STEM _people_ per-se, mostly because the people holding this resentment mostly don't know very many STEM people. Inside tech hubs like SF or Seattle there is targeted resentment at STEM people but I think mostly it's because they tend to be boring / not contributing to the community around them.
Arguing that attacks on businesspeople are inherently antisemtic is very different from arguing that attacks on bankers are (especially global finance with a focus on stereotypic looking jews). A lot of the criticism of Zuckerberg is similar to the criticism of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk (most of which is unfair but very different from what Soros gets).
As someone who thinks that Israel is over criticised, I do believe we have to allow criticism on bankers. Obviously if there are anti Semitic overtones, then that’s different.
I agree, what I meant is that there are more frequent antisemitic tropes in criticizing bankers that can be used without explicitly discussing the Jewishness of the targets. I was mostly trying to argue that the standard one should apply when considering if an attack on banker is antisemitic is lower than for an attack on business/tech due to its long history of use.
They both have anti-Semitic roots. I agree with Hnau's point that the Soros and Zuck stuff aren't meaningfully different, although whereas he seems to be arguing "neither is really anti-Semitic," my argument is that both are inspired from anti-Semitism. It's tempting for right-wingers and left-wingers to call out each other's anti-Semitism while ignoring their own side's, but I feel compelled to call out these toxic ideas wherever they appear.
Do I think the average person complaining about Soros or Zuck is an anti-Semite themselves? No, but that doesn't mean the ideas they're consuming aren't. And while someone pointed out that criticism of Zuck was similar to the criticism of Jack Dorsey, I'd argue that a lot of the Dorsey complaints are also based in taking anti-Semitic theories and repurposing them to target a non-Jewish person, similar to the Q-Anon conspiracy theories against Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga. Which isn't to say there aren't valid complaints to be made against *specific* celebrities, politicians, billionaires, etc., but rather that most of the complaints against "elites" as a single monolithic organization with sinister intentions basically amount to anti-Semitism with the serial numbers filed off.
How very convenient that any language used to criticize the active, ongoing, and completely brazen inequities foisted by THE ELITES upon THE REST OF US is immediately sequestered and brandished as antisemitic or problematic in any other way. How convenient indeed.
They _don't_ have anti-semitic roots. That's the point. The fact that there is a superficial correlation to previous antisemitic stances has no bearing on the source of the modern stance.
Basically, I hate facebook for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism, because that's laughable, and it's offensive and frustrating that ignorant people keep associating my perfectly valid hatred with antisemitism. Please! I hate them for what they _are_ and what they _do_. Stop telling me that I think something I don't!
What exactly does it mean for a person who is not "an anti-Semite themselves" to "consume" anti-Semitic ideas?
I guess it's possible that anti-Semites might cause negative media coverage of e.g. Facebook, leading to people who don't themselves have anti-Semitic views having negative views of Facebook. Is that what you mean?
Suppose I hate Nebraskans and I want to harm them. I realize that I'm not going to be able to win people over to that position, but I can win them over to positions that are just as good. Nebraska's top exports are soybeans, corn, 'nuclear reactors, boilers, macinery etc.; parts'(??!); and beef, so I then act as a motivated reasoner, arguing that soy messes with your hormones, we need to eat less corn because it's part of everything you eat, nuclear power is dangerous and meat is murder. (Coincidence thnt those already exist, or has the anti-Nebraska brigade already infiltrated the media?) Independent of the veracity of those claims, my arguments or advertisements or financial support will lead to more people believing them. Those people are consuming my ideas and being turned into my political weapons.
Genetic fallacy applies, I think. But only if the point was "these ideas have anti-semitic roots, and are therefore incorrect," rather than "and are therefore morally/ethically wrong." I personally disagree with holding beliefs based on ethical concerns, but it's not ridiculous- it at least works to tit-for-tat people motivated in the opposite direction, if they exist.
I really disagree with this. The criticisms of Zuckerburg and Dorsey come down to these people having massive wealth and power, and (in the opinion of the critics) using that power in selfish and short-sighted ways. The personal criticisms of tech billionaires like Zuckerburg and Musk tend to center on them being nerdy, out of touch, or immature.
None of that is rooted in antisemitism. The antisemitic attacks on big business or the wealthy are almost always rooted in the idea that Jewish elites are acting in secret to enact a sophisticated long-term malevolent agenda. That's very different from criticism of tech ceos as bumbling, short-sighted man-children.
With Soros, the criticisms are close to antisemitic tropes. Critics of Soros think that he's funding/behind all sorts of protests, radical organizations, or sources of social instability that he has nothing to do with, and talk about him as a puppetmaster controlling world events for his own purposes.
I say this by the way as a jew who thinks the criticisms of facebook are wildly overblown.
Soros is hated for excellent reasons. His university is seen (correctly) by the Hungarians as a device to insert a fifth column – creating an elite which will A, operate the bureaucracy and B, be turbo-liberal in a way that's far to the left of the modal Hungarian. Soros himself doesn't even deny this because the rest of the EU (let alone the elites of the rest of the EU) is also far to the left of the modal Hungarian, so he can just admit to doing it and they'll consider him virtuous for subverting the Hungarian people's will and control of their own state. The Judaism doesn't really figure into any of that, it's just a handy stick to whack Eastern Europeans with since they're also much more antisemitic generally than the rest of Europe.
The anti-Semitism that sprang out of the Soros campaign might not be too surprising, even if Finkelstein and Birnbaum did not intend it. They imported ancient themes and modern grievances into 21st-century communications technology. What was new: They had turned Soros into their central political enemy.
The allegation that he was responsible for anti-Semitism pains Birnbaum. He just doesn’t see it. He decided to speak primarily because he wants to refute it. He is, after all, an observant Jew and member of many pro-Israeli charities.
“When we planned the campaign,” he said, “we didn’t think a second about Soros being a Jew.” Birnbaum claimed he didn’t even know it back then, and that he never worked with anti-Semites.
Yes, I've read a lot of articles about Orban the Anti-Semite but there was very little of substance in them. Most of them seem to come down to: "You can just _tell_."
The other argument is that anybody noticing that George Soros is a remarkably rich and effective and energetic political operator is anti-Semitic.
It seems that anti-semitism is often a claim that falls apart when the details are probed. I'm by no means a fan of Jeremy Corbyn or the hard left in Britain but it feels like they're constantly being accused (by the right) of being anti-semitic, and when you dig in, it's almost always because they criticized Israeli policy.
There probably is some genuine anti-semitism in there too because Corbyn and his clique are pretty open about their classical Marxism, and Marx was strongly anti-semitic. Also Labour rely heavily on Muslim voters and the classical religious emnity can still be found there. But in practice by now I've just tuned these accusations out - disagreeing with the policies of a foreign government or population isn't the same thing as racism or religious hatred.
Right. When I looked into the many charges of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, there didn't seem to be much there either.
Britain has a lot of Muslim voters who don't like Israel and hence a lot of Corbyn's allies were Muslims who don't like Israel. But it's inevitable that somebody in Britain is going to build a coalition that includes anti-Israel Muslims.
With British politics, I can at least read the primary sources in English and judge for myself about the charges against Corbyn. But for Hungarian politics, I am largely at the mercy of the biases of journalists fluent in Hungarian and English, so it takes a lot of work to read all the way through articles denouncing Orban for anti-Semitism and notice that they don't quite ever come up with the evidence that they promised in the first paragraph.
You are a political pundit who focuses on such things as the crime rate of American Blacks. You have suggested conservatives try to label the Democrats as "The black party" or something close to that, with the notion that most Americans would be put off by that. Where I come from such things are considered racist, but I've been made to understand that a claim of "racism" has no bite anymore, at least in these parts of the WWW.
So instead of calling you a racist I will call you a cocksucker. You spend most of your energy trying to stir up anger against the actions of other races in the USA. I've read your blog for years. I've even commented there, before everyone called me a troll for spouting common sense.
So continue to suck cock, Steve Sailer, keep hard at it. I know you will. It's your first love.
You should have made counterarguments instead of calling your interlocutor a "cocksucker" and bringing up unrelated stuff that you think you can use for character assassination or something. If we had that betting market moderation system, I would wager that the above post gets moderated.
>So instead of calling you a racist I will call you a cocksucker
Implying that calling him "racist" was even on the table is a self-own. Your mind is totally controlled by the TV and the ruling class. You are merely a pseudo-rationalist. We need to stop letting people like this ruin our discourse. There are 3 major things to watch out for: ignorance of forbidden truths, charity towards the ruling class, and fear of condemnation. This person displays the first 2, probably as a function of the 3rd. See here: https://www.darkrationality.net/index.php?topic=3.0
Ah, on any specific charge against The Mighty Jezza Himself, this is reasonably true.
For certain values of True, anyway.
The problem that he has, is that since becoming an MP in 1983, he consistently allied himself, by speaking at rallies et cetera, et cetera, with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, and their allies, who explicitly want to wipe out the Jews, in Israel. And did nothing to distance himself from statements made by others, at those rallies.
The other issue, and the more general charge, is that he did nothing, as Party Leader, to curb the more excitable elements within his internal base - aka Momentum - when more overt statements were made, usually on Social Media, AKA, Publicly.
And that is the point that the report into the whole affair made. He just wasn't remotely interested in doing anything about it, and thus did nothing.
Corbyn opened himself and his party up to the charge by turning a blind eye to allies who were actually antisemitic, and to abuse of Jewish Labour MPs who were protesting that.
Once Britain admitted a huge number of Muslim immigrants, it was inevitable that anti-Israel voters would become part of one coalition or another.
Personally, I'm a fan of Israel, but I can't figure out any principal under which citizens who are not fans of Israel should be denied political representation.
Neither is it a problem with "a huge number" of Muslim immigrants.
It's known as "biraderi" and was basically the problem a Senior Labour MP had in Birmingham way back in the late sixties/early seventies. When net immigration to the UK was about a tenth of what it was now.
It's not a terribly uncommon position to say that being anti-Israel is a form of antisemitism ("new antisemitism", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_antisemitism). The closest I've come to being able to wrap my head about it "having a Jewish state is a part of the core identity of (modern) Jews, and therefore attacks on the (unique) Jewish state read like attacks on Jewishness as a concept." (I should say that I'm nominally Jewish, although in very few ways beyond the "I would've worn a star in Nazi Germany.")
I'm not sure I agree that Israel is an essential part of the Jewish identity, but as long as enough other Jews do, being pro-Israel and being Jewish will be strongly correlated. This doesn't make it impossible to be anti-one without being anti-the-other (anti-Israel without being anti-Jews), but it makes it natural to suspect that both are happening, and hard to prove otherwise. Cf. also how anti-Taliban sentiments are adjacent to, and often devolve into, anti-Muslim ones.
Criticism of Israel does tend to be excessive. That said Israel does do a lot that’s criticisable, it’s denying the right to exist of the state itself that most problematic to me.
How can a state have rights? States are figments of people's imaginations. They can't have rights any more than unicorns and dragons have rights. People have rights. States don't.
I think it's more like "The world's only Jewish state gets a disproportionate amount of criticism, even though many other states act in ways which are objectively much worse, therefore a lot of this criticism is probably motivated by the state's Jewishness."
By way of analogy, imagine a political pundit who devotes a great deal of time and effort to calling out sleaze and corruption among the Democratic party whilst ignoring or minimising similar scandals involving Republicans. I think it would be quite reasonable to suppose that this pundit is to a large degree motivated by political partisanship, even if the criticisms he makes are all individually merited.
But, tragically, he's likely too old to make a course correction now. He may still surprise: e.g., after the BLM Dallas Massacre of cops in July 2016 helped get Trump elected, he switched some of his financing from street activists to more respectable anti-police district attorney candidates, such as the white man who beat the anti-crime black woman DA of Los Angeles in the last election.
Is there any chance Soros will now say now that the record-setting murder statistics are finally out: "Oh, well, my Plan B didn't work either. I guess I didn't really understand crime and criminal justice in America, so therefore I should cut off these anti-police activists I'm funding before we get even more people murdered?"
Maybe. Soros is a very smart man. But it's asking a lot of any nonagenarian.
Clearly, though, it would be a violation of the best that Soros has stood for for the current trend toward abolishing criticism of Soros to succeed.
You paranoid right-wingers have pretended Soros was controlling politics for the past couple decades. I can remember a time when the Left-Wing Pacifica Radio crowd was really into being anti-Soros.
In truth, Soros has probably had little effect on much beyond the timing of some currency crashes. Yet people like you have loved to use Soros to spread your conspiracy theories over the years.
"People like you (us)" would like to point out that there is a lot of Soros money sloshing about, not just meddling in currency markets. $16 billion is a tidy bit of influence, including attempting to influence the result of the Irish referendum on repealing the constitutional amendment banning abortion:
"Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. The group's name is inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.
The OSF has branches in 37 countries, encompassing a group of country and regional foundations, such as the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa; its headquarters are at 224 West 57th Street in New York City. In 2018, OSF announced it was closing its European office in Budapest and moving to Berlin, in response to legislation passed by the Hungarian government targeting the foundation's activities. Since its establishment in 1993, OSF has reported expenditures in excess of $16 billion mostly in grants towards NGOs, aligned with the organisation's mission."
Yglesias has argued that an electoral hurdle the Democrats have is that they are so dependent on non-profits funded by super-rich people catering to ideological preferences far from the median voters. He doesn't blame Soros specifically as the main cause of this, but he does have a particularly low opinion of Sunrise for supposedly being a climate-focused organization but taking radical BLM/police defunding stances for no good reason:
> about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted by all the evidence
It sounds like Scott thinks that the that whistleblower trial was about one thing, and that thing was laughably and obviously false, when it in fact it was about a different thing which is totally true.
My impression is that, deep down, Mark Zuckerberg is a center-right kind of guy, which is why there is so much more organized hate directed at Facebook by big institutions like the New York Times than at, say, Google, the leaders of whom have managed to come across as acceptably center-left.
No, it's because most people get their news from their Facebook feed now, not from Google News or the traditional media. They hate him because he's been very effective at stealing their lunch.
Not any worse for your brain than left-leaning misinformation hives like Twitter, Snapchat, and even Facebook-owned Instagram. Yet elite ire is directed only at Facebook, for obvious reasons.
Just as a data point, I found out that Zuckerberg was Jewish today, from this comment section.
I already knew Soros was Jewish, but I learned that because people kept calling attacks against him "anti-semitic". The only people I've ever heard mention that he's a Jew are his defenders, and some alt-right twitter types who are trolling so hard that I can't tell whether their anti-semitism is ironic or not. But most complaints about Soros do not come from these people.
The Kochs are probably the most powerful people in the conservative movement after Trump, having bankrolled candidates and media. If there's a crusade against them it's gone poorly.
I'd argue the Mercers have been more effective at getting their personnel placed in positions of power, even if the Kochs have been more effective at getting their policy choices implemented.
Good general point: cf "personnel is policy". (cards on table - I have sneaking respect for the Kochs and unblended hatred for the Mercers)
Depending on how Trumpy the Rs continue to be, plus how much (additional) political power they regain over the next few years, there's a plausible argument that the near future (5 years?) on the American Right is going to look far more like Mercer than Koch.
I had to update my priors on the Kochs when I found out how much they fund criminal justice reform efforts. They say they are libertarians, and by this they are demonstrating intellectual consistency, rather than the more usual tribalism.
> WHAT US crusade against the Koch brothers? Kicking out the Soros-funded university was state action. What state action has been taken against the Koch Brothers?
Quoting this for emphasis, because the second paragraph is partially drowning it out. If distinguishing between state and private action as fundamentally different in kind is the greatest lesson of libertarianism, glossing over the distinction when inconvenient must surely be its greatest sin?
I'd say we can distinguish at least two dimentions of difference.
1) State/private action
2) Degree of centralisation of the action.
The distinction between highly and lowly centralised actions can be as dramatic as between state and private. Actually, I suspect that most reasons due to which we are worried about state actions comes from heuristic that state actions are easier centralizable.
It's annoying how conservative narrative aknowledges the difference between state and private actions when it's convinient and glosses over the distinction when it's not. But it's even more annoying how it totally ignores the centralization of the action. As far as I'm concerned, comparing "crusade against Koch brothers" and kicking out Soros university is bad for both of these reasons.
Actually, it's not just annoying. It's concerning. Nowdays real dictators love blurring the lines between low-medium harm low-medium centralisation private actions (cancelling) and high harm, high centralization, state actions (murder and imprisonment of political opponents).
If elites control private institutions and other elites who are ideologically in agreement with the first group also control government, and they get their way through brute force power, I'm not sure I'm seeing such a strong distinction.
I'm thinking specifically of the coordinated shutdown of Parler, when it was the #1 downloaded app in the US, and very specifically was coded as conservative. A group of elites (tech companies) coordinated to shut it down. The appeals process for them to complain (antitrust, breach of contract, whatever claims they may have had) would have to go through other elites who may have had ideological ties to the first group.
While it wasn't state action against Parler, it still bothers me a lot how that happened. It bothers me in a similar way to if it were state action, because the state (and press, and other elite powers) showed indifference to the situation that I doubt would have happened in reverse if it were a left/liberal company getting shut out. If you read up on the specific accusations against Parler - that they were fomenting insurrection, violence, terrorism - that was clearly false. They banned posters for inciting violence, and reported it to the FBI, the same as Facebook. They repeatedly reported the coordination of activities on January 6, while shutting down those conversation.
> I'm not sure I'm seeing such a strong distinction.
There might need to be a recalibration of effects here - it isn't very pleasant to be ostracized from polite society, but you know state power isn't trying particularly hard so long as your house remains unexploded. *That's* the scale a monopoly on force operates at, and the fact that we can take for granted that won't happen is a foundational victory for the distinction.
> A group of elites (tech companies) coordinated to shut it down. The appeals process for them to complain (antitrust, breach of contract, whatever claims they may have had) would have to go through other elites who may have had ideological ties to the first group.
You know Parler was back online barely a month later, right? That's freedom of association in action: one web hosting company chose to stop doing business with them, and they were able to find a replacement in short order. Where exactly do you think state power ought to have intervened?
Parler was shut down entirely for a month. Can you imagine if a group of companies conspired to shut down Facebook for an entire month? That wouldn't feel like a short timeframe to anyone. How many companies, including giant ones like Google, Apple, and Facebook, could survive an entire month offline? You think that's small??
More importantly, what happened after the one month was not that everything was back to what it had been, they just got new hosting so they could literally communicate with the internet again. They were still blocked from the major distribution networks (Apple Store and Google Play). They were effectively killed off as an alternative social media service. Nobody literally burned down the CEOs house, but he did lose his job, Parler lost some major funders, and most of their user base. Why bother with burning the house down at that point?
I will admit that I'm not a contract lawyer or antitrust lawyer, but both of those avenues seem like pretty obvious options. How does all of the major tech players (Apple, Google, and Amazon) literally conspiring to shut down a company not create an antitrust issue? An FBI interested in pursuing that angle would find plenty of evidence. Microsoft got a major antitrust case against it for much less (prioritizing their browser over competitors, in Windows systems). Microsoft lost that case.
Compared to how the US government deals with its actual enemies? Well, can you see the crater in satellite imagery? I'm not being hyperbolic - you're really not giving the scale of force state actors can bring to bear the respect it deserves.
Parler was and still is in a business largely focused around monetizing outrage. They did this with a nonexistent contingency plan for what might happen if they became a reputational liability for their service providers, and got burned when they had to figure out a backup on the fly. That's the system working as intended in the course of private business, and legal recourse is available in the case of actual violation of rights. And as it turns out...
>I will admit that I'm not a contract lawyer or antitrust lawyer, but both of those avenues seem like pretty obvious options.
...those avenues were tried, and Parler lost decisively because its actual case was lacking. What plays well in the media is not the same as what the law actually is, and freedom of association trumps entitlement to web hosting services.
I'm not sure we have to care about the difference between state and private action. What action of *any* sort has been taken against the Koch brothers? Various academics have tried to campaign against Koch-affiliated organizations and think tanks, but those organizations and think tanks haven't actually been stopped in any way that I'm aware of.
I happen to agree that the Kochs are not being public or privately acted against in the way that we are talking about here. I didn't respond to disagree with that, but to make a point that certain kinds of private action can be very detrimental, to a point where it's similar to state action.
What we care about with state action is that something bad happened, and there is no recourse. If private action happens, but there is recourse (criminal or civil court, private causes of action, take your business elsewhere without serious repercussions, etc.), then that's much better than state action that provides limited or no recourse. Even many state actions have recourse, though, including voting for alternative leaders and law suits. Which is worse, then, becomes a matter of particulars, rather than a blanket that says "state/private is always worse." I am more worried about state myself, as a general rule, because it has the potential to go much further. Potential becomes meaningless if the state isn't trying to hurt you, but private organizations are. The Pinkertons were private, but terrible, for instance.
> WRT to Facebook, where have you seen anyone talking about Zuck being Jewish? The comparison is ludicrous.
There is a strain of thought that worries about Jews having too much control of what it's acceptable to say in public; I'd be pretty surprised if Mark Zuckerberg didn't get called out there.
Year to date, there have been over 1.7 million encounters (not total immigrants - just those "caught"!) at the Southern border. People are vastly underestimating how quickly this has changed under Biden and how severe the situation at the border is, and thinking that overstays are the real problem in the current situation would betray deep ignorance of the facts. Source for the numbers, straight from CBP: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
Yup, and further to the visa situation, think twice about it and you realize that it has nothing to do with opposition to illegal immigrants who were not screened. "They're not sending their best" wasn't about people who overstayed visas. My impression is that more than the border wall, the knowledge that the US government fully intended to catch them and send them back was more effective than a completed wall might be
I think Republicans should get really creative with Latin American immigration. Create an "American Dream" immigration side system that allows South and Central Americans to enter a lottery that allows as many immigrants in legally as have traditionally entered illegally. Design the screening process to greatly reduce the pressure on low income Americans in the job market. Suddenly all the new arrivals think you're the great guy who let them in, they aren't systematically depressing the low wage job market and nobody has a clue on God's green earth why the liberals ever thought it was good idea to choose for a similar process to happen illegally in a manner in which either it's too dangerous to be humane to the immigrants or too safe and easy for drug dealers and even terrorists to try to enter the country. An America with a large legal, Republican friendly, socially conservative influx of Latin Americans. MAGLA!
At least for Mexican citizens, I would submit that program already exists: the TN visa. Did you know that in order to immigrate legally to America, all you need is a US job offer and a Bachelor's degree within any of a broad range of fields? There's no numerical limit to how many people can enter on TN visas; any Mexican citizen with a degree and a job offer can apply at a consulate. It was created by NAFTA, and was left wholly intact by Trump's USMCA.
Expanding TN status eligibility to other Central American countries is an intriguing idea, although the brain drain effect might be serious, I don't know. Either way, that would be a complement, not a substitute for border security, which Democrats will keep demonizing Republicans for demanding. No way around that.
But the interesting thing is that Hispanics aren't a monolith, and increasing numbers of them support border security. The Democratic line that border security is code for anti-Hispanic racism seems to be wearing thin, and Hispanic voters (i.e. citizens) often resent being lumped in with illegal immigrants. So if Republicans can keep the focus on policy and not racial categories, they can still win on this, even with Hispanics.
> Design the screening process to greatly reduce the pressure on low income Americans in the job market.
No screening required - simply allowing the illegal immigrants to enter legally would mean that they get the benefit of minimum wage laws, meaning they're no longer undercutting legal workers on price.
Unfortunately, the Republicans have already planted their flag firmly on the side of "increased immigration means letting more Democrats into the country," so good luck getting them to support it.
I understand that a majority, not a plurality, and not just higher than in the past, of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Republican for governor in Virginia. The switch may already be underway, and Republicans may already be leaning that direction. An interesting note is that a significant portion of the Hispanic voting population is against illegal immigration as well, quite strongly. I've heard it's a majority, but I'm sure it depends on definitions. If true, simply legalizing the currently illegal immigration is still a bad idea. Making people apply to come in, even if the approval criteria is much easier to pass, is still a good idea for Republicans.
Where did you get the idea that a majority of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia? The first source I found shows that 66% of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia: https://www.cnn.com/election/2021/november/exit-polls/virginia/governor/0
Perhaps there are some well-known corrections to apply to the initial exit polls, or there is some other source that you're relying on?
Interesting. I found this Politico report that says polling was inconsistent and the actual numbers may be different than reported. I must have heard one of the poll results that showed Republicans winning with Latinos, but others showed different.
Interesting! I had heard there was a lot of confusion, but just thought it was people indirectly reporting the same numbers, and getting confused about whether the number they were indirectly reporting was a relative increase, or an absolute majority. But it looks like there are several sets of numbers that actually show conflicting claims here!
> "Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymendeing that can explain that."
I'm not quite sure this commenter understands how gerrymandering works. (Winning almost all of the districts can be achieved with a little less than half of the vote, even less if you're competing with more than one other party.)
Are you imagining a two party system? With multiple parties running serious campaigns in a first past the post system, it doesn't require gerrymandering for a party with less than half the votes to win many more than half the districts.
Interesting point. I was looking for analogous elections from Western European democracies to compare it to but only the UK comes close in leading party vote share. Orban got 44% in 2014, in pretty much every multiparty democracy in Europe the leading party tops out at 35%. The exception is the UK which seems to have regressed to essentially a two party system (with regional exceptions).
It doesn’t seem like there are any healthy democracies in Europe/North America that are dominated by a single party to the extent that Orban/Fidesz dominates Hungary.
Wait a minute. Is the problem here that Fidesz won almost every district despite not getting enough votes, or is it that he got so many votes that of course he won almost every district? Your two comments appear to take both of those views.
I think that both appear to be problems. Fidesz winning as many districts as they did with >45% does seem to be weak evidence for gerrymandering. Additionally, a single party winning as high a share of the vote as Fidesz in a multi party system is not typical of a fair democracy.
I think the problem here (as alluded to by Scott) is that Orban/Fidesz have thoroughly captured the system to tilt it in their directions, all the while being relatively popular.
While no ~one~ change is enough to entrench their power, as a whole the result seems to be thoroughly undemocratic.
Inside Budapest, there's a better claim to gerrymandering, but the opposition runs in basically a stripe down the center of the city, north to south. There are a few things that look weird, enough to maybe get a few more districts that would be "fair," but not enough to overturn popular will.
The fact that orban gets such a consistent 40-70% in every district is highly suspicious. Party vote share usually is not evenly distributed geographically so we should expect the minor parties to have strongholds where they are the majority (at least more than 2 districts outside Budapest).
Even if the districts weren’t gerrymandered, the amount by which orban won would be highly atypical of a well functioning democracies. People elsewhere are blaming it on the opposition’s inability to coalesce into a single coalition, but the only other places where I see that happening is under autocrats like Putin or Lukashenko.
> The fact that orban gets such a consistent 40-70% in every district is highly suspicious.
If you are alleging vote-counting fraud, say so.
But getting 50-60% in one district and getting 50-60% in another region next door is the opposite of suspicious. He wasn't cramming all his opponents into one district.
> the amount by which orban won would be highly atypical of a well functioning democracies
There were more than two parties. 44-27-20-5.
Clinton got an uncharacteristically low percent of the vote, too, but there's a really good reason for that.
Find me another example of a multiparty democracy being won by a single leading party with >40% of the votes and a majority of seats without needing to form a coalition. I genuinely can’t find an example of this outside of autocratic countries (and Hungary).
All functioning democracies seem to either be two party systems or multi-party coalition governments, whereas Hungary is dominated by a single party with scattered opposition.
The UK is technically a multiparty democracy, albeit with 2 distinct major parties, and the fact that those minor parties exist absolutely results in spoiler effects and parliamentary majorities won with comparable vote totals
The Uk is a good counter example. As an outsider I have a hard time understanding the role that the libdems or UKIP play where they get significant vote shares but negligible representation while the real competition in between Labour/tories plays iut
The ideal strategy for gerrymandering is to start drawing districts so that each district has just enough of your voters to secure a victory. Below a certain threshold of voters, that means that in the remaining districts the opposing parties will win by an unusually high margin. Above that threshold, however, you have enough voters to secure every district, or nearly every district. So in such cases, you draw districts to artificially reduce the variance in how districts vote. You don't want your opponents to win a district just because it happened to have enough of their votes in it, so you adjust the boundaries to bring it back into line with the others. If you have enough votes to pursue this strategy, then you probably would have won the most seats anyway. But it could help you get a majority government instead of a minority one.
So how do we tell if there was gerrymandering? The golden test would be to compare the results to what we'd get if the districts were drawn according to some reasonable algorithm that tries to make compact districts. If the two sets of results differ significantly, then we know there was something fishy going on.
Call it the Demagogue Book Club! Orban, Modi, and Erdogan are all similar as leaders of populist-right parties who got elected in democracies with majorities large enough to start changing constitutional rules, and doing so substantially with the goal of changing the country's culture and entrenching their own power. All three continue to run states where opposition parties are real and win important posts (all three capital cities, in Hungary, India, and Turkey, are run by the opposition), and in Hungary and Turkey recent polling suggests the opposition is favored to win the next serious election. (But not in India). There are countries where you could not release a poll suggesting that the incumbent is about to lose (for instance, Belarus is mentioned in this very piece): those are dictatorships. (Or where elections are just not held at all, as an Iran).
On a different note, a question for Hungarian readers, why is there a substantial population of Hungarian voters that remains devoted to Ferenc Gyurcsany? I noticed that his wife did really well, but lost, in the opposition primary earlier this year, which amazed me. I can't believe that anyone would remain devoted to this guy -- even if you think his tenure as PM was a huge success, which boggles the mind, at this point he's lost so many times that you'd have to think his supporters would move on. (I guess this phenomenon sometimes happens with former leaders who never give up on trying to return to power -- there's a Saakashvili cult in Georgia too which keeps Kartuli Ocneba in power -- but I'm interested in hearing more about the Hungarian case. Preventing this sort of thing might be a good argument for term limits, on top of all the others.)
Iran for Supreme Leader, that is -- obviously Iran does hold elections for other positions, like President, but in Iran the real power is held by the Supreme Leader and he's just chosen by his predecessor like Roman Emperors or Mexican Presidents during the dedazo period.
Iran is unique in that the Judicial branch is supreme over Executive or Legislative (Vilayat-e-Fakih, rule of the jurisprudent). The Supreme Leader is inherently a (Shia sharia) judicial position.
+1 for "demagogue" as a term that encapsulates the series. It's not perfect (I keep wanting to say things like "authoritarian populist", which as a near-oxymoron speaks to how hard this category is to define) but it has the right flavor.
Just going by media takes, my impression is that Putin, Bolsonaro, and Duterte are all fair game for the series. If Scott is interested in the mechanisms of demagoguery and not just the current right-wing wave he might also consider Chavez (as the featured comment mentioned) and maybe Morales? I'm not very well-informed here, just brainstorming.
Daniel Ortega, the leftist Sandinista leader of Nicaragua, is coming under a lot of attack by the Biden Administration, rather like how he was also a bete noire of the Reagan Administration way back in the 1980s.
On the other hand, the right wing countries of Central America, seem to extrude more immigrants to the U.S. than leftist Nicaragua, so I don't know what to think about him.
One possibility is that people who get elected to multiple terms (e.g., Ortega was El Supremo from 1979-1990 and from 2007 to the present) tend to have been the right man at the right time during their first term. But as the years go by, the times tend to change and they decline in abilities, which offers a good reason for term limits.
Orban, who is still only in his 50s, appears to be unusually ideologically flexible.
Is Ortega still leftist? The things I've read (admittedly, none very detailed) say that he has undergone some sort of metamorphosis from a populist leftist demagogue to a populist rightist demagogue (sort of like if Mao and Xi had been the same person).
Completely off-topic, but mentioning Georgia makes me need to share this link once again - song first heard in the Werner Herzog remake of "Nosferatu" and absolutely gorgeous:
I think the Hungarian fertility deal (which is genuinely a pretty decent increase but from a terrible base) ties in with the fundamental and paradoxical antinatalism of conservatism/authoritarianism. Cultures that value having a ton of kids tend to have decent birth rates, and for Complex Reasons tend to be conservative, but on a broad scale conservative/authoritarian cultures tend to do a lot worse than their peers -- compare the "bad" TFRs of the West to the "holy shit are you going to die right now" TFRs of the developed East (and indeed often the underdeveloped East, North goddamn Korea is sub-replacement), and particularly note the tendency of wealthy nations with strict gender roles/expectations to have even worse situations than those without them. The most nightmarishly low fertility rates are in places like Singapore and South Korea, which fall into a cross-section of significant wealth, cultural conservatism, and political authoritarianism. Western Europe does poorly; Eastern Europe does even worse.
In the case of Hungary's natalist policies, this ties in with cultural conservatism's narrow band of acceptable family structures. Hungary offers free fertility treatments -- unless you're single, over 40, or non-heterosexual, which is to say, unless you're a significant proportion of the people seeking fertility treatments. From a natalist perspective, kicking huge swathes of people begging to have children out the door is lunacy.
For high fertility and high tech in the 21st Century, there's basically Israel, a polity so right wing that when Bibi Netanyahu was finally kicked out he was replaced by a new Prime Minister to his right, and nobody else.
The fertility is mostly in the Haredim population, though, and they are almost as under-represented as Israeli Arabs in the high-tech scene. Much of that is because in Israel the IDF hold the same role university has in the US, that's where contacts and friendships are made, and both Arabs and Haredim are largely excused from military service, although that is starting to change for the latter due to resentment among secular Jews.
The Israeli government subsidizes a breeding reserve in the ultra-Orthodox population, which helps explains why Jews had a higher Total Fertility Rate than Arabs in Israel in 2019 at 3.05 babies per woman lifetime compared to 3.04 for Arabs. Nonetheless, even secular Jewish women have replacement-level Total Fertility Rates, which are well above any other advanced country.
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
> Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
<i>In the case of Hungary's natalist policies, this ties in with cultural conservatism's narrow band of acceptable family structures. Hungary offers free fertility treatments -- unless you're single, over 40, or non-heterosexual, which is to say, unless you're a significant proportion of the people seeking fertility treatments. From a natalist perspective, kicking huge swathes of people begging to have children out the door is lunacy.</i>
They're a significant portion of those seeking fertility treatments, but a pretty insignificant portion of people who might have children.
As for the conditions attached to getting fertility treatment, presumably Orban doesn't *just* want more people, but more people who will grow up to contribute meaningfully to Hungarian society. Since children from single-parent families are more likely to fall into crime and delinquency, and children of homosexuals are hardly likely to espouse the kind of socially-conservative values Orban wants to promote, it makes perfect sense not to try and make more of them.
Very few people see increasing the population as an end in itself -- instead they want more people because they think their economy would be stronger with more workers, or because more people means more soldiers to defend the country with, or because they think it would benefit society in some other way. Increasing the population with people they don't think would benefit society defeats the whole point of the exercise.
<i>If the point is natalism, then yes, denying fertility treatments to a significant number of people asking for fertility treatments *is* lunacy.</i>
Did you even read what I said? The "point" is strengthening the country; natalism is just a means to that.
<i>It's only if the point is a certain kind of eugenics, where the *right* people reproduce, that limiting fertility treatments makes sense.</i>
I would submit that this is an instance of the Worst Argument In The World. Not offering someone government-funded fertility treatments is so far from what people normally think of as eugenics (forced sterilisation programmes and the like) that giving it the same name obscures more than it illuminates.
Authoritarian is not the same thing as refusing peaceful transition of power, though there is overlap there. Heavy-handed government control, even if the government leaders can change, is still authoritarian.
A conservatism grounded in conscientiousness and being a high earner / productive member of the economy is going to be absolutely devastating to fertility, especially if your economic growth is concentrated in high density areas.
But bear in mind that european countries have fertilities that mix the immigrant and native population. Without disaggregation the biggest explanatory difference between the two areas is that there aren't large muslim populations in Japan/Korea
The Amish seem to be high in conscientiousness. They aren't especially high earning, but they don't believe in our welfare state and are above a minimum level of productive.
I should have said "...is going to be devastating *in a modern/postmodern environment*"
The Amish "economic model" doesn't involve striving after high paying white collar work in high density, high cost of living metros, that also involves schooling people into their early twenties or beyond (and the associated student loan debt).
Formal education ends at a much younger age (8th grade IIRC) at that point you're in an apprenticeship and the typical Amish individual is getting married in their early 20s.
And obviously having social expectations where family formation is seen as part of rather than ancillary to what it means to be productive (or more generally being a good person) will both socially nudge people towards family formation as well as repelling the society as a whole from shifting towards practices that directly disincentive family formation.
"Before we get there: I interpreted the paragraph Richard quotes as claiming that, if a teacher or doctor protests Fidesz or Orban in their spare time, as part of the normal exercise of their rights as a citizen, they can get fired or otherwise see their career suffer. That doesn’t seem to me like the government exercising control over the bureaucracy, that seems like a nightmarish escalation of the “cancel culture” that both Richard and I are against. In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes."
This argument has been made by libertarian intellectuals for many decades. Typically in the context of arguing that undermining "economic freedom" also undermines "social freedom". As well as a general critique of central planning: obviously in the Soviet Union, the government controlled all media and industries and thereby could silence people even without actually arresting them.
I don't have specific page numbers at the ready, but I'm almost certain it would include von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, certainly an implicit point in Ayn Rand's fiction... I think I recall hearing a lecture on this specific point by George Reisman.
That would just make the private enterprises censorious. Socialists actually had to fight for free speech in workplaces - joining unions or having union meetings on site etc.
Per my comment below, I do not believe that is true w.r.t. First Amendment law in the US. Private enterprise has fairly broad rights to fire employees for their off-hours speech in ways public employers are bound not to.
All they can do is fire you, which a public employer could also do (the "bound not to" is a restriction the State imposes on itself, and it could reneg at will). But the latter can do many more things to you; I'd say that qualifies the former as having a more limited scope of control.
> All they can do is fire you, which a public employer could also do (the "bound not to" is a restriction the State imposes on itself, and it could reneg at will)
In the general case, I reject this particular framing: even if only considering strictly legal mechanisms, it makes no sense to treat the State as a unified actor capable of rewriting its own strictures at a whim while denying any private influence on the same.
In the particular: exactly how many public employers are capable of "reneg[ing] at will" on *the First Amendment*?
In the general case, any public employer outside the USA. We've got a pretty sweet setup here (for the time being, at least), but the State v. private power question transcends the circumstances of a particular time & place.
> Orban himself calls his regime an “illiberal democracy”, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.
This doesn't sound like what Orban or his allies mean by "illiberal". They see liberalism or lack thereof as primarily a property of society / culture not formal institutions. Roughly speaking, to be "illiberal" in this sense means to adopt social / cultural norms that tilt toward a specific vision of a good way to live, rather than aiming for some form of neutrality. For example, when "the illiberal left" is used as a synonym for woke cancel culture it doesn't imply any agenda to repeal the freedom of speech, only an agenda to bake the promotion of certain political views into social norms.
This is, admittedly, confusing because "liberal democracy" does historically mean a liberalism of formal institutions (bills of rights, universal suffrage, nondiscrimination rules, etc.). But taking advantage of fuzziness in such terms is nothing new in politics. Whether or not Orban intends to subvert Hungary's system of democracy I'm confident that's not what he means to convey by the term "illiberal".
Yes, my impression is that Orban is using "liberal" not in the constitutional or economic sense that John Stuart Mill used it, but in the cultural sense that Spiro Agnew used it.
But, I don't know.
That's a general problem with opining about current events in Hungary: Hungarian is an extremely foreign language.
Over the years, I've written a certain amount about Turkey, another country with a non-Indo-European language. But one general theme I try to emphasize is that Turkey is pretty opaque to me (and most other Americans).
I don't think anyone is arguing that Orban is a great guy or that everything he has done has been hunky-dory, but he does raise a very pertinent question about "what do we mean by 'democracy'?"
Because when people are talking about how they don't like what he's doing, and how illiberal it all is, and yet it does seem to be what the majority of Hungarian people want, we are coming dangerously close to "We don't like how you govern your country so you better change or else we'll invade and force regime change on you".
Military interventions or economic sanctions or even just international law proceedings (and as I understand it, the USA doesn't hold itself bound by the jurisdiction of foreign courts) may be necessary tools to save people from a tyrant - but is Orban a tyrant? Or simply a Hungarian strong man who is giving the populist line to the people as they ask for it?
Are we afraid he is going to be another Mussolini or Franco or Salazar? If he only was Franco or Salazar, would we be reassured?
Are we going to tell the Hungarian people (and again, this is what Poland is opposed to the EU about) that "So long as you pass laws that we like as liberalisation, we won't have anything to say about how you do it, or undemocratic methods, or using the courts instead of legislation, or foreign money coming in from abroad. But if you don't match up with our current views on social justice/culture war issues, then we very much feel free to tell you what to do and how to do it"?
I don't want to defend Orban. I don't even want to defend a lot of what is going on as "conservatism". But I am uneasy about "unless you bring your country up to the socially liberal standard we think it should be at, we will call you a dictator, your regime illicit, and claim all kinds of bad things are happening".
It seems democracy is only real democracy if it chimes in with what a certain level of technocrats/elite/however you want to call them want and like. If the people will not vote according to how we deem they should vote, let us dissolve the people!
And we can all agree that is indeed being a dictator. But if coming to power via being elected under a democratic system is also being a dictator, then what kind of dictator is Orban? Hitler-type or Franco-type? Because if it's a choice of the lesser of two evils, I think everyone would prefer Franco-type.
Your fondness for this sentiment exemplifies the cancer that currently threatens to destroy this country, and it's been spreading like wildfire since the trump experience. And it is reflected here routinely and breezily with the lazy notion that if people elected an authoritarian then that's simply the people's will, and really it's such a thin line between democracy and dictatorship, isn't it?
All of this softening toward authoritarianism is as dangerously shortsighted as the populist embrace of hitler in the 30s.
Here's the bottom line that should never, never be dismissed or minimized: It simply does not matter how many people such as Michael Flynn have a hard-on for authoritarianism, since there is precisely one way to make our country "illiberal."
To drastically amend the Constitution is an intentionally extremely difficult thing to do. The Constitution overrides any fickle "will of the people." If it is undermined, as trump did, and clearly the vast majority of the GOP is willing to continue doing, THAT is what will destroy democracy in this country. It's not just an abstract political problem, it is the utter violation of our deepest-level social contract.
This rotten and corrupt sentiment is reflected by trump's insistence that since everyone knows he's the best president ever there simply cannot be accountability to other branches of government or the Constitution. The logic is disgusting when coming from a loudmouth at the end of the bar, but it's downright dangerous when acted out by an entire political party who thinks stoking a violent insurrection with the intent of halting government proceedings and then cracking down on "antifa" with martial law is just a dandy strategy. More please!
So this is what you flirt with, Mr X, when you belittle Liz Cheney et al for defending democracy. You are contributing to the flippant anti-Constitutional attempt to shift the Overton Window so that increasing numbers of Americans grow suspicious of democracy itself, as if it were just another partisan issue.
If you think democracy here has grown too inefficient or whatever, then you can either join the struggle again McConnell-style obstructionism, or you can devote your life to changing the Constitution -- legally. Or, of course, you can move to Russia. Extra-legal subversions, however, must not be tolerated.
Case in point. SCOTUS inventing constitutional rights to abortion and gay marriage apparently doesn't count as subverting democracy, but Trump sounding off represents "a cancer that threatens to destroy this country".
I absolutely think we should be worried about authoritarianism, but that includes soft authoritarianism.
The Supreme Court of the USA in a close decision (5-4) over-rides states to make gay marriage legal, and the President and Vice-President drape themselves in rainbow flags, and everyone gets tingles down their legs about how wonderful such ruling the country from the bench is:
"The logic is disgusting when coming from a loudmouth at the end of the bar, but it's downright dangerous when acted out by an entire political party who thinks stoking a violent insurrection with the intent of halting government proceedings and then cracking down on "antifa" with martial law is just a dandy strategy."
Obviously the Capitol Kerfuffle was stupid, and the people whose responsibility it was should have forseen it as a reasonable possibility and beefed up security to prevent it happening. But I find it very difficult to understand the position of someone who gets het up about that first and foremost, while not even *mentioning* the far more destructive summer-long 'insurrection' egged on by blue team demagogues. I mean - if you're a blue team partisan, fair enough, you're going to be more well-disposed to rioters on your side than rioters on the other side, but you'd think that such a position ought to be defended, rather than just assumed.
(Though I am quite drawn to Anatoly Karlin's argument that the reason January 6th was seen as worse than the BLM riots is that the BLM rioters destroyed the property of peasants, whereas the Capitol rioters trespassed on the property of the elites).
Was there any attempt to subvert the electoral process in the summer of 2020? If the point is about challenges to electoral government, then it makes sense to focus on the riots that sought to overturn an election rather than whatever events may have involved more people doing something else the year before.
I will grant you that that is one aspect on which you could consider the Capitol events worse than the BLM events (though don't forget that Antifa poured a lot of effort into attacking the federal courthouse in Seattle; they just had a lot less success in actually getting inside) - though I would note that probably most of the people there thought that they were there to try to *prevent* the ratification of a stolen election (and yes, Trump stoking the fire on that one was a terrible idea) - but is it also worth bearing in mind that the scale of the destruction was nowhere near the cumulative chaos caused by the combined efforts of BLM and Antifa over the summer - figures vary but there seems to be broad consensus that the insurance costs will be over $1B, before you get to the people directly killed in the riots (something in the ballpark of 30, as far as I can tell), compared to ... well, just the one verifiably killed in the Capitol, and she was shot by a cop ...
... and *that's* before you even get to the several thousand incremental people killed in murders above the base rate from the previous year, in a spike which did not seriously get going until after the 2020 riots started. Obviously that's less certain, but it is at least plausible that there was something of a 'Ferguson Effect' whereby to the degree that protesters were successful in getting police to withdraw their presence, they emboldened would-be murderers to go and start shooting.
So all in all, I'd say that in terms of *symbolic* harm to a sacred totem of American democracy, sure the Capitol riot was worse, but in terms of actual damage caused to actual people and property, and to the fabric of civil society, the 2020 riots were at least in the same ballpark, and I find it hard, like I say, to imagine how anyone can be *so much more* upset about the former than the latter.
> For example, what about a country that elects an autocrat once every four years, the autocrat can do literally whatever they want, and then they stand for re-election (or not) on the strength of their accomplishments.
Isn't that essentially the french system post-De Gaulle?
In general, the U.S. has way more checks and balances than other advanced countries. For example, the British parliamentary system, the most influential of all political models, evolved to give England a strong and nimble government that can get things done in a hurry.
As an American over the years, I've been amazed by the British Prime Minister's power, such as over regional entities. For example, Margaret Thatcher got annoyed at the leftist mayor of London, so she simply abolished his office. Tony Blair redrew the ancient county lines of England.
Projecting American norms of checks and balances as the only possible meaning of "democracy" is provincial.
My impression is that United Kingdom nationalism was doomed by the UK being represented by four different soccer teams in the World Cup.
But the idea that, say, Derbyshire and Essex (or whatever they are called now that Tony Blair is done with them) should have local autonomy is foreign to the English.
England was socially constructed over the centuries to be a non-regional polity: e.g., the elites have been sending their sons for a very long time to a small number of national boarding schools such as Eton and Harrow. Hence, at the top of the English class structure, there have long been no regional accents, in contrast to the way that graduates of Dartmouth vs. William and Mary once had identifiable regional accents in the U.S.
England was ruled by rival branches of the same royal family as France for centuries, and that family had very strong centralizing instincts in both countries. Civil society was stronger in England and more able to push back, but both are very centralized compared to Germany or Italy, the other big Western European nations.
My impression is that England, which centralized in the 10th Century, evolved as Europe's first nation-state in order to beat the hell out of France (and then other European rivals like Spain and Germany). Eventually, other parts of Europe figured out that they need to centralize upon a similar or larger scale to stop being pushed around so much by the English. But England was the straw that stirred the drink of European nationalism.
That's complicated by the English being ruled by a set of successful invaders from France (the Normans). Their policy (at least later on) was to stir the pot in Europe enough so that they wouldn't be successfully invaded again.
As far as I can tell the thing you mention about redrawing county lines and abolishing mayoral offices etc. is simply because of the fact that the UK (and its constituent countries) is a unitary state and not a federation. It has this in common with almost all European countries, sans a few (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, B&H and Russia). This is simply a result of what a unitary state is: not a collection of lesser entities that also have rights and privileges of their own, but the sole state power in its territory.
When a subnational body of government exists in a unitary state -- such as the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries, etc. -- it does so solely because the existence of that body achieves some goal of the central state, such as easing administration (the traditional reason, from back in French pre-revolutionary times), meeting the demands of citizens who desire increased self-government or because it believes that locals make better decisions on matters of non-national importance. Unitary European states do this very frequently -- often iteratively through successive governments, but sometimes by grand reforms. As an example, the Norwegian government recently considerably reduced the number of counties and municipalities by merges, despite large majorities in many counties/municipalities being unhappy with the merges, simply for greater ease of administration and budget savings.
(The case of the UK is, of course, a bit more complicated -- in one sense the UK looks more like a federation now than it used to, but in some other sense Scotland isn't any different from a typical European autonomous region like the Basque Country, which could absolutely be dissolved if the central state found it useful to do so. In the end this is all a bit of a sliding scale -- the UK can't end Scottish devolution because it would make the incumbent government extremely unpopular, but does that actually make Scotland something else than a subdivision of convenience like in any other unitary country? After all, the US federal govt *could* dissolve a state or merge it with another, but it would likely have to send in the army to do so. Scotland could probably be dissolved without involving any armed forces, just some police to handle protests.)
Right, so it's informative for Americans to remember that things we take as essential to democracy, such as checks and balances and central vs. regional governmental institutions, aren't considered essential by many reasonably sophisticated European countries, even among our own forebears in England.
Well, my impression is that you are using this as an argument against the necessity of checks and balances -- while the European argument would be that having non-fiat regional government doesn't have much to do with checks and balances. It's important in the US because you have a certain conception of the states being the foundation of the Union, but if you don't have that then checks and balances only at the level of the central state are just as good.
Second, you argue that because the UK doesn't have much in terms of checks and balances, they aren't actually necessary in a democracy. Well, my knowledge on this is admittedly not very detailed, but it seems to be true that it has less than most comparable countries -- although slowly gaining more (e.g. SCOTUK). To be honest, I don't necessarily disagree. However, although I may be misreading you, you seem to chalk the UK's being a reasonably well functioning democracy despite having few checks and balances down to a history of the elites sending their kids to a few central boarding schools (and similar centralization efforts) with the result being that the people atop the class system are similar and able and willing to cooperate in running the UK.
I think this should be generalised into what I mention briefly in another comment: a properly functioning, non-kleptocratic and mostly non-corrupt democracy is possible (and in the modern era when democracy is the leading ideology follows) when the elites are competent and not strongly antagonistic, the members of the general population mostly trust each other and are not divided into factions with contradictory interests, and there's way into the elite. Further details are less important. The UK is weaker on the last point (has a stronger and less penetrable class system) than many other democratic nations, which gives it some peculiar/unfortunate properties. The US is strong on the third point but is getting weaker on the first two points. Hungary lacks all three.
I've got to admit, that when "redrawing ancient county lines" got mentioned, I have actually no idea what he's on about. Rutland? The division of West and East Sussex? The Hundreds? Mayoral Offices? Sod all to do with Blair.
It was a Blair administration that attempted to re-create Mayors in certain areas. They got voted down in several places.
"For example, Margaret Thatcher got annoyed at the leftist mayor of London, so she simply abolished his office."
The Comic Strip was a bit too pleased with itself, but it did a very funny parody called "GLC: The Carnage Continues" about Ken Livingstone and the GLC:
"GLC: The Carnage Continues" is an episode of the British television comedy series The Comic Strip Presents... broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. It parodied a Hollywood telling of the 1980s takeover of the Greater London Council by Ken Livingstone and the subsequent disbanding of that body by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, re-imagining the story as a Charles Bronson / Sylvester Stallone-style action movie."
OK if you are going to call somebody who does nothing that is not legal at the time a "dictator," what word are you going to reserver for a Mao or Stalin? Someone who has people dragged off in the middle of the night and murdered in secret? Who sends tens of millions of people to concentration camps to starve, or executes the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward?
I don't think this is a trivial issue. If you don't draw a very bright line between violence and non-violence (if nonviolence that is sleazy in all kinds of ways), you end up crying wolf so much that you reduce the psychic defense people have towards *real* dictatorship. You alienate a bunch of people who *don't* find your "dictator" a dictator, because you're calling them a bunch of dictator lickspittles. You're helping fray the social fabric, if only a bit, because you're magnifying a political dispute which is still, at this moment, being settled by peaceful means, and implying it bears no sharp and meaningful distinction from differences that *are* settled by violence. By de-emphasizing a common agreement on that bright line, you help blur it, erase it, so that we cannot count on *everyone* -- however pro- or anti-Orban, say -- from pulling together to resist the lure of the genuine psychopath, the Mussolini who promises to stop all this squabbling and make the trains run on time, breaking a few eggs on the way to that nice omelet to be sure.
I think words matter, when they become widespread and sloganish, and if you're helping spread the idea that a guy like Orban, unpleasant as you (or I) may find him, is not really in any qualitatively different class than Joe Stalin or Idi Amin, this is not helpful, and people with a long view, and an awareness that we cannot take a peaceful resolution of our differences as some kind of God-given natural right -- who are aware it is quite possible for those differences to end up with genuine bloodshed, if we cannot agree on a few Marquess of Queensbury rules about moderating our language -- are right to push back against it.
Good argument. I was of the opinion that calling it "Dictator Book Club" is close enough for the blog's purposes, we get the idea from the reviews' content, but you've changed my mind. Echoing the "Demagogue Book Club" suggestion from an earlier comment.
A better term would be "Dissident Book Club:" Orban dissented in 2015 from the globalist position adopted upon a whim by the German Chancellor, yet one foreordained by the zeitgeist (as predicted in Jean Raspail's 1973 dystopian novel "The Camp of the Saints", that of course Europe should import a million military-age Muslims.
"Dissident" is an appropriate term for someone who has not achieved formal political power. It is no longer an appropriate term for someone who has achieved formal political power. At most you can call them a "former dissident".
Certainly not „Demagogue Book Club“, as some here propose. As if they resented people rejecting „woke“ teaching and electing „demagogues“ instead. Why not „Elected Strongman Book Club“.
a leader who rules by the exercise of threats, force, or violence
How's this supposed to be different from dictator? Demagogue is also bad of course, all politics is demagoguery for the most part, so calling some politician that doesn't say anything meaningful other than that you dislike him.
It‘s different because it does not specify absolute power, whereas „dictator“ does. And what I get, on merriam-webster.com/dictionary, is not that anyway, but „one who leads or controls by force of will and character or by military methods“.
I agree words mean things, but if you use the word "dictator" to mean "people who order dissidents to be dragged off and killed", the phrase "benevolent dictator" (which has been around for a while in the context of discussions) no longer seems to make much sense? To me at least.
I don't think the word "dictator" means "someone who rules with violence" and I haven't observed that this is the common agreement of the definition. From my understanding, "someone who rules a country in such a way so it is impossible for people to remove them from office (except by assassination)*" is the common agreement of the definition and Scott seems to be using it.
(* this is a sloppy phrasing because I'm writing this in a hurry, I realise it e.g. doesn't exclude monarchies, which it should, but I hope it gets the idea across regardless.)
Caveat: I live in Germany. I don't know if this is a cultural difference in word usage. I just wanted to speak up because your argument for using-words-correctly really chafed against my existing understanding of the word, and it might be valuable to you as a data point.
Agreed. I would define "dictator" just based on its surface level: someone who dictates. A dictator is any leader who can enact pretty much whatever policy they want without meaningful checks and balances.
This isn't necessarily incompatible with democracy- it seems plausible to me that Hungary is both democratic and a dictatorship.
Is it enough that they *can* enact any policy, or do they have to actually go about doing so in some meaningful way? There are certainly governments with weak checks and balances, such that the leader can make significant changes. Not all of them do so, though.
I would say that it still counts even if they don't exercise their power, although I would say that a strong enough tradition of not exercising the theoretical powers of an office might be enough of a check to keep that office from necessarily counting as a dictatorship.
It seems as though your "strong enough tradition" has made it ambiguous enough and created a large enough caveat that you could drive a train through it.
A brand new government with the exact formulation of the UK's Parliament would count as a dictatorship in your framing, even if they only enact policies in line with that major Western democracies would have accepted as normal.
It's not clear to me that that's a bad thing. These terms are inherently fuzzy and deciding a government counts as a dictatorship doesn't mean you now fully understand everything about it.
If your new government holds dictatorial power and doesn't have a track record to judge by, that's reason for concern even if they're not doing anything unreasonable at the moment.
Also remember that it has to be a single person to count as a dictator. Just because a majority in Parliament can do what they want doesn't mean the Prime Minister can (although it may if the PM has strong enough personal devotion from a majority of MPs).
The Queen of England is still officially a dictator. However, tradition has made it clear that if she ever chose to use her dictatorial power, there would be an instant coup and her Prime Minister would just declare themself the actual formal leader and remove her dictatorial powers. Thus, she has checks and balances on her power, despite the formal dictatorial powers she might theoretically still have on paper.
Adjectives/modifiers can change standard aspects of a noun's definition.
For example, sandwiches normally have bread on the top and bottom, but an "open-face sandwich" or a "knuckle sandwich" does not.
In the same way, "dictator" suggests various negative things, but "benevolent dictator" does not. This does not mean that dictator shouldn't be expected to be bad, it just means that adjectives/modifiers can be subtractive, not just additive.
Reminder that all laws everywhere are ultimately backed by the threat of violence. If you break them, men with guns come and force you into a cage. Or they fine you, and if you don't pay, men with guns come and force you into a cage. Or they try to garnish your bank account, and if the bank doesn't comply with that order, eventually men with guns come to the bank and force somebody into a cage.
Whenever anyone votes, he's deciding how to exercise violence against his compatriots, not whether to.
This is a nice idea under old and traditional forms of government. But I believe there is a possible alternative. In a rich, modern state, you could enforce many laws just by cutting off subsidies rather than actually threatening to lock anyone in jail. If everyone gets a $10,000 basic income, but that basic income is garnished or revoked if you violate minor laws, then we no longer need men with guns to force you.
It wouldn't work in general for laws whose punishment is thought to need to be severe enough. Non-payment of taxes, for a rich person, would be a clear example of that. There might be other sorts of in-kind benefits that society gives people, whose value isn't exactly monetary, that might be able to get around some of these problems. Disabling someone's transport card and/or other travel documents, for instance (though there's a question about how exactly travel documents work, and whether preventing someone from traveling without valid documentation would itself require some threat of violence at ground level).
But the point I am replying to is the claim that *all* laws *everywhere* are ultimately backed by the threat of violence. If we can figure out ways to make more of them be backed in some other way, then that seems like it should be appealing to at least a certain kind of libertarian.
Ok, I'm updating some. You can bribe people to obey minor laws, and you can collect the money used for that purpose from dominant assurance contracts instead of taxes imposed by force. But no actual government on earth does that yet.
The meta problem: how do we enforce contracts without any recourse to violence? What if the guy who created the dominant assurance contract just runs off with the money? Some a multisig crypto system could make that much more difficult, but N people working together could still run off with the money.
What a stupid idea. No you couldn't, because you still have to use violence to prevent people whose basic income was garnished or revoked from stealing and robbing. Once you've revoked a thief's basic income and he wheels another cart of laundry detergent out of Walgreens, what are you going to do? Revoke his basic income again?
And here I was thinking that Basic Income would reduce crime, because an uneducated, unemployed person who is having trouble earning money will be able to survive without turning to panhandling or crime.
Taking away basic income for minor offenses is highly regressive and would probably increase crime.
I think this is a very general feature of financial punishments. The main point I want to make is that in the context of a basic income, financial punishments can be enforced in a way that involves no threat of violence. I'm not necessarily saying that they are the right way to go - but they do show that it is at least conceptually possible for there to be a law whose enforcement is not backed up by the threat of violence, which some libertarians deny.
> in the context of a basic income, financial punishments can be enforced in a way that involves no threat of violence
It did sound like an elegant solution at first sight, but on further reflection it just seems to me you’re ending the “effect chain” early.
In practical terms, “forcing the legal entities that distribute forcibly-collected taxes as basic income to garnish that income” is not really in any substantive way less violent than “forcing the banks that distribute income from your employers and creditors to garnish that income”.
Just the fact that one of those entities is nominally part of the state doesn’t really change anything. You might as well say “if we nationalize all financial institutions, we can enforce financial punishment without threat of violence”. No matter what you try, people who want to do something you don’t will eventually try to obtain money, or directly goods or services in some way, and you either stop them with violence (or threat thereof), or you give up enforcing punishment.
*Any* state uses violence against its citizens. A serial killer being shot while resisting arrest is on one end of the spectrum, anyone that dares speak up against the King being killed in the middle of the night on the other, but both are violent.
There's two separate issues here. First, 'dictator' describes a form of government, a power structure, which is separate from what that power structrue does (despite being related). If we're talking about atrocities, democracies are quite capable of those - the USA was never a dictatorship, but the Trail of Tears and similar massacres of Native Americans still happened. The Armenian Genocide took place in a constitutional monarchy.
Secondly, there *is* a word that describes something more extreme than dictatorship on the democracy-autocracy spectrum. That word is 'totalitarianism', and it's a class that the Mussolinis and Stalins of the world belong to. But 'dictatorship' and 'autocracy' mean something different and less extreme, with the bright line being whether there are meaningful elections ('meaningful' being disputable because dictators do their best to pretend to be democratic leaders [especially if their power isn't secure], it's an adversarial system).
Now, whether or not Orban actually fits the definition of dictator is a separate issue. He's certainly doing his best to, but time (and especially the next Hungarian election) will tell whether he actually succeeded.
Buying up the press is the least-violent way any semi-authoritarian regime has ever suppressed criticism of itself. The US sent people to jail for publishing anti-WWI pamphlets. Lincoln's administration siezed telegraph lines, shut down newspapers that criticized him, and arrested journalists and a congressman for criticizing his policy. Obama's administration prosecuted journalists for not betraying their sources of classified leaks about war crimes and illegal domestic spying, and persecuted Julian Assange for his journalism about war crimes and illegal domestic spying. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition acts. All of these things are more violent than a voluntary market exchange.
the entire journalism industry in the US (and probably most places) was experiencing rapid decline in revenue at the time, so I’d be very skeptical of claims of below-market sales until seeing the specifics.
I am going to make a comment which absolutely not charitable, so pardon me for this, but it seems to me that (differently from Scott) Hanania is NOT against cancel culture at all. He just want to be on the side of the cancelers.
Hungary is a small country that gets a lot of benefits out of the E.U., but is also therefore highly vulnerable being pushed around by the increasingly German-dominated E.U. The classic example of this was the German Chancellor's unilateral decision, made in not much more than Scott's ten minutes, in the late summer of 2015 to let a million military age Muslims into the E.U. and try to force the other members to take them on.
This shocking (but now largely memoryholed by the media) event largely set in motion Brexit and Trump's election the following year. Orban took the lead in resisting Germany's whim, so it's hardly surprising that Hungarian voters seem to want a strong leader who will resist German power over them.
Yes. We must also correct Scott's interpretation of the comment about the Dublin agreement. Dublin was originally the way migration was handled, but Merkel effectively abolished that agreement overnight when she decided to invite huge numbers of migrants to Germany. It still stands, technically, but has no real impact. Migrants routinely pile up on the north coast of France and then cross the channel in dinghies, it's a political problem in the UK at the moment. They can't be easily sent back to where they entered or even where they came from because they routinely lie about their origins and destroy any papers or items that could reveal where they entered the continent. Nobody wants them so by the time they turn up deep inside EU borders, there's no way to send them back to the 'entry point' because nobody knows where that is.
The EU's schizophrenic/hypocritical approach to migrants is now routinely exploited by nearby governments like Turkey, Belarus who use migrant flows as bargaining chips. They know EU leaders are far too left wing to actually enforce borders properly themselves, so they offer to do it for them in return for deals of various kinds.
In reality Merkel's decision to open German borders to Syrian refugees saved Orban a lot of trouble. What was the alternative? Well, Merkel could have said: we have the Dublin Regulation for these situations, so let's follow it. The refugees, already in Europe at the time and en route to Budapest train station, are Hungary's problem to deal with, since Hungary is the first EU country they enter. How would Orban have liked that?
Does democracy mean checks and balances? I always took democracy to mean "following the will of the people" and checks and balances to be sensible things we implement because we're not insane.
If 4 families control a country and must cooperate to create law that's checks and balances without democracy. If the public has complete control over whatever strongman rules them for the next 2 years its democracy without checks and balances.
Most countries modeled on the Westminster parliamentary system have fewer checks and balances than the U.S. Constitution.
The British system is a little like that of a pirate ship in which the crew in port periodically gets a big say in who should be captain for the next voyage, but when out at sea the captain is supreme.
The British had a lot of practical experience with difficult questions of authority and consent at sea, whether with commercial ships, the Royal Navy, or privateers/pirates (e.g., the mutiny on the Bounty is close to being a national epic). The British unwritten Constitution has proven more influential around the world than the slower American written Constitution in part because it has more of the nautical virtues: you can change the people in charge, but if you aren't willing to change them, then they are in charge, like a captain at sea.
Yes, Scott asks at the end: „Are there systems of government that can let leaders take decisive action without degenerating into dictatorship?“ The British system. Their House of Lords can slow things down, but not ultimately stop the government.
As for the US system, I found it just ridiculous that Trump could not even easily build his border wall, which was his signature policy (and not something that would create irreversible facts on the ground, like „Merkel‘s Mistake“). If the government cannot act without the opposition agreeing, the latter‘s incentives are systematically divided between party and country. Best for the party to block everything, so the government looks weak.
And regarding the „checks and balances“, I feel the book club indeed puts relatively too much emphasis on them, even on independent media, and too little on free elections. Could the governments of North Korea, Venezuela or Zimbabwe ever win somewhat free elections, even with total media control? Perhaps it might be worth looking into the work of Hugo Mercier, who argues that, contra popular wisdom, people are not actually fooled by government propaganda.
You're right on the general point that the U.S. system has too many veto points and incentivizes "block everything to make your opponents look bad" tactics. But in the specific instance, Trump's party had control of both houses of Congress and could have built the wall without opposition support had they wanted. Trump was unable to convince everyone in his party that it was a good idea. Same thing is happening to Biden with his current spending bills, and is endemic in the U.S. system. Individual representatives and (especially) senators have some veto power, and there's usually a few who want to use it.
* Democrats have a majority in the House, the Senate, and have the President
* Republicans have a majority in the House, the Senate, and have the President
* One of those entities is controlled by one party and the other two are controlled by the other
One of the first two has happened for ten years out of the last thirty. In recent history, that has been 2020- (Democrats under Biden in control), 2016-2018 (Republicans under Trump in control), and 2008-2010 (Democrats under Obama in control).
When one of those two happen, the control goes to people on the edges of the party, primarily the most moderates since they can choose to vote with the opposition party. In the current election cycle that’s been notably Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Things can get done, but only things that the entirety of the party agrees on unless you have a supermajority. (Obama has this in 2008-2010, which is how Obamacare was passed.)
In the third situation, control goes to the party cores since the party that controls the one center of government has to compromise with the other party if anything is to get done. On a few high importance issues though, moderates in the opposing party in each house can switch on that vote, but that’s rare. In practice nothing gets done that isn’t blandly unanimous.
Interesting. In the British system, potential rebels in parliament from the leader‘s own party provide a check as well, and that is a real factor, but it does not seem to lead to gridlock like in the US. (I had thought the difference was the filibuster, almost always giving the other party a veto at least on critical issues.)
He held both houses of congress but he did not have a filibuster proof majority in the senate and it would be difficult to shoehorn the "wall" into reconciliation (not that it wasn't discussed). Thus they did need opposition support. My recollection is that they could have gotten it passed if they had been willing to compromise.
I agree completely on the too many veto points. I would much prefer to eliminate this present situation where both sides campaign-on and pretend to vote for legislation they know will never pass.
The ability to spend money is one of the relatively few areas in which the President has little power in the US - thus Trump needing to (and failing to) do the generally awful/tedious work of lining up his party in Congress to vote for it.
> people are not actually fooled by government propaganda
The number of people I personally know who are completely fooled by propaganda makes me deeply skeptical of this claim.
I have not actually read Hugo Mercier‘s book, „Not Born Yesterday“, but I thought his work is worth looking into in this context.
Another thing perhaps worth looking into: there seems to be a claim in political science (but I don’t have a reference) that Britain-style parliamentary democracies are more resilient than US-style presidential ones. Credit to the US, if that‘s true, for staying democratic for so long against the odds!
>> people are not actually fooled by government propaganda
>
>The number of people I personally know who are completely fooled by >propaganda makes me deeply skeptical of this claim.
Is this true of purely 'government' propaganda though? I suspect this is really only true when the propaganda is coming from a significant social/cultural/political/media block as well. See variously "Russiagate" or "the Steal/Q", for recent instances.
I think we should always expect that when propaganda is working, it will be amplified and echoed in traditional and social media. "Stop the Steal" is a good example - it all started at the literal top of government but people were very happy to pick up that ball and run with it in traditional/social media.
Johnson's attempt to prorouge parliament in order to force through unpopular legislation with a minority government (prior to the elections when he got it back) certainly seemed dictatorial to me.
They don't have fewer checks and balances, they just have different ones. The Queen or her representative is a check on the system. Votes of confidence are a check. The designated opposition party is a balance (although not with a lot of power).
The captain isn't supreme. Every time he gives an order his crew has the right to mutiny and if enough of them do that, he automatically faces an election.
The British parliamentary system is quite logically elegant. I'm a patriotic American, so it took me a long time to admit that the British system is more brilliant than the American system.
The queen isn't much of a check. A Prime Minister with the support of the Commons can do pretty much exactly what he wants. It is however true that the Prime Minister could be turfed out tomorrow if he loses the support of the Commons. That's the only real check. The nautical analogy (the captain has supreme power, but can be replaced at any moment by majority vote of the sailors) is a good one.
Losing control of the commons can be common enough although in many cases this means control of the ruling party - see Theresa May. Which is fine by me as that is why we send representatives to parliament, amongst other things, to keep a check on the executive. Clearly in presidential systems the executive has more power over parliament (ie Congress).
And there’s the rise of executive orders, which bypass Congress entirely.
MPs can vote to replace the prime minister at any point they choose. Two of our last seven prime ministers have been forced out "at sea" because their own party stopped supporting them, and another two have had to step down because they felt their positions were untenable and that would probably happen if they didn't.
"The British system is a little like that of a pirate ship in which the crew in port periodically gets a big say in who should be captain for the next voyage, but when out at sea the captain is supreme."
That's not how pirate ships worked. To begin with, the captain was only supreme when combat was going on. Beyond that, both captain and quartermaster could be voted out by the crew more or less any time.
This isn't quite right, because they can & do have snap elections. A closer analogy would be that the crew, if sufficiently dissatisfied, could call a vote of no confidence at sea and replace the captain, if the situation is dire enough
> Does democracy mean checks and balances? I always took democracy to mean "following the will of the people" and checks and balances to be sensible things we implement because we're not insane.
I mean the whole thing here is that "democracy" and "liberal democracy" are often conflated. I think the thing here is to stop arguing over what is and isn't democracy (that's just debating definitions!) and focus on the concepts we care about.
Don't really agree with you here. I think it's very important to separate the two. For instance, if checks and balances were strongly correlated with economic performance, but democracy wasn't, it'd have a large impact on my political views.
While I agree that some people get obsessed with terminology, having consistent, clear definitions is a prerequisite for consistent clear analysis.
Athenian democracy had checks and balances, not to protect rights, but to prevent individuals or cliques from taking power and refusing to relinquish it. That's why they had practices like ostracism to exile the powerful who got too big for their britches, and very large juries for many positions that would be elected in current polities, to make capture or subornation much harder.
Separation of powers to protect rights and ensure the rule of law are an 18th Century Enlightenment invention (Montesquieu), and orthogonal to democracy.
Yes, I misspoke. Much greater use of randomly selected lot for positions, but also the juries they used at trials were much larger than ours: hundreds or thousands, not a dozen, and that was in a polity that was, perhaps 60,000 and 500,000 for the whole of Attica.
Julian Dibbell has a highly instructive article on the logistics of preserving democracy in Athens:
Separation of powers in the style of Montesquieu was invented to separate powers from the so-called absolute monarchs of the time. Stands to reason it is orthogonal to democracy. Incidentally, "democracy" at that time referred to Athenian-style democracy and was in very bad repute due to its record of bad governance and self-destructive decision-making.
"Following the will of the people" and "checks and balances existing" are different only in the most naive sense. If you have perfect control over a country's media, intellectuals, major corporations and so on you can manufacture consent in any way you'd like rendering the "will of the people" essentially meaningless.
Orban doesn't have perfect control, of course, but the argument presented by Scott sems to be roughly that he has enough control over the most important sections of society to allow him to stay in power by manipulating public opinion.
Of course, you can go deeper than this -- the "will of the people" is never a pure, independent thing that exists. All states -- more specifically, factions within those states -- manipulate opinion to some degree, but that's still too simple. The truth is that "evil masterminds" at the heart of governments with detailed plans of how to manipulate opinion in their countries to achieve their secret master plans aren't a real thing except in the most backwards, tyrannical nations. In real life, the politics and long-term direction of any country, whether the US, Hungary or China, is the result of an interplay of an innumerable different forces: individual power, external influences, history, tech, the people's needs and desires and those of various factions (e.g. ethnic subgroups), etc. There are feedback effects everywhere -- the people create politicians who influence the people and so on.
In the end, I don't think talking about idealisations like "democracy" or "liberal democracy" is very useful. It's more worthwhile to, for example, consider why some countries have mostly competent and benevolent elites who at worst are considered misguided by the part of the population who want their country to go in a different direction, while other countries (like Hungary) have kleptocratic and incompetent elites and an extremely polarised population who consider various politicians angels or devils depending on their political orientation. Orban didn't create this Hungary, he only inherited it and exploited its poor state to get to power. And like most Strongman Lite types, he is as influenced by his population (as an opportunist) as it is by him.
Orban has zero control over the global media. On the other hand, Hungarians speak an idiosyncratic language. So it appears that the elected government putting their own people into the taxpayer-subsidized media influences the masses while outraging the English-speaking elites.
In the Internet Age, how much does putting the elected PM's people into sinecures in the state-owned media matter? It appears to have little effect on the elite, who are incensed that their ideology is now a career detriment, and sizable effect on the masses.
I can't speak specifically about the media habits of Hungarians, but the vast majority of Norwegians -- especially middle-aged or older, but also many young people -- basically get all their news from Norwegian media. Social issues that are important elsewhere basically only become a significant topic of discussion once Norwegian media writes about it (the journalists read foreign media, of course -- where else would you get ideas for articles?). Social media is a more significant entry point for foreign thought, but even then most Norwegians I know with a Twitter account mainly follow other Norwegians.
This is in a country where most people have a good enough grasp of English to easily read the NYT or whatever -- still few do it regularly (mainly for extra details when something interesting happens in the US, is my impression), and even the highly educated trust local media more. In Hungary, where English skills are considerably worse than in Norway, the average age is higher and Internet use is lower, I would assume that news and perspectives from around the world being available on the Internet for whoever cares to look only has a minor effect on the politics/worldview of the average Hungarian.
The vast majority of Japanese get all their news from Japanese media, too, but this is less of a barrier to entry of foreign thought than it seems. This is because information does not propagate symmetrically between people, but instead cascades down from the most fashionable circles in a broadly hierarchical manner. Thus local news environment is a more or less delayed reflection of the intellectual fashions at the top. Japan used to be much more insulated 20 years ago and even 10 years ago, but its fashionable circles have since mastered click-bait techniques and there are now dozens of prolific Japanese-language BuzzFeed clones whose editors and writers are obviously looking up to American progressive media. Japanese Twitter recommendations consist of them almost entirely.
I certainly agree this happens here and elsewhere, but my point was that *if* you control the media to the point where this inflow doesn't happen in the same way then it doesn't seem implausible that you can stop ideas you don't like from gaining traction locally, because the local media is in fact the major "transmission vector" for such ideas.
Plus social media, these days. Sure, but that's hardly controversial. China is quite good at it, and is apparently subtler than Orban. The trouble for would-be establishers of such control over local media is that their activities in this direction tend to get them labeled dictators and authoritarians before bearing fruit. As Orban's case demonstrates, given balls and favorable circumstances it is possible to plow through and achieve a degree of media autonomy, although as several commenters noted he hasn't done anything really far-right with his powers.
I asked this question in the original book thread and I was assured that there was no possible avenue for people in Hungary to get news from non-Hungarian sources. It's a closed information ecosystem, apparently.
I think I read that comment chain, wasn't the conclusion rather that no-one outside of Hungary bothers writing anything in Hungarian? People in Hungary who learn a foreign language still have access to international media
"If you have perfect control over a country's media, intellectuals, major corporations and so on you can manufacture consent in any way you'd like rendering the "will of the people" essentially meaningless."
This seems false to me. During the later years of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had complete control over the country's media, intellectuals, and major corporations, but they were unable to manufacture enough consent to keep the regime from collapsing.
It is certainly a fascinating case. From what I've been able to learn, CPSU did all right manufacturing enough consent to manage until Gorbachev as Chairman of Politburo announced glasnost and started pushing it as the new and ideology-approved way to improve the parlous state of Soviet economy and command systems. It took a few years for Gorbachev's initiatives to percolate through the party machine, for the realization that control over the country's media and intellectuals has been ceded to sink in, and for others to pick up the ceded pieces. The horrible PR management of the Chernobyl accident apparently interacted with this process, throwing a large amount of fuel onto fires that proved to be more than CPSU was capable of dealing with. Environmental movements (originally created under the auspices of local party or komsomol organizations!) soaked up CPSU's stock of consent-manufacturing powers which was not being renewed due to glasnost policy. The Chinese reportedly study this case in depth as an example of what not to do.
> Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin.
There's something to this, but I think it's valuable to be very clear about what happened there. The Roman emperor was never -- NEVER -- known as a "king" *in Latin*. That is because, in the Roman cultural tradition, kingship was synonymous with evil and strictly tabooed. He could not be referred to as a rex.
But it wasn't controversial at all to refer to him as a king, only as a rex. In areas that spoke Greek he was called a king. In Egypt he was called a king. The only difference is that those areas did not speak Latin and therefore when they said king, they were not saying "rex". But they were using words, like "βασιλεύς" in the case of Greek speakers, that all parties agreed were equivalent to the Latin "rex".
So the situation in the Roman Empire is more along the lines of how modern Americans are adamant that the "police" are a nonmilitary organization, despite the fact that if you start with any definition of "military" there is no way to exclude the police from it. The *word* is taboo for vaguely-felt ideological reasons, but no one sees a problem with the concept.
Why? What would you suggest as an alternative, beyond perhaps including space forces?
In the US, the military reserves and National Guard are broken down along lines of those three basic armed services. In function, the military is trained, equipped and deployed primarily to fight foreign enemies. (They might perform infrastructure roles for training or emergency purposes.) In contrast, police forces -- including federal branches such as the Border Patrol and Coast Guard -- are domestic law enforcement agencies.
So I disagree with the original comment's assertion that police are definitionally military. English has an entirely different word for military forces with a primary job of law enforcement: gendarmerie.
You have excluded military bodies such as the entire military of ancient Egypt, which spent much of its time doing construction projects, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US National Guard, every royal or imperial guard to ever exist...
The Roman military was primarily deployed to fight foreign enemies. But it's exceptional. And even they had imperial guards.
It gets somewhat more complicated when you remember the famous 'rex'-related affray with Caesar on the Appian Way. He very much flirted with accepting the title, by joking about it rather than disavowing it seriously.
> In areas that spoke Greek he was called a king.
Colloquially, not officially, at least for a few centuries. The official title was the more circumspect 'autokrator'. Also, I don't think 'basileus' ever carried the same stigma in Greek as 'tyrannos', which would have come closer to the emotional charge of 'rex'. There were nominal 'basileis' in democratic Athens, too, after all.
I do think that there's some value, scant though it may be, in these hypocrisies. The point when no one bothers dancing around taboos any longer marks a very clear step in the consolidation of power.
> Also, I don't think 'basileus' ever carried the same stigma in Greek as 'tyrannos', which would have come closer to the emotional charge of 'rex'.
Sure, tyrannos was stigmatized and basileus wasn't. But my point is that basileus and rex mean the same thing. Tyrannos means something else, and its Latin equivalent is tyrannus.
> The point when no one bothers dancing around taboos any longer marks a very clear step in the consolidation of power.
Well... did this point come for imperial Rome before or after power had been maximally consolidated?
The comparison with Merkel is strange since she is {by the standards of her political system if not American ones) a right wing leader, who has been very successful. So if conservatives prefer Orban to her then it's not because they're looking for a successful right wing leader
She is the leader of the CDU, Germany's main centre right party. If you disagree with that then you are using a definition of the words that doesn't match normal usage
What makes you consider them "no longer on the right"? They are referred to as on the right by most German and English language news outlets. The right/left axis is always going to be an imperfect simplification, but with such terms its only meaningful to talk in terms of what the common usage is, not whatever idiosyncratic definition you prefer. Or this just descends into pointless definitional arguments
She was the leader in the period we are discussing. You just seem to be being needlessly pedantic at this point.
jstr is on the American right, so from his perspective the CDU is not center-right even if he himself links to a Wikipedia page saying "it is the major catch-all party of the centre-right".
You're the one arguing that American conservatives aren't real conservatives. Indeed, the definition of conservatism might differ between Germany and America, it should be unsurprising Americans will use the word to refer to the American variety.
The events of 2015 have the most influence on American conservatives' views of Merkel and Orban. Generally, however, Merkel's Mistake has gotten airbrushed out of the journalistic picture of recent years, so it just doesn't come up much, even though it was the pivotal event of the politics of the second half of the last decade.
I would generally argue that it was the unnecessary intervention into Libya, which both emboldened the Syrian opposition to launch an actual civil war and directly led to the large refugee flows of the 2010s. It also led to a sequence of failures of American foreign policy as world leaders became unlikely to trust the US after it went back on its 2003 agreement with Gaddafi. Merkel's Mistake was an understandable one in the context of her worldview, but the US intervention into Libya (itself memory-holed since few or no American service-members died, being entirely an air-based intervention) was the actual mistake, since it made no sense under any perspective which considered the intervention for more than 10 minutes and had far worse consequences on the world stage than the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter of which, in hindsight, was actually reasonably successful).
I was a high school freshman in 2011, and the Libyan intervention radicalized me on a number of anti-government axes, because it was just *so obviously* a stupid move. I did a research project for a high school Public Speaking class which took me perhaps two afternoons of reading about Libya's history and ethnic groups, and delivered a presentation where I had a map which accurately forecasted the civil war lines in 2014. Subsequently my family and acquaintances trusted my judgment for several years, but then I pissed that away when I was very confident that Trump could not win the Republican primary, and then again very confident that he could not win the general election. In hindsight these are unlike domains and elections are actually much harder to predict than civil wars.
In his 2016 exit interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Barack Obama was peeved by Hillary Clinton and the other foreign policy women cajoling him into intervening in Libya in 2011.
Count me in as another one of the people who thought the intervention in Libya was a dreadful mistake that would not end well. I did think Hillary was gung-ho on it to burnish her credentials for a run at the presidency, as one criticism about her was "would she be tough-minded enough to stand up to foreign potentates and protect American interests?" and she sure showed how tough she could be, huh?
Seriously, one reason I did not like Hillary for the presidency was that I thought she was a war-hawk, or at least easily persuaded to respond to criticism by showing off how tough and aggressive she could be in that manner (somewhat similar to the idea that Margaret Thatcher went for war over the Falklands Islands as a way to distract from criticism of domestic governing by whipping up patriotic fervour in the "Spirit of the Blitz" and going for an easy victory).
>the latter of which, in hindsight, was actually reasonably successful
Do you not count the emegrence of ISIS as a direct consequence of this, considering that it was formed and led mainly by Saddam's ex-military officers?
You say "Merkels Mistake" as if it's a common turn of phrase, but it's not very clear what you mean. I'm assuming from context the refugee crisis? In which case given she was in power another 6 years it's hard to call it a political mistake, not to mention the humanitarian element.
Regardless of if it worked for Merkel or not, if American conservatives when given the choice between an extremely successful democratic conservative leader who let in refugees, and a less successful and dictatorial one who didn't, then it's not really conservatism they're interested in anymore.
As a baseball fan, I prefer to label the events of 2015, which helped lead to Brexit and Trump the next year, as "Merkel's Boner" after Fred Merkle's once-infamous 1908 base-running mistake that was known for generations as "Merkle's Boner." But these days, Americans tend to be lax on their baseball history and have vulgar minds, so I've switched to "Merkel's Mistake." It's a striking exemplification of the media memory-holing of this epochal event that the term "Merkel's Mistake" isn't instantly recognizable.
> It's a striking exemplification of the media memory-holing of this epochal event that the term "Merkel's Mistake" isn't instantly recognizable.
I think everyone in western europe, and I would hope most people who follow the news in the USA and Canada, are aware of the history. Its certainly something that right wing parties are extremely keen to talk about at every opportunity.
Is it perhaps possible that other people aren't ignorant of certain facts you aware of, but disagree with you on how to interpret them and what moral valence to give them? Maybe we should call this Merkel's Triumph, or Merkel's Complex Policy Decision With Pros and Cons. Which admittedly lacks the alliteration, but might be more informative.
I had assumed that "Merkel's Mistake" would naturally refer to the Euro crisis and the resulting devastation of Greece, but I gathered from context that this was not what you were talking about.
While I'm very aware of the events to which you refer, you're the only person I've seen refer to them as "Merkel's Mistake" as a phrase, even amongst the man I've seen decrying the decision as a mistake
Abolishing German and EU border control and changing the demographic make-up of your country on a whim without consulting anyone is by definition not conservative.
1) Saying border control was abolished because of a specific instance of humanitarian admission is hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. If you want to demonstrate how trivially false it is look up the rules for living and working in Germany with a non-schengen passport
2) More or less everything governments do changes the demographics of their country, if she's not allowed to do that her job may be difficult. If there is specific reasons why you think this particular demographic change was bad please articulate them.
3) She's the leader of a coalition in a parliamentary system, she's not an independently elected executive leader. There is literally nothing she can do without consulting people.
You are allowed to just say you think her policies are bad y'know, and articulate reasons why, rather than reshaping the meaning of words to make your point for you
1. Border control was abolished along the asylum seeker-route. I didn't say it was completely abolished, but perhaps I should've specified that it was partially abolished.
2. Not on this scale. A large scale change in demographics through an open borders policy that was not voted on nor campaigned has no democratic mandate it seems to me.
3. Yes there is: she can say whatever she wants, and the world will think she is speaking for Germany and her party. Since Germany is very attractive to migrants and also the leading power of the EU, her words have great power.
I believe migrant pressures on the US changed immediately both after Trump and Biden were elected, did all those migrants have intimate knowledge of the powers the executive has at hand, or what executive orders they actually issued? Executive actions are not the only source of power. Do you think the pope has no power?
It depends on how we define 'successful right-wing leader': successful in winning political elections, or successful in making conservative policies and pushing the country in a conservative direction.
Most American conservatives want to see the second, but Merkel definitely failed on that count with the exception of fiscal conservativism.
Merkel ordered nuclear reactors closed after a populist outcry, she introduced minimum wage, she went from 'multiculturalism is a failure' to 'everyone is welcome here' and same-sex marriage was legalized.
The very presence of a relatively popular AfD is evidence of Merkel's failure.
On the subject of the importance of independent institutions for democracy I think you would like Fukuyama S's "Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay"
It’s hard to disentangle the Soros/anti semitism thing. Presumably Orban would fight just as hard against Soros and his influence if he wasn’t Jewish. And if Soros were a supporter of Orban presumably that would be just dandy by Orban and he’d invite him to the football on a regular basis. But none of that is to say anti semitism isn’t a thing in Hungarian society so Orban’s attacks on Soros benefit from that energy.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I know nothing about George Soros save that he is a very rich man who, amongst other things, likes funding foundations to improve the world (as he sees improvements) and that he's a boo-boy for the right as the Koch brothers are boo-boys for the left about "unelected billionaires using their money to sway society".
On the other hand, during our gay marriage referendum (yes, that old chestnut), Soros-funded foundation(s) were donating to the pro-legislation side; also ditto for donations about the pro-abortion legislation campaign. Fair enough, save that there was no outcry over "foreign billionaires trying to sway Irish society" *except* when it came to donations for the anti-legislation side, and there were some court cases about "you can't do that":
So, as I say, I'm torn. My own personal views are that I was "meh" on the gay marriage thing but definitely not pro-abortion. And while everyone is free to have an opinion, yes I am somewhat not very chuffed about outsiders deciding "I would really like if Ireland [did thing] so I am going to give money to change the law". I kinda rather that we'd make up our own minds on this, or if you are going to let outsiders have influence, then equal playing field: no crying foul over right-wing organisations donating as a 'threat to democracy' but not opening your mouth about left-wing organisations doing it.
I don't know if Orban is racist or anti-Semitic or just using a convenient scape-goat for domestic political gain. I do know that I can see the Hungarian point in "hey, why are you paying all this money to move the cultural needle?" I realise that it is complicated by Soros being Hungarian, so he does have a natural interest in his home country, but again - I'd be sympathetic to "if you want to have a say in Hungarian national politics, then move back and live in Hungary and conduct your business here" (we have at least one Irish moneybags who regularly unburdens himself of how the country should be governed, but that burning flame of patriotic fervour didn't stop him from taking out tax residency in Gibraltar).
“ On 23 September 2020, the European Commission adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum following consultations with the European Parliament, Member States and various stakeholders. The New Pact covers all the different elements needed for a comprehensive approach to migration. In particular, the New Pact recognises that no Member State should shoulder a disproportionate responsibility and that all Member States should contribute to solidarity on a constant basis.”
No one likes this proportional distribution of migrants. Some countries think that it is not fair that they have to accept migrants just because some countries fail to control their borders. And migrants also don't want to go poorer countries which causes more problems with integration.
I am very interested if you have fresher information on this. 23rd September 2020 is already some time ago...
I have been following the debate on the "New Pact" proposal. The initial proposal did indeed suggest a quota-type system, where refugees arriving in EU front states were to be shared between all EU states, according to some to-be-agreed-upon quota principle (for example based on the country's share in EU's total population). It was the most controversial point in the initial proposition (which also includes a lot of less controversial stuff).
If my information is correct, it was watered down already in late 2020. In particular, it was suggested that other EU members could offer frontline EU states money to handle the refugee-applications, as an alternative to accepting actual refugees. Below is a link to the latest paper I have read on the issue. It is from 18th May this year.
According to the paper, the "New Pact" proposal as it now stands will imply softening the situation somewhat for refugees who already have close family members legally living in inland EU states. But they are a minority, and might in practice be granted passage anyway. The main rule is referred in the last paragraph in Part III, and it is similar to the present Dublin III-rule. Hence Dublin still rules (so to speak). Quote:
"However, the above analysis demonstrates that the responsibility criteria included in the Proposal will not substantially shift the burden of asylum examinations away from front-line States, given that the “first country of irregular entry” criterion remains applicable (art. 21)."
..but again, if you have newer information, I am genuinely very interested.
Was he himself much of a genocider? He was a slave owner, it's true. But as far as his autocracy goes, he was decent at moderating the political tendencies of his time, and prevented the president-for-life failure mode that has, retrospectively, come to be seen as the natural failure mode of revolutionary democracies.
When I read your comment, the first thing that came to mind was the incident at Joumonville Glen, in which young officer of the Virginia Militia named George Washington partnered with a groups of Natives led by Tanacharisson. Those Natives helped the Virginians surprise and capture a detachment of French soldiers.
After the French soldiers surrendured, Tanacharisson did a surprise attack on the leader of the French unit, splitting the man's skull open. This precipitated a killing of most of the other French soldiers, at the hands of the remaining Natives.
George Washington didn't have many good options in trying to stop this killing. And it made a lot of trouble for him.
You see, George wanted to tell the French soldiers to leave the area. He also wanted to send a letter from the King of England with them, telling all the other French soldiers that the King of England didn't want French soldiers in that part of North America. (At this point in history, George Washington was a loyal subject of King George III.)
But when most of the French soldiers were killed--after they surrendered--it was rather hard to send the letter back with them. And the act of killing, after a truce, was an act that would be considered a war-crime by most European leaders.
The killing was not considered a war-crime, or equivalent, by the Natives. Which underscores just how different the Native practices of warfare were from the European practices of warfare.
This event is not Washington being genocidal towards Natives. It wasn't even Natives being genocidal towards Frenchmen, even if it was Natives perpetrating an uncalled-for massacre.
But it does lead me to ask: when did George Washington act in a genocidal way towards Natives?
I'd heard that Washington was part of the events that triggered (the England v France part of) the 7 years war (also known as the French and Indian War to the Americans), is this one of the events in question?
I was wondering if this Belarus flights thing would carry enough people to matter. If there are 55 flights/week, 52 weeks/year, and (based on a cursory search) 150 people per flight, that gives us about 400k people per year. The figure I normally see quoted for the refugees taken in in 2015 is 1 million (and apparently this helped the European far right a lot).
So, it looks like Belarus might get somewhere with this plan to destabilize its neighbors.
I think the plan is to destabilize by creating more friction between the EU and Poland. They already have certain disagreements and right now is pressuring Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to change some rules: https://euobserver.com/migration/153474
Really the plan is to create a lot of death and evil at the border to make it clear that Poland is being just as evil as he is. This situation has convinced me that closed borders is just an unworkable policy, and we have to end this and return to a world of open borders.
Return? As in the age of imperialism? I’m not sure when the borders were open. Its true that passports didn’t matter much pre 19C, but people didn’t move beyond their village.
You’ve learned the wrong lesson here. Mass migration has clearly destabilising effects, which is why Lukashenko is using it.
I don't think it makes sense to compare how long the infrastructure bill got passed to Hungary's fence change. The former handed out massive amounts of money for planned projects that will unfold over years. Of course every Congressperson wanted their fingerprints on it. And if they delayed another month, what would the harm really be? You would need to compare the SHORTEST time to adopt a law/amendment under Biden. And I still think that would be longer. The Democrats barely hold a majority and thus their most marginal members have more power to extract concessions.
My recollection of September 2015 is that Bibi Netanyahu announced a new border fence to keep out Africans coming through Egypt (IIRC) virtually overnight, with work beginning within a couple of days when the magnitude of the influx into Europe became evident.
And on different issues, there have been a few times when Australian governments have rammed through legislation in the space of an afternoon, even very significant legislation, though I think refugee intake stuff tends to get debated a bit more than most things because it has a disproportionate amount of public attention.
Broadly, I think the issue boils down to American party whips being toothless - in most countries crossing the floor on an important bill means you're going to be running as an independent next election.
McConnell nearly managed to pass legislation that was written in secret hours before the final vote. (In fact, there was the spectacle of a week of debate for a bill that hadn't even been written yet). That's the closest I can think of, and of course the *idea* of repealing Obamacare was in motion for months before hand, just not the details.
> So much so that before the 20th century, "democracy" was often used *literally as a synonym* for "authoritarian and demagogic rule"!
> A democracy is supposed to have some number of independent power centers to provide checks and balances, and if you put too much effort into making every power center bow to you, you stop having checks and balances, and become authoritarian.
These quotes both ring intuitively true to me, and their proximity made me really step back and admire the radical rebrand that the Hamilton and Madison pulled off with democratic structures.
Not for the worse, but the overton window has certainly shifted a lot since then. They had to write 85 articles explaining how we could have a little voting without immediately collapsing into some kind of hellish anarchy or dictatorship. They talked about how important it was to limit the powers of the new democratic government and bind it with additional competing layers and structures, and loaded it with reassurances that they understood mob rule was bad.
If you advocate for expanded democracy today, you don't need a long intro explaining why you would want such a thing. (And that's often good, expanded access can absolutely make democracy better at the things it does well.)
If you advocate, exactly like they did, for structures that attenuate just the areas democracy is bad at-- you're much more likely to need to start off with 85 pamphlets emphasizing that you understand the dangers of monarchies or technocracies or communism.
I'm not saying the flipped burden is necessarily for the worse, but it feels rare to see such a polar change in all our presumptions about "what is good" in some domain.
Are there other areas like this I'm overlooking, where we fundamentally flipped the presumptive value system from one end to its complete opposite?
The supremacy over empiricism over armchair theorising is also only a few hundred years old, and IIUC it used to be completely opposite in the era of classical Greek philosophers (and thus most of early Christendom thanks to their obsession with the classical era).
Supernatural explanations vs mundane ones is one that currently seems to differ by person, and I don't know whether we're in the middle of a slow paradigm shift away from faith or if it's always been a personality thing and we just hear less about historical cynics.
There are probably many others, but they're definitionally hard to see unless you study a lot of history
Kind of tangent, but this made me think of this 2010 blog post about how we once "forgot" how to cure scurvy and had to rediscover that it was definitely a vitamin deficiency:
I would prefer Autocrat Book Club to Dictator Book Club.
There are a lot of very different systems of government that have existed. The modern understanding of a single axis between democracy and dictatorship is an extremely limited sample.
Older authors (maybe pre-1800?) have a much richer understanding of political systems, in part because there were a lot more different political systems. Medieval Europe had everything from hereditary monarchies to elected monarchies (Holy Roman Emperor - also modern Malaysia) to theocracies (bishoprics) to aristocracies (Italian city states) to elected city councils and city leagues (Lubeck Law & Magdeburg Law in the Hanseatic League) to anarchies (Frisian freedom, Cospaia, Dithmarschen) - and lots of mixed systems in between.
There are a lot of axes we can disambiguate political systems according to. These do not all have to be correlated and some may even be anti-correlated.
- Democracy. Does the government reflect the will of the people?
- Moral Liberalism. To what extent does the government impose its morals on the people?
- Political Liberalism. Can anyone run for office?
- Informational Liberalism. Is there freedom of speech? How diverse is the media?
- Economic Liberalism. Ease of doing business and what fraction of the economy is controlled by the government.
- Centralization. Are there multiple power centers? The idea of a bicameral legislature was originally to represent different English social classes - but is extremely useful to allow time for public debate between when legislation is proposed and passed.
- Federalism vs Unitary State. Are there multiple governments as well as multiple branches of government?
- Expertise. Are there independent experts whose opinions are respected in their areas of expertise?
- Nationalism. Does the government represent a ethnic / cultural group or something else?
- Rule of Law vs Rule of Man. Is the government constrained by its Constitution and precedence or can it do what it wants.
- Corruption. Is public money used for the public good or to enrich the rulers.
Compared to the Western ideal, Orban is unusually informationally illiberal (controlling most of the press), centralized, Rule of Man, corrupt (though compared to what?), and nationalistic.
“Orban himself calls his regime an ‘illiberal democracy’, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.”
Yeah, the more I think about this, the more it seems like democracy is defined as “elections plus things liberals do to overturn the will of the people” and non-democracy is “elections plus equivalent things conservatives might do.”
Like most American states had referenda against gay marriage. Then 5 judges came along and said “lol, jk”. That sounds like a fair vote within a system that’s still rigged. A lot of things are like this.
Regarding the conservative/liberal asymmetry, that was indeed part of what motivated my comment. “Judges overruling the voters” is seen as sort of the liberal template, while “masculine guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats” is the conservative template, and so the latter is “un-democratic,” even if it is closer to reflecting what people voted for. I can’t shake the feeling that the whole discussion is shaped by this underlying bias of NGOs and journalists who report on foreign countries.
I think this gets at the comment above comparing democracy with checks and balances. One of the key issues Hamilton, et al. had to contend with was how to achieve majority rule without the majority tyrannizing the minority. The Constitution's checks and balances within the federal government, enumeration of federal powers, and declaration of individual rights were all at least somewhat geared toward achieving this balance. Maybe you could call this an effort at achieving an "optimal" democracy instead of achieving a "pure" democracy?
I can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds) and instances of "[charismatic?] guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats [slash uses the bureaucracy to override checks and balances]" helping liberals. Richard, IIRC you wrote about several examples of the latter phenomenon in your piece explaining why a somewhat moderate elected federal U.S. government presided over the implementation of vast public and private woke bureaucracies regulating individual conduct.
Of course, one could say that sometimes the courts reverse democratically-enacted laws for "legitimate" or "illegitimate" reasons and say the legitimate ones align with the Madisonian view of a checked-and-balanced democracy and the illegitimate ones don't, but that would just realign you along the conservative-progressive axis again.
"I can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds)"
These rulings typically have very limited impact—saving a few lucky souls from modern degeneracy— and are hardly comparable to entrenched woke bureaucracies.
"instances of "[charismatic?] guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats [slash uses the bureaucracy to override checks and balances]" helping liberals."
And this is an interesting point. We might be seeing that now with Biden—sans any charisma—straight up defying Federal court rulings. This is because those who wield our society's megaphone—the press and academia—characterize conservative resistance to the administrative state as insurrection. But when liberals do the same they are seen as properly ignoring unelected bodies who are baselessly trying to impede implementation of popular mandates by invoking arcane legalisms (recall the Supreme Court during the New Deal and FDR's court packing proposal).
So while it is true that there is probably no principled and non-politically-self-interested way of distinguishing "legitimate" from "illegitimate" reasons for Courts or agencies to countermand popular preferences, it is clear that when liberals do it will generally be considered legitimate.
> can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds)
The counterpoint to this is that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom to marry for sodomy is not. And I think conservatives would be more open to the idea of judges looking for and expanding upon non-enumerated rights if:
a) The actual enumerated rights were first given real teeth (here's to looking at you 2nd, 9th and 10th)>
b) The new-found anti-democratic rights didn't always seem to go in a single direction.
Scott writes: ‘I’ve been unconsciously working off a definition that has something to do with “somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them.”’ Why does this remind me of Boris Johnson?
"A country that elects an autocrat once every four years, the autocrat can do literally whatever they want, and then they stand for re-election (or not)" is pre-2005 Britain. Whoever wins a majority in the House of Commons became prime minister (like an electoral college), and generally has enough control over their party to pass any laws. There's no limit to what laws parliament can pass (no court can overrule them), and the House of Commons can pass laws on their own. Until 2010, the Prime Minister also got to hold elections whenever he/she felt like it (albeit with a five-year deadline).
Pre-2005, the Prime Minister also got to appoint (and dismiss at will) the Lord Chancellor (chief judge who was also the speaker of the House of Lords), and the Lord Chancellor picked whomever he wanted to fill all other judicial vacancies. For bonus Orban, Blair's first Lord Chancellor was the guy who trained him to be a lawyer, and the second was his former housemate.
Thatcher's Lord Chancellor approvingly referred to this system, where whomever controls a majority in the House of Commons controls everything, as "Elective Dictatorship."
Possible name for the series: Dictator(?) Book Club. A series looking into those who are somewhere that looks kinda like dictatorship, and asking, "Are They a Dictator?"
>In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes. But if you’ve got to have a government that controls major industries, and you want to leave room for democratic rights, you’ve got to have some kind of firewall between people’s off-the-clock activities and their government-sponsored careers.
That firewall exists in US First Amendment law, see Garcetti v. Ceballos for an example of the explicit consideration of whether a speaker was acting as a public employee in the course of performing their job or as a citizen on a subject of public concern. There are further areas where rights are further protected, ex: a professor in the course of their academic functions.
All told, I trust the integrity of First Amendment jurisprudence a hell of a lot more than I trust private companies to be restrained in dealing with employees whose speech they view as troublesome. The idea that increasing privatization would promote free speech on the margin strikes me as exactly backwards.
I don't think one can make an argument that professors in the course of their academic functions are currently well protected from being punished for speech. FIRE has a rather busy time keeping up with that.
There's a whole philosophical argument to be had regarding whether a right can be considered well-protected if it must frequently be defended through litigation, and I'm not producing any breakthroughs on that topic any time soon. FIRE does invaluable work and I wish them the best, but I'm not sure whether a society where they do not have to exist in the first place is a reasonable threshold for success.
What is clear is that in the case of state schools, 1A protections give them a powerful additional tool to wield against administrative overreach, and removing that tool would be decidedly unhelpful. Perhaps there are those that would argue that in a fully-privatized system competitive forces would produce a frictionless equilibrium where everyone would find themselves sorted with employers that see no reason to exert undue control over their private speech... but I'm not holding my breath.
Traditionally, the biggest advantage that employees have with private employers is that there are so many of them. If one fires you for your speech, you can go to another one.
But in the days when Twitter mobs decide to follow someone from employer to employer, this leaves something to be desired. (We still don't know who David Shor works for these days -- and that's fine, I don't care who he works for, but it's crazy he has to hide it.)
> But in the days when Twitter mobs decide to follow someone from employer to employer, this leaves something to be desired.
Every time I see it argued that reputational effects will be sufficient to police privatized conduct, I can't help but wonder how much thought has been put into exactly how that works in practice... if you want a picture of the future, imagine a twitter ratio stamping on a human face— forever.
He literally posts the name of the firm that he works right in his Twitter bio- it is the first sentence, 'Head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research'. Before Blue Rose he had his past employer also listed right in his bio. I think you may be a bit mistaken
When have Twitter mobs followed someone from employer to employer? Twitter cancellation mobs have a notoriously short attention span. You can easily ride it out if you can convince your boss to wait a week, and the former targets all find jobs again relatively quickly.
Possible typo: " I called this *serious* “Dictator Book Club” because it had a nice ring to it, but I don’t want to assert that I definitely know what dictatorship is, or that Orban definitely qualifies"
Would it be crazy to have a system where you elect an autocrat once every 4-6 years, but put in some kind of ironclad rules that they CANNOT run or be elected again, or at least until after a waiting period. Maybe that's a worst of both worlds experience, but hopefully solves the issue of them just changing the rules so they can't be ousted.
I'm kind of a fan of the top dog being limited to two terms of 8 to 10 years. That gives him the incentive to have a good first term and then retires him (hopefully graciously) when he's likely to be wearing down. Of course, you get problems like the ex-boss running his wife or putting in a puppet ...
So, term limits protect against a real threat, but on the flip side good leaders seems genuinely rare and when you get one it's really nice to be able to keep them for a long time, especially considering some of the most important national projects are ones that last decades. Hell, one of the biggest arguments in favour of monarchy is that they have so much more incentive to think long-term than elected politicians who won't be around when the consequences of their actions manifest. (Though obviously there are sizeable drawbacks to autocratic monarchies that hopefully are familiar to all here)
One quick comment on bureaucracies and why everyone hates them. I think they frustrate both liberals and conservatives because they are both liberal and conservative, but in different ways.
Bureaucrats tend to be conservative personalities that sought stability and low-risk in a career--going to work for the forest service, the utility, or department of X means you’re unlikely to get rich but have an almost guaranteed stable job with solid benefits. They also tend to be extremely status-quo biased; you never get in trouble for keeping things running the way they have been, your only real failure point is implementing something new and having that fail. This lends itself towards conservative policy and implementation. And then there’s institutional conservativism where after a while, an institution will be comprised of many multiple departments (often with different internal incentives) any of which can say “no” to new ideas.
But bureaucrats tend to be better educated than average. Probably because of that, they’re more likely to be more culturally liberal. Like most educated people, they’re more likely to trust experts in academia and elsewhere. Some of them will have PHDs or specializations in esoteric topics. They’re not in “real world” businesses or small business owners. This is enough to make conservatives feel like bureaucrats aren’t their people.
Put together, everyone thinks the bureaucracy is working against them.
I’ve heard it claimed that *anti-corruption* efforts helped make the US bureaucracy as cumbersome as it is. The argument goes like this:
It used to be the case that when a new US president took office, he’d immediately fire a great many civil-service bureaucrats to free up space to appoint old college friends, high-status party members, campaign donors, people owed favors. Who would keep their fancy presidential-appointee high-status jobs until the NEXT administration swept in and turned them out to do the same.
The civil service didn’t like this and were able to argue that it looks (okay, is) corrupt and destroys institutional knowledge. So over time, civil service rules came about which greatly limited the president’s ability to fire anyone on a whim.
Problem solved, right? Wrong. An incoming administration *still has* people they owe favors to and would like to give jobs! What can they do about that? CREATE NEW DEPARTMENTS! Pretend there’s dire need for a new committee/sub-committee/department to do X, and now the president has a place to PUT some of those people he owes favors to.
So now we are keeping *too much* institutional knowledge - for any issue (welfare, homelessness, coordinating pandemic emergency response…) there are now a dozen *competing* departments who could conceivably handle that issue. Which means the issue gets handled badly if at all - in practice nothing gets done. If the president desperately needs a committee to actually DO something he has to create a brand new one whose real job is something OTHER than to provide continuing cushy jobs for friends of prior administrations.
Given that context, the idea of a president changing the rules so he can just “fire any civil servant on a whim” strikes me as REALLY APPEALING. I kinda wish OUR presidents had that power so they could do some pruning from time to time on the overgrown thicket of bureaucracy at, say, the CDC.
That's clever, and I kind of like it. I mean, we'd want to think through the edge cases, and maybe need sub-limits for different levels or branches of the civil service. But if each POTUS gets some number of "fire any civil servant, no questions asked, during the first 100 days of the administration, and a smaller number of the "...at any time during their term" version, that would go a fair ways towards keeping the bureaucracy under the control of the elected executive while avoiding most of the evils of the patronage system we had before.
Are you really allowed to just staff up a new branch of civil service with cronies? I thought you had to go through the standardized civil service tests and everything, apart from the political leaders of the agencies.
In political-science terms, what you are looking for isn't exactly "conservative", but incrementalist. This is on the incrementalist <-> revolutionary spectrum.
If Orban is so incredibly popular, and continues to enact policies that his people want him to enact, then why does he feel the need to rig elections ?
> The most common comment was that it was a stretch to call Orban a dictator. Maybe I’ll rename the series - Autocrat Book Club? Political Leader I Am Uncomfortable With Book Club? Suggestions are welcome
I think it's reasonable to call it Dictator book club, if you are trying to answer questions like "what is a dictator?", "how do people become dictators?", or "how can we prevent dictatorship?" Your summary and the comments provided a lot of useful fodder for such discussions, even if Orban is not a dictator. In fact, you have to include some non-dictators in your dataset, otherwise you might accidentally find factors common to all leaders, without being able to actually distinguish dictators.
> If one of the two major parties got to answer all these questions the way it wanted, how many votes would that be worth? Would it turn 49% into a victory? 45%? 40%?
I'd say we have fairly clear answers to these questions in US states today - North Carolina's new maps, for example, turn something like 44% into a majority. My own state, Indiana, turns about a 55-45 split into an unbreakable Republican supermajority, and it's very easy to draw districts that would put the state house in Dem control instead.
From that beginning advantage, many advantages are derived. Turnout among Dems is low because they don't feel they can win, and even if they take a seat here or there, it won't break the supermajority. Weak GOP politicians get their districts redrawn to protect their seats, which discourages opposing candidates. They employ research firms to assess the impact of various laws on turnout and adjust voting laws accordingly.
So, the media aspects you mentioned don't exist, but also don't especially need to. It only takes a handful of structural advantages to lock in power.
> The analogy seems weird - I think most Americans who think they’re of English descent are, and nobody ever claimed the Italian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, etc were descended from Englishmen. Still, the point about cultural descent is well-taken.
The Hungarians don't claim purity either. While almost every culture tells themselves a story about how they're superior not all cultures claim its due to single descent or purity of blood. The point is twofold. Firstly, that ancestors or culture heroes like the Founding Fathers or the Magyar kings don't require particular genes. Secondly, that applying blood purity to nationalist racism is not always going to give you an accurate view of the world.
PS: Some people pointed out that English genes are more common in the US population than I thought. But aside from that point I guess it's because I'm not much of a genetic determinist. I think that identity
> We’re back to our old question of “What is a dictator?” I’ve been unconsciously working off a definition that has something to do with “somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them.” So shutting down the press, making it illegal to join opposing parties, committing voter fraud, that kind of thing.
I'd argue that's a bad definition. By that definition, the Democrats who ended the legislative filibuster are dictators. Obama's a dictator for his various norm breaking. Likewise, the EU reaction to the financial crisis would be defined as dictatorial under this definition. To be clear, I don't think that. I'm bringing it up to point out the definition is too wide. Democratic (little d) politicians norm break too.
I'd also argue you're not really looking at norm breaking. You're looking at a new form of muscular conservative populism that's been cropping up in the world. One that's alarming the media (and I think you) for two reasons. Firstly, because they're on the opposite side of the aisle. But secondly because some of these movements are making major political shifts and often for the worse. A lot of them are pretty corrupt, for example. There's also a minority of thinkers who are far leftists and see any move right as a move toward dictatorship.
I'd call it something like The Populists and include the left wingers, though you'd have to note left wing populism has been much less successful. Bernie Sanders is not unsuccessful but he's done less than Trump.
I think that by, "somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them,” Scott meant oppose _them_, rather than oppose their agenda. They were voted in. Pulling the levers of power to enact their agenda is their agenda is their mandate. Pulling levers to make that mandate permanent and irrevocable is the behavior that may (or may not) be best described as "dictatorship."
Nothing done by either National Party in the U.S. (certainly not related to the filibuster or Obama's "norm breaking") significantly curtailed the ability of voters to vote them out in the next election.
Nor has Orban. Orban has gerrymandered and tried to allow people who are otherwise ineligible to vote and made it somewhat harder for populations that oppose him to vote. But both American parties do that too.
I guess I don't see the distinction you're drawing. What's the difference between opposing a politician and opposing their policies?
(Also, why the scare quotes on Obama "breaking norms"? Obama changed the entire nature of how the tax system is allowed to be used in front of the Supreme Court in order to get his healthcare agenda through. Even if you like that accomplishment it definitely broke norms. As did things like DACA.)
I am unconvinced that you don't see the distinction.
Neither U.S. party has shut down opposition media. Neither U.S. party has rewritten the constitution dramatically increasing their power, removing the voting rights of some minorities and allowing imprisonment of significant swaths of their opposition. Neither U.S. party passed a law allowing the jailing of anyone who spreads misinformation.
I do understand how hard it is to pass up an opportunity to bash on the outgroup, though.
----
I used quotes because I was not sure what he was referring to. I was assuming it was executive orders which were a tad lower under Obama but you can always debate content. But it absolutely holds true that the ACA also did not attempt to permanently enshrine Obama as the defacto ruler.
> Neither U.S. party has shut down opposition media.
An ally of his bought a paper and scuttled it but he hasn't criminalized opposition speech. While I agree it's egregious that isn't the same as actual censorship.
> Neither U.S. party has rewritten the constitution dramatically increasing their power
No but both sides are threatening it. If they haven't it's probably only because they literally can't under the rules as written.
> removing the voting rights of some minorities
What minorities has Orban prevented from voting?
> allowing imprisonment of significant swaths of their opposition
Who has Orban imprisoned? Perhaps I just missed it but I haven't heard of any Hungarian political prisoners. Certainly not significant swaths of them.
> Neither U.S. party passed a law allowing the jailing of anyone who spreads misinformation.
One side of the aisle is trying and is already using corporate power to do so. Do you really think the left in the US would disagree with Orban criminalizing the spread of CoVid misinformation?
The other is banning teaching of ideologies they don't like in school (CRT etc).
> I do understand how hard it is to pass up an opportunity to bash on the outgroup, though.
I find it frustrating how quickly people go to "you're bashing your outgroup" when I disagree with them. It's start to become a bad habit of this community. I chose liberal examples because Orban is conservative, not because I think only liberals do it in the US. In fact I ended the post saying I thought Republicans were breaking more norms. But nope, I'm obviously ideologically captured.
> But it absolutely holds true that the ACA also did not attempt to permanently enshrine Obama as the defacto ruler.
Sure? I think we have a different definition of norms. To me norms means something that is usual or expected, in politics usually due to being within precedent.
Threatening to rewrite the constitution is free speech. I thought you were in favor of that. Can we agree that it is not the same as actually rewriting it. That Orban did and they talked is different. Talk that is hyperbolic and inconsequential due to the procedures involved.
Anyone who is defined as mentally challenged is not allowed to vote. (of course mentally challenged is left to be determined by those in charge).
Anyone who can be deemed homeless can be locked up. (A significant swath of their population)
We have always had corporate power deeply involved in politics in the US. It is probably less dominant now than ever before. This is not something that one of the parties pioneered recently.
We have always (since long before our nation was founded) had to decide what to teach kids in school. This is a control on what certain government schools can teach. Perhaps it's worrying(not sure I see it). But it isn't tilting the electoral field anywhere in the short term. It also isn't being directed by our president. We are discussing dictators...
I don't know who your outgroup. I was leaving it to you to define.
I only expressed one objection and have stuck to it throughout. That Orban is dramatically changing the political rules to lock in his power. You denied it and I listed examples. You listed examples of U.S. behavior that I agree is problematic. None of the behavior locks in a president or a national parties power. Speech is speech. Having a few dozen idiots in the legislature proposing illiberal things is not the same as having every legislature sign on to them.
You said "By that definition, the Democrats who ended the legislative filibuster are dictators." Perhaps you were being intentionally hyperbolic and what you meant was, "We have plenty of parallels here in the US. We're no angels." I would absolutely agree with that.
Again, I am unconvinced you cannot see the distinction.
"I called this serious “Dictator Book Club” because..." --> I called this SERIES “Dictator Book Club” because...
"If one of the two parties was allowed to create its own system from scratch, and it was allowed to be at least as weird as the Electoral College is now, how many votes would that be worth?"
I think you mean "at most as weird as the Electoral College", to convey that the hypothetical party could make something comparable to the Electoral College but not worse. As it it it doesn't provide an upper bound on "weirdness".
One point on the "Is Orban really a dictator" question. I think people are missing something important here when they defend Hungary as a democracy because it meets some condition (e.g. it still has elections).
They're trying to use objective definitions without realizing that wannabe dictators are playing an adversarial game with spectators over those definitions. If Hungary has to be considered a democracy to get EU aid money (and avoid international condemnation), and the EU democracy guidelines say "must hold free and fair elections", Orban will do everything he possibly can to meet *that definition* in theory while negating it in practice. He'll gerrymander, he'll pack the courts, he'll take over the media using barely-plausible intermediaries, etc. You need to realize you're in an adversarial environment, anything else will give you the wrong answer. Inspired by this: https://twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1456032851477028870?s=20
Once you're in a situation where one party *wants to* head a dictatorship and has made some progress I think you evaluate the system in light of the above paragraph. That said, the numbers matter here. I'm inclined to say that if you can get 45% of the vote or so vs. an opposing party/coalition and still win, you're more an illiberal democracy, and lower than like 40% is straight dictatorship. If coupled with moves like buying out media orgs, imprisoning rivals, etc. I'd say you can still win majorities and be illiberal/a dictator. It's just too easy to win some support from the population, especially if you have the media on your side/handicap the opposition.
As for all the "Biden's done the same things" complaining, I think this is pretty transparently partisan and dumb. The Democrats could change the rules around filibusters to let them pass major legislation tomorrow, but they haven't done it. And if the US were in remotely the same situation as Hungary or Turkey, Democratic donors could have bought Fox, Breitbart, OAN, etc. and thrown Trump in jail. None of that has happened or will (his AG declined to even investigate Trump) because we're worlds apart from the dictatorships covered in Scott's reviews. As Scott mentioned, Biden can't get much more done than Trump did, because the US government is hard to move in any direction.
I agree with both your points but I think the first one is worth expanding on. It is beneficial to the 'dictator' to do make enough illiberal changes to greatly decrease the likelihood of them being voted out.
Any more looks bad. It also looks bad if they have to step in and further move the goalposts if they find they are still at risk.
"We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating,” the president said.
“I've got a phone that allows me to convene Americans from every walk of life, nonprofits, businesses, the private sector, universities to try to bring more and more Americans together around what I think is a unifying theme: making sure that this is a country where, if you work hard, you can make it,” he added."
And if your first reaction to that is "Don't be absurd, of course he wasn't anything like a dictator!" how is "If the elected representatives of the people don't do what I want, then I will simply go around them by using the powers of my office expansively and getting non-elected persons who will follow my agenda involved".
What was that about Orban putting all his college buddies into positions of power, again?
(No, I'm not saying Obama was a dictator. But he had no problem posturing in an attitude not a million miles removed from 'populist strongman', and the media etc. generally ate it up with a spoon).
Excellent point. The amount of executive overreach in the US is pretty shocking if you are going by a reasonable reading of the Constitution etc. So much of modern rule making is done by the bureaucracy and executive order instead of going through the congress and being signed into law by the president, it is a bit hard to square things within the definition of "representative government."
>The idea is something like: there are a few ways to govern. One is to be Angela Merkel. Be more or less an elite, who only likes things other elites like. Then you can do things like have an independent judiciary (because the elites in the judiciary will mostly be nice to you), have an independent media (because the elites in the media will mostly cover you positively), have independent academic experts (because they will say the evidence supports you), etc.
>[..]
>Another is to be Viktor Orban. Go against elite opinion, and when the elites try to stop you, crush them. Crush the judiciary and replace it with your college friends. Crush the media and replace it with your college friends. Crush the intelligentsia and replace them with your college friends. Then do whatever you want, and the judiciary, media, and intelligentsia will take your side!
Yes, but you're missing a key bit of nuance here in the form of the Long March Through the Institutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institutions). Cultural Marxists, by which I literally mean men like Marcuse and his fellow travelers in the post-1968 New Left, systematically and deliberately infiltrated the academy, the bureaucracy, the media, the Catholic clergy, etc. in order to promote their vision of progressivism. It is not a mistake that elite opinion in 2021 leans progressive: that situation is the results of five decades of entryism.
Reversing that takeover, literally as old as the French Fifth Republic, means that at least two full generations of elites need to be removed and replaced. Which means either somehow taking and holding those institutions for 25 years or so so that the next generations will be educated in a more neutral manner, or draining the swamp and accepting the chaos in the short term as a necessary evil.
> [...] But Biden isn’t having an easy time either, judging by the increasingly-shabby-looking reconciliation bill. If Biden wants $3.5 trillion in spending, a tax on unrealized capital gains, and maybe Medicare For All for good measure, who does he have to crush? Maybe the “liberalism = hewing to elite opinion = playing on easy mode” equivalence isn’t the right way to think of things.
Apples and oranges.
$3.5 trillion is hardly chump change even for the US Federal government, and much of that is clearly pork barrel spending aimed at the progressive left (e.g. hundreds of billions earmarked for Historic Black Universities). Which, incidentally, is why the infrastructure spending bill was held up: the progressive wing of the democrats was afraid they wouldn't get their promised payout in the form of Build Back Better. Getting that ridiculously large bribe through both houses of congress at all is an impressive flex, doing so in under a year even moreso.
A tax on unrealized capital gains, meanwhile, would explicitly violate Article I Section 9 of the constitution which forbids such direct taxes. Collecting federal income tax required passing the 16th Amendment and there is zero chance that a 28th amendment wealth tax would be approved. Which does support your argument, in that Biden would need to pack or strongarm the supreme court, so one point for you.
The issue with Medicare for All, like with Obamacare, is that nobody who says that phrase can agree on what it means. Which is why the AMA, despite passing without a single Republican vote, was such a mess: its supporters couldn't agree on what the bill they voted on should even say. If he wants some vague gesture at healthcare reform they can push AMA II through and figure out what to write in it after arbitration but it's not like Biden and the Democrats have a clear agenda item here. The biggest obstacle here is not the Republican opposition but their own deliberately unclear messaging.
So by my count, you have one case where in one case Biden seems to be getting what he wanted despite it being completely insane, one case where Biden may be genuinely stymied by the US Constitution, and one case where neither Biden nor anyone else knows what would constitute winning or losing. Not exactly the sort of sandbagging we saw over the last four years.
>A tax on unrealized capital gains, meanwhile, would explicitly violate Article I Section 9 of the constitution which forbids such direct taxes. Collecting federal income tax required passing the 16th Amendment and there is zero chance that a 28th amendment wealth tax would be approved. Which does support your argument, in that Biden would need to pack or strongarm the supreme court, so one point for you.
As an aside, can you explain why that's true for stocks but not for houses? Is it there more to it than stocks are for patricians and houses are for plebs, so f*ck you? Or is it just that?
As Edward Scizorhands correctly notes, the federal government doesn't and can't levy property taxes but states and localities are permitted to.
A federal property or wealth tax would be a huge mess because of the requirement that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
“whereas it took Biden six months to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that as far as I can tell nobody actually disagreed with.”
Really? Reason Magazine - and fiscal conservatives everywhere - disagreed with it. We’d have been better off to just pass nothing or failing that at least to leave out the parts of this bill that *actively make infrastructure more expensive* such as “buy american” provisions.
There exist conceivable versions of an “infrastructure bill” which would have been worth passing, but this wasn’t one of them.
Are you actually claiming *this* bill constitutes “reducing the deficit that the Republicans dug”? (If so, I’d like to see the math on that!)
FWIW the Reason crowd was similarly appalled with big poorly-targeted spending bills under Trump. I’m sure I could find you a few relevant back episodes of the _Reason Roundtable_ or the _Fifth Column_ podcast if you want to hear small *groups* of them grousing about it, or you can browse the magazine archive for yourself.
I’m not a Republican and don’t know a lot of them but I do have the general sense that the Republican *base* on average is much more fiscally conservative than the elected officials representing them. Politicians get elected in part by promising stuff to people. Public Choice Theory predicts this - when you promise concentrated benefits to a few paid for by costs spread out over a large population, the people receiving the benefit are *highly motivated* to lobby for its continuance while the people paying the costs are only *mildly* bothered by any *particular* insult. So it’s easy to find people who are “against big spending” but harder to coordinate opposition to any one program.
To my mind, the phrase "fiscal conservative" doesn't mean the exact same thing as "deficit hawk". It's true that fiscal conservatives would rather have a more balanced budget but they also want the government to SPEND LESS and DO LESS and HAVE LESS DEBT. A series of bills that spend A LOT MORE (while also raising taxes enough that they can not-very-plausibly claim to have covered the extra spending with even more extra taxes) and regulate A LOT MORE is not "fiscally conservative". At least not by my definition. Or for that matter Wikipedia's definition. Hang on, let's check that one. Here's what Google/Wikipedia says:
>"Fiscal conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility advocating low taxes, reduced government spending and minimal government debt. Deregulation, free trade, privatization and tax cuts are its defining qualities."
How much of that stuff is Biden doing? Is he reducing government spending? Lowering taxes? Reducing the DEBT (note: not the deficit, the debt)? Is he deregulating anything? Privatizing anything? No? Then I'm not seeing how "backing democratic fiscal policies" resembles a win for fiscal conservatives. Fiscal conservatives are free to - and nearly compelled to - dislike both recent democratic fiscal policies AND recent republican fiscal policies. The fact that the other team is bad at this doesn't mean your team is good at it - they are BOTH bad to the extent that "fiscal conservatism" is the relevant metric.
I'm opposed to almost all government spending (esp. Federal government spending) outside the realm of Courts, police, and national defense. And I think we need to have a major discussion about what we want out of national defense before we keep funding everything. I've even phoned my legislators about it. But they don't listen.
>After reading your comments, I think I understand the answer better: it’s not any particular policy, it’s that he was able to gain and hold power despite being conservative.
This seems too charitable towards the Orban supporters outside of Hungary, many of whom know almost nothing about Orban. When working with limited information, one does not have to have an opinion consistent with all the facts.
Lots of people like Orban because they think he has done so much to support conservative policies, even though in reality Orban has not done so much to support conservative policies. But I think most pople who like Orban do so because
(a) the "elites" dislike and fear him
(b) he (figuratively) tells people who are in power in Europe to fuck themselves.
As an American, you may not realise how invasive the EU is when it comes to national sovreignty and similar issues. Any figure who stands up to this and doesn't lose will be celebarted in some circles.
I'm thinking a definition for democracy would help us a lot more than a definition for dictatorship.
I'm not particularly concerned with the minutia and flavours of various forms of autocrats, dictators, oligarchies, kelptocracies, etc. Perhaps some political science researcher will care to help them get published by generating a lot of jargon and models around the exact same thing. A tiny group of people, often with a singular figurehead or leader, get to decide everything for everyone else. Queue the 'how is this different to kings and feudal rule' and a long red herring discussion on that.
What matters more to me is how close or how far away we are from democratic rule, principles, processes, etc. Measuring things in a binary on/off 'voting vs no votign' equals democracy or not democracy is incredibly simplistic and uncharitable. And oddly uncaring about the thing I thought we cared about.
If anything it speaks to our mindset and history of kings ruling over us that our minds are parasitised to look for and examine 1000 and 1 minor differences between the type of king we have and democracy is reduced to 'election happened' or not.
Perhaps I'm thinking of some aristotelean ideal for democracy which has never been achieved anywhere, but it is at least good to have a target. And it isn't a novel or unusual way of approaching things. Beyond the headlines and moronic left right mind-killer arguments of which 'tribe' people are in, the more detailed researchers do look at things like press diversity, press freedom, economic factors, ease of starting new political parties in terms of process, fundraising rules, level of cronyism, etc.
It seems incredibly clear to me that all of the 'more like a democracy' principles are things Orban has undermined. And indeed, these principles are also lacking in almost every western nation where you can see even elite studies about elites doing elite things from Harvard show in the US the upper class get whatever laws they want passed almost all the time.
The poor know this and this non-democratic enfeeblement of their desires is why half of the US doesn't even bother to vote. Not voting is the best way they have to object to their disenfranchisement, as counterintuitve as the object-level meaning of those words are.
But so what? Orban and the US and Germany and whoever you want can be said to stray from democracy in any number of ways. The argument of 'Timmy stole cookies from the cookie jar too' doesn't hold up when little Bobby stole the cookie factory and put his friend in charge of it. Orban and Hungary have strayed much much furtehr away from the ideals of democracy and freedom and inclusion of all ideas in government.
I truly don't understand the idea of rejecting a king as a dictator, and then wanting to see one political party in charge as a not-dictator. The coalitions and whatever in pluralistic systems of voting where 10% of the votes = 10% of the seats in the legislature....that's a good thing in my view. The only part where it is 'bad' and 'oh no, the 'winning' party has to compromise' is from the King's view, not the democracy view of the world.
We have real factions in society and far more disagreement than not. So I'd be skeptical of anyone lamenting how an election and democracy does not result in a 'CLEAR' winner who then can or can't do whatever the hell they want. I'd rather have those factions and checks and balances who hold back the political party be other elected people rather than bureaucrats or elites.
In one system it is the elite educators, judges, and wealthy people acting like a not so mini oligarchy of views on and issues they care about being in a compromise with the elected winner.
In another system all of the diverse views of society where 20% of people think this and 30% think that and 10% think this and 5% think something else....they all duke it out in congress or parliament or whatever. Rather than using democracy to reduce all of society down to 'one winner' or a 'ruling party'.
Maybe it is MORE democratic if you NEVER have a RULING party. Perhaps the idea of this winner and ruling class who then go on to negotiate how the government will act with the elite power structure of non-elected people is not the ideal of democracy.
Those coalitions which have to form from many many parties is a better representation of the struggles people have. Why would we go from two neighbours disagreeing with each other to then having everyone vote such that only one of their views is 'in charge'.
Maybe you have a very different idea of what a democracy is or how to define it, but amongst Scott and the commenters and Scott's replies, it seems no one is in disagreement that Orban's views and actions are 'bad for democracy' in Hungary.
As an extra thought...if anything I would think to have a ban on any party having more than 50% of the seats in their legislature or parliament. Obviously you can just have sister parties to get around this which end up being essentially one party, but in terms of an ideal in democracy.....might it be a statement to say 'one group of people' being 'in charge' is overall a bad thing which is to be discouraged.
Perhaps we're not being democratic enough in our Overton Window on the limits of the definition of democracy. In that way, you'd actually find a point where democracy and libertarian ideas being to blend together where the strongest bias and principle in the system is to 'avoid having a king'! Avoid them in a literal and de facto way.
I don't think it is a reality to say a single political party can actually represent all or even most of the views of more than 50% of the people....if anything this type of populist and reductionist way of 'winning' at democracy with a super powerful political party which is 'in charge like a king'....is anti-democracy.
In reality you could find any number of things those 50% of people disagree about and the reduction of their views and the discarding of those disagreements in a step by step by step way in order to 'unite the party' so that it can 'get into power'....that is super super anti-democracy in my view.
It means prior to the election you crush the majority of dissent and disagreement such that everyone is voting on incredibly narrow and homogenised views into parties they have to trust will at least represent a handful of each voters desires.
How is sweeping away 90%+ of opinion, views, and ideas people have before the election in order to form powerful or viable political power bases....how is that democracy?
Let those arguments play out in public in parliament through many parties which actually represent the views of their members, rather than nearly all dissent and diversity of views get squelched within the private halls and invisible processes of political parties.
Maybe a good litmus test for whether an area is democratic or not is if leaders can be thrown out if ~60% of the uniformly distributed population votes to throw them out? This deals with mild to moderate gerrymandering.
The United Kingdom is sometimes labelled, only half-jokingly, an elective dictatorship. There are few formal checks and balances in the British political system, and the winner-takes-all voting system often gives one party a majority of parliamentary seats (unlike proportional representation systems).
This criterion seems right, about 60 percent. Incidentally, I just saw yesterday from The Economist‘s new issue that Venezuela‘s dictator (a real dictator, unlike Orban etc) has an approval rating around 15 percent. And as if to weigh in on the definitional discussions going on here, their headline topic is „Vladimir Putin has shifted from autocracy to dictatorship“.
Were there any cases where a governor acted in opposition to the legislature during COVID? My guess is that in most cases, they had at least implicit support from the legislature.
> All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries.
Your response to this focused on parliamentary procedure, but I think this is also wildly false regarding elections. Let's look at the US. Orban has been accused of making parliamentary districts vary wildly in size, with his political opponents packed into larger districts. US house districts don't vary much in size, but one party (it's the GOP) has managed to gain a bit of an advantage through strategically-shaped districts anyway. And US Senate districts do vary wildly in size, significantly to the benefit of Republicans. Presidential elections also work in a convoluted way that benefits Republicans; of the last three Presidential elections won by Republicans, the Republican candidate only won a plurality of the popular vote in one of them. (As a side note, it was also elements of the GOP that seriously attempted to remain in power after losing an election, though perhaps this doesn't technically count, as Orban was not accused of doing that.)
Orban was accused of controlling the media so no one could say anything bad about him. I must have missed the memo on the Democratic Party acquiring Fox News and the FCC shutting down conservative talk radio hosts.
Orban was accused of court packing. Some Democrats have talked about court packing sure, but who in the US has actually done anything remotely similar to that recently? Just the Republicans, who prevented Obama from filling court vacancies (most famously a Supreme Court seat, but also lower court vacancies), so that a Republican president would be able to fill more court positions later.
Preventing the filling of vacancies is not similar to court packing. Court packing is adding extra seats for justices to the supreme court, with the intent then to fill those seats with your own people in a hurry. Not approving of who the president selects to go in the seats is one of the specific powers of the Senate.
Not approving of who the president selects as a judge is a power of the Senate, and deciding how large the Supreme Court is is a power of Congress, so this doesn't distinguish blocking appointments from court packing. Both of these violate implicit rather than constitutional democratic norms. And if you were planning to say that if the Senate isn't supposed to ever use its power to reject court appointments then there's no real sense in which it has that power, note that I didn't say the Senate isn't supposed to ever reject court appointments; I said that the Senate isn't supposed to prevent court vacancies from getting filled at all. Prior norms were that nominees should at least be able to get a vote, and that while if there are strong objections to a particular nominee, they can be rejected, Presidents should be given a fair amount of leeway to appoint someone acceptable to them.
This isn't stated directly in the Constitution, but it's always been this way. The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number of justices at 6, and the current number of 9 comes from the Judiciary Act of 1869.
Rejecting unsuitable nominee is part of the power of the senate, but if I recall correctly McConnell explicitly stated that his senate would reject *any* nominee put forward by Obama, which is qualitatively very different than blocking partisan ones in order to force the president to appoint a compromise candidate.
One major difference is that the rules for Senate apportionment are centuries old and the Republicans benefit from them essentially by chance, whereas Orban actively rewrote the rules.
Since the book club series focuses on biographies, perhaps "They Call Them 'Dictator' Book Club". Sort highlight the fact that the biographer is doing a lot of judging.
"Are governments that try to control the bureaucracy more authoritarian than ones that don’t?
One argument in favor: I think most of us would agree that a government (here used as eg “the Tory government”, a particular political regime) which tries to control the judiciary and pack it with supporters is more authoritarian than one that doesn’t. A democracy is supposed to have some number of independent power centers to provide checks and balances, and if you put too much effort into making every power center bow to you, you stop having checks and balances, and become authoritarian."
I think, from a USA point of view, it is a mistake to match controlling the judiciary by packing the court with controlling the bureaucracy as a president, or even the Congress. In the first case, the Judicial Branch is one of the Big 3 power centers in the Constitution. The bureaucracy is a late comer, the result of legislative action and under the purview of the president, and not a distinct branch of the federal government in the Constitution. As such, controlling the bureaucracy is incumbent on the legislature and president; a fourth branch of the federal government operating independently of the legislative or executive branches is a big no-no.
What always gets left out of foreign discussions of Hungarian politics is the fact the opposition party Jobbik was an ultra far right party until around the time people wanted to get rid of Orban. They had members that spat at the holocaust memorials and make public speeches about removing Zionists.
I get a little uncomfortable with defenses of authoritarian leaders (there, I avoided "dictators") on the grounds that they improved the economy. That's what He Who Must Not Be Named Because of Godwin's Law did, and a common explanation of his popularity. That's not to say that any authoritarian leader who does the same is as bad as He Who ... It's to say that it's not a good defense of Orban as a leader because it could equally well be used to defend He Who ...
Stevenjbc writes: "All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries. In fact, if he ever rigged an election it could be called "fortifying" it (see NYT on February 4, 2021)." Couldn't find anything in the NYT, but Time had a big article around that time about "fortifying" the 2020 election, an article which makes very clear the difference between fortifying and rigging. The fortification was to prevent rigging. No doubt a person rigging elections would call it "fortifying," but they'd be lying. Soviet dictatorships calling themselves "democracies" were lying: it was propaganda.
Vicoldi writes, "Most importantly, the gerrymandering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000." You've just proved there wasn't malapportionment. Doesn't say anything about gerrymandering.
Vicoldi also writes, "Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymandering that can explain that." Yes it can. See North Carolina.
I agree with Furrfu about the trappings of democracy and with Erusian about Magyar ethnicity: it's very crude to suggest that a break in ancestry, especially at many centuries' distance, means a break in ethnicity. Ethnicity and genetics are not identical.
Also, populations of districts that vary by a factor of 1/3 seems quite malapportioned. In the United States, we are required to redo the districts every decade to avoid malapportionment due to moves in the intervening years. At the moment, the worst imbalance seems to be between the TX 13 (710,000 people) and TX 22 (880,000 people). Intentionally drawing districts with a worse balance than the districts that have had a decade of drift seems pretty bad.
I wanted to write that I mostly reverse my Gell-Mann amnesia statement:
I think that the original post had a number of serious problems, but together with this Highlights post, it gives a pretty accurate picture of what's happening in Hungary.
Scott also gets some reverse-Gell-Mann points for not repating the frequent accusations about the anti-semitism of the anti-Soros crusade in Hungary. The anti-Soros campaign is often very nasty and demagogic, but Scott's sense is right, it is just the usual anti-billionaire-populism, nothing more.
Orban often makes it clear very explicitly how much he tries to be on good terms with Jewish people and has zero tolerace for anti-semitism. The allegations of anti-semitism appearing in the Western media is the same kind of dog-whistle-based accusations that were at some point made about Trump being an anti-semite.
The narrative (in original review, but also in this post) relies heavily on the assumption that Hungarian elections are rigged, that Orban has gerrymandered districts and changed election rules so that he can not me removed (or at least it is very very hard to remove him).
After reading more about Hungarian electoral system, I do not think this is true. Yes, hungarians outside Hungary are overwhelmingly voting for Orban, but they are such a small fraction that they do not have meaningful impact. And claim about gerrymandering is just not true.
Orban wins because Hungary has quasi-majoritarian electoral system and his party is about 3 times more popular than other parties. In these circumstances it would be miracle for Orban not to win.
Sometimes you do not even need majoritarian system. In Sweden, Social Democrats were in power 40 years straight, Tage Erlander was prime minister for 23 years in a row. And they did not even need majoritarian system, it just meant that Social Democrats had 40-45% support and other parties had 10-15%. Does it mean that Sweden was not democracy or Erlander was dictator? I do not think so.
I would say this the crux of the issue. Is it possible to move Orban from power? Is it possible that opposition wins and Orban looses? In case of Hungary, I would say yes, you can compete with Orban and you can win. For instance, in case of Russia or Belorussia I would say no, you cannot compete and you cannot win.
"[Having elite support means] you can do things like have an independent judiciary (because the elites in the judiciary will mostly be nice to you), have an independent media (because the elites in the media will mostly cover you positively), have independent academic experts (because they will say the evidence supports you), etc."
I think this statement, or at minimum the popular perception that this statement is true, underlies a lot of claims for the reform of partisan gerrymandering. I think that most principled conservatives recognize that gerrymandering can be abused, but at minimum it still represents an arena in which the parties can contend openly for their interests. Many of the proposed reformist alternatives involve giving power to officially non-partisan boards or committees, which sounds great in principle... but it's a lot easier to support such a system if you trust that the committees will err on the side of supporting you when things are murky and come down to judgment calls. Conservatives think that such boards, which are likely to be disproportionately "elite" at least in terms of education, will incline to favor the Left, and unlike in the case of open partisan gerrymandering (at least you can *try* to win elections when the districts are against you) there's not much that could be done to check the power of a nonpartisan commission once established. Drawing districts favoring your side is boring old partisanship, and both sides do it. Criticizing a "non-partisan" committee would likely be labelled a "threat to democracy" on some level.
So non-partisan commissions to draw districts are, or at least are perceived as, one more luxury that sounds good but in practice will help the pro-elite side. If you're on the pro-elite side, great; you will support such things. If not, you're stuck arguing against a seemingly attractive and pro-democracy measure, because you fear in practice it will help your opponents.
I know there are other proposals to entrust district-drawing to an algorithm, but this just kicks the problem up a level. Are algorithm programmers likely to be friendly to conservatives, as a demographic? Not social conservatives, I would guess (though Libertarians might fare better; not sure). Once again, the concern is that "neutral" decisions makers are not in fact neutral, and installing them would result in a world that is not only elite-slanted, but in which resisting the elite consensus comes across as "anti-democracy" as opposed to just partisan.
Do you mean proportional representation at the state level? Districts each elect a specific person, who is meant to represent regional interests not just the party line - and they frequently do that in America, with even the much-maligned "pork-barrelling" usually taking the form of getting money for the communities that voted for them rather than lining the pockets of the representative directly. Eg. many of the people that voted for Manchin almost certainly approve of how he's a thorn in the side of the Democratic party on most issues - they weren't voting for a generic D, they were voting for a specific representative with known opinions that don't always track the party line.
> The USSR retained the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy (that's what the "soviets" were) even while the Party took over real control.
I'd rather say that USSR retained the trappings of the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy. Whether it was nearly as bottom-up grassroots as usually depicted is very doubtful. Community organizers / party activists would arrive from St. Petersburg or from the guberniya seat and put together soviets. Lenin's theory of bringing-from-without of revolutionary consciousness by the vanguard party explicitly stated that this was the right thing to do.
> Yeah, I didn’t get into Orban’s crusade against George Soros. I think all the “no worse than Biden” people would have been extra angry about that one; is this different from the US crusade against the Koch Brothers?
>
> Maybe the difference is that it feels potentially anti-Semitic? But the same week I wrote my post, Congress was interrogating the Facebook whistleblower about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted by all the evidence. I think billionaires with political influence, Jewish or not, seem to be unpopular everywhere.
>
> That having been said, I disagree with this tendency, and Soros is a good example of why: billionaires are independent power centers who are able to build things without government approval, and so they play an important role in pushing back against authoritarianism. Orban trying to shut down Soros’ university was bad and I hope they’re able to figure something out to stay in Hungary.
Billionaires are also usually distinctly Anywhere people on the Somewhere-Anywhere spectrum, and Soros certainly is a supranational presence and as Anywhere/globalist as they come. A lot of at least European right wing populism is the rise of pro-Somewhere politics so hostility to Soros' ilk should be no surprise.
Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political decay examines directly the question of the tradeoff between decisive government action and resistance to capture. You may find it useful.
All of Soros' influence in the West is undermining of the West, Orban was right to ban it and every other Western country, if it was acting in the interest of its people, would follow suit. Same goes for many other of these globalists who are trying to spread lies through universities and the media and any lies in them should be punished, Same in politics. The practical effect would be that leftism would be impossible as leftism is nothing but false promise from freedom of laws of nature.
They're idiots. Absolute free speech is a communist invention. Free speech as conceived by founding fathers was a speech free from prior restraint and compulsion, never did it occur to them that this would be turn into speech free from liability for fraud, libel, slander or undermining of social norms.
If Orban is a "dictator", what's left for eternal Frau Merkel, and other quasi tyrants presiding over most of the western world? He's called names just because he deviates a little from the policies favored by the name-callers. Simple. Pure hypocrisy.
> glaring problems in this review [...] Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
Scott linked to a source that said, "51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds."
With gerrymandering - and sometimes without gerrymandering - an outcome like this is possible even if all electoral districts have the same size, so it sounds like Vicoldi doesn't understand how gerrymandering works.
All systems based on single-winner electoral districts (and especially the first-past-the-post system used in the US, Canada, and I assume Hungary) tend to amplify the number of seats won by the largest parties. So this imbalance surely isn't entirely the fault of gerrymandering. But with gerrymandering it is possible to amplify winnings even further for one particular party—again, even if the population in each district is identical.
How can we report comments like this?
In the sense that a diverse ecosystem is more robust, I think this is unironically true. Even if you firmly believe that democracy is on average the best way to decide things it's still better not to have every egg in the one basket.
USA is a much more complicated polity than Orban's Hungary. Expecting direct correspondence is silly. Biden does not need to appoint leaders of media companies, universities, corporations etc., as with a handful of exceptions they are all on the same page already. The exceptions, of course, stick out like sore thumbs, irritating people on the left to no end. If they become aware of the uniformly progressive environment around these exceptions at all, they tend to perceive it as simply normal and par for the course. It is indeed very different from a government centrally putting its people in positions of power. E.g. to take your school example, the federal government does not appoint public school teachers, but it does seem to exercise an awful amount of control over what public schools can and cannot do. Its powers of legal intimidation are so vast that DOE Dear Colleague letters which are neither laws nor, ostensibly, even regulations, seem to be taken not much differently from direct orders. "Nice school board you got there, shame if it got sued in federal court for Title IX violations." I'm sure Orban would love to be able to do this rather than mess with appointments directly.
Cleanup, aisle 3!
I am bit more cynical:
''Dreher was given a paid fellowship by an institute funded by Orban's government'
I've felt for a while this works the opposite way, There is variety of opinions amoung people and institutes like the Hungarian one just hire the people that agree with them.
I think most people underestimate how much this is the traditional form of corruption. You don't affect people's opinions in a quid pro quo - you just promote the people that already agree with you. The net result is the same - a bunch of people with audiences or political seats who support your views. Except that you get true believers, rather than mercenaries who would split the instant someone else offered them a better deal.
Are you under the impression that liberal elites don't coordinate and hand out cushy jobs to insiders/friends? Spend some time looking into the connections between high level reporters, business leaders, and politicians. The Cuomo brothers were more obvious but far less insidious than many of the elite deals that happen every day between those groups.
That goes for high level Republicans as well, but I'm mentioning the left/liberals because there are a lot of people who seem to overlook when that happens in the US, as if Hungary is somehow beyond the pale when it looks awfully similar to what happens in the US daily.
WHAT US crusade against the Koch brothers? Kicking out the Soros-funded university was state action. What state action has been taken against the Koch Brothers?
And WRT to Facebook, where have you seen anyone talking about Zuck being Jewish? The comparison is ludicrous.
Very few instances of alleged anti-Semitism by public figures involve direct reference to someone being Jewish. The first link I found re: Orban vs Soros is this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/george-soros-upset-by-anti-semitic-campaign-against-him-in-hungary which is... incredibly vague about what the alleged anti-Semitism in the campaign consists of. It certainly doesn't involve any mention of Jewishness. It might be as little as "it treats this powerful, well-known Jewish person as a symbol / focus of social ills" which applies just as well to the Facebook coverage as to Soros.
That's true but you can kinda tell -- in a subtextual way that's hard to quantify -- when something is loathed for weird racist/antisemitic reasons, versus loathed for perfectly good reasons. Can't speak to Soros but Zuckerberg and Facebook are obviously loathed for all sorts of good reasons, and literally none of the criticism against them has ever rung of anti-semitism.
I am sure you have good grounds, internally, for knowing your criticism is good and pure. But from the outside a lot of the anti-Facebook stuff seems motivated by... not antisemitism, but social / cultural resentment of businesspeople and STEM types-- both demographics that happen to be disproportionately Jewish.
The point being, what evidence do you have that Hungarians' dislike of Soros feels less pure, from the inside, than your dislike of Facebook? "I know it when I see it" is not at all convincing to me, especially when applied to a foreign culture.
That crime in my hometown, 6000 miles from Budapest, is up since George Soros's candidate got elected District Attorney is a tribute to Mr. Soros' global influence.
According to the Los Angeles Times on November 3, 2020, Mr. Soros was the single biggest individual donor in the 2020 Los Angeles DA race against the anti-criminal incumbent black woman DA Jackie Lacey, under whom crime had fallen agreeably. Soros gave $2.25 million to anti-police candidate George Gascon, who garnered $12.4 million in donations to Lacey's $7.0 million. The biggest organizational donor to Gascon was Van Jones' group Color of Change with $3.4 million, which has received a half-million dollar donation from Soros.
I greatly admire Mr. Soros's energy and acumen. I just think, in accordance with Mr. Soros's own Popperian philosophy, that he deserves criticism for his role in the sizable exacerbation of the American murder rate since Ferguson and the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014.
Increasingly, however, the conventional wisdom has become that Mr. Soros is above criticism, precisely because his trans-national political influence is slightly reminiscent of that of earlier Jewish financial geniuses such as the Rothschilds.
It's an interesting conundrum. According to Mr. Soros' own well-articulated political philosophy, he deserves criticism for the role he has played in the unexpected rise in the American murder rate since 2014.
But because his own individual genius and weaknesses are somewhat ethnically stereotypical, it is now increasingly asserted that his sizable role in current events should be completely ignored and that anybody who criticizes Mr. Soros should be cancelled.
It would be interesting to ask Mr. Soros whether he should be above criticism. As an admirer of him, I believe he would disagree.
Attributing criticism of a specific individual's specific acts to hatred of an entire group s/he belongs to is such a common and toxic rhetorical dark art. When the bar for proving the bias is so low, it's a fully generic way to dismiss criticism, since everyone belongs to multiple groups that are hated by someone.
If you tell most people that some ultra-wealthy person is spending billions of dollars to influence elections all over the globe, they'd probably lean towards that being a bad thing. But then you tell them he's jewish, and they somehow update towards it being OK.
If anything, for a company owned by a Jewish person, Facebook has been remarkably reluctant to crack down on actual neo-nazis using its platform to spread their filth. It reminds me of the NYT deliberately downplaying the Holocaust during WW2 to avoid being accused of pursuing a Jewish agenda.
Isn't neo-nazism & holocaust denial officially banned on Facebook? Whereas those would not be under standards endorsed by Scott: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
Facebook is for-profit company first.
I think it’s driven by journalists who have had their lunch eaten by online search engines and social media.
And also are looking for scapegoats for their own faillings: https://www.baekdal.com/newsletter/we-need-to-get-news-off-facebook-and-we-need-to-talk-about-mental-health/
Yeah, there's not really a way I convince you with 'hard evidence', but I can say with confidence that if you went around asking people who dislike facebook why they do, and then probed as hard as you could, none of them would say anything about Jewishness, and if you mentioned that they would all look at you like you're crazy. It's a total non-issue. Nobody in America (outside of, I guess, anachronistic weirdos?) associates business people and STEM with Jewishness. Not even in the slightest.
I'll fully grant that there's a lot of social/cultural resentment of
a) businesspeople
b) STEM companies
c) corporate elites, and the like
I'm not aware of the resentment being targeted at STEM _people_ per-se, mostly because the people holding this resentment mostly don't know very many STEM people. Inside tech hubs like SF or Seattle there is targeted resentment at STEM people but I think mostly it's because they tend to be boring / not contributing to the community around them.
The media absolutely seems to resent the tech industry, despite being located across the country in NYC.
I didn't even know Zuckerberg was Jewish until this post.
Arguing that attacks on businesspeople are inherently antisemtic is very different from arguing that attacks on bankers are (especially global finance with a focus on stereotypic looking jews). A lot of the criticism of Zuckerberg is similar to the criticism of Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk (most of which is unfair but very different from what Soros gets).
As someone who thinks that Israel is over criticised, I do believe we have to allow criticism on bankers. Obviously if there are anti Semitic overtones, then that’s different.
I agree, what I meant is that there are more frequent antisemitic tropes in criticizing bankers that can be used without explicitly discussing the Jewishness of the targets. I was mostly trying to argue that the standard one should apply when considering if an attack on banker is antisemitic is lower than for an attack on business/tech due to its long history of use.
They both have anti-Semitic roots. I agree with Hnau's point that the Soros and Zuck stuff aren't meaningfully different, although whereas he seems to be arguing "neither is really anti-Semitic," my argument is that both are inspired from anti-Semitism. It's tempting for right-wingers and left-wingers to call out each other's anti-Semitism while ignoring their own side's, but I feel compelled to call out these toxic ideas wherever they appear.
Do I think the average person complaining about Soros or Zuck is an anti-Semite themselves? No, but that doesn't mean the ideas they're consuming aren't. And while someone pointed out that criticism of Zuck was similar to the criticism of Jack Dorsey, I'd argue that a lot of the Dorsey complaints are also based in taking anti-Semitic theories and repurposing them to target a non-Jewish person, similar to the Q-Anon conspiracy theories against Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga. Which isn't to say there aren't valid complaints to be made against *specific* celebrities, politicians, billionaires, etc., but rather that most of the complaints against "elites" as a single monolithic organization with sinister intentions basically amount to anti-Semitism with the serial numbers filed off.
How very convenient that any language used to criticize the active, ongoing, and completely brazen inequities foisted by THE ELITES upon THE REST OF US is immediately sequestered and brandished as antisemitic or problematic in any other way. How convenient indeed.
They _don't_ have anti-semitic roots. That's the point. The fact that there is a superficial correlation to previous antisemitic stances has no bearing on the source of the modern stance.
Basically, I hate facebook for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism, because that's laughable, and it's offensive and frustrating that ignorant people keep associating my perfectly valid hatred with antisemitism. Please! I hate them for what they _are_ and what they _do_. Stop telling me that I think something I don't!
What exactly does it mean for a person who is not "an anti-Semite themselves" to "consume" anti-Semitic ideas?
I guess it's possible that anti-Semites might cause negative media coverage of e.g. Facebook, leading to people who don't themselves have anti-Semitic views having negative views of Facebook. Is that what you mean?
Suppose I hate Nebraskans and I want to harm them. I realize that I'm not going to be able to win people over to that position, but I can win them over to positions that are just as good. Nebraska's top exports are soybeans, corn, 'nuclear reactors, boilers, macinery etc.; parts'(??!); and beef, so I then act as a motivated reasoner, arguing that soy messes with your hormones, we need to eat less corn because it's part of everything you eat, nuclear power is dangerous and meat is murder. (Coincidence thnt those already exist, or has the anti-Nebraska brigade already infiltrated the media?) Independent of the veracity of those claims, my arguments or advertisements or financial support will lead to more people believing them. Those people are consuming my ideas and being turned into my political weapons.
Genetic fallacy applies, I think. But only if the point was "these ideas have anti-semitic roots, and are therefore incorrect," rather than "and are therefore morally/ethically wrong." I personally disagree with holding beliefs based on ethical concerns, but it's not ridiculous- it at least works to tit-for-tat people motivated in the opposite direction, if they exist.
I really disagree with this. The criticisms of Zuckerburg and Dorsey come down to these people having massive wealth and power, and (in the opinion of the critics) using that power in selfish and short-sighted ways. The personal criticisms of tech billionaires like Zuckerburg and Musk tend to center on them being nerdy, out of touch, or immature.
None of that is rooted in antisemitism. The antisemitic attacks on big business or the wealthy are almost always rooted in the idea that Jewish elites are acting in secret to enact a sophisticated long-term malevolent agenda. That's very different from criticism of tech ceos as bumbling, short-sighted man-children.
With Soros, the criticisms are close to antisemitic tropes. Critics of Soros think that he's funding/behind all sorts of protests, radical organizations, or sources of social instability that he has nothing to do with, and talk about him as a puppetmaster controlling world events for his own purposes.
I say this by the way as a jew who thinks the criticisms of facebook are wildly overblown.
Soros is hated for excellent reasons. His university is seen (correctly) by the Hungarians as a device to insert a fifth column – creating an elite which will A, operate the bureaucracy and B, be turbo-liberal in a way that's far to the left of the modal Hungarian. Soros himself doesn't even deny this because the rest of the EU (let alone the elites of the rest of the EU) is also far to the left of the modal Hungarian, so he can just admit to doing it and they'll consider him virtuous for subverting the Hungarian people's will and control of their own state. The Judaism doesn't really figure into any of that, it's just a handy stick to whack Eastern Europeans with since they're also much more antisemitic generally than the rest of Europe.
Orban's main political consultants were Jews, Birnbaum and Athur Finkelstein.
according to this article (which argues that it was deliberate): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu
The anti-Semitism that sprang out of the Soros campaign might not be too surprising, even if Finkelstein and Birnbaum did not intend it. They imported ancient themes and modern grievances into 21st-century communications technology. What was new: They had turned Soros into their central political enemy.
The allegation that he was responsible for anti-Semitism pains Birnbaum. He just doesn’t see it. He decided to speak primarily because he wants to refute it. He is, after all, an observant Jew and member of many pro-Israeli charities.
“When we planned the campaign,” he said, “we didn’t think a second about Soros being a Jew.” Birnbaum claimed he didn’t even know it back then, and that he never worked with anti-Semites.
Yes, I've read a lot of articles about Orban the Anti-Semite but there was very little of substance in them. Most of them seem to come down to: "You can just _tell_."
The other argument is that anybody noticing that George Soros is a remarkably rich and effective and energetic political operator is anti-Semitic.
It seems that anti-semitism is often a claim that falls apart when the details are probed. I'm by no means a fan of Jeremy Corbyn or the hard left in Britain but it feels like they're constantly being accused (by the right) of being anti-semitic, and when you dig in, it's almost always because they criticized Israeli policy.
There probably is some genuine anti-semitism in there too because Corbyn and his clique are pretty open about their classical Marxism, and Marx was strongly anti-semitic. Also Labour rely heavily on Muslim voters and the classical religious emnity can still be found there. But in practice by now I've just tuned these accusations out - disagreeing with the policies of a foreign government or population isn't the same thing as racism or religious hatred.
Right. When I looked into the many charges of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn, there didn't seem to be much there either.
Britain has a lot of Muslim voters who don't like Israel and hence a lot of Corbyn's allies were Muslims who don't like Israel. But it's inevitable that somebody in Britain is going to build a coalition that includes anti-Israel Muslims.
With British politics, I can at least read the primary sources in English and judge for myself about the charges against Corbyn. But for Hungarian politics, I am largely at the mercy of the biases of journalists fluent in Hungarian and English, so it takes a lot of work to read all the way through articles denouncing Orban for anti-Semitism and notice that they don't quite ever come up with the evidence that they promised in the first paragraph.
You are a political pundit who focuses on such things as the crime rate of American Blacks. You have suggested conservatives try to label the Democrats as "The black party" or something close to that, with the notion that most Americans would be put off by that. Where I come from such things are considered racist, but I've been made to understand that a claim of "racism" has no bite anymore, at least in these parts of the WWW.
So instead of calling you a racist I will call you a cocksucker. You spend most of your energy trying to stir up anger against the actions of other races in the USA. I've read your blog for years. I've even commented there, before everyone called me a troll for spouting common sense.
So continue to suck cock, Steve Sailer, keep hard at it. I know you will. It's your first love.
Mindless rage seems to be a common response to being unable to think of rational answers ...
"You spend most of your energy trying to stir up anger against the actions of other races in the USA."
Is that why he spends so much time talking about how progressive politics often harms black people more than anyone? BLM homicide spikes etc.
Hey, Jack Wilson, do you realise that intimating that sucking cock is something bad that only bad people do is homophobic?
Seeing as how you're so concerned about racism and all, surely you remember it's all part of the same grouping.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/start-black-lives-matter-lgbtq-lives/story?id=71320450
I don't need to read personal insults about commenters (or anyone really). It's also against the rules of this site.
You should have made counterarguments instead of calling your interlocutor a "cocksucker" and bringing up unrelated stuff that you think you can use for character assassination or something. If we had that betting market moderation system, I would wager that the above post gets moderated.
I strongly repudiate your derogatory comments about sucking cock, which I do not think are in keeping with the spirit of community we wish to foster.
>So instead of calling you a racist I will call you a cocksucker
Implying that calling him "racist" was even on the table is a self-own. Your mind is totally controlled by the TV and the ruling class. You are merely a pseudo-rationalist. We need to stop letting people like this ruin our discourse. There are 3 major things to watch out for: ignorance of forbidden truths, charity towards the ruling class, and fear of condemnation. This person displays the first 2, probably as a function of the 3rd. See here: https://www.darkrationality.net/index.php?topic=3.0
Ah, on any specific charge against The Mighty Jezza Himself, this is reasonably true.
For certain values of True, anyway.
The problem that he has, is that since becoming an MP in 1983, he consistently allied himself, by speaking at rallies et cetera, et cetera, with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, and their allies, who explicitly want to wipe out the Jews, in Israel. And did nothing to distance himself from statements made by others, at those rallies.
The other issue, and the more general charge, is that he did nothing, as Party Leader, to curb the more excitable elements within his internal base - aka Momentum - when more overt statements were made, usually on Social Media, AKA, Publicly.
And that is the point that the report into the whole affair made. He just wasn't remotely interested in doing anything about it, and thus did nothing.
Corbyn opened himself and his party up to the charge by turning a blind eye to allies who were actually antisemitic, and to abuse of Jewish Labour MPs who were protesting that.
Once Britain admitted a huge number of Muslim immigrants, it was inevitable that anti-Israel voters would become part of one coalition or another.
Personally, I'm a fan of Israel, but I can't figure out any principal under which citizens who are not fans of Israel should be denied political representation.
The issue, is not necessarily a Muslim one.
Neither is it a problem with "a huge number" of Muslim immigrants.
It's known as "biraderi" and was basically the problem a Senior Labour MP had in Birmingham way back in the late sixties/early seventies. When net immigration to the UK was about a tenth of what it was now.
It's not a terribly uncommon position to say that being anti-Israel is a form of antisemitism ("new antisemitism", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_antisemitism). The closest I've come to being able to wrap my head about it "having a Jewish state is a part of the core identity of (modern) Jews, and therefore attacks on the (unique) Jewish state read like attacks on Jewishness as a concept." (I should say that I'm nominally Jewish, although in very few ways beyond the "I would've worn a star in Nazi Germany.")
I'm not sure I agree that Israel is an essential part of the Jewish identity, but as long as enough other Jews do, being pro-Israel and being Jewish will be strongly correlated. This doesn't make it impossible to be anti-one without being anti-the-other (anti-Israel without being anti-Jews), but it makes it natural to suspect that both are happening, and hard to prove otherwise. Cf. also how anti-Taliban sentiments are adjacent to, and often devolve into, anti-Muslim ones.
Criticism of Israel does tend to be excessive. That said Israel does do a lot that’s criticisable, it’s denying the right to exist of the state itself that most problematic to me.
How can a state have rights? States are figments of people's imaginations. They can't have rights any more than unicorns and dragons have rights. People have rights. States don't.
I think it's more like "The world's only Jewish state gets a disproportionate amount of criticism, even though many other states act in ways which are objectively much worse, therefore a lot of this criticism is probably motivated by the state's Jewishness."
By way of analogy, imagine a political pundit who devotes a great deal of time and effort to calling out sleaze and corruption among the Democratic party whilst ignoring or minimising similar scandals involving Republicans. I think it would be quite reasonable to suppose that this pundit is to a large degree motivated by political partisanship, even if the criticisms he makes are all individually merited.
My view is that George Soros is a great man.
But, tragically, he's likely too old to make a course correction now. He may still surprise: e.g., after the BLM Dallas Massacre of cops in July 2016 helped get Trump elected, he switched some of his financing from street activists to more respectable anti-police district attorney candidates, such as the white man who beat the anti-crime black woman DA of Los Angeles in the last election.
Is there any chance Soros will now say now that the record-setting murder statistics are finally out: "Oh, well, my Plan B didn't work either. I guess I didn't really understand crime and criminal justice in America, so therefore I should cut off these anti-police activists I'm funding before we get even more people murdered?"
Maybe. Soros is a very smart man. But it's asking a lot of any nonagenarian.
Clearly, though, it would be a violation of the best that Soros has stood for for the current trend toward abolishing criticism of Soros to succeed.
You paranoid right-wingers have pretended Soros was controlling politics for the past couple decades. I can remember a time when the Left-Wing Pacifica Radio crowd was really into being anti-Soros.
In truth, Soros has probably had little effect on much beyond the timing of some currency crashes. Yet people like you have loved to use Soros to spread your conspiracy theories over the years.
"People like you (us)" would like to point out that there is a lot of Soros money sloshing about, not just meddling in currency markets. $16 billion is a tidy bit of influence, including attempting to influence the result of the Irish referendum on repealing the constitutional amendment banning abortion:
https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2018/0731/982216-amnesty-international/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations
"Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. The group's name is inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.
The OSF has branches in 37 countries, encompassing a group of country and regional foundations, such as the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa; its headquarters are at 224 West 57th Street in New York City. In 2018, OSF announced it was closing its European office in Budapest and moving to Berlin, in response to legislation passed by the Hungarian government targeting the foundation's activities. Since its establishment in 1993, OSF has reported expenditures in excess of $16 billion mostly in grants towards NGOs, aligned with the organisation's mission."
Yglesias has argued that an electoral hurdle the Democrats have is that they are so dependent on non-profits funded by super-rich people catering to ideological preferences far from the median voters. He doesn't blame Soros specifically as the main cause of this, but he does have a particularly low opinion of Sunrise for supposedly being a climate-focused organization but taking radical BLM/police defunding stances for no good reason:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left
I agree with this take.
> about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted by all the evidence
It sounds like Scott thinks that the that whistleblower trial was about one thing, and that thing was laughably and obviously false, when it in fact it was about a different thing which is totally true.
"Trial"? What was the charge?
Ah yes, I see you know your judo well...
> And WRT to Facebook, where have you seen anyone talking about Zuck being Jewish? The comparison is ludicrous.
Where have you seen the critics of Soros talking about him being Jewish? I haven't noticed this so far, & when I searched for news articles on Soros ( https://archive.is/2021.11.11-070514/https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=george+soros&iar=news&ia=news ) the only people who treated his Jewishness as important were progressives arguing that conservatives' criticism of him is antisemitic (without much of an argument, eg https://forward.com/culture/477059/george-soros-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-virginia-governor-terry/ seems to assume that any criticism of a progressive Jewish billionaire's political activity must be motivated by antisemitism rather than anti-progressivism or resentment of the rich) & conservatives arguing that calling their criticism antisemitic is unfair.
My impression is that, deep down, Mark Zuckerberg is a center-right kind of guy, which is why there is so much more organized hate directed at Facebook by big institutions like the New York Times than at, say, Google, the leaders of whom have managed to come across as acceptably center-left.
No, it's because most people get their news from their Facebook feed now, not from Google News or the traditional media. They hate him because he's been very effective at stealing their lunch.
OR, it might be because facebook is super incredibly ovbvious brain poison, and everbot relized simultainiously it is bad for society on every metric
Not any worse for your brain than left-leaning misinformation hives like Twitter, Snapchat, and even Facebook-owned Instagram. Yet elite ire is directed only at Facebook, for obvious reasons.
Certainly if look at (open or nearly-open) antisemites, they talk a LOT about Soros being Jewish.
Much less about Zuckerberg, but that may just be because hating Zuck is mildly left-codex.
*left-coded
Just as a data point, I found out that Zuckerberg was Jewish today, from this comment section.
I already knew Soros was Jewish, but I learned that because people kept calling attacks against him "anti-semitic". The only people I've ever heard mention that he's a Jew are his defenders, and some alt-right twitter types who are trolling so hard that I can't tell whether their anti-semitism is ironic or not. But most complaints about Soros do not come from these people.
The Kochs are probably the most powerful people in the conservative movement after Trump, having bankrolled candidates and media. If there's a crusade against them it's gone poorly.
I'd argue the Mercers have been more effective at getting their personnel placed in positions of power, even if the Kochs have been more effective at getting their policy choices implemented.
Good general point: cf "personnel is policy". (cards on table - I have sneaking respect for the Kochs and unblended hatred for the Mercers)
Depending on how Trumpy the Rs continue to be, plus how much (additional) political power they regain over the next few years, there's a plausible argument that the near future (5 years?) on the American Right is going to look far more like Mercer than Koch.
I had to update my priors on the Kochs when I found out how much they fund criminal justice reform efforts. They say they are libertarians, and by this they are demonstrating intellectual consistency, rather than the more usual tribalism.
> WHAT US crusade against the Koch brothers? Kicking out the Soros-funded university was state action. What state action has been taken against the Koch Brothers?
Quoting this for emphasis, because the second paragraph is partially drowning it out. If distinguishing between state and private action as fundamentally different in kind is the greatest lesson of libertarianism, glossing over the distinction when inconvenient must surely be its greatest sin?
I agree, this point deserves much more emphasis.
I'd say we can distinguish at least two dimentions of difference.
1) State/private action
2) Degree of centralisation of the action.
The distinction between highly and lowly centralised actions can be as dramatic as between state and private. Actually, I suspect that most reasons due to which we are worried about state actions comes from heuristic that state actions are easier centralizable.
It's annoying how conservative narrative aknowledges the difference between state and private actions when it's convinient and glosses over the distinction when it's not. But it's even more annoying how it totally ignores the centralization of the action. As far as I'm concerned, comparing "crusade against Koch brothers" and kicking out Soros university is bad for both of these reasons.
Actually, it's not just annoying. It's concerning. Nowdays real dictators love blurring the lines between low-medium harm low-medium centralisation private actions (cancelling) and high harm, high centralization, state actions (murder and imprisonment of political opponents).
If elites control private institutions and other elites who are ideologically in agreement with the first group also control government, and they get their way through brute force power, I'm not sure I'm seeing such a strong distinction.
I'm thinking specifically of the coordinated shutdown of Parler, when it was the #1 downloaded app in the US, and very specifically was coded as conservative. A group of elites (tech companies) coordinated to shut it down. The appeals process for them to complain (antitrust, breach of contract, whatever claims they may have had) would have to go through other elites who may have had ideological ties to the first group.
While it wasn't state action against Parler, it still bothers me a lot how that happened. It bothers me in a similar way to if it were state action, because the state (and press, and other elite powers) showed indifference to the situation that I doubt would have happened in reverse if it were a left/liberal company getting shut out. If you read up on the specific accusations against Parler - that they were fomenting insurrection, violence, terrorism - that was clearly false. They banned posters for inciting violence, and reported it to the FBI, the same as Facebook. They repeatedly reported the coordination of activities on January 6, while shutting down those conversation.
> I'm not sure I'm seeing such a strong distinction.
There might need to be a recalibration of effects here - it isn't very pleasant to be ostracized from polite society, but you know state power isn't trying particularly hard so long as your house remains unexploded. *That's* the scale a monopoly on force operates at, and the fact that we can take for granted that won't happen is a foundational victory for the distinction.
> A group of elites (tech companies) coordinated to shut it down. The appeals process for them to complain (antitrust, breach of contract, whatever claims they may have had) would have to go through other elites who may have had ideological ties to the first group.
You know Parler was back online barely a month later, right? That's freedom of association in action: one web hosting company chose to stop doing business with them, and they were able to find a replacement in short order. Where exactly do you think state power ought to have intervened?
Parler was shut down entirely for a month. Can you imagine if a group of companies conspired to shut down Facebook for an entire month? That wouldn't feel like a short timeframe to anyone. How many companies, including giant ones like Google, Apple, and Facebook, could survive an entire month offline? You think that's small??
More importantly, what happened after the one month was not that everything was back to what it had been, they just got new hosting so they could literally communicate with the internet again. They were still blocked from the major distribution networks (Apple Store and Google Play). They were effectively killed off as an alternative social media service. Nobody literally burned down the CEOs house, but he did lose his job, Parler lost some major funders, and most of their user base. Why bother with burning the house down at that point?
I will admit that I'm not a contract lawyer or antitrust lawyer, but both of those avenues seem like pretty obvious options. How does all of the major tech players (Apple, Google, and Amazon) literally conspiring to shut down a company not create an antitrust issue? An FBI interested in pursuing that angle would find plenty of evidence. Microsoft got a major antitrust case against it for much less (prioritizing their browser over competitors, in Windows systems). Microsoft lost that case.
>You think that's small??
Compared to how the US government deals with its actual enemies? Well, can you see the crater in satellite imagery? I'm not being hyperbolic - you're really not giving the scale of force state actors can bring to bear the respect it deserves.
Parler was and still is in a business largely focused around monetizing outrage. They did this with a nonexistent contingency plan for what might happen if they became a reputational liability for their service providers, and got burned when they had to figure out a backup on the fly. That's the system working as intended in the course of private business, and legal recourse is available in the case of actual violation of rights. And as it turns out...
>I will admit that I'm not a contract lawyer or antitrust lawyer, but both of those avenues seem like pretty obvious options.
...those avenues were tried, and Parler lost decisively because its actual case was lacking. What plays well in the media is not the same as what the law actually is, and freedom of association trumps entitlement to web hosting services.
I'm not sure we have to care about the difference between state and private action. What action of *any* sort has been taken against the Koch brothers? Various academics have tried to campaign against Koch-affiliated organizations and think tanks, but those organizations and think tanks haven't actually been stopped in any way that I'm aware of.
I happen to agree that the Kochs are not being public or privately acted against in the way that we are talking about here. I didn't respond to disagree with that, but to make a point that certain kinds of private action can be very detrimental, to a point where it's similar to state action.
What we care about with state action is that something bad happened, and there is no recourse. If private action happens, but there is recourse (criminal or civil court, private causes of action, take your business elsewhere without serious repercussions, etc.), then that's much better than state action that provides limited or no recourse. Even many state actions have recourse, though, including voting for alternative leaders and law suits. Which is worse, then, becomes a matter of particulars, rather than a blanket that says "state/private is always worse." I am more worried about state myself, as a general rule, because it has the potential to go much further. Potential becomes meaningless if the state isn't trying to hurt you, but private organizations are. The Pinkertons were private, but terrible, for instance.
Agreed.
> WRT to Facebook, where have you seen anyone talking about Zuck being Jewish? The comparison is ludicrous.
There is a strain of thought that worries about Jews having too much control of what it's acceptable to say in public; I'd be pretty surprised if Mark Zuckerberg didn't get called out there.
The immigration numbers people were raising to say that overstays are the real problem are also now very outdated. People were quoting 2016 and 2017 numbers; the first person to comment on it quoted the following article, which said there were 410,000 overstays - https://apnews.com/article/illegal-immigration-archive-immigration-cb7493650af7e1a06f6eeaf9628ecf7a
Year to date, there have been over 1.7 million encounters (not total immigrants - just those "caught"!) at the Southern border. People are vastly underestimating how quickly this has changed under Biden and how severe the situation at the border is, and thinking that overstays are the real problem in the current situation would betray deep ignorance of the facts. Source for the numbers, straight from CBP: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
Yup, and further to the visa situation, think twice about it and you realize that it has nothing to do with opposition to illegal immigrants who were not screened. "They're not sending their best" wasn't about people who overstayed visas. My impression is that more than the border wall, the knowledge that the US government fully intended to catch them and send them back was more effective than a completed wall might be
I think Republicans should get really creative with Latin American immigration. Create an "American Dream" immigration side system that allows South and Central Americans to enter a lottery that allows as many immigrants in legally as have traditionally entered illegally. Design the screening process to greatly reduce the pressure on low income Americans in the job market. Suddenly all the new arrivals think you're the great guy who let them in, they aren't systematically depressing the low wage job market and nobody has a clue on God's green earth why the liberals ever thought it was good idea to choose for a similar process to happen illegally in a manner in which either it's too dangerous to be humane to the immigrants or too safe and easy for drug dealers and even terrorists to try to enter the country. An America with a large legal, Republican friendly, socially conservative influx of Latin Americans. MAGLA!
At least for Mexican citizens, I would submit that program already exists: the TN visa. Did you know that in order to immigrate legally to America, all you need is a US job offer and a Bachelor's degree within any of a broad range of fields? There's no numerical limit to how many people can enter on TN visas; any Mexican citizen with a degree and a job offer can apply at a consulate. It was created by NAFTA, and was left wholly intact by Trump's USMCA.
Expanding TN status eligibility to other Central American countries is an intriguing idea, although the brain drain effect might be serious, I don't know. Either way, that would be a complement, not a substitute for border security, which Democrats will keep demonizing Republicans for demanding. No way around that.
But the interesting thing is that Hispanics aren't a monolith, and increasing numbers of them support border security. The Democratic line that border security is code for anti-Hispanic racism seems to be wearing thin, and Hispanic voters (i.e. citizens) often resent being lumped in with illegal immigrants. So if Republicans can keep the focus on policy and not racial categories, they can still win on this, even with Hispanics.
> Design the screening process to greatly reduce the pressure on low income Americans in the job market.
No screening required - simply allowing the illegal immigrants to enter legally would mean that they get the benefit of minimum wage laws, meaning they're no longer undercutting legal workers on price.
Unfortunately, the Republicans have already planted their flag firmly on the side of "increased immigration means letting more Democrats into the country," so good luck getting them to support it.
I understand that a majority, not a plurality, and not just higher than in the past, of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Republican for governor in Virginia. The switch may already be underway, and Republicans may already be leaning that direction. An interesting note is that a significant portion of the Hispanic voting population is against illegal immigration as well, quite strongly. I've heard it's a majority, but I'm sure it depends on definitions. If true, simply legalizing the currently illegal immigration is still a bad idea. Making people apply to come in, even if the approval criteria is much easier to pass, is still a good idea for Republicans.
Where did you get the idea that a majority of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia? The first source I found shows that 66% of Latino/Hispanic voters supported the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia: https://www.cnn.com/election/2021/november/exit-polls/virginia/governor/0
Perhaps there are some well-known corrections to apply to the initial exit polls, or there is some other source that you're relying on?
Interesting. I found this Politico report that says polling was inconsistent and the actual numbers may be different than reported. I must have heard one of the poll results that showed Republicans winning with Latinos, but others showed different.
Pretty deep dive if you are interested: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/04/latino-poll-virginia-youngkin-mcauliffe-519425
Interesting! I had heard there was a lot of confusion, but just thought it was people indirectly reporting the same numbers, and getting confused about whether the number they were indirectly reporting was a relative increase, or an absolute majority. But it looks like there are several sets of numbers that actually show conflicting claims here!
> "Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymendeing that can explain that."
I'm not quite sure this commenter understands how gerrymandering works. (Winning almost all of the districts can be achieved with a little less than half of the vote, even less if you're competing with more than one other party.)
Yeah that statement is so ridiculous. Orban won almost every district when his party only won 44% of the vote in 2014. I think gerrymandering exactly explains that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election
Are you imagining a two party system? With multiple parties running serious campaigns in a first past the post system, it doesn't require gerrymandering for a party with less than half the votes to win many more than half the districts.
Interesting point. I was looking for analogous elections from Western European democracies to compare it to but only the UK comes close in leading party vote share. Orban got 44% in 2014, in pretty much every multiparty democracy in Europe the leading party tops out at 35%. The exception is the UK which seems to have regressed to essentially a two party system (with regional exceptions).
It doesn’t seem like there are any healthy democracies in Europe/North America that are dominated by a single party to the extent that Orban/Fidesz dominates Hungary.
Wait a minute. Is the problem here that Fidesz won almost every district despite not getting enough votes, or is it that he got so many votes that of course he won almost every district? Your two comments appear to take both of those views.
I think that both appear to be problems. Fidesz winning as many districts as they did with >45% does seem to be weak evidence for gerrymandering. Additionally, a single party winning as high a share of the vote as Fidesz in a multi party system is not typical of a fair democracy.
I think the problem here (as alluded to by Scott) is that Orban/Fidesz have thoroughly captured the system to tilt it in their directions, all the while being relatively popular.
While no ~one~ change is enough to entrench their power, as a whole the result seems to be thoroughly undemocratic.
(I made mistakes in my original comment; I deleted it and updated it here. Sorry to OP who might get two mails.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election_-_Vote_Strength.svg does not look like a crazy gerrymander, at least for the bulk of the country. Outside Budapest, there were only two districts won by the competition, and each district votes in generally the same way as its neighbors.
Inside Budapest, there's a better claim to gerrymandering, but the opposition runs in basically a stripe down the center of the city, north to south. There are a few things that look weird, enough to maybe get a few more districts that would be "fair," but not enough to overturn popular will.
The fact that orban gets such a consistent 40-70% in every district is highly suspicious. Party vote share usually is not evenly distributed geographically so we should expect the minor parties to have strongholds where they are the majority (at least more than 2 districts outside Budapest).
Even if the districts weren’t gerrymandered, the amount by which orban won would be highly atypical of a well functioning democracies. People elsewhere are blaming it on the opposition’s inability to coalesce into a single coalition, but the only other places where I see that happening is under autocrats like Putin or Lukashenko.
> The fact that orban gets such a consistent 40-70% in every district is highly suspicious.
If you are alleging vote-counting fraud, say so.
But getting 50-60% in one district and getting 50-60% in another region next door is the opposite of suspicious. He wasn't cramming all his opponents into one district.
> the amount by which orban won would be highly atypical of a well functioning democracies
There were more than two parties. 44-27-20-5.
Clinton got an uncharacteristically low percent of the vote, too, but there's a really good reason for that.
Find me another example of a multiparty democracy being won by a single leading party with >40% of the votes and a majority of seats without needing to form a coalition. I genuinely can’t find an example of this outside of autocratic countries (and Hungary).
All functioning democracies seem to either be two party systems or multi-party coalition governments, whereas Hungary is dominated by a single party with scattered opposition.
The UK is technically a multiparty democracy, albeit with 2 distinct major parties, and the fact that those minor parties exist absolutely results in spoiler effects and parliamentary majorities won with comparable vote totals
The Uk is a good counter example. As an outsider I have a hard time understanding the role that the libdems or UKIP play where they get significant vote shares but negligible representation while the real competition in between Labour/tories plays iut
The ideal strategy for gerrymandering is to start drawing districts so that each district has just enough of your voters to secure a victory. Below a certain threshold of voters, that means that in the remaining districts the opposing parties will win by an unusually high margin. Above that threshold, however, you have enough voters to secure every district, or nearly every district. So in such cases, you draw districts to artificially reduce the variance in how districts vote. You don't want your opponents to win a district just because it happened to have enough of their votes in it, so you adjust the boundaries to bring it back into line with the others. If you have enough votes to pursue this strategy, then you probably would have won the most seats anyway. But it could help you get a majority government instead of a minority one.
So how do we tell if there was gerrymandering? The golden test would be to compare the results to what we'd get if the districts were drawn according to some reasonable algorithm that tries to make compact districts. If the two sets of results differ significantly, then we know there was something fishy going on.
Call it the Demagogue Book Club! Orban, Modi, and Erdogan are all similar as leaders of populist-right parties who got elected in democracies with majorities large enough to start changing constitutional rules, and doing so substantially with the goal of changing the country's culture and entrenching their own power. All three continue to run states where opposition parties are real and win important posts (all three capital cities, in Hungary, India, and Turkey, are run by the opposition), and in Hungary and Turkey recent polling suggests the opposition is favored to win the next serious election. (But not in India). There are countries where you could not release a poll suggesting that the incumbent is about to lose (for instance, Belarus is mentioned in this very piece): those are dictatorships. (Or where elections are just not held at all, as an Iran).
On a different note, a question for Hungarian readers, why is there a substantial population of Hungarian voters that remains devoted to Ferenc Gyurcsany? I noticed that his wife did really well, but lost, in the opposition primary earlier this year, which amazed me. I can't believe that anyone would remain devoted to this guy -- even if you think his tenure as PM was a huge success, which boggles the mind, at this point he's lost so many times that you'd have to think his supporters would move on. (I guess this phenomenon sometimes happens with former leaders who never give up on trying to return to power -- there's a Saakashvili cult in Georgia too which keeps Kartuli Ocneba in power -- but I'm interested in hearing more about the Hungarian case. Preventing this sort of thing might be a good argument for term limits, on top of all the others.)
Iran for Supreme Leader, that is -- obviously Iran does hold elections for other positions, like President, but in Iran the real power is held by the Supreme Leader and he's just chosen by his predecessor like Roman Emperors or Mexican Presidents during the dedazo period.
Iran is unique in that the Judicial branch is supreme over Executive or Legislative (Vilayat-e-Fakih, rule of the jurisprudent). The Supreme Leader is inherently a (Shia sharia) judicial position.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is notably influenced by the Ayatollah Khomeini's fascination with Plato's "Republic."
+1 for "demagogue" as a term that encapsulates the series. It's not perfect (I keep wanting to say things like "authoritarian populist", which as a near-oxymoron speaks to how hard this category is to define) but it has the right flavor.
Just going by media takes, my impression is that Putin, Bolsonaro, and Duterte are all fair game for the series. If Scott is interested in the mechanisms of demagoguery and not just the current right-wing wave he might also consider Chavez (as the featured comment mentioned) and maybe Morales? I'm not very well-informed here, just brainstorming.
Daniel Ortega, the leftist Sandinista leader of Nicaragua, is coming under a lot of attack by the Biden Administration, rather like how he was also a bete noire of the Reagan Administration way back in the 1980s.
On the other hand, the right wing countries of Central America, seem to extrude more immigrants to the U.S. than leftist Nicaragua, so I don't know what to think about him.
One possibility is that people who get elected to multiple terms (e.g., Ortega was El Supremo from 1979-1990 and from 2007 to the present) tend to have been the right man at the right time during their first term. But as the years go by, the times tend to change and they decline in abilities, which offers a good reason for term limits.
Orban, who is still only in his 50s, appears to be unusually ideologically flexible.
Is Ortega still leftist? The things I've read (admittedly, none very detailed) say that he has undergone some sort of metamorphosis from a populist leftist demagogue to a populist rightist demagogue (sort of like if Mao and Xi had been the same person).
Completely off-topic, but mentioning Georgia makes me need to share this link once again - song first heard in the Werner Herzog remake of "Nosferatu" and absolutely gorgeous:
Tsintskaro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3pTaSe4c-s
Ooooh, I like that. And so far, whatever it queues up afterwards for me has been good too!
How about the Caesar book club? The 'dictator' voted in when the romans got sick off all the red-blue BS. (it might have been blue-green in Rome.)
I think the Hungarian fertility deal (which is genuinely a pretty decent increase but from a terrible base) ties in with the fundamental and paradoxical antinatalism of conservatism/authoritarianism. Cultures that value having a ton of kids tend to have decent birth rates, and for Complex Reasons tend to be conservative, but on a broad scale conservative/authoritarian cultures tend to do a lot worse than their peers -- compare the "bad" TFRs of the West to the "holy shit are you going to die right now" TFRs of the developed East (and indeed often the underdeveloped East, North goddamn Korea is sub-replacement), and particularly note the tendency of wealthy nations with strict gender roles/expectations to have even worse situations than those without them. The most nightmarishly low fertility rates are in places like Singapore and South Korea, which fall into a cross-section of significant wealth, cultural conservatism, and political authoritarianism. Western Europe does poorly; Eastern Europe does even worse.
In the case of Hungary's natalist policies, this ties in with cultural conservatism's narrow band of acceptable family structures. Hungary offers free fertility treatments -- unless you're single, over 40, or non-heterosexual, which is to say, unless you're a significant proportion of the people seeking fertility treatments. From a natalist perspective, kicking huge swathes of people begging to have children out the door is lunacy.
For high fertility and high tech in the 21st Century, there's basically Israel, a polity so right wing that when Bibi Netanyahu was finally kicked out he was replaced by a new Prime Minister to his right, and nobody else.
The fertility is mostly in the Haredim population, though, and they are almost as under-represented as Israeli Arabs in the high-tech scene. Much of that is because in Israel the IDF hold the same role university has in the US, that's where contacts and friendships are made, and both Arabs and Haredim are largely excused from military service, although that is starting to change for the latter due to resentment among secular Jews.
The Israeli government subsidizes a breeding reserve in the ultra-Orthodox population, which helps explains why Jews had a higher Total Fertility Rate than Arabs in Israel in 2019 at 3.05 babies per woman lifetime compared to 3.04 for Arabs. Nonetheless, even secular Jewish women have replacement-level Total Fertility Rates, which are well above any other advanced country.
Are there other policy reasons for this, or is this a siege mentality in action, or something else?
"The fertility is mostly in the Haredim population"
Not true.
No. There are breakdowns by religiosity and even secular Jews in Israel have a TFR well above replacement. See e.g. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/:
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
> Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
<i>In the case of Hungary's natalist policies, this ties in with cultural conservatism's narrow band of acceptable family structures. Hungary offers free fertility treatments -- unless you're single, over 40, or non-heterosexual, which is to say, unless you're a significant proportion of the people seeking fertility treatments. From a natalist perspective, kicking huge swathes of people begging to have children out the door is lunacy.</i>
They're a significant portion of those seeking fertility treatments, but a pretty insignificant portion of people who might have children.
As for the conditions attached to getting fertility treatment, presumably Orban doesn't *just* want more people, but more people who will grow up to contribute meaningfully to Hungarian society. Since children from single-parent families are more likely to fall into crime and delinquency, and children of homosexuals are hardly likely to espouse the kind of socially-conservative values Orban wants to promote, it makes perfect sense not to try and make more of them.
"We need less of the people I don't like" is obviously in tension with "we need more people".
Very few people see increasing the population as an end in itself -- instead they want more people because they think their economy would be stronger with more workers, or because more people means more soldiers to defend the country with, or because they think it would benefit society in some other way. Increasing the population with people they don't think would benefit society defeats the whole point of the exercise.
If the point is natalism, then yes, denying fertility treatments to a significant number of people asking for fertility treatments *is* lunacy.
It's only if the point is a certain kind of eugenics, where the *right* people reproduce, that limiting fertility treatments makes sense.
<i>If the point is natalism, then yes, denying fertility treatments to a significant number of people asking for fertility treatments *is* lunacy.</i>
Did you even read what I said? The "point" is strengthening the country; natalism is just a means to that.
<i>It's only if the point is a certain kind of eugenics, where the *right* people reproduce, that limiting fertility treatments makes sense.</i>
I would submit that this is an instance of the Worst Argument In The World. Not offering someone government-funded fertility treatments is so far from what people normally think of as eugenics (forced sterilisation programmes and the like) that giving it the same name obscures more than it illuminates.
South Korea is politically authoritarian?
It used to be quite authoritarian, and still retains some aspects of it.
My understanding is that South Korea has been basically a normal democracy for a while now.
I'll ask you rhetorically to define "normal" in that case.
They've had peaceful transitions of power. What's authoritarian about it now?
Authoritarian is not the same thing as refusing peaceful transition of power, though there is overlap there. Heavy-handed government control, even if the government leaders can change, is still authoritarian.
It's still very culturally traditionalist and conservative, like Singapore and Japan, even if it's politically more like Japan than like Singapore.
A conservatism grounded in conscientiousness and being a high earner / productive member of the economy is going to be absolutely devastating to fertility, especially if your economic growth is concentrated in high density areas.
But bear in mind that european countries have fertilities that mix the immigrant and native population. Without disaggregation the biggest explanatory difference between the two areas is that there aren't large muslim populations in Japan/Korea
The Amish seem to be high in conscientiousness. They aren't especially high earning, but they don't believe in our welfare state and are above a minimum level of productive.
I should have said "...is going to be devastating *in a modern/postmodern environment*"
The Amish "economic model" doesn't involve striving after high paying white collar work in high density, high cost of living metros, that also involves schooling people into their early twenties or beyond (and the associated student loan debt).
Formal education ends at a much younger age (8th grade IIRC) at that point you're in an apprenticeship and the typical Amish individual is getting married in their early 20s.
And obviously having social expectations where family formation is seen as part of rather than ancillary to what it means to be productive (or more generally being a good person) will both socially nudge people towards family formation as well as repelling the society as a whole from shifting towards practices that directly disincentive family formation.
What's a TFR?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
"Before we get there: I interpreted the paragraph Richard quotes as claiming that, if a teacher or doctor protests Fidesz or Orban in their spare time, as part of the normal exercise of their rights as a citizen, they can get fired or otherwise see their career suffer. That doesn’t seem to me like the government exercising control over the bureaucracy, that seems like a nightmarish escalation of the “cancel culture” that both Richard and I are against. In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes."
This argument has been made by libertarian intellectuals for many decades. Typically in the context of arguing that undermining "economic freedom" also undermines "social freedom". As well as a general critique of central planning: obviously in the Soviet Union, the government controlled all media and industries and thereby could silence people even without actually arresting them.
I don't have specific page numbers at the ready, but I'm almost certain it would include von Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, certainly an implicit point in Ayn Rand's fiction... I think I recall hearing a lecture on this specific point by George Reisman.
That would just make the private enterprises censorious. Socialists actually had to fight for free speech in workplaces - joining unions or having union meetings on site etc.
Still an improvement; private enterprises' scope of control is far narrower than the State's.
Per my comment below, I do not believe that is true w.r.t. First Amendment law in the US. Private enterprise has fairly broad rights to fire employees for their off-hours speech in ways public employers are bound not to.
All they can do is fire you, which a public employer could also do (the "bound not to" is a restriction the State imposes on itself, and it could reneg at will). But the latter can do many more things to you; I'd say that qualifies the former as having a more limited scope of control.
All they can do is destroy your livelihood.
A rather melodramatic description of losing one job; still pales in comparison to what a State can do to an individual.
> All they can do is fire you, which a public employer could also do (the "bound not to" is a restriction the State imposes on itself, and it could reneg at will)
In the general case, I reject this particular framing: even if only considering strictly legal mechanisms, it makes no sense to treat the State as a unified actor capable of rewriting its own strictures at a whim while denying any private influence on the same.
In the particular: exactly how many public employers are capable of "reneg[ing] at will" on *the First Amendment*?
In the general case, any public employer outside the USA. We've got a pretty sweet setup here (for the time being, at least), but the State v. private power question transcends the circumstances of a particular time & place.
> Orban himself calls his regime an “illiberal democracy”, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.
This doesn't sound like what Orban or his allies mean by "illiberal". They see liberalism or lack thereof as primarily a property of society / culture not formal institutions. Roughly speaking, to be "illiberal" in this sense means to adopt social / cultural norms that tilt toward a specific vision of a good way to live, rather than aiming for some form of neutrality. For example, when "the illiberal left" is used as a synonym for woke cancel culture it doesn't imply any agenda to repeal the freedom of speech, only an agenda to bake the promotion of certain political views into social norms.
This is, admittedly, confusing because "liberal democracy" does historically mean a liberalism of formal institutions (bills of rights, universal suffrage, nondiscrimination rules, etc.). But taking advantage of fuzziness in such terms is nothing new in politics. Whether or not Orban intends to subvert Hungary's system of democracy I'm confident that's not what he means to convey by the term "illiberal".
Yes, my impression is that Orban is using "liberal" not in the constitutional or economic sense that John Stuart Mill used it, but in the cultural sense that Spiro Agnew used it.
But, I don't know.
That's a general problem with opining about current events in Hungary: Hungarian is an extremely foreign language.
Over the years, I've written a certain amount about Turkey, another country with a non-Indo-European language. But one general theme I try to emphasize is that Turkey is pretty opaque to me (and most other Americans).
I don't think anyone is arguing that Orban is a great guy or that everything he has done has been hunky-dory, but he does raise a very pertinent question about "what do we mean by 'democracy'?"
Because when people are talking about how they don't like what he's doing, and how illiberal it all is, and yet it does seem to be what the majority of Hungarian people want, we are coming dangerously close to "We don't like how you govern your country so you better change or else we'll invade and force regime change on you".
Military interventions or economic sanctions or even just international law proceedings (and as I understand it, the USA doesn't hold itself bound by the jurisdiction of foreign courts) may be necessary tools to save people from a tyrant - but is Orban a tyrant? Or simply a Hungarian strong man who is giving the populist line to the people as they ask for it?
Are we afraid he is going to be another Mussolini or Franco or Salazar? If he only was Franco or Salazar, would we be reassured?
Are we going to tell the Hungarian people (and again, this is what Poland is opposed to the EU about) that "So long as you pass laws that we like as liberalisation, we won't have anything to say about how you do it, or undemocratic methods, or using the courts instead of legislation, or foreign money coming in from abroad. But if you don't match up with our current views on social justice/culture war issues, then we very much feel free to tell you what to do and how to do it"?
I don't want to defend Orban. I don't even want to defend a lot of what is going on as "conservatism". But I am uneasy about "unless you bring your country up to the socially liberal standard we think it should be at, we will call you a dictator, your regime illicit, and claim all kinds of bad things are happening".
It seems democracy is only real democracy if it chimes in with what a certain level of technocrats/elite/however you want to call them want and like. If the people will not vote according to how we deem they should vote, let us dissolve the people!
"After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?"
Franco came to power as a military leader during a civil war, rather than via being elected.
And we can all agree that is indeed being a dictator. But if coming to power via being elected under a democratic system is also being a dictator, then what kind of dictator is Orban? Hitler-type or Franco-type? Because if it's a choice of the lesser of two evils, I think everyone would prefer Franco-type.
As someone I follow on Twitter once said, when journalists talk about democracy being in danger, by "democracy" they usually mean "liberalism".
Your fondness for this sentiment exemplifies the cancer that currently threatens to destroy this country, and it's been spreading like wildfire since the trump experience. And it is reflected here routinely and breezily with the lazy notion that if people elected an authoritarian then that's simply the people's will, and really it's such a thin line between democracy and dictatorship, isn't it?
All of this softening toward authoritarianism is as dangerously shortsighted as the populist embrace of hitler in the 30s.
Here's the bottom line that should never, never be dismissed or minimized: It simply does not matter how many people such as Michael Flynn have a hard-on for authoritarianism, since there is precisely one way to make our country "illiberal."
To drastically amend the Constitution is an intentionally extremely difficult thing to do. The Constitution overrides any fickle "will of the people." If it is undermined, as trump did, and clearly the vast majority of the GOP is willing to continue doing, THAT is what will destroy democracy in this country. It's not just an abstract political problem, it is the utter violation of our deepest-level social contract.
This rotten and corrupt sentiment is reflected by trump's insistence that since everyone knows he's the best president ever there simply cannot be accountability to other branches of government or the Constitution. The logic is disgusting when coming from a loudmouth at the end of the bar, but it's downright dangerous when acted out by an entire political party who thinks stoking a violent insurrection with the intent of halting government proceedings and then cracking down on "antifa" with martial law is just a dandy strategy. More please!
So this is what you flirt with, Mr X, when you belittle Liz Cheney et al for defending democracy. You are contributing to the flippant anti-Constitutional attempt to shift the Overton Window so that increasing numbers of Americans grow suspicious of democracy itself, as if it were just another partisan issue.
If you think democracy here has grown too inefficient or whatever, then you can either join the struggle again McConnell-style obstructionism, or you can devote your life to changing the Constitution -- legally. Or, of course, you can move to Russia. Extra-legal subversions, however, must not be tolerated.
Case in point. SCOTUS inventing constitutional rights to abortion and gay marriage apparently doesn't count as subverting democracy, but Trump sounding off represents "a cancer that threatens to destroy this country".
I absolutely think we should be worried about authoritarianism, but that includes soft authoritarianism.
The Supreme Court of the USA in a close decision (5-4) over-rides states to make gay marriage legal, and the President and Vice-President drape themselves in rainbow flags, and everyone gets tingles down their legs about how wonderful such ruling the country from the bench is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges#/media/File:Celebrating_a_new_America_-lovewins_58242_(18588276403).jpg
But when the Supreme Court tilts to conservativism, then it is a dangerous threat to Mom and apple pie and Something Should Be Done:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/21/supreme-court-legitimacy-conservative-justice-step-down
"The logic is disgusting when coming from a loudmouth at the end of the bar, but it's downright dangerous when acted out by an entire political party who thinks stoking a violent insurrection with the intent of halting government proceedings and then cracking down on "antifa" with martial law is just a dandy strategy."
Obviously the Capitol Kerfuffle was stupid, and the people whose responsibility it was should have forseen it as a reasonable possibility and beefed up security to prevent it happening. But I find it very difficult to understand the position of someone who gets het up about that first and foremost, while not even *mentioning* the far more destructive summer-long 'insurrection' egged on by blue team demagogues. I mean - if you're a blue team partisan, fair enough, you're going to be more well-disposed to rioters on your side than rioters on the other side, but you'd think that such a position ought to be defended, rather than just assumed.
(Though I am quite drawn to Anatoly Karlin's argument that the reason January 6th was seen as worse than the BLM riots is that the BLM rioters destroyed the property of peasants, whereas the Capitol rioters trespassed on the property of the elites).
Was there any attempt to subvert the electoral process in the summer of 2020? If the point is about challenges to electoral government, then it makes sense to focus on the riots that sought to overturn an election rather than whatever events may have involved more people doing something else the year before.
I will grant you that that is one aspect on which you could consider the Capitol events worse than the BLM events (though don't forget that Antifa poured a lot of effort into attacking the federal courthouse in Seattle; they just had a lot less success in actually getting inside) - though I would note that probably most of the people there thought that they were there to try to *prevent* the ratification of a stolen election (and yes, Trump stoking the fire on that one was a terrible idea) - but is it also worth bearing in mind that the scale of the destruction was nowhere near the cumulative chaos caused by the combined efforts of BLM and Antifa over the summer - figures vary but there seems to be broad consensus that the insurance costs will be over $1B, before you get to the people directly killed in the riots (something in the ballpark of 30, as far as I can tell), compared to ... well, just the one verifiably killed in the Capitol, and she was shot by a cop ...
... and *that's* before you even get to the several thousand incremental people killed in murders above the base rate from the previous year, in a spike which did not seriously get going until after the 2020 riots started. Obviously that's less certain, but it is at least plausible that there was something of a 'Ferguson Effect' whereby to the degree that protesters were successful in getting police to withdraw their presence, they emboldened would-be murderers to go and start shooting.
So all in all, I'd say that in terms of *symbolic* harm to a sacred totem of American democracy, sure the Capitol riot was worse, but in terms of actual damage caused to actual people and property, and to the fabric of civil society, the 2020 riots were at least in the same ballpark, and I find it hard, like I say, to imagine how anyone can be *so much more* upset about the former than the latter.
Democracy is when the people vote correctly. Or in the case of the Irish, again. Voting wrong is undemocratic.
> For example, what about a country that elects an autocrat once every four years, the autocrat can do literally whatever they want, and then they stand for re-election (or not) on the strength of their accomplishments.
Isn't that essentially the french system post-De Gaulle?
Relevant post on a substack on french politics that I've been following for a while: https://lacampagne.substack.com/p/camembert-president
Key quote: "France is a monarchy that undergoes a succession crisis every five years, by way of an election. "
I thought of that post too. Importantly it seems that the legislature is sufficiently powerful to block changes to the rules.
In general, the U.S. has way more checks and balances than other advanced countries. For example, the British parliamentary system, the most influential of all political models, evolved to give England a strong and nimble government that can get things done in a hurry.
As an American over the years, I've been amazed by the British Prime Minister's power, such as over regional entities. For example, Margaret Thatcher got annoyed at the leftist mayor of London, so she simply abolished his office. Tony Blair redrew the ancient county lines of England.
Projecting American norms of checks and balances as the only possible meaning of "democracy" is provincial.
Yes, but Blair also engineered devolution, which is why Scotland and Wales now have different COVID policies to England.
My impression is that United Kingdom nationalism was doomed by the UK being represented by four different soccer teams in the World Cup.
But the idea that, say, Derbyshire and Essex (or whatever they are called now that Tony Blair is done with them) should have local autonomy is foreign to the English.
England was socially constructed over the centuries to be a non-regional polity: e.g., the elites have been sending their sons for a very long time to a small number of national boarding schools such as Eton and Harrow. Hence, at the top of the English class structure, there have long been no regional accents, in contrast to the way that graduates of Dartmouth vs. William and Mary once had identifiable regional accents in the U.S.
England was ruled by rival branches of the same royal family as France for centuries, and that family had very strong centralizing instincts in both countries. Civil society was stronger in England and more able to push back, but both are very centralized compared to Germany or Italy, the other big Western European nations.
My impression is that England, which centralized in the 10th Century, evolved as Europe's first nation-state in order to beat the hell out of France (and then other European rivals like Spain and Germany). Eventually, other parts of Europe figured out that they need to centralize upon a similar or larger scale to stop being pushed around so much by the English. But England was the straw that stirred the drink of European nationalism.
That's complicated by the English being ruled by a set of successful invaders from France (the Normans). Their policy (at least later on) was to stir the pot in Europe enough so that they wouldn't be successfully invaded again.
As far as I can tell the thing you mention about redrawing county lines and abolishing mayoral offices etc. is simply because of the fact that the UK (and its constituent countries) is a unitary state and not a federation. It has this in common with almost all European countries, sans a few (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, B&H and Russia). This is simply a result of what a unitary state is: not a collection of lesser entities that also have rights and privileges of their own, but the sole state power in its territory.
When a subnational body of government exists in a unitary state -- such as the UK, France, the Scandinavian countries, etc. -- it does so solely because the existence of that body achieves some goal of the central state, such as easing administration (the traditional reason, from back in French pre-revolutionary times), meeting the demands of citizens who desire increased self-government or because it believes that locals make better decisions on matters of non-national importance. Unitary European states do this very frequently -- often iteratively through successive governments, but sometimes by grand reforms. As an example, the Norwegian government recently considerably reduced the number of counties and municipalities by merges, despite large majorities in many counties/municipalities being unhappy with the merges, simply for greater ease of administration and budget savings.
(The case of the UK is, of course, a bit more complicated -- in one sense the UK looks more like a federation now than it used to, but in some other sense Scotland isn't any different from a typical European autonomous region like the Basque Country, which could absolutely be dissolved if the central state found it useful to do so. In the end this is all a bit of a sliding scale -- the UK can't end Scottish devolution because it would make the incumbent government extremely unpopular, but does that actually make Scotland something else than a subdivision of convenience like in any other unitary country? After all, the US federal govt *could* dissolve a state or merge it with another, but it would likely have to send in the army to do so. Scotland could probably be dissolved without involving any armed forces, just some police to handle protests.)
Right, so it's informative for Americans to remember that things we take as essential to democracy, such as checks and balances and central vs. regional governmental institutions, aren't considered essential by many reasonably sophisticated European countries, even among our own forebears in England.
Well, my impression is that you are using this as an argument against the necessity of checks and balances -- while the European argument would be that having non-fiat regional government doesn't have much to do with checks and balances. It's important in the US because you have a certain conception of the states being the foundation of the Union, but if you don't have that then checks and balances only at the level of the central state are just as good.
Second, you argue that because the UK doesn't have much in terms of checks and balances, they aren't actually necessary in a democracy. Well, my knowledge on this is admittedly not very detailed, but it seems to be true that it has less than most comparable countries -- although slowly gaining more (e.g. SCOTUK). To be honest, I don't necessarily disagree. However, although I may be misreading you, you seem to chalk the UK's being a reasonably well functioning democracy despite having few checks and balances down to a history of the elites sending their kids to a few central boarding schools (and similar centralization efforts) with the result being that the people atop the class system are similar and able and willing to cooperate in running the UK.
I think this should be generalised into what I mention briefly in another comment: a properly functioning, non-kleptocratic and mostly non-corrupt democracy is possible (and in the modern era when democracy is the leading ideology follows) when the elites are competent and not strongly antagonistic, the members of the general population mostly trust each other and are not divided into factions with contradictory interests, and there's way into the elite. Further details are less important. The UK is weaker on the last point (has a stronger and less penetrable class system) than many other democratic nations, which gives it some peculiar/unfortunate properties. The US is strong on the third point but is getting weaker on the first two points. Hungary lacks all three.
I've got to admit, that when "redrawing ancient county lines" got mentioned, I have actually no idea what he's on about. Rutland? The division of West and East Sussex? The Hundreds? Mayoral Offices? Sod all to do with Blair.
It was a Blair administration that attempted to re-create Mayors in certain areas. They got voted down in several places.
Also those lines date back to the time immemorial of 1974. They've
often been tinkered with since they became a modern administrative unit in the 1880s, and for good reason.
What would Middlesex council even do?
"For example, Margaret Thatcher got annoyed at the leftist mayor of London, so she simply abolished his office."
The Comic Strip was a bit too pleased with itself, but it did a very funny parody called "GLC: The Carnage Continues" about Ken Livingstone and the GLC:
"GLC: The Carnage Continues" is an episode of the British television comedy series The Comic Strip Presents... broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. It parodied a Hollywood telling of the 1980s takeover of the Greater London Council by Ken Livingstone and the subsequent disbanding of that body by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, re-imagining the story as a Charles Bronson / Sylvester Stallone-style action movie."
Complete with soundtrack song by Kate Bush!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8q3Q2JIJQQ
OK if you are going to call somebody who does nothing that is not legal at the time a "dictator," what word are you going to reserver for a Mao or Stalin? Someone who has people dragged off in the middle of the night and murdered in secret? Who sends tens of millions of people to concentration camps to starve, or executes the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward?
I don't think this is a trivial issue. If you don't draw a very bright line between violence and non-violence (if nonviolence that is sleazy in all kinds of ways), you end up crying wolf so much that you reduce the psychic defense people have towards *real* dictatorship. You alienate a bunch of people who *don't* find your "dictator" a dictator, because you're calling them a bunch of dictator lickspittles. You're helping fray the social fabric, if only a bit, because you're magnifying a political dispute which is still, at this moment, being settled by peaceful means, and implying it bears no sharp and meaningful distinction from differences that *are* settled by violence. By de-emphasizing a common agreement on that bright line, you help blur it, erase it, so that we cannot count on *everyone* -- however pro- or anti-Orban, say -- from pulling together to resist the lure of the genuine psychopath, the Mussolini who promises to stop all this squabbling and make the trains run on time, breaking a few eggs on the way to that nice omelet to be sure.
I think words matter, when they become widespread and sloganish, and if you're helping spread the idea that a guy like Orban, unpleasant as you (or I) may find him, is not really in any qualitatively different class than Joe Stalin or Idi Amin, this is not helpful, and people with a long view, and an awareness that we cannot take a peaceful resolution of our differences as some kind of God-given natural right -- who are aware it is quite possible for those differences to end up with genuine bloodshed, if we cannot agree on a few Marquess of Queensbury rules about moderating our language -- are right to push back against it.
Good argument. I was of the opinion that calling it "Dictator Book Club" is close enough for the blog's purposes, we get the idea from the reviews' content, but you've changed my mind. Echoing the "Demagogue Book Club" suggestion from an earlier comment.
A better term would be "Dissident Book Club:" Orban dissented in 2015 from the globalist position adopted upon a whim by the German Chancellor, yet one foreordained by the zeitgeist (as predicted in Jean Raspail's 1973 dystopian novel "The Camp of the Saints", that of course Europe should import a million military-age Muslims.
I'd be happy with "Autocrat Book Club" as it would enable me to smugly reference "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" as another Autocrat book 😀
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autocrat_of_the_Breakfast-Table
"Dissident" is an appropriate term for someone who has not achieved formal political power. It is no longer an appropriate term for someone who has achieved formal political power. At most you can call them a "former dissident".
Certainly not „Demagogue Book Club“, as some here propose. As if they resented people rejecting „woke“ teaching and electing „demagogues“ instead. Why not „Elected Strongman Book Club“.
strongman
noun
a leader who rules by the exercise of threats, force, or violence
How's this supposed to be different from dictator? Demagogue is also bad of course, all politics is demagoguery for the most part, so calling some politician that doesn't say anything meaningful other than that you dislike him.
It‘s different because it does not specify absolute power, whereas „dictator“ does. And what I get, on merriam-webster.com/dictionary, is not that anyway, but „one who leads or controls by force of will and character or by military methods“.
I agree words mean things, but if you use the word "dictator" to mean "people who order dissidents to be dragged off and killed", the phrase "benevolent dictator" (which has been around for a while in the context of discussions) no longer seems to make much sense? To me at least.
I don't think the word "dictator" means "someone who rules with violence" and I haven't observed that this is the common agreement of the definition. From my understanding, "someone who rules a country in such a way so it is impossible for people to remove them from office (except by assassination)*" is the common agreement of the definition and Scott seems to be using it.
(* this is a sloppy phrasing because I'm writing this in a hurry, I realise it e.g. doesn't exclude monarchies, which it should, but I hope it gets the idea across regardless.)
Caveat: I live in Germany. I don't know if this is a cultural difference in word usage. I just wanted to speak up because your argument for using-words-correctly really chafed against my existing understanding of the word, and it might be valuable to you as a data point.
Agreed. I would define "dictator" just based on its surface level: someone who dictates. A dictator is any leader who can enact pretty much whatever policy they want without meaningful checks and balances.
This isn't necessarily incompatible with democracy- it seems plausible to me that Hungary is both democratic and a dictatorship.
Is it enough that they *can* enact any policy, or do they have to actually go about doing so in some meaningful way? There are certainly governments with weak checks and balances, such that the leader can make significant changes. Not all of them do so, though.
I would say that it still counts even if they don't exercise their power, although I would say that a strong enough tradition of not exercising the theoretical powers of an office might be enough of a check to keep that office from necessarily counting as a dictatorship.
It seems as though your "strong enough tradition" has made it ambiguous enough and created a large enough caveat that you could drive a train through it.
A brand new government with the exact formulation of the UK's Parliament would count as a dictatorship in your framing, even if they only enact policies in line with that major Western democracies would have accepted as normal.
It's not clear to me that that's a bad thing. These terms are inherently fuzzy and deciding a government counts as a dictatorship doesn't mean you now fully understand everything about it.
If your new government holds dictatorial power and doesn't have a track record to judge by, that's reason for concern even if they're not doing anything unreasonable at the moment.
Also remember that it has to be a single person to count as a dictator. Just because a majority in Parliament can do what they want doesn't mean the Prime Minister can (although it may if the PM has strong enough personal devotion from a majority of MPs).
The Queen of England is still officially a dictator. However, tradition has made it clear that if she ever chose to use her dictatorial power, there would be an instant coup and her Prime Minister would just declare themself the actual formal leader and remove her dictatorial powers. Thus, she has checks and balances on her power, despite the formal dictatorial powers she might theoretically still have on paper.
Adjectives/modifiers can change standard aspects of a noun's definition.
For example, sandwiches normally have bread on the top and bottom, but an "open-face sandwich" or a "knuckle sandwich" does not.
In the same way, "dictator" suggests various negative things, but "benevolent dictator" does not. This does not mean that dictator shouldn't be expected to be bad, it just means that adjectives/modifiers can be subtractive, not just additive.
Reminder that all laws everywhere are ultimately backed by the threat of violence. If you break them, men with guns come and force you into a cage. Or they fine you, and if you don't pay, men with guns come and force you into a cage. Or they try to garnish your bank account, and if the bank doesn't comply with that order, eventually men with guns come to the bank and force somebody into a cage.
Whenever anyone votes, he's deciding how to exercise violence against his compatriots, not whether to.
This is a nice idea under old and traditional forms of government. But I believe there is a possible alternative. In a rich, modern state, you could enforce many laws just by cutting off subsidies rather than actually threatening to lock anyone in jail. If everyone gets a $10,000 basic income, but that basic income is garnished or revoked if you violate minor laws, then we no longer need men with guns to force you.
Presumably that wouldn't work on anyone paying more in taxes than they get in basic income.
It wouldn't work in general for laws whose punishment is thought to need to be severe enough. Non-payment of taxes, for a rich person, would be a clear example of that. There might be other sorts of in-kind benefits that society gives people, whose value isn't exactly monetary, that might be able to get around some of these problems. Disabling someone's transport card and/or other travel documents, for instance (though there's a question about how exactly travel documents work, and whether preventing someone from traveling without valid documentation would itself require some threat of violence at ground level).
But the point I am replying to is the claim that *all* laws *everywhere* are ultimately backed by the threat of violence. If we can figure out ways to make more of them be backed in some other way, then that seems like it should be appealing to at least a certain kind of libertarian.
Ok, I'm updating some. You can bribe people to obey minor laws, and you can collect the money used for that purpose from dominant assurance contracts instead of taxes imposed by force. But no actual government on earth does that yet.
The meta problem: how do we enforce contracts without any recourse to violence? What if the guy who created the dominant assurance contract just runs off with the money? Some a multisig crypto system could make that much more difficult, but N people working together could still run off with the money.
What a stupid idea. No you couldn't, because you still have to use violence to prevent people whose basic income was garnished or revoked from stealing and robbing. Once you've revoked a thief's basic income and he wheels another cart of laundry detergent out of Walgreens, what are you going to do? Revoke his basic income again?
And here I was thinking that Basic Income would reduce crime, because an uneducated, unemployed person who is having trouble earning money will be able to survive without turning to panhandling or crime.
Taking away basic income for minor offenses is highly regressive and would probably increase crime.
I think this is a very general feature of financial punishments. The main point I want to make is that in the context of a basic income, financial punishments can be enforced in a way that involves no threat of violence. I'm not necessarily saying that they are the right way to go - but they do show that it is at least conceptually possible for there to be a law whose enforcement is not backed up by the threat of violence, which some libertarians deny.
Fair enough.
> in the context of a basic income, financial punishments can be enforced in a way that involves no threat of violence
It did sound like an elegant solution at first sight, but on further reflection it just seems to me you’re ending the “effect chain” early.
In practical terms, “forcing the legal entities that distribute forcibly-collected taxes as basic income to garnish that income” is not really in any substantive way less violent than “forcing the banks that distribute income from your employers and creditors to garnish that income”.
Just the fact that one of those entities is nominally part of the state doesn’t really change anything. You might as well say “if we nationalize all financial institutions, we can enforce financial punishment without threat of violence”. No matter what you try, people who want to do something you don’t will eventually try to obtain money, or directly goods or services in some way, and you either stop them with violence (or threat thereof), or you give up enforcing punishment.
*Any* state uses violence against its citizens. A serial killer being shot while resisting arrest is on one end of the spectrum, anyone that dares speak up against the King being killed in the middle of the night on the other, but both are violent.
There's two separate issues here. First, 'dictator' describes a form of government, a power structure, which is separate from what that power structrue does (despite being related). If we're talking about atrocities, democracies are quite capable of those - the USA was never a dictatorship, but the Trail of Tears and similar massacres of Native Americans still happened. The Armenian Genocide took place in a constitutional monarchy.
Secondly, there *is* a word that describes something more extreme than dictatorship on the democracy-autocracy spectrum. That word is 'totalitarianism', and it's a class that the Mussolinis and Stalins of the world belong to. But 'dictatorship' and 'autocracy' mean something different and less extreme, with the bright line being whether there are meaningful elections ('meaningful' being disputable because dictators do their best to pretend to be democratic leaders [especially if their power isn't secure], it's an adversarial system).
Now, whether or not Orban actually fits the definition of dictator is a separate issue. He's certainly doing his best to, but time (and especially the next Hungarian election) will tell whether he actually succeeded.
Buying up the press is the least-violent way any semi-authoritarian regime has ever suppressed criticism of itself. The US sent people to jail for publishing anti-WWI pamphlets. Lincoln's administration siezed telegraph lines, shut down newspapers that criticized him, and arrested journalists and a congressman for criticizing his policy. Obama's administration prosecuted journalists for not betraying their sources of classified leaks about war crimes and illegal domestic spying, and persecuted Julian Assange for his journalism about war crimes and illegal domestic spying. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition acts. All of these things are more violent than a voluntary market exchange.
I agree with almost everything you said but if papers are being bought below market value I would assume there is government force behind the offers
the entire journalism industry in the US (and probably most places) was experiencing rapid decline in revenue at the time, so I’d be very skeptical of claims of below-market sales until seeing the specifics.
I am going to make a comment which absolutely not charitable, so pardon me for this, but it seems to me that (differently from Scott) Hanania is NOT against cancel culture at all. He just want to be on the side of the cancelers.
Citation desperately needed.
Hungary is a small country that gets a lot of benefits out of the E.U., but is also therefore highly vulnerable being pushed around by the increasingly German-dominated E.U. The classic example of this was the German Chancellor's unilateral decision, made in not much more than Scott's ten minutes, in the late summer of 2015 to let a million military age Muslims into the E.U. and try to force the other members to take them on.
This shocking (but now largely memoryholed by the media) event largely set in motion Brexit and Trump's election the following year. Orban took the lead in resisting Germany's whim, so it's hardly surprising that Hungarian voters seem to want a strong leader who will resist German power over them.
Yes. We must also correct Scott's interpretation of the comment about the Dublin agreement. Dublin was originally the way migration was handled, but Merkel effectively abolished that agreement overnight when she decided to invite huge numbers of migrants to Germany. It still stands, technically, but has no real impact. Migrants routinely pile up on the north coast of France and then cross the channel in dinghies, it's a political problem in the UK at the moment. They can't be easily sent back to where they entered or even where they came from because they routinely lie about their origins and destroy any papers or items that could reveal where they entered the continent. Nobody wants them so by the time they turn up deep inside EU borders, there's no way to send them back to the 'entry point' because nobody knows where that is.
The EU's schizophrenic/hypocritical approach to migrants is now routinely exploited by nearby governments like Turkey, Belarus who use migrant flows as bargaining chips. They know EU leaders are far too left wing to actually enforce borders properly themselves, so they offer to do it for them in return for deals of various kinds.
Turkey and Belarus are genuinely trolling on this. I think you are wrong about the EU being overtly liberal on this, it’s all changed since 2015.
In reality Merkel's decision to open German borders to Syrian refugees saved Orban a lot of trouble. What was the alternative? Well, Merkel could have said: we have the Dublin Regulation for these situations, so let's follow it. The refugees, already in Europe at the time and en route to Budapest train station, are Hungary's problem to deal with, since Hungary is the first EU country they enter. How would Orban have liked that?
Does democracy mean checks and balances? I always took democracy to mean "following the will of the people" and checks and balances to be sensible things we implement because we're not insane.
If 4 families control a country and must cooperate to create law that's checks and balances without democracy. If the public has complete control over whatever strongman rules them for the next 2 years its democracy without checks and balances.
Most countries modeled on the Westminster parliamentary system have fewer checks and balances than the U.S. Constitution.
The British system is a little like that of a pirate ship in which the crew in port periodically gets a big say in who should be captain for the next voyage, but when out at sea the captain is supreme.
This makes so much sense. Thank you for making the little lightbulb go off in my head.
The British had a lot of practical experience with difficult questions of authority and consent at sea, whether with commercial ships, the Royal Navy, or privateers/pirates (e.g., the mutiny on the Bounty is close to being a national epic). The British unwritten Constitution has proven more influential around the world than the slower American written Constitution in part because it has more of the nautical virtues: you can change the people in charge, but if you aren't willing to change them, then they are in charge, like a captain at sea.
Yes, Scott asks at the end: „Are there systems of government that can let leaders take decisive action without degenerating into dictatorship?“ The British system. Their House of Lords can slow things down, but not ultimately stop the government.
As for the US system, I found it just ridiculous that Trump could not even easily build his border wall, which was his signature policy (and not something that would create irreversible facts on the ground, like „Merkel‘s Mistake“). If the government cannot act without the opposition agreeing, the latter‘s incentives are systematically divided between party and country. Best for the party to block everything, so the government looks weak.
And regarding the „checks and balances“, I feel the book club indeed puts relatively too much emphasis on them, even on independent media, and too little on free elections. Could the governments of North Korea, Venezuela or Zimbabwe ever win somewhat free elections, even with total media control? Perhaps it might be worth looking into the work of Hugo Mercier, who argues that, contra popular wisdom, people are not actually fooled by government propaganda.
You're right on the general point that the U.S. system has too many veto points and incentivizes "block everything to make your opponents look bad" tactics. But in the specific instance, Trump's party had control of both houses of Congress and could have built the wall without opposition support had they wanted. Trump was unable to convince everyone in his party that it was a good idea. Same thing is happening to Biden with his current spending bills, and is endemic in the U.S. system. Individual representatives and (especially) senators have some veto power, and there's usually a few who want to use it.
Thanks for the correction, I am not following US politics closely and should have checked what exactly happened to that wall.
There are basically three states to US politics:
* Democrats have a majority in the House, the Senate, and have the President
* Republicans have a majority in the House, the Senate, and have the President
* One of those entities is controlled by one party and the other two are controlled by the other
One of the first two has happened for ten years out of the last thirty. In recent history, that has been 2020- (Democrats under Biden in control), 2016-2018 (Republicans under Trump in control), and 2008-2010 (Democrats under Obama in control).
When one of those two happen, the control goes to people on the edges of the party, primarily the most moderates since they can choose to vote with the opposition party. In the current election cycle that’s been notably Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Things can get done, but only things that the entirety of the party agrees on unless you have a supermajority. (Obama has this in 2008-2010, which is how Obamacare was passed.)
In the third situation, control goes to the party cores since the party that controls the one center of government has to compromise with the other party if anything is to get done. On a few high importance issues though, moderates in the opposing party in each house can switch on that vote, but that’s rare. In practice nothing gets done that isn’t blandly unanimous.
Interesting. In the British system, potential rebels in parliament from the leader‘s own party provide a check as well, and that is a real factor, but it does not seem to lead to gridlock like in the US. (I had thought the difference was the filibuster, almost always giving the other party a veto at least on critical issues.)
He held both houses of congress but he did not have a filibuster proof majority in the senate and it would be difficult to shoehorn the "wall" into reconciliation (not that it wasn't discussed). Thus they did need opposition support. My recollection is that they could have gotten it passed if they had been willing to compromise.
I agree completely on the too many veto points. I would much prefer to eliminate this present situation where both sides campaign-on and pretend to vote for legislation they know will never pass.
The ability to spend money is one of the relatively few areas in which the President has little power in the US - thus Trump needing to (and failing to) do the generally awful/tedious work of lining up his party in Congress to vote for it.
> people are not actually fooled by government propaganda
The number of people I personally know who are completely fooled by propaganda makes me deeply skeptical of this claim.
I have not actually read Hugo Mercier‘s book, „Not Born Yesterday“, but I thought his work is worth looking into in this context.
Another thing perhaps worth looking into: there seems to be a claim in political science (but I don’t have a reference) that Britain-style parliamentary democracies are more resilient than US-style presidential ones. Credit to the US, if that‘s true, for staying democratic for so long against the odds!
>> people are not actually fooled by government propaganda
>
>The number of people I personally know who are completely fooled by >propaganda makes me deeply skeptical of this claim.
Is this true of purely 'government' propaganda though? I suspect this is really only true when the propaganda is coming from a significant social/cultural/political/media block as well. See variously "Russiagate" or "the Steal/Q", for recent instances.
I think we should always expect that when propaganda is working, it will be amplified and echoed in traditional and social media. "Stop the Steal" is a good example - it all started at the literal top of government but people were very happy to pick up that ball and run with it in traditional/social media.
Johnson's attempt to prorouge parliament in order to force through unpopular legislation with a minority government (prior to the elections when he got it back) certainly seemed dictatorial to me.
They don't have fewer checks and balances, they just have different ones. The Queen or her representative is a check on the system. Votes of confidence are a check. The designated opposition party is a balance (although not with a lot of power).
The captain isn't supreme. Every time he gives an order his crew has the right to mutiny and if enough of them do that, he automatically faces an election.
The British parliamentary system is quite logically elegant. I'm a patriotic American, so it took me a long time to admit that the British system is more brilliant than the American system.
The queen isn't much of a check. A Prime Minister with the support of the Commons can do pretty much exactly what he wants. It is however true that the Prime Minister could be turfed out tomorrow if he loses the support of the Commons. That's the only real check. The nautical analogy (the captain has supreme power, but can be replaced at any moment by majority vote of the sailors) is a good one.
Losing control of the commons can be common enough although in many cases this means control of the ruling party - see Theresa May. Which is fine by me as that is why we send representatives to parliament, amongst other things, to keep a check on the executive. Clearly in presidential systems the executive has more power over parliament (ie Congress).
And there’s the rise of executive orders, which bypass Congress entirely.
MPs can vote to replace the prime minister at any point they choose. Two of our last seven prime ministers have been forced out "at sea" because their own party stopped supporting them, and another two have had to step down because they felt their positions were untenable and that would probably happen if they didn't.
"The British system is a little like that of a pirate ship in which the crew in port periodically gets a big say in who should be captain for the next voyage, but when out at sea the captain is supreme."
That's not how pirate ships worked. To begin with, the captain was only supreme when combat was going on. Beyond that, both captain and quartermaster could be voted out by the crew more or less any time.
This isn't quite right, because they can & do have snap elections. A closer analogy would be that the crew, if sufficiently dissatisfied, could call a vote of no confidence at sea and replace the captain, if the situation is dire enough
> Does democracy mean checks and balances? I always took democracy to mean "following the will of the people" and checks and balances to be sensible things we implement because we're not insane.
I mean the whole thing here is that "democracy" and "liberal democracy" are often conflated. I think the thing here is to stop arguing over what is and isn't democracy (that's just debating definitions!) and focus on the concepts we care about.
Don't really agree with you here. I think it's very important to separate the two. For instance, if checks and balances were strongly correlated with economic performance, but democracy wasn't, it'd have a large impact on my political views.
While I agree that some people get obsessed with terminology, having consistent, clear definitions is a prerequisite for consistent clear analysis.
Athenian democracy had checks and balances, not to protect rights, but to prevent individuals or cliques from taking power and refusing to relinquish it. That's why they had practices like ostracism to exile the powerful who got too big for their britches, and very large juries for many positions that would be elected in current polities, to make capture or subornation much harder.
Separation of powers to protect rights and ensure the rule of law are an 18th Century Enlightenment invention (Montesquieu), and orthogonal to democracy.
Yeah, this is the way I see it. Checks and balances may be helpful in maintaining democracy, but is mostly orthogonal to it.
"and very large juries for many positions that would be elected in current polities"
I don't understand what you mean about juries. Positions that would be elected in current polities were filled by lot.
Yes, I misspoke. Much greater use of randomly selected lot for positions, but also the juries they used at trials were much larger than ours: hundreds or thousands, not a dozen, and that was in a polity that was, perhaps 60,000 and 500,000 for the whole of Attica.
Julian Dibbell has a highly instructive article on the logistics of preserving democracy in Athens:
http://alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html
Separation of powers in the style of Montesquieu was invented to separate powers from the so-called absolute monarchs of the time. Stands to reason it is orthogonal to democracy. Incidentally, "democracy" at that time referred to Athenian-style democracy and was in very bad repute due to its record of bad governance and self-destructive decision-making.
"Following the will of the people" and "checks and balances existing" are different only in the most naive sense. If you have perfect control over a country's media, intellectuals, major corporations and so on you can manufacture consent in any way you'd like rendering the "will of the people" essentially meaningless.
Orban doesn't have perfect control, of course, but the argument presented by Scott sems to be roughly that he has enough control over the most important sections of society to allow him to stay in power by manipulating public opinion.
Of course, you can go deeper than this -- the "will of the people" is never a pure, independent thing that exists. All states -- more specifically, factions within those states -- manipulate opinion to some degree, but that's still too simple. The truth is that "evil masterminds" at the heart of governments with detailed plans of how to manipulate opinion in their countries to achieve their secret master plans aren't a real thing except in the most backwards, tyrannical nations. In real life, the politics and long-term direction of any country, whether the US, Hungary or China, is the result of an interplay of an innumerable different forces: individual power, external influences, history, tech, the people's needs and desires and those of various factions (e.g. ethnic subgroups), etc. There are feedback effects everywhere -- the people create politicians who influence the people and so on.
In the end, I don't think talking about idealisations like "democracy" or "liberal democracy" is very useful. It's more worthwhile to, for example, consider why some countries have mostly competent and benevolent elites who at worst are considered misguided by the part of the population who want their country to go in a different direction, while other countries (like Hungary) have kleptocratic and incompetent elites and an extremely polarised population who consider various politicians angels or devils depending on their political orientation. Orban didn't create this Hungary, he only inherited it and exploited its poor state to get to power. And like most Strongman Lite types, he is as influenced by his population (as an opportunist) as it is by him.
Orban has zero control over the global media. On the other hand, Hungarians speak an idiosyncratic language. So it appears that the elected government putting their own people into the taxpayer-subsidized media influences the masses while outraging the English-speaking elites.
In the Internet Age, how much does putting the elected PM's people into sinecures in the state-owned media matter? It appears to have little effect on the elite, who are incensed that their ideology is now a career detriment, and sizable effect on the masses.
I can't speak specifically about the media habits of Hungarians, but the vast majority of Norwegians -- especially middle-aged or older, but also many young people -- basically get all their news from Norwegian media. Social issues that are important elsewhere basically only become a significant topic of discussion once Norwegian media writes about it (the journalists read foreign media, of course -- where else would you get ideas for articles?). Social media is a more significant entry point for foreign thought, but even then most Norwegians I know with a Twitter account mainly follow other Norwegians.
This is in a country where most people have a good enough grasp of English to easily read the NYT or whatever -- still few do it regularly (mainly for extra details when something interesting happens in the US, is my impression), and even the highly educated trust local media more. In Hungary, where English skills are considerably worse than in Norway, the average age is higher and Internet use is lower, I would assume that news and perspectives from around the world being available on the Internet for whoever cares to look only has a minor effect on the politics/worldview of the average Hungarian.
Unfortunately the English speaking (as a first language) world isn’t so lucky.
My advice to Norwegians: You've got the world's best country, so don't listen to advice from Americans.
The vast majority of Japanese get all their news from Japanese media, too, but this is less of a barrier to entry of foreign thought than it seems. This is because information does not propagate symmetrically between people, but instead cascades down from the most fashionable circles in a broadly hierarchical manner. Thus local news environment is a more or less delayed reflection of the intellectual fashions at the top. Japan used to be much more insulated 20 years ago and even 10 years ago, but its fashionable circles have since mastered click-bait techniques and there are now dozens of prolific Japanese-language BuzzFeed clones whose editors and writers are obviously looking up to American progressive media. Japanese Twitter recommendations consist of them almost entirely.
I certainly agree this happens here and elsewhere, but my point was that *if* you control the media to the point where this inflow doesn't happen in the same way then it doesn't seem implausible that you can stop ideas you don't like from gaining traction locally, because the local media is in fact the major "transmission vector" for such ideas.
Plus social media, these days. Sure, but that's hardly controversial. China is quite good at it, and is apparently subtler than Orban. The trouble for would-be establishers of such control over local media is that their activities in this direction tend to get them labeled dictators and authoritarians before bearing fruit. As Orban's case demonstrates, given balls and favorable circumstances it is possible to plow through and achieve a degree of media autonomy, although as several commenters noted he hasn't done anything really far-right with his powers.
I asked this question in the original book thread and I was assured that there was no possible avenue for people in Hungary to get news from non-Hungarian sources. It's a closed information ecosystem, apparently.
Does Hungary have a Great Firewall like in China? I seldom get comments from within China, but I believe I do from Hungary.
I think I read that comment chain, wasn't the conclusion rather that no-one outside of Hungary bothers writing anything in Hungarian? People in Hungary who learn a foreign language still have access to international media
"If you have perfect control over a country's media, intellectuals, major corporations and so on you can manufacture consent in any way you'd like rendering the "will of the people" essentially meaningless."
This seems false to me. During the later years of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had complete control over the country's media, intellectuals, and major corporations, but they were unable to manufacture enough consent to keep the regime from collapsing.
It is certainly a fascinating case. From what I've been able to learn, CPSU did all right manufacturing enough consent to manage until Gorbachev as Chairman of Politburo announced glasnost and started pushing it as the new and ideology-approved way to improve the parlous state of Soviet economy and command systems. It took a few years for Gorbachev's initiatives to percolate through the party machine, for the realization that control over the country's media and intellectuals has been ceded to sink in, and for others to pick up the ceded pieces. The horrible PR management of the Chernobyl accident apparently interacted with this process, throwing a large amount of fuel onto fires that proved to be more than CPSU was capable of dealing with. Environmental movements (originally created under the auspices of local party or komsomol organizations!) soaked up CPSU's stock of consent-manufacturing powers which was not being renewed due to glasnost policy. The Chinese reportedly study this case in depth as an example of what not to do.
> Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin.
There's something to this, but I think it's valuable to be very clear about what happened there. The Roman emperor was never -- NEVER -- known as a "king" *in Latin*. That is because, in the Roman cultural tradition, kingship was synonymous with evil and strictly tabooed. He could not be referred to as a rex.
But it wasn't controversial at all to refer to him as a king, only as a rex. In areas that spoke Greek he was called a king. In Egypt he was called a king. The only difference is that those areas did not speak Latin and therefore when they said king, they were not saying "rex". But they were using words, like "βασιλεύς" in the case of Greek speakers, that all parties agreed were equivalent to the Latin "rex".
So the situation in the Roman Empire is more along the lines of how modern Americans are adamant that the "police" are a nonmilitary organization, despite the fact that if you start with any definition of "military" there is no way to exclude the police from it. The *word* is taboo for vaguely-felt ideological reasons, but no one sees a problem with the concept.
From a quick Google:
military (noun): the armed forces of a country.
armed forces (noun): a country's army, navy, and air force.
That definition of "armed forces" seems obviously too narrow.
Why? What would you suggest as an alternative, beyond perhaps including space forces?
In the US, the military reserves and National Guard are broken down along lines of those three basic armed services. In function, the military is trained, equipped and deployed primarily to fight foreign enemies. (They might perform infrastructure roles for training or emergency purposes.) In contrast, police forces -- including federal branches such as the Border Patrol and Coast Guard -- are domestic law enforcement agencies.
So I disagree with the original comment's assertion that police are definitionally military. English has an entirely different word for military forces with a primary job of law enforcement: gendarmerie.
> In function, the military is trained, equipped and deployed primarily to fight foreign enemies.
If you really believe this, you will be forced to conclude that most historical states had no military at all.
So force me to. Provide an elaboration for that very confident yet unsupported assertion.
You have excluded military bodies such as the entire military of ancient Egypt, which spent much of its time doing construction projects, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US National Guard, every royal or imperial guard to ever exist...
The Roman military was primarily deployed to fight foreign enemies. But it's exceptional. And even they had imperial guards.
It gets somewhat more complicated when you remember the famous 'rex'-related affray with Caesar on the Appian Way. He very much flirted with accepting the title, by joking about it rather than disavowing it seriously.
> In areas that spoke Greek he was called a king.
Colloquially, not officially, at least for a few centuries. The official title was the more circumspect 'autokrator'. Also, I don't think 'basileus' ever carried the same stigma in Greek as 'tyrannos', which would have come closer to the emotional charge of 'rex'. There were nominal 'basileis' in democratic Athens, too, after all.
I do think that there's some value, scant though it may be, in these hypocrisies. The point when no one bothers dancing around taboos any longer marks a very clear step in the consolidation of power.
> Also, I don't think 'basileus' ever carried the same stigma in Greek as 'tyrannos', which would have come closer to the emotional charge of 'rex'.
Sure, tyrannos was stigmatized and basileus wasn't. But my point is that basileus and rex mean the same thing. Tyrannos means something else, and its Latin equivalent is tyrannus.
> The point when no one bothers dancing around taboos any longer marks a very clear step in the consolidation of power.
Well... did this point come for imperial Rome before or after power had been maximally consolidated?
The comparison with Merkel is strange since she is {by the standards of her political system if not American ones) a right wing leader, who has been very successful. So if conservatives prefer Orban to her then it's not because they're looking for a successful right wing leader
She is the leader of the CDU, Germany's main centre right party. If you disagree with that then you are using a definition of the words that doesn't match normal usage
What makes you consider them "no longer on the right"? They are referred to as on the right by most German and English language news outlets. The right/left axis is always going to be an imperfect simplification, but with such terms its only meaningful to talk in terms of what the common usage is, not whatever idiosyncratic definition you prefer. Or this just descends into pointless definitional arguments
She was the leader in the period we are discussing. You just seem to be being needlessly pedantic at this point.
jstr is on the American right, so from his perspective the CDU is not center-right even if he himself links to a Wikipedia page saying "it is the major catch-all party of the centre-right".
You're the one arguing that American conservatives aren't real conservatives. Indeed, the definition of conservatism might differ between Germany and America, it should be unsurprising Americans will use the word to refer to the American variety.
> The comparison with Merkel is strange since she is {by the standards of her political system if not American ones) a right wing leader,
The events of 2015 have the most influence on American conservatives' views of Merkel and Orban. Generally, however, Merkel's Mistake has gotten airbrushed out of the journalistic picture of recent years, so it just doesn't come up much, even though it was the pivotal event of the politics of the second half of the last decade.
I would generally argue that it was the unnecessary intervention into Libya, which both emboldened the Syrian opposition to launch an actual civil war and directly led to the large refugee flows of the 2010s. It also led to a sequence of failures of American foreign policy as world leaders became unlikely to trust the US after it went back on its 2003 agreement with Gaddafi. Merkel's Mistake was an understandable one in the context of her worldview, but the US intervention into Libya (itself memory-holed since few or no American service-members died, being entirely an air-based intervention) was the actual mistake, since it made no sense under any perspective which considered the intervention for more than 10 minutes and had far worse consequences on the world stage than the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter of which, in hindsight, was actually reasonably successful).
I was a high school freshman in 2011, and the Libyan intervention radicalized me on a number of anti-government axes, because it was just *so obviously* a stupid move. I did a research project for a high school Public Speaking class which took me perhaps two afternoons of reading about Libya's history and ethnic groups, and delivered a presentation where I had a map which accurately forecasted the civil war lines in 2014. Subsequently my family and acquaintances trusted my judgment for several years, but then I pissed that away when I was very confident that Trump could not win the Republican primary, and then again very confident that he could not win the general election. In hindsight these are unlike domains and elections are actually much harder to predict than civil wars.
In his 2016 exit interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Barack Obama was peeved by Hillary Clinton and the other foreign policy women cajoling him into intervening in Libya in 2011.
Count me in as another one of the people who thought the intervention in Libya was a dreadful mistake that would not end well. I did think Hillary was gung-ho on it to burnish her credentials for a run at the presidency, as one criticism about her was "would she be tough-minded enough to stand up to foreign potentates and protect American interests?" and she sure showed how tough she could be, huh?
Seriously, one reason I did not like Hillary for the presidency was that I thought she was a war-hawk, or at least easily persuaded to respond to criticism by showing off how tough and aggressive she could be in that manner (somewhat similar to the idea that Margaret Thatcher went for war over the Falklands Islands as a way to distract from criticism of domestic governing by whipping up patriotic fervour in the "Spirit of the Blitz" and going for an easy victory).
>the latter of which, in hindsight, was actually reasonably successful
Do you not count the emegrence of ISIS as a direct consequence of this, considering that it was formed and led mainly by Saddam's ex-military officers?
You say "Merkels Mistake" as if it's a common turn of phrase, but it's not very clear what you mean. I'm assuming from context the refugee crisis? In which case given she was in power another 6 years it's hard to call it a political mistake, not to mention the humanitarian element.
Regardless of if it worked for Merkel or not, if American conservatives when given the choice between an extremely successful democratic conservative leader who let in refugees, and a less successful and dictatorial one who didn't, then it's not really conservatism they're interested in anymore.
As a baseball fan, I prefer to label the events of 2015, which helped lead to Brexit and Trump the next year, as "Merkel's Boner" after Fred Merkle's once-infamous 1908 base-running mistake that was known for generations as "Merkle's Boner." But these days, Americans tend to be lax on their baseball history and have vulgar minds, so I've switched to "Merkel's Mistake." It's a striking exemplification of the media memory-holing of this epochal event that the term "Merkel's Mistake" isn't instantly recognizable.
> It's a striking exemplification of the media memory-holing of this epochal event that the term "Merkel's Mistake" isn't instantly recognizable.
I think everyone in western europe, and I would hope most people who follow the news in the USA and Canada, are aware of the history. Its certainly something that right wing parties are extremely keen to talk about at every opportunity.
Is it perhaps possible that other people aren't ignorant of certain facts you aware of, but disagree with you on how to interpret them and what moral valence to give them? Maybe we should call this Merkel's Triumph, or Merkel's Complex Policy Decision With Pros and Cons. Which admittedly lacks the alliteration, but might be more informative.
I had assumed that "Merkel's Mistake" would naturally refer to the Euro crisis and the resulting devastation of Greece, but I gathered from context that this was not what you were talking about.
The Energiewende was also pretty dumb.
While I'm very aware of the events to which you refer, you're the only person I've seen refer to them as "Merkel's Mistake" as a phrase, even amongst the man I've seen decrying the decision as a mistake
Abolishing German and EU border control and changing the demographic make-up of your country on a whim without consulting anyone is by definition not conservative.
1) Saying border control was abolished because of a specific instance of humanitarian admission is hyperbolic to the point of absurdity. If you want to demonstrate how trivially false it is look up the rules for living and working in Germany with a non-schengen passport
2) More or less everything governments do changes the demographics of their country, if she's not allowed to do that her job may be difficult. If there is specific reasons why you think this particular demographic change was bad please articulate them.
3) She's the leader of a coalition in a parliamentary system, she's not an independently elected executive leader. There is literally nothing she can do without consulting people.
You are allowed to just say you think her policies are bad y'know, and articulate reasons why, rather than reshaping the meaning of words to make your point for you
1. Border control was abolished along the asylum seeker-route. I didn't say it was completely abolished, but perhaps I should've specified that it was partially abolished.
2. Not on this scale. A large scale change in demographics through an open borders policy that was not voted on nor campaigned has no democratic mandate it seems to me.
3. Yes there is: she can say whatever she wants, and the world will think she is speaking for Germany and her party. Since Germany is very attractive to migrants and also the leading power of the EU, her words have great power.
I believe migrant pressures on the US changed immediately both after Trump and Biden were elected, did all those migrants have intimate knowledge of the powers the executive has at hand, or what executive orders they actually issued? Executive actions are not the only source of power. Do you think the pope has no power?
(I mean do you think the pope has no power outside executive actions, simply by speaking?)
Anyway, the issue was whether rapidly changing the demographics of your country is conservative, not whether she's allowed to do it.
It depends on how we define 'successful right-wing leader': successful in winning political elections, or successful in making conservative policies and pushing the country in a conservative direction.
Most American conservatives want to see the second, but Merkel definitely failed on that count with the exception of fiscal conservativism.
Merkel ordered nuclear reactors closed after a populist outcry, she introduced minimum wage, she went from 'multiculturalism is a failure' to 'everyone is welcome here' and same-sex marriage was legalized.
The very presence of a relatively popular AfD is evidence of Merkel's failure.
On the subject of the importance of independent institutions for democracy I think you would like Fukuyama S's "Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay"
It’s hard to disentangle the Soros/anti semitism thing. Presumably Orban would fight just as hard against Soros and his influence if he wasn’t Jewish. And if Soros were a supporter of Orban presumably that would be just dandy by Orban and he’d invite him to the football on a regular basis. But none of that is to say anti semitism isn’t a thing in Hungarian society so Orban’s attacks on Soros benefit from that energy.
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I know nothing about George Soros save that he is a very rich man who, amongst other things, likes funding foundations to improve the world (as he sees improvements) and that he's a boo-boy for the right as the Koch brothers are boo-boys for the left about "unelected billionaires using their money to sway society".
On the other hand, during our gay marriage referendum (yes, that old chestnut), Soros-funded foundation(s) were donating to the pro-legislation side; also ditto for donations about the pro-abortion legislation campaign. Fair enough, save that there was no outcry over "foreign billionaires trying to sway Irish society" *except* when it came to donations for the anti-legislation side, and there were some court cases about "you can't do that":
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/amnesty-international-ordered-to-return-donation-from-billionaire-george-soros-1.3320638
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/human-rights-campaigners-defend-donations-from-abroad-1.3329201
So, as I say, I'm torn. My own personal views are that I was "meh" on the gay marriage thing but definitely not pro-abortion. And while everyone is free to have an opinion, yes I am somewhat not very chuffed about outsiders deciding "I would really like if Ireland [did thing] so I am going to give money to change the law". I kinda rather that we'd make up our own minds on this, or if you are going to let outsiders have influence, then equal playing field: no crying foul over right-wing organisations donating as a 'threat to democracy' but not opening your mouth about left-wing organisations doing it.
I don't know if Orban is racist or anti-Semitic or just using a convenient scape-goat for domestic political gain. I do know that I can see the Hungarian point in "hey, why are you paying all this money to move the cultural needle?" I realise that it is complicated by Soros being Hungarian, so he does have a natural interest in his home country, but again - I'd be sympathetic to "if you want to have a say in Hungarian national politics, then move back and live in Hungary and conduct your business here" (we have at least one Irish moneybags who regularly unburdens himself of how the country should be governed, but that burning flame of patriotic fervour didn't stop him from taking out tax residency in Gibraltar).
The rising European populism is pretty distinctly a politics of Somewhere - politics of place. Soros is as Anywhere a person as they come.
https://mikefrost.net/people-somewhere-vs-people-anywhere/
The Dublin agreement is largely done for:
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/policies/migration-and-asylum/common-european-asylum-system/country-responsible-asylum-application_en
“ On 23 September 2020, the European Commission adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum following consultations with the European Parliament, Member States and various stakeholders. The New Pact covers all the different elements needed for a comprehensive approach to migration. In particular, the New Pact recognises that no Member State should shoulder a disproportionate responsibility and that all Member States should contribute to solidarity on a constant basis.”
As is only fair.
No one likes this proportional distribution of migrants. Some countries think that it is not fair that they have to accept migrants just because some countries fail to control their borders. And migrants also don't want to go poorer countries which causes more problems with integration.
I am very interested if you have fresher information on this. 23rd September 2020 is already some time ago...
I have been following the debate on the "New Pact" proposal. The initial proposal did indeed suggest a quota-type system, where refugees arriving in EU front states were to be shared between all EU states, according to some to-be-agreed-upon quota principle (for example based on the country's share in EU's total population). It was the most controversial point in the initial proposition (which also includes a lot of less controversial stuff).
If my information is correct, it was watered down already in late 2020. In particular, it was suggested that other EU members could offer frontline EU states money to handle the refugee-applications, as an alternative to accepting actual refugees. Below is a link to the latest paper I have read on the issue. It is from 18th May this year.
According to the paper, the "New Pact" proposal as it now stands will imply softening the situation somewhat for refugees who already have close family members legally living in inland EU states. But they are a minority, and might in practice be granted passage anyway. The main rule is referred in the last paragraph in Part III, and it is similar to the present Dublin III-rule. Hence Dublin still rules (so to speak). Quote:
"However, the above analysis demonstrates that the responsibility criteria included in the Proposal will not substantially shift the burden of asylum examinations away from front-line States, given that the “first country of irregular entry” criterion remains applicable (art. 21)."
..but again, if you have newer information, I am genuinely very interested.
https://www.europeanpapers.eu/en/europeanforum/new-pact-migration-asylum-supporting-or-constraining-rights-vulnerable-groups
President Hammond Book Club?
>. If you get a really virtuous autocrat, maybe George Washington, this works fine
The virtuous autocrat slave owner and genocider of Native Americans George Washington.
Was he himself much of a genocider? He was a slave owner, it's true. But as far as his autocracy goes, he was decent at moderating the political tendencies of his time, and prevented the president-for-life failure mode that has, retrospectively, come to be seen as the natural failure mode of revolutionary democracies.
When I read your comment, the first thing that came to mind was the incident at Joumonville Glen, in which young officer of the Virginia Militia named George Washington partnered with a groups of Natives led by Tanacharisson. Those Natives helped the Virginians surprise and capture a detachment of French soldiers.
After the French soldiers surrendured, Tanacharisson did a surprise attack on the leader of the French unit, splitting the man's skull open. This precipitated a killing of most of the other French soldiers, at the hands of the remaining Natives.
George Washington didn't have many good options in trying to stop this killing. And it made a lot of trouble for him.
You see, George wanted to tell the French soldiers to leave the area. He also wanted to send a letter from the King of England with them, telling all the other French soldiers that the King of England didn't want French soldiers in that part of North America. (At this point in history, George Washington was a loyal subject of King George III.)
But when most of the French soldiers were killed--after they surrendered--it was rather hard to send the letter back with them. And the act of killing, after a truce, was an act that would be considered a war-crime by most European leaders.
The killing was not considered a war-crime, or equivalent, by the Natives. Which underscores just how different the Native practices of warfare were from the European practices of warfare.
This event is not Washington being genocidal towards Natives. It wasn't even Natives being genocidal towards Frenchmen, even if it was Natives perpetrating an uncalled-for massacre.
But it does lead me to ask: when did George Washington act in a genocidal way towards Natives?
I'd heard that Washington was part of the events that triggered (the England v France part of) the 7 years war (also known as the French and Indian War to the Americans), is this one of the events in question?
I was wondering if this Belarus flights thing would carry enough people to matter. If there are 55 flights/week, 52 weeks/year, and (based on a cursory search) 150 people per flight, that gives us about 400k people per year. The figure I normally see quoted for the refugees taken in in 2015 is 1 million (and apparently this helped the European far right a lot).
So, it looks like Belarus might get somewhere with this plan to destabilize its neighbors.
I think the plan is to destabilize by creating more friction between the EU and Poland. They already have certain disagreements and right now is pressuring Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to change some rules: https://euobserver.com/migration/153474
Really the plan is to create a lot of death and evil at the border to make it clear that Poland is being just as evil as he is. This situation has convinced me that closed borders is just an unworkable policy, and we have to end this and return to a world of open borders.
Return? As in the age of imperialism? I’m not sure when the borders were open. Its true that passports didn’t matter much pre 19C, but people didn’t move beyond their village.
You’ve learned the wrong lesson here. Mass migration has clearly destabilising effects, which is why Lukashenko is using it.
I don't think it makes sense to compare how long the infrastructure bill got passed to Hungary's fence change. The former handed out massive amounts of money for planned projects that will unfold over years. Of course every Congressperson wanted their fingerprints on it. And if they delayed another month, what would the harm really be? You would need to compare the SHORTEST time to adopt a law/amendment under Biden. And I still think that would be longer. The Democrats barely hold a majority and thus their most marginal members have more power to extract concessions.
My recollection of September 2015 is that Bibi Netanyahu announced a new border fence to keep out Africans coming through Egypt (IIRC) virtually overnight, with work beginning within a couple of days when the magnitude of the influx into Europe became evident.
Parliamentary governments can move fast.
And on different issues, there have been a few times when Australian governments have rammed through legislation in the space of an afternoon, even very significant legislation, though I think refugee intake stuff tends to get debated a bit more than most things because it has a disproportionate amount of public attention.
Broadly, I think the issue boils down to American party whips being toothless - in most countries crossing the floor on an important bill means you're going to be running as an independent next election.
McConnell nearly managed to pass legislation that was written in secret hours before the final vote. (In fact, there was the spectacle of a week of debate for a bill that hadn't even been written yet). That's the closest I can think of, and of course the *idea* of repealing Obamacare was in motion for months before hand, just not the details.
> So much so that before the 20th century, "democracy" was often used *literally as a synonym* for "authoritarian and demagogic rule"!
> A democracy is supposed to have some number of independent power centers to provide checks and balances, and if you put too much effort into making every power center bow to you, you stop having checks and balances, and become authoritarian.
These quotes both ring intuitively true to me, and their proximity made me really step back and admire the radical rebrand that the Hamilton and Madison pulled off with democratic structures.
Not for the worse, but the overton window has certainly shifted a lot since then. They had to write 85 articles explaining how we could have a little voting without immediately collapsing into some kind of hellish anarchy or dictatorship. They talked about how important it was to limit the powers of the new democratic government and bind it with additional competing layers and structures, and loaded it with reassurances that they understood mob rule was bad.
If you advocate for expanded democracy today, you don't need a long intro explaining why you would want such a thing. (And that's often good, expanded access can absolutely make democracy better at the things it does well.)
If you advocate, exactly like they did, for structures that attenuate just the areas democracy is bad at-- you're much more likely to need to start off with 85 pamphlets emphasizing that you understand the dangers of monarchies or technocracies or communism.
I'm not saying the flipped burden is necessarily for the worse, but it feels rare to see such a polar change in all our presumptions about "what is good" in some domain.
Are there other areas like this I'm overlooking, where we fundamentally flipped the presumptive value system from one end to its complete opposite?
That's why Garett Jones wrote "10% Less Democracy" and caught a lot of flack for such arguments.
10percentlessdemocracy.com
The supremacy over empiricism over armchair theorising is also only a few hundred years old, and IIUC it used to be completely opposite in the era of classical Greek philosophers (and thus most of early Christendom thanks to their obsession with the classical era).
Supernatural explanations vs mundane ones is one that currently seems to differ by person, and I don't know whether we're in the middle of a slow paradigm shift away from faith or if it's always been a personality thing and we just hear less about historical cynics.
There are probably many others, but they're definitionally hard to see unless you study a lot of history
https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1191248240739409920
Yeah, empiricism is a good candidate.
Kind of tangent, but this made me think of this 2010 blog post about how we once "forgot" how to cure scurvy and had to rediscover that it was definitely a vitamin deficiency:
https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
I would prefer Autocrat Book Club to Dictator Book Club.
There are a lot of very different systems of government that have existed. The modern understanding of a single axis between democracy and dictatorship is an extremely limited sample.
Older authors (maybe pre-1800?) have a much richer understanding of political systems, in part because there were a lot more different political systems. Medieval Europe had everything from hereditary monarchies to elected monarchies (Holy Roman Emperor - also modern Malaysia) to theocracies (bishoprics) to aristocracies (Italian city states) to elected city councils and city leagues (Lubeck Law & Magdeburg Law in the Hanseatic League) to anarchies (Frisian freedom, Cospaia, Dithmarschen) - and lots of mixed systems in between.
There are a lot of axes we can disambiguate political systems according to. These do not all have to be correlated and some may even be anti-correlated.
- Democracy. Does the government reflect the will of the people?
- Moral Liberalism. To what extent does the government impose its morals on the people?
- Political Liberalism. Can anyone run for office?
- Informational Liberalism. Is there freedom of speech? How diverse is the media?
- Economic Liberalism. Ease of doing business and what fraction of the economy is controlled by the government.
- Centralization. Are there multiple power centers? The idea of a bicameral legislature was originally to represent different English social classes - but is extremely useful to allow time for public debate between when legislation is proposed and passed.
- Federalism vs Unitary State. Are there multiple governments as well as multiple branches of government?
- Expertise. Are there independent experts whose opinions are respected in their areas of expertise?
- Nationalism. Does the government represent a ethnic / cultural group or something else?
- Rule of Law vs Rule of Man. Is the government constrained by its Constitution and precedence or can it do what it wants.
- Corruption. Is public money used for the public good or to enrich the rulers.
Compared to the Western ideal, Orban is unusually informationally illiberal (controlling most of the press), centralized, Rule of Man, corrupt (though compared to what?), and nationalistic.
“Orban himself calls his regime an ‘illiberal democracy’, which seems as fair a description as any. Technically people vote, and probably the elections are even mostly fair, but things are rigged enough behind the scenes that it’s really hard for the elections to matter.”
Yeah, the more I think about this, the more it seems like democracy is defined as “elections plus things liberals do to overturn the will of the people” and non-democracy is “elections plus equivalent things conservatives might do.”
Like most American states had referenda against gay marriage. Then 5 judges came along and said “lol, jk”. That sounds like a fair vote within a system that’s still rigged. A lot of things are like this.
Regarding the conservative/liberal asymmetry, that was indeed part of what motivated my comment. “Judges overruling the voters” is seen as sort of the liberal template, while “masculine guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats” is the conservative template, and so the latter is “un-democratic,” even if it is closer to reflecting what people voted for. I can’t shake the feeling that the whole discussion is shaped by this underlying bias of NGOs and journalists who report on foreign countries.
I think this gets at the comment above comparing democracy with checks and balances. One of the key issues Hamilton, et al. had to contend with was how to achieve majority rule without the majority tyrannizing the minority. The Constitution's checks and balances within the federal government, enumeration of federal powers, and declaration of individual rights were all at least somewhat geared toward achieving this balance. Maybe you could call this an effort at achieving an "optimal" democracy instead of achieving a "pure" democracy?
I can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds) and instances of "[charismatic?] guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats [slash uses the bureaucracy to override checks and balances]" helping liberals. Richard, IIRC you wrote about several examples of the latter phenomenon in your piece explaining why a somewhat moderate elected federal U.S. government presided over the implementation of vast public and private woke bureaucracies regulating individual conduct.
Of course, one could say that sometimes the courts reverse democratically-enacted laws for "legitimate" or "illegitimate" reasons and say the legitimate ones align with the Madisonian view of a checked-and-balanced democracy and the illegitimate ones don't, but that would just realign you along the conservative-progressive axis again.
"I can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds)"
These rulings typically have very limited impact—saving a few lucky souls from modern degeneracy— and are hardly comparable to entrenched woke bureaucracies.
"instances of "[charismatic?] guy wins elections and smashes the heads of bureaucrats [slash uses the bureaucracy to override checks and balances]" helping liberals."
And this is an interesting point. We might be seeing that now with Biden—sans any charisma—straight up defying Federal court rulings. This is because those who wield our society's megaphone—the press and academia—characterize conservative resistance to the administrative state as insurrection. But when liberals do the same they are seen as properly ignoring unelected bodies who are baselessly trying to impede implementation of popular mandates by invoking arcane legalisms (recall the Supreme Court during the New Deal and FDR's court packing proposal).
So while it is true that there is probably no principled and non-politically-self-interested way of distinguishing "legitimate" from "illegitimate" reasons for Courts or agencies to countermand popular preferences, it is clear that when liberals do it will generally be considered legitimate.
> can also think of instances of "judges overruling the voters" helping conservatives (e.g. on free exercise and certain free speech grounds)
The counterpoint to this is that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom to marry for sodomy is not. And I think conservatives would be more open to the idea of judges looking for and expanding upon non-enumerated rights if:
a) The actual enumerated rights were first given real teeth (here's to looking at you 2nd, 9th and 10th)>
b) The new-found anti-democratic rights didn't always seem to go in a single direction.
I'm in favor of "Political Leader I Am Uncomfortable With Book Club"!
Same here!
Scott writes: ‘I’ve been unconsciously working off a definition that has something to do with “somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them.”’ Why does this remind me of Boris Johnson?
"A country that elects an autocrat once every four years, the autocrat can do literally whatever they want, and then they stand for re-election (or not)" is pre-2005 Britain. Whoever wins a majority in the House of Commons became prime minister (like an electoral college), and generally has enough control over their party to pass any laws. There's no limit to what laws parliament can pass (no court can overrule them), and the House of Commons can pass laws on their own. Until 2010, the Prime Minister also got to hold elections whenever he/she felt like it (albeit with a five-year deadline).
Pre-2005, the Prime Minister also got to appoint (and dismiss at will) the Lord Chancellor (chief judge who was also the speaker of the House of Lords), and the Lord Chancellor picked whomever he wanted to fill all other judicial vacancies. For bonus Orban, Blair's first Lord Chancellor was the guy who trained him to be a lawyer, and the second was his former housemate.
Thatcher's Lord Chancellor approvingly referred to this system, where whomever controls a majority in the House of Commons controls everything, as "Elective Dictatorship."
Possible name for the series: Dictator(?) Book Club. A series looking into those who are somewhere that looks kinda like dictatorship, and asking, "Are They a Dictator?"
I called this serious “Dictator Book Club” ... I think you meant series.
> see NYT on February 4, 2021
It was actually Time magazine, not the NYT.
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
>In fact, this is an unusual but kind of compelling argument for directionally privatizing education and health care; if the government controls the hiring, promotion, and firing process for people in education and health care, that makes it harder for people in those fields to stand up to authoritarian regimes. But if you’ve got to have a government that controls major industries, and you want to leave room for democratic rights, you’ve got to have some kind of firewall between people’s off-the-clock activities and their government-sponsored careers.
That firewall exists in US First Amendment law, see Garcetti v. Ceballos for an example of the explicit consideration of whether a speaker was acting as a public employee in the course of performing their job or as a citizen on a subject of public concern. There are further areas where rights are further protected, ex: a professor in the course of their academic functions.
All told, I trust the integrity of First Amendment jurisprudence a hell of a lot more than I trust private companies to be restrained in dealing with employees whose speech they view as troublesome. The idea that increasing privatization would promote free speech on the margin strikes me as exactly backwards.
I don't think one can make an argument that professors in the course of their academic functions are currently well protected from being punished for speech. FIRE has a rather busy time keeping up with that.
There's a whole philosophical argument to be had regarding whether a right can be considered well-protected if it must frequently be defended through litigation, and I'm not producing any breakthroughs on that topic any time soon. FIRE does invaluable work and I wish them the best, but I'm not sure whether a society where they do not have to exist in the first place is a reasonable threshold for success.
What is clear is that in the case of state schools, 1A protections give them a powerful additional tool to wield against administrative overreach, and removing that tool would be decidedly unhelpful. Perhaps there are those that would argue that in a fully-privatized system competitive forces would produce a frictionless equilibrium where everyone would find themselves sorted with employers that see no reason to exert undue control over their private speech... but I'm not holding my breath.
Traditionally, the biggest advantage that employees have with private employers is that there are so many of them. If one fires you for your speech, you can go to another one.
But in the days when Twitter mobs decide to follow someone from employer to employer, this leaves something to be desired. (We still don't know who David Shor works for these days -- and that's fine, I don't care who he works for, but it's crazy he has to hide it.)
> But in the days when Twitter mobs decide to follow someone from employer to employer, this leaves something to be desired.
Every time I see it argued that reputational effects will be sufficient to police privatized conduct, I can't help but wonder how much thought has been put into exactly how that works in practice... if you want a picture of the future, imagine a twitter ratio stamping on a human face— forever.
He literally posts the name of the firm that he works right in his Twitter bio- it is the first sentence, 'Head of Data Science at Blue Rose Research'. Before Blue Rose he had his past employer also listed right in his bio. I think you may be a bit mistaken
Even Justine Sacco, the original cancellation victim, eventually returned to her old career.
I don't go on Twitter so I was relying on past news stories
When have Twitter mobs followed someone from employer to employer? Twitter cancellation mobs have a notoriously short attention span. You can easily ride it out if you can convince your boss to wait a week, and the former targets all find jobs again relatively quickly.
Possible typo: " I called this *serious* “Dictator Book Club” because it had a nice ring to it, but I don’t want to assert that I definitely know what dictatorship is, or that Orban definitely qualifies"
Would it be crazy to have a system where you elect an autocrat once every 4-6 years, but put in some kind of ironclad rules that they CANNOT run or be elected again, or at least until after a waiting period. Maybe that's a worst of both worlds experience, but hopefully solves the issue of them just changing the rules so they can't be ousted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin-Medvedev_tandemocracy
I'm kind of a fan of the top dog being limited to two terms of 8 to 10 years. That gives him the incentive to have a good first term and then retires him (hopefully graciously) when he's likely to be wearing down. Of course, you get problems like the ex-boss running his wife or putting in a puppet ...
So, term limits protect against a real threat, but on the flip side good leaders seems genuinely rare and when you get one it's really nice to be able to keep them for a long time, especially considering some of the most important national projects are ones that last decades. Hell, one of the biggest arguments in favour of monarchy is that they have so much more incentive to think long-term than elected politicians who won't be around when the consequences of their actions manifest. (Though obviously there are sizeable drawbacks to autocratic monarchies that hopefully are familiar to all here)
One quick comment on bureaucracies and why everyone hates them. I think they frustrate both liberals and conservatives because they are both liberal and conservative, but in different ways.
Bureaucrats tend to be conservative personalities that sought stability and low-risk in a career--going to work for the forest service, the utility, or department of X means you’re unlikely to get rich but have an almost guaranteed stable job with solid benefits. They also tend to be extremely status-quo biased; you never get in trouble for keeping things running the way they have been, your only real failure point is implementing something new and having that fail. This lends itself towards conservative policy and implementation. And then there’s institutional conservativism where after a while, an institution will be comprised of many multiple departments (often with different internal incentives) any of which can say “no” to new ideas.
But bureaucrats tend to be better educated than average. Probably because of that, they’re more likely to be more culturally liberal. Like most educated people, they’re more likely to trust experts in academia and elsewhere. Some of them will have PHDs or specializations in esoteric topics. They’re not in “real world” businesses or small business owners. This is enough to make conservatives feel like bureaucrats aren’t their people.
Put together, everyone thinks the bureaucracy is working against them.
I’ve heard it claimed that *anti-corruption* efforts helped make the US bureaucracy as cumbersome as it is. The argument goes like this:
It used to be the case that when a new US president took office, he’d immediately fire a great many civil-service bureaucrats to free up space to appoint old college friends, high-status party members, campaign donors, people owed favors. Who would keep their fancy presidential-appointee high-status jobs until the NEXT administration swept in and turned them out to do the same.
The civil service didn’t like this and were able to argue that it looks (okay, is) corrupt and destroys institutional knowledge. So over time, civil service rules came about which greatly limited the president’s ability to fire anyone on a whim.
Problem solved, right? Wrong. An incoming administration *still has* people they owe favors to and would like to give jobs! What can they do about that? CREATE NEW DEPARTMENTS! Pretend there’s dire need for a new committee/sub-committee/department to do X, and now the president has a place to PUT some of those people he owes favors to.
So now we are keeping *too much* institutional knowledge - for any issue (welfare, homelessness, coordinating pandemic emergency response…) there are now a dozen *competing* departments who could conceivably handle that issue. Which means the issue gets handled badly if at all - in practice nothing gets done. If the president desperately needs a committee to actually DO something he has to create a brand new one whose real job is something OTHER than to provide continuing cushy jobs for friends of prior administrations.
Given that context, the idea of a president changing the rules so he can just “fire any civil servant on a whim” strikes me as REALLY APPEALING. I kinda wish OUR presidents had that power so they could do some pruning from time to time on the overgrown thicket of bureaucracy at, say, the CDC.
Modest proposal: maybe incoming administrations should get to fire a percentage of the civil service.
That's clever, and I kind of like it. I mean, we'd want to think through the edge cases, and maybe need sub-limits for different levels or branches of the civil service. But if each POTUS gets some number of "fire any civil servant, no questions asked, during the first 100 days of the administration, and a smaller number of the "...at any time during their term" version, that would go a fair ways towards keeping the bureaucracy under the control of the elected executive while avoiding most of the evils of the patronage system we had before.
Are you really allowed to just staff up a new branch of civil service with cronies? I thought you had to go through the standardized civil service tests and everything, apart from the political leaders of the agencies.
Nit:
In political-science terms, what you are looking for isn't exactly "conservative", but incrementalist. This is on the incrementalist <-> revolutionary spectrum.
How many spectrums are there, exactly?
If Orban is so incredibly popular, and continues to enact policies that his people want him to enact, then why does he feel the need to rig elections ?
He needs supermajorities to do certain things.
> The most common comment was that it was a stretch to call Orban a dictator. Maybe I’ll rename the series - Autocrat Book Club? Political Leader I Am Uncomfortable With Book Club? Suggestions are welcome
I think it's reasonable to call it Dictator book club, if you are trying to answer questions like "what is a dictator?", "how do people become dictators?", or "how can we prevent dictatorship?" Your summary and the comments provided a lot of useful fodder for such discussions, even if Orban is not a dictator. In fact, you have to include some non-dictators in your dataset, otherwise you might accidentally find factors common to all leaders, without being able to actually distinguish dictators.
IMO none of the entries thus far have been dictators...
> If one of the two major parties got to answer all these questions the way it wanted, how many votes would that be worth? Would it turn 49% into a victory? 45%? 40%?
I'd say we have fairly clear answers to these questions in US states today - North Carolina's new maps, for example, turn something like 44% into a majority. My own state, Indiana, turns about a 55-45 split into an unbreakable Republican supermajority, and it's very easy to draw districts that would put the state house in Dem control instead.
From that beginning advantage, many advantages are derived. Turnout among Dems is low because they don't feel they can win, and even if they take a seat here or there, it won't break the supermajority. Weak GOP politicians get their districts redrawn to protect their seats, which discourages opposing candidates. They employ research firms to assess the impact of various laws on turnout and adjust voting laws accordingly.
So, the media aspects you mentioned don't exist, but also don't especially need to. It only takes a handful of structural advantages to lock in power.
> The analogy seems weird - I think most Americans who think they’re of English descent are, and nobody ever claimed the Italian-Americans, blacks, Hispanics, etc were descended from Englishmen. Still, the point about cultural descent is well-taken.
The Hungarians don't claim purity either. While almost every culture tells themselves a story about how they're superior not all cultures claim its due to single descent or purity of blood. The point is twofold. Firstly, that ancestors or culture heroes like the Founding Fathers or the Magyar kings don't require particular genes. Secondly, that applying blood purity to nationalist racism is not always going to give you an accurate view of the world.
PS: Some people pointed out that English genes are more common in the US population than I thought. But aside from that point I guess it's because I'm not much of a genetic determinist. I think that identity
> We’re back to our old question of “What is a dictator?” I’ve been unconsciously working off a definition that has something to do with “somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them.” So shutting down the press, making it illegal to join opposing parties, committing voter fraud, that kind of thing.
I'd argue that's a bad definition. By that definition, the Democrats who ended the legislative filibuster are dictators. Obama's a dictator for his various norm breaking. Likewise, the EU reaction to the financial crisis would be defined as dictatorial under this definition. To be clear, I don't think that. I'm bringing it up to point out the definition is too wide. Democratic (little d) politicians norm break too.
I'd also argue you're not really looking at norm breaking. You're looking at a new form of muscular conservative populism that's been cropping up in the world. One that's alarming the media (and I think you) for two reasons. Firstly, because they're on the opposite side of the aisle. But secondly because some of these movements are making major political shifts and often for the worse. A lot of them are pretty corrupt, for example. There's also a minority of thinkers who are far leftists and see any move right as a move toward dictatorship.
I'd call it something like The Populists and include the left wingers, though you'd have to note left wing populism has been much less successful. Bernie Sanders is not unsuccessful but he's done less than Trump.
I think that by, "somebody who tries to clear away the normal mechanisms of civil society in an attempt to make it hard for people to oppose them,” Scott meant oppose _them_, rather than oppose their agenda. They were voted in. Pulling the levers of power to enact their agenda is their agenda is their mandate. Pulling levers to make that mandate permanent and irrevocable is the behavior that may (or may not) be best described as "dictatorship."
Nothing done by either National Party in the U.S. (certainly not related to the filibuster or Obama's "norm breaking") significantly curtailed the ability of voters to vote them out in the next election.
Nor has Orban. Orban has gerrymandered and tried to allow people who are otherwise ineligible to vote and made it somewhat harder for populations that oppose him to vote. But both American parties do that too.
I guess I don't see the distinction you're drawing. What's the difference between opposing a politician and opposing their policies?
(Also, why the scare quotes on Obama "breaking norms"? Obama changed the entire nature of how the tax system is allowed to be used in front of the Supreme Court in order to get his healthcare agenda through. Even if you like that accomplishment it definitely broke norms. As did things like DACA.)
I am unconvinced that you don't see the distinction.
Neither U.S. party has shut down opposition media. Neither U.S. party has rewritten the constitution dramatically increasing their power, removing the voting rights of some minorities and allowing imprisonment of significant swaths of their opposition. Neither U.S. party passed a law allowing the jailing of anyone who spreads misinformation.
I do understand how hard it is to pass up an opportunity to bash on the outgroup, though.
----
I used quotes because I was not sure what he was referring to. I was assuming it was executive orders which were a tad lower under Obama but you can always debate content. But it absolutely holds true that the ACA also did not attempt to permanently enshrine Obama as the defacto ruler.
> Neither U.S. party has shut down opposition media.
An ally of his bought a paper and scuttled it but he hasn't criminalized opposition speech. While I agree it's egregious that isn't the same as actual censorship.
> Neither U.S. party has rewritten the constitution dramatically increasing their power
No but both sides are threatening it. If they haven't it's probably only because they literally can't under the rules as written.
> removing the voting rights of some minorities
What minorities has Orban prevented from voting?
> allowing imprisonment of significant swaths of their opposition
Who has Orban imprisoned? Perhaps I just missed it but I haven't heard of any Hungarian political prisoners. Certainly not significant swaths of them.
> Neither U.S. party passed a law allowing the jailing of anyone who spreads misinformation.
One side of the aisle is trying and is already using corporate power to do so. Do you really think the left in the US would disagree with Orban criminalizing the spread of CoVid misinformation?
The other is banning teaching of ideologies they don't like in school (CRT etc).
> I do understand how hard it is to pass up an opportunity to bash on the outgroup, though.
I find it frustrating how quickly people go to "you're bashing your outgroup" when I disagree with them. It's start to become a bad habit of this community. I chose liberal examples because Orban is conservative, not because I think only liberals do it in the US. In fact I ended the post saying I thought Republicans were breaking more norms. But nope, I'm obviously ideologically captured.
> But it absolutely holds true that the ACA also did not attempt to permanently enshrine Obama as the defacto ruler.
Sure? I think we have a different definition of norms. To me norms means something that is usual or expected, in politics usually due to being within precedent.
I have no idea who your outgroup is.
Threatening to rewrite the constitution is free speech. I thought you were in favor of that. Can we agree that it is not the same as actually rewriting it. That Orban did and they talked is different. Talk that is hyperbolic and inconsequential due to the procedures involved.
Anyone who is defined as mentally challenged is not allowed to vote. (of course mentally challenged is left to be determined by those in charge).
Anyone who can be deemed homeless can be locked up. (A significant swath of their population)
We have always had corporate power deeply involved in politics in the US. It is probably less dominant now than ever before. This is not something that one of the parties pioneered recently.
We have always (since long before our nation was founded) had to decide what to teach kids in school. This is a control on what certain government schools can teach. Perhaps it's worrying(not sure I see it). But it isn't tilting the electoral field anywhere in the short term. It also isn't being directed by our president. We are discussing dictators...
I don't know who your outgroup. I was leaving it to you to define.
I only expressed one objection and have stuck to it throughout. That Orban is dramatically changing the political rules to lock in his power. You denied it and I listed examples. You listed examples of U.S. behavior that I agree is problematic. None of the behavior locks in a president or a national parties power. Speech is speech. Having a few dozen idiots in the legislature proposing illiberal things is not the same as having every legislature sign on to them.
You said "By that definition, the Democrats who ended the legislative filibuster are dictators." Perhaps you were being intentionally hyperbolic and what you meant was, "We have plenty of parallels here in the US. We're no angels." I would absolutely agree with that.
Again, I am unconvinced you cannot see the distinction.
None of the alternative series names sound great to me, maybe just add "scare-quotes". "On this installment of "Dictator" Book Club..."
Some minor corrections:
"I called this serious “Dictator Book Club” because..." --> I called this SERIES “Dictator Book Club” because...
"If one of the two parties was allowed to create its own system from scratch, and it was allowed to be at least as weird as the Electoral College is now, how many votes would that be worth?"
I think you mean "at most as weird as the Electoral College", to convey that the hypothetical party could make something comparable to the Electoral College but not worse. As it it it doesn't provide an upper bound on "weirdness".
"Is there any real-world difference between that the world where the Democrats just.. "
"Is there any real-world difference between that AND the world where the Democrats just"
One point on the "Is Orban really a dictator" question. I think people are missing something important here when they defend Hungary as a democracy because it meets some condition (e.g. it still has elections).
They're trying to use objective definitions without realizing that wannabe dictators are playing an adversarial game with spectators over those definitions. If Hungary has to be considered a democracy to get EU aid money (and avoid international condemnation), and the EU democracy guidelines say "must hold free and fair elections", Orban will do everything he possibly can to meet *that definition* in theory while negating it in practice. He'll gerrymander, he'll pack the courts, he'll take over the media using barely-plausible intermediaries, etc. You need to realize you're in an adversarial environment, anything else will give you the wrong answer. Inspired by this: https://twitter.com/0xdoug/status/1456032851477028870?s=20
Once you're in a situation where one party *wants to* head a dictatorship and has made some progress I think you evaluate the system in light of the above paragraph. That said, the numbers matter here. I'm inclined to say that if you can get 45% of the vote or so vs. an opposing party/coalition and still win, you're more an illiberal democracy, and lower than like 40% is straight dictatorship. If coupled with moves like buying out media orgs, imprisoning rivals, etc. I'd say you can still win majorities and be illiberal/a dictator. It's just too easy to win some support from the population, especially if you have the media on your side/handicap the opposition.
As for all the "Biden's done the same things" complaining, I think this is pretty transparently partisan and dumb. The Democrats could change the rules around filibusters to let them pass major legislation tomorrow, but they haven't done it. And if the US were in remotely the same situation as Hungary or Turkey, Democratic donors could have bought Fox, Breitbart, OAN, etc. and thrown Trump in jail. None of that has happened or will (his AG declined to even investigate Trump) because we're worlds apart from the dictatorships covered in Scott's reviews. As Scott mentioned, Biden can't get much more done than Trump did, because the US government is hard to move in any direction.
I agree with both your points but I think the first one is worth expanding on. It is beneficial to the 'dictator' to do make enough illiberal changes to greatly decrease the likelihood of them being voted out.
Any more looks bad. It also looks bad if they have to step in and further move the goalposts if they find they are still at risk.
"Are there systems of government that can let leaders take decisive action without degenerating into dictatorship?"
This conundrum makes me think of the epigram by Sir John Harington:
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/death-sir-john-harington
Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
If the strong, decisive leader is doing things we like, he's not a dictator. Was Obama a dictator when he brandished his pen and phone?
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-a-phone-obama-goes-it-alone
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-i-will-use-my-pen-and-phone-to-take-on-congress/
"We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I've got a pen, and I've got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating,” the president said.
“I've got a phone that allows me to convene Americans from every walk of life, nonprofits, businesses, the private sector, universities to try to bring more and more Americans together around what I think is a unifying theme: making sure that this is a country where, if you work hard, you can make it,” he added."
And if your first reaction to that is "Don't be absurd, of course he wasn't anything like a dictator!" how is "If the elected representatives of the people don't do what I want, then I will simply go around them by using the powers of my office expansively and getting non-elected persons who will follow my agenda involved".
What was that about Orban putting all his college buddies into positions of power, again?
(No, I'm not saying Obama was a dictator. But he had no problem posturing in an attitude not a million miles removed from 'populist strongman', and the media etc. generally ate it up with a spoon).
Excellent point. The amount of executive overreach in the US is pretty shocking if you are going by a reasonable reading of the Constitution etc. So much of modern rule making is done by the bureaucracy and executive order instead of going through the congress and being signed into law by the president, it is a bit hard to square things within the definition of "representative government."
>The idea is something like: there are a few ways to govern. One is to be Angela Merkel. Be more or less an elite, who only likes things other elites like. Then you can do things like have an independent judiciary (because the elites in the judiciary will mostly be nice to you), have an independent media (because the elites in the media will mostly cover you positively), have independent academic experts (because they will say the evidence supports you), etc.
>[..]
>Another is to be Viktor Orban. Go against elite opinion, and when the elites try to stop you, crush them. Crush the judiciary and replace it with your college friends. Crush the media and replace it with your college friends. Crush the intelligentsia and replace them with your college friends. Then do whatever you want, and the judiciary, media, and intelligentsia will take your side!
Yes, but you're missing a key bit of nuance here in the form of the Long March Through the Institutions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institutions). Cultural Marxists, by which I literally mean men like Marcuse and his fellow travelers in the post-1968 New Left, systematically and deliberately infiltrated the academy, the bureaucracy, the media, the Catholic clergy, etc. in order to promote their vision of progressivism. It is not a mistake that elite opinion in 2021 leans progressive: that situation is the results of five decades of entryism.
Reversing that takeover, literally as old as the French Fifth Republic, means that at least two full generations of elites need to be removed and replaced. Which means either somehow taking and holding those institutions for 25 years or so so that the next generations will be educated in a more neutral manner, or draining the swamp and accepting the chaos in the short term as a necessary evil.
> [...] But Biden isn’t having an easy time either, judging by the increasingly-shabby-looking reconciliation bill. If Biden wants $3.5 trillion in spending, a tax on unrealized capital gains, and maybe Medicare For All for good measure, who does he have to crush? Maybe the “liberalism = hewing to elite opinion = playing on easy mode” equivalence isn’t the right way to think of things.
Apples and oranges.
$3.5 trillion is hardly chump change even for the US Federal government, and much of that is clearly pork barrel spending aimed at the progressive left (e.g. hundreds of billions earmarked for Historic Black Universities). Which, incidentally, is why the infrastructure spending bill was held up: the progressive wing of the democrats was afraid they wouldn't get their promised payout in the form of Build Back Better. Getting that ridiculously large bribe through both houses of congress at all is an impressive flex, doing so in under a year even moreso.
A tax on unrealized capital gains, meanwhile, would explicitly violate Article I Section 9 of the constitution which forbids such direct taxes. Collecting federal income tax required passing the 16th Amendment and there is zero chance that a 28th amendment wealth tax would be approved. Which does support your argument, in that Biden would need to pack or strongarm the supreme court, so one point for you.
The issue with Medicare for All, like with Obamacare, is that nobody who says that phrase can agree on what it means. Which is why the AMA, despite passing without a single Republican vote, was such a mess: its supporters couldn't agree on what the bill they voted on should even say. If he wants some vague gesture at healthcare reform they can push AMA II through and figure out what to write in it after arbitration but it's not like Biden and the Democrats have a clear agenda item here. The biggest obstacle here is not the Republican opposition but their own deliberately unclear messaging.
So by my count, you have one case where in one case Biden seems to be getting what he wanted despite it being completely insane, one case where Biden may be genuinely stymied by the US Constitution, and one case where neither Biden nor anyone else knows what would constitute winning or losing. Not exactly the sort of sandbagging we saw over the last four years.
Apologies for the ugly formatting. I have no idea how to use blockquotes here.
As far as I'm aware, you *can't* use blockquotes here (or italics), so nothing to apologise for.
>A tax on unrealized capital gains, meanwhile, would explicitly violate Article I Section 9 of the constitution which forbids such direct taxes. Collecting federal income tax required passing the 16th Amendment and there is zero chance that a 28th amendment wealth tax would be approved. Which does support your argument, in that Biden would need to pack or strongarm the supreme court, so one point for you.
As an aside, can you explain why that's true for stocks but not for houses? Is it there more to it than stocks are for patricians and houses are for plebs, so f*ck you? Or is it just that?
Property taxes are local.
As Edward Scizorhands correctly notes, the federal government doesn't and can't levy property taxes but states and localities are permitted to.
A federal property or wealth tax would be a huge mess because of the requirement that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
Makes sense. Thanks.
“whereas it took Biden six months to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill that as far as I can tell nobody actually disagreed with.”
Really? Reason Magazine - and fiscal conservatives everywhere - disagreed with it. We’d have been better off to just pass nothing or failing that at least to leave out the parts of this bill that *actively make infrastructure more expensive* such as “buy american” provisions.
There exist conceivable versions of an “infrastructure bill” which would have been worth passing, but this wasn’t one of them.
https://reason.com/2021/11/06/congress-finally-passed-bidens-inefficient-deficit-hiking-infrastructure-bill/
Are you actually claiming *this* bill constitutes “reducing the deficit that the Republicans dug”? (If so, I’d like to see the math on that!)
FWIW the Reason crowd was similarly appalled with big poorly-targeted spending bills under Trump. I’m sure I could find you a few relevant back episodes of the _Reason Roundtable_ or the _Fifth Column_ podcast if you want to hear small *groups* of them grousing about it, or you can browse the magazine archive for yourself.
I’m not a Republican and don’t know a lot of them but I do have the general sense that the Republican *base* on average is much more fiscally conservative than the elected officials representing them. Politicians get elected in part by promising stuff to people. Public Choice Theory predicts this - when you promise concentrated benefits to a few paid for by costs spread out over a large population, the people receiving the benefit are *highly motivated* to lobby for its continuance while the people paying the costs are only *mildly* bothered by any *particular* insult. So it’s easy to find people who are “against big spending” but harder to coordinate opposition to any one program.
To my mind, the phrase "fiscal conservative" doesn't mean the exact same thing as "deficit hawk". It's true that fiscal conservatives would rather have a more balanced budget but they also want the government to SPEND LESS and DO LESS and HAVE LESS DEBT. A series of bills that spend A LOT MORE (while also raising taxes enough that they can not-very-plausibly claim to have covered the extra spending with even more extra taxes) and regulate A LOT MORE is not "fiscally conservative". At least not by my definition. Or for that matter Wikipedia's definition. Hang on, let's check that one. Here's what Google/Wikipedia says:
>"Fiscal conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility advocating low taxes, reduced government spending and minimal government debt. Deregulation, free trade, privatization and tax cuts are its defining qualities."
How much of that stuff is Biden doing? Is he reducing government spending? Lowering taxes? Reducing the DEBT (note: not the deficit, the debt)? Is he deregulating anything? Privatizing anything? No? Then I'm not seeing how "backing democratic fiscal policies" resembles a win for fiscal conservatives. Fiscal conservatives are free to - and nearly compelled to - dislike both recent democratic fiscal policies AND recent republican fiscal policies. The fact that the other team is bad at this doesn't mean your team is good at it - they are BOTH bad to the extent that "fiscal conservatism" is the relevant metric.
I'm opposed to almost all government spending (esp. Federal government spending) outside the realm of Courts, police, and national defense. And I think we need to have a major discussion about what we want out of national defense before we keep funding everything. I've even phoned my legislators about it. But they don't listen.
>After reading your comments, I think I understand the answer better: it’s not any particular policy, it’s that he was able to gain and hold power despite being conservative.
This seems too charitable towards the Orban supporters outside of Hungary, many of whom know almost nothing about Orban. When working with limited information, one does not have to have an opinion consistent with all the facts.
Lots of people like Orban because they think he has done so much to support conservative policies, even though in reality Orban has not done so much to support conservative policies. But I think most pople who like Orban do so because
(a) the "elites" dislike and fear him
(b) he (figuratively) tells people who are in power in Europe to fuck themselves.
As an American, you may not realise how invasive the EU is when it comes to national sovreignty and similar issues. Any figure who stands up to this and doesn't lose will be celebarted in some circles.
I'm thinking a definition for democracy would help us a lot more than a definition for dictatorship.
I'm not particularly concerned with the minutia and flavours of various forms of autocrats, dictators, oligarchies, kelptocracies, etc. Perhaps some political science researcher will care to help them get published by generating a lot of jargon and models around the exact same thing. A tiny group of people, often with a singular figurehead or leader, get to decide everything for everyone else. Queue the 'how is this different to kings and feudal rule' and a long red herring discussion on that.
What matters more to me is how close or how far away we are from democratic rule, principles, processes, etc. Measuring things in a binary on/off 'voting vs no votign' equals democracy or not democracy is incredibly simplistic and uncharitable. And oddly uncaring about the thing I thought we cared about.
If anything it speaks to our mindset and history of kings ruling over us that our minds are parasitised to look for and examine 1000 and 1 minor differences between the type of king we have and democracy is reduced to 'election happened' or not.
Perhaps I'm thinking of some aristotelean ideal for democracy which has never been achieved anywhere, but it is at least good to have a target. And it isn't a novel or unusual way of approaching things. Beyond the headlines and moronic left right mind-killer arguments of which 'tribe' people are in, the more detailed researchers do look at things like press diversity, press freedom, economic factors, ease of starting new political parties in terms of process, fundraising rules, level of cronyism, etc.
It seems incredibly clear to me that all of the 'more like a democracy' principles are things Orban has undermined. And indeed, these principles are also lacking in almost every western nation where you can see even elite studies about elites doing elite things from Harvard show in the US the upper class get whatever laws they want passed almost all the time.
The poor know this and this non-democratic enfeeblement of their desires is why half of the US doesn't even bother to vote. Not voting is the best way they have to object to their disenfranchisement, as counterintuitve as the object-level meaning of those words are.
But so what? Orban and the US and Germany and whoever you want can be said to stray from democracy in any number of ways. The argument of 'Timmy stole cookies from the cookie jar too' doesn't hold up when little Bobby stole the cookie factory and put his friend in charge of it. Orban and Hungary have strayed much much furtehr away from the ideals of democracy and freedom and inclusion of all ideas in government.
I truly don't understand the idea of rejecting a king as a dictator, and then wanting to see one political party in charge as a not-dictator. The coalitions and whatever in pluralistic systems of voting where 10% of the votes = 10% of the seats in the legislature....that's a good thing in my view. The only part where it is 'bad' and 'oh no, the 'winning' party has to compromise' is from the King's view, not the democracy view of the world.
We have real factions in society and far more disagreement than not. So I'd be skeptical of anyone lamenting how an election and democracy does not result in a 'CLEAR' winner who then can or can't do whatever the hell they want. I'd rather have those factions and checks and balances who hold back the political party be other elected people rather than bureaucrats or elites.
In one system it is the elite educators, judges, and wealthy people acting like a not so mini oligarchy of views on and issues they care about being in a compromise with the elected winner.
In another system all of the diverse views of society where 20% of people think this and 30% think that and 10% think this and 5% think something else....they all duke it out in congress or parliament or whatever. Rather than using democracy to reduce all of society down to 'one winner' or a 'ruling party'.
Maybe it is MORE democratic if you NEVER have a RULING party. Perhaps the idea of this winner and ruling class who then go on to negotiate how the government will act with the elite power structure of non-elected people is not the ideal of democracy.
Those coalitions which have to form from many many parties is a better representation of the struggles people have. Why would we go from two neighbours disagreeing with each other to then having everyone vote such that only one of their views is 'in charge'.
Maybe you have a very different idea of what a democracy is or how to define it, but amongst Scott and the commenters and Scott's replies, it seems no one is in disagreement that Orban's views and actions are 'bad for democracy' in Hungary.
As an extra thought...if anything I would think to have a ban on any party having more than 50% of the seats in their legislature or parliament. Obviously you can just have sister parties to get around this which end up being essentially one party, but in terms of an ideal in democracy.....might it be a statement to say 'one group of people' being 'in charge' is overall a bad thing which is to be discouraged.
Perhaps we're not being democratic enough in our Overton Window on the limits of the definition of democracy. In that way, you'd actually find a point where democracy and libertarian ideas being to blend together where the strongest bias and principle in the system is to 'avoid having a king'! Avoid them in a literal and de facto way.
I don't think it is a reality to say a single political party can actually represent all or even most of the views of more than 50% of the people....if anything this type of populist and reductionist way of 'winning' at democracy with a super powerful political party which is 'in charge like a king'....is anti-democracy.
In reality you could find any number of things those 50% of people disagree about and the reduction of their views and the discarding of those disagreements in a step by step by step way in order to 'unite the party' so that it can 'get into power'....that is super super anti-democracy in my view.
It means prior to the election you crush the majority of dissent and disagreement such that everyone is voting on incredibly narrow and homogenised views into parties they have to trust will at least represent a handful of each voters desires.
How is sweeping away 90%+ of opinion, views, and ideas people have before the election in order to form powerful or viable political power bases....how is that democracy?
Let those arguments play out in public in parliament through many parties which actually represent the views of their members, rather than nearly all dissent and diversity of views get squelched within the private halls and invisible processes of political parties.
Elective Dictatorship is good phrase to describe people like Orban. I learned about it from Caplan describing individual States in the US during covid, as (he argues) governors had effectively no check on their power. https://www.econlib.org/the-american-experiment-in-federalist-dictatorship/ but the expression seems to be older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_dictatorship . Seems to be fitting for Orban as well?
Maybe a good litmus test for whether an area is democratic or not is if leaders can be thrown out if ~60% of the uniformly distributed population votes to throw them out? This deals with mild to moderate gerrymandering.
The United Kingdom is sometimes labelled, only half-jokingly, an elective dictatorship. There are few formal checks and balances in the British political system, and the winner-takes-all voting system often gives one party a majority of parliamentary seats (unlike proportional representation systems).
This criterion seems right, about 60 percent. Incidentally, I just saw yesterday from The Economist‘s new issue that Venezuela‘s dictator (a real dictator, unlike Orban etc) has an approval rating around 15 percent. And as if to weigh in on the definitional discussions going on here, their headline topic is „Vladimir Putin has shifted from autocracy to dictatorship“.
Were there any cases where a governor acted in opposition to the legislature during COVID? My guess is that in most cases, they had at least implicit support from the legislature.
> All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries.
Your response to this focused on parliamentary procedure, but I think this is also wildly false regarding elections. Let's look at the US. Orban has been accused of making parliamentary districts vary wildly in size, with his political opponents packed into larger districts. US house districts don't vary much in size, but one party (it's the GOP) has managed to gain a bit of an advantage through strategically-shaped districts anyway. And US Senate districts do vary wildly in size, significantly to the benefit of Republicans. Presidential elections also work in a convoluted way that benefits Republicans; of the last three Presidential elections won by Republicans, the Republican candidate only won a plurality of the popular vote in one of them. (As a side note, it was also elements of the GOP that seriously attempted to remain in power after losing an election, though perhaps this doesn't technically count, as Orban was not accused of doing that.)
Orban was accused of controlling the media so no one could say anything bad about him. I must have missed the memo on the Democratic Party acquiring Fox News and the FCC shutting down conservative talk radio hosts.
Orban was accused of court packing. Some Democrats have talked about court packing sure, but who in the US has actually done anything remotely similar to that recently? Just the Republicans, who prevented Obama from filling court vacancies (most famously a Supreme Court seat, but also lower court vacancies), so that a Republican president would be able to fill more court positions later.
Preventing the filling of vacancies is not similar to court packing. Court packing is adding extra seats for justices to the supreme court, with the intent then to fill those seats with your own people in a hurry. Not approving of who the president selects to go in the seats is one of the specific powers of the Senate.
Not approving of who the president selects as a judge is a power of the Senate, and deciding how large the Supreme Court is is a power of Congress, so this doesn't distinguish blocking appointments from court packing. Both of these violate implicit rather than constitutional democratic norms. And if you were planning to say that if the Senate isn't supposed to ever use its power to reject court appointments then there's no real sense in which it has that power, note that I didn't say the Senate isn't supposed to ever reject court appointments; I said that the Senate isn't supposed to prevent court vacancies from getting filled at all. Prior norms were that nominees should at least be able to get a vote, and that while if there are strong objections to a particular nominee, they can be rejected, Presidents should be given a fair amount of leeway to appoint someone acceptable to them.
Where does it state that Congress has the power to decide how large the Supreme Court is?
This isn't stated directly in the Constitution, but it's always been this way. The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number of justices at 6, and the current number of 9 comes from the Judiciary Act of 1869.
Rejecting unsuitable nominee is part of the power of the senate, but if I recall correctly McConnell explicitly stated that his senate would reject *any* nominee put forward by Obama, which is qualitatively very different than blocking partisan ones in order to force the president to appoint a compromise candidate.
So if he just didn't say it out loud. . . ?
One major difference is that the rules for Senate apportionment are centuries old and the Republicans benefit from them essentially by chance, whereas Orban actively rewrote the rules.
Since the book club series focuses on biographies, perhaps "They Call Them 'Dictator' Book Club". Sort highlight the fact that the biographer is doing a lot of judging.
In the Modi case, the biographer was calling him "blessed savior of the country and definitely not a dictator".
We need not assume who "they" are who are doing the calling :) The review will likely clarify who in question is making the claim.
"Are governments that try to control the bureaucracy more authoritarian than ones that don’t?
One argument in favor: I think most of us would agree that a government (here used as eg “the Tory government”, a particular political regime) which tries to control the judiciary and pack it with supporters is more authoritarian than one that doesn’t. A democracy is supposed to have some number of independent power centers to provide checks and balances, and if you put too much effort into making every power center bow to you, you stop having checks and balances, and become authoritarian."
I think, from a USA point of view, it is a mistake to match controlling the judiciary by packing the court with controlling the bureaucracy as a president, or even the Congress. In the first case, the Judicial Branch is one of the Big 3 power centers in the Constitution. The bureaucracy is a late comer, the result of legislative action and under the purview of the president, and not a distinct branch of the federal government in the Constitution. As such, controlling the bureaucracy is incumbent on the legislature and president; a fourth branch of the federal government operating independently of the legislative or executive branches is a big no-no.
>either you’ll get stagnation and dysfunction, or you need someone who at least flirts with dictatorship
Isn't this the neoreactionary thesis?
What always gets left out of foreign discussions of Hungarian politics is the fact the opposition party Jobbik was an ultra far right party until around the time people wanted to get rid of Orban. They had members that spat at the holocaust memorials and make public speeches about removing Zionists.
I get a little uncomfortable with defenses of authoritarian leaders (there, I avoided "dictators") on the grounds that they improved the economy. That's what He Who Must Not Be Named Because of Godwin's Law did, and a common explanation of his popularity. That's not to say that any authoritarian leader who does the same is as bad as He Who ... It's to say that it's not a good defense of Orban as a leader because it could equally well be used to defend He Who ...
Stevenjbc writes: "All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries. In fact, if he ever rigged an election it could be called "fortifying" it (see NYT on February 4, 2021)." Couldn't find anything in the NYT, but Time had a big article around that time about "fortifying" the 2020 election, an article which makes very clear the difference between fortifying and rigging. The fortification was to prevent rigging. No doubt a person rigging elections would call it "fortifying," but they'd be lying. Soviet dictatorships calling themselves "democracies" were lying: it was propaganda.
Vicoldi writes, "Most importantly, the gerrymandering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000." You've just proved there wasn't malapportionment. Doesn't say anything about gerrymandering.
Vicoldi also writes, "Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymandering that can explain that." Yes it can. See North Carolina.
I agree with Furrfu about the trappings of democracy and with Erusian about Magyar ethnicity: it's very crude to suggest that a break in ancestry, especially at many centuries' distance, means a break in ethnicity. Ethnicity and genetics are not identical.
Also, populations of districts that vary by a factor of 1/3 seems quite malapportioned. In the United States, we are required to redo the districts every decade to avoid malapportionment due to moves in the intervening years. At the moment, the worst imbalance seems to be between the TX 13 (710,000 people) and TX 22 (880,000 people). Intentionally drawing districts with a worse balance than the districts that have had a decade of drift seems pretty bad.
https://www.azavea.com/blog/2020/07/29/which-congressional-districts-are-over-and-under-populated/
I wanted to write that I mostly reverse my Gell-Mann amnesia statement:
I think that the original post had a number of serious problems, but together with this Highlights post, it gives a pretty accurate picture of what's happening in Hungary.
Scott also gets some reverse-Gell-Mann points for not repating the frequent accusations about the anti-semitism of the anti-Soros crusade in Hungary. The anti-Soros campaign is often very nasty and demagogic, but Scott's sense is right, it is just the usual anti-billionaire-populism, nothing more.
Orban often makes it clear very explicitly how much he tries to be on good terms with Jewish people and has zero tolerace for anti-semitism. The allegations of anti-semitism appearing in the Western media is the same kind of dog-whistle-based accusations that were at some point made about Trump being an anti-semite.
The narrative (in original review, but also in this post) relies heavily on the assumption that Hungarian elections are rigged, that Orban has gerrymandered districts and changed election rules so that he can not me removed (or at least it is very very hard to remove him).
After reading more about Hungarian electoral system, I do not think this is true. Yes, hungarians outside Hungary are overwhelmingly voting for Orban, but they are such a small fraction that they do not have meaningful impact. And claim about gerrymandering is just not true.
Orban wins because Hungary has quasi-majoritarian electoral system and his party is about 3 times more popular than other parties. In these circumstances it would be miracle for Orban not to win.
Sometimes you do not even need majoritarian system. In Sweden, Social Democrats were in power 40 years straight, Tage Erlander was prime minister for 23 years in a row. And they did not even need majoritarian system, it just meant that Social Democrats had 40-45% support and other parties had 10-15%. Does it mean that Sweden was not democracy or Erlander was dictator? I do not think so.
I would say this the crux of the issue. Is it possible to move Orban from power? Is it possible that opposition wins and Orban looses? In case of Hungary, I would say yes, you can compete with Orban and you can win. For instance, in case of Russia or Belorussia I would say no, you cannot compete and you cannot win.
"[Having elite support means] you can do things like have an independent judiciary (because the elites in the judiciary will mostly be nice to you), have an independent media (because the elites in the media will mostly cover you positively), have independent academic experts (because they will say the evidence supports you), etc."
I think this statement, or at minimum the popular perception that this statement is true, underlies a lot of claims for the reform of partisan gerrymandering. I think that most principled conservatives recognize that gerrymandering can be abused, but at minimum it still represents an arena in which the parties can contend openly for their interests. Many of the proposed reformist alternatives involve giving power to officially non-partisan boards or committees, which sounds great in principle... but it's a lot easier to support such a system if you trust that the committees will err on the side of supporting you when things are murky and come down to judgment calls. Conservatives think that such boards, which are likely to be disproportionately "elite" at least in terms of education, will incline to favor the Left, and unlike in the case of open partisan gerrymandering (at least you can *try* to win elections when the districts are against you) there's not much that could be done to check the power of a nonpartisan commission once established. Drawing districts favoring your side is boring old partisanship, and both sides do it. Criticizing a "non-partisan" committee would likely be labelled a "threat to democracy" on some level.
So non-partisan commissions to draw districts are, or at least are perceived as, one more luxury that sounds good but in practice will help the pro-elite side. If you're on the pro-elite side, great; you will support such things. If not, you're stuck arguing against a seemingly attractive and pro-democracy measure, because you fear in practice it will help your opponents.
I know there are other proposals to entrust district-drawing to an algorithm, but this just kicks the problem up a level. Are algorithm programmers likely to be friendly to conservatives, as a demographic? Not social conservatives, I would guess (though Libertarians might fare better; not sure). Once again, the concern is that "neutral" decisions makers are not in fact neutral, and installing them would result in a world that is not only elite-slanted, but in which resisting the elite consensus comes across as "anti-democracy" as opposed to just partisan.
Do you mean proportional representation at the state level? Districts each elect a specific person, who is meant to represent regional interests not just the party line - and they frequently do that in America, with even the much-maligned "pork-barrelling" usually taking the form of getting money for the communities that voted for them rather than lining the pockets of the representative directly. Eg. many of the people that voted for Manchin almost certainly approve of how he's a thorn in the side of the Democratic party on most issues - they weren't voting for a generic D, they were voting for a specific representative with known opinions that don't always track the party line.
> The USSR retained the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy (that's what the "soviets" were) even while the Party took over real control.
I'd rather say that USSR retained the trappings of the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy. Whether it was nearly as bottom-up grassroots as usually depicted is very doubtful. Community organizers / party activists would arrive from St. Petersburg or from the guberniya seat and put together soviets. Lenin's theory of bringing-from-without of revolutionary consciousness by the vanguard party explicitly stated that this was the right thing to do.
> Yeah, I didn’t get into Orban’s crusade against George Soros. I think all the “no worse than Biden” people would have been extra angry about that one; is this different from the US crusade against the Koch Brothers?
>
> Maybe the difference is that it feels potentially anti-Semitic? But the same week I wrote my post, Congress was interrogating the Facebook whistleblower about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted by all the evidence. I think billionaires with political influence, Jewish or not, seem to be unpopular everywhere.
>
> That having been said, I disagree with this tendency, and Soros is a good example of why: billionaires are independent power centers who are able to build things without government approval, and so they play an important role in pushing back against authoritarianism. Orban trying to shut down Soros’ university was bad and I hope they’re able to figure something out to stay in Hungary.
Billionaires are also usually distinctly Anywhere people on the Somewhere-Anywhere spectrum, and Soros certainly is a supranational presence and as Anywhere/globalist as they come. A lot of at least European right wing populism is the rise of pro-Somewhere politics so hostility to Soros' ilk should be no surprise.
Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political decay examines directly the question of the tradeoff between decisive government action and resistance to capture. You may find it useful.
All of Soros' influence in the West is undermining of the West, Orban was right to ban it and every other Western country, if it was acting in the interest of its people, would follow suit. Same goes for many other of these globalists who are trying to spread lies through universities and the media and any lies in them should be punished, Same in politics. The practical effect would be that leftism would be impossible as leftism is nothing but false promise from freedom of laws of nature.
They're idiots. Absolute free speech is a communist invention. Free speech as conceived by founding fathers was a speech free from prior restraint and compulsion, never did it occur to them that this would be turn into speech free from liability for fraud, libel, slander or undermining of social norms.
In Soviet Russia, speech frees you!
If Orban is a "dictator", what's left for eternal Frau Merkel, and other quasi tyrants presiding over most of the western world? He's called names just because he deviates a little from the policies favored by the name-callers. Simple. Pure hypocrisy.
Why an American conservative might be in favor of Orbán, despite his obvious flaws:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hungary-new-yorker-rod-dreher-viktor-orban-conservatism/
Probably someone already mentioned this article, but just to be sure.
> glaring problems in this review [...] Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
Scott linked to a source that said, "51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds."
With gerrymandering - and sometimes without gerrymandering - an outcome like this is possible even if all electoral districts have the same size, so it sounds like Vicoldi doesn't understand how gerrymandering works.
All systems based on single-winner electoral districts (and especially the first-past-the-post system used in the US, Canada, and I assume Hungary) tend to amplify the number of seats won by the largest parties. So this imbalance surely isn't entirely the fault of gerrymandering. But with gerrymandering it is possible to amplify winnings even further for one particular party—again, even if the population in each district is identical.