I also wonder about this. The number of pre-likes I get in the first three minutes is very variable based on post type, so maybe people are liking the fact that I wrote about a particular topic?
I usually like posts that write about a subject I'm interested in, not necessarily as a sign of approval of the contents or the conclusion. It would be nice if there was an LW-style differentiator between "posts I like" and "posts I agree with" but alas, one 'like' thingy is all we have.
As somebody who does in fact do this some of the time, it’s more that I can generally tell from reading the first couple pages whether I will like a post or not, and if you already think there is a 70 to 90% chance of liking the post after reading it might as well do it now since you can always change your mind later.
I often like your posts at the beginning before reading, so I don’t accidentally forget to like them once I’m finished. I have not once read a post of yours that didn’t make a point worth liking, even if I don’t agree with you every time, so I just cut to the chase. It’s good to signal boost your excellent writing. I could always unlike the post later, but it’s never happened.
A mystery to me too: even my small newsletter, launched a few months ago, gets *automatically* three-four likes every time I push a new piece. Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for.
"...Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for."
The likes for your small newsletter may be protective coloration for the bots. So that they appear less like focused bots to whatever software might be scanning for them.
I have a number of followers on disqus. Maybe three of them appear to be real humans. I figure something similar is happening on disqus.
You can click on the names of the people who voted on an article, and then click on their blogs... so maybe redirecting some of the attention to their blogs was the goal?
Probably not very effective, but hey, it only costs them one click. If you are the kind of person who doesn't mind spamming others, this would be worth doing even manually.
There are some social medias where I would "like" posts as a save/bookmark feature, as it lacked a native one. I'm sure there are other people who did the same, maybe carried the habit forward.
I have people who consistently like posts within minutes of them being posted, so there is definitely some kind of automation at work. I have no idea why someone would want to do this, however.
Bot Automation, to keep people writing on substack, so that substack stays in business? Never assume that any signal online is actually from a human, unless you can literally prove that by meeting them face to face (and even then, there's substantial odds this isn't the person you've been interacting with online*).
*Some people are Very Shy, and would rather not meet in person. Taken to extreme, this includes hiring someone to meet with you. Given that conventions have entire rooms devoted to "authors who are very shy"... this is more than just Salinger.
Oh, exciting! My algorithm is that I always press the like button for the sheer joy of making the little heart go red and feeling that I've done a nice thing. After all if the essay turns out to be boring I will be surprised, notice, and can go back and make the heart go back to white.
But it looks like some people might actually be reading the title first, which strikes me as silly. The title doesn't tell me much about whether the essay is good!
I think this is pretty ubiquitous across all platforms that have like buttons. There's a reason why everyone focuses so hard on titles and thumbnails, and it's because a like is just as much a signal of agreement as it is a signal that you enjoyed reading the post in particular: you don't have to read the post to know that you agree that Orban Was Bad. Some platforms try to get around this (e.g. Less Wrong differentiates between karma upvotes and agreement upvotes, as you know) but even there, a lot of people upvote posts that resonate and downvote posts that irritate.
I like every post from you and other writers before even reading it, just as thanks for the free entertaining content. Same for good YouTube channels. If it turns out to be a bad piece I can unlike it. But I'm 90% likely to like it so might as well do while I remember.
I like almost all YT vids I watch before I start them because I basically always know -- just from who it came from, or the subject matter -- I almost certainly will like it. If I find I don't then I simply unlike. I imagine some people are doing something similar here.
The probability of me liking a favourite author's post is high enough that spending time to determine whether or not I do is a waste of time. If I actually don't like it I can just unlike it halfway through
Hardly ever comment here, but love Scott's posts. I learned from other content creators on YouTube - please please leave a like, so if I *already* like someone I’ll hit the like button early because otherwise I’ll get distracted, leave their page, do some work, come back to some other page… never leave a like. And that, my friends, is BAD karma.
Is it dishonest to give to a charity? Or to recommend a previous employee to a new company? Not trying to be annoyingly snarky there. But the metaphor seems relevant. Let's imagine that I like the charity's, or my old employee's, previous work. I trust they will continue to perform admirably due to their track record. I give my endorsement via money or recommendation or whatever, even though I am not going to be following up on whether they actually help people with my money or do a good job in their new role -- I might change my mind if I hear something bad! But I'm happy to boost their visibility to the (human or non-human, as the case may be) algorithm.
The difference here may be the interpretation of what a "like" on Substack means. To me, it means "boost this to more readers," because that's what it actually does. I think some people want likes to mean, "I like this," but unfortunately that's not what likes do.
Clicking "like" on a post doesn't mean "I have read this". It means "I am a modern human being who understands that the only purpose of likes, especially on a for-profit VC funded platform, is to feed an algorithm and I, for whatever reason, have chosen to do so".
I have heard that Orban is no more - and probably less - corrupt than most of his predecessors.
But that doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is that Orban held back the tsunami of globalism and loss of national sovereignty, and Russophobia, that has swept over so Europe. This makes him a hero in my eyes.
I personally attach some non-zero value to democratic institutions, but I also attach non-zero value to governments that are interested in the non-extinction of their people, and Orban scores noticeably higher than his predecessors on that front.
This isn't a subjective preference, by the way- you don't have democracy without survival. Try solving for that equilibrium.
Can you explain what you mean? I usually hear this used about immigration, but even non-Orban Eastern European countries have very few immigrants. Czechia and Poland, the two countries I checked as natural comparison points, both seem to be between 0.5 - 1% nonwhite. Czechia's government is moderate, Poland's is conservative but hasn't attracted the same kind of democracy fears as Fideisz. Is your argument that, absent Orban, Hungary would have many more immigrants than its neighbor/comparison countries?
Are you sure you checked the correct governments for Czechia and Poland?
Current government of Czechia is a coalition between populist catch all russian adjacent Babiš and with smaller far right parties (SPD and motorists). The previous government was moderate spanning from center-left to conservative, and the current president is moderate, but it's a parliamentary republic where the president mostly has a representative role.
This last point is also true for poland (although the president has a veto power there). The president is from PiS (very conservative right wing) but the government is a coalition spanning across center-left to right with Tusk (KO, center-right/right). Former government was from PiS, for which there was antidemocratic concerns in a similar direction as Fidesz (reform of constitutional court and strong control of public TV), but to a much weaker extent.
Edit: "Russian adjacent" is maybe too strong and unfair for Babiš, especially as I haven't been following much his position on this since the election. During the campaign he focused a lot on criticizing military aid to Ukraine.
In the specific case of Hungary, I don't think migrants are even the primary concern so much as an internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates. Orban's pro-natalism hasn't been very effective, but trying at least counts for something, and I would like our ruling class to spend as much time, energy and ingenuity on eugenic pro-natalism as they expended on left-wing social programs over the past 50 years before declaring "nothing works".
I think it's totally plausible Hungary would have had more suspiciously-tanned-Ukrainian refugees in the non-Orban scenario, but I suppose I can't prove it. My broader point is that you're starting with this implicit argument that Preserving Democracy is the ultimate and overriding moral consideration here, and while I have no especial love for dictators I can imagine a world where less democracy could be a lesser evil.
I see what you're saying, but this just seems like the SBF argument for it sometimes being okay to do evil for the greater good. I think the reason we have deontological bars against this kind of reasoning is to encode a heuristic that this works much less than you would think - people do the evil, and then the greater good doesn't result, and you're just stuck with evil, and sometimes even less good than you started with because your plan has backfired (as SBF's did with effective altruism).
For example, it seems like Hungary had all the normal downsides of illiberalism over the past few years - poor economy, people so unhappy that they overcome all these obstacles and kicked out Orban in a landslide. But it also seems like the native fertility rate has done *worse* than in all the other comparison countries - the way I phrased it last links post was "Hungary now has a lower birthrate than all the surrounding countries, a greater 2-year drop in birthrate (by far) than any surrounding country, and the second highest ten year drop...proposed causes include declining approval ratings for Orban, who has become associated with pronatalist policies in the Hungarian mind..." (see https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3910901/hungary-little-baby-bust/ ).
So although I agree that in principle, you should sometimes be consequentialist about this sort of thing, I think there's rightly an incredibly high bar.
Arctotherium did a pretty lengthy breakdown on the topic here, but it's possible Orban's pro-natal incentives were less than successful because they primarily went to mothers, not fathers.
I think the economic arguments for left-wing/liberal policies are entirely myopic, of course, since there are few migrant groups that are net economic benefits in the 2nd/3rd generation and the exceptions are just unsustainable zero-sum brain drain. Suppressing family formation likewise does wonders for GDP in the short-term until you run out of people, so it's a totally misleading metric. But you know this already.
The politicians should have very high bars for doing this, but voters shouldn't be quite as cautious; something can easily be obviously bad without being overridingly so.
"Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe (not even the far-right minority party "Our Homeland" officially says that's a problem). Orbán's worry was general population decline, ie. the population of the country getting smaller due to a below-2 fertility rate.
While this seems to have been one of the very few things Orbán honestly cared about besides stealing lots of money (unlike his anti-immigration and pro-Russia sentiment which have been pretty clearly dictated by political convenience), his efforts have been net negative - the quality of health care and education plummeted, and that deterred the middle class that was the target of his tax exemption based fertility policies. Also the middle class probably got significantly smaller during his reign, due to a mix of botched economic policies and constant brain drain to more liberal countries.
As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism. If we grade regimes based on actual outcomes, the winners will be ones that are light on intentions (ie. free markets and lots of individual and group freedoms, with the state having very limited ability to shape things according to its intentions). Orbán's regime was another predictable example of heavy state meddling into economy, culture and public discourse making everything worse.
(Mostly in non-fertility-policy-related ways, mind you. His fertility policies, which consisted of various forms of tax relief, would be entirely compatible with more democratic governments, I just wouldn't expect them to be effective.)
> ""Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe"
I'm honestly baffled as how they can pretend this isn't a major problem, unless their plan is to have the Roma running their society by end-of-century.
> "As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism"
I don't regard equality of outcome as a good thing, so I really don't see how this follows.
I also think arguments pertaining to "but we must preserve our health and education systems!" are basically bogus, since there is, e.g, no correlation between health spending and lifespan within the OECD, and similarly no correlation between homework assigned and PISA scores. The outcomes here are overwhelmingly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to government systems, and vast increases in spending on health/education across the western world have all yielded marginal or nonexistent returns on investment since the 1970s. These systems are all going to be bankrupted by a combination of demographic ageing and welfare bloat in the not too distant future (barring miracles in the automation or biotech sector), so I'm not going to penalise Orban for not caring about them.
I also don't think much of "the Hungarian middle class are fleeing to more liberal countries" argument. Any country that tries to move in a more right-wing- i.e, socially sane- direction, is going to face a problem where high-IQ-but-self-interested people don't want to shoulder the moral burdens now expected of them. Emigration needs to be shut down as much as immigration, and you logically cannot constrict the latter without reducing options for the former. The alternative is the current pattern of the world's talent being slowly devoured by IQ shredders, and I am not signing up for that.
That *REALLY* depends on the specific problem. Getting the lead out of gasoline definitely required government level intervention. So do many other problems, like keeping the streets paved. The problem is keeping the interventions to the domain where they are the preferable solution. (Preferred by who? is a real problem. And regulatory capture needs to *strenuously* be avoided. I recommend that regulators be forever forbidden from taking any payment of any nature from those the ever regulated.)
I just finished reading about the anti-Roma racism and segregation in Hungary. So I asked ChatGPT "Tell me about the fertility rates of Roma vs other Hungarians", and it says their fertility rate is driven by socioeconomic status, as "Highly educated Roma women → fertility similar to non-Roma" and "Low-education non-Roma women → fertility closer to Roma levels". Well, somehow I doubt Orbán segregating Roma children in into their own lower-quality schools was exploiting this.
(P.S. anyone who knows how humans work knows it's incredibly suspicious to suggest that a particular ethnic group, with no unifying ideology, is vermin-like going to out-reproduce the other humans in an area. Because that's just classic racist dehumanization.)
Their TFR might or might not be driven by SES, but SES is hugely influenced by genetic factors, so I'm a little skeptical about how sustainable anti-poverty initiatives can be without massive perpetual welfare transfers.
The year is 2060. With a population swollen by ethnically-exclusive pronatalist policies, gypsies sweep the Hungarian state, allied parties taking practically every seat in Parliament. They may be dusky, and suspiciously tanned, but they are FINE: rippling muscles, gleaming hair, perfect teeth. Seems like they’ve been practicing a “gypsy eugenics” of their own, through partner selection. Death of a nation, nary a pale face to be seen. But take heart: Rod Dreher’s corpse is spinning so fast in his coffin it provides a 100% clean renewable power source nationally. He’s finally earned his state salary.
"He did something. I mean obviously it didn't work, like all those evil bad globalists would have predicted immediately, and it caused various side effects and forms of suffering in the process, but he did something!"
I think the topic of birthrates should be less taboo in liberal spaces but that's where the agremeent ends. No, I don't think "ruling classes spending time on eugenic pro-natalism" would be good or useful. It wasn't the last time it happened.
I often wonder, if you went back in time and talked to Reagan and Bush Sr and told them "in 40 years time, the political party you are leading will advocate for the end of democracy," what would they say? Would they shed a tear? I have to think Reagan would, given his entire foreign policy mission was the dissolution of the soviet union in favor of new democratic institutions in western Europe.
Respectfully, when Poland's government was standing with Orban against the EU's desire to let in migrants, there were LOTS of complaints that the ruling "Law and Justice" party and its leader Kaczynski (no relation to Uncle Ted, I think) were massively undemocratic. This was particularly because the party undertook judicial reforms which led to the disempowerment of sitting progressive judges which had attempted to force Poland's border policy into alignment with the EU's more permissive stance.
Surely, to the extent that a country is a democracy, the organs of state including the judiciary, must do what the people want.
So if judges want to force though immigration, against the will of the people as expressed in an election, it is democratically right that they should be removed.
If the ex-judges don't like it, they can set up their own political party and contest the next election and (again, to the extent that the country is a democracy) they will win seats proportional to their vote share.
Aristotle would have called elected rulers replacing unelected judges "democracy."
Of course, Aristotle didn't favor democracy.
Lately, though, we are supposed to use the term "democracy" to refer to whatever the pundit considers to be good government, such as a democratically-elected rightwing government's powers being ham-strung.
Of course even if one thinks that it was wise of Orban to keep out migrants, it does not follow that he should fire schoolteachers with contrary political views, use government money to gain control of media outlets, or be re-elected prime minister forever no matter how badly he screws up everything else.
Approximately zero Syrian refugees wanted to go to Hungary; it was just between them and Germany / Sweden / the Netherlands etc. The actual problem there was that the EU (or more accurately the Schengen area) has an internal return policy, where the country where illegal immigrants first entered needs to take those immigrants back from other EU countries (even if those immigrants set out because the chancellor of Germany invited them). Orbán tried for a couple weeks to just ship refugees across the country, then richer EU countries started getting cold feet, he got cold feet that they will ship those people back to Hungary and he won't be able to send them anywhere else, and built the fence.
This was a somewhat legitimate problem, unfortunately Orbán realized that scaremongering with refugees works extremely well, so even though the migrant crisis ended, state propaganda media continued to pretend that Hungary is being besieged by Asian hordes.
Comparing Orban strictly to his predecessors I think is a category error as a rebuttal to this sort of argument.
It is great that Orban was able to win an election against bad predecessors by talking about all the ways his ideas were better than theirs.
It is bad that it became increasingly uncertain that he would have anything other than a hand picked *successor* and that the strength of their arguments or improvement in quality of life would not be relevant.
Asking you to do the same on the last sentence. Do you really want to boost the types of people who support coups? I can guarantee that Europe would have clapped wildly at Erdogan's political funeral.
I liked that line. Using a TC quip against a comment in a post that in large part is also a counter to TC. But your observation may also be literally true. For all 3 of us.
In this context it means, "if everybody thinks this way, what is the result," i.e. you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views.
For every action, there's often an opposite and (approximately) equal reaction. In this specific case, Scott is worried about escalation. If the Rightwing breaks the rules of Liberal Democracy, the Leftwing will break the rules as well.
And yeah, it's Tyler Cowen's tagline. Basically a restatement of Supply & Demand.
The Leftwing is already breaking them and this: "you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views" is definitely happening on both sides already. As an example:
Pedro Sanchez, president of Spain and current world bastion of the Socialdemocratic Left:
-stuffed ballots to get elected in his party's primaries
- drive to power funded by his father-in-law's prostitution business
-got into power on a no-confidence vote because of corruption proceedings against the governing right-wing party
-now has three of his own ministers, including his right-hand man sitting in jail on corruption charges
- his wife on trial for corruption (she somehow managed to become a tenured professor at one of Spain's most respected public universities, despite having only a high-school degree)
- his brother on trial for corruption
- his Attorney General convicted of revealing private information (against a prominent right-wing regional governor) and defenestrated
- Constitutional Courts completely under his control
- State statisics office (responsable for polls) completely under his control, and routinely giving his party 5-10% better results than actually end up happening
- State TV and radio completely sycophantic towards him
- promotion of laws to silence any right to far-right media outlets who are naturally critical with him
- his government routinely critical in the media about judges who rule against his interests (such as the judge who convicted his attorney general and the judge who has brought his wife to trial) undermining the separation of powers
- lost his second election but managed to stay in power by forming a coalition with right-wing separatists who had perpetrated a coup by unilaterally declaring Catalunya a separate country, and whom he said, before the election, he would never form a coalition with and never pardon
- after being elected pardoned the right-wing separatists whom he promised never to pardon
- invited into his coalition the basque separatist party comprised of ex ETA members, who were assassinating people up until about 2003, and have never apologised for doing so
- has not managed to pass a budget in the entire 4 years of his second term
- has justified not stepping down (despite all of the above) because "Spain needs to build a wall against the far-right and the right" (ie everybody to the right of his party, over 55% of the voters based on polls at the moment) because they are a "threat to democracy" (but somehow insisting there is only one legitimate party that everyone "who values democracy" must vote for isn't a threat to said democracy...)
- has brought in a law to give automatic citizenship to grandchildren of people exiled during Franco's dictatorship, as they will all presumably vote sympathetically to him
- constantly likens the far-right and right to Franco, and to dictatorships, but is currently best friends with Xi Jinping
There is actually more, but I will leave it there as I think it paints an adequate picture.
Sanchez is currently trying to sell himself as a great champion against Trump (because his domestic popularity is such a disaster), but he has done much of the same anti-democratic stuff as Trump, he's just left-wing... and left-wing sympathizers naturally seem to look the other way in his case.
I think the counterfactual was demonstrated 20 years ago: a proud, beautiful, but starkly post-Soviet country with few exports and a weak economy. Orban's rise was disappointing but not shocking, and something similar could happen again.
It is complicated. Orbán basically invented the word "illiberalism", and that is largely because partially Western liberalism came to Hungary in a wrong way, and was not even ready for it even if it would have been the right way.
Let's talk about the right way first. For example all those white Americans in 1965 who supported the civil rights movement of blacks, they understood it is going to cost them. But they had so much surplus that they felt they can sacrifice for justice. It does not work in a poor country. Hungarians feel they themselves are the victims of poor circumstances, so they have nothing to offer to the Roma or to gays or trans people or anything like that. They were not ready.
Now as for the wrong kind of liberalism. First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country. Same as in Russia. Then it was that kind of liberalism that is talked about it here, too, that somehow tolerance means tolerating crime and disorder.
So Orbán's illiberalism was a rebellion against this.
> First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country.
The realistic alternative was to get the country looted by the local strongman.
For example, in 1990s Slovakia during Mečiar's regime, instead of selling the state property on a free market (where mostly the foreign investors would buy it), it was sold (so cheaply that it was practically donated) to local entrepreneurs from Mečiar's party. His voters applauded this, as from their perspective it meant that the national wealth will stay in the nation.
What actually happened was that these entrepreneurs turned out to be so incompetent that they ruined the companies overnight, and then there was 22% unemployment (on average, which means that in some regions it approached 50%). Some companies went bankrupt, the rest was sold to foreign investors for about 10% of the original price (and the money now went to private pockets, instead of the national budget).
Today, the situation is back to normal, and yes the major employers are German (Volkswagen, Kaufland, Lidl, HELLA, Henkel, Slovak Telekom), American (U.S. Steel), Brittish (Tesco, Mondi), Irish (Accenture), Swiss (Swiss Re), French (Orange), Dutch (ING), South Korean (Kia, Samsung), Chinese (Volvo) etc. (Stellantis) companies.
So it seems to me that the situation is opposite to what most people naively predict. "Keeping your national treasures" gets people unemployed and starving, "being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed.
Unfortunately, this sometimes creates a self-reinforcing loop. The more you ruin your country by "protecting" it, the more people get convinced that the situation is so bad that they need more protection.
I think the main issue here is that neither paths lead you to what "feels fair" and what "was promised" -- the "well-fed" still means "pretty far from Western Europe, and huge internal differences" (both in the society and geographically). And this logically leads to people being unhappy from time to time, and want to "try some other way".
Unironically using the term Russophobia while Russia is in the fifth year of an all-out invasion of a neighhoring country, while also launching sabotage attacks and trying tp subvert democracy in the rest of Europe, is a bit rich.
I know! The Greens in Germany should be shot for being traitors**.
... what, surely you were aware that Russia wanted those nuclear plants shut down, as it would eliminate the only practical competition for its fossil fuels?
**I suppose I ought to say that I do know someone who got paid to make anti-nuclear propaganda in German.
[To be clear: I am not serious about shooting people, merely trying to point out that Russian Influence is widespread and not always in directions you'd expect.]
Really depends on how aware they were of what they were doing. Although personally I support life in prison rather than death penalty in pretty much all cases.
It is not all-out - Russia didn't mobilize men (except for one episode in 2022, and still relying on volunteers; borders are still open). Industry/economy also was largely left as is.
>> subvert democracy in the rest of Europe
And how is that subversion going? Any tangible results favoring Russia? Perhaps, another set of sanctions was blocked? Or maybe some European country experienced a coup?
Can you maybe explicitly state what you are trying to argue?
It seems that there might be some confusion between 2 points I've replied to above?
1. all-out vs. limited war - this indeed killed a lot of people (but how do you know which, if any, of them are 'my people'?)
2. strength of Russian government propaganda effort - which is objectively very weak ('nerf gun'), and not having much of an impact.
IMO, US / European governments routinely do much more press control / narrative shaping / psyops (in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe), quite often get desired results... but then exactly the same actions are somehow very evil if attempted by China / Russia / Gulf States.
LOL at Russophobia. That is a bit like Gengiskhanophobia.
You're a free person, you can take a vacation in Kyiv and enjoy the raining Iskanders and Shaheds yourself. I'd be surprised if it didn't make you at least a teeny bit Russophobic.
By indirect connection, I could name a few thousand people who are actively helping Ukraine by gathering unused meds, fixing wheelchairs, donating tourniquets, donating time and fuel with their truck to get the stuff over there, etc.
Try and find someone who is even thinking of helping Russia in the same way. Not even any of the Russians I know know any other Russians that are willing to help Russia materially (other than being "jerks" and supporting them vocally, while cozying up in western Europe, of course)).
Ukraine is considered a US / EU ally, and helping Ukraine socially and legally (i.e. not risking fines / jail time) is way, way easier that helping Russia. So people helping Russia and living in US / EU probably won't talk about it much (if at all).
I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Don't hear much about that either, though. The only people I ever met that defend Russia verbally come across as the type of person that don't give a fish about helping anyone but themselves.
Whereas, on the other side, I have met dozens of Russians sacrificing free time to aid Ukrainians with humanitarian needs. Talking with these people gives quite the opposite impression - level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things. Some with pain in their heart about what their own relatives and friends back home are still saying about them, Ukraine, and the war. The kind of people that would rather work to make an honest living for themselves without trampling over others.
As much as I try to steelman then other side, nothing comes of it. My own experience is obviously skewed *and* biased, but I'm no stranger to self-criticism. And yet, crickets.
>> I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians (i.e. individuals with Russian citizenship who might or might not be living in Russia, and might or might not agree with official Russian state policies); and same thing with Ukraine (state) vs. Ukrainians.
Helping individuals is much easier; but I would be surprised if from a legal standpoint helping Russia (state) would be no different from helping Ukraine (state), at least in Europe.
Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
>> level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things <...>
There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
>> Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians
Yeah, obviously. But strictly humanitarian help is not sanctioned to the best of my knowledge, even for the state of Russia. But I'm not 100% sure on that one and could ask around if you want a more certain answer.
If you want to send Russians, not the state, strictly humanitarian help - knock yourself out. Nobody is going to stop you.
>> Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
You load up (a) truck(s) with humanitarian aid and drive it to Russia. Just like we and many other private persons do to Ukraine, every week.
As for money/wire transfers, I don't know. Easiest is cash, but crypto or other paypal-like services probably exist.
>>And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
EU border agents would probably search your truck for sanctioned goods. What else is there to do?
>>There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
Sure. But for some weird reasons, I can find thousands after thousands of people helping Ukraine outside of Ukraine, non-Ukrainians even. Does that tell you anything?
The same or worse? Did I miss the U.S. ground invasion seeking to annex Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran? Did I miss U.S. soldiers raping and massacring civilians?
They were talking about Israel, which has had annexations or prolonged occupations of parts of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria in the past and has made clear its continuation of intent to do so very recently. It also, to not get into detail, definitely has cases of soldiers raping or massacring civilians (as do both Ukraine and Russia, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah - this is just a thing that happens in sufficiently large scale conflicts. You can deny it's a structural problem but not really that it happens at a baseline.)
I was talking about both, I don't think you can neatly separate Israeli atrocities from its main patron and enabler, especially as there's been direct US involvement in Gaza (it's why Bushnell self-immolated) and Iran.
Not sure re: Lebanon but it wouldn't surprise me there either.
The phrase many (and myself) have interpreted as an intention to annex in the near future is "the new Israeli border must be the Litani", a river about a tenth of the way into Lebanon (30ish km) from the Israeli border, by the Finance Minister. Other officials tend to use the term "security zone" or "buffer zone" or such to imply an occupation rather than actual annexation, but when asked to comment on the Finance Minister's explicit intent to annex none of them chose to disavow it.
Assuming that's the part you weren't sure on since it's a relatively recent development.
I think this is referencing Israel. And rampantly ignoring the Bibi-endorsed "Western Governments giving money to Hamas." (whether or not you consider this supporting Bibi, he certainly did. But "bibi-supporters who give money to terrorists on his say-so" are qualitatively different from Israel-supporters who aren't doing much other than giving money to Israel).
Smart alecs are now asking about Isis, and whose idea that was, exactly?
"Closely wedded" means what in your book? There are diplomatic relations between Israel and the EU, but nowhere near the level of closeness as between the US and Israel, and some EU member countries are quite openly hostile to Netanyahu's government.
Regardless, it is quite natural that wars happening in your own backyard will provoke more of a reaction that more distant wars. For example, the Arab world does not care much about Ukraine either and is happy to welcome Russian potentates - that does not mean that Arab complaints about Palestine are "hard to take seriously". Or does it?
Arabs seem quite happy to cheer America taking on Iran, the neighborhood problem child. Only the Houthi seem even a tad upset (and with them, it's more a "If Iran goes, who stops the Sauds from attempting to curbstomp us, again?").
Arab complaints about Palestine are... hard to take "seriously" in the sense that the second most hated ethnic group in the Arab World are the Palestinians, and they're not that much behind the Israelis (who could stand to fire Bibi, mind you.) -->nobody will take the Palestinians from Gaza (Egypt would gladly take the land otherwise, Israel offered at some point, but the problem was the Palestinians).
"Ruling" Yemen -- the Houthis are more in control of the place, but yeah, they all DO say "we'd rather work with Israel, no matter how much of a pain in the ass Israel is"** just, not in big public speeches.
**businesses, in general, HATE dealing with Israeli businesses, in terms of negotiating. It's a bit of a culture clash, but Israeli businesses will keep yelling until the last shekel, and ... half the time the other guy is convinced the deal isn't going to get made at all, when the Israeli guy thinks "we're almost done."
I just want to note here, that within the EU, Orban himself was probably the strongest and most consistent supporter of Israel and especially Netanyahu.
Well, yeah, you can also visit Tehran (although getting a visa might be trickier) and then enjoy nearby denotations of US and Israel missiles. Or you can go to Donetsk and experience Ukrainian drone strikes.
... but how would you decide which <insert country name>-phobia to feed in the first place?
Careful about that first proposal, the Iranian regime is not above using visitors as hostages or hanging them as spies.
There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard. Russia is a clear aggressor in that war and Putin himself broke a treaty he signed, do you know? Treaty on the Russian–Ukrainian border, 2003.
Equivocating between Russia and Ukraine is like equivocating between a SS guard and a Jewish prisoner who got hold of a gun.
>> There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard.
In which regard?
My claim is that if you knowingly and intentionally go to the area under attack by country / armed group X, and see that attack (or its aftermath) with your own eyes, then most likely you would dislike group X more (they are shooting at me/people around me!).
But your choice to go to the side opposing X means you already dislike side X more.
This is fine, everybody entitled to have their sympathies; but I am much more interested in discussing various policies based on their merits, regardless of which side might be implementing those policies.
You heard that very wrong, Orbán was much more corrupt than his predecessors (who were also pretty significantly corrupt).
One way to measure it is kickbacks (ie. whenever you get a grant or win a tender or are otherwise paid from public funds based on the decision of some government body, you have to secretly give the people in that body some part of the money). In the pre-Orbán times, a 10-20% kickback was common. In the Orbán regime, the kickback is usually the majority of the money (e.g. the latest major corruption story [1] involved a 75% kickback).
Can someone chime in on American/Western European kickbacks? How often are those more than 10%?
(I don't know enough on bribery in America (where I live), and although I do suspect that the answer is often "this school's slots are priceless", I'm aware that some bribery does occur in Actual Dollars, and we should be able to measure that).
We're 'Murrican. We don't "bribe" other countries. We "generously offer assistance in international development" which has the "unfortunate" side-effect of destabilizing inconvenient regimes and removing inconvenient politicians from office.
I would say, kickbacks are even the wrong word or approach for what happened. In case of kickbacks, a company takes the initiative to bribe someone from the state, it is very individual. But it was more like a state-ran organized corruption machine where it was the state who took the initative to use business as a cover for shoveling money out of the state. It was the state who decided we want X money, let's figure out what can we build for X*1.25 money, and then distribute the X among political loyalists, propagandists etc. I think the correct term for this is political machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
Corrupt and undemocratic leaders are bad in their own right. Corruption reduces government efficacy by MUCH more than what the people siphon off (say, you give a $200m contract to a worse company, costing the tax payers $20m, in exchange for a $1m payoff), so you get less of everything including what you want.
Undemocratic policies undermine the democratic mechanisms that encourage good policy: normally, voters get mad at gas prices/inflation/losing their jobs/whatever and vote you out, and the fear of this makes you try not to let those things get bad in the first place. If you don't fear getting kicked out, then you have less reason to care about gas prices, and more reason to care about making all the bank notes multiples of nine.
So you just get worse, shittier governance. Then you get negative polarization against all their signature special interest policies, because those things get associated with their shitty government.
We're not talking about the alternative being "don't spend the money," though. We're talking about the alternative being "spend the same money for a worse version of the same thing, or more money for the same thing, or some combination thereof."
It is difficult for me to imagine the kind of asymmetric dystopia you desire, or the kind of suffering and toil you want to sentence the vast majority of human beings to experience from behind eyes and inside minds that are just as real and wondrous as your own, even if they may in some cases rotate hammers in their mind slightly slower or less accurately (or whatever kind of ‘peasants are NPCs’ BS this implies).
Tanks are fine, they're small potatoes. It's when governments start paying for "destroy civilization" weapons that we ought to consider whether this whole "western civilization" was exactly a good idea... Actually, any technology with the potential to destroy civilization (or the world) should be a cause to reevaluate "does the government do generally bad things"? Everyone has a level of risk, sure, but -- does it need to be 50% chance of "no more Earth" before we get upset?
(Not Nuclear Weapons. Those are city-destroyers, and yes, bad, but if Putin had nuked Cleveland in 2019, you'd still be going about your life.)
I think corruption is even worse than that. In capitalism people innovate or provide good services to customers because that is the only way to get rich. So when you can get rich on corruption, the desire to innovate or provide good services goes away. So it kills the marketplace as much as badly thought out socialism does.
If the typical free market margin rate is 20%, at least as margin1, it means $100 stolen displaces $500 worth of products and services of the kind that customers actually want.
You are right about the effect of corruption; on the other hand, "capitalism" also includes to build a monopoly (buy out your competitors) and then just collect the money as there is no more alternative. This is also not "doing good work" and "satisfying customers". :-)
Please define globalism, Russophobia and how Orban's policies actually stopped this half formed concepts (also loss of national sovereignity).
Russophobia in particular I have often seen it used as a term to say opposing current Russian expansionism (which in cases of countries bordering Russia could be rebranded as basic common sense). Safe to say at the beginning of WW2 no american was considered Germanophobic for condemning Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Of course there are other use of the word, but not ones that Iv'e personally heard often
I do think there's a genuine phenomenon where Russian culture as a whole becomes stigmatised out of opposition to Putin's current regime - concert halls cancelling performances of 19th century Russian music and the like - and if we're willing to distinguish anti-Zionism (and indeed, even more narrowly, anti-Netenyahu-ism) from antisemitism, it should likewise be possible to acknowledge that there can be a problem of anti-Russian xenophobia without going soft on the current regime.
It should be noted that Putin's war is also a cultural war. His policy is to eradicate Ukrainin culture in the occupied territories, to completely "russify" the people starting with the children. Other countries pushing back on Russia's cultural influence is not a phobia, it's entirely justifiable.
It should be noted that Orban reacted* to the cultural genocide that Zelensky was instituting on his own people (the transcarpathians). This is hardly a "just russia" thing.
*Did you see the comic? Was that blacklisted? It was... very undiplomatic.
I can understand that in Eastern European countries which are actually at risk of having their culture overwritten by Russia, but I hardly think that cancelling a Tchaikovsky concert in Paris or New York is doing anything to thwart Russian expansionism.
Yeah, well, I didn't talk about Russian expansionism, but about the cultural war; that is a parallel battlefield. Boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest is not likely to save a single Palestinian or Lebanese life either. Sometimes "business as usual" is just even less appropriate.
My point is that Tchaikovsky concerts in the West, or classes about Tolstoy on western syllabuses, are not being advanced by agents of Putin's regime. The comparison to Eurovision is fair to a degree, but we're not talking about cultural events organised *by* Russia, just classics of global arts and culture that happen to have been created by centuries-old Russians. Israel's relative youth as a nation makes it difficult to find an exact analogue, but there is such a thing as Israeli cinema, and if some TV station pulled a previously-scheduled rerun of a 1950s Israeli film that had been scheduled internally with no influence by the current Israeli government, I would consider that prejudiced overreach too.
Let's say, you are in charge of providing basic education to the population on the territory controlled by US in Afghanistan or Israel in Gaza.
Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Also, how do you think your policies would look from the outside, if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
>Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Granted, it's not entirely off the mark to compare the Russia-Ukrain war with your examples. But if you believe that your points are all that's happening in Ukraine, let me add some more questions:
What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense. What would it look like if I also mandated that all edcuation has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed. What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
Do you need more? I could go on.
>if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
You know, sometimes being unfriendly is the objectively correct behaviour. As is the case with Russia.
End of your reply suggests that you made up your mind and whatever I can say probably would be in vain, but let me try anyway:
>> What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense.
Afghanistan under Taliban harbored jihadi training camps, as well and Al-Qaeda leadership, and was not willing/capable to arrest jihadists and Osama ben Laden, so yes, it is fair to point out this in school books, and say that US attacked Afghanistan to eliminate any possibility of another 9/11 (which was clearly an atrocity, with ~3000 civilian victims).
>> What would it look like if I also mandated that all education has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed.
>> What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
If those kids are indeed orphans (i.e. there are no relatives who have legal custody, regardless of why it happened), then the state has the duty to provide them with food/shelter/education (especially if it considers these kids its own citizens), including via adoption; doesn't look very good - but alternatives seems worse.
There can be and it's generally performative and useless to actually affect the Russian war effort. Still I find the comparison with antisemitism unconvincing. Antisemitism is based on centuries of proven hate and violence inflicted against an isolated and during the time of persecution innocent ethnic group.
This is not remotely close to what's happening today against Russia.
No, the amount his buddies were stealing literally led to a serious dysfunction in public services, in the trains catching fire due to lack of maintenance way. And sorry to say that but after 2022 Russophobia is objectively correct and globalism looks a whole lot better than that.
Were anyone really minded to, they could say this was a "serious dysfunction in public services." (Really, this was delayed maintenance, probably, due to half the city's population leaving town, and everything going on "delayed maintenance" schedules for over a decade).
One of my closest online friends lives in Pittsburgh! She says “very cool working class culture, lots of anarchist punks and other lovely counter-cultural weirdos”, I guess working class culture can also mean “kinda poor”
There's a good deal of sporting culture (hockey, football). There are some weirdos, but that's probably in a part of the city I don't live in (I live in a quiet neighborhood). There's a lot of colleges and medicine, it keeps things lively around here.
Pittsburgh was hurting pretty bad through the 1980s and the 1990s, it's gotten better in terms of "no longer bleeding population."
Oh, naturally, Orban wouldn't say no to Transcarpathia. And Poland still thinks Lvov is theirs. This is europe, and "national sovereignty" depends on who you ask and when they're talking about. Poland didn't exist for a couple of centuris.
"It's fine to bend democratic as long as you advance <purely ideological ill defined pet cause>" isn't a great way of doing things and not how the west has worked or achieved its success until now. People who often claim about wanting to preserve the keys to that success should pay more attention to what they keys *are* instead of just going with vibes.
If there is any embodiment for "loss of national sovereignty", "globalism" and "corruption" that's Russia
Every single Russian politician who didn't use the term Russian as a slur, is killed by Putin in not so subtle way
(most translations ignore it, but Putin uses colonial term for Russia like "Cisleithania" for Hungary)
And it's not a linguistic quirk, you may look on Putin government and institutions and find how much length he went to make majority-minority rule in 85% Russian country
Yo
Or you may look into constitution, and find that Russia belongs to "Multi-ethnic Cisleithanian people"
Or finally you may look at his foreign policy and find he spend last 12 years in cringe cold and then hot war with Ukraine, Ukrainians closer to Russians than Berliners to Bavarians, painting very soft protection of Ukrainian culture as something only nazi would do
Like, Russia is in real life all the "globohomo gay agenda Klaus Schwab eat bugs own nothing be happy" state that exists only in memes outside of Russia
>In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!)
Which Wikipedia pages have notably cursed headings?
The one for Australian film producer Pat Sullivan takes you on a pretty wild ride. "Rape Conviction." "Racism." "Involvement in the creation of Felix the Cat".
Snicker. The article for my (apparently internet-happy) city is complaining about "this article is longer than World War I" (we're kind of locally patriotic like that, it's a good article.)
Orban reminded me of the the Daleys, who were mayors of Chicago for over 40 years between them. Orban, like the Daleys, was a pretty crooked political machine boss.
In the late 1960s, student radicals tended to refer to Richard J. Daley as a Fascist, but that quickly calmed down and largely vanished before his death in, I believe, 1976. Very few people called Richard M. Daley a Fascist.
The Daley family was so little suspected of Fascism in this century that Barack Obama selected William Daley, son of Richard J. and brother of Richard M. Daley, as his Chief of Staff for his third and fourth years in office.
Of course, the Daleys weren't a threat to Democracy.
How could they be? They were loyal Democrats.
For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley held back the last Cook County precincts until the downstate Republican machine caved in and laid all their cards on the table, setting off an appreciative celebration of Mayor Daley in Hyannisport among Kennedy staffers (according to Theodore White's memoir "In Search of History").
There were two massive cases of vote fraud in Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs) involving Democrats when I lived there in the 1980s:
The 1982 Senatorial election when the Democrat Adlai Stevenson the Something did improbably better than all the polls predicted until finally, several days after the election, the Republicans scraped together enough votes in DuPage County to end it. Stevenson, a naive blue blood, kept demanding a recount although all his boys kept telling him that, you know, Adlai, we gave it our best shot, so it would be best to let bygones be bygones and not turn over too many rocks with a recount. Stevenson's recount led to several dozen Democrats and a few Republicans being convicted of vote fraud.
Then the Democratic mayoral primary in 1987 appears to have had massive vote fraud on various sides.
Neither scandal directly involved a Daley, however.
For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
> For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley...1982...1987...
> For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
Why are you stopping at 1960? Go back further, you may find more interesting and highly relevant information for 2026 voters. For example, my understanding is that there was significant voter fraud among the hunter gatherers in the Jeaga tribe who used to occupy the Palm Beach area. In fact, they didn't even have voting! So we should be somewhat suspicious of the current president, who spends quite a bit of time in that region.
It's a perfectly reasonable description of the highly successful narrative engineering that biased elites engage in. Canada just got a majority by the fairly manifest bribery of opposition MPs, the media are glowing about it
1. Do you think this tactic used by Democrats, of unfairly calling their political opponents threats to democracy, has been effective? Have Republicans been harmed by it? Should they be worried?
2. Assuming the implied obverse is also true--that Republicans, by contrast, more consistently refer to their political opponents using unexaggerated & readily defensible language--does it suggest some kind of path forward or actionable outcome for Republicans? I.e. What would you wish Republicans to do with the information you've provided?
It's extremely easy to find many examples of Democrats referring to victories by Democrats as being fraudulent. In many of those cases Democrats would be quicker to say so than Republicans.
The Daleys won a dozen or so Chicago mayoral elections. Maybe they cheated once or twice, but still ... the Daleys, for better or worse, more or less represent democracy in action.
Personally, I'm pretty pro-democracy. Let the people have what they want, good and hard.
But I'm also aware that smarter guys than me such as Plato were not pro-democracy.
Orban has only won five out of eight elections to be Hungary's supremo, but it sure seems that the people who claim to be "pro-democracy" are much, much angrier toward him about the five times he won than they are about the three times he lost.
ProDemocracy people often tend to be so because Democratic governments are far easier to manipulate, both by manipulating the elections, and by manipulating the elected officials.
Hell, I know someone who tried to crash Canada's currency by manipulating the Canadian government into enough infighting (HardRight versus Loopy Left) that they'd fail to form a government (and this was all to get a cheaper Canadian vacation) -- it notably didn't work because Canadians Just Compromised, but -- it was a good college try.
I don't think anyone is angry about Orban *winning* elections. Rather people are angry what shady things he did in order to support himself winning the elections, and how to build large parliamentary majorities out of very thin popular vote majorities.
But all of this is already in Scott's blogpost above. So your argument seems rather disingenious.
Yep, the Daleys were corrupt and bad and undermined democracy.
Maybe would have been fascist or authoritarian if they had had the power to be so. But since Chicago is a small part of a larger mainly-democratic polity, we (fortunately) never got to find out.
The Daleys are my go-to example for "good corrupt government." Yes, they were corrupt machine politicians who made Chicago their personal fiefdom. But they were genuinely attached to it. "This is MY city, so it better be functional (or it makes me look bad), semi-solvent (or it can't pay me off), beautiful (because I'll always live here), host important events (to show off my importance)." The Daleys, for all their faults, cared about the long-term health and well-being of THEIR city, perhaps mostly for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it put guardrails on it. The current Mayor Johnson, and previous Mayor Lightfoot, are excellent examples of the perils of the alternative - also corrupt, but more ideological and rootless, with less location-permanence and personal investment in the cities they run. You get the sense they'd abandon the place in a heartbeat to advance themselves (e.g. Lightfoot getting booted and immediately going to Harvard / Michigan).
*Noblesse Oblige* is a very real concept, in my experience. The nobles expect to get *paid* and *respected* for their *oblige*, and they don't expect the rules to apply to them, but there's a massive difference between an upper class who feels a responsibility and ownership toward their local town or city and one who doesn't.
I knew my (small-town rich) grandparents-in-law as fairly narcissistic, small-minded people. But at their funeral, it was amazing to hear all of the work and donations they had done for the benefit of their hometown. They really cared about it, and their actions showed it.
Yes, exactly. Today's upper classes, it seems to me, still expect to get paid, demand respect, and to have the rules not apply to them - but without any corresponding responsibility for the ongoing health of the polity. Sure, you'd be better off with honest government officials who aren't quasi-feudal, but that's not the choice available. More often it's either pure climbers, ideologues, and looters, or else the feudal fief model where at least there's some personal connection and stake in the enterprise by the local nobility.
I might reconsider that go-to example, at least in the case of Daley Jr. He was responsible for a number of public finance blunders, most infamously the parking deal which is sending our meter revenue to Abu Dhabi for the next 50 years. Johnson and Lightfoot haven't done anything close to that. And Johnson is very much a Chicago-bred machine politician in the mold of Daley, not a parachuting elite, so your criticism of him from that angle doesn't make much sense.
Really though this entire subthread is kind of silly. "Chicago politics" is a punchline due to the kind of stunts that the Daleys pulled, and to spin that into some sort of partisan victimhood narrative is a stretch. I'm glad that Chicago has moved on from the Daleys, and glad that Hungary has now moved on from Orban.
Johnson in particular is so unpopular that his worst ideas have often been killed off. That he is a creature of, by, and for the CTU, with a dash of befuddled woke for flavor, does not inspire confidence that he is permanently yoked to the city, although he's so incompetent and hated that he may not have a featherbed landing elsewhere like Lightfoot. Instead the city remains billions in deficit and with dismal credit / bond ratings. In 2008, the year of the "worst deal of the century" (no question it was bad), Chicago's bonds were rated AA. Now they're BBB. I would happily take Richard J. or Richard M. over Brandon Johnson any day of the week, and based on his single-digit approval ratings I'd guess that large portions of Chicago's electorate would as well.
EDIT: Also, as to "partisan victimhood," all of the above are Democrats, as you know. If anything it's a generational question - old vs. new Democrats. I wouldn't call that "partisan."
The decline in bond rating just proves my point, Daley got a bailout that screwed over the city's finances in the long term. And he had other similar deals like the Skyway tolls, the parking meters deal was just the worst of them. I'm not going to defend Johnson, I just don't think it's accurate to say he isn't attached to the city, nor is it really relevant to his (lack of) effectiveness. Rahm has been our best mayor this century IMO, and he went off to be the ambassador of Japan or whatever after he left office.
Re: partisan victimhood, I was referring to the original comment comparing Orban and the Daleys, not anything in your reply. Sorry for the confusion.
The brother of a friend of mine in Chicago was a U.S. Senator. He didn't even bother running for a second term because, being a rare honest man in Illinois politics, everybody who was anybody in the state was mad at him.
There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion". I think this is a reasonable argument to hold against people who say any threat to democratic values must come strictly before any other election issue - a candidate who seems 10% more authoritarian than the alternative but who you agree with strongly on many other issues probably is a better choice to vote for in many cases.
(In practice people almost exclusively accuse only people who's other policies they don't like anyway of being authoritarian, so not sure how many such people even think they have to make this tradeoff).
I basically agree, but the more you separate out "real dictatorship" as a category containing only the worst and most unlikely outcomes, the more that real dictatorship is very bad and even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent.
I also think there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things. The same way that a candidate with good policies who also rapes children might be consequentially better for the country than a candidate with bad policies who doesn't, but you can have a win-win bargain between different parties by all of them agreeing never to vote in someone like that no matter how good their policies seem.
To my eyes, your first paragraph doesn’t say much except, “No, you’re wrong, it *is* a slippery slope.” I wonder if maybe AI has gotten you too much in the habit of thinking in apocalyptic terms.
Your second paragraph is sounder, but if you accept that both sides have to be constantly vigilant that potential autocrats don’t gain power, I don’t see why you imagine that such an agreement could be arrived at.
(I *especially* don’t see how you imagine it could be struck in the US after the last twenty years. But you’re talking about theory and principles, not the situation on the ground.)
"Small chance" is very much *denying* "slippery slope". The point of the slippery slope metaphor is to argue that something is likely. Scott's point is that if something is bad, then even small chances are relevant.
Also, no one should be saying "both sides" have to be vigilant that autocrats don't gain power - *all* sides should be vigilant, and we shouldn't pretend that people who opt out of two major parties can ignore autocracy.
Agreed, if you want to criticize it it's more Pascal's mugging then slippery slope. Argument was trading off some democratic value support for support in other categories may be worth it. Rebuttal is ant-democratic can be really bad even a small chance is therefore bad. But without saying how small and how bad it leans into Pascal's mugging style argument.
Fair enough; I agree with tg56’s assessment. But if Scott doesn’t think it’s a slippery slope then I’m not sure his call for action (“even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent”) makes sense. A concerted political effort to stem potential autocracy seems quite likely to produce the autocracy it seeks to prevent, either by direct action or by reaction. What we need is a cooling off, a stepping back. We’ve had two decades with an atmosphere of “it’s now or never” on both sides.
To get in a panic over Trump, the first Chief Executive in my lifetime to actually reduce the size of the executive branch, is indicative of this mood, not of Trump’s actual threat.
I think it's a bit weird to focus on the *size* of the executive branch, while ignoring the degree of centralization. Trump is the first president to make personal demands about what people at so many levels of the executive branch were supposed to do! (Everything from asking them to cancel individual grants to finding reasons to prosecute particular people to renaming parts of the country, on the basis of "the president's priorities", rather than treating the executive branch as a system, the way previous administration had done.) The Supreme Court has endorsed this idea, that perhaps the executive branch is meant to function as a "unitary" agent. But this is definitely a move towards concentrating power in an individual, not distributing it!
But overall, I agree - many attempts to enshrine policies that oppose autocracy tend to push towards autocracy as well. It's often hard to distinguish anti-virus software from malware, given the control it has over your computer, and the immune system is actually the cause of many diseases (like lupus and arthritis and allergies), even as it protects against others.
Well, there is only so much the Executive can do by his own hand. If your point is that the executive branch is working against the wishes of the Executive, then I can only agree, but in that case an autocracy by Trump seems even more remote.
The centralization of the executive branch isn't a threat to democracy -- in fact, it's putting the power back in someone *elected*'s hands, instead of a bunch of unelected, almost completely unaccountable (look at the struggles to even slightly reduce their numbers or fire the ones that were actively sabotaging changes in policy from the political side) bureaucrats.
Now if it's power that the executive branch *shouldn't have* (because the federal government shouldn't have it OR because one of the other branches should have it), that's more of a concern. But no one's actually talking about changing *that*--in fact, the Democrats have been pushing for *more* independent (ie unaccountable to anyone, including Congress) agencies!
The executive power belongs entirely to the President and him alone. He can (and often should) choose to delegate, but he cannot legitimately be *forced* to delegate. The prosecutors and grant writers aren't some independent branch with independent authority. Either they have legislative power (which is a separation of powers problem and itself a threat to democracy), judicial power (same deal), or they have executive power (which isn't theirs but only delegated), or some combination.
And IMO Congress delegating *legislative* or *judicial* authority to the executive (see all the rule-making executive branches and the whole administrative judge complex) is a *way* bigger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done.
“there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things”
But this is undermined by your (correct!) point that “antidemocratic” is a spectrum, and approximately every ruling party is at least a bit antidemocratic when they have the power to be and think they can get away with it.
You can consider dictator risk before other things, but if the choice is between 10% dictator risk with 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, and a 15% dictator risk with 100% of your other preferred policies being enacted… is that really a clear choice to pick the former?
How about "consider relevant differences in dictatorship risk between the candidates"? Obviously nobody is worried about a 1% difference, especially not if other concerns point in a much different direction.
Sure, but that starts to sound less like a “deontological bar” and more like regular old consequentialism.
And in any case, endlessly arguing about whether the difference in risk is 1% or 10% is kind of where we’re at right now. It doesn’t seem like a clean solution.
Per your last paragraph: If you think that there is 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, than I hope it sparks some reflection. Either your assessment of likelihood is very bad or your preferred policies are very bad in the sense of "approximately 0% of other voters/citizens in my democracy want the same or similar policies". The latter is actually a feature of democracy, no? And if you think you know better and still think those policies should be enacted, and you better bend the system in order to achieve it.. then I hope at some point you are going to ask "are we the baddies?"
Being enacted *under the alternative leader*. In this hypothetical we're talking about a potentially authoritarian leader who still has a decent chance of winning the election (despite being perceived as authoritarian even by some of his own supporters), so presumably his actual policies aren't unpopular.
Yes, this is what I meant. You’re choosing between two democratically viable candidates (so, both are pretty popular), one of whom has a somewhat higher chance of becoming a dictator but whose other policies are much more aligned with your preferences.
And obviously in any realistic democracy, the candidates with a viable chance to win don’t literally disagree on 100% of policies - but it may be the case that they disagree on all, or nearly all, of the policies that are “up for debate” or likely to change over the course of the next administration. For example, I think it would be fair to say that a Trump 2024 voter likely disagreed with ~100% of the immigration policy changes during the Biden administration.
There’s also the case that a lot of good things in society are downstream from democracy (via corruption and undermining institutions etc) and that the damage is similarly continuous. There’s no sharp threshold so modeling it as a Risk for some sort of Event which marks the point of no return misses a lot of the negative consequences.
This is true but a different mechanism - e.g. New York or California governance isn't exactly authoritarian but as one party states they still suffer all the other downsides of being weak democracies (like the corruption and weak institutions).
I think, ultimately, there are unfortunately sometimes blurry lines between "ordinary politics" and the meta-politics about whether anyone is undemocratic (and thus undermining the conditions of ordinary politics). Or the entrenchedness of parties can be bad even if they aren't doing anything concrete to undermine democracy. But at the same time, I feel like this blurriness can be used to obscure the plurality of mechanisms by which the spectrum of democratic backsliding affects people negatively.
Yeah. The issue with there being multiple mechanisms which enable democratic backsliding is that they often imply different solutions - for example if you're worried about an executive concentrating power and restricting free elections you want to double down on voting for your own party (assuming you're a partisan who believes only the other party's candidates do this, which most voters are). But if you're worried about single party rule and lack of accountability you want to be more open to voting for the other party.
The California gerrymandering thing is a good example of this tension.
(There are solutions that work for both - e.g. I generally support voting for more palatable candidates in the opposite party's primary and think it's good for both these issues - but there are tensions).
"Real Dictatorship" as a Very Bad Category comes from our Hitler As Antichrist worship. If we lay that down, we can talk about all the stripes and strains of authoritarianism Together, as they probably ought to be. I consider An American Junta to be probably worse in all respects than An American Dictatorship (other political philosophers made some of these arguments in favor of monarchs, they certainly aren't new).
In general dictatorship seems to be a high variance mode so most of the worst failures of government are pretty dictatorial (Stalin, pol pot etc - Mao is a clear example of how a single bad leader can deliver much worse results than the baseline for his system if he has enough power). So it makes sense to worry about it.
But it has to not be the *only* thing you worry about, because that leads to paralysis and "nobody should ever be allowed to do anything", which is also really bad. The example of this is New York after Robert Moses, which decided "hey a guy with too much power pushed city planning in a direction we didn't like, let's make sure nobody ever has the power to change anything again" and thus got eternally stuck in its post-moses planning.
Dictatorship is significantly more stable, and "prone to large moves" than, say, a junta. One can argue that there are very bad failures ongoing in the EU, because they Cannot Come Up With A New Plan. But those are the sort of failures that aren't... quite... as splashy* as A Great Leap Forward (and though that does expose flaws in the dictatorial governance style, it's still an outlier -- Stalin's moves are core: dictatorial power entrenchment).
*"when you shiver this winter, remember you're doing it for them." along with a Ukrainian flag in the background.
Someone who's got sufficiently extreme bad behavior in their personal life - and thus, presumably, is a good enough liar to avoid having that land them in prison - might reasonably turn out to also be lying about what their public policies will be, and/or the expected results of those policies.
> There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion".
Could you explain what you mean with the first ("charitable") part? Aren't there quite obviously antidemocratic leaders who are like 95% worse on democratic values (Kim Jong Un, or Stalin, or Hitler, or whomever you consider to be an *actual* dictator)?
Charitably/uncharitably towards the anti democratic leader. In practice "willingness to break democratic norms" is a spectrum among politicians, so if you live in a fairly democratic society you're much more likely to have a candidate who's like, 20% more willing to be norm breaking than his alternative. While obviously there exist people at the end of the scale, most people on the authoritarian spectrum aren't at the end of it.
See? Here you're talking about undemocratic leaders. I'd far rather have that conversation (and get to bring up Joe Biden's administration with its neoconservatives -- who the hell on the liberal side meant to elect a neoconservative foreign policy?)... than simply talk about strongmen, as if the opposite side (ruling junta) is any Less Of A Problem (it's arguably more so, if only because dictators can be assassinated, which tends to cause chaos).
I think it's pretty obvious that democracy is a spectrum. As Scott said, wannabe authoritarians are going to push as hard as they can, until they can't. Judging where that stopping point lies is tricky, and the price of failure is revolution -- and thus Orban chickened out. Trump is also famously known for chickening out; but the situation in the US is different. We are halfway down the road to a cult of personality, and are long past the tipping point of the cult of political identity; thus, Americans are much easier to manage than Hungarians.
I feel like we should be able to do better than calling democracy a "spectrum"; there's multiple different ways that democracy can go wacky.
1. A country where the party in power routinely rigs the system in their favour, but not enough to stop themselves from losing, and then the other party comes in and rigs the system in their own favour, so it doesn't really matter that much.
2. A country where there's two parties that alternate power, but neither of them actually satisfies the populace's preferences on some particular issue.
3. A country where all the democratic institutions seem to be there and working, but there's a weird equilibrium where one party keeps getting voted in decade after decade.
3 is Japan, and for a few decades was also India, Canada, and Mexico.
2 is the United States on many things, and I'm sure some other relevant countries.
Has 1 happened anywhere? In any case, it seems unlikely to me that "it doesn't really matter that much" if you get long periods with one party in power through rigged elections, followed by long periods with another party in power through rigged elections.
I think you see something like #1 in the UK where both parties have an opportunity to appoint life peers to try to stuff the House of Lords, but they only do it when a prime minister steps down so it is designed to be self balancing.
In Japan, getting a female PM from the conservative wing of the conservative party that has ruled the country nearly uninterrupted since the end of WW2 is apparently so much the only slightest glimmer of reformist the populace can imagine getting that they give her the first ever super majority.
I feel like I should be learning more about something by witnessing it close up. But all I can manage so far is stuttering "guys you know its just going to be more of the same right?". Its not even that I want the opposition to win. Its just i feel baffled by the expectations gap.
There are also a lot of countries with more than two parties, which adds other options, for example, a coalition dominated by one party that keeps adding more extreme parties to remain in power.
A country where NonNative Forces elect their government, via outright vote manipulation, advertising, or more flagrant moves (like removing popular politicians via assassination).
We are one of three bullets shy of this in America (Flagging Iran.).
I think there's both a spectrum, and a quite clear difference between cases like Communist countries where there's no opposition party allowed to compete with them, and cases like Orban where he just stays in power longer than we in the US would permit with our term limits after FDR but can eventually come up short in his Nth election.
In Orban's case, it's not just that elections were perfectly normal and everyone got to campaign fairly and he just happened to keep winning, the way that it has often been the case in places like Canada and the UK. You should re-read Scott's post, and maybe his earlier posts on Orban, to get a sense of what he actually did.
I read Scott's post and his original on Orban, and don't think there's a simple definition of "normal" or "fairly". People can always claim an election is "unfair". An actual transfer of power to an opposition party via election is a proof by example that we don't see in any Communist dictatorship.
Yes, people can always *claim* an election to be unfair. But nevertheless, there are differences of degree of fairness, and you might look through Scott's list to see proof by example that many other democratically-challenged leaders have also actually transferred power to opposition parties via election. Being communist isn't the only way of being bad.
Orbán completey rewrote the election law pretty much first thing after election. It contains several slight nuances, each adding just a couple of seats to his party -- if you are really interested, I can list half a dozen similar stuff. And these are just the election laws, for example, Scott's estimate of the 90% party-controlled media is roughly correct. The elections in 2014, 2018 and 2022 were clearly and obviously "unfair".
(2026 as well BTW, just now so many people were fed up with Orbán that they vote for Magyar pretty much "no matter what". Magyar is also a right-wing populist, BTW.)
In part, yes. (Though Orbán took the time to gerrymander as well, and the population of the districts is not uniform either -- the law expects some 30% maximal difference (or maybe +/-15% from the average, I can't recall exactly), while the max/min ratio is now around 2. (Orbán's party, as most right-wing parties are, is more popular in the rural areas, and of course districts in the cities are more populous.) There was also a minority seat (for the German minority), who also voted with Orbán. There are unverified votes from the neighbouring countries (cca. 200k from the total of usually 5M), usually 90% Fidesz (this time "only" 84%).
The strategy BTW built on the demographics factors: the supporters of Orbán's party (itself a moderately right-wing, populist party, roughly) is of a similar demographics, while the opposition is fractioned into several groups (far-right (formerly the Jobbik, now Mi Hazánk), "commie nostalgics", city liberals, all their separate parties in most cases). So yes, when these groups run with independent parties (which would be the case in a normal European democracy), the Fidesz wins, and wins large, due to the several tricks. (As happened in 2014 and 2018.) When the opposition joins forces, they can be mocked as the Coalition With the Devil (former PM Ferenc Gyurcsány), and becomes unpopular, as it happened in 2022.
Currently, the Tisza proved to be the largest party by far (the far-right party got 6%, which is pretty much what anyone expected; the nostalgic commies and the liberals/protest party got like 1-1% each -- 1-2 years ago they were around (more like slightly below) the parliamentary limit, i.e. 5%). The reason is that lots of people fed up with Fidesz, practically casting a protest vote (pretty much a "with us or against us" situation).
But this is temporary, as the demographics are still quite different. Furthermore, Tisza currently looks like a right-wing populist party (i.e. a better version of Fidesz, e.g. Fidesz 15-20 years ago), which is again not to anyone's taste. I mean, the three parties in the Parliament are all right-wing, and all are populist... This is not a long-term equillibrium.
Tyler Cowen using the fact that Orbán conceded as proof that Trump isn’t a threat to US democracy is a little rich considering he rather famously did not concede last time he lost. Which I would go so far as to suggest indicates that he might even be a fair bit worse in terms of character than Orbán.
He didn't concede but he also didn't _not_ concede.
He didn't say "I concede" but he did all the actions of a person who has conceded -- he didn't need to be physically removed from the Oval Office, nor did he set up a White House In Exile and continue to issue orders. He put on a big show of not conceding but in practice he conceded.
He attempted a coup. After it was thwarted, he remained uncooperative with the transition team. Then he left with his tail between his legs. That's not conceding, not even "in practice."
Which part was wrong? He very famously didn't cooperate with the transition team, and while there's some reason to dispute whether Trump himself attempted the coup in 2021, it's clear that he didn't do much to try to stop it.
No, if you'll forgive me citing Tyler Cowen again marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html it was a riot. Riots are of course bad, and Trump should be condemned for pardoning rioters (along with basically every other pardon), and the President's pardon power should be removed.
No, it was a coup. You seem to be rounding down everything Trump did to January 6th, which was just one of many things he tried to do to overturn the election.
That simply isn’t historically true. Elections are very often a prelude to coups. Virtually the entire history of the French Revolution is a list of elections that were followed by coups
Trump's whole scheme turned on taking the case directly to the Supreme Court (an extremely rare and weird idea, but ... ask the Red Team for ideas, and you get asymmetric warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)
This wasn't a coup, not in any senses of the word.
To the extent there was a coup near Jan 6th, it was "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" in a non-legal (unconstitutional, non-legislative) way. (To be clear: Had Pence assumed the presidency, I'd have no leg to stand on here. Or had an impeachment actually removed Trump. These are legal within our political structure. What's not legal is having a palace coup.)
I actually agree that "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" was a major and under-discussed issue after Jan 6th. And it does reflect poorly on the Dems and people in the administration that went along with it.
But to be clear, it reflects poorly because they *didn't* impeach him even though if they were all worried that he'd launch nukes for no reason ... and it reflects *much more poorly* on Trump and on Republicans who continued to support him.
Like, there's a reason Republicans don't go around yelling about the one thing that actually happened that legitimately looks like the deep state coup-ing Trump.
Just because something is a riot doesn't mean it's not a coup. I don't think Trump intentionally instigated a coup attempt, but he doesn't intentionally do a lot of the things that he eventually takes advantage of.
A coup is a sudden strike to seize power. You can only pull it off if organized in a military manner. A riot is when there's a large enough crowd breaking laws that local law enforcement is overwhelmed. Rioters can't hold up to actual militaries (hence the Iranian regime remaining in power).
Not strictly true, honestly. If Harris had taken power in, say, 2022 without "following the rules" (the appropriate constitutional amendment), and had enough political allies that they were willing to greenlight her as President, that would be a coup.
She'd undoubtedly have used her friends in the DoD as part of her powerbase, but it need not have been organized in a military manner.
With media cosigning it, you'd get... about what happened when Joe Biden "decided not to run for President" -- nobody wanted to ask why this was the one time Joe Biden didn't use the autopen, or why it got posted to Twitter (or indeed, who posted it, because Biden was sick and in bed).
[Technically, the "deciding not to run for President" isn't a coup, as Biden still... retained as much power as he'd had beforehand.]
No, it was a coup attempt. Donald Trump created a series of false slates of electors in seven states he lost, then attempted to pressure Mike Pence to use them to throw out the true slates, then when Mike Pence refused, sent a mob of violent people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" at the Capitol Building to try to pressure him even more.
That’s really a very specific type of coup that you’re describing. The typical developing country coup in the 20th century where a faction in the armed forces arrests the President and occupies the TV station.
But historically most coups aren’t that. It’s usually some faction in the regime using some mixture of force and procedural shenanigans to seize power. It doesn’t have to be the army proving the teeth. On that model Jan 6 looks like an incompetent attempt at a coup. The rioters intimidate Congress into using an unprecedented legal theory to recognize alternate slates of electors, the case goes to SCOTUS and they approve the result, either due to more intimidation or because they approve the scheme.
I don’t think the argument that just because this was done incompetently it wasn’t a coup attempt really stands up. The best argument it wasn’t a coup is that is there wasn’t the required element of coordination between the regime and that rioters. I don’t really buy this but I can see that it’s a possible objection
His attorneys assembled "alternate" electors as a necessary part of their lawsuits challenging the results in those states (as has been done in the past) to avoid a procedural hurdle known as "mootness." Without alternates that the court could hypothetically bless upon a successful claim, the courts would not have been able to rule on the merits of his challenges, something that I hope we can agree every losing candidate should be entitled to.
He then pressured Mike Pence to delay certification as those lawsuits played out, which he refused. They lost the lawsuits anyway, so their electors who were explicitly conditioned on winning those challenges would never have been certified regardless.
He pressured Mike Pence into throwing out seven lawful slates of electors. If these electors had been thrown out, either he would have a majority of remaining electors, or he would have forced it into a vote by the majority of representatives from each state in the House, which he expected to win.
Then, after doing that, he sent a violent mob at the capital, telling them that "if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election" and watching and sipping Diet Coke as they beat cops.
He did some effort to not concede, which failed. It's very charitable on your side to say "in practice he conceded" after he called Georgia secretary of state to "find votes" to secure his win, after he called several governors to pressure them to not certify Biden's victory in their state, and after he put pressure on Pence to not certify the election. And that's forgetting all the false claims he made about the elections.
How do your priors change if you consider that Trump has an entire National Security and Intelligence Team behind him? That Trump knows, say, that some/all of the mail-in ballots in Fulton County were never folded (in which case, how were they mailed in the proper envelope?)...
This year, FBI has collected ballots from Fulton County, which was the point of that phone call (read the transcript), by warrant. This is an active case, and you shouldn't assume you have all the details about it.
Given that the entire National Security and Intelligence Team (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) said there was nothing to any of the cheating allegations, causing Trump to try to do an end run around them, my priors don't change at all.
After 240 something years, the end of Trump 1 made it so we can no longer say that America has an uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power. That cannot be considered a concession
Sure, and if there's any such dispute in fifty years, some future person will do what you're doing and say "after 300 something years …." There have been plenty of similar cases of some unrest after elections in the past, quite famously in 1876, as the easiest example.
Can you elaborate on the 1876 comparison? My understanding is that the dispute was institutional, with competing certified slates that required a resolution mechanism, and that Tilden accepted the outcome once it was reached. This seems like an entirely separate category from a losing candidate personally choosing to resist a clear result. Is there something I'm missing that makes it a closer parallel?
It is my understanding that there were plenty of armed Southern militias credibly threatening a march on Washington to get Tilden into office, and managed to exact significant concessions from Hayes in exchange for not starting a civil war.
I don't think they had the capability of threatening DC. But the military occupation of the south had lost political support over time, so they were willing to give that up while retaining most power at the federal level.
Yes, but Tilden didn't direct the militias (afaik) or refuse to concede. I'm fairly certain he was happy about being able to both have the popular vote victory and escape the stress of the presidency. Doesn't the relevant parallel require the losing candidate to be the one resisting the peaceful transfer of power, rather than the supporters and surrounding unrest which the candidate eventually quelled?
I wouldn't. Not an example of violence used to prevent the transfer of power to the winner of the election. The Battle of Fort Sumter didn't start until more than a month after Lincoln assumed office, uncontested.
You might have to throw in Presidential assassinations as well. Hard to argue it's a peaceful transfer of power when the pervious occupant was violently murdered.
The War over Toledo, West By God Virginia, etc.? I'm pretty sure you have to narrow your range a little more than "America" before you actually get to "uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power."
I'm not the OP but what's the answer to this rhetorical question? I assume it's something to do with not stepping down but I wasn't sure of the exact reason you're hinting at.
The reason is that Pence refused to certify a set of fraudulent electoral slates from states that were won by Biden, but those slates claimed those states for Trump. If Pence had co-operated with the plan, Trump would either have successfully stolen the election or there would be some sort of constitutional crisis.
The point of the rethorical question is to say that the US was one man's integrity away from a successful Trump coup.
The whole idea of the "new electoral slates" was running off the Supreme Court investigating the election. This was NOT illegal, as the Supreme Judiciary can do whatever it pleases to settle the election, including throwing out all the votes, telling everyone to rerun the election, etc.
When you take a puncher's chance and fail, all your plans collapse. That's what happened here.
When you say “the Supreme Court [was] investigating the election,” what are you referring to? Did the Supreme Court ask anyone to send more elector slates? Worth noting that the Eastman memo explicitly advised Trump/Pence not to check with the courts before executing the plan.
Consider that his opponents technically conceded when he won, but proceeded to launch a national scale conspiracy theory that Russia got him elected, which was deeply democratically corrosive. After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election. What he did was wrong - was it more wrong? It was really just more stupid. I hated the idea of Trump but by that point I didn't really consider him to be breaking norms in the way that they already had
Conceding but definitely not conceding in the most sophisticated and effective way you can is just as much of a threat. The J6 people got Shanghaied in extraordinarily hostile court settings. And pretty much nothing, to my knowledge, has happened to the collusion conspiracists
Yeah and in 2016 they also launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits, repeated ad nauseam the claim that the election was outright stolen and that Trump did not win the votes attributed to him, phoned election administrators to try and strong arm them into “finding” votes, insisted on vetting all future hires on a purity test of agreeing that the election was stolen, and never officially conceded.
(Sarcasm aside since I’m sure you’ve had enough and feel sorry for being so silly. It actually is a recognised fact that Russia DID attempt to intervene in favour of Trump. That is verified. Whether it was decisive is unknown and unlikely.)
My understanding of the Georgia phone call was that Trump honestly believed that the votes could be "found" - though I have no expectation that that was an accurate belief. You may be unfamiliar with the civil judgment against Trump which was and is extraordinarily salient to his supporters. This kind of thing basically melts the "quality liberal democracy" fuse. For instance, it's entirely out of my character to have no concern about Trump making a huge amount of money with his gaudy meme coin after his election. But because of the half billion judgment against him, which was later voided, I have literally no issue with it. It's an efficient way for him to fund defenses against future lawfare. This is Grok's summary:
"A Trump supporter might reasonably see the New York civil fraud case as extraordinary lawfare because Attorney General Letitia James— who campaigned explicitly on targeting Trump—used a rarely invoked state statute to pursue a real-estate developer over asset valuations that caused no proven losses to sophisticated banks and insurers, who did their own due diligence and profited anyway. Judge Engoron then imposed a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty (with interest) plus a three-year ban on new loans from New York financial institutions, which Trump's team argued made posting a full appeal bond "practically impossible."
To outsiders, it looked like selective persecution: the massive "fine" was later thrown out entirely by an appeals court as an unconstitutional excessive penalty, yet the fraud label and some restrictions lingered, saddling Trump with huge legal costs and publicity damage during his campaign—without the state ever showing real public harm. In a city where such valuation practices are common, it appeared less like neutral enforcement and more like stretching the law to financially and reputationally cripple a political opponent."
You write this like that Democrats conceded but only in some narrow technical sense that's actually misleading. There's no sense in which they didn't concede. Not only did Hillary concede the next day, but Obama invited Trump to the White House a few days after, said that he was the president elect and he'd work with him on the transition - something every president in recent history has done, except for Trump in 2020.
> After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election
There was no such abuse, and even if there was, this doesn't follow at all. But of course if it did follow, it would follow all the more so that Democrats would think that *Trump* would try to steal the election in 2024 and would justify Dems stealing *that* election ...
It's certainly debatable as to whether Trump no longer had a reasonable expectation that norms would be respected but you might find it interesting to ask your local LLM this: "Are there any classic quotes in which Hillary or other Democrats described Trump's victory in 2016 as illegitimate in an unusual way for American politics?"
Then I asked if anything similar happened with Obama in 2008 or 2012 and it gave 8 examples.
But of course both are small potatoes compared to Trump's (and other Republicans') comments - and actions - in/since 2020. To bring up the previous example, Bush had Obama at the White House, Obama had Trump, Trump didn't have Biden because he never acknowledged he lost and his administration didn't cooperate with the transition, then Biden had Trump.
On the most basic level he's the only one not to concede, and saying "but Hillary called Trump illegitimate 3 years later" is very obviously not the same thing.
We are not too likely to persuade each other any farther, but I appreciate the reminder about the birth certificate people - especially when I asked the question and found one of them was Trump, though he eventually disavowed it
The episode was especially painful, because it was a great opportunity to change the law so Schwarzenegger could run 😅
Orban's situation was quite different, too: he lost 55% to 36% with 80% turnout. That means that anyone not deeply beholden to him is going to defect immediately. Trying to fight in that situation could land you prison or dead. Trump lost by only a percent or two and had a reasonable chance of a comeback.
I like the percentage scale! You could even directly couple it to the election result, as in, “this democracy has a 4% deformation, because one party can shift the result 4% in their favor”
I think gini ratio should be a nice equivalent. Truly egaliteratian republic should have "power inequality" of zero while full dictatorship have the opposite. There's also equivalent mechanism of money begets money, power begets power.
That doesn't count, because 4% is just Lizardman's Constant, which I have just realized explains quite a bit about the smaller weirdnesses of many elections.
You would need to scale those 4% to the amount necessary to reliably win the election. If one party only needs 4% deformation to reliably seize power, then they have little incentive to do more than 4%, and those 4% are effectively 100%.
For a stable electorate that may be true, but I think the US is a good example of a system where it is a bit more nuanced.. These things tend to shift over time, but let's say that for a given decade party A has an unfair advantage of 4% in the house of representatives (because of more successful gerrymandering, poll access, etc). That means that party B would have to lead the generic congressional poll by 4+ percentage points to have a good chance of winning the house. I think it's a useful metric to describe this as a 4%-deformed democracy.
Other than dictatorships with sham elections, the American electorate is the most stable I can think of (basically 51-49 one way or the other), so I may misunderstand what you mean by that.
Your numbers have a difference of less than 9 and 3 points, respectively. I consider that stable because relatively few people, on the whole, change their vote from election to election; there is low variance in the results. In such a scenario, little cheating is required and would be hard to detect by the numbers alone.
For example, if you had a country where every election usually varies widely from 70-30 to 30-70, the amount of fraud necessary to invert the overall result would be much more obvious. But in a US scenario, a few percentage points can make a huge difference and are, on the surface, not obviously suspicious.
Edit: Therefore, if one party can swing the result of an election by a flat 4 points, that effect would be much higher in the US than in the hypothetical other country, and calling them both "4% deformed" would be misleading.
I see what you mean! Let's say there was a country of 1 million + 1 people, of which exactly 500k are die-hard team green and exactly 500k are die-hard green red. Oh and there is also one dude who really doesn't care and just always votes red because the red party slips him a few bucks. Therefore the red party is perpetually in power. This would arguably be a very broken democracy.
I'm not so sure though that this applies to the US. Democrats have recently managed to win elections under conditions that unfairly disfavored them by a few percent. And we have excellent estimates on how much their disadvantage was.
In Canada the media is subsidized to the tune of about 20%. This isn't really necessary for their support, but it's not their money so it's a good deal all around
Hopefully all the non-US anglophone countries can learn from the new Hungarian leader's shut down of the state media
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that state subsidy to media, is the same as state-run media, is the same as media run by friends of the leader with an explicit political slant?
The effectivenes of biased media has two driving factors. The level of bias, and the level of credibility. Media that is plausibly ambiguous in terms of bias and control can have an equal or greater effect than straightforward state media
Surely this is a spectrum. On one end, there's a state-run media that says exactly what the president wants said and nothing else, never contradicts the party line, etc. On another end, all media are 100% independent of government and are entirely free to say whatever they like.
If I'm paying your bills, I have some influence over you. Media organizations can and do try to build some kind of insulation between the owners/donors and news operations, but those don't always work. There are many cases of network TV news stories being influenced (and sometimes killed) by the parent company of the network. If Disney owns your network, there are some stories you are not able to run. If Bezos owns your newspaper, likewise, there are some stories you probably won't be able to run (or at least, if you do, it will be bad for your career). You can also have some insulation in the funding mechanisms, like having a government grant to some media outlet that tries to prevent anyone pressuring the media outlet to change its coverage. But again, this is always imperfect, and of course a lot of the partisan decision is which media to subsidize. If we lived in a world where the public radio stations getting government funding were mostly conservative Christian stations, the Republicans and Democrats would basically swap sides on what kind of funding was appropriate for those stations.
I feel like we have a set of recent worked examples where institutional controls on bias were defeated by ideological takeover in a bunch of media outlets, and a current set of worked examples where norms and rules in executive-branch agencies intended to insulate those agencies from politics have been defeated by a president who DGAF about those norms. This should make us all a lot more skeptical about both kinds of controls to avoid bias.
I think it's fuzzy, but there was a real and important difference in 1970 between Pravda and the New York Times.
What I want from news/information sources is an honest and competent effort to tell me what's going on. It is inevitable that the people doing that will sometimes get things wrong due to biases, their background assumptions, lack of relevant knowledge, lack of resources, etc. It is not inevitable that the people doing that will knowingly lie, omit information they know to be relevant to spin the story or avoid trouble with their coworkers, phrase things in a misleading way in hopes of confusing people, etc. That's all a choice.
NPR can't help being NPR--a news operation staffed overwhelmingly by educated urban liberals of a particular bent, with all the blind spots and biases that ensures. But they can decide whether or not to, say, refuse to report on some stories for ideological or political reasons, or whether or not to omit relevant details of some story in order to try to shape the political impact of the story. Once they start doing that, their value as a news source goes way, way down for me.
And this is true for every news source. Perfection isn't available, but honesty and competence and due dilligence in getting the facts right is within reach of professional journalistic organizations.
In the Netherlands we have a system where editorial decisions aren't made by one centralized public media broadcaster like the BBC or CBC. Instead, there are a number of different broadcasting associations that get time allotted to them according to their membership. Which they can use for whatever content they wish. This system is a holdover from a previous "pillerised" time, but I think more countries should adopt it
Interesting. So essentially the way it would work is the voter gets a ballot with a number of media organizations, and media organizations get broadcast time according to their vote count?
Do you feel this aspect of the system is essential to its success? From my point of view it seems like it could worsen polarization. And overrepresent the views of wealthy people I suppose.
The anti-Orban activity outside of Hungary was 99% institutions who didn't like his policies (being anti the policies of the EU, which is another insane anti-democracy). Go look at the recent election in Romania to find out what kind of democracy the EU likes.
As to Hungary having no tradition of democracy: they had a "Magna Carta moment" 100 years before Britain. (I only know about this from) Mike Johnson's "Revolutions" podcast:
Yes, we can't have a serious discussion about the political nature of European states and leaders without looking at the big picture and going beyond the scope of a sole country like Hungary.
The EU cancels binding referendums when the result displeases its leadership and then just enacts the same laws under a different name (European Constitution Referendum in 2005) or legitimises and endorses an outright judicial coup annulling a completely free election if they don't like the winner (Romanian Presidential Election in 2024).
The EU establishment also has zero issue with highly gerrymandered voting systems like the one France has, which was explicitly conceived in order to assure the ruling President's party could get an easy parliamentary majority with as little as a third of the popular vote.
Nor does the EU seem to particularly mind nepotistic distribution of government positions, since Ursula von der Leyen was literally weaselled into the position of Commission President through a series of backroom deals despite not even being on the ballot for the 2019 EU elections.
Why do we have a decade-long torrent of mediatic and diplomatic warfare between the EU leadership and Viktor Orban?
Because he made a fool of them during the 2015 refugee Crisis, was able to prove to the European community that you can resist accepting huge amounts of illegal migrants without any serious consequences, and has exercised his sovereign diplomatic right to curate positive relations with Russia at a time when the EU demands closed ranks on this matter. Virtually none of these things have any relation on his supposed autocracy or corrupt nature - he was simply pursuing political goals they disagreed with.
I understand the reluctance to use 'dictator' or 'autocrat' until someone is immune to losing power at the ballot box. But what's wrong with 'strongman'? Fujimori and Juan Peron are both classic strongmen and neither ever outright successfully stole an election (Fujimori tried).
I feel like machine poltiics in the US in the early-to-mid 1900s gives a lot of examples of this kind of leader--the machine does all it can to fix elections in its direction, but its abilities are limited, so it has to actually keep the voters reasonably happy or lose power.
An interesting example -- those city "machines" often were very responsive to the masses, in that they provided a system of patronage that took care of the needs of a lot of incompletely-assimilated (and often not English-speaking) immigrants.
But that does expose another dimension: Orban was a "strongman" in that his power was very personalized. The city machines were much more institutionalized, it seems to me, with the same machine surviving for decades with considerable turnover of personnel.
We could just use "wanna-be dictator"? I think that adequately captures "This person would like to rule with an iron fist" without implying "there's a hope in hell of it happening."
"Cheater" only applies if there's an actual rule violation. I'm not deeply read about Orban, but it's not clear to me that he ever did anything strictly illegal.
Installing cronies in the media, banning opponents from appearing on TV, tapping phones, and gerrymandering the country feel like cheating to me. The other stuff in Scott's list don't feel like the rise to the same level - more like "dirty tricks".
I'm not clear how the "did he do anything strictly illegal" threshold works when we're talking about running a country. Wouldn't someone on this spectrum of authoritarianism be actively changing the rules/laws in their favor and by definition do a lot of things that would colloquially count as cheating but be technically legal under their newly-written laws?
How does Trump being put on trial and convicted of a felony by his political opponents rate in the "Orban tilts the playing field" scale? Yeah, the Democrats lost anyway; so did Orban.
If it's so easy to convict someone of a felony they didn't really do, why is it that Trump isn't able to do it against the vast number of political enemies that he's tried it against? The obvious answer is that, while, yes, the New York case was selective prosecution, he did actually commit those crimes. And, moreover, he stole classified documents from the government and tried to overturn a fair election -- two far more serious crimes that he will never pay the price for because of partisan judges.
The answer is "Trump doesn't have the deep state on his side".
And it's not "a felony he didn't do", it's "three felonies a day". Everyone with any money or political presence has actually done something that would be a felony, to a zealous prosecutor.
You have a good chance of getting a jury to convict a ham sandwich.
And I'm sure he did do the felony; the problem is that everyone in his position has committed a felony so the selective prosecution is actually important. It's impossible to not commit a felony in his position.
Comey and James got off because Trump's prosecutor got kicked out by a Clinton appointed judge, who he didn't have on his side. He's still trying to get Powell.
That's specifically a grand jury, because a grand jury is shown the prosecution's case and not the case of any hypothetical defense. It's not trivial to convict people of crimes: nor should it be.
And, of course, the standard of proof in a grand jury is just "probable cause" (the same standard for making an arrest, or getting a warrant), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Famously, Trump's people couldn't even succeed in indicting the guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. You can say that it's easy to convict people of felony, because laws are written in a way that lots of people are technically guilty, but in practice it's actually pretty hard to even indict if someone hasn't really committed a crime!
If laws are written in such a way that lots of people are technically guilty, then lots of people have really committed a crime, so are not hard to indict for something.
I don't think comparing the difficulty of indicting someone for a particular action and the difficulty of indicting someone for at least something in their life is really comparable (I didn't follow the Trump case enough to know whether it was reasonable or not so this is just general principles)
A New York jury is not a regular jury. Political orientation, I hear, is now the largest source of bias in the US. You should see the D.C. Mark Steyn case where he was "convicted" of slander. The prosecution didn't even try to prove a primary component of the case and the jury found there were $1 of damages - and assessed $1 million dollars of punitive damages against Steyn. This was overturned as the traditional maximum multiplier was about 7x, with I believe $1,000 punitive chosen by the judge. It was a political circus
wait until you hear about how mossad controls the deep state, the illuminati control mossad, and steve irwin controls the illuminati from a secret base on antarctica
More to the point, Trump's nature and followers make it hard for him to get a lot of first-rate people to work for him. He's a legendarily terrible boss who has no loyalty to anyone but close family. A different leader with the same broad set of beliefs but without Trump's flaws would have a lot more Marco Rubios and a lot fewer Pam Bondis working for him, and that would probably make it easier for him to tell his underlings to get his enemies and have it actually happen. Further, Trump and his followers just absolutely do not do subtlety or nuance. ISTM that Trump doesn't just want to prosecute his enemies, he wants to be *seen* to prosecute his enemies, and brag about it, and loudly demand that his subordinates get those bastards, and that's the sort of thing that makes judges, grand juries, and juries all balk.
If you pay hush money with your private money, that's illegal because it helps with your campaign. If you pay hush money with your campaign money, that's illegal because you're using your campaign money for private stuff, and also you have to disclose it, but that violates the whole point of paying hush money. But I guess we want to make sure that if any politician pays hush money, whoever they were paying now can blackmail them for having committed a felony.
If this is the worst Trump has done, then he is a far, far better man than I imagined. Probably better than virtually all politicians.
Given what a genuinely sketchy life Trump seems to have lived, it's actually kinda shocking that motivated prosecutors couldn't find more convincing stuff to charge him with.
"Stealing" classified documents that the Federal Government still has copies of, isn't the same level of "stealing" as most people generally mean it.
This is on the level of "forgot to return a library book" for Heads of State. (Notably, Biden did this as well).
Trump isn't nearly as powerful as the guys that ran Eliot Spitzer out of power. Yes, you can absolutely trump up charges, false or otherwise. As the California frontrunner who punted a cat off a balcony shows, there's also the matter of "everyone's got a rape charge or three" lying around, or they wouldn't have support (you have to have some reason why you'll be more loyal than the next politico, and "we have blackmail material" is a good start).
Asking that you wait until the FBI is done with an active case before being quite so prejudicial about the "fair election."
The issue of contention in Trump "stealing" classified documents isn't that the government no longer had them, and its operation was impeded by their absence, the issue is that Trump was very likely selling access to national secrets for personal gain, which is a crime which under ordinary circumstances is treated very seriously and has very severe penalties. If Trump had simply forgotten to return classified documents, and then returned them on request, the whole thing would never have been a newsworthy story among everything else he's done.
If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
Citing Walz, and my former mayor Ravenstaahl, and a whole host of other people. If the FBI cottons on to someone being dirty, and has anything close to "enough dirt to muddy them in a trial", they just get them to stop being a politician.
Remember, this was all done under Biden's FBI -- and I don't think folks are really alleging that the FBI is actually "pro-Trump" (we can get into the whys of this if you really want).
If they actually had anything like a paper trail, they'd have run with it. Biden's team threw every other felony into the mix, didn't they just?
**the counterargument to this is Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and the laptop. But if you don't see a large amount of "tilting in favor of the Democrats" involved in those actions...
>If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
By doing what, specifically? The case was going to trial, the prosecution felt that they could prove the case to a jury, the judge violated procedure in numerous ways to stall the case until Trump was elected. What specifically do you think the FBI would have done to "stop Trump being a candidate" if the evidence was there?
What case? Seriously, cite it here. What was trump being charged with? Because I'm sure it wasn't "selling state secrets". That's a Big Charge, "forgetting to return documents that the feds have copies of" is a small charge -- particularly when Trump's counter is "I already declassified them."
So, sit down and look at that, he's allowed to declassify anything -- completely outside the Executive System -- he is supposed to document his work, of course (presumably so that the Executive Offices stop protecting the data as classified).
Judge "violated procedure" -- yeah, but you aren't talking Judge Dugan violated procedure, where she got to go to jail for obstructing justice. Judges are allowed a lot of lattitude -- technically, sending in a gravy boat as a filing (filled with gravy) ought to get a lawyer some sort of rap alongside the head -- in that he ran out of time to get a Real Filing In, and that's bad, judges don't like that. But the judge can simply say, "don't do it again, we recognize you're sorry."
And you're still looking at a pretty small case. if the FBI thought they had an Actual Case Worth Making, as opposed to Biden's non-civil-service folks saying "throw anything you've got at him", they'd have led with something way bigger.
You're alleging that the FBI had enough evidence to throw together a trial saying "Trump totally sold secrets" (to whom? show me the money.), and then Didn't Run With It. That's looney.
The felonies Trump was convicted of in NY were really a stretch. They found a way to charge him in NY for violating federal campaign financing laws using a questionable legal framework. I think he's a terrible president but that doesn't mean hitting him with that particular suit was a good precedent.
The election interference case in Georgia was much more serious. I wish it had been allowed to continue.
Having it continue while the FBI is raiding Fulton County and reopening the "mailin ballots that weren't folded" case would be hilarious, no? I think we maybe ought to wait on the facts, and then consider whether the President did anything "wrong" (In considering that, one might consider that the President does indeed have access to intelligence reports. And that, after Jan 6th, an unprompted nuclear attack on China was one scenario that the Joint Chiefs were worried about, given their intelligence assessments of Trumps personality and the intelligence on the election)
"Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia is at 70%, and North Korea is at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. "
...so I guess I'm committed to saying it's 2/7 as bad as what Orban did, which sounds about right.
What I would say about the cases against Trump is that, whatever you think of the NY state cases, they aren't nearly as bad as the other cases against Trump being undermined by his political supporters in the government.
The classified documents case and the Jan 6 related charges, all very serious, all with a mountain of evidence, all stopped by Trump appointees/supporters in the judiciary and elsewhere (including the supreme court inventing a "the president is almost entirely above the law" doctrine).
I think we gauge how democratic some country or state is largely on vibes. I mean, our political system has extensive gerrymandering, including legally-required gerrymandering to ensure majority-minority districts in some places. The way presidential elections work make sure that no California Republican or Texas Democrat will ever have a say in who becomes president. Appointed judges routinely overturn laws that are put in place by elected legislators or plebicite. Pretty much every state has ballot access laws that make it very hard for third parties or independents to get elected anywhere. And so on.
Now, I'd say we're still a pretty democratic country--power can and does change hands based on election results, and I certainly think the difficulty of defeating the incumbent party is much less here than in Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey. But also, it's pretty easy to just gloss over the antidemocratic stuff we're familiar and comfortable with.
The problem with that reasoning is that you're trying to say that Trump is particularly bad because he does this sort of stuff. You can't *simultaneously* say that when Trump does it, that's particularly bad, and that when the Democrats do it, it may be bad but it's just something that everyone in power does, unless you actually try to compare both sides and argue that one is worse, not just say "look, Trump did bad things".
I'm not sure what you mean. I think on this hypothetical scale, the US Democrats are (let's say) 10%, and Trump is (let's say) 20%. I agree that if this had been the point of my post, I would have had to explain exactly what things Trump did worse than the Democrats, but since it's an unrelated question, I'll just say that I think it's consistent to think everyone is at various (different) gradations of badness.
(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats! There's a tension between 'it's easy to seize power by convicting your enemies in show trials' and 'you can't have a blanket assumption that no powerful person has ever committed a crime'. I think the Democrats probably let Trump's status as their political enemy push them somewhat in how hard they prosecuted him, and failed to follow a sort of appearance-of-virtue-based caution against prosecuting political enemies even when they're guilty except in the most extreme cases, but this is consistent with my claim that they're 10% bad. I think Trump does many worse things, which is consistent with my claim that he's 20% bad.)
If you are claiming that your post does not say that Trump is particularly bad compared to his opponents, I don't believe you. It is true that you didn't add the literal words "... and the Democrats aren't", but principles of implicature make it communicate that you think Trump is particularly bad.
>(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats
Come on, you haven't heard of three felonies a day? It's not as if he was convicted of murder or counterfeiting. All important politicians have committed something that a hostile court could call a felony; whether they get prosecuted is just a matter of whether the people prosecuting have the power and the will.
I guess it depends on how strong the evidence was that Trump really did commit the crimes in question. I mean, what would be the alternative? Give Trump carte blanche for any crime as long as he isn't in power because prosecuting him would be "lawfare" and "election interference", and also giving him carte blanche while he IS in power because presidential immunity yada yada? Oh wait, that's exactly how it turned out... and it's not democratic either.
It's very hard in the US to find someone guilty for something they didn't do. But there's often a lot of latitude in whether to prosecute something in the first place. So the real question there is, did Trump do something that was technically a crime but is done by a lot of people and usually ignored? That might be the case in the Stormy Daniels case (although certainly not in most of his other cases, about refusing to return confidential documents, and his attempt to steal the election).
The alternative is Gore, of course. This is a strategic level alternative, but they didn't NEED to force Trump into running again (or wearing pinstripes). They could have just bought him off, let him keep ranting about stolen elections, and gotten on with the good business of selling America to China.
... I suspect your "what would be the alternative" depends on how much you think rape is normal within our legislative bodies. Swalwell, for example, only resigned after someone threw his entire rape file at him.
He was reelected democratically though. I would characterize a lot of his actions as president as undemocratic, but the election itself was democratic.
Ultimately the Ds never learned the lesson that Trump behaving badly wouldn't give them a "win one free election" card. You still have to put a ticket together, and make sure both candidates can string a sentence together.
I'm divided on the utility of prosecuting Trump's crimes after he leaves in 2028. He definitely deserves it, but I also don't want to spend the next four elections relitigating this disaster.
And what exactly Orban did to make salaries not increase? I always find such simplistic appeals to economy weird. Russia experienced massive growth in 2000s and early 2010s, but according to Putin's opponents, it's all just because of oil prices and he had very little to do with that. Afterwards this growth slowed down greatly, and that, of course, according to Putin's opponents, was now entirely his own fault, because he has too much corruption or something (I'm talking about late 2010s-early 2020s, pre-Ukraine war, let's not get into that).
Economies are very complex things, depending on many structural and external factors, there aren't really any guaranteed recipes for continuous growth, especially past middle-income zone, and there's only so much that even a 100% dictatory dictator can do, or, for that matter, a 100% democratey democracy can do to make salaries larger, even if they really want to. Case in point, in Finland, widely considered one of the most democratic countries in the world, real incomes have famously not grown for 15 years or more at this point, basically since great financial crisis and subsequent Nokia crash. In fact, it seems that it's exactly the stagnation and backslides in living conditions in much of the Western world that brings characters such as Trump to power; whatever liberal democracies have been doing seems to have stopped working. At the end of the day, it's not like Western people are so enlightened and freedom-loving, it's just that under the current system they have enjoyed high standards of life for decades or more, but exactly to which extent this has been helped by democracy is not at all obvious.
I would generally also say that people who never lived in more than one country typically seem to have very little perspective on whether things in their country are actually unusually bad (or good) or in line with trends. If you look at GDP per capita trajectory of Hungary, it actually tracks Poland quite closely (and, for example, tracks Romania with a rather consistent gap, in favor of Hungary). Or, as someone in another comment complains: "Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating." Um, minus the "educated accused of leftism" part, that happens kinda everywhere now! In Finland for sure.
He created a mafia state where the primary means for companies of being successful is playing the corruption game better, rather than fulfilling consumers' needs better, resulting in approximately zero productivity growth over sixteen years. (Wrecking the education system and the scientific institutions also didn't help.)
He did significantly increase the labor force participation rate during the first half of his reign, which along with the influx of EU funds led to a pretty significant increase in real wages, so he was genuinely popular until the late 2010's; also the regime was significantly less oppressive during that time, although I wouldn't call it a democracy past 2014. But labor force participation can only be increased once while productivity can increase forever, so his system very predictably became a dead-end.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, as I obviously can't show clear links between these difference in salary growth with Orban policies (Gergő Tisza's comment address this better than I could anyway). My point was that one's nationalistic rhetoric doesn't necessarily imply that one deeply care about the wellbeing of the population of one's nation, or that one's policies would provide obvious benefits to one's nation. But I think it's generally fair to assume that corruption and embezzlement correlate with weaker economic performance.
Where do you get your GDP per capita from? Is it adjusted for PPA/inflation? In the data I see Hungary performed worse than Poland, Romania and Croatia over the last 16 years and better than Slovakia (not known to be the least corrupted country in central Europe either)
Yes, that's exactly the narrative that keeps them in power and let's them do whatever they want.
As someone from Eastern Europe, I can say they are not heroes. I wouldn't go as far as saying we are suffering, but it is slow landslide for us, who are trying to live their own lives, start a business and a family.
Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
>Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
To be fair, apart from the "educated accused of leftism" bit (they're more likely to be accused of not being leftist), that's happening basically everywhere now.
You are right, that's happening everywhere. And there are other factors involved, like COVID and wars. That's the price for oversimplification of my comment to keep it short.
So let's put some numbers. Prices of accommodation in the last 10 years more than tripled here. I checked and now you need roughly 1.5 annual median salaries to buy average house in US according to Gemini (which might be wrong of course). Here, it's more than 15 annual salaries. Why is that? Houses are kept by a few, usually connected to people on the right places. And there are very friendly laws for them. E.g. housing tax is very low, like 3 Starbucks coffees annually. For every house you own.
Inflation? Super high because no investments in anything over the last few years. Half of GDP goes to retirements, so ruling parties are winning all old people votes.
So basically - you put the entire economy in sustaining very few. And there's new term for that I discovered recently - neoroyalism. It's basically feudalism where vassals are companies and friends loyal to the ruling family/party. Downside? It will economically decimate the country as whole in a few decades.
Again, that's not really specific to Hungary. In the UK, where I live, real wages have barely risen since 2008, average house price went up from c. 3.1 times the average salary in 1993 to 8.5 times the average salary in 2022 (and even higher today, of course, but the source I looked at only went to 2022). We have this thing called the triple lock, which means that state pensions are guarenteed to increase by either the rate of inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%, whatever is highest. As for starting a business, energy costs, regulation, and tax rates mean that you can pretty much forget about it, even if none of the Prime Minister's friends are interested in the sector. Plus we have loads of extra welfare spending, because we have millions of economically unproductive immigrants in the country. All of which is to say -- maybe Hungary's economy would be doing better if someone other than Orban were in charge, but it's far from guaranteed.
I know it's not ideal in UK either. However, it's important to keep in mind that democracy doesn't imply wealth. Autocracy, on the other hand, almost guarantees the contrary. Sometimes I also think of UK and Japan economic potential as very non-linear, with many cycles of growth/stagnation/downhills, probably given the limited resources islands have to offer. Foreign buyers of houses in London that is generally limited in space is probably not really helping either.
However, I checked numbers again, this time for retirements. UK has replacement rate of 25-30% and average pension is roughly 38% of median salary. Czech Republic has replacement rate of 50-55% and average pension is roughly 59% of median salary. And then there are subsidiaries for rents.
In our house, there are only 2 flats that are not inhabited by people 60+. This is the direct product of pro-russian Billionaire running the country for his 4th term, slowly taking over everything in the state, including media and business. So retirees are far better in Czechia than in UK. But the same can happen in UK if people like Nigel Farage lead the country for some time.
As with being better with someone else than Orban. 20 years ago, the entire V4 economy was highly successful. A lot of young and highly educated people willing to make a difference. Nowadays, it's a totally different picture after 4 terms of populist leaders in 3 out of 4 of those countries. You can ask GPT to compare economies of last 20 years of Hungary and Poland.
So it's not impossible that if Trump people stay there for another 10 years, houses will have 10 times more price tag, usually owned by people connected to trumpists, who collect money on rents. Mortgage will be accessible only to those who work at Google/OpenAI. I mean accessible, on 30 years loan, they still won't be able to buy it right away.
Then you get the same Orbán/Fico/Babiš reality we are facing right now. That is the price for autocrats/neoroyalists/illiberal democrats or whatever name you find for them.
And then there's business part I forgot to mention.
You can do your business in your field usually until some rulers friend wants to start own business in the same field. Traditionally it was construction, but there are new ones, IT or even environmental magnates recently. Oh, psychological counselor? Be afraid of a day some king's friend with a degree from health studies will want to do the same. Then they impose new rules that are hard to follow and easy to break. So you either join them, keep very low profile or face penalties and prepare for endless battles.
This logic is beyond stupid. Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project? Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it? You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
"Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively."
That is not a reason *why* normal people should care, the vast majority of which do not.
"Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?"
Institutions are materially beneficial for people's lives, even people outside of Hungary, whereas culture is a simulacrum, a form of high level human social role playing basically. It means nothing concretely, and can easily be changed.
"This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want."
Not if they are damaging their own people, which in this case they were, for 16 years.
As Bret Devereaux notes, the United States is not, and never has been, the homeland of an ethnic group. So as an American, I consider "He kept Hungary for the Hungarians." to be a *primary* reason I don't want to see any US politician copy him.
> I’ve also heard the term “hybrid regime”, but you can’t naturally say “Viktor Orban, the hybrid regimester of Hungary…”
Regimester is too fun a word, we've got to use it now. A regimester, you know, somebody who's crookedly in the bag for a regime, but a smidgen lovable at the same time.
As a dyed in the wool classical liberal, I definitely would prefer liberal democracy, but I'm not sure calling Orban anti-democratic is the right frame. I think the right distinction here is liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. There have been all sorts of schemes that polled some segment of the population in order to determine who was in office. In many times and places, framing opponents, or preventing them from addressing the voting public through various means, or using dirty tricks to smear opponents were considered within the norms. It's mainly been in the last 130 years or so with the destruction of machine politics things have gotten increasingly tight about using the power of government to stay in office. The spoils system was used in the US for the first ~40% of it's existence and we'd consider that wildy corrupt today.
Using dirty tricks to smear opponents isn't illiberal, it's just corrupt.
Honestly this feels like the best way to discuss the likes of Orban without it turning into a right-vs-left political shitfight, he was a corrupt leader who, while acting within a democratic system, used all sorts of dirty tricks to benefit himself and his party. He wasn't ideologically opposed to democracy, he was just keen on the idea of getting his own way.
Putting it this way I think emphasises the spectrum of continuity between Orban and ordinary politicians in our own countries, rather than emphasising the spectrum of continuity between Orban and Kim Jong Un.
His old friend, Lőrinc Mészáros is now the richest man in the country (his total assets are around 5B USD). This guy had around 100k USD in 2010, and it is pretty obvious that he is one of the figureheads of Orbán himself (who is officially far from being rich). Mészáros got rich mostly by making business with the state itself (for example, his company manages the highways for some 35 years).
Interestingly, Orbán's father and his son-in-law (István Tiborcz, if you feel like googling him) also made a fortune. But no, Orbán cannot be corrupt.
Biden also cannot be corrupt. Despite his failson getting plum positions after proving so much of a drugaddict (onduty) that he could not perform adequately for the US Navy.
I agree that "illiberal democracy" is one of the better framings, but it does bother me that even extreme dictators like Putin hold elections. The only thing you can accuse Putin of not conducting the election freely and fairly, which is the same thing you can accuse Orban of. So can Putin claim to be an "illiberal democrat"?
It seems like you’re putting too much weight on the elections as a signifier of democracy rather than looking at the whole picture. You can accuse Putin of killing political opponents. That’s a difference in kind that takes someone from illiberal democrat to authoritarian in my opinion. You could also put throwing people in jail in that bucket. Or operating outside the law (though changing the law to let you throw your opponents in jail I’d need to think some about).
But "operating outside of the law" is a spectrum. Was Biden an autocrat for illegally cancelling student loans (even though he probably knew he would lose at the Supreme Court)?
I don't know what the test for true disregard of the law is, but I seriously doubt it's "this will lose at the supreme court". Prosecuting someone when you know it will lose at the supreme court is generally scummy, but when it comes to other government matters, there's no harm in forcing the court to actually state its convictions, in order to put in line for public and elite pressure etc. If you think the supreme court has it wrong, and you think pushing them on it will be salubrious, that seems fine to me.
It's like with the filibuster. Letting senators filibuster is one thing (a bad thing in my view), but letting them filibuster without having to have the courage of their convictions and actually filibuster publicly- that's worse.
I have no doubt conservative and liberal majority courts would exercise far more extensive and unchecked power if governments tried to avoid ever pushing them into saying no.
Ducking the supreme court's expressed intention, forcing the supreme court to come back from vacation in order to tell you "No, you can't just say you're going to do one thing in oral, and then write something different once we leave town."
... That's some disregard for the supreme court's expressed authority and judgement. That's biden for the "CDC can force landlords to not evict non-rent-payers."
(Broadly speaking, though, I do think that "making the Supremes put their position in writing" is fine, particularly when the Districts have made a mess of differing interpretations.)
I would say that if you knew you’d lose, that’s illiberal and if you ignore a court order, that’s an authoritarian move, especially if it’s related to holding onto power.
This is the Fukuyama 'end of history' thesis, btw. The idea is not that history actually stops, but that liberal democracy, at least for now, is the Final Boss of legitimacy, such that even obvious dictators have at least pretend to be doing democracy. Even literal autocrats realize that only democracy is legitimate, so they go through the motions.
I hardly think that an election where robots are allowed to vote is considered as "every vote is legitimate." In short, Russia is getting Something Different out of its elections, and you shouldn't expect every exercise in anthropology to devolve down to "We're Right and They're Wrong" (Russia thinks its getting something good out of their notoriously shammy elections, and I believe it is, just not democracy).
Elections are nothing more that a conventional orderly and non-violent mechanism of legitimizing power. Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion. Legitimization is important, as you can't rule without consent of a significant fraction of those being ruled (not for a very long time, typically, anyway). But ultimately elections serve this purpose both in liberal democracies and in Russia. Sure, in Russia Putin won't let anyone potentially dangerous to him anywhere close to elections, but he still needs elections to see and to demonstrate that he has still enough loyalty to him among the populace.
One aspect I always found interesting is the personification of these things. I don't know that much about Orban; I know a bit more about Putin, so let me use that example. Of course, all of this is conjecture, not based on any insider knowledge of Putin’s mind or the exact workings of the Moscow power apparatus, and many will disagree, but for what it’s worth: I do *not* think that Putin rigs elections.
Now, the Russian elections are obviously nowhere near being either free or fair. But, if I had to bet, I’d say Putin really, honestly doesn’t know that. Of course, nobody thinks he personally tells people to stuff ballots here and change the numbers there; I do not think he tells people to tamper with the elections at all, and wouldn’t, by now, believe anyone telling him this happens. I think that most initially elected strongmen, authoritarian rulers, perhaps even dictators start out believing they are democratic and popular – and, since they just won elections, this seems at least broadly true. And then, when something happens that seems to challenge their power, they – at least on a conscious level - *have* to interpret them as nefarious plots, by outside ill-wishers or fifth columnists. When Putin said time and again that the 2011 protests following the rigged elections you mentioned were nothing but a plot hatched, financed and ordered by the US, I believe he meant every word of it. In his mind, he was a popular leader, the elections had been free and fair – what other explanation, then, could there have been for protests?
And, crucially, the more entrenched they become, the less they are able to hear uncomfortable truths, and the less those around them are willing to tell them. I think this was a major cause of the 2022 Ukraine debacle (not just in that it was and is horrible for Ukraine, and bad for most of the world – but also in that it turned out to be a debacle for Russia); apparently, hardly anybody was willing to tell Putin this was a bad idea. I don’t know in how far Orban went down that particular road; perhaps not that far, given that he conceded his defeat quickly and quietly. And I don’t know how far Trump is down that road; whether, say, his behavior after the 2020 elections was just the tantrum of someone who knows they’ve lost and tries their best to hold on – or the righteous indignation of someone who is completely certain they did have the largest inauguration crowd, they are the greatest President in US history, they have actually won the election.
So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements. Given what we see from Trump in public, I have no trouble at all believing this is true; and I do think it’s a major reason not just for foreign disasters, but also for, yes, a threat to domestic democracy.
"So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements."
--agree this sounds bad. Suspect your sources are trying to backstab Trump to prove their bona-fides as "Not Really Trump's Man" so they can get back into the cocktail circuit.
Advancing a different alternative: Trump, like a lot of executives, may not want to be told "no" (in those words, "no, Mr. President you can't invade Iran with our infantry"). Instead, he wants to hear the consequences, and think out himself whether this is a bad idea. "If you do this, the Iranians will do that." (This, as a businessman, is a structure he understands -- he does know he can't control other, non-allied governments). Given Trump's noted propensity to hire autists (not exactly the most socially inclined people, but definitely Very Honest), I can see that someone might have been trying to prevent Social Friction.
I'll note that the intelligence reports about Afghanistan were ignored, utterly (the only guy who got fired was the guy who stated publically, on TV, two weeks ahead of time, that the withdrawal was going to be a CF) -- in particular, the "Wait Until 9/11" so that Biden could claim the withdrawal as a PR Victory incensed the Taliban. I'll note that there was no plan in place for "Russia decides to backstab our deal and invade the Ukraine." That intelligence reports on "how bad the Ukrainian War is going" did not actually make it to people capable of dealing with the increasingly unstable diplomatic leadership for YEARS.
>In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats,
Can people stop using "gerrymandering" to refer to any deviation from proportionality?
Yeah, something like 90% of parliamentary majority governments throughout history have been people winning a plurality in a majority of seats. That's not gerrymandering, it's just...how the system works.
The US senate deviates from proportionality, but unlike the House cannot be gerrymandered. So the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones (which are themselves known to be dysfunctional in practice).
As NLRG notes, the Senate can be gerrymandered, just not on an every-few-years basis like the House can. If a future Democratic strongman president rams through a split of California into twenty 60% Dem states, that's also a gerrymander.
I know most proportionate systems have boundary conditions where you need a certain percent, so even they aren't perfectly proportionate, but I was simplifying.
That's not what I was saying. As long as the pool of winners is smaller than the pool of voters, the results will never be proportionate to share of votes. Boundary conditions are not necessary to the result.
The disconnect comes from the fact that winners have to be chosen in integer numbers, and vote share doesn't.
had you heard of direct representation democracy? from wikipedia:Direct representation is a hybrid form of democracy that combines elements of direct and representative systems to create a more authentic political connection between voters and officials. Unlike conventional representative democracy where representatives are elected by geographic districts, direct representation allows voters to choose any candidate in the entire country, with each representative's voting power weighted by the number of citizens who selected them.
If the vote of each representative is wheigted on how many votes he got you got perfect proportionality. edited for spelling
49% refers to the United Russia results as a fraction of all cast votes (including invalid votes and including ballots for parties that got less than 7% which was required to get into Duma). 52% refers to the United Russia result as a fraction of all valid votes for parties obtaining at least 7%.
Do we know what percent were "invalid" vs for parties getting less than 7%? Also, my understanding is that Russia currently has half proportionate & half first-past-the-post district representation in the State Duma. Was it purely proportional back then?
It might be good to include that the party won a plurality of the vote, with the second most popular party only getting 19. As written, most readers would assume that there was some other party that was more popular. It's not uncommon for large parties to be overepresented and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Why not just say something like “because of their political structure”? The 2021 Canadian election resulted in the 2nd place party having the most seats and that usually isn't described as the result of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the drawing of districts in a way that distorts electoral outcomes in an intended manner. People like to focus on partisan gerrymandering, but there's plenty of examples of racial gerrymandering, pro-incumbent gerrymandering, gerrymandering to dilute representation of particular locations regardless of party, and other cases.
But when you're dealing with districts, even if no one intends any particular distorted electoral outcome, there will be distortions. It is nearly impossible to draw a contiguous congressional district in Massachusetts that a Republican can win, even though nearly 40% of Massachusetts voters vote for Republicans. (The regions that are majority Republican are big enough to make up a single district, but they're separated from each other by some blue regions and state borders.)
Mathematicians have recently developed techniques to effectively sample from the space of all possible districtings of a state, to estimate the distribution. They find that with the voting patterns in Pennsylvania, a strong majority of districtings end up with a larger fraction of Republicans elected than the Republican vote share, just because of how Democrats and Republicans have spread themselves across the map. But the point of using this technique was to identify the distribution of these districtings, and prove that the Republican implemented plan was *even more* tilted towards the Republicans than 95% of all plans, making it unlikely that it was drawn unintentionally.
It's very hard to know unless you do a detailed analysis (or have records of the debates) whether a single case is just the inherent difficulty of putting districts on the map in a way that results in proportional outcomes, or whether it's intentional gerrymandering.
Appreciate you bringing this up - disproportionality is inevitable in *some* metric, and it's just a matter of if you're writing up the system in a way to maximally favor along a specific metric. And to be fair, people often are, but it's still very important to remember that the alternative is just "less severe, less intentional favoring of a possibly incidental group" and not proportional representation in a shining platonic form.
"Getting 52% of the seats due to three parties not reaching the vote threshold." The 49%->52% boost was totally normal, it was getting 49% of the votes that pissed people off.
The real outright manipulation of the legal system happened in the next election, when single-member constituencies were reintroduced in addition to proportional voting. Putin's party won nearly all of them due to having a plurality, thus securing 50% of the seats easily.
First past the post. The US is an outlier because it has two parties, but the last UK election saw Labour get 34.7% of the vote and 64.2% of the seats. This is normal and the main argument in favour of FPTP.
Yes. It strengthens the winning party. A perfectly proportional system could lead to deadlock in the legislature. Allowing the winning party to win by more leads to consolidation of power so they can govern.
It's similar to how some governments prefer a strong executive. It's even more "wildly undemocratic" that 100 percent of the presidency is republican, despite that party winning only about half the vote.
As opposed to right now, where the FPTP system surely is not in legislative deadlock, especially not compared to the many representative democracies in the world.
"Undemocratic" and "proportionate" aren't synonyms. The arguments for a winner-takes-all system (FPTP or Majority Bonus) are:
1) It maximises the number of people who get what they want. Relatively few people want a coalition, so the number of people getting their preferred policies approximates zero.
2) It incentivises parties to win broad appeal. In a proportionate system (which, again, means coalitions), a handful of narrow sections of the population can cobble together a coalition by all scratching each other's backs. If the only route to power is to be the most popular, you generally have to argue for something that at least approximates the national interest.
3) It kills unpopular ideas that attract fanaticism. In a coalition system, the party that really passionately cares about teachers pensions or agricultural subsidies or vegetarianism or whatever can side with others and insist on their thing as a concession, even if most people don't like it.
4) It allows decisive changes of government and lets the populace straightforwardly eject failures. Labour won the last election in the UK mostly because people wanted to get rid of the Tories* and were able to straightforwardly do so. This compares to Germany, for example, where it looks like the SPD are now going to be a component of every coalition going forward, or the Netherlands where Rutte was prime minister for 14 years in spite of not being that popular purely by being head of the party that was floating in the middle of the political spectrum.
*Labour's share of the vote barely changed.
5) It allows unified/decisive government, instead of endless compromise and cludge.
None of these make up for the fact that it allows a government to pass policies that barely over a third of the population want. Or a fifth, judging by recent polling. Is there really a British consensus for banning repeated protests and jury trials?
If democracy means anything it means majority rule.
Banning repeated protests probably has majority support (in the abstract, there's a majority view that policing of protests in the UK is correct or too lenient, in spite of being fairly draconian by Western standards). There's a majority against scrapping juries, which has been an obsession of parts of the civil service and some activists since the early 2000s, but that's the sort of thing you get more of in a proportionate system; if Labour had been permanently in various coalitions for the last 20 years, it's likely to be one of the things they pushed for. If it doesn't happen, it will either be because enough Labour MPs don't want to lose their majorities, or because the Lords blocks it (not FPTP, also not democracy).
If you want straight-up majority-wins democracy, the key is public initiative referenda and other direct democracy measures that bypass elite consensus. You'd find yourself getting some very right-wing social policies (eg. capital punishment would make a comeback) and some very left-wing economic policies (price controls), but that should be the point.
Is it really true that relatively few people want a coalition? In my representative democracy (the Netherlands), the fact that different parties of different political leanings have to work together is usually seen as a feature, not a bug. By that nature, it solves problem 3).
Also, you say it allows for decisive government without endless compromise, but you've simply moved the compromise to an earlier stage, in point 2).
At least in a representative democracy you can actually vote for someone that represents your ideals. In the FPTP system, you will forever have to choose between 2 candidates you're at most kind of lukewarm on.
I don't know, but if a 49% plurality winning 52% of seats is proof of gerrymandering then it literally applies to every non-explicitly proportional allocated legislative body in the world (and even most proportional ones since they usually exclude fringe parties by having a min threshold).
I would actually take a 49% plurality winning only 52% of seats as evidence that a place was not particularly gerrymandered, that's pretty close! The most recent UK election saw the Labour Party win >60% of seats with a plurality of < 40% of the vote. And the UK is not considered to have much of a gerrymandering problem with independent districting, etc. Whatever Putin is/was doing to stay in power around then Gerrymandering doesn't seem to have been a big part.
In the Russian case it was the electoral threshold that excluded small parties. Gerrymandering is something done to districts, there were no districts in Russia to gerrymander because it was (at the time) a pure proportional system.
In other cases, the "gerrymandering" is just the natural result of FPTP being a winner-take-all system. People said that it was "gerrymandering" when the U.K. Labour party won 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote in the last election, yet it couldn't have been gerrymandering since the maps were drawn by the outgoing Conservative government. In the Hungarian case it was because the far-right Jobbik party did not ally with the left (as they would do later), splitting the anti-Orban vote and allowing him to sweep the FPTP seats. Not that that was an accident, Orban set up the system knowing that would happen.
Claude tells me there are no districts in Russia to gerrymander and that what did the work here was a cutoff for proportional representation that systematically benefits large parties. This coupled with the fact that large oppositions get banned in Russia is a good way to keep an edge (but even without banning a large opposition I think 49pct would always put you over the top in a PR with cutoff scheme). I agree that the term gerrymander doesn't quite feel right and probably wasnt the decisive rigging tool when taking it all apart.
I guess the interesting question that everyone's actually asking for is, how correlated is current authoritarianism quotient with rate of change of authoritarianism quotient? What's dx in x?
I guess "liberal" would argue that it correlate positively, any x above zero will accelerate dx further and further until it reaches 100% (or even beyond!). One simple mechanism is that a party that has power to influence election will use it to further and further their grip of power until there's nothing to grip anymore. With this perspective, it's a sliding slope and any x beyond zero must be resisted by any means. Maybe including violence (or even beyond!).
"Conservative" would argue that it correlate negatively. The more x is, the harder it's to raise x even further. Maybe too much x will even make it start to decrease. For an example of this, we can imagine a multi faction civil war where any party that's deemed too strong will soon be ganged up by other parties. With this perspective, high x is not a problem at all and it'll fix itself sooner or later. Any awareness about high x is deemed unnecessary and even fearmongering, especially if it includes a call for violence. We can even be funny and try to induce high x to trigger distaste of other parties and make x go even lower than before.
All variables here is up to debate and ambiguous. I can't even say that if that dx equation converges for any time or place. Maybe it's a chaotic fractal that resist comprehension. It's even more complicated if our target ideal x is not zero. Maybe we can try to oscillate x around our ideal x, but it seems like a very unstable solution.
But this is not a new problem. Ancient Greeks had debated about the ideal x for centuries. Maybe it does resist comprehension.
* liberal and conservative here is in quotes because it obviously doesn't square completely with any real liberal and conservative in any country
Perhaps in your model, when x is less than 50%, dx tends to be negative, and when x goes greater than 50%, dx is positive. Then things tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, and shifts from one pole to the other tend to be naturally resisted up to a breaking point.
This implies that maximum resistance would only become necessary when you started getting near 50%.
It resists comprehension because every power struggle has unique confounders that you can't control for, trivially starting with the given time and place of the struggle. History rhymes, but it doesn't repeat like a scientific experiment, let alone a mathematical model.
Possibly the "conservative" perspective is true, but an additional factor is that sudden changes in the magnitude of x lead to major negative consequences in their own right, from economic disruption (like Russia in the 90s) to outright civil war. It may therefore be worthwhile to try to keep x low even though it is true in principle that a high-x society is unstable and will eventually revert to low-x.
This seems like it could risk endogeneity problems. What if dx is negative but part of the mechanism that makes it negative is people saying "x is quite big and in danger of getting bigger! Sound the alarm! Let's all act to bring x down"
If somebody responded to that by saying "no, don't worry, we actually have good reason to believe dx is negative", they'd be missing the point
(Is "anti-inductive" what I'm gesturing at here? Seems slightly similar to an investment bank saying "no point in us trying to pick winners - don't you know you can't beat the market?")
If dx is random then having positive x is still bad. Assuming 100pct is a barrier where we get authoritarian lock in. The closer we are to the barrier the higher the chance we get randomly locked in. So it is then important that we dont just assume the correlation is negative but actively make it so by voting out material positive x governments.
Edit: I suppose at full generalization this is claiming a complex level dependent dx, but I see less disagreement about what dx tends towards when x=100.
Is it the case that authoritarianism is a directional quantifiable variable? I's say that the fractal/chaos theory comparison is apt, at best, it's a dimensionless quantity. If we state that authoritarianism is related to the institutional reduction of the freedom of citizens, then it follows that the methodological problem is that there is no objective measurement of freedom.
This is a philosophical issue:
One might even state that the creation of a quantifiable definition of freedom necessarily entails that any individual who adheres to it is no longer maximally free.
So while I do think it's a fun idea, the philsoohical paradox at the core of the issue makes X and dX unsolvable variables.
A tangential, but still important point: democracy is _always_ under threat, same as human rights, piece, etc. Things can be OK in a given place at a given time, but they can go very bad very fast.
Places which have had a long period of democratic handovers of power don't seem to "go very bad very fast" in practice. They could be conquered by an enemy, in which case their old traditions might be irrelevant, but their endogenous behavior seems to be more conservative. Although I'm speaking more of the modern world, as the ancient Greeks & Romans were different.
As far as I know, the full list of cases of authoritarianism winning (due to internal factors) in modern countries which have had at least one generation (30 years) of democratic rule are Imperial Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and Italy.
And conversely, (either outsiders or insiders) attempting to install a democracy in a country with little history of democracy seems to almost always rapidly turn into some sort of autocracy, machine politics, or tyranny.
Also: an anyone give me a defense of their position that illiberalism doesn't matter because... [your argument] that you think is likely to sound reasonable enough to consider to someone both extremely convinced of personal liberty and who has somewhat idiosyncratic views of social policy, but ones which would (for example) consider saying 'we should incentivize not being gay for [legitimate social concern]' be unacceptably bad, and which give some credence to tradition due to epistemic doubt, and which generally do not consider the nation to be an important thing?
This is not my position but I think they'd say (for example, with regards to immigration) that countries are the way they are because of the traits of the people living there and if you like the fact that your country is liberal, you should support preserving the nation because other nations are less liberal-minded. This is true even if it requires restricting liberalism to some extent because you're doing it to avoid even greater restrictions on liberalism in the future by the more illiberal population you'd have if you didn't.
I can imagine a situation in which this would be optimal, but I don't think the numbers it would take for this to be real are... well... real. you'd need to be taking in, like, full percents of your population of literal Disney villains and it would need to be preventable with very small liberty violations I think... and even then the norms damage could be brutal. feels like the sort of weird hyperbole you get in constrained media/social ecosystems.
Political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to personal liberty. In most autocracies you are in practice free to live your life as you wish, insofar as you don't engage in meaningful levels of political dissent (and the vast majority of people don't really do that under any system).
I think political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to autocracy.
I agree that autocracies are often authoritarian rather than totalitarian, and don't necessarily restrict non-political personal liberties that much. However, I think that there are quite a few autocracies where the restrictions are much tighter (not just North Korea and *cough* Hitler *cough*). Perhaps more importantly, I think the example of Russian development over the past years shows that authoritarian states can become totalitarian and clamp down on the remaining liberties much faster and easier than truly democratic ones.
Of course, but you can have a society some prople are free because their views align with the collective, while others are not. If the latter people are removed... are the remaining people free?
Maybe it's better that we have Waffle-House-teleporter guy now? He did everyone a service by making it clear he was a crackpot and not to be taken seriously, instead of having a fake veneer of respectability for his dumb ideas.
As opposed to the stupid biases of the earlier leftist experts. E.g. when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
Gregg Phillips telling everyone not to use radios during a FEMA operation because it might teleport you 50 miles into a Waffle House is in res ipsa loquitur territory. Who would listen to something that pants on head crazy? A bit different when the U of Washington faculty and over 1,000 people officially endorse stupidity.
The main issue is that the earlier leftist experts are so much more competent that even when they handicap themselves by prioritizing anti-racism, they can still be more effective at containing covid than the current elites would be.
The worse that could happen? Is that a rethorical question?
The actual worst that could happen is that the pandemic happens now and instead of Operation Warp Speed like we got during Trump 1 we will get.... free bleach? I don't even know what RFK thinks would be appropriate in that situation.
It is a value claim, but it is also a tool of propagandists attempting to switch messaging. The Left's inability to handle promulgating more than one message at a time was noted, and exploited as a strategic vulnerability.
Don't forget there was a time Trump endorsed the vaccine and leading Democratic candidates did not.
I do think there is significant value in "this guy is all-around crackpot" versus "this guy is 80% normie, 20% crackpot, and uses the normie to launder the crackpot." Funny enough thanks to our dear host's extensive writing history, he even has an essay on that topic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
>When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Though I disagree somewhat with that specific statement, as "misinformation" was created as a category to describe those not-explicitly-lying situations but from the other side.
When you have ten newscasters having "The exact same Murrow Moment" in the exact same words, and doing this all across the country... that's deliberate, and it's playing on people's trust in the newscasters (and their trust that they'd not do this sort of bullshit).
I think our host doesn't have much of a grasp of how much disinformation is in the news. When it reached more than 90%, it was time to start finding other sources of information.
The "apologize now" people have leftist derangement syndrome. Its completely consistent that prominent media leftists fearmonger and take enormous numbers of shortcuts in their reasoning all the time, and are right about some things some of the time.
I'm a bit confused by the tone of this comment. <Something> Derangement Syndrome has tended to be a rather inflammatory way to call out someone you think is completely irrational in the pursuit of harming <Something> that they have decided is their priority outgroup threat. But the rest of your post indicates you think the <Something> in question also *are* overwhelmingly irrational (enormous numbers of shortcuts in reasoning) and harmful (fearmonger).
It feels like saying people have derangement syndrome just because they thought people who are wrong 95% of the time are in fact wrong 100% of the time is a bit needlessly extreme/inflammatory?
I think the "apologize now" people are gravely mistaken, but the reasoning leading to their position as called out by Scott seems like pretty mundane tribal bias and doesn't require them to be deranged?
I might just read the term "derangement syndrome" as being much stronger than you do - I've tended to see it as pure political shit-slinging that never benefits a measured discussion. The following comment on your part being much more even-handed thus has me confused.
It was the name of the nomadic steppe ethnicity that founded the country. I think the best analogue for the US might be John Pilgrim. Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
But you wouldn't call someone "John [the] American" if you were both currently living in America. Surnames, historically, are like nicknames, to distinguish one particular John from the dozens that are already living in your village. If your surname, then, is "Hungarian", it implies that they got their surname when they were living outside Hungary entirely, but already identified as Hungarian.
Seems like a real equivelent (in the sense that it is an actual, real name) would be Peter English, for an English person. And yeah according to Wikipedia: "The name is attested from the 12th century. From parts of Great Britain near the borders of England with Scotland and Wales, it may have been applied to people who spoke English, or to distinguish people of English ancestry from Celts"
Well it doesn't strictly _matter_, since it's a mild joke. It's equally mild pushback against the implication that someone named after their home country must be particularly patriotic and thus the ideal leader of that country, because their family got their name while living abroad.
Literally Hungary's name, in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország' . Country of Magyars. It refers both to the ethnic group and the country name, like England or Scotland.
John Pilgrim seems like a poor analogue. People in the USA today don't identify themselves as Pilgrims as people living in Hungary/Magyarország identify as Magyars.
There was a Twitter thread about other examples of this. Charles de Gaulle was one. But there were also some messups, like Francisco Franco (Frenchman France) leading Spain.
Actually de Gaulle's name is probably not linked etymologically with "Gaul" (Gaule in french). De Gaulle's name is derived from ancient dutch "de Walle" (from the wall). Ofc that's less fun.
Not sure, Jews around that time (and a bit before that) were known to change their family names to better fit the local context. Too bad it did not work, most of the time...
Then there are examples of nominative anti-determinism. E.g. "Jack Lynch" was culture minister of France, which meant he was in charge of keeping France free of creeping Anglicisms.
I haven't looked into his family history at all, but if his family got their surname in the traditional way, as a distinguishing feature, then they got it at a time when they were already Hungarians but were living outside Hungary.
We also have a commenter her going by Gergo Tisza, the equivalent of George Democrat I suppose? (Tisza was, as we recall, the party winning the election.) No wait, it seems it would be George Respect and Freedom.
Tisza is also the second largest river in Hungary, and, as opposed to the "international" Danube, it is held as a symbol of Hungary/Hungarians (both in good and bad sense). (Before WW1, it was located entirely in Hungary.)
Orban was bad because his government was corrupt (in the mundane, venal sense) and had anti-growth economic policies, not because of anything to do with "democracy."
Can you explain? I tried to give many examples of ways he was bad for democracy. Are you claiming that my examples are false, that they're not really bad, or some other thing?
I'm not claiming that your examples are not factual. (I withhold judgment on that).
I'm claiming that they are not bad in context, especially given the degree to which EU bureaucracy freely and blatantly engages in non-democratic interventions to override disfavored democratic outcomes among member states.
Orbán needed to dismantle fundamentals of liberal democracy (such as separation of powers and rule of law) to achieve the levels of corruption he did. You could debate whether that dismantling was inherently bad, or bad because of the corruption it paved the way for, but it seems somewhat academic.
I like the term "wannabe dictator." As far as I can tell, Orban wanted to be a dictator and had no reverence for democracy, but he couldn't make himself dictator because his power had limits and people resisted (and if he had tried to more aggressively become a dictator, people would have pushed back harder, and he feared losing).
I dislike the term "strongman" because because "strong" on its own has a good connotation, and here we are appending it to a neutral word to try to describe something evil.
Also strongman is a bit nebulous. Is Al-Shaara a strongman, was Ataturk a strongman? They both ruled with force and came from military backgrounds, so the dictionary definition could apply here, but obviously these people are very different from Gaddafi and the like.
He was gradually turning himself into a dictator. He got maybe 50% of the way before he bungled up; every year he was more powerful and his regime more oppressive (although still not powerful and oppressive enough, by 2026, to survive the combination of popular sentiment turning against him, a talented and energetic new opponent, and some bad luck).
Also, using median voter theory and consolidating around a guy who is maybe two millimeters to his left (Magyar was a Fidesz member until 2024 and left after they pardoned somebody for covering up CSA).
Two millimeters to the left of where Orbán started in 2010, maybe. But present-day Orbán is on the far right while Magyar is center-right. I'm not even sure it's median voter theory, it's more like attacking the left flank of Orbán's voter coalition in the knowledge that anyone who doesn't like Orbán will vote for Magyar regardless of his policies.
By no means do I think Orban is perfect, nor should he be immune from criticism. But there have been all sorts of shenanigans from the European Establishment (including the so-called center-right parties, and everyone to their left). Most notable is probably annulling the 2024 Romanian presidential election; also egregious are the threats by Thierry Breton to nullify elections in Germany if there's evidence of so-called evidence (but only if AfD wins, of course). https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1877861172306673790
There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008. I think it's hypocritical to call Orban anti-democratic for changing election rules and then look on happily when multi-party systems marginalize right-wing parties that are winning 20-30% or more of the popular vote, often gaining a plurality.
The nullification thing is a fair point. I don't know enough about coalition politics to have a sense of whether the cordon sanitaires are antidemocratic vs. something the system always allowed.
Some stuff is fair, I think. Other stuff clearly goes against well-established convention (e.g. not allowing the AfD to have a Vice President while allowing smaller parties to have them). And I think it's pretty clear (both from opinion polls, and from election results, especially the two rounds of the 2024 French elections) that a significant portion of rank-and-file voters of center-right parties such as the CDU/CSU in Germany and LR in France, would prefer the right-wing parties to the center-left parties if forced to choose between them.
AfD/Vice-president issue is something that goes against previous convention, but at the same time it is something the system always allowed. In the Bundestag, there is no legal procedure or right for the AfD to get voted in their preferred VPs.
As the AfD is considered to be a risk for our democracy, and parts of the party are officially considered a threat to democracy as confirmed by courts, why should the other parties honour a convention that was traditionally extended to all parties that do not intend to openly dismantle our democratic traditions.
You imply this is not fair, and I imply that it clearly is. There is no point in tolerating those that do not wish to return the favor and are therefore an existential threat to "our way of life".
Among other things, the AfD officially called the EU a "failed project" and is generally highly critical of anything EU-related. There have been ideas floated of "Dexit", leaving the Euro-zone, or otherwise diminishing German participation in EU. That alone I would call trying to "openly dismantle our democratic traditions". I'll be the fist-shaking old man here and say "read some books" about history, to understand the importance of the EU and how intertwined and fundamental it is in recent German history.
They also want to massively decrease tax for high incomes and rich people. Again, direct attack on the fundamental post-WW2-German way of life and economics ("social market economy"). This kind of policy is even generally anti-democratic, as it further increases wealth-gaps and turns us back into a quasi-feudal economy.
In foreign policy, they want less coordination and cooperation with EU, and increased cooperation and alignment with Russia. Do I need to comment any further how this endangers our democratic traditions, and democracy in general? In the AfDs most recent election manifesto of 2025, they do not even mention the Russian invasion as anything to be condemned, and instead demand lifting of sanctions and unbridled trade with Russia.
In a previous manifesto, they asked for Bundeswehr (our armed forces) to be used internally for certain purposes. This demand is in direct violation to one of our most sacred constitutional paragraphs, that completely bars the use of Bundeswehr inside Germany in peacetime, borne out of historical experience. Salami-tactics..
In environmental politics, they see our "Energiewende" (energy transition) as a danger to our national energy needs. How ironic! Renewables provide >50% of our electricity and have considerably decreased our need of fossil fuels from Russia and other countries that could extort us (and that includes the US, by now).
You can't just call tax breakes antidemocratic, large amounts of wealth inequality don't automatically lead to dictatorship. Same with leaving the EU, Britain left the EU but didn't turn into a dictatorship.
And them being against Renewables has nothing to do with democracy at all. Mostly it seems like you just don't like the AFD's policies.
Of course, "existential threat to 'our way of life'" is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider vehicle-ramming attacks at Christmas markets and trade union protests a threat to your way of life, but feel free to disagree.
I find it immensely hypocritical when "democratic" is defined as "my people win an election" and "anti-democratic" is defined as "the other people win an election."
Your accusation is completely off the mark. There is plenty of "others" here to win that I'd call democratic. In fact, our current ruling party is the "other" for me personally, that I happily accept as perfectly democratic, but very unaligned with my own position.
AfD has openly racist influential party figures that are directly flirting with literal Nazi-rhetoric, as well as bending historical facts to downplay the Holocaust and other wrongdoings.
There is plenty of room in democracy to fight terrorists and even be immigration-critical without reviving Nazi-rhetoric. But you seem to have just assumed that I'm a far-left "no borders" type of guy, right?
What is "literal nazi rhetoric"? I only see handwaving and baseless accusations. I assume you are the type to undermine democracy and freedom in the name of fighting "nazis" and "racists" while claiming to defend it.
Cordon sanitaires are basically fair game. You know them as partisan politics, I believe. That level of granularity it would take to call that undemocratic is not something any known system of democracy can model.
Most democracies are representative - you elect politicians, they go to the capital, and there they go underground to work in the Politics mines 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their constituents expect results, not so much how exactly they wield the pickaxe.
Even direct democracy can only go so far to take direct control of the process, such as holding a vote on the occasional single law proposal.
I'd like to read more into the Romanian thing - the guy was also apparently charged with plotting a coup (not in some flimsy "do pro-Russia tiktok ads" sense but in the "get a bunch of mercenaries with guns to raid the capital" sense), my default view is that it was still fucked up and a subversion of democracy to annul the election but willing to be convinced otherwise. I don't think you have to have a "no annulling elections ever" rule to be pro-democracy, on some level certain choices by candidates force you into situations where any option is a bad one.
But even if it was completely wrong, in the US at least, nobody holds up anyone in Romania as a paragon of true democracy and wise leadership, unlike the treatment of Orban.
Also cordon sanitaires aren't only against the right. The treatment of Arab parties in Israel comes to mind, and IIRC communist/socialist parties at various times/places.
Outside of “relative to other middle eastern countries” has anyone ever held up Israel as a model of democracy? That’s not rhetorical, although I am incredulous.
Winning 30% of the vote puts you at a worst-case result of coming in third overall in an election.
There are systems where this could translate into nothing, but the only one you're likely to see described as "democratic" is the case where the total number of seats in government is less than three.
The entire purpose of the cordon sanitaire is to thwart the expressed desires of the voters. How do you describe that as anything other than "undemocratic"?
I mean, back in 1977 Labor became the largest party (a little over 33%) in The Netherlands after leading the most far-left cabinet in our history, but the Christian Democrats (32%) and the centre-right (18%) decided to form a right-wing cabinet.
Winning 50% of the seats, rounded down, does not entitle you to participating in government, if the other side can put together 50% rounded up. What's so controversial about that?
It depends on system what 30% of votes translate to. In Hungary's lopsided, inner-rewarding system, Orbán's 39% translates to 52 out of 199 MP, barely more than a fourth of seats, and gives them zero say in the government.
In two-round elections, its common for a relatively strong extremist party to totally fall out and barely win anything in second round since there's almost no voters who have them as secondary preference (France's RN being the most obvious example).
To govern, you always need majority of seats, and 30% pretty much never delivers that alone.
That is fake news. The EU did not nullify the Romanian election, a Romanian court did. And Breton did not talk about the EU nullifying elections (in either Romania or Germany), he talked about the EU enforcing its social media laws in both countries. Here is a description of the specific social media law enforcement that was done in Romania:
Having laws about what companies can do surrounding elections is perfectly reasonable. And I think it's reasonable that there would be situations where a court may have to step in and order an election to be re-run. But that should be an extreme last resort, especially in the current world, where bots (Russian or otherwise) are always going to be on TikTok, X, and various other internet platforms.
>There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008.
First, a firewall is a term for a normal political activity: the decision who to cooperate with on the legislative level. Just because a party has seats in a multi-party system, doesn't mean they are entitled to being worked with proportionally.
Second, "mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US" are, at any point post-Tea Party or so, clearly to the right of mainstream non-US positions and so are not representative for the EU.
What's the most important difference between European center-right and right-wing parties? Immigration. If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened. Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
>If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened.
Doubtful. In Germany at least, proposed immigration policies are largely the core of the far-right's undemocratic qualities. If the center-right adopted those policies, they would either have to weaken them to remain on the constitutional playing field, in which case people would still choose the far-right because they are the undiluted original, or the center-right would become indistinguishable from the far-right, which doesn't exactly weaken the far right in any practical sense.
And none of that even touches on the positive aspects of immigration, which would be lost in any case.
I think some of the proposals by various right-wing parties are bad (forced remigration stuff). But I think it's entirely possible for centrist, even left-of-center parties like Denmark's Social Democrats, to take a stricter line on immigration.
I assume some of those immigrants in the source I linked to may have only stayed temporarily and then left, so they wouldn't necessarily increase the population by 17.5 million.
Annulling the Romanian election was questionable, although (unlike in the US where it is often thrown around as a charge, but with very little substance) Russian election interference is a real and major problem in Eastern European countries, and did clearly happen in the course of that election. Mostly the issue was the secret services sitting on that information and waiting to see first whether they like the election results.
In any case, the "European Establishment" is one of those shallow conspiracy theories where people try to organize everything they don't like into a single shadowy opponent (like George Soros or the Elders of Zion). Romanian democracy has well known problems, although in a different direction -- "deep state" also gets thrown around a lot with no substance, but Romania actually has a deep state problem, with the security services (which largely remained intact during the fall of Communism) having an undue influence on things with not enough accountability or oversight. That has nothing to do with the rest of Europe though.
Right, the US would Never sponsor an investigative journalist who just happened to be investigating a politician we didn't like in order to influence the outcome of the election of a NATO country. Oh wait....
I see that EU will consider releasing $35bn of 'frozen' funds to Hungary now that Orban is gone. E.g., "EU ties €35bn fund release to Hungary's break with Orbán era" (Financial Times) or "EU rushes to Budapest talks with Magyar team to unlock frozen funds amid Ukraine tensions" (MSNBC).
The funds were blocked due to EU concerns over some policies which Orban refused to address. Magyar promised to solve the issues so the money (probably) will get unblocked. Orban could have done the same at any time.
Seems extortionary to me. "Do this or we don't give you money that's rightfully yours."
(Granted, I'm sure America's done stuff like this to Mexico before, using tariffs. Of course, that's less "money you rightly deserve" and more "access to our shiny shiny dollars.")
The better comparison would be trump linking university funding to, I think it was more effort against antisemitism?
Is this extortionary? I guess you have to decide case by case, but generally linking funding to the compliance with some predefined rules is fine with me. You just have to make sure that the enforcement of these rules does not become arbitrary.
It's extortionary if the goal is to change the current guy's behavior. It's... a little more, actually, if the goal is regime change. Not sure we have a word for it.
(Granting the comparison with Trump/uni funding, it's an apt one, my thanks!)
Just one example, Orbán created the "foundational model" (or whatnot) for the previously state-owned universities, which became "private" universities governed by some hastily set-up board, full of party members and party-related people. (Everything was quite tricky, for example the substitute of a dropout member is chosen by the remaining members.) At the same time, transparency fell back a lot, and state funds were secured by long-term contracts.
(This, to date, affected thirty-something universities, so all except like two.)
This all happened shortly after the EU announced that in its next fiscal period it will increase funding for research.
From this, one can hardly think of anything else that they want to channel the money towards their own pockets (done before on several other levels). So, in response, the EU excluded these universities from the EU-funded research grants (e.g. H2020).
Long story short, if you want to steal a large part of our money, you get none. Yes, ignoring democratic conventions might had also played a role in all this, but overall this is clearly a dont-steal-our-money scenario.
(Now, don't get me wrong, Western EU members are more than happy to keep their money as frequently as they can. Scientific research funds are quite rare east of the Elbe.)
It is a continuum but there is a big leap at the point of stuffing ballot boxes. There are lots of parties and power players who will accept legal and political shenanigans and pressure on the media even at extreme levels but wouldn't tolerate ballot stuffing.
AFAIK, that's pretty much the distinction between free elections (the votes are cast and counted correctly) and fair elections (the pre-voting process like registration and campaigning is open and equal-opportunity).
I feel kind of silly that I've read the words "free and fair elections" so many times and never stopped to dwell on which details fall under "free" and which under "fair."
To be fair, in most cases, people using these words don't really distinguish between these aspects, either. It's become just a shorthand for "good" elections.
Fun fact, a part of the Hungarian votes (about 200k, i.e. 4%) are cast without any meaningful check. There is dual citizenship for ethnic Hungarians living in the neighbouring countries, who can also vote (it is quite common in the area, Romania, Serbia and Croatia surely has some method to handle it). Since it cannot be expected from the Slovak or Romanian authorities to cooperate in such a voting (e.g. Slovakia explicitly forbids dual citizenship), the ballots are sent by mail (simply by post!), and they have to come back in some way (e.g. post, or local volunteers collect them, maybe even helping the citizens in the voting). There is not even a reliable registration of voters, yes, something happens like every 10 years, but whoever dies in the meantime goes unnoticed.
So this is one huge security hole. Not explicit ballot stuffing, but well, you know.
Usually, 90% of these votes go to Orbán's party (this time it was 84%).
(Around the Ukranian border, there were some villages with hundreds of temporary citizens as well, registering just before the election. Sometimes 100+ people registering to the very same address. Not a huge help, but, you know.)
BTW I don't fully get it. I mean, the question was pretty much that is it cheating or not?
To sum it up, Orbán created a mechanism, over which there is no democratic control (or any control at all), but where his people can interfere (he has many active fans in the neighbouring countries who can "help" to "fill" and "deliver" the ballots, but the general sentiment is pro-Orbán there anyway), and which clearly benefits his party. Well, this is pretty much the definition of cheating.
Yes, it is small-scale (resulting in like two extra seats, out of the 199); part of his strategy was to have many small-scale changes, which all happened to favor his party, but which are quite hard to point out (since, you know, "this is only two extra seats").
Well, I stand by my point: creating a mechanism which benefits you, and where some (or even several) people will eventually tamper with the ballots (and they will do it to your advantage, and you know it perfectly well up front, as it is clear as day to pretty much anyone) is cheating.
Or, to put it even simpler: encouraging your fants to cheat on your behalf is cheating. (Allowing them to cheat on your behalf is cheating as well, BTW.)
They all seem bad, but "undemocratic" isn't the word I'd use for most of them (gerrymandering was the only one directly related to democratic elections). Lots of policies strike me as bad, but I can't get everyone else to agree that all deviations from libertarianism on the part of governments are inherently suspect and deserve the same degree of scrutiny as restrictions on the franchise.
> In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election.
No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite. All people could vote for instead of his continued rule was "No". Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
> In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life.
A referendum is, again, not the same thing as an election. He didn't have to step down from power, handing it over to anyone else.
> Why did these people hold elections at all?
I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
> Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem.
Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
> Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them.
Communist regimes also effectively solved that first one, such as via purging the military, and I think largely solved the second by purging them as well.
> and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide)
That theory really annoys me, as I recall the blogger "agnostic" at akinokure.blogspot.com trumpeting how it was impossible for Trump to lose in 2020 because even if they cheated his victory would still overwhelm them... and then Biden won, he claimed he was only wrong by underestimating how MUCH they would cheat, and then claiming that this had completely discredited the election in the eyes of the public because we're all now aware it was a sham. The simpler explanation is just that none of the elections were stolen, Trump won twice and lost once. I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
> use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller
I think he was more of an "opponent" in Trump's mind. He wasn't an actual politician.
> This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as “not that bad, really”
No, most of them never lost an election (not a referendum or plebiscite) and then handed over power. It should be noted that Charles de Gaulle also stepped down after losing one to amend the Constitution, rather than losing an actual election to some other politician. He could have stayed on and tried again, but he made the choice to leave. This is separate from being a dictator vs democratic politician.
That makes sense, though I believe in Czechoslovakia they first grabbed a foothold of power within a larger government, then used that to seize power without killing that many people initially.
I guess it was the same in most EE countries (in Hungary for sure). Still, there was some killing, but not that much; during and after the revolution of 1956, there was again some; then the system consolidated and went on without murders. (There were other measures like pushing people towards exile, jailing them, or firing them from their jobs (being unemployed was a crime BTW), blackmailing and this stuff.) It could have been going on forever, but well, the economy...
This is pretty much unrelated to the events following WW2. The Soviets occupied Hungary just as they occupied Czechoslovakia (which was not involed in Barbarossa -- well, yes, Slovakia was, but everyone pretended to forget about that). In both places, first a coalition of several parties started governing, there were elections and all that, but of course the Soviets made sure that the communists were included. Then the independent parties were destroyed, one after the other.
It is quite related to the post BTW: even though the Soviets were capturing the country (countries), they pretended that there are free and fair elections, and tried to take over the countries formally following the law, operating behind the scenes as much as possible.
(Oh, and the people rose against both communist governments, although in Hungary it happened a lot earlier.)
> I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
What makes you think that? The only charitable explanation for what he's done to the political system of Russia is that he really sees what's happening only in terms of Russell's conjugations.
I'm not sure what they meant, but I think there's often a meaningful distinction of how democratic a leader considers themselves to be and how democratic the system around them actually is.
Putin's first priority is to ensure that he remains in power. Since the "divine right of kings" doctrine is thoroughly discredited these days, even dictators pretend that their power derives from the will of the people, and maintaining this pretense goes much smoother if you're actually popular.
Part of construal level theory is that we perceive things far from us (both in terms of literal distance as well as the more metaphorical sort) as more simple/homogenous while the local/familiar is more detailed. Most Americans don't know the name of Putin's party, or what the biggest opposition parties are. People actually reporting from Russia tend to note that Putin is genuinely popular there (perhaps less so since his botched invasion of Ukraine and the hit the Russian economy has taken), but Americans don't know much about that and don't feel like we need to know.
The political system of Russia wasn't in any great condition prior to Putin.
I'd say he's close to Trump in the nature of his popularity. Both are the kind of leaders that I once heard someone call "folk heroes". Americans have low trust in their institutions, as do Russians. Yet somehow a lot of them think that a single man can be "on their side", that he can spend five or twenty-six years draining the swamp, but the swamp remains, the swamp lets him remain in charge and at the same time he's neither a useful idiot nor one with the swamp.
The difference is that Trump is organic (I hope), Putin is originally hydroponic. He was reportedly picked as the successor because 1998-1999 sentiment surveys regularly identified Max Otto von Stierlitz (an undercover Soviet spy inside the SS) as the most popular fictional character people would have liked to see in charge of Russia: phlegmatic, reserved, quietly competent.
The basic story appeared to be KGB/FSB saw Russia under Yeltsin going to hell, suffering rampant organized crime, being plundered by oligarchs, hyperinflation, etc, and decided that something had to be done. Once elected, Putin executed a successful turnaround. He remains popular (?).
(Intelligence services are underrated btw when it comes to their roles in democracy.)
Putin was in the middle of this mess, co-opted by the WEF Young Leaders thing. He was very much supposed to be a Western Pawn.
Trump has done more than you'd think to drain the swamp. USAID for one (and since that was years of forensic accounting, you gotta give his allies credit for work during the Biden Administration).
Trump's about as organic as you get when the Democratic Strategists decide to quit the Democratic party and run a Republican instead (see the whole pied piper strategy -- Bad Idea Dog in Action!)
> No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite.... Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
There was no parliament at the time. So unless he called an election for an "elected dictator" to continue ruling without a parliament, calling an election would have necessarily implied a simultaneous parliamentary election. And he may have considered the possibility of winning the presidency in such scenario, assuming the center and left parties couldn't agree on a single candidate, but even then he must have known there was a high likelihood of having to rule with an opposition-controlled parliament.
There was to be a parliamentary election anyway in case Pinochet won. But if that had been the case (legitimately, no fraud) then he could be confident of ruling with a complaisant parliament.
Having a plebiscite was the pragmatic choice for him.
> Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
They did face a genuine risk of revolution though, which is what Scott said. In most Communist countries this was suppressed by the military might of Russia; once Communism in Russia collapsed, it collapsed almost everywhere else basically instantly.
> I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
In the sense that the official vote count accurately reflected the vote slips people dropped in ballot boxes, yes. (But then, you could say the same about most Communist countries.) But the voting was increasingly influenced by all kinds of illegal practices, some of which are mentioned in the post.
In most Communist countries, opposition parties weren't actually allowed to compete. That's a different category from merely "influenced", and it resulted in Communists never losing power via such elections, whereas Orban just did.
Putin isn’t in power.
People are just pre-read liking Scott’s posts, it’s only been up for three minutes I know forty of you are not done yet.
I also wonder about this. The number of pre-likes I get in the first three minutes is very variable based on post type, so maybe people are liking the fact that I wrote about a particular topic?
Maybe people are using AI agents to summarize the posts in a few sentences ?
I think this happened even before AI agents took off.
Oh, then I think your explanation (people liking the mere fact that you wrote about a topic) is the most likely one.
I dated a speed reader once. He could definitely have finished this post in three minutes.
I stand corrected, and a little frightened !
My girlfriend is like this.
I usually like posts that write about a subject I'm interested in, not necessarily as a sign of approval of the contents or the conclusion. It would be nice if there was an LW-style differentiator between "posts I like" and "posts I agree with" but alas, one 'like' thingy is all we have.
It happens with OTs too.
I don’t have a more reasonable explanation than that.
I liked the fact that it was a free post
I liked the fact that it was a post at all, on up-to-date matters, proving that Scott didn't go blind staring into the sun.
He may have dictated the post.
If only we had a word for someone who does that..
Omg that's funny. Very clever!
I wouldn't go that far. At worse, I illiberal-democracied it.
Well, given that, I definitely want to be able to like comments again.
"I strongmanned it" is the phrase you're looking for.
I seem to recall something about the hospital where he did his residency giving out a "Best Dictator Award" to doctors.
As somebody who does in fact do this some of the time, it’s more that I can generally tell from reading the first couple pages whether I will like a post or not, and if you already think there is a 70 to 90% chance of liking the post after reading it might as well do it now since you can always change your mind later.
Yeah some posts earn their like early
I often like your posts at the beginning before reading, so I don’t accidentally forget to like them once I’m finished. I have not once read a post of yours that didn’t make a point worth liking, even if I don’t agree with you every time, so I just cut to the chase. It’s good to signal boost your excellent writing. I could always unlike the post later, but it’s never happened.
A mystery to me too: even my small newsletter, launched a few months ago, gets *automatically* three-four likes every time I push a new piece. Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for.
"...Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for."
The likes for your small newsletter may be protective coloration for the bots. So that they appear less like focused bots to whatever software might be scanning for them.
I have a number of followers on disqus. Maybe three of them appear to be real humans. I figure something similar is happening on disqus.
Didn't think of that !
You can click on the names of the people who voted on an article, and then click on their blogs... so maybe redirecting some of the attention to their blogs was the goal?
Probably not very effective, but hey, it only costs them one click. If you are the kind of person who doesn't mind spamming others, this would be worth doing even manually.
Although I'm not one of those 40s, but I generally like every post I open. I do it at the start and I rarely have to unlike.
There are a surprising number of internet users who just click the like button on everything to make it change colour.
Wait, that’s not the point of clicking it?
I totally do this, especially if it's a nice change like 'make heart go red'. Also it serves as a 'you have already read this one' marker.
There are some social medias where I would "like" posts as a save/bookmark feature, as it lacked a native one. I'm sure there are other people who did the same, maybe carried the habit forward.
I have people who consistently like posts within minutes of them being posted, so there is definitely some kind of automation at work. I have no idea why someone would want to do this, however.
Bot Automation, to keep people writing on substack, so that substack stays in business? Never assume that any signal online is actually from a human, unless you can literally prove that by meeting them face to face (and even then, there's substantial odds this isn't the person you've been interacting with online*).
*Some people are Very Shy, and would rather not meet in person. Taken to extreme, this includes hiring someone to meet with you. Given that conventions have entire rooms devoted to "authors who are very shy"... this is more than just Salinger.
Oh, exciting! My algorithm is that I always press the like button for the sheer joy of making the little heart go red and feeling that I've done a nice thing. After all if the essay turns out to be boring I will be surprised, notice, and can go back and make the heart go back to white.
But it looks like some people might actually be reading the title first, which strikes me as silly. The title doesn't tell me much about whether the essay is good!
I think this is pretty ubiquitous across all platforms that have like buttons. There's a reason why everyone focuses so hard on titles and thumbnails, and it's because a like is just as much a signal of agreement as it is a signal that you enjoyed reading the post in particular: you don't have to read the post to know that you agree that Orban Was Bad. Some platforms try to get around this (e.g. Less Wrong differentiates between karma upvotes and agreement upvotes, as you know) but even there, a lot of people upvote posts that resonate and downvote posts that irritate.
I like every post from you and other writers before even reading it, just as thanks for the free entertaining content. Same for good YouTube channels. If it turns out to be a bad piece I can unlike it. But I'm 90% likely to like it so might as well do while I remember.
Indeed, I think some folks just hit like based on a title.
I like almost all YT vids I watch before I start them because I basically always know -- just from who it came from, or the subject matter -- I almost certainly will like it. If I find I don't then I simply unlike. I imagine some people are doing something similar here.
In this case (and others) the post title is a thesis statement not just a topic statement, people might like because they agree with it.
I don't read, I osmose. My osmosis of Scott's piece generated a like. Sorry.
The tiktok generation at work again
The probability of me liking a favourite author's post is high enough that spending time to determine whether or not I do is a waste of time. If I actually don't like it I can just unlike it halfway through
Hardly ever comment here, but love Scott's posts. I learned from other content creators on YouTube - please please leave a like, so if I *already* like someone I’ll hit the like button early because otherwise I’ll get distracted, leave their page, do some work, come back to some other page… never leave a like. And that, my friends, is BAD karma.
hasn't he earned it though?
No one has earned it. "Liking" something you don't actually know whether you like is dishonest.
Is it dishonest to give to a charity? Or to recommend a previous employee to a new company? Not trying to be annoyingly snarky there. But the metaphor seems relevant. Let's imagine that I like the charity's, or my old employee's, previous work. I trust they will continue to perform admirably due to their track record. I give my endorsement via money or recommendation or whatever, even though I am not going to be following up on whether they actually help people with my money or do a good job in their new role -- I might change my mind if I hear something bad! But I'm happy to boost their visibility to the (human or non-human, as the case may be) algorithm.
The difference here may be the interpretation of what a "like" on Substack means. To me, it means "boost this to more readers," because that's what it actually does. I think some people want likes to mean, "I like this," but unfortunately that's not what likes do.
Clicking "like" on a post doesn't mean "I have read this". It means "I am a modern human being who understands that the only purpose of likes, especially on a for-profit VC funded platform, is to feed an algorithm and I, for whatever reason, have chosen to do so".
I always thought it meant "BLOOD AND SOULS FOR ARIOCH".
It's two hours after it went up; I got home from work, read it, and liked it after reading your comment.
You are clearly not who the comment was aimed at.
Hahahaha.
I have heard that Orban is no more - and probably less - corrupt than most of his predecessors.
But that doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is that Orban held back the tsunami of globalism and loss of national sovereignty, and Russophobia, that has swept over so Europe. This makes him a hero in my eyes.
Orban's predecessors were bad in lots of ways, but not the particular form of corruption and undemocraticness that he has. You can see more at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban .
As for you not caring how corrupt and undemocratic he is as long as he shares your views, solve for the equilibrium.
I personally attach some non-zero value to democratic institutions, but I also attach non-zero value to governments that are interested in the non-extinction of their people, and Orban scores noticeably higher than his predecessors on that front.
This isn't a subjective preference, by the way- you don't have democracy without survival. Try solving for that equilibrium.
Can you explain what you mean? I usually hear this used about immigration, but even non-Orban Eastern European countries have very few immigrants. Czechia and Poland, the two countries I checked as natural comparison points, both seem to be between 0.5 - 1% nonwhite. Czechia's government is moderate, Poland's is conservative but hasn't attracted the same kind of democracy fears as Fideisz. Is your argument that, absent Orban, Hungary would have many more immigrants than its neighbor/comparison countries?
Are you sure you checked the correct governments for Czechia and Poland?
Current government of Czechia is a coalition between populist catch all russian adjacent Babiš and with smaller far right parties (SPD and motorists). The previous government was moderate spanning from center-left to conservative, and the current president is moderate, but it's a parliamentary republic where the president mostly has a representative role.
This last point is also true for poland (although the president has a veto power there). The president is from PiS (very conservative right wing) but the government is a coalition spanning across center-left to right with Tusk (KO, center-right/right). Former government was from PiS, for which there was antidemocratic concerns in a similar direction as Fidesz (reform of constitutional court and strong control of public TV), but to a much weaker extent.
Edit: "Russian adjacent" is maybe too strong and unfair for Babiš, especially as I haven't been following much his position on this since the election. During the campaign he focused a lot on criticizing military aid to Ukraine.
__browsing proposed Hungarians could become "extinct" but for Orbán.
In the specific case of Hungary, I don't think migrants are even the primary concern so much as an internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates. Orban's pro-natalism hasn't been very effective, but trying at least counts for something, and I would like our ruling class to spend as much time, energy and ingenuity on eugenic pro-natalism as they expended on left-wing social programs over the past 50 years before declaring "nothing works".
I think it's totally plausible Hungary would have had more suspiciously-tanned-Ukrainian refugees in the non-Orban scenario, but I suppose I can't prove it. My broader point is that you're starting with this implicit argument that Preserving Democracy is the ultimate and overriding moral consideration here, and while I have no especial love for dictators I can imagine a world where less democracy could be a lesser evil.
I see what you're saying, but this just seems like the SBF argument for it sometimes being okay to do evil for the greater good. I think the reason we have deontological bars against this kind of reasoning is to encode a heuristic that this works much less than you would think - people do the evil, and then the greater good doesn't result, and you're just stuck with evil, and sometimes even less good than you started with because your plan has backfired (as SBF's did with effective altruism).
For example, it seems like Hungary had all the normal downsides of illiberalism over the past few years - poor economy, people so unhappy that they overcome all these obstacles and kicked out Orban in a landslide. But it also seems like the native fertility rate has done *worse* than in all the other comparison countries - the way I phrased it last links post was "Hungary now has a lower birthrate than all the surrounding countries, a greater 2-year drop in birthrate (by far) than any surrounding country, and the second highest ten year drop...proposed causes include declining approval ratings for Orban, who has become associated with pronatalist policies in the Hungarian mind..." (see https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3910901/hungary-little-baby-bust/ ).
So although I agree that in principle, you should sometimes be consequentialist about this sort of thing, I think there's rightly an incredibly high bar.
Arctotherium did a pretty lengthy breakdown on the topic here, but it's possible Orban's pro-natal incentives were less than successful because they primarily went to mothers, not fathers.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/communist-pro-natalism
I think the economic arguments for left-wing/liberal policies are entirely myopic, of course, since there are few migrant groups that are net economic benefits in the 2nd/3rd generation and the exceptions are just unsustainable zero-sum brain drain. Suppressing family formation likewise does wonders for GDP in the short-term until you run out of people, so it's a totally misleading metric. But you know this already.
The politicians should have very high bars for doing this, but voters shouldn't be quite as cautious; something can easily be obviously bad without being overridingly so.
"Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe (not even the far-right minority party "Our Homeland" officially says that's a problem). Orbán's worry was general population decline, ie. the population of the country getting smaller due to a below-2 fertility rate.
While this seems to have been one of the very few things Orbán honestly cared about besides stealing lots of money (unlike his anti-immigration and pro-Russia sentiment which have been pretty clearly dictated by political convenience), his efforts have been net negative - the quality of health care and education plummeted, and that deterred the middle class that was the target of his tax exemption based fertility policies. Also the middle class probably got significantly smaller during his reign, due to a mix of botched economic policies and constant brain drain to more liberal countries.
As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism. If we grade regimes based on actual outcomes, the winners will be ones that are light on intentions (ie. free markets and lots of individual and group freedoms, with the state having very limited ability to shape things according to its intentions). Orbán's regime was another predictable example of heavy state meddling into economy, culture and public discourse making everything worse.
(Mostly in non-fertility-policy-related ways, mind you. His fertility policies, which consisted of various forms of tax relief, would be entirely compatible with more democratic governments, I just wouldn't expect them to be effective.)
> ""Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe"
I'm honestly baffled as how they can pretend this isn't a major problem, unless their plan is to have the Roma running their society by end-of-century.
> "As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism"
I don't regard equality of outcome as a good thing, so I really don't see how this follows.
I also think arguments pertaining to "but we must preserve our health and education systems!" are basically bogus, since there is, e.g, no correlation between health spending and lifespan within the OECD, and similarly no correlation between homework assigned and PISA scores. The outcomes here are overwhelmingly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to government systems, and vast increases in spending on health/education across the western world have all yielded marginal or nonexistent returns on investment since the 1970s. These systems are all going to be bankrupted by a combination of demographic ageing and welfare bloat in the not too distant future (barring miracles in the automation or biotech sector), so I'm not going to penalise Orban for not caring about them.
I also don't think much of "the Hungarian middle class are fleeing to more liberal countries" argument. Any country that tries to move in a more right-wing- i.e, socially sane- direction, is going to face a problem where high-IQ-but-self-interested people don't want to shoulder the moral burdens now expected of them. Emigration needs to be shut down as much as immigration, and you logically cannot constrict the latter without reducing options for the former. The alternative is the current pattern of the world's talent being slowly devoured by IQ shredders, and I am not signing up for that.
That *REALLY* depends on the specific problem. Getting the lead out of gasoline definitely required government level intervention. So do many other problems, like keeping the streets paved. The problem is keeping the interventions to the domain where they are the preferable solution. (Preferred by who? is a real problem. And regulatory capture needs to *strenuously* be avoided. I recommend that regulators be forever forbidden from taking any payment of any nature from those the ever regulated.)
I just finished reading about the anti-Roma racism and segregation in Hungary. So I asked ChatGPT "Tell me about the fertility rates of Roma vs other Hungarians", and it says their fertility rate is driven by socioeconomic status, as "Highly educated Roma women → fertility similar to non-Roma" and "Low-education non-Roma women → fertility closer to Roma levels". Well, somehow I doubt Orbán segregating Roma children in into their own lower-quality schools was exploiting this.
(P.S. anyone who knows how humans work knows it's incredibly suspicious to suggest that a particular ethnic group, with no unifying ideology, is vermin-like going to out-reproduce the other humans in an area. Because that's just classic racist dehumanization.)
Their TFR might or might not be driven by SES, but SES is hugely influenced by genetic factors, so I'm a little skeptical about how sustainable anti-poverty initiatives can be without massive perpetual welfare transfers.
The year is 2060. With a population swollen by ethnically-exclusive pronatalist policies, gypsies sweep the Hungarian state, allied parties taking practically every seat in Parliament. They may be dusky, and suspiciously tanned, but they are FINE: rippling muscles, gleaming hair, perfect teeth. Seems like they’ve been practicing a “gypsy eugenics” of their own, through partner selection. Death of a nation, nary a pale face to be seen. But take heart: Rod Dreher’s corpse is spinning so fast in his coffin it provides a 100% clean renewable power source nationally. He’s finally earned his state salary.
"He did something. I mean obviously it didn't work, like all those evil bad globalists would have predicted immediately, and it caused various side effects and forms of suffering in the process, but he did something!"
I think the topic of birthrates should be less taboo in liberal spaces but that's where the agremeent ends. No, I don't think "ruling classes spending time on eugenic pro-natalism" would be good or useful. It wasn't the last time it happened.
I often wonder, if you went back in time and talked to Reagan and Bush Sr and told them "in 40 years time, the political party you are leading will advocate for the end of democracy," what would they say? Would they shed a tear? I have to think Reagan would, given his entire foreign policy mission was the dissolution of the soviet union in favor of new democratic institutions in western Europe.
Respectfully, when Poland's government was standing with Orban against the EU's desire to let in migrants, there were LOTS of complaints that the ruling "Law and Justice" party and its leader Kaczynski (no relation to Uncle Ted, I think) were massively undemocratic. This was particularly because the party undertook judicial reforms which led to the disempowerment of sitting progressive judges which had attempted to force Poland's border policy into alignment with the EU's more permissive stance.
Replacing the judiciary with your own people is generally considered undemocratic, yes.
Even in Israel with their hereditary judiciary?
(It's not "actually" hereditary, but the judges appoint their own successors, is racist, etc)
Surely, to the extent that a country is a democracy, the organs of state including the judiciary, must do what the people want.
So if judges want to force though immigration, against the will of the people as expressed in an election, it is democratically right that they should be removed.
If the ex-judges don't like it, they can set up their own political party and contest the next election and (again, to the extent that the country is a democracy) they will win seats proportional to their vote share.
Aristotle would have called elected rulers replacing unelected judges "democracy."
Of course, Aristotle didn't favor democracy.
Lately, though, we are supposed to use the term "democracy" to refer to whatever the pundit considers to be good government, such as a democratically-elected rightwing government's powers being ham-strung.
I think this is actually true. The path of European migrants leaving Asia took them to/through Hungary, not Czechia or Poland. Check out the map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis
Of course even if one thinks that it was wise of Orban to keep out migrants, it does not follow that he should fire schoolteachers with contrary political views, use government money to gain control of media outlets, or be re-elected prime minister forever no matter how badly he screws up everything else.
Approximately zero Syrian refugees wanted to go to Hungary; it was just between them and Germany / Sweden / the Netherlands etc. The actual problem there was that the EU (or more accurately the Schengen area) has an internal return policy, where the country where illegal immigrants first entered needs to take those immigrants back from other EU countries (even if those immigrants set out because the chancellor of Germany invited them). Orbán tried for a couple weeks to just ship refugees across the country, then richer EU countries started getting cold feet, he got cold feet that they will ship those people back to Hungary and he won't be able to send them anywhere else, and built the fence.
This was a somewhat legitimate problem, unfortunately Orbán realized that scaremongering with refugees works extremely well, so even though the migrant crisis ended, state propaganda media continued to pretend that Hungary is being besieged by Asian hordes.
Comparing Orban strictly to his predecessors I think is a category error as a rebuttal to this sort of argument.
It is great that Orban was able to win an election against bad predecessors by talking about all the ways his ideas were better than theirs.
It is bad that it became increasingly uncertain that he would have anything other than a hand picked *successor* and that the strength of their arguments or improvement in quality of life would not be relevant.
Asking you to do the same on the last sentence. Do you really want to boost the types of people who support coups? I can guarantee that Europe would have clapped wildly at Erdogan's political funeral.
What does “solve for the equilibrium” mean?/gen
It means someone has been reading too much Tyler Cowen.
You're being Straussian.
I liked that line. Using a TC quip against a comment in a post that in large part is also a counter to TC. But your observation may also be literally true. For all 3 of us.
In this context it means, "if everybody thinks this way, what is the result," i.e. you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views.
For every action, there's often an opposite and (approximately) equal reaction. In this specific case, Scott is worried about escalation. If the Rightwing breaks the rules of Liberal Democracy, the Leftwing will break the rules as well.
And yeah, it's Tyler Cowen's tagline. Basically a restatement of Supply & Demand.
The Leftwing is already breaking them and this: "you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views" is definitely happening on both sides already. As an example:
Pedro Sanchez, president of Spain and current world bastion of the Socialdemocratic Left:
-stuffed ballots to get elected in his party's primaries
- drive to power funded by his father-in-law's prostitution business
-got into power on a no-confidence vote because of corruption proceedings against the governing right-wing party
-now has three of his own ministers, including his right-hand man sitting in jail on corruption charges
- his wife on trial for corruption (she somehow managed to become a tenured professor at one of Spain's most respected public universities, despite having only a high-school degree)
- his brother on trial for corruption
- his Attorney General convicted of revealing private information (against a prominent right-wing regional governor) and defenestrated
- Constitutional Courts completely under his control
- State statisics office (responsable for polls) completely under his control, and routinely giving his party 5-10% better results than actually end up happening
- State TV and radio completely sycophantic towards him
- promotion of laws to silence any right to far-right media outlets who are naturally critical with him
- his government routinely critical in the media about judges who rule against his interests (such as the judge who convicted his attorney general and the judge who has brought his wife to trial) undermining the separation of powers
- lost his second election but managed to stay in power by forming a coalition with right-wing separatists who had perpetrated a coup by unilaterally declaring Catalunya a separate country, and whom he said, before the election, he would never form a coalition with and never pardon
- after being elected pardoned the right-wing separatists whom he promised never to pardon
- invited into his coalition the basque separatist party comprised of ex ETA members, who were assassinating people up until about 2003, and have never apologised for doing so
- has not managed to pass a budget in the entire 4 years of his second term
- has justified not stepping down (despite all of the above) because "Spain needs to build a wall against the far-right and the right" (ie everybody to the right of his party, over 55% of the voters based on polls at the moment) because they are a "threat to democracy" (but somehow insisting there is only one legitimate party that everyone "who values democracy" must vote for isn't a threat to said democracy...)
- has brought in a law to give automatic citizenship to grandchildren of people exiled during Franco's dictatorship, as they will all presumably vote sympathetically to him
- constantly likens the far-right and right to Franco, and to dictatorships, but is currently best friends with Xi Jinping
There is actually more, but I will leave it there as I think it paints an adequate picture.
Sanchez is currently trying to sell himself as a great champion against Trump (because his domestic popularity is such a disaster), but he has done much of the same anti-democratic stuff as Trump, he's just left-wing... and left-wing sympathizers naturally seem to look the other way in his case.
Hungary isn't western Europe and you shouldn't assume it would be the same in a counterfactual without Orban.
I think the counterfactual was demonstrated 20 years ago: a proud, beautiful, but starkly post-Soviet country with few exports and a weak economy. Orban's rise was disappointing but not shocking, and something similar could happen again.
It is complicated. Orbán basically invented the word "illiberalism", and that is largely because partially Western liberalism came to Hungary in a wrong way, and was not even ready for it even if it would have been the right way.
Let's talk about the right way first. For example all those white Americans in 1965 who supported the civil rights movement of blacks, they understood it is going to cost them. But they had so much surplus that they felt they can sacrifice for justice. It does not work in a poor country. Hungarians feel they themselves are the victims of poor circumstances, so they have nothing to offer to the Roma or to gays or trans people or anything like that. They were not ready.
Now as for the wrong kind of liberalism. First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country. Same as in Russia. Then it was that kind of liberalism that is talked about it here, too, that somehow tolerance means tolerating crime and disorder.
So Orbán's illiberalism was a rebellion against this.
> First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country.
The realistic alternative was to get the country looted by the local strongman.
For example, in 1990s Slovakia during Mečiar's regime, instead of selling the state property on a free market (where mostly the foreign investors would buy it), it was sold (so cheaply that it was practically donated) to local entrepreneurs from Mečiar's party. His voters applauded this, as from their perspective it meant that the national wealth will stay in the nation.
What actually happened was that these entrepreneurs turned out to be so incompetent that they ruined the companies overnight, and then there was 22% unemployment (on average, which means that in some regions it approached 50%). Some companies went bankrupt, the rest was sold to foreign investors for about 10% of the original price (and the money now went to private pockets, instead of the national budget).
Today, the situation is back to normal, and yes the major employers are German (Volkswagen, Kaufland, Lidl, HELLA, Henkel, Slovak Telekom), American (U.S. Steel), Brittish (Tesco, Mondi), Irish (Accenture), Swiss (Swiss Re), French (Orange), Dutch (ING), South Korean (Kia, Samsung), Chinese (Volvo) etc. (Stellantis) companies.
So it seems to me that the situation is opposite to what most people naively predict. "Keeping your national treasures" gets people unemployed and starving, "being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed.
Unfortunately, this sometimes creates a self-reinforcing loop. The more you ruin your country by "protecting" it, the more people get convinced that the situation is so bad that they need more protection.
I think the main issue here is that neither paths lead you to what "feels fair" and what "was promised" -- the "well-fed" still means "pretty far from Western Europe, and huge internal differences" (both in the society and geographically). And this logically leads to people being unhappy from time to time, and want to "try some other way".
Thank you. This provides a different perspective on the EU/Clintonian idea of cutting Russia into parts and looting it (economically speaking).
""being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed."
That neither! They immediately closed them down because they only wanted to buy market share, and 30% unemployment.
best thing would have been to keep them as state property and hire an international, capitalism-expert board of directors and CEO
Companies can have competent native owners as well as incompetent ones.
Foreign purchases can be at a fair price as well as a knock down one.
Rights doesn't have to mean cash transfers.
Unironically using the term Russophobia while Russia is in the fifth year of an all-out invasion of a neighhoring country, while also launching sabotage attacks and trying tp subvert democracy in the rest of Europe, is a bit rich.
I know! The Greens in Germany should be shot for being traitors**.
... what, surely you were aware that Russia wanted those nuclear plants shut down, as it would eliminate the only practical competition for its fossil fuels?
**I suppose I ought to say that I do know someone who got paid to make anti-nuclear propaganda in German.
[To be clear: I am not serious about shooting people, merely trying to point out that Russian Influence is widespread and not always in directions you'd expect.]
Really depends on how aware they were of what they were doing. Although personally I support life in prison rather than death penalty in pretty much all cases.
>> of an all-out invasion
It is not all-out - Russia didn't mobilize men (except for one episode in 2022, and still relying on volunteers; borders are still open). Industry/economy also was largely left as is.
>> subvert democracy in the rest of Europe
And how is that subversion going? Any tangible results favoring Russia? Perhaps, another set of sanctions was blocked? Or maybe some European country experienced a coup?
If I shoot you and miss, would you say its ok?
If you do it with a nerf gun - yes!
I'm not sure we can map the inoffensiveness of a nerf gun onto a conflict that's killed 100,000ish of your people...
Can you maybe explicitly state what you are trying to argue?
It seems that there might be some confusion between 2 points I've replied to above?
1. all-out vs. limited war - this indeed killed a lot of people (but how do you know which, if any, of them are 'my people'?)
2. strength of Russian government propaganda effort - which is objectively very weak ('nerf gun'), and not having much of an impact.
IMO, US / European governments routinely do much more press control / narrative shaping / psyops (in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe), quite often get desired results... but then exactly the same actions are somehow very evil if attempted by China / Russia / Gulf States.
LOL at Russophobia. That is a bit like Gengiskhanophobia.
You're a free person, you can take a vacation in Kyiv and enjoy the raining Iskanders and Shaheds yourself. I'd be surprised if it didn't make you at least a teeny bit Russophobic.
Just commenting here to support you.
By indirect connection, I could name a few thousand people who are actively helping Ukraine by gathering unused meds, fixing wheelchairs, donating tourniquets, donating time and fuel with their truck to get the stuff over there, etc.
Try and find someone who is even thinking of helping Russia in the same way. Not even any of the Russians I know know any other Russians that are willing to help Russia materially (other than being "jerks" and supporting them vocally, while cozying up in western Europe, of course)).
Deeds over words.
Ukraine is considered a US / EU ally, and helping Ukraine socially and legally (i.e. not risking fines / jail time) is way, way easier that helping Russia. So people helping Russia and living in US / EU probably won't talk about it much (if at all).
I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Don't hear much about that either, though. The only people I ever met that defend Russia verbally come across as the type of person that don't give a fish about helping anyone but themselves.
Whereas, on the other side, I have met dozens of Russians sacrificing free time to aid Ukrainians with humanitarian needs. Talking with these people gives quite the opposite impression - level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things. Some with pain in their heart about what their own relatives and friends back home are still saying about them, Ukraine, and the war. The kind of people that would rather work to make an honest living for themselves without trampling over others.
As much as I try to steelman then other side, nothing comes of it. My own experience is obviously skewed *and* biased, but I'm no stranger to self-criticism. And yet, crickets.
>> I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians (i.e. individuals with Russian citizenship who might or might not be living in Russia, and might or might not agree with official Russian state policies); and same thing with Ukraine (state) vs. Ukrainians.
Helping individuals is much easier; but I would be surprised if from a legal standpoint helping Russia (state) would be no different from helping Ukraine (state), at least in Europe.
Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
>> level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things <...>
There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
>> Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians
Yeah, obviously. But strictly humanitarian help is not sanctioned to the best of my knowledge, even for the state of Russia. But I'm not 100% sure on that one and could ask around if you want a more certain answer.
If you want to send Russians, not the state, strictly humanitarian help - knock yourself out. Nobody is going to stop you.
>> Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
You load up (a) truck(s) with humanitarian aid and drive it to Russia. Just like we and many other private persons do to Ukraine, every week.
As for money/wire transfers, I don't know. Easiest is cash, but crypto or other paypal-like services probably exist.
>>And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
EU border agents would probably search your truck for sanctioned goods. What else is there to do?
>>There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
Sure. But for some weird reasons, I can find thousands after thousands of people helping Ukraine outside of Ukraine, non-Ukrainians even. Does that tell you anything?
hard to take that complaint seriously while the EU remains closely wedded to a regime doing the same or worse in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran
The same or worse? Did I miss the U.S. ground invasion seeking to annex Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran? Did I miss U.S. soldiers raping and massacring civilians?
They were talking about Israel, which has had annexations or prolonged occupations of parts of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria in the past and has made clear its continuation of intent to do so very recently. It also, to not get into detail, definitely has cases of soldiers raping or massacring civilians (as do both Ukraine and Russia, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah - this is just a thing that happens in sufficiently large scale conflicts. You can deny it's a structural problem but not really that it happens at a baseline.)
I was talking about both, I don't think you can neatly separate Israeli atrocities from its main patron and enabler, especially as there's been direct US involvement in Gaza (it's why Bushnell self-immolated) and Iran.
Not sure re: Lebanon but it wouldn't surprise me there either.
The phrase many (and myself) have interpreted as an intention to annex in the near future is "the new Israeli border must be the Litani", a river about a tenth of the way into Lebanon (30ish km) from the Israeli border, by the Finance Minister. Other officials tend to use the term "security zone" or "buffer zone" or such to imply an occupation rather than actual annexation, but when asked to comment on the Finance Minister's explicit intent to annex none of them chose to disavow it.
Assuming that's the part you weren't sure on since it's a relatively recent development.
I think this is referencing Israel. And rampantly ignoring the Bibi-endorsed "Western Governments giving money to Hamas." (whether or not you consider this supporting Bibi, he certainly did. But "bibi-supporters who give money to terrorists on his say-so" are qualitatively different from Israel-supporters who aren't doing much other than giving money to Israel).
Smart alecs are now asking about Isis, and whose idea that was, exactly?
"Closely wedded" means what in your book? There are diplomatic relations between Israel and the EU, but nowhere near the level of closeness as between the US and Israel, and some EU member countries are quite openly hostile to Netanyahu's government.
Regardless, it is quite natural that wars happening in your own backyard will provoke more of a reaction that more distant wars. For example, the Arab world does not care much about Ukraine either and is happy to welcome Russian potentates - that does not mean that Arab complaints about Palestine are "hard to take seriously". Or does it?
Arabs seem quite happy to cheer America taking on Iran, the neighborhood problem child. Only the Houthi seem even a tad upset (and with them, it's more a "If Iran goes, who stops the Sauds from attempting to curbstomp us, again?").
Arab complaints about Palestine are... hard to take "seriously" in the sense that the second most hated ethnic group in the Arab World are the Palestinians, and they're not that much behind the Israelis (who could stand to fire Bibi, mind you.) -->nobody will take the Palestinians from Gaza (Egypt would gladly take the land otherwise, Israel offered at some point, but the problem was the Palestinians).
Heck, the ruling Saudi and Yemen and Qatari folks would vastly prefer working with Israel over the Palestinians. They just can't say so too loudly.
"Ruling" Yemen -- the Houthis are more in control of the place, but yeah, they all DO say "we'd rather work with Israel, no matter how much of a pain in the ass Israel is"** just, not in big public speeches.
**businesses, in general, HATE dealing with Israeli businesses, in terms of negotiating. It's a bit of a culture clash, but Israeli businesses will keep yelling until the last shekel, and ... half the time the other guy is convinced the deal isn't going to get made at all, when the Israeli guy thinks "we're almost done."
I just want to note here, that within the EU, Orban himself was probably the strongest and most consistent supporter of Israel and especially Netanyahu.
Despite some anti-semetic tweets about Zelensky's cultural genocidal policies? Yeah, that tracks.
i dont give a shit about the turd world.
Well, yeah, you can also visit Tehran (although getting a visa might be trickier) and then enjoy nearby denotations of US and Israel missiles. Or you can go to Donetsk and experience Ukrainian drone strikes.
... but how would you decide which <insert country name>-phobia to feed in the first place?
Careful about that first proposal, the Iranian regime is not above using visitors as hostages or hanging them as spies.
There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard. Russia is a clear aggressor in that war and Putin himself broke a treaty he signed, do you know? Treaty on the Russian–Ukrainian border, 2003.
Equivocating between Russia and Ukraine is like equivocating between a SS guard and a Jewish prisoner who got hold of a gun.
>> There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard.
In which regard?
My claim is that if you knowingly and intentionally go to the area under attack by country / armed group X, and see that attack (or its aftermath) with your own eyes, then most likely you would dislike group X more (they are shooting at me/people around me!).
But your choice to go to the side opposing X means you already dislike side X more.
This is fine, everybody entitled to have their sympathies; but I am much more interested in discussing various policies based on their merits, regardless of which side might be implementing those policies.
You heard that very wrong, Orbán was much more corrupt than his predecessors (who were also pretty significantly corrupt).
One way to measure it is kickbacks (ie. whenever you get a grant or win a tender or are otherwise paid from public funds based on the decision of some government body, you have to secretly give the people in that body some part of the money). In the pre-Orbán times, a 10-20% kickback was common. In the Orbán regime, the kickback is usually the majority of the money (e.g. the latest major corruption story [1] involved a 75% kickback).
[1] https://kontroll.hu/cikk/belfold/2026/03/28/evek-ota-eredmenytelenuel-nyomoz-egy-jegybanki-vesztegetes-uegyeben-az-ah-es-az-nni
Can someone chime in on American/Western European kickbacks? How often are those more than 10%?
(I don't know enough on bribery in America (where I live), and although I do suspect that the answer is often "this school's slots are priceless", I'm aware that some bribery does occur in Actual Dollars, and we should be able to measure that).
We're 'Murrican. We don't "bribe" other countries. We "generously offer assistance in international development" which has the "unfortunate" side-effect of destabilizing inconvenient regimes and removing inconvenient politicians from office.
I would say, kickbacks are even the wrong word or approach for what happened. In case of kickbacks, a company takes the initiative to bribe someone from the state, it is very individual. But it was more like a state-ran organized corruption machine where it was the state who took the initative to use business as a cover for shoveling money out of the state. It was the state who decided we want X money, let's figure out what can we build for X*1.25 money, and then distribute the X among political loyalists, propagandists etc. I think the correct term for this is political machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
This.
Corrupt and undemocratic leaders are bad in their own right. Corruption reduces government efficacy by MUCH more than what the people siphon off (say, you give a $200m contract to a worse company, costing the tax payers $20m, in exchange for a $1m payoff), so you get less of everything including what you want.
Undemocratic policies undermine the democratic mechanisms that encourage good policy: normally, voters get mad at gas prices/inflation/losing their jobs/whatever and vote you out, and the fear of this makes you try not to let those things get bad in the first place. If you don't fear getting kicked out, then you have less reason to care about gas prices, and more reason to care about making all the bank notes multiples of nine.
So you just get worse, shittier governance. Then you get negative polarization against all their signature special interest policies, because those things get associated with their shitty government.
Government efficacy is undesirable when governments do generally bad things.
They don't, though, they mostly build and fund schools and hospitals and roads and pay for pensions and unemployment insurance and things like that.
Tanks too.
Paying for pensions and insurance and schools over time translates into a massive drain on the economy, so it would be better if all that stopped.
We're not talking about the alternative being "don't spend the money," though. We're talking about the alternative being "spend the same money for a worse version of the same thing, or more money for the same thing, or some combination thereof."
It is a tragedy that right wing governments have yet to figure out how to remove pensions, yes.
It is difficult for me to imagine the kind of asymmetric dystopia you desire, or the kind of suffering and toil you want to sentence the vast majority of human beings to experience from behind eyes and inside minds that are just as real and wondrous as your own, even if they may in some cases rotate hammers in their mind slightly slower or less accurately (or whatever kind of ‘peasants are NPCs’ BS this implies).
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
Tanks are fine, they're small potatoes. It's when governments start paying for "destroy civilization" weapons that we ought to consider whether this whole "western civilization" was exactly a good idea... Actually, any technology with the potential to destroy civilization (or the world) should be a cause to reevaluate "does the government do generally bad things"? Everyone has a level of risk, sure, but -- does it need to be 50% chance of "no more Earth" before we get upset?
(Not Nuclear Weapons. Those are city-destroyers, and yes, bad, but if Putin had nuked Cleveland in 2019, you'd still be going about your life.)
I think corruption is even worse than that. In capitalism people innovate or provide good services to customers because that is the only way to get rich. So when you can get rich on corruption, the desire to innovate or provide good services goes away. So it kills the marketplace as much as badly thought out socialism does.
If the typical free market margin rate is 20%, at least as margin1, it means $100 stolen displaces $500 worth of products and services of the kind that customers actually want.
You are right about the effect of corruption; on the other hand, "capitalism" also includes to build a monopoly (buy out your competitors) and then just collect the money as there is no more alternative. This is also not "doing good work" and "satisfying customers". :-)
Please define globalism, Russophobia and how Orban's policies actually stopped this half formed concepts (also loss of national sovereignity).
Russophobia in particular I have often seen it used as a term to say opposing current Russian expansionism (which in cases of countries bordering Russia could be rebranded as basic common sense). Safe to say at the beginning of WW2 no american was considered Germanophobic for condemning Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Of course there are other use of the word, but not ones that Iv'e personally heard often
I do think there's a genuine phenomenon where Russian culture as a whole becomes stigmatised out of opposition to Putin's current regime - concert halls cancelling performances of 19th century Russian music and the like - and if we're willing to distinguish anti-Zionism (and indeed, even more narrowly, anti-Netenyahu-ism) from antisemitism, it should likewise be possible to acknowledge that there can be a problem of anti-Russian xenophobia without going soft on the current regime.
It should be noted that Putin's war is also a cultural war. His policy is to eradicate Ukrainin culture in the occupied territories, to completely "russify" the people starting with the children. Other countries pushing back on Russia's cultural influence is not a phobia, it's entirely justifiable.
It should be noted that Orban reacted* to the cultural genocide that Zelensky was instituting on his own people (the transcarpathians). This is hardly a "just russia" thing.
*Did you see the comic? Was that blacklisted? It was... very undiplomatic.
I can understand that in Eastern European countries which are actually at risk of having their culture overwritten by Russia, but I hardly think that cancelling a Tchaikovsky concert in Paris or New York is doing anything to thwart Russian expansionism.
Yeah, well, I didn't talk about Russian expansionism, but about the cultural war; that is a parallel battlefield. Boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest is not likely to save a single Palestinian or Lebanese life either. Sometimes "business as usual" is just even less appropriate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwy9n786n0o
My point is that Tchaikovsky concerts in the West, or classes about Tolstoy on western syllabuses, are not being advanced by agents of Putin's regime. The comparison to Eurovision is fair to a degree, but we're not talking about cultural events organised *by* Russia, just classics of global arts and culture that happen to have been created by centuries-old Russians. Israel's relative youth as a nation makes it difficult to find an exact analogue, but there is such a thing as Israeli cinema, and if some TV station pulled a previously-scheduled rerun of a 1950s Israeli film that had been scheduled internally with no influence by the current Israeli government, I would consider that prejudiced overreach too.
Let's say, you are in charge of providing basic education to the population on the territory controlled by US in Afghanistan or Israel in Gaza.
Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Also, how do you think your policies would look from the outside, if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
>Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Granted, it's not entirely off the mark to compare the Russia-Ukrain war with your examples. But if you believe that your points are all that's happening in Ukraine, let me add some more questions:
What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense. What would it look like if I also mandated that all edcuation has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed. What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
Do you need more? I could go on.
>if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
You know, sometimes being unfriendly is the objectively correct behaviour. As is the case with Russia.
End of your reply suggests that you made up your mind and whatever I can say probably would be in vain, but let me try anyway:
>> What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense.
Afghanistan under Taliban harbored jihadi training camps, as well and Al-Qaeda leadership, and was not willing/capable to arrest jihadists and Osama ben Laden, so yes, it is fair to point out this in school books, and say that US attacked Afghanistan to eliminate any possibility of another 9/11 (which was clearly an atrocity, with ~3000 civilian victims).
>> What would it look like if I also mandated that all education has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed.
Bad analogy - Russian is (one of / majority) native language in those regions, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language_in_Ukraine#Polls (pre-war data); Ukrainian is also one of the official languages in Crimea and Russia-controlled part of Kherson region. Ukrainian is not outlawed in any of the Russian-controlled territory (compare with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Ukraine_"On_protecting_the_functioning_of_the_Ukrainian_language_as_the_state_language"/).
>> What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
If kids are not orphans (which might take some time to ascertain during the ongoing war), then kids should be returned to their legal guardians. However, there are stories like this - https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/virginia-supreme-court-rules-us-marines-adoption-afghan-orphan-stands-rcna258881
If those kids are indeed orphans (i.e. there are no relatives who have legal custody, regardless of why it happened), then the state has the duty to provide them with food/shelter/education (especially if it considers these kids its own citizens), including via adoption; doesn't look very good - but alternatives seems worse.
There can be and it's generally performative and useless to actually affect the Russian war effort. Still I find the comparison with antisemitism unconvincing. Antisemitism is based on centuries of proven hate and violence inflicted against an isolated and during the time of persecution innocent ethnic group.
This is not remotely close to what's happening today against Russia.
No, the amount his buddies were stealing literally led to a serious dysfunction in public services, in the trains catching fire due to lack of maintenance way. And sorry to say that but after 2022 Russophobia is objectively correct and globalism looks a whole lot better than that.
In my city, a bus fell into a sinkhole. In Downtown.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/surreal-images-show-city-bus-swallowed-sinkhole-downtown-pittsburgh-n1072976
Were anyone really minded to, they could say this was a "serious dysfunction in public services." (Really, this was delayed maintenance, probably, due to half the city's population leaving town, and everything going on "delayed maintenance" schedules for over a decade).
One of my closest online friends lives in Pittsburgh! She says “very cool working class culture, lots of anarchist punks and other lovely counter-cultural weirdos”, I guess working class culture can also mean “kinda poor”
Seriously?! Cool to hear.
There's a good deal of sporting culture (hockey, football). There are some weirdos, but that's probably in a part of the city I don't live in (I live in a quiet neighborhood). There's a lot of colleges and medicine, it keeps things lively around here.
Pittsburgh was hurting pretty bad through the 1980s and the 1990s, it's gotten better in terms of "no longer bleeding population."
Nothing says "upholding national sovereignty" like supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.
Oh, naturally, Orban wouldn't say no to Transcarpathia. And Poland still thinks Lvov is theirs. This is europe, and "national sovereignty" depends on who you ask and when they're talking about. Poland didn't exist for a couple of centuris.
He was free to leave the EU whenever he wanted.
"It's fine to bend democratic as long as you advance <purely ideological ill defined pet cause>" isn't a great way of doing things and not how the west has worked or achieved its success until now. People who often claim about wanting to preserve the keys to that success should pay more attention to what they keys *are* instead of just going with vibes.
No idea what's your problem with Russophobia
If there is any embodiment for "loss of national sovereignty", "globalism" and "corruption" that's Russia
Every single Russian politician who didn't use the term Russian as a slur, is killed by Putin in not so subtle way
(most translations ignore it, but Putin uses colonial term for Russia like "Cisleithania" for Hungary)
And it's not a linguistic quirk, you may look on Putin government and institutions and find how much length he went to make majority-minority rule in 85% Russian country
Yo
Or you may look into constitution, and find that Russia belongs to "Multi-ethnic Cisleithanian people"
Or finally you may look at his foreign policy and find he spend last 12 years in cringe cold and then hot war with Ukraine, Ukrainians closer to Russians than Berliners to Bavarians, painting very soft protection of Ukrainian culture as something only nazi would do
Like, Russia is in real life all the "globohomo gay agenda Klaus Schwab eat bugs own nothing be happy" state that exists only in memes outside of Russia
As a Russian, I can confidently say that Europe isn't as Russophobic as it should be.
>In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!)
Which Wikipedia pages have notably cursed headings?
The one for Australian film producer Pat Sullivan takes you on a pretty wild ride. "Rape Conviction." "Racism." "Involvement in the creation of Felix the Cat".
It seems unfair to have a whole section labelled "Racism" for someone born in 1885.
(Especially when there's nothing there except a second-hand report of a single incident where he didn't hire some black guy.)
It's Wikipedia! Would you also remark upon, say, the Daily Stormer's lack of even-handed coverage of people of Jewish ancestry?
Are you alleging that Wikipedia feels the same way about Australians as the Daily Stormer does about Jewish people?
No, the relevant bias here is not against Australians.
Who is it bias against?
Whatever happened to be the bias of the editor who last touched that page.
It's pretty pervasive on political articles.
The same people that the (left-leaning) mainstream media is biased against, because they're the only allowed "reliable sources". See here for elaboration: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
Well, it's really a sub-section of controversies, so I feel its a bit fairer.
Lord Dawson used to have a heading "Regicide of George V". Sadly, this got edited to the mealy-mouthed heading "Death of George V".
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1665/
Snicker. The article for my (apparently internet-happy) city is complaining about "this article is longer than World War I" (we're kind of locally patriotic like that, it's a good article.)
Orban reminded me of the the Daleys, who were mayors of Chicago for over 40 years between them. Orban, like the Daleys, was a pretty crooked political machine boss.
In the late 1960s, student radicals tended to refer to Richard J. Daley as a Fascist, but that quickly calmed down and largely vanished before his death in, I believe, 1976. Very few people called Richard M. Daley a Fascist.
The Daley family was so little suspected of Fascism in this century that Barack Obama selected William Daley, son of Richard J. and brother of Richard M. Daley, as his Chief of Staff for his third and fourth years in office.
Of course, the Daleys weren't a threat to Democracy.
How could they be? They were loyal Democrats.
For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley held back the last Cook County precincts until the downstate Republican machine caved in and laid all their cards on the table, setting off an appreciative celebration of Mayor Daley in Hyannisport among Kennedy staffers (according to Theodore White's memoir "In Search of History").
ah, didn't read your comments before recalling that old joke!
There were two massive cases of vote fraud in Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs) involving Democrats when I lived there in the 1980s:
The 1982 Senatorial election when the Democrat Adlai Stevenson the Something did improbably better than all the polls predicted until finally, several days after the election, the Republicans scraped together enough votes in DuPage County to end it. Stevenson, a naive blue blood, kept demanding a recount although all his boys kept telling him that, you know, Adlai, we gave it our best shot, so it would be best to let bygones be bygones and not turn over too many rocks with a recount. Stevenson's recount led to several dozen Democrats and a few Republicans being convicted of vote fraud.
Then the Democratic mayoral primary in 1987 appears to have had massive vote fraud on various sides.
Neither scandal directly involved a Daley, however.
For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
> For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley...1982...1987...
> For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
Why are you stopping at 1960? Go back further, you may find more interesting and highly relevant information for 2026 voters. For example, my understanding is that there was significant voter fraud among the hunter gatherers in the Jeaga tribe who used to occupy the Palm Beach area. In fact, they didn't even have voting! So we should be somewhat suspicious of the current president, who spends quite a bit of time in that region.
How are Democrats immune from being threats to Democracy?
Democracy is when Democrats win.
This is really low effort and makes the comment threads way worse. Less of this please.
It's a perfectly reasonable description of the highly successful narrative engineering that biased elites engage in. Canada just got a majority by the fairly manifest bribery of opposition MPs, the media are glowing about it
Who says that?
Democrats.
Two basic sets of questions for you.
1. Do you think this tactic used by Democrats, of unfairly calling their political opponents threats to democracy, has been effective? Have Republicans been harmed by it? Should they be worried?
2. Assuming the implied obverse is also true--that Republicans, by contrast, more consistently refer to their political opponents using unexaggerated & readily defensible language--does it suggest some kind of path forward or actionable outcome for Republicans? I.e. What would you wish Republicans to do with the information you've provided?
It's extremely easy to find many examples of Democrats referring to victories by Democrats as being fraudulent. In many of those cases Democrats would be quicker to say so than Republicans.
What if the Daleys and Orban were both threads to democracy?
The Daleys won a dozen or so Chicago mayoral elections. Maybe they cheated once or twice, but still ... the Daleys, for better or worse, more or less represent democracy in action.
Personally, I'm pretty pro-democracy. Let the people have what they want, good and hard.
But I'm also aware that smarter guys than me such as Plato were not pro-democracy.
Orban has only won five out of eight elections to be Hungary's supremo, but it sure seems that the people who claim to be "pro-democracy" are much, much angrier toward him about the five times he won than they are about the three times he lost.
ProDemocracy people often tend to be so because Democratic governments are far easier to manipulate, both by manipulating the elections, and by manipulating the elected officials.
Hell, I know someone who tried to crash Canada's currency by manipulating the Canadian government into enough infighting (HardRight versus Loopy Left) that they'd fail to form a government (and this was all to get a cheaper Canadian vacation) -- it notably didn't work because Canadians Just Compromised, but -- it was a good college try.
I don't think anyone is angry about Orban *winning* elections. Rather people are angry what shady things he did in order to support himself winning the elections, and how to build large parliamentary majorities out of very thin popular vote majorities.
But all of this is already in Scott's blogpost above. So your argument seems rather disingenious.
Yep, the Daleys were corrupt and bad and undermined democracy.
Maybe would have been fascist or authoritarian if they had had the power to be so. But since Chicago is a small part of a larger mainly-democratic polity, we (fortunately) never got to find out.
The Daleys are my go-to example for "good corrupt government." Yes, they were corrupt machine politicians who made Chicago their personal fiefdom. But they were genuinely attached to it. "This is MY city, so it better be functional (or it makes me look bad), semi-solvent (or it can't pay me off), beautiful (because I'll always live here), host important events (to show off my importance)." The Daleys, for all their faults, cared about the long-term health and well-being of THEIR city, perhaps mostly for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it put guardrails on it. The current Mayor Johnson, and previous Mayor Lightfoot, are excellent examples of the perils of the alternative - also corrupt, but more ideological and rootless, with less location-permanence and personal investment in the cities they run. You get the sense they'd abandon the place in a heartbeat to advance themselves (e.g. Lightfoot getting booted and immediately going to Harvard / Michigan).
*Noblesse Oblige* is a very real concept, in my experience. The nobles expect to get *paid* and *respected* for their *oblige*, and they don't expect the rules to apply to them, but there's a massive difference between an upper class who feels a responsibility and ownership toward their local town or city and one who doesn't.
I knew my (small-town rich) grandparents-in-law as fairly narcissistic, small-minded people. But at their funeral, it was amazing to hear all of the work and donations they had done for the benefit of their hometown. They really cared about it, and their actions showed it.
Yes, exactly. Today's upper classes, it seems to me, still expect to get paid, demand respect, and to have the rules not apply to them - but without any corresponding responsibility for the ongoing health of the polity. Sure, you'd be better off with honest government officials who aren't quasi-feudal, but that's not the choice available. More often it's either pure climbers, ideologues, and looters, or else the feudal fief model where at least there's some personal connection and stake in the enterprise by the local nobility.
I might reconsider that go-to example, at least in the case of Daley Jr. He was responsible for a number of public finance blunders, most infamously the parking deal which is sending our meter revenue to Abu Dhabi for the next 50 years. Johnson and Lightfoot haven't done anything close to that. And Johnson is very much a Chicago-bred machine politician in the mold of Daley, not a parachuting elite, so your criticism of him from that angle doesn't make much sense.
Really though this entire subthread is kind of silly. "Chicago politics" is a punchline due to the kind of stunts that the Daleys pulled, and to spin that into some sort of partisan victimhood narrative is a stretch. I'm glad that Chicago has moved on from the Daleys, and glad that Hungary has now moved on from Orban.
Johnson in particular is so unpopular that his worst ideas have often been killed off. That he is a creature of, by, and for the CTU, with a dash of befuddled woke for flavor, does not inspire confidence that he is permanently yoked to the city, although he's so incompetent and hated that he may not have a featherbed landing elsewhere like Lightfoot. Instead the city remains billions in deficit and with dismal credit / bond ratings. In 2008, the year of the "worst deal of the century" (no question it was bad), Chicago's bonds were rated AA. Now they're BBB. I would happily take Richard J. or Richard M. over Brandon Johnson any day of the week, and based on his single-digit approval ratings I'd guess that large portions of Chicago's electorate would as well.
EDIT: Also, as to "partisan victimhood," all of the above are Democrats, as you know. If anything it's a generational question - old vs. new Democrats. I wouldn't call that "partisan."
The decline in bond rating just proves my point, Daley got a bailout that screwed over the city's finances in the long term. And he had other similar deals like the Skyway tolls, the parking meters deal was just the worst of them. I'm not going to defend Johnson, I just don't think it's accurate to say he isn't attached to the city, nor is it really relevant to his (lack of) effectiveness. Rahm has been our best mayor this century IMO, and he went off to be the ambassador of Japan or whatever after he left office.
Re: partisan victimhood, I was referring to the original comment comparing Orban and the Daleys, not anything in your reply. Sorry for the confusion.
I don't know how many states have one of these, but I bet it's less than 50.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Illinois
The brother of a friend of mine in Chicago was a U.S. Senator. He didn't even bother running for a second term because, being a rare honest man in Illinois politics, everybody who was anybody in the state was mad at him.
Daley II had a pretty good record for awhile so when the now infamous parking meter deal came along, people were too trusting.
There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion". I think this is a reasonable argument to hold against people who say any threat to democratic values must come strictly before any other election issue - a candidate who seems 10% more authoritarian than the alternative but who you agree with strongly on many other issues probably is a better choice to vote for in many cases.
(In practice people almost exclusively accuse only people who's other policies they don't like anyway of being authoritarian, so not sure how many such people even think they have to make this tradeoff).
I basically agree, but the more you separate out "real dictatorship" as a category containing only the worst and most unlikely outcomes, the more that real dictatorship is very bad and even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent.
I also think there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things. The same way that a candidate with good policies who also rapes children might be consequentially better for the country than a candidate with bad policies who doesn't, but you can have a win-win bargain between different parties by all of them agreeing never to vote in someone like that no matter how good their policies seem.
To my eyes, your first paragraph doesn’t say much except, “No, you’re wrong, it *is* a slippery slope.” I wonder if maybe AI has gotten you too much in the habit of thinking in apocalyptic terms.
Your second paragraph is sounder, but if you accept that both sides have to be constantly vigilant that potential autocrats don’t gain power, I don’t see why you imagine that such an agreement could be arrived at.
(I *especially* don’t see how you imagine it could be struck in the US after the last twenty years. But you’re talking about theory and principles, not the situation on the ground.)
"Small chance" is very much *denying* "slippery slope". The point of the slippery slope metaphor is to argue that something is likely. Scott's point is that if something is bad, then even small chances are relevant.
Also, no one should be saying "both sides" have to be vigilant that autocrats don't gain power - *all* sides should be vigilant, and we shouldn't pretend that people who opt out of two major parties can ignore autocracy.
Agreed, if you want to criticize it it's more Pascal's mugging then slippery slope. Argument was trading off some democratic value support for support in other categories may be worth it. Rebuttal is ant-democratic can be really bad even a small chance is therefore bad. But without saying how small and how bad it leans into Pascal's mugging style argument.
Fair enough; I agree with tg56’s assessment. But if Scott doesn’t think it’s a slippery slope then I’m not sure his call for action (“even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent”) makes sense. A concerted political effort to stem potential autocracy seems quite likely to produce the autocracy it seeks to prevent, either by direct action or by reaction. What we need is a cooling off, a stepping back. We’ve had two decades with an atmosphere of “it’s now or never” on both sides.
To get in a panic over Trump, the first Chief Executive in my lifetime to actually reduce the size of the executive branch, is indicative of this mood, not of Trump’s actual threat.
I think it's a bit weird to focus on the *size* of the executive branch, while ignoring the degree of centralization. Trump is the first president to make personal demands about what people at so many levels of the executive branch were supposed to do! (Everything from asking them to cancel individual grants to finding reasons to prosecute particular people to renaming parts of the country, on the basis of "the president's priorities", rather than treating the executive branch as a system, the way previous administration had done.) The Supreme Court has endorsed this idea, that perhaps the executive branch is meant to function as a "unitary" agent. But this is definitely a move towards concentrating power in an individual, not distributing it!
But overall, I agree - many attempts to enshrine policies that oppose autocracy tend to push towards autocracy as well. It's often hard to distinguish anti-virus software from malware, given the control it has over your computer, and the immune system is actually the cause of many diseases (like lupus and arthritis and allergies), even as it protects against others.
Well, there is only so much the Executive can do by his own hand. If your point is that the executive branch is working against the wishes of the Executive, then I can only agree, but in that case an autocracy by Trump seems even more remote.
The centralization of the executive branch isn't a threat to democracy -- in fact, it's putting the power back in someone *elected*'s hands, instead of a bunch of unelected, almost completely unaccountable (look at the struggles to even slightly reduce their numbers or fire the ones that were actively sabotaging changes in policy from the political side) bureaucrats.
Now if it's power that the executive branch *shouldn't have* (because the federal government shouldn't have it OR because one of the other branches should have it), that's more of a concern. But no one's actually talking about changing *that*--in fact, the Democrats have been pushing for *more* independent (ie unaccountable to anyone, including Congress) agencies!
The executive power belongs entirely to the President and him alone. He can (and often should) choose to delegate, but he cannot legitimately be *forced* to delegate. The prosecutors and grant writers aren't some independent branch with independent authority. Either they have legislative power (which is a separation of powers problem and itself a threat to democracy), judicial power (same deal), or they have executive power (which isn't theirs but only delegated), or some combination.
And IMO Congress delegating *legislative* or *judicial* authority to the executive (see all the rule-making executive branches and the whole administrative judge complex) is a *way* bigger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done.
“there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things”
But this is undermined by your (correct!) point that “antidemocratic” is a spectrum, and approximately every ruling party is at least a bit antidemocratic when they have the power to be and think they can get away with it.
You can consider dictator risk before other things, but if the choice is between 10% dictator risk with 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, and a 15% dictator risk with 100% of your other preferred policies being enacted… is that really a clear choice to pick the former?
How about "consider relevant differences in dictatorship risk between the candidates"? Obviously nobody is worried about a 1% difference, especially not if other concerns point in a much different direction.
Sure, but that starts to sound less like a “deontological bar” and more like regular old consequentialism.
And in any case, endlessly arguing about whether the difference in risk is 1% or 10% is kind of where we’re at right now. It doesn’t seem like a clean solution.
Per your last paragraph: If you think that there is 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, than I hope it sparks some reflection. Either your assessment of likelihood is very bad or your preferred policies are very bad in the sense of "approximately 0% of other voters/citizens in my democracy want the same or similar policies". The latter is actually a feature of democracy, no? And if you think you know better and still think those policies should be enacted, and you better bend the system in order to achieve it.. then I hope at some point you are going to ask "are we the baddies?"
Being enacted *under the alternative leader*. In this hypothetical we're talking about a potentially authoritarian leader who still has a decent chance of winning the election (despite being perceived as authoritarian even by some of his own supporters), so presumably his actual policies aren't unpopular.
Yes, this is what I meant. You’re choosing between two democratically viable candidates (so, both are pretty popular), one of whom has a somewhat higher chance of becoming a dictator but whose other policies are much more aligned with your preferences.
And obviously in any realistic democracy, the candidates with a viable chance to win don’t literally disagree on 100% of policies - but it may be the case that they disagree on all, or nearly all, of the policies that are “up for debate” or likely to change over the course of the next administration. For example, I think it would be fair to say that a Trump 2024 voter likely disagreed with ~100% of the immigration policy changes during the Biden administration.
There's almost always a spectrum in any deontological category.
You can still have simple rules. Pick a threshold of democratisation, and vote only for candidates expected to be above that threshold.
If all candidates are below,l the threshold, vote strictly for the candidate more likely to have the higher democratisation.
There’s also the case that a lot of good things in society are downstream from democracy (via corruption and undermining institutions etc) and that the damage is similarly continuous. There’s no sharp threshold so modeling it as a Risk for some sort of Event which marks the point of no return misses a lot of the negative consequences.
This is true but a different mechanism - e.g. New York or California governance isn't exactly authoritarian but as one party states they still suffer all the other downsides of being weak democracies (like the corruption and weak institutions).
I think, ultimately, there are unfortunately sometimes blurry lines between "ordinary politics" and the meta-politics about whether anyone is undemocratic (and thus undermining the conditions of ordinary politics). Or the entrenchedness of parties can be bad even if they aren't doing anything concrete to undermine democracy. But at the same time, I feel like this blurriness can be used to obscure the plurality of mechanisms by which the spectrum of democratic backsliding affects people negatively.
Yeah. The issue with there being multiple mechanisms which enable democratic backsliding is that they often imply different solutions - for example if you're worried about an executive concentrating power and restricting free elections you want to double down on voting for your own party (assuming you're a partisan who believes only the other party's candidates do this, which most voters are). But if you're worried about single party rule and lack of accountability you want to be more open to voting for the other party.
The California gerrymandering thing is a good example of this tension.
(There are solutions that work for both - e.g. I generally support voting for more palatable candidates in the opposite party's primary and think it's good for both these issues - but there are tensions).
"Real Dictatorship" as a Very Bad Category comes from our Hitler As Antichrist worship. If we lay that down, we can talk about all the stripes and strains of authoritarianism Together, as they probably ought to be. I consider An American Junta to be probably worse in all respects than An American Dictatorship (other political philosophers made some of these arguments in favor of monarchs, they certainly aren't new).
In general dictatorship seems to be a high variance mode so most of the worst failures of government are pretty dictatorial (Stalin, pol pot etc - Mao is a clear example of how a single bad leader can deliver much worse results than the baseline for his system if he has enough power). So it makes sense to worry about it.
But it has to not be the *only* thing you worry about, because that leads to paralysis and "nobody should ever be allowed to do anything", which is also really bad. The example of this is New York after Robert Moses, which decided "hey a guy with too much power pushed city planning in a direction we didn't like, let's make sure nobody ever has the power to change anything again" and thus got eternally stuck in its post-moses planning.
Dictatorship is significantly more stable, and "prone to large moves" than, say, a junta. One can argue that there are very bad failures ongoing in the EU, because they Cannot Come Up With A New Plan. But those are the sort of failures that aren't... quite... as splashy* as A Great Leap Forward (and though that does expose flaws in the dictatorial governance style, it's still an outlier -- Stalin's moves are core: dictatorial power entrenchment).
*"when you shiver this winter, remember you're doing it for them." along with a Ukrainian flag in the background.
Someone who's got sufficiently extreme bad behavior in their personal life - and thus, presumably, is a good enough liar to avoid having that land them in prison - might reasonably turn out to also be lying about what their public policies will be, and/or the expected results of those policies.
> There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion".
Could you explain what you mean with the first ("charitable") part? Aren't there quite obviously antidemocratic leaders who are like 95% worse on democratic values (Kim Jong Un, or Stalin, or Hitler, or whomever you consider to be an *actual* dictator)?
Charitably/uncharitably towards the anti democratic leader. In practice "willingness to break democratic norms" is a spectrum among politicians, so if you live in a fairly democratic society you're much more likely to have a candidate who's like, 20% more willing to be norm breaking than his alternative. While obviously there exist people at the end of the scale, most people on the authoritarian spectrum aren't at the end of it.
See? Here you're talking about undemocratic leaders. I'd far rather have that conversation (and get to bring up Joe Biden's administration with its neoconservatives -- who the hell on the liberal side meant to elect a neoconservative foreign policy?)... than simply talk about strongmen, as if the opposite side (ruling junta) is any Less Of A Problem (it's arguably more so, if only because dictators can be assassinated, which tends to cause chaos).
I think it's pretty obvious that democracy is a spectrum. As Scott said, wannabe authoritarians are going to push as hard as they can, until they can't. Judging where that stopping point lies is tricky, and the price of failure is revolution -- and thus Orban chickened out. Trump is also famously known for chickening out; but the situation in the US is different. We are halfway down the road to a cult of personality, and are long past the tipping point of the cult of political identity; thus, Americans are much easier to manage than Hungarians.
I feel like we should be able to do better than calling democracy a "spectrum"; there's multiple different ways that democracy can go wacky.
1. A country where the party in power routinely rigs the system in their favour, but not enough to stop themselves from losing, and then the other party comes in and rigs the system in their own favour, so it doesn't really matter that much.
2. A country where there's two parties that alternate power, but neither of them actually satisfies the populace's preferences on some particular issue.
3. A country where all the democratic institutions seem to be there and working, but there's a weird equilibrium where one party keeps getting voted in decade after decade.
3 is Japan, and for a few decades was also India, Canada, and Mexico.
2 is the United States on many things, and I'm sure some other relevant countries.
Has 1 happened anywhere? In any case, it seems unlikely to me that "it doesn't really matter that much" if you get long periods with one party in power through rigged elections, followed by long periods with another party in power through rigged elections.
I think you see something like #1 in the UK where both parties have an opportunity to appoint life peers to try to stuff the House of Lords, but they only do it when a prime minister steps down so it is designed to be self balancing.
I would assume #1 happened in Bangladesh but don't know for sure.
Congress and then the BJP in India seems a pretty good example there.
3 is also true of a number of state and city governments in the United States and is often associated with a lot of soft corruption
In Japan, getting a female PM from the conservative wing of the conservative party that has ruled the country nearly uninterrupted since the end of WW2 is apparently so much the only slightest glimmer of reformist the populace can imagine getting that they give her the first ever super majority.
I feel like I should be learning more about something by witnessing it close up. But all I can manage so far is stuttering "guys you know its just going to be more of the same right?". Its not even that I want the opposition to win. Its just i feel baffled by the expectations gap.
There are also a lot of countries with more than two parties, which adds other options, for example, a coalition dominated by one party that keeps adding more extreme parties to remain in power.
Seems like a democracy that has gone "wacky" is not easy to differentiate from one that hasn't.
A country where NonNative Forces elect their government, via outright vote manipulation, advertising, or more flagrant moves (like removing popular politicians via assassination).
We are one of three bullets shy of this in America (Flagging Iran.).
I think there's both a spectrum, and a quite clear difference between cases like Communist countries where there's no opposition party allowed to compete with them, and cases like Orban where he just stays in power longer than we in the US would permit with our term limits after FDR but can eventually come up short in his Nth election.
In Orban's case, it's not just that elections were perfectly normal and everyone got to campaign fairly and he just happened to keep winning, the way that it has often been the case in places like Canada and the UK. You should re-read Scott's post, and maybe his earlier posts on Orban, to get a sense of what he actually did.
I read Scott's post and his original on Orban, and don't think there's a simple definition of "normal" or "fairly". People can always claim an election is "unfair". An actual transfer of power to an opposition party via election is a proof by example that we don't see in any Communist dictatorship.
Yes, people can always *claim* an election to be unfair. But nevertheless, there are differences of degree of fairness, and you might look through Scott's list to see proof by example that many other democratically-challenged leaders have also actually transferred power to opposition parties via election. Being communist isn't the only way of being bad.
No, not via election. Most of his examples were referenda/plebiscites and/or didn't result in transferring power.
Orbán completey rewrote the election law pretty much first thing after election. It contains several slight nuances, each adding just a couple of seats to his party -- if you are really interested, I can list half a dozen similar stuff. And these are just the election laws, for example, Scott's estimate of the 90% party-controlled media is roughly correct. The elections in 2014, 2018 and 2022 were clearly and obviously "unfair".
(2026 as well BTW, just now so many people were fed up with Orbán that they vote for Magyar pretty much "no matter what". Magyar is also a right-wing populist, BTW.)
My understanding is that the system benefits the largest party, which was previously Fidesz and is now Tisza.
In part, yes. (Though Orbán took the time to gerrymander as well, and the population of the districts is not uniform either -- the law expects some 30% maximal difference (or maybe +/-15% from the average, I can't recall exactly), while the max/min ratio is now around 2. (Orbán's party, as most right-wing parties are, is more popular in the rural areas, and of course districts in the cities are more populous.) There was also a minority seat (for the German minority), who also voted with Orbán. There are unverified votes from the neighbouring countries (cca. 200k from the total of usually 5M), usually 90% Fidesz (this time "only" 84%).
The strategy BTW built on the demographics factors: the supporters of Orbán's party (itself a moderately right-wing, populist party, roughly) is of a similar demographics, while the opposition is fractioned into several groups (far-right (formerly the Jobbik, now Mi Hazánk), "commie nostalgics", city liberals, all their separate parties in most cases). So yes, when these groups run with independent parties (which would be the case in a normal European democracy), the Fidesz wins, and wins large, due to the several tricks. (As happened in 2014 and 2018.) When the opposition joins forces, they can be mocked as the Coalition With the Devil (former PM Ferenc Gyurcsány), and becomes unpopular, as it happened in 2022.
Currently, the Tisza proved to be the largest party by far (the far-right party got 6%, which is pretty much what anyone expected; the nostalgic commies and the liberals/protest party got like 1-1% each -- 1-2 years ago they were around (more like slightly below) the parliamentary limit, i.e. 5%). The reason is that lots of people fed up with Fidesz, practically casting a protest vote (pretty much a "with us or against us" situation).
But this is temporary, as the demographics are still quite different. Furthermore, Tisza currently looks like a right-wing populist party (i.e. a better version of Fidesz, e.g. Fidesz 15-20 years ago), which is again not to anyone's taste. I mean, the three parties in the Parliament are all right-wing, and all are populist... This is not a long-term equillibrium.
Tyler Cowen using the fact that Orbán conceded as proof that Trump isn’t a threat to US democracy is a little rich considering he rather famously did not concede last time he lost. Which I would go so far as to suggest indicates that he might even be a fair bit worse in terms of character than Orbán.
He didn't concede but he also didn't _not_ concede.
He didn't say "I concede" but he did all the actions of a person who has conceded -- he didn't need to be physically removed from the Oval Office, nor did he set up a White House In Exile and continue to issue orders. He put on a big show of not conceding but in practice he conceded.
He attempted a coup. After it was thwarted, he remained uncooperative with the transition team. Then he left with his tail between his legs. That's not conceding, not even "in practice."
Which part was wrong? He very famously didn't cooperate with the transition team, and while there's some reason to dispute whether Trump himself attempted the coup in 2021, it's clear that he didn't do much to try to stop it.
This is a poor way to hold a discussion. Please do not do this.
Banned for this comment.
No, if you'll forgive me citing Tyler Cowen again marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html it was a riot. Riots are of course bad, and Trump should be condemned for pardoning rioters (along with basically every other pardon), and the President's pardon power should be removed.
No, it was a coup. You seem to be rounding down everything Trump did to January 6th, which was just one of many things he tried to do to overturn the election.
See: https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup for a complete rundown.
He says that Trump tried to steal the election. But coups normally happen without elections at all! That's a separate thing.
That simply isn’t historically true. Elections are very often a prelude to coups. Virtually the entire history of the French Revolution is a list of elections that were followed by coups
Trump's whole scheme turned on taking the case directly to the Supreme Court (an extremely rare and weird idea, but ... ask the Red Team for ideas, and you get asymmetric warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)
This wasn't a coup, not in any senses of the word.
To the extent there was a coup near Jan 6th, it was "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" in a non-legal (unconstitutional, non-legislative) way. (To be clear: Had Pence assumed the presidency, I'd have no leg to stand on here. Or had an impeachment actually removed Trump. These are legal within our political structure. What's not legal is having a palace coup.)
I actually agree that "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" was a major and under-discussed issue after Jan 6th. And it does reflect poorly on the Dems and people in the administration that went along with it.
But to be clear, it reflects poorly because they *didn't* impeach him even though if they were all worried that he'd launch nukes for no reason ... and it reflects *much more poorly* on Trump and on Republicans who continued to support him.
Like, there's a reason Republicans don't go around yelling about the one thing that actually happened that legitimately looks like the deep state coup-ing Trump.
Just because something is a riot doesn't mean it's not a coup. I don't think Trump intentionally instigated a coup attempt, but he doesn't intentionally do a lot of the things that he eventually takes advantage of.
A coup is a sudden strike to seize power. You can only pull it off if organized in a military manner. A riot is when there's a large enough crowd breaking laws that local law enforcement is overwhelmed. Rioters can't hold up to actual militaries (hence the Iranian regime remaining in power).
Yes but riots can be used as part of a larger scheme to facilitate a coop.
Not strictly true, honestly. If Harris had taken power in, say, 2022 without "following the rules" (the appropriate constitutional amendment), and had enough political allies that they were willing to greenlight her as President, that would be a coup.
She'd undoubtedly have used her friends in the DoD as part of her powerbase, but it need not have been organized in a military manner.
With media cosigning it, you'd get... about what happened when Joe Biden "decided not to run for President" -- nobody wanted to ask why this was the one time Joe Biden didn't use the autopen, or why it got posted to Twitter (or indeed, who posted it, because Biden was sick and in bed).
[Technically, the "deciding not to run for President" isn't a coup, as Biden still... retained as much power as he'd had beforehand.]
No, it was a coup attempt. Donald Trump created a series of false slates of electors in seven states he lost, then attempted to pressure Mike Pence to use them to throw out the true slates, then when Mike Pence refused, sent a mob of violent people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" at the Capitol Building to try to pressure him even more.
He tried to cheat. A coup requires security forces seizing the area.
That’s really a very specific type of coup that you’re describing. The typical developing country coup in the 20th century where a faction in the armed forces arrests the President and occupies the TV station.
But historically most coups aren’t that. It’s usually some faction in the regime using some mixture of force and procedural shenanigans to seize power. It doesn’t have to be the army proving the teeth. On that model Jan 6 looks like an incompetent attempt at a coup. The rioters intimidate Congress into using an unprecedented legal theory to recognize alternate slates of electors, the case goes to SCOTUS and they approve the result, either due to more intimidation or because they approve the scheme.
I don’t think the argument that just because this was done incompetently it wasn’t a coup attempt really stands up. The best argument it wasn’t a coup is that is there wasn’t the required element of coordination between the regime and that rioters. I don’t really buy this but I can see that it’s a possible objection
His attorneys assembled "alternate" electors as a necessary part of their lawsuits challenging the results in those states (as has been done in the past) to avoid a procedural hurdle known as "mootness." Without alternates that the court could hypothetically bless upon a successful claim, the courts would not have been able to rule on the merits of his challenges, something that I hope we can agree every losing candidate should be entitled to.
He then pressured Mike Pence to delay certification as those lawsuits played out, which he refused. They lost the lawsuits anyway, so their electors who were explicitly conditioned on winning those challenges would never have been certified regardless.
You can see more from Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law here: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-constitution-protects-fake-electors-law-history-presidential-election-722c9db0
He pressured Mike Pence into throwing out seven lawful slates of electors. If these electors had been thrown out, either he would have a majority of remaining electors, or he would have forced it into a vote by the majority of representatives from each state in the House, which he expected to win.
Then, after doing that, he sent a violent mob at the capital, telling them that "if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election" and watching and sipping Diet Coke as they beat cops.
He did some effort to not concede, which failed. It's very charitable on your side to say "in practice he conceded" after he called Georgia secretary of state to "find votes" to secure his win, after he called several governors to pressure them to not certify Biden's victory in their state, and after he put pressure on Pence to not certify the election. And that's forgetting all the false claims he made about the elections.
How do your priors change if you consider that Trump has an entire National Security and Intelligence Team behind him? That Trump knows, say, that some/all of the mail-in ballots in Fulton County were never folded (in which case, how were they mailed in the proper envelope?)...
This year, FBI has collected ballots from Fulton County, which was the point of that phone call (read the transcript), by warrant. This is an active case, and you shouldn't assume you have all the details about it.
Given that the entire National Security and Intelligence Team (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) said there was nothing to any of the cheating allegations, causing Trump to try to do an end run around them, my priors don't change at all.
After 240 something years, the end of Trump 1 made it so we can no longer say that America has an uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power. That cannot be considered a concession
Sure, and if there's any such dispute in fifty years, some future person will do what you're doing and say "after 300 something years …." There have been plenty of similar cases of some unrest after elections in the past, quite famously in 1876, as the easiest example.
Can you elaborate on the 1876 comparison? My understanding is that the dispute was institutional, with competing certified slates that required a resolution mechanism, and that Tilden accepted the outcome once it was reached. This seems like an entirely separate category from a losing candidate personally choosing to resist a clear result. Is there something I'm missing that makes it a closer parallel?
It is my understanding that there were plenty of armed Southern militias credibly threatening a march on Washington to get Tilden into office, and managed to exact significant concessions from Hayes in exchange for not starting a civil war.
I don't think they had the capability of threatening DC. But the military occupation of the south had lost political support over time, so they were willing to give that up while retaining most power at the federal level.
Yes, but Tilden didn't direct the militias (afaik) or refuse to concede. I'm fairly certain he was happy about being able to both have the popular vote victory and escape the stress of the presidency. Doesn't the relevant parallel require the losing candidate to be the one resisting the peaceful transfer of power, rather than the supporters and surrounding unrest which the candidate eventually quelled?
Did the militias actually come?
I'd say the easiest example would be the election of 1860. I heard there might have been some violence after that one.
I wouldn't. Not an example of violence used to prevent the transfer of power to the winner of the election. The Battle of Fort Sumter didn't start until more than a month after Lincoln assumed office, uncontested.
Are you not counting the Civil War?
You might have to throw in Presidential assassinations as well. Hard to argue it's a peaceful transfer of power when the pervious occupant was violently murdered.
Presidential deaths aren't transfers of power - the same electoral slate remains in office.
"I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is President!"
The War over Toledo, West By God Virginia, etc.? I'm pretty sure you have to narrow your range a little more than "America" before you actually get to "uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power."
You’re omitting some actions he took between November 3 and January 20 that were the opposite of conceding.
Hey quick question, why didn't Trump stick with Mike Pence as his VP?
I'm not the OP but what's the answer to this rhetorical question? I assume it's something to do with not stepping down but I wasn't sure of the exact reason you're hinting at.
The reason is that Pence refused to certify a set of fraudulent electoral slates from states that were won by Biden, but those slates claimed those states for Trump. If Pence had co-operated with the plan, Trump would either have successfully stolen the election or there would be some sort of constitutional crisis.
The point of the rethorical question is to say that the US was one man's integrity away from a successful Trump coup.
The whole idea of the "new electoral slates" was running off the Supreme Court investigating the election. This was NOT illegal, as the Supreme Judiciary can do whatever it pleases to settle the election, including throwing out all the votes, telling everyone to rerun the election, etc.
When you take a puncher's chance and fail, all your plans collapse. That's what happened here.
Submitting fraudulent certificates of ascertainment is illegal, and rightfully, several people were indicted for it.
When you say “the Supreme Court [was] investigating the election,” what are you referring to? Did the Supreme Court ask anyone to send more elector slates? Worth noting that the Eastman memo explicitly advised Trump/Pence not to check with the courts before executing the plan.
Consider that his opponents technically conceded when he won, but proceeded to launch a national scale conspiracy theory that Russia got him elected, which was deeply democratically corrosive. After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election. What he did was wrong - was it more wrong? It was really just more stupid. I hated the idea of Trump but by that point I didn't really consider him to be breaking norms in the way that they already had
Conceding but definitely not conceding in the most sophisticated and effective way you can is just as much of a threat. The J6 people got Shanghaied in extraordinarily hostile court settings. And pretty much nothing, to my knowledge, has happened to the collusion conspiracists
Yeah and in 2016 they also launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits, repeated ad nauseam the claim that the election was outright stolen and that Trump did not win the votes attributed to him, phoned election administrators to try and strong arm them into “finding” votes, insisted on vetting all future hires on a purity test of agreeing that the election was stolen, and never officially conceded.
(Sarcasm aside since I’m sure you’ve had enough and feel sorry for being so silly. It actually is a recognised fact that Russia DID attempt to intervene in favour of Trump. That is verified. Whether it was decisive is unknown and unlikely.)
My understanding of the Georgia phone call was that Trump honestly believed that the votes could be "found" - though I have no expectation that that was an accurate belief. You may be unfamiliar with the civil judgment against Trump which was and is extraordinarily salient to his supporters. This kind of thing basically melts the "quality liberal democracy" fuse. For instance, it's entirely out of my character to have no concern about Trump making a huge amount of money with his gaudy meme coin after his election. But because of the half billion judgment against him, which was later voided, I have literally no issue with it. It's an efficient way for him to fund defenses against future lawfare. This is Grok's summary:
"A Trump supporter might reasonably see the New York civil fraud case as extraordinary lawfare because Attorney General Letitia James— who campaigned explicitly on targeting Trump—used a rarely invoked state statute to pursue a real-estate developer over asset valuations that caused no proven losses to sophisticated banks and insurers, who did their own due diligence and profited anyway. Judge Engoron then imposed a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty (with interest) plus a three-year ban on new loans from New York financial institutions, which Trump's team argued made posting a full appeal bond "practically impossible."
To outsiders, it looked like selective persecution: the massive "fine" was later thrown out entirely by an appeals court as an unconstitutional excessive penalty, yet the fraud label and some restrictions lingered, saddling Trump with huge legal costs and publicity damage during his campaign—without the state ever showing real public harm. In a city where such valuation practices are common, it appeared less like neutral enforcement and more like stretching the law to financially and reputationally cripple a political opponent."
The knots you tie yourself in….
> his opponents technically conceded
You write this like that Democrats conceded but only in some narrow technical sense that's actually misleading. There's no sense in which they didn't concede. Not only did Hillary concede the next day, but Obama invited Trump to the White House a few days after, said that he was the president elect and he'd work with him on the transition - something every president in recent history has done, except for Trump in 2020.
> After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election
There was no such abuse, and even if there was, this doesn't follow at all. But of course if it did follow, it would follow all the more so that Democrats would think that *Trump* would try to steal the election in 2024 and would justify Dems stealing *that* election ...
It's certainly debatable as to whether Trump no longer had a reasonable expectation that norms would be respected but you might find it interesting to ask your local LLM this: "Are there any classic quotes in which Hillary or other Democrats described Trump's victory in 2016 as illegitimate in an unusual way for American politics?"
I did and it gave 7 examples.
Then I asked if anything similar happened with Obama in 2008 or 2012 and it gave 8 examples.
But of course both are small potatoes compared to Trump's (and other Republicans') comments - and actions - in/since 2020. To bring up the previous example, Bush had Obama at the White House, Obama had Trump, Trump didn't have Biden because he never acknowledged he lost and his administration didn't cooperate with the transition, then Biden had Trump.
On the most basic level he's the only one not to concede, and saying "but Hillary called Trump illegitimate 3 years later" is very obviously not the same thing.
We are not too likely to persuade each other any farther, but I appreciate the reminder about the birth certificate people - especially when I asked the question and found one of them was Trump, though he eventually disavowed it
The episode was especially painful, because it was a great opportunity to change the law so Schwarzenegger could run 😅
Tyler Cowen is such a twit sometimes
I continue to think this overestimates Trump’s ability to plan
Edit: rather than being obscenely lucky and having absurd instincts.
Orban's situation was quite different, too: he lost 55% to 36% with 80% turnout. That means that anyone not deeply beholden to him is going to defect immediately. Trying to fight in that situation could land you prison or dead. Trump lost by only a percent or two and had a reasonable chance of a comeback.
I like the percentage scale! You could even directly couple it to the election result, as in, “this democracy has a 4% deformation, because one party can shift the result 4% in their favor”
I think gini ratio should be a nice equivalent. Truly egaliteratian republic should have "power inequality" of zero while full dictatorship have the opposite. There's also equivalent mechanism of money begets money, power begets power.
That doesn't count, because 4% is just Lizardman's Constant, which I have just realized explains quite a bit about the smaller weirdnesses of many elections.
10% of people are pro-Ebola. I think that's a better constant.
And 2% of people are pro-JoePaterno (which says that even the lizardmen weirdos do actually pay attention to gossip).
(Same poll I think).
What poll is that?
That's too old to quickly google.
https://www.businessinsider.com/panetta-burns-plan-ppp-poll-simpson-bowles-question-public-policy-polling-2012-12
Guessing PPP? Maybe Rasmussen? One of the big guys, and both Paterno and Ebola were relevant at once, so they both got lumped into the same poll.
You would need to scale those 4% to the amount necessary to reliably win the election. If one party only needs 4% deformation to reliably seize power, then they have little incentive to do more than 4%, and those 4% are effectively 100%.
For a stable electorate that may be true, but I think the US is a good example of a system where it is a bit more nuanced.. These things tend to shift over time, but let's say that for a given decade party A has an unfair advantage of 4% in the house of representatives (because of more successful gerrymandering, poll access, etc). That means that party B would have to lead the generic congressional poll by 4+ percentage points to have a good chance of winning the house. I think it's a useful metric to describe this as a 4%-deformed democracy.
Other than dictatorships with sham elections, the American electorate is the most stable I can think of (basically 51-49 one way or the other), so I may misunderstand what you mean by that.
In 2018 the vote for the house was 53.4%-44.8% D and in 2022 it was 50.0%-47.3% R (wikipedia). Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
Your numbers have a difference of less than 9 and 3 points, respectively. I consider that stable because relatively few people, on the whole, change their vote from election to election; there is low variance in the results. In such a scenario, little cheating is required and would be hard to detect by the numbers alone.
For example, if you had a country where every election usually varies widely from 70-30 to 30-70, the amount of fraud necessary to invert the overall result would be much more obvious. But in a US scenario, a few percentage points can make a huge difference and are, on the surface, not obviously suspicious.
Edit: Therefore, if one party can swing the result of an election by a flat 4 points, that effect would be much higher in the US than in the hypothetical other country, and calling them both "4% deformed" would be misleading.
I see what you mean! Let's say there was a country of 1 million + 1 people, of which exactly 500k are die-hard team green and exactly 500k are die-hard green red. Oh and there is also one dude who really doesn't care and just always votes red because the red party slips him a few bucks. Therefore the red party is perpetually in power. This would arguably be a very broken democracy.
I'm not so sure though that this applies to the US. Democrats have recently managed to win elections under conditions that unfairly disfavored them by a few percent. And we have excellent estimates on how much their disadvantage was.
In Canada the media is subsidized to the tune of about 20%. This isn't really necessary for their support, but it's not their money so it's a good deal all around
Hopefully all the non-US anglophone countries can learn from the new Hungarian leader's shut down of the state media
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that state subsidy to media, is the same as state-run media, is the same as media run by friends of the leader with an explicit political slant?
The effectivenes of biased media has two driving factors. The level of bias, and the level of credibility. Media that is plausibly ambiguous in terms of bias and control can have an equal or greater effect than straightforward state media
Surely this is a spectrum. On one end, there's a state-run media that says exactly what the president wants said and nothing else, never contradicts the party line, etc. On another end, all media are 100% independent of government and are entirely free to say whatever they like.
If I'm paying your bills, I have some influence over you. Media organizations can and do try to build some kind of insulation between the owners/donors and news operations, but those don't always work. There are many cases of network TV news stories being influenced (and sometimes killed) by the parent company of the network. If Disney owns your network, there are some stories you are not able to run. If Bezos owns your newspaper, likewise, there are some stories you probably won't be able to run (or at least, if you do, it will be bad for your career). You can also have some insulation in the funding mechanisms, like having a government grant to some media outlet that tries to prevent anyone pressuring the media outlet to change its coverage. But again, this is always imperfect, and of course a lot of the partisan decision is which media to subsidize. If we lived in a world where the public radio stations getting government funding were mostly conservative Christian stations, the Republicans and Democrats would basically swap sides on what kind of funding was appropriate for those stations.
I feel like we have a set of recent worked examples where institutional controls on bias were defeated by ideological takeover in a bunch of media outlets, and a current set of worked examples where norms and rules in executive-branch agencies intended to insulate those agencies from politics have been defeated by a president who DGAF about those norms. This should make us all a lot more skeptical about both kinds of controls to avoid bias.
This sounds right. Especially because “avoid bias” is a hopelessly ill defined concept.
I think it's fuzzy, but there was a real and important difference in 1970 between Pravda and the New York Times.
What I want from news/information sources is an honest and competent effort to tell me what's going on. It is inevitable that the people doing that will sometimes get things wrong due to biases, their background assumptions, lack of relevant knowledge, lack of resources, etc. It is not inevitable that the people doing that will knowingly lie, omit information they know to be relevant to spin the story or avoid trouble with their coworkers, phrase things in a misleading way in hopes of confusing people, etc. That's all a choice.
NPR can't help being NPR--a news operation staffed overwhelmingly by educated urban liberals of a particular bent, with all the blind spots and biases that ensures. But they can decide whether or not to, say, refuse to report on some stories for ideological or political reasons, or whether or not to omit relevant details of some story in order to try to shape the political impact of the story. Once they start doing that, their value as a news source goes way, way down for me.
And this is true for every news source. Perfection isn't available, but honesty and competence and due dilligence in getting the facts right is within reach of professional journalistic organizations.
In the Netherlands we have a system where editorial decisions aren't made by one centralized public media broadcaster like the BBC or CBC. Instead, there are a number of different broadcasting associations that get time allotted to them according to their membership. Which they can use for whatever content they wish. This system is a holdover from a previous "pillerised" time, but I think more countries should adopt it
Interesting. So essentially the way it would work is the voter gets a ballot with a number of media organizations, and media organizations get broadcast time according to their vote count?
Not quite. You actually have to become a due-paying member, it's not a free vote.
Do you feel this aspect of the system is essential to its success? From my point of view it seems like it could worsen polarization. And overrepresent the views of wealthy people I suppose.
It's not an essential feestje, but just hope it works over here.
The anti-Orban activity outside of Hungary was 99% institutions who didn't like his policies (being anti the policies of the EU, which is another insane anti-democracy). Go look at the recent election in Romania to find out what kind of democracy the EU likes.
As to Hungary having no tradition of democracy: they had a "Magna Carta moment" 100 years before Britain. (I only know about this from) Mike Johnson's "Revolutions" podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/7-06-the-kingdom-of-hungary/id703889772?i=1000391364389
Having to reach back 800 years to some document giving constitutional rights for *nobles* is just conceding the point.
Ya gotta start somewhere.
Literally Magna Carta
Mike Duncan! Love that dude.
I am shamed. I even looked up his podcast.
We'll let it slide this time, but if it happens again, it's the Earl of Strafford sentence for you.
Yes, we can't have a serious discussion about the political nature of European states and leaders without looking at the big picture and going beyond the scope of a sole country like Hungary.
The EU cancels binding referendums when the result displeases its leadership and then just enacts the same laws under a different name (European Constitution Referendum in 2005) or legitimises and endorses an outright judicial coup annulling a completely free election if they don't like the winner (Romanian Presidential Election in 2024).
The EU establishment also has zero issue with highly gerrymandered voting systems like the one France has, which was explicitly conceived in order to assure the ruling President's party could get an easy parliamentary majority with as little as a third of the popular vote.
Nor does the EU seem to particularly mind nepotistic distribution of government positions, since Ursula von der Leyen was literally weaselled into the position of Commission President through a series of backroom deals despite not even being on the ballot for the 2019 EU elections.
Why do we have a decade-long torrent of mediatic and diplomatic warfare between the EU leadership and Viktor Orban?
Because he made a fool of them during the 2015 refugee Crisis, was able to prove to the European community that you can resist accepting huge amounts of illegal migrants without any serious consequences, and has exercised his sovereign diplomatic right to curate positive relations with Russia at a time when the EU demands closed ranks on this matter. Virtually none of these things have any relation on his supposed autocracy or corrupt nature - he was simply pursuing political goals they disagreed with.
Thank you for your eloquence where I could only gibber.
akkor menj a faszomba moszkvába geci
hát akkor a kurva anyád
I understand the reluctance to use 'dictator' or 'autocrat' until someone is immune to losing power at the ballot box. But what's wrong with 'strongman'? Fujimori and Juan Peron are both classic strongmen and neither ever outright successfully stole an election (Fujimori tried).
Yeah, I think "strongman" is probably the best compromise, although unfortunately it sounds kind of based.
Trump would very clearly like being called a strongman. But, regardless, I think Juan Peron is the historical figure and movement he best resembles.
I proposed „elected strongman“ (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban/comment/3580969), maybe the dissonant combination can help: he’s a strongman, yes, but apparently nevertheless constrained to some extent by some system of rules that forced him to go through elections.
I feel like machine poltiics in the US in the early-to-mid 1900s gives a lot of examples of this kind of leader--the machine does all it can to fix elections in its direction, but its abilities are limited, so it has to actually keep the voters reasonably happy or lose power.
An interesting example -- those city "machines" often were very responsive to the masses, in that they provided a system of patronage that took care of the needs of a lot of incompletely-assimilated (and often not English-speaking) immigrants.
But that does expose another dimension: Orban was a "strongman" in that his power was very personalized. The city machines were much more institutionalized, it seems to me, with the same machine surviving for decades with considerable turnover of personnel.
That expression is still often used to refer to athletes focusing on strength training:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongman
We could just use "wanna-be dictator"? I think that adequately captures "This person would like to rule with an iron fist" without implying "there's a hope in hell of it happening."
How about "cheater"?
"Cheater" only applies if there's an actual rule violation. I'm not deeply read about Orban, but it's not clear to me that he ever did anything strictly illegal.
Installing cronies in the media, banning opponents from appearing on TV, tapping phones, and gerrymandering the country feel like cheating to me. The other stuff in Scott's list don't feel like the rise to the same level - more like "dirty tricks".
I'm not clear how the "did he do anything strictly illegal" threshold works when we're talking about running a country. Wouldn't someone on this spectrum of authoritarianism be actively changing the rules/laws in their favor and by definition do a lot of things that would colloquially count as cheating but be technically legal under their newly-written laws?
How does Trump being put on trial and convicted of a felony by his political opponents rate in the "Orban tilts the playing field" scale? Yeah, the Democrats lost anyway; so did Orban.
If it's so easy to convict someone of a felony they didn't really do, why is it that Trump isn't able to do it against the vast number of political enemies that he's tried it against? The obvious answer is that, while, yes, the New York case was selective prosecution, he did actually commit those crimes. And, moreover, he stole classified documents from the government and tried to overturn a fair election -- two far more serious crimes that he will never pay the price for because of partisan judges.
The answer is "Trump doesn't have the deep state on his side".
And it's not "a felony he didn't do", it's "three felonies a day". Everyone with any money or political presence has actually done something that would be a felony, to a zealous prosecutor.
You realize that it was just a regular jury that convicted him?
You have a good chance of getting a jury to convict a ham sandwich.
And I'm sure he did do the felony; the problem is that everyone in his position has committed a felony so the selective prosecution is actually important. It's impossible to not commit a felony in his position.
Again, if that’s the case, why is he not able to get past a grand jury against Powell or Comey or Tish James?
The expression is ‘indict a ham sandwich’ — which he can’t do —, not convict a ham sandwich (juries find people not guilty all the time)
Comey and James got off because Trump's prosecutor got kicked out by a Clinton appointed judge, who he didn't have on his side. He's still trying to get Powell.
That's a GRAND jury, not a regular jury, which would INDICT, rather than convict, the sandwich. Ham sandwiches are too popular to be convicted!
That's specifically a grand jury, because a grand jury is shown the prosecution's case and not the case of any hypothetical defense. It's not trivial to convict people of crimes: nor should it be.
And, of course, the standard of proof in a grand jury is just "probable cause" (the same standard for making an arrest, or getting a warrant), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Famously, Trump's people couldn't even succeed in indicting the guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. You can say that it's easy to convict people of felony, because laws are written in a way that lots of people are technically guilty, but in practice it's actually pretty hard to even indict if someone hasn't really committed a crime!
If laws are written in such a way that lots of people are technically guilty, then lots of people have really committed a crime, so are not hard to indict for something.
I don't think comparing the difficulty of indicting someone for a particular action and the difficulty of indicting someone for at least something in their life is really comparable (I didn't follow the Trump case enough to know whether it was reasonable or not so this is just general principles)
A New York jury is not a regular jury. Political orientation, I hear, is now the largest source of bias in the US. You should see the D.C. Mark Steyn case where he was "convicted" of slander. The prosecution didn't even try to prove a primary component of the case and the jury found there were $1 of damages - and assessed $1 million dollars of punitive damages against Steyn. This was overturned as the traditional maximum multiplier was about 7x, with I believe $1,000 punitive chosen by the judge. It was a political circus
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-change-on-trial/id1713827256
Did you actually read the book "three felonies a day"? All the examples are of people who were doing pretty obviously sketchy things.
wait until you hear about how mossad controls the deep state, the illuminati control mossad, and steve irwin controls the illuminati from a secret base on antarctica
It's not THAT easy to get a conviction in the US, and Trump is incompetent.
More to the point, Trump's nature and followers make it hard for him to get a lot of first-rate people to work for him. He's a legendarily terrible boss who has no loyalty to anyone but close family. A different leader with the same broad set of beliefs but without Trump's flaws would have a lot more Marco Rubios and a lot fewer Pam Bondis working for him, and that would probably make it easier for him to tell his underlings to get his enemies and have it actually happen. Further, Trump and his followers just absolutely do not do subtlety or nuance. ISTM that Trump doesn't just want to prosecute his enemies, he wants to be *seen* to prosecute his enemies, and brag about it, and loudly demand that his subordinates get those bastards, and that's the sort of thing that makes judges, grand juries, and juries all balk.
If you pay hush money with your private money, that's illegal because it helps with your campaign. If you pay hush money with your campaign money, that's illegal because you're using your campaign money for private stuff, and also you have to disclose it, but that violates the whole point of paying hush money. But I guess we want to make sure that if any politician pays hush money, whoever they were paying now can blackmail them for having committed a felony.
If this is the worst Trump has done, then he is a far, far better man than I imagined. Probably better than virtually all politicians.
Given what a genuinely sketchy life Trump seems to have lived, it's actually kinda shocking that motivated prosecutors couldn't find more convincing stuff to charge him with.
"Stealing" classified documents that the Federal Government still has copies of, isn't the same level of "stealing" as most people generally mean it.
This is on the level of "forgot to return a library book" for Heads of State. (Notably, Biden did this as well).
Trump isn't nearly as powerful as the guys that ran Eliot Spitzer out of power. Yes, you can absolutely trump up charges, false or otherwise. As the California frontrunner who punted a cat off a balcony shows, there's also the matter of "everyone's got a rape charge or three" lying around, or they wouldn't have support (you have to have some reason why you'll be more loyal than the next politico, and "we have blackmail material" is a good start).
Asking that you wait until the FBI is done with an active case before being quite so prejudicial about the "fair election."
The issue of contention in Trump "stealing" classified documents isn't that the government no longer had them, and its operation was impeded by their absence, the issue is that Trump was very likely selling access to national secrets for personal gain, which is a crime which under ordinary circumstances is treated very seriously and has very severe penalties. If Trump had simply forgotten to return classified documents, and then returned them on request, the whole thing would never have been a newsworthy story among everything else he's done.
If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
Citing Walz, and my former mayor Ravenstaahl, and a whole host of other people. If the FBI cottons on to someone being dirty, and has anything close to "enough dirt to muddy them in a trial", they just get them to stop being a politician.
Remember, this was all done under Biden's FBI -- and I don't think folks are really alleging that the FBI is actually "pro-Trump" (we can get into the whys of this if you really want).
If they actually had anything like a paper trail, they'd have run with it. Biden's team threw every other felony into the mix, didn't they just?
**the counterargument to this is Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and the laptop. But if you don't see a large amount of "tilting in favor of the Democrats" involved in those actions...
>If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
By doing what, specifically? The case was going to trial, the prosecution felt that they could prove the case to a jury, the judge violated procedure in numerous ways to stall the case until Trump was elected. What specifically do you think the FBI would have done to "stop Trump being a candidate" if the evidence was there?
What case? Seriously, cite it here. What was trump being charged with? Because I'm sure it wasn't "selling state secrets". That's a Big Charge, "forgetting to return documents that the feds have copies of" is a small charge -- particularly when Trump's counter is "I already declassified them."
https://legalclarity.org/how-the-presidential-declassification-process-works/
So, sit down and look at that, he's allowed to declassify anything -- completely outside the Executive System -- he is supposed to document his work, of course (presumably so that the Executive Offices stop protecting the data as classified).
Judge "violated procedure" -- yeah, but you aren't talking Judge Dugan violated procedure, where she got to go to jail for obstructing justice. Judges are allowed a lot of lattitude -- technically, sending in a gravy boat as a filing (filled with gravy) ought to get a lawyer some sort of rap alongside the head -- in that he ran out of time to get a Real Filing In, and that's bad, judges don't like that. But the judge can simply say, "don't do it again, we recognize you're sorry."
And you're still looking at a pretty small case. if the FBI thought they had an Actual Case Worth Making, as opposed to Biden's non-civil-service folks saying "throw anything you've got at him", they'd have led with something way bigger.
You're alleging that the FBI had enough evidence to throw together a trial saying "Trump totally sold secrets" (to whom? show me the money.), and then Didn't Run With It. That's looney.
The felonies Trump was convicted of in NY were really a stretch. They found a way to charge him in NY for violating federal campaign financing laws using a questionable legal framework. I think he's a terrible president but that doesn't mean hitting him with that particular suit was a good precedent.
The election interference case in Georgia was much more serious. I wish it had been allowed to continue.
Having it continue while the FBI is raiding Fulton County and reopening the "mailin ballots that weren't folded" case would be hilarious, no? I think we maybe ought to wait on the facts, and then consider whether the President did anything "wrong" (In considering that, one might consider that the President does indeed have access to intelligence reports. And that, after Jan 6th, an unprompted nuclear attack on China was one scenario that the Joint Chiefs were worried about, given their intelligence assessments of Trumps personality and the intelligence on the election)
+1
IIRC, that was derailed by the state AG hiring her boyfriend to prosecute the case.
I think you're referring to Fani Willis, the prosecutor in the Georgia election interference case. A real debacle.
In the post, I wrote:
"Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia is at 70%, and North Korea is at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. "
...so I guess I'm committed to saying it's 2/7 as bad as what Orban did, which sounds about right.
What I would say about the cases against Trump is that, whatever you think of the NY state cases, they aren't nearly as bad as the other cases against Trump being undermined by his political supporters in the government.
The classified documents case and the Jan 6 related charges, all very serious, all with a mountain of evidence, all stopped by Trump appointees/supporters in the judiciary and elsewhere (including the supreme court inventing a "the president is almost entirely above the law" doctrine).
I think we gauge how democratic some country or state is largely on vibes. I mean, our political system has extensive gerrymandering, including legally-required gerrymandering to ensure majority-minority districts in some places. The way presidential elections work make sure that no California Republican or Texas Democrat will ever have a say in who becomes president. Appointed judges routinely overturn laws that are put in place by elected legislators or plebicite. Pretty much every state has ballot access laws that make it very hard for third parties or independents to get elected anywhere. And so on.
Now, I'd say we're still a pretty democratic country--power can and does change hands based on election results, and I certainly think the difficulty of defeating the incumbent party is much less here than in Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey. But also, it's pretty easy to just gloss over the antidemocratic stuff we're familiar and comfortable with.
This is a late reply but I just noticed this now.
The problem with that reasoning is that you're trying to say that Trump is particularly bad because he does this sort of stuff. You can't *simultaneously* say that when Trump does it, that's particularly bad, and that when the Democrats do it, it may be bad but it's just something that everyone in power does, unless you actually try to compare both sides and argue that one is worse, not just say "look, Trump did bad things".
I'm not sure what you mean. I think on this hypothetical scale, the US Democrats are (let's say) 10%, and Trump is (let's say) 20%. I agree that if this had been the point of my post, I would have had to explain exactly what things Trump did worse than the Democrats, but since it's an unrelated question, I'll just say that I think it's consistent to think everyone is at various (different) gradations of badness.
(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats! There's a tension between 'it's easy to seize power by convicting your enemies in show trials' and 'you can't have a blanket assumption that no powerful person has ever committed a crime'. I think the Democrats probably let Trump's status as their political enemy push them somewhat in how hard they prosecuted him, and failed to follow a sort of appearance-of-virtue-based caution against prosecuting political enemies even when they're guilty except in the most extreme cases, but this is consistent with my claim that they're 10% bad. I think Trump does many worse things, which is consistent with my claim that he's 20% bad.)
>since it's an unrelated question
If you are claiming that your post does not say that Trump is particularly bad compared to his opponents, I don't believe you. It is true that you didn't add the literal words "... and the Democrats aren't", but principles of implicature make it communicate that you think Trump is particularly bad.
>(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats
Come on, you haven't heard of three felonies a day? It's not as if he was convicted of murder or counterfeiting. All important politicians have committed something that a hostile court could call a felony; whether they get prosecuted is just a matter of whether the people prosecuting have the power and the will.
I guess it depends on how strong the evidence was that Trump really did commit the crimes in question. I mean, what would be the alternative? Give Trump carte blanche for any crime as long as he isn't in power because prosecuting him would be "lawfare" and "election interference", and also giving him carte blanche while he IS in power because presidential immunity yada yada? Oh wait, that's exactly how it turned out... and it's not democratic either.
It's very hard in the US to find someone guilty for something they didn't do. But there's often a lot of latitude in whether to prosecute something in the first place. So the real question there is, did Trump do something that was technically a crime but is done by a lot of people and usually ignored? That might be the case in the Stormy Daniels case (although certainly not in most of his other cases, about refusing to return confidential documents, and his attempt to steal the election).
The Stormy Daniels case was not very interesting but the other 3 cases were serious accusations of serious crime which all warranted charges
The alternative is Gore, of course. This is a strategic level alternative, but they didn't NEED to force Trump into running again (or wearing pinstripes). They could have just bought him off, let him keep ranting about stolen elections, and gotten on with the good business of selling America to China.
... I suspect your "what would be the alternative" depends on how much you think rape is normal within our legislative bodies. Swalwell, for example, only resigned after someone threw his entire rape file at him.
He was reelected democratically though. I would characterize a lot of his actions as president as undemocratic, but the election itself was democratic.
Ultimately the Ds never learned the lesson that Trump behaving badly wouldn't give them a "win one free election" card. You still have to put a ticket together, and make sure both candidates can string a sentence together.
I'm divided on the utility of prosecuting Trump's crimes after he leaves in 2028. He definitely deserves it, but I also don't want to spend the next four elections relitigating this disaster.
With any luck he'll be convicted of many more once he's out. If you commit crimes, you should be charged with them.
He and his coalition are pretty unprecedentedly corrupt and anti-democratic, relative to American history.
Who gives a f _ ck
He kept Hungary for the Hungarians.
He kept Hungary for his gang.
Hungarian average salary increased little in the last 16 years compared to other countries in the region.
Given last election's results, I guess most Hungarian voters do care.
Banned for this comment.
And what exactly Orban did to make salaries not increase? I always find such simplistic appeals to economy weird. Russia experienced massive growth in 2000s and early 2010s, but according to Putin's opponents, it's all just because of oil prices and he had very little to do with that. Afterwards this growth slowed down greatly, and that, of course, according to Putin's opponents, was now entirely his own fault, because he has too much corruption or something (I'm talking about late 2010s-early 2020s, pre-Ukraine war, let's not get into that).
Economies are very complex things, depending on many structural and external factors, there aren't really any guaranteed recipes for continuous growth, especially past middle-income zone, and there's only so much that even a 100% dictatory dictator can do, or, for that matter, a 100% democratey democracy can do to make salaries larger, even if they really want to. Case in point, in Finland, widely considered one of the most democratic countries in the world, real incomes have famously not grown for 15 years or more at this point, basically since great financial crisis and subsequent Nokia crash. In fact, it seems that it's exactly the stagnation and backslides in living conditions in much of the Western world that brings characters such as Trump to power; whatever liberal democracies have been doing seems to have stopped working. At the end of the day, it's not like Western people are so enlightened and freedom-loving, it's just that under the current system they have enjoyed high standards of life for decades or more, but exactly to which extent this has been helped by democracy is not at all obvious.
I would generally also say that people who never lived in more than one country typically seem to have very little perspective on whether things in their country are actually unusually bad (or good) or in line with trends. If you look at GDP per capita trajectory of Hungary, it actually tracks Poland quite closely (and, for example, tracks Romania with a rather consistent gap, in favor of Hungary). Or, as someone in another comment complains: "Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating." Um, minus the "educated accused of leftism" part, that happens kinda everywhere now! In Finland for sure.
He created a mafia state where the primary means for companies of being successful is playing the corruption game better, rather than fulfilling consumers' needs better, resulting in approximately zero productivity growth over sixteen years. (Wrecking the education system and the scientific institutions also didn't help.)
He did significantly increase the labor force participation rate during the first half of his reign, which along with the influx of EU funds led to a pretty significant increase in real wages, so he was genuinely popular until the late 2010's; also the regime was significantly less oppressive during that time, although I wouldn't call it a democracy past 2014. But labor force participation can only be increased once while productivity can increase forever, so his system very predictably became a dead-end.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, as I obviously can't show clear links between these difference in salary growth with Orban policies (Gergő Tisza's comment address this better than I could anyway). My point was that one's nationalistic rhetoric doesn't necessarily imply that one deeply care about the wellbeing of the population of one's nation, or that one's policies would provide obvious benefits to one's nation. But I think it's generally fair to assume that corruption and embezzlement correlate with weaker economic performance.
Where do you get your GDP per capita from? Is it adjusted for PPA/inflation? In the data I see Hungary performed worse than Poland, Romania and Croatia over the last 16 years and better than Slovakia (not known to be the least corrupted country in central Europe either)
Yes, that's exactly the narrative that keeps them in power and let's them do whatever they want.
As someone from Eastern Europe, I can say they are not heroes. I wouldn't go as far as saying we are suffering, but it is slow landslide for us, who are trying to live their own lives, start a business and a family.
Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
>Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
To be fair, apart from the "educated accused of leftism" bit (they're more likely to be accused of not being leftist), that's happening basically everywhere now.
You are right, that's happening everywhere. And there are other factors involved, like COVID and wars. That's the price for oversimplification of my comment to keep it short.
So let's put some numbers. Prices of accommodation in the last 10 years more than tripled here. I checked and now you need roughly 1.5 annual median salaries to buy average house in US according to Gemini (which might be wrong of course). Here, it's more than 15 annual salaries. Why is that? Houses are kept by a few, usually connected to people on the right places. And there are very friendly laws for them. E.g. housing tax is very low, like 3 Starbucks coffees annually. For every house you own.
Inflation? Super high because no investments in anything over the last few years. Half of GDP goes to retirements, so ruling parties are winning all old people votes.
So basically - you put the entire economy in sustaining very few. And there's new term for that I discovered recently - neoroyalism. It's basically feudalism where vassals are companies and friends loyal to the ruling family/party. Downside? It will economically decimate the country as whole in a few decades.
Again, that's not really specific to Hungary. In the UK, where I live, real wages have barely risen since 2008, average house price went up from c. 3.1 times the average salary in 1993 to 8.5 times the average salary in 2022 (and even higher today, of course, but the source I looked at only went to 2022). We have this thing called the triple lock, which means that state pensions are guarenteed to increase by either the rate of inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%, whatever is highest. As for starting a business, energy costs, regulation, and tax rates mean that you can pretty much forget about it, even if none of the Prime Minister's friends are interested in the sector. Plus we have loads of extra welfare spending, because we have millions of economically unproductive immigrants in the country. All of which is to say -- maybe Hungary's economy would be doing better if someone other than Orban were in charge, but it's far from guaranteed.
I know it's not ideal in UK either. However, it's important to keep in mind that democracy doesn't imply wealth. Autocracy, on the other hand, almost guarantees the contrary. Sometimes I also think of UK and Japan economic potential as very non-linear, with many cycles of growth/stagnation/downhills, probably given the limited resources islands have to offer. Foreign buyers of houses in London that is generally limited in space is probably not really helping either.
However, I checked numbers again, this time for retirements. UK has replacement rate of 25-30% and average pension is roughly 38% of median salary. Czech Republic has replacement rate of 50-55% and average pension is roughly 59% of median salary. And then there are subsidiaries for rents.
In our house, there are only 2 flats that are not inhabited by people 60+. This is the direct product of pro-russian Billionaire running the country for his 4th term, slowly taking over everything in the state, including media and business. So retirees are far better in Czechia than in UK. But the same can happen in UK if people like Nigel Farage lead the country for some time.
As with being better with someone else than Orban. 20 years ago, the entire V4 economy was highly successful. A lot of young and highly educated people willing to make a difference. Nowadays, it's a totally different picture after 4 terms of populist leaders in 3 out of 4 of those countries. You can ask GPT to compare economies of last 20 years of Hungary and Poland.
So it's not impossible that if Trump people stay there for another 10 years, houses will have 10 times more price tag, usually owned by people connected to trumpists, who collect money on rents. Mortgage will be accessible only to those who work at Google/OpenAI. I mean accessible, on 30 years loan, they still won't be able to buy it right away.
Then you get the same Orbán/Fico/Babiš reality we are facing right now. That is the price for autocrats/neoroyalists/illiberal democrats or whatever name you find for them.
And then there's business part I forgot to mention.
You can do your business in your field usually until some rulers friend wants to start own business in the same field. Traditionally it was construction, but there are new ones, IT or even environmental magnates recently. Oh, psychological counselor? Be afraid of a day some king's friend with a degree from health studies will want to do the same. Then they impose new rules that are hard to follow and easy to break. So you either join them, keep very low profile or face penalties and prepare for endless battles.
Like a recent law against "international agents".
This logic is beyond stupid. Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project? Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it? You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
>Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project?
Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively.
>Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it?
Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?
>You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want.
"Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively."
That is not a reason *why* normal people should care, the vast majority of which do not.
"Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?"
Institutions are materially beneficial for people's lives, even people outside of Hungary, whereas culture is a simulacrum, a form of high level human social role playing basically. It means nothing concretely, and can easily be changed.
"This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want."
Not if they are damaging their own people, which in this case they were, for 16 years.
The Hungarians got sick of him and elected someone else "for the Hungarians".
In fact, they elected Mr Hungarian (Magyar) himself!
Hungary for Hungarians, and Mr. Hungarian for Hungary!
What's that supposed to mean, no migrants? The rest of eastern Europe also has close to no migrants.
As Bret Devereaux notes, the United States is not, and never has been, the homeland of an ethnic group. So as an American, I consider "He kept Hungary for the Hungarians." to be a *primary* reason I don't want to see any US politician copy him.
> I’ve also heard the term “hybrid regime”, but you can’t naturally say “Viktor Orban, the hybrid regimester of Hungary…”
Regimester is too fun a word, we've got to use it now. A regimester, you know, somebody who's crookedly in the bag for a regime, but a smidgen lovable at the same time.
Regimester, said like "jester".
Regimestermaxxing
As a dyed in the wool classical liberal, I definitely would prefer liberal democracy, but I'm not sure calling Orban anti-democratic is the right frame. I think the right distinction here is liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. There have been all sorts of schemes that polled some segment of the population in order to determine who was in office. In many times and places, framing opponents, or preventing them from addressing the voting public through various means, or using dirty tricks to smear opponents were considered within the norms. It's mainly been in the last 130 years or so with the destruction of machine politics things have gotten increasingly tight about using the power of government to stay in office. The spoils system was used in the US for the first ~40% of it's existence and we'd consider that wildy corrupt today.
Using dirty tricks to smear opponents isn't illiberal, it's just corrupt.
Honestly this feels like the best way to discuss the likes of Orban without it turning into a right-vs-left political shitfight, he was a corrupt leader who, while acting within a democratic system, used all sorts of dirty tricks to benefit himself and his party. He wasn't ideologically opposed to democracy, he was just keen on the idea of getting his own way.
Putting it this way I think emphasises the spectrum of continuity between Orban and ordinary politicians in our own countries, rather than emphasising the spectrum of continuity between Orban and Kim Jong Un.
I think the better term is "scummy" or "dishonest" than "corrupt". Taking a bribe is corrupt, lying for your own benefit is dishonest.
He is corrupt as hell.
His old friend, Lőrinc Mészáros is now the richest man in the country (his total assets are around 5B USD). This guy had around 100k USD in 2010, and it is pretty obvious that he is one of the figureheads of Orbán himself (who is officially far from being rich). Mészáros got rich mostly by making business with the state itself (for example, his company manages the highways for some 35 years).
Interestingly, Orbán's father and his son-in-law (István Tiborcz, if you feel like googling him) also made a fortune. But no, Orbán cannot be corrupt.
Biden also cannot be corrupt. Despite his failson getting plum positions after proving so much of a drugaddict (onduty) that he could not perform adequately for the US Navy.
Kim Jong Un got reelected every four years just like Orbán! It's all very democratic.
I agree that "illiberal democracy" is one of the better framings, but it does bother me that even extreme dictators like Putin hold elections. The only thing you can accuse Putin of not conducting the election freely and fairly, which is the same thing you can accuse Orban of. So can Putin claim to be an "illiberal democrat"?
He hasn't actually lost power yet.
It seems like you’re putting too much weight on the elections as a signifier of democracy rather than looking at the whole picture. You can accuse Putin of killing political opponents. That’s a difference in kind that takes someone from illiberal democrat to authoritarian in my opinion. You could also put throwing people in jail in that bucket. Or operating outside the law (though changing the law to let you throw your opponents in jail I’d need to think some about).
But "operating outside of the law" is a spectrum. Was Biden an autocrat for illegally cancelling student loans (even though he probably knew he would lose at the Supreme Court)?
I don't know what the test for true disregard of the law is, but I seriously doubt it's "this will lose at the supreme court". Prosecuting someone when you know it will lose at the supreme court is generally scummy, but when it comes to other government matters, there's no harm in forcing the court to actually state its convictions, in order to put in line for public and elite pressure etc. If you think the supreme court has it wrong, and you think pushing them on it will be salubrious, that seems fine to me.
It's like with the filibuster. Letting senators filibuster is one thing (a bad thing in my view), but letting them filibuster without having to have the courage of their convictions and actually filibuster publicly- that's worse.
I have no doubt conservative and liberal majority courts would exercise far more extensive and unchecked power if governments tried to avoid ever pushing them into saying no.
Ducking the supreme court's expressed intention, forcing the supreme court to come back from vacation in order to tell you "No, you can't just say you're going to do one thing in oral, and then write something different once we leave town."
... That's some disregard for the supreme court's expressed authority and judgement. That's biden for the "CDC can force landlords to not evict non-rent-payers."
(Broadly speaking, though, I do think that "making the Supremes put their position in writing" is fine, particularly when the Districts have made a mess of differing interpretations.)
I would say that if you knew you’d lose, that’s illiberal and if you ignore a court order, that’s an authoritarian move, especially if it’s related to holding onto power.
This is the Fukuyama 'end of history' thesis, btw. The idea is not that history actually stops, but that liberal democracy, at least for now, is the Final Boss of legitimacy, such that even obvious dictators have at least pretend to be doing democracy. Even literal autocrats realize that only democracy is legitimate, so they go through the motions.
I hardly think that an election where robots are allowed to vote is considered as "every vote is legitimate." In short, Russia is getting Something Different out of its elections, and you shouldn't expect every exercise in anthropology to devolve down to "We're Right and They're Wrong" (Russia thinks its getting something good out of their notoriously shammy elections, and I believe it is, just not democracy).
Elections are nothing more that a conventional orderly and non-violent mechanism of legitimizing power. Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion. Legitimization is important, as you can't rule without consent of a significant fraction of those being ruled (not for a very long time, typically, anyway). But ultimately elections serve this purpose both in liberal democracies and in Russia. Sure, in Russia Putin won't let anyone potentially dangerous to him anywhere close to elections, but he still needs elections to see and to demonstrate that he has still enough loyalty to him among the populace.
> Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion.
North Korea has a hybrid system in that sense - sham elections and divine providence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_cult_of_personality
There is outright fraud in Russian elections. Not so in Hungary, I believe.
https://cedarus.io/research/evolution-of-russian-elections
I don't know if he can, but I suspect he would.
One aspect I always found interesting is the personification of these things. I don't know that much about Orban; I know a bit more about Putin, so let me use that example. Of course, all of this is conjecture, not based on any insider knowledge of Putin’s mind or the exact workings of the Moscow power apparatus, and many will disagree, but for what it’s worth: I do *not* think that Putin rigs elections.
Now, the Russian elections are obviously nowhere near being either free or fair. But, if I had to bet, I’d say Putin really, honestly doesn’t know that. Of course, nobody thinks he personally tells people to stuff ballots here and change the numbers there; I do not think he tells people to tamper with the elections at all, and wouldn’t, by now, believe anyone telling him this happens. I think that most initially elected strongmen, authoritarian rulers, perhaps even dictators start out believing they are democratic and popular – and, since they just won elections, this seems at least broadly true. And then, when something happens that seems to challenge their power, they – at least on a conscious level - *have* to interpret them as nefarious plots, by outside ill-wishers or fifth columnists. When Putin said time and again that the 2011 protests following the rigged elections you mentioned were nothing but a plot hatched, financed and ordered by the US, I believe he meant every word of it. In his mind, he was a popular leader, the elections had been free and fair – what other explanation, then, could there have been for protests?
And, crucially, the more entrenched they become, the less they are able to hear uncomfortable truths, and the less those around them are willing to tell them. I think this was a major cause of the 2022 Ukraine debacle (not just in that it was and is horrible for Ukraine, and bad for most of the world – but also in that it turned out to be a debacle for Russia); apparently, hardly anybody was willing to tell Putin this was a bad idea. I don’t know in how far Orban went down that particular road; perhaps not that far, given that he conceded his defeat quickly and quietly. And I don’t know how far Trump is down that road; whether, say, his behavior after the 2020 elections was just the tantrum of someone who knows they’ve lost and tries their best to hold on – or the righteous indignation of someone who is completely certain they did have the largest inauguration crowd, they are the greatest President in US history, they have actually won the election.
So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements. Given what we see from Trump in public, I have no trouble at all believing this is true; and I do think it’s a major reason not just for foreign disasters, but also for, yes, a threat to domestic democracy.
"So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements."
--agree this sounds bad. Suspect your sources are trying to backstab Trump to prove their bona-fides as "Not Really Trump's Man" so they can get back into the cocktail circuit.
Advancing a different alternative: Trump, like a lot of executives, may not want to be told "no" (in those words, "no, Mr. President you can't invade Iran with our infantry"). Instead, he wants to hear the consequences, and think out himself whether this is a bad idea. "If you do this, the Iranians will do that." (This, as a businessman, is a structure he understands -- he does know he can't control other, non-allied governments). Given Trump's noted propensity to hire autists (not exactly the most socially inclined people, but definitely Very Honest), I can see that someone might have been trying to prevent Social Friction.
I'll note that the intelligence reports about Afghanistan were ignored, utterly (the only guy who got fired was the guy who stated publically, on TV, two weeks ahead of time, that the withdrawal was going to be a CF) -- in particular, the "Wait Until 9/11" so that Biden could claim the withdrawal as a PR Victory incensed the Taliban. I'll note that there was no plan in place for "Russia decides to backstab our deal and invade the Ukraine." That intelligence reports on "how bad the Ukrainian War is going" did not actually make it to people capable of dealing with the increasingly unstable diplomatic leadership for YEARS.
>In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats,
Can people stop using "gerrymandering" to refer to any deviation from proportionality?
Yeah, something like 90% of parliamentary majority governments throughout history have been people winning a plurality in a majority of seats. That's not gerrymandering, it's just...how the system works.
What would be a better word here?
The US senate deviates from proportionality, but unlike the House cannot be gerrymandered. So the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones (which are themselves known to be dysfunctional in practice).
splitting the dakotas was gerrymandering!
As NLRG notes, the Senate can be gerrymandered, just not on an every-few-years basis like the House can. If a future Democratic strongman president rams through a split of California into twenty 60% Dem states, that's also a gerrymander.
> the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones
No, it's also a feature of proportional systems. You can never get rid of it as long as the pool of electees is smaller than the pool of voters.
I know most proportionate systems have boundary conditions where you need a certain percent, so even they aren't perfectly proportionate, but I was simplifying.
That's not what I was saying. As long as the pool of winners is smaller than the pool of voters, the results will never be proportionate to share of votes. Boundary conditions are not necessary to the result.
The disconnect comes from the fact that winners have to be chosen in integer numbers, and vote share doesn't.
had you heard of direct representation democracy? from wikipedia:Direct representation is a hybrid form of democracy that combines elements of direct and representative systems to create a more authentic political connection between voters and officials. Unlike conventional representative democracy where representatives are elected by geographic districts, direct representation allows voters to choose any candidate in the entire country, with each representative's voting power weighted by the number of citizens who selected them.
If the vote of each representative is wheigted on how many votes he got you got perfect proportionality. edited for spelling
The Russian 2011 Duma election WAS proportionate.
49% refers to the United Russia results as a fraction of all cast votes (including invalid votes and including ballots for parties that got less than 7% which was required to get into Duma). 52% refers to the United Russia result as a fraction of all valid votes for parties obtaining at least 7%.
Do we know what percent were "invalid" vs for parties getting less than 7%? Also, my understanding is that Russia currently has half proportionate & half first-past-the-post district representation in the State Duma. Was it purely proportional back then?
Sure, you can see all the numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_election#Results. There was 1.5% invalid ballots and about 5% combined for three parties that were on the ballot but did not get to 7%.
To your second question: yes, exactly. This was changed after the 2011 election.
It might be good to include that the party won a plurality of the vote, with the second most popular party only getting 19. As written, most readers would assume that there was some other party that was more popular. It's not uncommon for large parties to be overepresented and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Why not just say something like “because of their political structure”? The 2021 Canadian election resulted in the 2nd place party having the most seats and that usually isn't described as the result of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the drawing of districts in a way that distorts electoral outcomes in an intended manner. People like to focus on partisan gerrymandering, but there's plenty of examples of racial gerrymandering, pro-incumbent gerrymandering, gerrymandering to dilute representation of particular locations regardless of party, and other cases.
But when you're dealing with districts, even if no one intends any particular distorted electoral outcome, there will be distortions. It is nearly impossible to draw a contiguous congressional district in Massachusetts that a Republican can win, even though nearly 40% of Massachusetts voters vote for Republicans. (The regions that are majority Republican are big enough to make up a single district, but they're separated from each other by some blue regions and state borders.)
Mathematicians have recently developed techniques to effectively sample from the space of all possible districtings of a state, to estimate the distribution. They find that with the voting patterns in Pennsylvania, a strong majority of districtings end up with a larger fraction of Republicans elected than the Republican vote share, just because of how Democrats and Republicans have spread themselves across the map. But the point of using this technique was to identify the distribution of these districtings, and prove that the Republican implemented plan was *even more* tilted towards the Republicans than 95% of all plans, making it unlikely that it was drawn unintentionally.
It's very hard to know unless you do a detailed analysis (or have records of the debates) whether a single case is just the inherent difficulty of putting districts on the map in a way that results in proportional outcomes, or whether it's intentional gerrymandering.
Appreciate you bringing this up - disproportionality is inevitable in *some* metric, and it's just a matter of if you're writing up the system in a way to maximally favor along a specific metric. And to be fair, people often are, but it's still very important to remember that the alternative is just "less severe, less intentional favoring of a possibly incidental group" and not proportional representation in a shining platonic form.
"Getting 52% of the seats due to three parties not reaching the vote threshold." The 49%->52% boost was totally normal, it was getting 49% of the votes that pissed people off.
The real outright manipulation of the legal system happened in the next election, when single-member constituencies were reintroduced in addition to proportional voting. Putin's party won nearly all of them due to having a plurality, thus securing 50% of the seats easily.
First past the post. The US is an outlier because it has two parties, but the last UK election saw Labour get 34.7% of the vote and 64.2% of the seats. This is normal and the main argument in favour of FPTP.
Wildly undemocratic outcomes are an argument *in favour* of FPTP?
It's not a terrible argument. I don't want Alex Jones in the U.S. Senate.
Yes. It strengthens the winning party. A perfectly proportional system could lead to deadlock in the legislature. Allowing the winning party to win by more leads to consolidation of power so they can govern.
It's similar to how some governments prefer a strong executive. It's even more "wildly undemocratic" that 100 percent of the presidency is republican, despite that party winning only about half the vote.
As opposed to right now, where the FPTP system surely is not in legislative deadlock, especially not compared to the many representative democracies in the world.
There's no need to be sarcastic.
Do you agree that first past the post tends to consolidate power?
"Undemocratic" and "proportionate" aren't synonyms. The arguments for a winner-takes-all system (FPTP or Majority Bonus) are:
1) It maximises the number of people who get what they want. Relatively few people want a coalition, so the number of people getting their preferred policies approximates zero.
2) It incentivises parties to win broad appeal. In a proportionate system (which, again, means coalitions), a handful of narrow sections of the population can cobble together a coalition by all scratching each other's backs. If the only route to power is to be the most popular, you generally have to argue for something that at least approximates the national interest.
3) It kills unpopular ideas that attract fanaticism. In a coalition system, the party that really passionately cares about teachers pensions or agricultural subsidies or vegetarianism or whatever can side with others and insist on their thing as a concession, even if most people don't like it.
4) It allows decisive changes of government and lets the populace straightforwardly eject failures. Labour won the last election in the UK mostly because people wanted to get rid of the Tories* and were able to straightforwardly do so. This compares to Germany, for example, where it looks like the SPD are now going to be a component of every coalition going forward, or the Netherlands where Rutte was prime minister for 14 years in spite of not being that popular purely by being head of the party that was floating in the middle of the political spectrum.
*Labour's share of the vote barely changed.
5) It allows unified/decisive government, instead of endless compromise and cludge.
None of these make up for the fact that it allows a government to pass policies that barely over a third of the population want. Or a fifth, judging by recent polling. Is there really a British consensus for banning repeated protests and jury trials?
If democracy means anything it means majority rule.
Banning repeated protests probably has majority support (in the abstract, there's a majority view that policing of protests in the UK is correct or too lenient, in spite of being fairly draconian by Western standards). There's a majority against scrapping juries, which has been an obsession of parts of the civil service and some activists since the early 2000s, but that's the sort of thing you get more of in a proportionate system; if Labour had been permanently in various coalitions for the last 20 years, it's likely to be one of the things they pushed for. If it doesn't happen, it will either be because enough Labour MPs don't want to lose their majorities, or because the Lords blocks it (not FPTP, also not democracy).
If you want straight-up majority-wins democracy, the key is public initiative referenda and other direct democracy measures that bypass elite consensus. You'd find yourself getting some very right-wing social policies (eg. capital punishment would make a comeback) and some very left-wing economic policies (price controls), but that should be the point.
Is it really true that relatively few people want a coalition? In my representative democracy (the Netherlands), the fact that different parties of different political leanings have to work together is usually seen as a feature, not a bug. By that nature, it solves problem 3).
Also, you say it allows for decisive government without endless compromise, but you've simply moved the compromise to an earlier stage, in point 2).
At least in a representative democracy you can actually vote for someone that represents your ideals. In the FPTP system, you will forever have to choose between 2 candidates you're at most kind of lukewarm on.
I don't know, but if a 49% plurality winning 52% of seats is proof of gerrymandering then it literally applies to every non-explicitly proportional allocated legislative body in the world (and even most proportional ones since they usually exclude fringe parties by having a min threshold).
I would actually take a 49% plurality winning only 52% of seats as evidence that a place was not particularly gerrymandered, that's pretty close! The most recent UK election saw the Labour Party win >60% of seats with a plurality of < 40% of the vote. And the UK is not considered to have much of a gerrymandering problem with independent districting, etc. Whatever Putin is/was doing to stay in power around then Gerrymandering doesn't seem to have been a big part.
The legislative system in Russian 2011 election was 100% proportionate, so the concept of gerrymandering simply did not apply.
In the Russian case it was the electoral threshold that excluded small parties. Gerrymandering is something done to districts, there were no districts in Russia to gerrymander because it was (at the time) a pure proportional system.
In other cases, the "gerrymandering" is just the natural result of FPTP being a winner-take-all system. People said that it was "gerrymandering" when the U.K. Labour party won 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote in the last election, yet it couldn't have been gerrymandering since the maps were drawn by the outgoing Conservative government. In the Hungarian case it was because the far-right Jobbik party did not ally with the left (as they would do later), splitting the anti-Orban vote and allowing him to sweep the FPTP seats. Not that that was an accident, Orban set up the system knowing that would happen.
Claude tells me there are no districts in Russia to gerrymander and that what did the work here was a cutoff for proportional representation that systematically benefits large parties. This coupled with the fact that large oppositions get banned in Russia is a good way to keep an edge (but even without banning a large opposition I think 49pct would always put you over the top in a PR with cutoff scheme). I agree that the term gerrymander doesn't quite feel right and probably wasnt the decisive rigging tool when taking it all apart.
I guess the interesting question that everyone's actually asking for is, how correlated is current authoritarianism quotient with rate of change of authoritarianism quotient? What's dx in x?
I guess "liberal" would argue that it correlate positively, any x above zero will accelerate dx further and further until it reaches 100% (or even beyond!). One simple mechanism is that a party that has power to influence election will use it to further and further their grip of power until there's nothing to grip anymore. With this perspective, it's a sliding slope and any x beyond zero must be resisted by any means. Maybe including violence (or even beyond!).
"Conservative" would argue that it correlate negatively. The more x is, the harder it's to raise x even further. Maybe too much x will even make it start to decrease. For an example of this, we can imagine a multi faction civil war where any party that's deemed too strong will soon be ganged up by other parties. With this perspective, high x is not a problem at all and it'll fix itself sooner or later. Any awareness about high x is deemed unnecessary and even fearmongering, especially if it includes a call for violence. We can even be funny and try to induce high x to trigger distaste of other parties and make x go even lower than before.
All variables here is up to debate and ambiguous. I can't even say that if that dx equation converges for any time or place. Maybe it's a chaotic fractal that resist comprehension. It's even more complicated if our target ideal x is not zero. Maybe we can try to oscillate x around our ideal x, but it seems like a very unstable solution.
But this is not a new problem. Ancient Greeks had debated about the ideal x for centuries. Maybe it does resist comprehension.
* liberal and conservative here is in quotes because it obviously doesn't square completely with any real liberal and conservative in any country
Thanks, this is an interesting way to look at things.
Perhaps in your model, when x is less than 50%, dx tends to be negative, and when x goes greater than 50%, dx is positive. Then things tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, and shifts from one pole to the other tend to be naturally resisted up to a breaking point.
This implies that maximum resistance would only become necessary when you started getting near 50%.
It resists comprehension because every power struggle has unique confounders that you can't control for, trivially starting with the given time and place of the struggle. History rhymes, but it doesn't repeat like a scientific experiment, let alone a mathematical model.
Possibly the "conservative" perspective is true, but an additional factor is that sudden changes in the magnitude of x lead to major negative consequences in their own right, from economic disruption (like Russia in the 90s) to outright civil war. It may therefore be worthwhile to try to keep x low even though it is true in principle that a high-x society is unstable and will eventually revert to low-x.
This seems like it could risk endogeneity problems. What if dx is negative but part of the mechanism that makes it negative is people saying "x is quite big and in danger of getting bigger! Sound the alarm! Let's all act to bring x down"
If somebody responded to that by saying "no, don't worry, we actually have good reason to believe dx is negative", they'd be missing the point
(Is "anti-inductive" what I'm gesturing at here? Seems slightly similar to an investment bank saying "no point in us trying to pick winners - don't you know you can't beat the market?")
If dx is random then having positive x is still bad. Assuming 100pct is a barrier where we get authoritarian lock in. The closer we are to the barrier the higher the chance we get randomly locked in. So it is then important that we dont just assume the correlation is negative but actively make it so by voting out material positive x governments.
Edit: I suppose at full generalization this is claiming a complex level dependent dx, but I see less disagreement about what dx tends towards when x=100.
Is it the case that authoritarianism is a directional quantifiable variable? I's say that the fractal/chaos theory comparison is apt, at best, it's a dimensionless quantity. If we state that authoritarianism is related to the institutional reduction of the freedom of citizens, then it follows that the methodological problem is that there is no objective measurement of freedom.
This is a philosophical issue:
One might even state that the creation of a quantifiable definition of freedom necessarily entails that any individual who adheres to it is no longer maximally free.
So while I do think it's a fun idea, the philsoohical paradox at the core of the issue makes X and dX unsolvable variables.
Happy to hear your thoughts though!
This really ought to be elaborated on more. This thought can possibly go places
A tangential, but still important point: democracy is _always_ under threat, same as human rights, piece, etc. Things can be OK in a given place at a given time, but they can go very bad very fast.
"Never more than one generation from extinction."
Places which have had a long period of democratic handovers of power don't seem to "go very bad very fast" in practice. They could be conquered by an enemy, in which case their old traditions might be irrelevant, but their endogenous behavior seems to be more conservative. Although I'm speaking more of the modern world, as the ancient Greeks & Romans were different.
How long is long?
Generations, I'd guess.
Probably a pretty limited sample size then.
As far as I know, the full list of cases of authoritarianism winning (due to internal factors) in modern countries which have had at least one generation (30 years) of democratic rule are Imperial Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and Italy.
Thank you for the evidence
And conversely, (either outsiders or insiders) attempting to install a democracy in a country with little history of democracy seems to almost always rapidly turn into some sort of autocracy, machine politics, or tyranny.
Good write-up, Scott.
Also: an anyone give me a defense of their position that illiberalism doesn't matter because... [your argument] that you think is likely to sound reasonable enough to consider to someone both extremely convinced of personal liberty and who has somewhat idiosyncratic views of social policy, but ones which would (for example) consider saying 'we should incentivize not being gay for [legitimate social concern]' be unacceptably bad, and which give some credence to tradition due to epistemic doubt, and which generally do not consider the nation to be an important thing?
This is not my position but I think they'd say (for example, with regards to immigration) that countries are the way they are because of the traits of the people living there and if you like the fact that your country is liberal, you should support preserving the nation because other nations are less liberal-minded. This is true even if it requires restricting liberalism to some extent because you're doing it to avoid even greater restrictions on liberalism in the future by the more illiberal population you'd have if you didn't.
I can imagine a situation in which this would be optimal, but I don't think the numbers it would take for this to be real are... well... real. you'd need to be taking in, like, full percents of your population of literal Disney villains and it would need to be preventable with very small liberty violations I think... and even then the norms damage could be brutal. feels like the sort of weird hyperbole you get in constrained media/social ecosystems.
Political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to personal liberty. In most autocracies you are in practice free to live your life as you wish, insofar as you don't engage in meaningful levels of political dissent (and the vast majority of people don't really do that under any system).
I think political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to autocracy.
I agree that autocracies are often authoritarian rather than totalitarian, and don't necessarily restrict non-political personal liberties that much. However, I think that there are quite a few autocracies where the restrictions are much tighter (not just North Korea and *cough* Hitler *cough*). Perhaps more importantly, I think the example of Russian development over the past years shows that authoritarian states can become totalitarian and clamp down on the remaining liberties much faster and easier than truly democratic ones.
Man is political... if you do not have preferences about the rules the govern you, something is wrong; if you cannot voice them, you cannot be free.
Of course, but you can have a society some prople are free because their views align with the collective, while others are not. If the latter people are removed... are the remaining people free?
Thanks for writing this. Excellent points all around.
Maybe it's better that we have Waffle-House-teleporter guy now? He did everyone a service by making it clear he was a crackpot and not to be taken seriously, instead of having a fake veneer of respectability for his dumb ideas.
Are you really saying that endorsing the covid vaccine is equally dumb and just has a fake veneer of respectability?
As opposed to the stupid biases of the earlier leftist experts. E.g. when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
Gregg Phillips telling everyone not to use radios during a FEMA operation because it might teleport you 50 miles into a Waffle House is in res ipsa loquitur territory. Who would listen to something that pants on head crazy? A bit different when the U of Washington faculty and over 1,000 people officially endorse stupidity.
The main issue is that the earlier leftist experts are so much more competent that even when they handicap themselves by prioritizing anti-racism, they can still be more effective at containing covid than the current elites would be.
Ship the covid19 infected patients back to the nursing facilities! What's the worst that could happen!?
And remember, it absolutely wasn't a lab leak! Get the Germans to lie about that one (when they knowingly thought it was a lab leak, mind you).
The worse that could happen? Is that a rethorical question?
The actual worst that could happen is that the pandemic happens now and instead of Operation Warp Speed like we got during Trump 1 we will get.... free bleach? I don't even know what RFK thinks would be appropriate in that situation.
Omicron!
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
(Yes, I do realize some people believe it was incubated in an single South African AIDS patient for about 6 months...)
> when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
This is a value claim, not a fact claim, so it is also res ipsa loquitur.
If you want to say it was a fact claim, well - Covid didn't spike after the protests, so I guess it was fine to protest racism.
It is a value claim, but it is also a tool of propagandists attempting to switch messaging. The Left's inability to handle promulgating more than one message at a time was noted, and exploited as a strategic vulnerability.
Don't forget there was a time Trump endorsed the vaccine and leading Democratic candidates did not.
I do think there is significant value in "this guy is all-around crackpot" versus "this guy is 80% normie, 20% crackpot, and uses the normie to launder the crackpot." Funny enough thanks to our dear host's extensive writing history, he even has an essay on that topic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
>When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Though I disagree somewhat with that specific statement, as "misinformation" was created as a category to describe those not-explicitly-lying situations but from the other side.
When you have ten newscasters having "The exact same Murrow Moment" in the exact same words, and doing this all across the country... that's deliberate, and it's playing on people's trust in the newscasters (and their trust that they'd not do this sort of bullshit).
I think our host doesn't have much of a grasp of how much disinformation is in the news. When it reached more than 90%, it was time to start finding other sources of information.
The "apologize now" people have leftist derangement syndrome. Its completely consistent that prominent media leftists fearmonger and take enormous numbers of shortcuts in their reasoning all the time, and are right about some things some of the time.
I'm a bit confused by the tone of this comment. <Something> Derangement Syndrome has tended to be a rather inflammatory way to call out someone you think is completely irrational in the pursuit of harming <Something> that they have decided is their priority outgroup threat. But the rest of your post indicates you think the <Something> in question also *are* overwhelmingly irrational (enormous numbers of shortcuts in reasoning) and harmful (fearmonger).
It feels like saying people have derangement syndrome just because they thought people who are wrong 95% of the time are in fact wrong 100% of the time is a bit needlessly extreme/inflammatory?
I think the "apologize now" people are gravely mistaken, but the reasoning leading to their position as called out by Scott seems like pretty mundane tribal bias and doesn't require them to be deranged?
I might just read the term "derangement syndrome" as being much stronger than you do - I've tended to see it as pure political shit-slinging that never benefits a measured discussion. The following comment on your part being much more even-handed thus has me confused.
The winner of the election is named Peter Magyar. Magyar in Hungarian means Hungarian. It would be like a US president named Charlie American.
It was the name of the nomadic steppe ethnicity that founded the country. I think the best analogue for the US might be John Pilgrim. Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
> Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
So like if Hope Hicks became president?
Okay, I'm convinced. Vance–Hicks 2028.
It's also the name of the ethnicity that currently lives in the country; that's why the equivalent is Charlie American.
But you wouldn't call someone "John [the] American" if you were both currently living in America. Surnames, historically, are like nicknames, to distinguish one particular John from the dozens that are already living in your village. If your surname, then, is "Hungarian", it implies that they got their surname when they were living outside Hungary entirely, but already identified as Hungarian.
Why does it matter when the surname came about?
Seems like a real equivelent (in the sense that it is an actual, real name) would be Peter English, for an English person. And yeah according to Wikipedia: "The name is attested from the 12th century. From parts of Great Britain near the borders of England with Scotland and Wales, it may have been applied to people who spoke English, or to distinguish people of English ancestry from Celts"
Well it doesn't strictly _matter_, since it's a mild joke. It's equally mild pushback against the implication that someone named after their home country must be particularly patriotic and thus the ideal leader of that country, because their family got their name while living abroad.
Literally Hungary's name, in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország' . Country of Magyars. It refers both to the ethnic group and the country name, like England or Scotland.
John Pilgrim seems like a poor analogue. People in the USA today don't identify themselves as Pilgrims as people living in Hungary/Magyarország identify as Magyars.
There was a Twitter thread about other examples of this. Charles de Gaulle was one. But there were also some messups, like Francisco Franco (Frenchman France) leading Spain.
Actually de Gaulle's name is probably not linked etymologically with "Gaul" (Gaule in french). De Gaulle's name is derived from ancient dutch "de Walle" (from the wall). Ofc that's less fun.
Yes, he sould definitely have led Wallonia instead.
Leon Britain in the UK.
His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had migrated to Britain before the Second World War, which makes it all the weirder.
Not sure, Jews around that time (and a bit before that) were known to change their family names to better fit the local context. Too bad it did not work, most of the time...
Then there are examples of nominative anti-determinism. E.g. "Jack Lynch" was culture minister of France, which meant he was in charge of keeping France free of creeping Anglicisms.
I haven't looked into his family history at all, but if his family got their surname in the traditional way, as a distinguishing feature, then they got it at a time when they were already Hungarians but were living outside Hungary.
We also have a commenter her going by Gergo Tisza, the equivalent of George Democrat I suppose? (Tisza was, as we recall, the party winning the election.) No wait, it seems it would be George Respect and Freedom.
Tisza is also the second largest river in Hungary, and, as opposed to the "international" Danube, it is held as a symbol of Hungary/Hungarians (both in good and bad sense). (Before WW1, it was located entirely in Hungary.)
(Also it is an abbreviation, that is for sure.)
This is as balanced, clear and thoughtful a take on this topic as I can imagine.
Orban was bad because his government was corrupt (in the mundane, venal sense) and had anti-growth economic policies, not because of anything to do with "democracy."
Can you explain? I tried to give many examples of ways he was bad for democracy. Are you claiming that my examples are false, that they're not really bad, or some other thing?
I'm not claiming that your examples are not factual. (I withhold judgment on that).
I'm claiming that they are not bad in context, especially given the degree to which EU bureaucracy freely and blatantly engages in non-democratic interventions to override disfavored democratic outcomes among member states.
The whole point of OPs post is that there are degrees of anti democratic tomfoolery. The EU is not equivalent to Orban in this regard
Yeah, I disagree.
> Yeah, I disagree.
Which is fine, but you haven't presented any facts or made an argument, so what are we supposed to take from this?
That EU be worse. (A sentiment with which I would agree, btw.)
these are not necessarily unrelated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
Orbán needed to dismantle fundamentals of liberal democracy (such as separation of powers and rule of law) to achieve the levels of corruption he did. You could debate whether that dismantling was inherently bad, or bad because of the corruption it paved the way for, but it seems somewhat academic.
I like the term "wannabe dictator." As far as I can tell, Orban wanted to be a dictator and had no reverence for democracy, but he couldn't make himself dictator because his power had limits and people resisted (and if he had tried to more aggressively become a dictator, people would have pushed back harder, and he feared losing).
I dislike the term "strongman" because because "strong" on its own has a good connotation, and here we are appending it to a neutral word to try to describe something evil.
Also strongman is a bit nebulous. Is Al-Shaara a strongman, was Ataturk a strongman? They both ruled with force and came from military backgrounds, so the dictionary definition could apply here, but obviously these people are very different from Gaddafi and the like.
He was gradually turning himself into a dictator. He got maybe 50% of the way before he bungled up; every year he was more powerful and his regime more oppressive (although still not powerful and oppressive enough, by 2026, to survive the combination of popular sentiment turning against him, a talented and energetic new opponent, and some bad luck).
Also, using median voter theory and consolidating around a guy who is maybe two millimeters to his left (Magyar was a Fidesz member until 2024 and left after they pardoned somebody for covering up CSA).
Two millimeters to the left of where Orbán started in 2010, maybe. But present-day Orbán is on the far right while Magyar is center-right. I'm not even sure it's median voter theory, it's more like attacking the left flank of Orbán's voter coalition in the knowledge that anyone who doesn't like Orbán will vote for Magyar regardless of his policies.
I like the old joke of Jack, Bobby and Daley in a lifeboat that will only support one person.
Jack argues that it should be him because he is the President.
Bobby argues that it should be him because he is the future of the Party.
Daley says, "Come gentlemen, we're all Democrats here, let's vote on it!" and Daley wins by 4 votes.
By no means do I think Orban is perfect, nor should he be immune from criticism. But there have been all sorts of shenanigans from the European Establishment (including the so-called center-right parties, and everyone to their left). Most notable is probably annulling the 2024 Romanian presidential election; also egregious are the threats by Thierry Breton to nullify elections in Germany if there's evidence of so-called evidence (but only if AfD wins, of course). https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1877861172306673790
There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008. I think it's hypocritical to call Orban anti-democratic for changing election rules and then look on happily when multi-party systems marginalize right-wing parties that are winning 20-30% or more of the popular vote, often gaining a plurality.
The nullification thing is a fair point. I don't know enough about coalition politics to have a sense of whether the cordon sanitaires are antidemocratic vs. something the system always allowed.
Some stuff is fair, I think. Other stuff clearly goes against well-established convention (e.g. not allowing the AfD to have a Vice President while allowing smaller parties to have them). And I think it's pretty clear (both from opinion polls, and from election results, especially the two rounds of the 2024 French elections) that a significant portion of rank-and-file voters of center-right parties such as the CDU/CSU in Germany and LR in France, would prefer the right-wing parties to the center-left parties if forced to choose between them.
AfD/Vice-president issue is something that goes against previous convention, but at the same time it is something the system always allowed. In the Bundestag, there is no legal procedure or right for the AfD to get voted in their preferred VPs.
As the AfD is considered to be a risk for our democracy, and parts of the party are officially considered a threat to democracy as confirmed by courts, why should the other parties honour a convention that was traditionally extended to all parties that do not intend to openly dismantle our democratic traditions.
You imply this is not fair, and I imply that it clearly is. There is no point in tolerating those that do not wish to return the favor and are therefore an existential threat to "our way of life".
AfD does not intend to openly dismantle any democratic traditions. It's just an excuse elites make to suppress dissent.
Among other things, the AfD officially called the EU a "failed project" and is generally highly critical of anything EU-related. There have been ideas floated of "Dexit", leaving the Euro-zone, or otherwise diminishing German participation in EU. That alone I would call trying to "openly dismantle our democratic traditions". I'll be the fist-shaking old man here and say "read some books" about history, to understand the importance of the EU and how intertwined and fundamental it is in recent German history.
They also want to massively decrease tax for high incomes and rich people. Again, direct attack on the fundamental post-WW2-German way of life and economics ("social market economy"). This kind of policy is even generally anti-democratic, as it further increases wealth-gaps and turns us back into a quasi-feudal economy.
In foreign policy, they want less coordination and cooperation with EU, and increased cooperation and alignment with Russia. Do I need to comment any further how this endangers our democratic traditions, and democracy in general? In the AfDs most recent election manifesto of 2025, they do not even mention the Russian invasion as anything to be condemned, and instead demand lifting of sanctions and unbridled trade with Russia.
In a previous manifesto, they asked for Bundeswehr (our armed forces) to be used internally for certain purposes. This demand is in direct violation to one of our most sacred constitutional paragraphs, that completely bars the use of Bundeswehr inside Germany in peacetime, borne out of historical experience. Salami-tactics..
In environmental politics, they see our "Energiewende" (energy transition) as a danger to our national energy needs. How ironic! Renewables provide >50% of our electricity and have considerably decreased our need of fossil fuels from Russia and other countries that could extort us (and that includes the US, by now).
Care to rebut me?
You can't just call tax breakes antidemocratic, large amounts of wealth inequality don't automatically lead to dictatorship. Same with leaving the EU, Britain left the EU but didn't turn into a dictatorship.
And them being against Renewables has nothing to do with democracy at all. Mostly it seems like you just don't like the AFD's policies.
Of course, "existential threat to 'our way of life'" is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider vehicle-ramming attacks at Christmas markets and trade union protests a threat to your way of life, but feel free to disagree.
I find it immensely hypocritical when "democratic" is defined as "my people win an election" and "anti-democratic" is defined as "the other people win an election."
Your accusation is completely off the mark. There is plenty of "others" here to win that I'd call democratic. In fact, our current ruling party is the "other" for me personally, that I happily accept as perfectly democratic, but very unaligned with my own position.
AfD has openly racist influential party figures that are directly flirting with literal Nazi-rhetoric, as well as bending historical facts to downplay the Holocaust and other wrongdoings.
There is plenty of room in democracy to fight terrorists and even be immigration-critical without reviving Nazi-rhetoric. But you seem to have just assumed that I'm a far-left "no borders" type of guy, right?
What is "literal nazi rhetoric"? I only see handwaving and baseless accusations. I assume you are the type to undermine democracy and freedom in the name of fighting "nazis" and "racists" while claiming to defend it.
Democracy can't be left to the voters.
Better: Democracy is too important to be left to the voters.
Could be both, couldn’t it?
Cordon sanitaires are basically fair game. You know them as partisan politics, I believe. That level of granularity it would take to call that undemocratic is not something any known system of democracy can model.
Most democracies are representative - you elect politicians, they go to the capital, and there they go underground to work in the Politics mines 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their constituents expect results, not so much how exactly they wield the pickaxe.
Even direct democracy can only go so far to take direct control of the process, such as holding a vote on the occasional single law proposal.
I'd like to read more into the Romanian thing - the guy was also apparently charged with plotting a coup (not in some flimsy "do pro-Russia tiktok ads" sense but in the "get a bunch of mercenaries with guns to raid the capital" sense), my default view is that it was still fucked up and a subversion of democracy to annul the election but willing to be convinced otherwise. I don't think you have to have a "no annulling elections ever" rule to be pro-democracy, on some level certain choices by candidates force you into situations where any option is a bad one.
But even if it was completely wrong, in the US at least, nobody holds up anyone in Romania as a paragon of true democracy and wise leadership, unlike the treatment of Orban.
Also cordon sanitaires aren't only against the right. The treatment of Arab parties in Israel comes to mind, and IIRC communist/socialist parties at various times/places.
Outside of “relative to other middle eastern countries” has anyone ever held up Israel as a model of democracy? That’s not rhetorical, although I am incredulous.
i don't see why a cordon sanitaire is undemocratic. winning 30% of the vote doesn't entitle you to a seat in government.
What a beautiful pair of sentences.
Please explain what you mean, preferably without being snarky.
Winning 30% of the vote puts you at a worst-case result of coming in third overall in an election.
There are systems where this could translate into nothing, but the only one you're likely to see described as "democratic" is the case where the total number of seats in government is less than three.
The entire purpose of the cordon sanitaire is to thwart the expressed desires of the voters. How do you describe that as anything other than "undemocratic"?
I mean, back in 1977 Labor became the largest party (a little over 33%) in The Netherlands after leading the most far-left cabinet in our history, but the Christian Democrats (32%) and the centre-right (18%) decided to form a right-wing cabinet.
Seems perfectly fair to me.
What does "a seat" mean to you?
Winning 50% of the seats, rounded down, does not entitle you to participating in government, if the other side can put together 50% rounded up. What's so controversial about that?
It depends on system what 30% of votes translate to. In Hungary's lopsided, inner-rewarding system, Orbán's 39% translates to 52 out of 199 MP, barely more than a fourth of seats, and gives them zero say in the government.
In two-round elections, its common for a relatively strong extremist party to totally fall out and barely win anything in second round since there's almost no voters who have them as secondary preference (France's RN being the most obvious example).
To govern, you always need majority of seats, and 30% pretty much never delivers that alone.
That is fake news. The EU did not nullify the Romanian election, a Romanian court did. And Breton did not talk about the EU nullifying elections (in either Romania or Germany), he talked about the EU enforcing its social media laws in both countries. Here is a description of the specific social media law enforcement that was done in Romania:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_6487
Having laws about what companies can do surrounding elections is perfectly reasonable. And I think it's reasonable that there would be situations where a court may have to step in and order an election to be re-run. But that should be an extreme last resort, especially in the current world, where bots (Russian or otherwise) are always going to be on TikTok, X, and various other internet platforms.
>There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008.
First, a firewall is a term for a normal political activity: the decision who to cooperate with on the legislative level. Just because a party has seats in a multi-party system, doesn't mean they are entitled to being worked with proportionally.
Second, "mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US" are, at any point post-Tea Party or so, clearly to the right of mainstream non-US positions and so are not representative for the EU.
What's the most important difference between European center-right and right-wing parties? Immigration. If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened. Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
>If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened.
Doubtful. In Germany at least, proposed immigration policies are largely the core of the far-right's undemocratic qualities. If the center-right adopted those policies, they would either have to weaken them to remain on the constitutional playing field, in which case people would still choose the far-right because they are the undiluted original, or the center-right would become indistinguishable from the far-right, which doesn't exactly weaken the far right in any practical sense.
And none of that even touches on the positive aspects of immigration, which would be lost in any case.
I think some of the proposals by various right-wing parties are bad (forced remigration stuff). But I think it's entirely possible for centrist, even left-of-center parties like Denmark's Social Democrats, to take a stricter line on immigration.
> Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
Yeah, no. Germany's population didn't increase by anything close to 17.5 million in the last 10 years, that would have been an increase of more than 20%. Instead, it was around 1.3 million. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/672608/development-population-numbers-germany/
And I'm pretty sure Germany didn't get rid of 16.2 million Germans in the same time to make room for all those immigrants.
I assume some of those immigrants in the source I linked to may have only stayed temporarily and then left, so they wouldn't necessarily increase the population by 17.5 million.
And in any cases, the number of deaths in Germany has been greater than the number of births, so you'd have expected a population decline of 3.9 million over that time period with no immigration. (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Population/Births/Tables/lrbev04.html#242410)
According to this there currently live 16.4 million first-generation immigrants in Germany https://www.dw.com/en/germany-1-in-4-residents-has-immigration-history/a-76764004
So close to your number but not restricted to 10 years, and we should keep in mind that this includes inner-EU migration as well.
Merkel is usually only blamed for Syrian immigration which amounts to just 1 million
Also, how many of those first-gen immigrants are from other EU countries?
It is very important since no government can ban that.
statista is notoriously ass for these figures, and this also ignores that most migrants are from the EU.
Annulling the Romanian election was questionable, although (unlike in the US where it is often thrown around as a charge, but with very little substance) Russian election interference is a real and major problem in Eastern European countries, and did clearly happen in the course of that election. Mostly the issue was the secret services sitting on that information and waiting to see first whether they like the election results.
In any case, the "European Establishment" is one of those shallow conspiracy theories where people try to organize everything they don't like into a single shadowy opponent (like George Soros or the Elders of Zion). Romanian democracy has well known problems, although in a different direction -- "deep state" also gets thrown around a lot with no substance, but Romania actually has a deep state problem, with the security services (which largely remained intact during the fall of Communism) having an undue influence on things with not enough accountability or oversight. That has nothing to do with the rest of Europe though.
Right, the US would Never sponsor an investigative journalist who just happened to be investigating a politician we didn't like in order to influence the outcome of the election of a NATO country. Oh wait....
I see that EU will consider releasing $35bn of 'frozen' funds to Hungary now that Orban is gone. E.g., "EU ties €35bn fund release to Hungary's break with Orbán era" (Financial Times) or "EU rushes to Budapest talks with Magyar team to unlock frozen funds amid Ukraine tensions" (MSNBC).
That's a bit misleading.
The funds were blocked due to EU concerns over some policies which Orban refused to address. Magyar promised to solve the issues so the money (probably) will get unblocked. Orban could have done the same at any time.
Seems extortionary to me. "Do this or we don't give you money that's rightfully yours."
(Granted, I'm sure America's done stuff like this to Mexico before, using tariffs. Of course, that's less "money you rightly deserve" and more "access to our shiny shiny dollars.")
The better comparison would be trump linking university funding to, I think it was more effort against antisemitism?
Is this extortionary? I guess you have to decide case by case, but generally linking funding to the compliance with some predefined rules is fine with me. You just have to make sure that the enforcement of these rules does not become arbitrary.
It's extortionary if the goal is to change the current guy's behavior. It's... a little more, actually, if the goal is regime change. Not sure we have a word for it.
(Granting the comparison with Trump/uni funding, it's an apt one, my thanks!)
Just one example, Orbán created the "foundational model" (or whatnot) for the previously state-owned universities, which became "private" universities governed by some hastily set-up board, full of party members and party-related people. (Everything was quite tricky, for example the substitute of a dropout member is chosen by the remaining members.) At the same time, transparency fell back a lot, and state funds were secured by long-term contracts.
(This, to date, affected thirty-something universities, so all except like two.)
This all happened shortly after the EU announced that in its next fiscal period it will increase funding for research.
From this, one can hardly think of anything else that they want to channel the money towards their own pockets (done before on several other levels). So, in response, the EU excluded these universities from the EU-funded research grants (e.g. H2020).
Long story short, if you want to steal a large part of our money, you get none. Yes, ignoring democratic conventions might had also played a role in all this, but overall this is clearly a dont-steal-our-money scenario.
(Now, don't get me wrong, Western EU members are more than happy to keep their money as frequently as they can. Scientific research funds are quite rare east of the Elbe.)
It is a continuum but there is a big leap at the point of stuffing ballot boxes. There are lots of parties and power players who will accept legal and political shenanigans and pressure on the media even at extreme levels but wouldn't tolerate ballot stuffing.
AFAIK, that's pretty much the distinction between free elections (the votes are cast and counted correctly) and fair elections (the pre-voting process like registration and campaigning is open and equal-opportunity).
I agree and think that is an important and useful distinction.
I feel kind of silly that I've read the words "free and fair elections" so many times and never stopped to dwell on which details fall under "free" and which under "fair."
To be fair, in most cases, people using these words don't really distinguish between these aspects, either. It's become just a shorthand for "good" elections.
Fun fact, a part of the Hungarian votes (about 200k, i.e. 4%) are cast without any meaningful check. There is dual citizenship for ethnic Hungarians living in the neighbouring countries, who can also vote (it is quite common in the area, Romania, Serbia and Croatia surely has some method to handle it). Since it cannot be expected from the Slovak or Romanian authorities to cooperate in such a voting (e.g. Slovakia explicitly forbids dual citizenship), the ballots are sent by mail (simply by post!), and they have to come back in some way (e.g. post, or local volunteers collect them, maybe even helping the citizens in the voting). There is not even a reliable registration of voters, yes, something happens like every 10 years, but whoever dies in the meantime goes unnoticed.
So this is one huge security hole. Not explicit ballot stuffing, but well, you know.
Usually, 90% of these votes go to Orbán's party (this time it was 84%).
(Around the Ukranian border, there were some villages with hundreds of temporary citizens as well, registering just before the election. Sometimes 100+ people registering to the very same address. Not a huge help, but, you know.)
That kind of thing is both very dodgy and legitimate.
Especially if your buddy is the chief prosecutor.
BTW I don't fully get it. I mean, the question was pretty much that is it cheating or not?
To sum it up, Orbán created a mechanism, over which there is no democratic control (or any control at all), but where his people can interfere (he has many active fans in the neighbouring countries who can "help" to "fill" and "deliver" the ballots, but the general sentiment is pro-Orbán there anyway), and which clearly benefits his party. Well, this is pretty much the definition of cheating.
Yes, it is small-scale (resulting in like two extra seats, out of the 199); part of his strategy was to have many small-scale changes, which all happened to favor his party, but which are quite hard to point out (since, you know, "this is only two extra seats").
It isn't cheating, it is bad policy but that is a different flaw.
Well, I stand by my point: creating a mechanism which benefits you, and where some (or even several) people will eventually tamper with the ballots (and they will do it to your advantage, and you know it perfectly well up front, as it is clear as day to pretty much anyone) is cheating.
Or, to put it even simpler: encouraging your fants to cheat on your behalf is cheating. (Allowing them to cheat on your behalf is cheating as well, BTW.)
> are these things bad and undemocratic?
They all seem bad, but "undemocratic" isn't the word I'd use for most of them (gerrymandering was the only one directly related to democratic elections). Lots of policies strike me as bad, but I can't get everyone else to agree that all deviations from libertarianism on the part of governments are inherently suspect and deserve the same degree of scrutiny as restrictions on the franchise.
> In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election.
No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite. All people could vote for instead of his continued rule was "No". Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
> In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life.
A referendum is, again, not the same thing as an election. He didn't have to step down from power, handing it over to anyone else.
> Why did these people hold elections at all?
I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
> Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem.
Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
> Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them.
Communist regimes also effectively solved that first one, such as via purging the military, and I think largely solved the second by purging them as well.
> and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide)
That theory really annoys me, as I recall the blogger "agnostic" at akinokure.blogspot.com trumpeting how it was impossible for Trump to lose in 2020 because even if they cheated his victory would still overwhelm them... and then Biden won, he claimed he was only wrong by underestimating how MUCH they would cheat, and then claiming that this had completely discredited the election in the eyes of the public because we're all now aware it was a sham. The simpler explanation is just that none of the elections were stolen, Trump won twice and lost once. I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
> use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller
I think he was more of an "opponent" in Trump's mind. He wasn't an actual politician.
> This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as “not that bad, really”
No, most of them never lost an election (not a referendum or plebiscite) and then handed over power. It should be noted that Charles de Gaulle also stepped down after losing one to amend the Constitution, rather than losing an actual election to some other politician. He could have stayed on and tried again, but he made the choice to leave. This is separate from being a dictator vs democratic politician.
communists regimes generally achieved power by killing a bunch of people, which maybe makes it easier to keep killing people in office
That makes sense, though I believe in Czechoslovakia they first grabbed a foothold of power within a larger government, then used that to seize power without killing that many people initially.
The bolsheviks did the same in Russia, if memory serves.
There was a Civil War in Russia as a result.
I guess it was the same in most EE countries (in Hungary for sure). Still, there was some killing, but not that much; during and after the revolution of 1956, there was again some; then the system consolidated and went on without murders. (There were other measures like pushing people towards exile, jailing them, or firing them from their jobs (being unemployed was a crime BTW), blackmailing and this stuff.) It could have been going on forever, but well, the economy...
My recollection is that Hungary joined in Operation Barbarossa during WW2, but the Red Army won and took over.
This is pretty much unrelated to the events following WW2. The Soviets occupied Hungary just as they occupied Czechoslovakia (which was not involed in Barbarossa -- well, yes, Slovakia was, but everyone pretended to forget about that). In both places, first a coalition of several parties started governing, there were elections and all that, but of course the Soviets made sure that the communists were included. Then the independent parties were destroyed, one after the other.
It is quite related to the post BTW: even though the Soviets were capturing the country (countries), they pretended that there are free and fair elections, and tried to take over the countries formally following the law, operating behind the scenes as much as possible.
(Oh, and the people rose against both communist governments, although in Hungary it happened a lot earlier.)
> I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
What makes you think that? The only charitable explanation for what he's done to the political system of Russia is that he really sees what's happening only in terms of Russell's conjugations.
I'm not sure what they meant, but I think there's often a meaningful distinction of how democratic a leader considers themselves to be and how democratic the system around them actually is.
Putin's first priority is to ensure that he remains in power. Since the "divine right of kings" doctrine is thoroughly discredited these days, even dictators pretend that their power derives from the will of the people, and maintaining this pretense goes much smoother if you're actually popular.
Part of construal level theory is that we perceive things far from us (both in terms of literal distance as well as the more metaphorical sort) as more simple/homogenous while the local/familiar is more detailed. Most Americans don't know the name of Putin's party, or what the biggest opposition parties are. People actually reporting from Russia tend to note that Putin is genuinely popular there (perhaps less so since his botched invasion of Ukraine and the hit the Russian economy has taken), but Americans don't know much about that and don't feel like we need to know.
The political system of Russia wasn't in any great condition prior to Putin.
I'd say he's close to Trump in the nature of his popularity. Both are the kind of leaders that I once heard someone call "folk heroes". Americans have low trust in their institutions, as do Russians. Yet somehow a lot of them think that a single man can be "on their side", that he can spend five or twenty-six years draining the swamp, but the swamp remains, the swamp lets him remain in charge and at the same time he's neither a useful idiot nor one with the swamp.
The difference is that Trump is organic (I hope), Putin is originally hydroponic. He was reportedly picked as the successor because 1998-1999 sentiment surveys regularly identified Max Otto von Stierlitz (an undercover Soviet spy inside the SS) as the most popular fictional character people would have liked to see in charge of Russia: phlegmatic, reserved, quietly competent.
The basic story appeared to be KGB/FSB saw Russia under Yeltsin going to hell, suffering rampant organized crime, being plundered by oligarchs, hyperinflation, etc, and decided that something had to be done. Once elected, Putin executed a successful turnaround. He remains popular (?).
(Intelligence services are underrated btw when it comes to their roles in democracy.)
Putin was in the middle of this mess, co-opted by the WEF Young Leaders thing. He was very much supposed to be a Western Pawn.
Trump has done more than you'd think to drain the swamp. USAID for one (and since that was years of forensic accounting, you gotta give his allies credit for work during the Biden Administration).
Trump's about as organic as you get when the Democratic Strategists decide to quit the Democratic party and run a Republican instead (see the whole pied piper strategy -- Bad Idea Dog in Action!)
> No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite.... Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
There was no parliament at the time. So unless he called an election for an "elected dictator" to continue ruling without a parliament, calling an election would have necessarily implied a simultaneous parliamentary election. And he may have considered the possibility of winning the presidency in such scenario, assuming the center and left parties couldn't agree on a single candidate, but even then he must have known there was a high likelihood of having to rule with an opposition-controlled parliament.
There was to be a parliamentary election anyway in case Pinochet won. But if that had been the case (legitimately, no fraud) then he could be confident of ruling with a complaisant parliament.
Having a plebiscite was the pragmatic choice for him.
It could have been pragmatic, but the fact that there was no parliament at the time seems extremely relevant to contrast with Orban!
> Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
They did face a genuine risk of revolution though, which is what Scott said. In most Communist countries this was suppressed by the military might of Russia; once Communism in Russia collapsed, it collapsed almost everywhere else basically instantly.
> I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
In the sense that the official vote count accurately reflected the vote slips people dropped in ballot boxes, yes. (But then, you could say the same about most Communist countries.) But the voting was increasingly influenced by all kinds of illegal practices, some of which are mentioned in the post.
In most Communist countries, opposition parties weren't actually allowed to compete. That's a different category from merely "influenced", and it resulted in Communists never losing power via such elections, whereas Orban just did.