The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life.
Of course the most frustrating part about that is as the US and other western countries start sliding into authoritarianism, people deny it because they don’t feel like it’s authoritarian.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think life is exactly the same - just that the consequences of authoritarianism are much more insidious than they’re portrayed.
Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.
The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.
We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
It sure is good being a foreigner in an autocratic country. You are most likely there there for business. You don’t really care about anything because you will leave anyway. Most of my coworkers in Singapore were all like that. Who cares about the mass deportation of bus drivers after their strikes for better working condition? Why look at what’s behind the curtain when you can enjoy the pool?
I have met people who have fled autocratic countries. Life sure looks ok there from a surface level. Unless of course you are from the extended family of someone who displeased someone better connected. Or you are in the way of someone. Or you happen to have said something which displeased someone. Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
Of course everyone there knows that’s how it works. That’s why everyone there shuts up and lower their head because they don’t want to be the idiot having a run up with the power that be.
> Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.
Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.
But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.
It certainly is. I’m not pretending that liberal democracies are perfect. Ensuring that the one with the least power or at the margin don’t become victims and remain free is a constant struggle but people are fighting it. It can be a dispiriting one when you go through times like the one of the USA are currently traversing
It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.
I look at it from a different lens: the political system and what people's life look like isn't a predefined matrix.
To take a mild example, we don't look at federal countries and assume it affects citizen's life in a radical way that can be straight attributed to the federal nature of it. Germany biggest differences from France probably aren't because of that. Sure it has an impact, but not in an easily predictable way.
Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. We've have democracies fully melt down and becoming literal hell on earth.
I don't intend to praise authoritarian regimes and don't see them as sustainable, but IMHO there is a lot more to a country than just that.
> Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries.
You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed.
Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and defending the marginalised in authoritarian countries because they themselves become the target of the state.
I’m not blind to the fact that most of the apologists I have met in my life who are always happy to point that it’s relative and what about the majority actually happy often want nothing more than to be the authoritarian power themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the current American context.
My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge.
We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.
And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.
You might notice that I have carefully talked about liberal democracies in my previous comments. This is not a flourish. Democracy is not a panacea. The liberal part is essential.
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Precisely.
It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not.
For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped off in your business? The courts won't care. Accused of a crime? Bribes are your only recourse.
So yes, the mundane day to day is the same, but when problems pop up the difference is like night and day. In authoritarian country you're at the complete mercy of those with more power than you.
It can't be understated the physiological impact of living in countries with functional liberal institutions. Having grown up in a country where crime and corruption were the norm, then coming to a country where I could reliably depend on the systems to be fair felt like meeting a nice girl after escaping an abusive relationship. As much as I sometimes miss my old country, and feel a twinge of nationalistic pride, I never want to go back. It honestly makes me emotional to see people in the "the West" say that things aren't so bad in illiberal countries. You are a fish that doesn't even know they're in water.
I'll respond to this one, as it's at the top and it started off unpleasantly personal. Do try and avoid making assumptions about the person you're speaking to, please.
I live in a post-Soviet country taking an autocratic turn, I have friends fleeing. I will probably have to leave myself and it's making me miserable. I do not mean to diminish their experience or the experience of anyone suffering under an authoritarian government.
If you'll read the context of the post, I was talking about how Western (predominately US) media portrays other countries, which is frankly dehumanizing for the most part.
I grew up thinking that war starts, life stops; that a different form of government radically and instantly transmogrifies every aspect of a society. We are a peaceful, normal, democratic society and everywhere else is war or repression. A primitive dualism which has not stood up to my experience.
This is what's implied in the news and the movies, and forms a basis for the acceptance of the Western versions of the shared problems I discussed. It is often exaggerated in a way that lines places up for a bomb-driven democratization process.
It also means that, as GP noted, we don't feel the problems coming along when they do.
Do you get where I'm coming from?
> Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
This is a wild take, unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
I’ve seen a couple Reddit threads recently where someone says something like “my neighbor has been doing [insert major nuisance here], I think they might not be citizens. I’m not in favor of ICE taking people away, but should I report them since it might solve [nuisance]?”
The couple I’ve seen, the people aren’t that direct in their comments.
And I’ve seen reports of citizens being arrested for a day or two while they’re investigated about whether they’re legal or not, before being released, all without warrants or even probable cause. Sure, not a prison camp, but far from what I’d expect in a free society.
But the seeds of disappearing and detaining people without cause are already sprouting in the US among the general population, even if only among a tiny minority of shitty people. And that’s scary.
OK but that's something that's beginning to happen in the US versus the default of authoritarian regimes - my point is that is not "pretty much the same" as OP put it.
You might get physically attacked by some neanderthal if you're openly gay in public in the west, and in some middle eastern countries you get stoned on a public square - but hey we all unwind and have some fun when we can, so it's pretty much the same ?
I believe the OP's point was that if you are in the ingroup, you can expect life to be pretty much equivalent to what you'd experience in the US. It's only if you are in the outgroup (like being gay) that you start to see state violence.
This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime".
To Godwin this, life for a non-jewish, non-communist, non-disabled citizen in 1940s germany was typical, even pleasant. I mean, heck, the german government at the time was taking the Jewish citizens property and giving it to favored classes.
The deceptive part of an authoritarian regime is that the outgroup is almost always a minority. The number of people that experience outgroup treatment is almost always a small portion of the general population.
Even in the strictest and most brutal governments like north korea, so long as you abide by state rules things are just fine. You can even go on vacations out of the country if you are obedient enough.
A measure of government is how it treats internal state enemies. Crime exists everywhere, so the question is what's criminalized and how are criminals punished. Also importantly, what crimes does the state look away from if they hit political enemies.
But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries. Half this forum is calling their political leaders idiots and will work (vote) against them, they are still in group. This is not a small distinction.
Also the path upwards in society changes a lot.
Only the most extreme authoritarians will attempt to silence all dissonance. Most will have a controlled opposition as the illusion of choice and a release valve for anger.
Russia, for example, runs elections and up until recently allowed the opposing party on the ballot. Same with Belarus. China and Iran also have elections, but the candidates are vetted through the state party. I know now Americans from each of these countries (except Iran). One who still votes in the Belarus elections even though they know it won't change anything.
NK is about the only modern regime I know where all opposition is punished. And even then, there's been reports of a loosening of enforcement.
Trying posting online about what you really think should happen to, say, the head of state, and you'll get a visit from the Secret Service, which will just be the start of your problems.
Compare this to enemies of the state, where we're allowed to wantonly express, depict and act out, sometimes literally, desires and calls for even lethal harm against them.
>> But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries
That's not true. It requires wilful ignorance in some cases, but sometimes not even that.
Take, for example, russian troll farms. They initially were made to shift in-group opinion, because in-group started to a. get mad at Putin, b. reaching the conclusion that most of the in-group was dissatisfied and something had to be done.
Small forums in Russia (and HN is a small forum) aren't even monitored, but you can find abusive and violent language towards politicians in big social russian networks pretty easily.
So you can be in-group for authority and think yourself a free-thinker who isn't afraid to say the truth and cyberbully the president.
They have argued in court against normal or indeed any due process; for stopping people purely based on race, language, and accent; against recognition of birthright citizenship and said that the next job after purging illegals is getting rid of the citizens who don't belong here.
Remember the immigration czar said if he had his way only 100M white folks would remain.
If those who are asserted without proof to be illegal can be sent to die in a foreign prison camp so can you.
Oh that's tame, go to Facebook where boomers are falling over themselves tagging ICE in comments with their neighbors' names and addresses
>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. They are making the case that delivering material goods to people rather than exhausting yourself in some idiocracy-like circus of abstract rights is what should be the point of government.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people%27s_democ...
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda.
That absolutely is propaganda.
The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
However hard China tries to change the definition of "democracy", won't change that fact.
> The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
That is only undemocratic if it is against the will of the population. If the population is choosing to only allow selecting employees from one party, then that is perfectly in line with democracy. A "political party" is just a labor union by another name, after all.
Western countries by and large value free and fair elections, but that isn't what defines democracy. Hosting free and fair elections to select the autocrat of your choosing would not make a democracy. What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control. How they choose to use that control is up to them.
There are plenty of good indicators revealing why China isn't democratic, but that statement in isolation isn't telling. Keep in mind, though, that the claim wasn't being strictly democratic — rather, it claims that on the spectrum it is more democratic than the alternatives in use.
>What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control.
Politics is the question of how political heterogenity is resolved. The political system is the range of acceptable methods used in that resolution and how power is distrbuted amongst those competing groups. In that restrospect, Democracy and Authoritarianism exist on the same axis. The former resolves things peacefully through voting, the latter has a single interest overriding all others violently.
Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system. In reality, politics always exist, groups are not homogenous, especially not a group on the size of billions. 99% of people don't really care about what OP says, in so much that they would forsake that for more pettier thing. We will all disagree over the tiniest of issues, and thus from there heterogenity springs and a political system is formed.
Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics. It's a given after all that a interest group would achieve it's goals without the political restraining it. So no, China isn't "more democratic" because the CCP is effective in achieving it's goals when it already has total political control. That's axiomatic.
But there is explicit rejection of plurality, and thus the expression of political heterogenity, there is only one center of power allowed, and political decision-making is resolved violently. So it is Authoritarian, full stop. It is not "Democratic", in the same way it is a oxymoron to state a "Democratic Absolute Monarchy" or a "Democratic Military Dictatorship" even when the latter two can produce results. If you want to call it something, just call Authoritarian Populism.
> Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system.
Control does not imply lack of negotiation. The population at large still has to gather and sort out their issues and contentions, ultimately settling upon an agreement in the end.
A representative democracy takes that model and decentralizes it, seeing the population at large gather only at a local level, hiring messengers to carry the final determination at the local level to a central meeting place where it is compiled with the results of all other localities, but the idea of people gathering, communicating, negotiating, and ultimately reaching an agreement remains the same.
> Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics.
Right, but we're talking about government, not politics. "Delivering the results" is the role of government. Politics takes place during the time when the people have gathered. Once they figure out what they want, then it is handed off to the hired workers in the business known as government to fulfill the wishes of the people. To reiterate: Politics comes before government gets involved...
Well, it does in a democracy, at least. I expect what you are trying to say is that in China the politics happens inside government? That's fair. But what China is saying is that in many so-called 'democracies' the politics is also happening inside government, thereby making them not really democratic either. So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying that on the spectrum it is closer to being democratic by at least trying to serve the interests of the population at large rather than, say, "corporations".
>So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying that on the spectrum it is closer to being democratic by at least trying to serve the interests of the population at large rather than, say, "corporations".
What I'm trying to point out here that a democracy is going to try to serve, or rather balance the interests of everyone involved. And that means the corporations do have a seat on the table. Along with HOAs, Investors, Religious Groups, Farmers, Foreign lobbysits, Internet Advocates, Feminists, Minority Advocates, White Collar Workers, Blue Collar Workers etc. There isn't really something called the "interests of the population at large" here, populations in reality are heavily heterogenous with often conflicting interests.
If we talk about the lack of safety or train networks, etc, it's not because of a lack of competence, it's because the sum of vested interests of not having that exceeds the sum of interests that want it, and neither side is willing to compromise that nothing happens. Fustrating, but it's not "idiocracy" as OP says, that is what it means to cooperate in reality. Getting nothing done is very much what it means to be a democracy. If you choose not do, you can end up like Somalia or Syria in total chaos.
When it comes to the CCP, the nuanced but important distinction here is that the CCP is only seat on the table, and they explicitly prevent others from sitting. Their pejorative objective is power for it's own sake, and the action of "caring for the citizens" is more akin to a owner caring for it's pets in accordance to it's own particular perspective than everyone having a seat on the table with metaphorical guns pointed at another. Those other interest groups I mentioned, they cannot coerce the CCP in the same way that they can in USA.
After all, the State of China dosen't have a official military, the PLA is explicitly the armed wing of the CCP that declares loyalty to the party first and foremost. That's a key distinction here from the US Military that serves the Constitution, not the Democrats or Republicans.
Of course, there is inter-party heterogenity, and also the fact that acting like a totalitarian dictator dosen't work well economically, so of course the CCP has to concede a bit. But claiming you are "more democratic" because aren't the most extreme version of authoritiariaism and far less pluralistic than most liberal democracies then it's a awfully banal statement, and more of a propaganda term really with retrospect to OP.
> There isn't really something called the "interests of the population at large" here, populations in reality are heavily heterogenous with often conflicting interests.
Incorrect. In a democracy, the people gather, present ideas, discuss, argue, and eventually reach agreement. That agreement may not be exactly what any individual wants, but the population at large does reach an agreement as to what is in its interest as a whole group.
> What I'm trying to point out here that a democracy is going to try to serve, or rather balance the interests of everyone involved.
Whereas in reality the interests don't show up. In fact, in the USA, showing up to the table (a.k.a. lobbying) has come to be considered abhorrent behaviour, even though that's technically the civic duty of all citizens in a democracy. Lobbying (i.e. gathering, presenting ideas, discussing, arguing, and eventually reaching agreement — and passing that result onto the massager, in the case of representative democracy) is the only way a democracy can function, fundamentally.
China isn't cut off from the rest of the world. They notice just as well as we do that even if these places are democratic on paper, the people don't actually practice it, instead leaving control to a small group of figureheads and the few people who do show up to (i.e. the 'evil' lobbyists). Their claim is that leaving control to that small group of people who are pushing their own personal interests, is, on the spectrum, ultimately less democratic than an equally small group that ostensibly takes in all the considerations of the population at large.
I infer that what you are trying to say is that in a place like the USA, the social environment would allow people to change their ways, kick the small group to the curb, and start practicing democracy, if for some reason they wanted to in the future, without tremendous pushback, whereas the CCP would not be so accepting. That is no doubt a fair assessment, but completely talking past the original point. It wasn't said based on some kind of future hypothetical.
>Their claim is that leaving control to that small group of people who are pushing their own personal interests, is, on the spectrum, ultimately less democratic than an equally small group that ostensibly takes in all the considerations of the population at large.
Well then it's important then actually to undertand what the CCP itself believes here. This is not what they are claiming explicitly. Wang Huning's critique of America isn't because it is poor or mismanaged, it's because it accepts heterogenity, in multiculturalism and diversity that he believes leads to social decay, loss of cohesion, and weak stability. And National Sovereignity and Powerful State is Paramount, not the livelihood of the people. To that extent, heterogenity is suppressed in favour of enforced homogenization all through a powerful central party. Dissent, Historical "Nihilism", Postmodernism, Plurality, cannot be tolerated because they weaken National Direction.
They don't find the idea of small group of corporates leading as problematic because it still provides a single coherent direction. No, what they fear is when everyone goes to table and starts pushing their own opinion.
If you understand this, that their rejection of liberal democracy comes from fundamental point through influence of figures like Carl Schmitt and Marx, the idea that they are "democratic" is just largely just rhetoric for foreign audiences. And it's worldview that quite close to American Postliberals like JD Vance or Peter Thiel. Whether you agree with it or not is another thing, but this is not democracy in any sense of the word. You need to know at least what side you're speaking for, because many posters in HN certainly are displaying irony in supporting China while simultaneously opposing Trump, when Trump's authoritarian actions of cracking down on minorities and opposition are very much what the CCP would be endorsing. And by Trump's own words, he is justified by the "Will of the People".
> the idea that they are "democratic" is just largely just rhetoric for foreign audiences.
They don't claim to be democratic, only more democratic. The alternatives compared against aren't democratic either, so the hypothetical possibility of the CCP being, on the spectrum, more democratic is theoretically sound. Reality isn't, though. The trouble with the claim is that what makes something more or less democratic in the real world is completely nebulous, allowing anyone to pick arbitrary criteria to make the claim.
> You need to know at least what side you're speaking for
Information can be inaccurate, but it doesn't have a side, fundamentally.
>They don't claim to be democratic, only more democratic.
No. As shown in Wang Huning's Neo-Authoritarianism, being more democratic is bad. Ideally they'd be operating on greater homogenization.
>Information can be inaccurate, but it doesn't have a side, fundamentally.
You need to seperate foreign rhetoric from actual political beliefs. Do you understand here what are the implications of Huning's beliefs, and lineage they draw from Schmitt? Or are you going to make the claim that Trump is more "democratic", which is banal it's meaningless.
"The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic."
This claim is not accurate. I'm currently reading The Search for Modern China, and I was surprised to learn that there are, in fact, eight officially recognized political parties in China — all operating under the leadership of the CCP. One of them is even called the 'Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League.'
> That absolutely is propaganda.
Of course it is, and so is the opposite claim.
But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda"
"merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.
This is true for every propaganda, otherwise it wouldn't work.
Nope. These days, most of it is "flood the zone with crap" stuff (1) that's wrong on even a quick inspection, not to mention contradictory to the rest of the crap.
It's almost refreshing to see a good old-fashioned well-constructed propaganda edifice, and not a big pile of crap, one that that aims to get people to believe in something rather than nothing at all.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotat...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8220792-the-point-of-modern...
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda.
It's wild to me that you believe this.
I've spent a few years in China and have made close Chinese friends. One constant I see is Chinese will not admit publicly, but they'll whisper to you in quiet corners that that know their government is authoritarian and the West is more free.
>If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
Well, umm, far more people (rich, middle, poor) are emmigrating out of China with preference for Western Liberal Democracies than Westeners immigrating in. The thing is, in terms of job opportunities, the USA still far surpasses China for same amount of individual effort. And if I want to just live comfortably, Japan, Australia, Korea are all valid options.
Like even the abysmally poor birthrate dosen't reflect on China with regards to the long viability of what you describe.
Plenty of people are emigrating from China to Singapore, which is not particularly less authoritarian.
Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way, but they very much obey rule of law as opposed to explicit Rule By Law in the CCP. They also don't effectively declare themselves God as the ultimate authority and moral arbiters of the nation.
Like, having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here. Most countries, even poorer ones don't do that.
> If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
Try implementing direct political action and see how Western governments treat you. You'll be deemed a terrorist, and if you're caught alive, you'll never see the sun again.
Define "direct political action"? Like, murder yes. But belgium has (too many) popular local initiatives that get picked up by The Government in some form.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/rico-and-domestic-terr...
It is worth noting that the EOP OSC is investigating Jack Smith and the DOJ is investigating Letitia James.
This suggests the worst that could happen if you called the US President a criminal liar is that you would go to federal prison.
I suppose the conclusion is that the US is an autocracy.
What would happen if you deeply insulted a cop at night during a routine check ?
What would be the impact on your life of publicly calling names your company's CEO on social media ? You make it sound like a defamation lawsuit is peanuts, when you'd probably be fighting against an army of lawyer while you're unemployed, if you're in the US that definitely sounds like a life defining event.
I also wonder if most authoritarian régimes even have prison camps ?
In the US you wouldn't even be subject to a defamation lawsuit in the first place. Such a thing is strictly un-American, we have every right to insult mock and insult our elected officials.
Has this happened to you or someone you know or else how do you know better about what happens in other countries than someone who's lived there?
When U.S. neighbors report you to the police because you tell them to stop harassing you, you're in an HOA knowingly but without knowing it's absolutely turning authoritarian.
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum.
That's the point. You have the same type of problems everywhere, but not the same quantity and quality. But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
> But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
This is politics.
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The superiority of democracy is not that it will produce the best leadership. It's that bad leaders can be removed by the governed.
In theory the last 10-15 years show that it might be easier to overthrow a radical regime...
The huge volume of immigration, both where people leave and where they go to reveals this to be false. The experience may be similar for whatever class you belong to, but the reality is demand to live in western democracies is massive for a reason.
Your day-to-day life may have been the same, but that does not mean everyone's lives would be.
1.1 million dead Russians would beg to differ.
right.
and if we wanted to give ANY society a geometric representation it would have a point at the very top that would represent the most powerfull person, and would then widen out to represent the average and then taper down to another singal point, that would represent the single person in that society whoes life was composed of nothing but horror not of thier own fault and who will die with no chance of any help or redress. We can name those living at the top, but pretend that the wieght of society is not carried by a succesion of nameless inocents , comunist, socialist, religious and other societies give lip service to this, but all fall short of declaring a policy that no one will ever be ignored, forgotten and abandoned, but each and everyone of these systems has an elaborote way of doing reputation management or credit score, merit, titles,etc to signal virtue/worth, that can be gamed, so it is. And here we are, and my time/attention must now, be diverted back to the game, lest I loose more than the few points of carma it costs me to speak out here.
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum
Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.
I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.
Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).
Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.
Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.
And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
Well here in the West we were also sent to some kind of school to be brainwashed to be obedient soldiers for rubbish ideologies, so we have that in common
Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory?
I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours.
You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a dozen years). Bananas, oranges & other exotic stuff was not available, maybe around Christmas if you had the right information and waited in a long queue. Slightly better but nor really good with better cuts of meat.
I never ever saw empty shelves in shops, not in Bulgaria, not in Czechoslovakia. I am pretty sure of that, because in 1982+- we were on a 'friendly exchange trip' to Kiev (elementary school organized, with a school in Kiev reciprocally coming to us a couple months later) and saw those there, and still remember the shock.
Jeans and such stuff was for kids with connections or family in the west. Few people had cars, mostly skoda/lada/moskvich/wartburg/trabant/polski fiat. Small, very basic shit. Public transport worked, to every little village. Nothing fancy, but functional. You could live without car, not like in USA.
I have never met a soviet soldier in my life at that time, those poor souls were closed-off at military bases and were forbidden getting out (maybe to prevent them seeing than life in Czechoslovakia was so much better than in CCCP).
The education in schools was focused more on math/engineering/hard sciences, and kids of those times had better background in those than the kids growing today, although humanities are another thing. We did not sing the hymn, like they do in USA. Everyone knew those are lies. But a photo of the current leader of the communist party was hanging there. Communist indoctrination was everywhere, you learnt to live with it and filter it out. Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
I could see Austria behind the iron fence from the window of my bedroom, seeing the lights of the cars driving there, but thinking I will never see those places in my life.
One afternoon, I saw my younger brother (late elementary school at that time) walking across the field towards the fence, too curious and stupid. Suddenly, from a well-hidden bunker, a couple of guys with rifles and a german shepherd appeared, and escorted him out. No shooting at sigh, no beating, no record of 'dangerous anti-communistic element'.
My uncle, serving as a young conscript at Shumava forest, late 50's (he had no choice about that), on the border between Czechia and Western Germany, got knifed in back by somebody trying to flee to the West. Survived, 2cm from kidneys. Ended up living most of his life (since 1969) in USA.
My mother threw away her communist card, shouting, at the face of the local party committee, with the words 'to hell with such party, when I, a widow with two small kids, have to live in such apartment (small room + small kitchen, dark, a toilet and a kitchen sink with only cold water (no bathroom), small coal stove the only heating). She did not go to jail, eventually we got better apartment (central heating, real bathroom and toiled, hot water).
You know, those are real life anecdotes. Not the propaganda tropes endlessly replicated.
If you were politically active, anti-communist, you lost your engineering/science/arts/whatever fancy job and ended up e.g. as boiler operator of the local heating plant for municipal heating. 50's were wild with several highly-politicized processes ending up in capital punishment (so was McCarthyism in the USA at that time), but 70's and 80's were relatively tame.
In the next class, there was a son of a well-known dissident. Had no problems getting into high-quality high school (merit-based entry exams, mostly math), not sure how would the thing went with the university studies (math/engineering probably OK, law/philosophy probably not), but the fall of communism came.
There was widespread small-scale stealing from the state ('if you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from the family'), although the real large-scale looting came after the fall of the communism.
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”
⸻
Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU
I live near a port and dock workers there make a quarter of a million dollars a year along with great benefits, meanwhile the majority of professors these days are adjuncts who aren't even university employees lol
>were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
This sort of thing is happening in the states. Maybe we're the commies now.
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
>There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.
The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.
So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.
I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.
Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.
Too late to edit after a late post-proofread I got distracted by the ICFP2025.
>I really Prague
I really liked Prague... except for the tourist stretch on the non-castle side of the river which way tacky. We have our own tacky shops where I'm from, they're just not all together in a long continuous span.
>Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
Tell me what these narratives are. I do not disagree, but I am a westerner who never left home.
We (the west) are the force of good, spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
And our socio-economic system is the best there can be, don't even think about changing anything about it (questioning this is a total taboo).
That's not even the official narrative. The official narrative, is that we the West have a democracy by historic accident and bring war and slavery to the rest of the world seeking for cheap oil and other resources. But this is fine, because if we wouldn't extort them someone else would. And of course everyone is free to choose their situation, so they could just leave. But please don't become an immigrant here, because then you take our taxes and pensions, because we don't allow you to work, because then you would eventually get voting rights. But all these problems are far away and actually only the concern of their countries, we have no part in it, we just do our big money game.
The people distrusting the official narrative, think that we don't actually live in a democracy an there is an elite in power who just keeps this as there facade.
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yet, many people claim they were happier back then. At least in the country where I’m from. No options in life, no hard decisions or responsibility for their lives. Our current PM said he didn’t notice the fall of communism. shrug
The only difference in the United States is that you have a better chance of being the head authoritarian, and by that I mean a business owner.
We have had a pretend democracy in the US for the last 60 years.
"pretend democracy"
I rarely offer an opinion here, expecting in advance it will gray into oblivion, however politely or sincerely it's presented. I see it happen to others often enough to remember.
In most cases I see the word democracy used, I have the exact thought, "pretend democracy". I don't deliberately try to be a morose cynic. I've just become incapable of thinking the very word without the subjunction "pretend".
The corporatism burgeoning here makes this seem undeniable to me. Am I that delusional? Is it really not that bad? Do the so called people really have a level of influence over their society befitting of the word? I don't see it. I just see words.
Democracy is the opium for the masses.
I won't try to evaluate that.
For me, as a born eccentric, aspects of the concept terrify me. I tend to favor the principles of a Republic, with unassailable foundations impervious to popular fervors and whims. Ideally with heavy democratic principles fortifying the Republic. I don't see either.
I look at recent affairs with FTC for example, and too many things to list. I don't even know what to call what I see. Recipe for nightmares comes to mind, but I know the flaws of emotions well enough.
Personally I find myself retreating into a quasi spiritual state, remotely bordering asceticism. Fading into an in but not of it.
I'm convinced it's a brutally complicated situation. Evey day, though, I think it could be drastically simplified with kindness, but that's a subject where I'm inclined to go full macabre and will hush now.
We should try sortition.
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> unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
Sure; I think his point was that people much less likely to even notice/acknowledge the slide towards authoritarianism when their own individual experience isn't changing much. Not that it changes authoritarianism's moral standing.
There isn't an "authoritarian bit", it's not binary. When I was young the idea that your own computer would spy on you, or the one in your phone, or in your car? That was a William Gibson novel, wiretaps happened to mob bosses, you didn't worry about it happening to you as part of a dragnet. Security camera? You mean in a bank right?
Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off from chasing drug dealers and terrorists and came within an inch of being split up if it didn't back the fuck off on strangling the web. Financial fraud on Wall St or in the boardroom? Skilling, Fastow, Ebers. Hard prison time. Clinton lied about chasing skirt in the office, ended his career, real consequences.
Even once the Internet was becoming common, the idea that something typed into it might get you fired? Preposterous!
I don't know what being a "western liberal" government means to you, but this thing where all the walls have ears and billionaires do fucking anything they want and no scandal can damage a politician and all the surveilance and technology is an ever-tightening noose and everything is on a permanent record?
Sounds pretty damned Soviet to me.
I haven't seen anything more authoritarian than the fact that, when you travel, someone will open your suitcase, rifle through your stuff, then close it again, and maybe leave you a little "you are being watched" note, just to make sure you know you shouldn't try anything funny.
What sounds pretty damned Soviet is people having to carry their papers around with them in case the gestapo or ICE stop them.
And the papers don't matter because the brownshirts signed up to crack skulls, not check paperwork
I think we’re in violent agreement about what is bad and what we should fight for.
My point is that there is a difference and throwing your hands up and saying everywhere is bad obscures what is being lost and how democracies allow nonviolent ways to seize it back.
Okay but no scandal can damage a politician because you the American people are currently choosing to let that be the case.
Same with the billionaires.
The entire problem gets painted as "other" but it's you: you're actually promulgating it by your very choice of language here!
I'm not saying that the decline of Enlightenment values and the rise of crony-nepo-central-committee surveilance nightmare is "other", I'm saying it is indifferent to the stated political system, it's about the de facto political system no matter what you call it.
What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.
And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
You could explain any authoritarian regime this way, but how much of what we believe and do is some kind of pure, unconditioned-by-our-surroundings choice?
Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant.
This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.
The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.
There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
Authoritarianism is not a left v right thing, and failing to recognize this is a big part of the problem.
The left is completely comfortable with censorship. It is completely comfortable with DEI statements being required for college admissions or with establishing issues related to gender or race discourse that the population doesn't agree on as a matter of law.
A rule doesn't stop being authoritarian just because you agree with what is being pushed. Nor does it stop being authoritarian when it doesn't come explicitly from the government. I do believe the right has worse intentions on these matters, but the left has so, so, so much more power that it's absurd to even try to draw a comparison. The idea of college requiring statements aligning with right-wing values being tolerated in any way, shape or form for example is just unthinkable.
The left has… vastly less power than the right, especially the christian right, because the right has money.
Money? More money than Hollywood? California? Both of which lean left pretty hard? It's not 1980 anymore.
"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
People who are afraid of the "left authoritarians" seem to think that you can just sum up human history and cherry pick some great "left-branded" authoritarian and equate that to todays.
You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.
It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
Sorry but I can't take this seriously. I've given more than enough contemporary examples, if you want to dismiss the whole of it and pretend nothing makes sense, that's a choice and I can't help you.
All your examples were social movements that did nothing or virtue signaling from massive corporations owned by right wing billionaires.
I’m not gonna convince you of a thing. Who’s your favorite youtuber?
What do you think leftist means? I think we can divide it loosely into social and economic elements, and while aspects of social leftism have (sort of) made serious advancements in the last 50 or so years, the US has become more economically right over that same period. We’ve deregulated and allowed vast consolidation among corporations and wealth and income inequality have exploded. Leftists typically share many opinions with socialists economically, and typically don’t get along with the growing class of the uber-wealthy (they want to take their money). They don’t get along with huge companies so they don’t get campaign funding from them. The democrats are centrists with some progressive social policies (because they need to be to get money). They hardly ever do useful leftist things like tax corporations or the wealthy. Leftists have been screaming about palestine, dems hardly give it a peep and some are proudly, openly zionist.
> Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
I’m baffled by your detachment. All three branches of the US government. Fox news for the olds. Joe rogan, the largest podcast I think, is moderate and constantly brings on righties. The corporations that make all our stuff and heavily influence our government aren’t exactly socialists. Academia might be the least right wing institution I can think of, and it’s a glorified jobs training program that rakes in money and holds enormous investment portfolios. If left means not lynching gays then sure, but otherwise our society is quite right wing in the ways that matter. Do you think a corporation putting up a pride flag for a month to make more money makes them leftists?
>Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
>"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
Frankly, do you care about any issues that matter? Literally issues made of matter. Point me to material shit that affects lots of people. I can point at plenty of real, material issues that are produced and sustained by right wing economic and social policy. Homelessness, disproportionate incarceration, high recidivism, housing costs, soon power costs from datacenters, shit pay, pay not tracking productivity gains, shit infrastructure, tons of drug overdoses etc.
>Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right?
Maga?
>You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Yeah they do it out of the kindness of their fucking hearts right? I bet uber cares a ton about the minorities while they pay shit, deny you benefits, and raise prices.
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The current difference in the US context is bureaucratic authoritarianism vs autocratic authoritarianism. They're both authoritarian, and they're both oppressive and stifling. But their actual specific dynamics/mechanisms/effects can be quite different. For example autocratic authoritarianism has a much higher variance (for better and for worse) - look at the current autocrat in the White House coming up with idiotic ideas by the week/month, It's done in the name of unchaining greatness, and it would be nice if that were indeed the outcome. But in reality the chaos from the unrestrained terrible ideas is actually quite stifling. Whereas bureaucratic authoritarianism is more of a beige tyranny of the mediocre, which creates a drag on greatness, but at least provides a stable foundation for building on (as long as you can outrun the bureaucrats)
(disclaimer: I've gotten more conservative as I've gotten older. It will happen to you, too)
Yeah sure, but todays market is monopolized by the right.
The bogeyman of authoritarian left is just amusing.
Well, if you're in this category in the US (equivalent is being on some kind of arbitrary list that you're not allowed to see and have no way to appeal) your life will also be horrible.
The US being imperfect, or currently on an authoritarian swing, in no way makes it equivalent to countries that are all-in on authoritarianism. The US is still among the very best places in the world to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble.
I think you are greatly underestimating how hard it has been, historically, in the US, to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble. Note that in the Cold War, many people, especially minorities, were indefinitely imprisoned with show trials (e.g. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier) or extrajudicially killed (Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Marsha P. Johnson, the victims of the MOVE bombing) because of being politically active.
Let's not perfect be the enemy of good. OP is making a relative judgement, not an absolute one. And in authoritarian countries, figures like Jack Ma are dissappeared for far less, while radicals like you mention are just shot and silenced. You are not going to be allowed to build a alternative power structure that can challenge authority regardless if your views are valid or not.
Might be a hard metric for some people to confront, but the USA is one the least racist countries in the world. The gridlock in many ways is strongest signal of excessive plurality and minoritarianism (of marginalized groups) than of single power groups unilaterally controlling things.
Jack Ma was not, in fact, disappeared, though? He lay low for several months while being investigated for financial crimes. He is still the largest stakeholder in Alibaba, and still has a net worth around $27B. It's not even like his assets were frozen.
Disappearing for 6 months immediately after making a controversial speech about the financial system dosen't look good to investors. And we all know it's because of his speech, not because of "financial" crimes when the Ant Group is heavily works with the CCP given the scale of its activities.
How is US being a good place to be at if you are in legal trouble? It is super expensive, trial penalty is huge so you are severely motivated to sign plea deal and not push it. The punishments are huge and incarceration rates among highest in the world. Protections seems to be largely theoretical - technically you have them, practically they do not do much but make you pay more money.
"It's super expensive" is still different from "you disappear". Yes, the US system is flawed, but the difference really matters.
People have started being disappeared by ICE. They've been kidnapped off the streets with no access to a lawyer until after. The difference does matter, but it seems we're uncomfortably close to there now.
Yes and this makes the US just not an example of liberal democracy anymore, so you can't use it as an example for "the West" when using very recent examples.
But it is not "The US is still among the very best places in the world"
And the incidence of 'being in legal trouble in USA' vs 'being disappeared in BAD COUNTRY XXX' is quite different, for almost all bad countries.
Despite the noted slide, it feels accurate. I, for one, would not want to move back to EU despite some QoL notables. At this time, it is still hard to find a better spot for a random nobody ( when you have money and/or power, 'where you can live well' calculus changes ).
I mean I live in the US and people are getting persecuted right now for being a minority, being politically active, or being in legal trouble.
So not seeing a huge difference between liberal democracies and authoritarians.
Yes, because we’re sliding into authoritarianism and we need to criticize and correct course
Sliding in? Your head of state declared themselves to be a dictator, declared the end of the rule of law, and ignores the constitution. They openly take bribes without consequences. They, or their handlers, unilaterally decide on the application of justice and the progress of investigations. They unilaterally control international relations (eg tariffs) without oversight. They put armed military on the streets. They have taken action to prevent ongoing democratic elections.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
if mid-term elections and the next presidential election are cancelled then i'll call it authoritarian. Until then you're just trolling.
Trolling? They were stating facts.
We might get a peak much sooner if the supreme court shoots down his tariffs.
So Putin isn't authoritarian because he stages elections. And you require two _cancelled_ elections before declaring someone authoritarian?
Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjev2j70v19o
Perhaps the US is no longer a liberal democracy?
Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today, with people getting arrested for their political views instead of just deported. not to mention segregation and such.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today,
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
>Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt
"Eventually discarded when no longer useful" would be a more accurate phrasing. The witch hunts continued under other schemes and for other targets.
>As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
Well, isn't that the case with every government?
it was a good witch hunt. we very much almost lost the Cold War to the soviets. the US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR. The majority of intellectuals glazed the Soviet Union.
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
Not witch hunts.
> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
> Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular.
isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?
Democracy? Yes. Liberal democracy? No.
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Or popularity rather.
Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.
I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
Yes they are trying to change the laws to be more oppressive which I don't like, but at least they aren't doing that illegally.
I feel the EU level is not very democratic since its more removed from voters, similar to the US federal level, I see the same kinds of problems in both. As long as the EU doesn't get the same level of power as the US federals I am happy though since local lawmakers can fix things.
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Yes, never happened under Biden. Completely new and unheard of.
I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference. Just imagine the difference in the level of fear that you would feel about 1) getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power, vs. 2) getting up in a public square in Russia and yelling that Putin is a terrible person who should be removed from power.
> getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power
I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with different circumstances than yours. At least to me, it seems pretty likely that if a country were to slide into authoritarianism, not everyone would feel the effects equally all at once, so the fact that you haven't felt a change in your level of concern about this doesn't necessarily mean that a shift isn't happening.
To be clear, I'm definitively not saying that it's impossible for anyone to know whether it's happening or not because we can't know the experience of literally everyone, or that I'm 100% positive what we're experiencing will end up in undeniable strict authoritarianism for everyone. My point is that I do think there's been a genuine shift in how safe a large number of people feel from persecution in the past year and a half that's based on things happening to them or people in similar circumstances to them. It's certainly possible that I'm in a bubble where I'm associating with a lot more people than average who have these concerns, but the reverse is equally true for someone who hasn't been noticing these things, and I do think there's sufficient evidence that the concerns are real. The implicit assumption that everyone feels equally comfortable in their rights protecting them just isn't something that seems accurate right now.
> I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now.
don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).
If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace.
I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.
And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.
That distinction really matters.
A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
> It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
In the 90's, DARE got kids to narc on their parents for drug related crimes. You can discount that as being drug related and oh just don't do drugs, but let's not pretend you're not gonna get reported to the unsecret police called the DEA or the FBI if it would be sufficiently to your friends and family's benefit.
Have you heard of what ICE has been doing for the last six months? And that Trump has militarized Washington DC?
Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions, and I would have very little to no fear about going to Washington DC right now, standing up on a podium, and yelling that Trump sucks while there are 100 National Guardsmen across the street from me.
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
See Mahmoud Khalil's case. They're trying to and would continue to have done so if they weren't blocked. What is there stopping them from changing the rules and doing it again?
> See Mahmoud Khalil's case
they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.
I disagree with what has been done in the Mahmoud Khalil matter. But it is a far distance between that on the one hand and what happens in places like Russia on the other.
I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of Trump. My point is that there is a huge difference in the level of authoritarianism between today's US and what I consider to be actual authoritarian countries. Today's US is one of the freest countries on the entire planet. We should keep it that way. I don't see what good it does to act as if today's US is anywhere close to actual authoritarian countries.
Have you decided what your personal red line is after which you would conclude that we've entered an authoritarian regime? Have we crossed the neofascist Rubicon yet? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs
The distance is closing, it's already closer than many Americans would have considered possible. How close does it need to get before we should be concerned?
Blacks were once slaves. Women couldn't vote. Japanese-Americans were put in camps. Worker strikes were met with guards killing people. Rousevelt had amassed all kinds of extra executive powers and control of all aspects of government that would seem over the top excessive before him.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
Is it really worse than McCarthyism era? I feel that time was much worse than currently.
I'm already somewhat concerned. I've been concerned since long before Trump. And Trump has added some new concerns. For example, with that strike against the Venezualan boat today. But that doesn't mean that I believe that we're anywhere actually close to it. Those are two separate questions.
People really should try to understand that if someone says "I think that the US is vastly freer than Russia", it does not mean "I think that there is no reason for concern" or "I think that the US is going in a good direction".
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions.
Actually, they do. If you have the wrong color, they take any reason as a pretext for action.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
Not yet? Currently, they are only imprisoning and deporting legal permanent residents and people on student visas for their political opinions. But denaturalization is clearly on the table.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.
I'm happy for you as a privileged US citizen, enjoying your privilege as someone who's at least currently on the right side of the line, but anyone who's a legal immigrant doesn't feel anywhere near the same degree of security that you do.
The administration recently announced that it will review the visas of 55 million immigrants, and factors like political opinion are on the table when it comes to their choice of who to go after.
"First They Came"[1] was written to try to wake up people like you, whose privilege blinded them to the significance of the events around them. You need to start paying attention before you lose the country you thought you knew.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
Go do it then. See if you can get a permit in DC right now to have a rally and shout that Trump sucks. If you can, try actually doing it. You will not be doing it for very long until some excuse is made to stop you and punish you.
yet.
right now they are "deporting" (without due process it's kidnapping/trafficking) in order of skin colour. they will work their way down towards you.
It's exactly these comments the OP is talking about. This is what they are trying to do, what they said they would do, and it's the kind of authoritarian shit that Trump has publicly praised and envied Putin for.
Liberal in words. If you don't follow the rules you are expelled anyway. There is a reason why 99% of all politicians and CEOs are coming from the same universities and bubbles.
In certain things it can be better.
Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.
And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.
And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
Prevalence of masked gangs (ostensibly a Gestapo, but without uniform or id) kidnapping people in government buildings without police intervening appears (as an outside observer) to be ~100% higher than under recent USA administrations.
Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Of course it didn't happen as much, but the fact that we already had active black sites and people getting pulled off the streets and abused at all paved the way towards apathy about its expansion now. If city or state police forces can do such things to random citizens for decades before now, why would we expect federal agencies under the direction of the president and his cabinet to not be able to get away with it too?
>Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?
As for your strawman:
--
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/
--
No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).
But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
Yes, due process is important. Habeus corpus is important. Rule of law is a cornerstone of democracy. People acting for the state, such as border police, should act lawfully; they should identify themselves, wear the proper uniform, get the proper warrants and so on.
Why? Because you're breaching innocent peoples rights and removing their ability to get justice.
The fact that prior administrations did this on a large scale without the need to have gangs of thugs shows that the lawlessness of the administration is unnecessary to meet the ends of managing immigration.
Could you explain why you consider this a strawman? It sounds like you're onboard with the dismantling of USA democracy?
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We've banned this account for abusing HN for political, ideological, and religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>In china, there is a murder wagon with a crematory. Nobody ever finds you..
In China there are portable vans to serve as execution places for executions that are ordered by court - in lieu of having special buildings. No crematory and no 'nobody finds you' nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van
Still bad, but same for the "land of the free" that still has and carries the death penalty (for comparison, no EU or European country has it).
Right, other places also have evil people in charge and lack of rule of law. Agreed.
This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time".
I'm unmoved by the argument. If the choice comes down between "the trains run on time" and "I can arbitrarily imprisons for my speech", I'd happily live with trains that don't run on time.
>This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time"
No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".
Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.
That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
Setup a site to stream Pixar's latest movie, or post some CSAM, and see if you don't get imprisoned. It's not like totally arbitrary, just don't criticize dear leader. Where the US is though, is that Trump wants to make criticizing him online a crime. We know this is true because of the actions taken by him against people who are immigrants who have been critical of him online. So I'll let a tiny bit of doom out, but he way the US is headed, the trains won't run on time and you can't run your mouth about shit the people in power don't like as well.
Yes, I agree
>> The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.
The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished. This use to be a easy decision for foreign students to stay in the US for work opportunities. Nowadays, a US degree isn't considered prestigious outside of a few elite schools and the cost has completely spiraled out of control. I've talked to numerous colleagues who abandoned waiting for a green card because it's no longer a clear cut decision. Opportunities and quality of life in other countries have either caught up or surpassed the US in certain areas. This would of been unthinkable 10-20 years ago.
>The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished
Do you have any data to back up that claim?
E.g. the number of diversity lottery applicants (one of the easiest proxies to judge how many people express their interest in moving to the US) went up from 12 million in 2011 to almost 20 million last year.
This thread is largely about college educated folks who represent a small minority of diversity lottery applicants. As to why the DV lottery has grown, I suspect it has a lot to do with it just having become more visible and known, growing hand in hand with increased access to internet and ability to apply.
Sure, if we are talking about the top end we can check the O-visas, the "extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics" ones, both the applications and the issuance of those went up even more than the DV applications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa#Number_of_visas_issued_...
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They’re right about 1 and 3, but not 2. Life has gotten much better in a good chunk of the world, that the opportunity loss for not moving to US is getting smaller. You can easily see it by immigration application numbers by country.
> You can easily see it by immigration application numbers by country.
Where are you getting this information? Visa issuance more than doubled between 2020 and 2024.
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
Visa issuance doubling and having less applications from improving countries can both be true. I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
> I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
I’m not seeing a year to year comparison on the page you linked. It’s calculable from the monthly figures, but I’ll wait and see if the GP responds with his own source.
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA
Yes, primarily because its the richest country in the world and it's "easy" to make money.
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees
I think overall you are correct but probably still not safe to generalize. If you're moving to escape persecution then just being "on the other side" achieved this. If you are economically motivated then just leaving doesn't guarantee anything, you can be worse off. This circles back to the idea that the people who are persecuted by a regime paint the public opinion of that regime.
I have friends from Eastern Europe who emigrated to North America (mostly Canada) in the early '90s only to move back shortly after when the reality didn't live up to the hype and their expectations. They had a better life back home. The move was economically motivated, not escaping persecution. Many families under authoritarian regimes had the option to move to a Western country but not being actively persecuted meant they had no hard push and decided for the "comfort of familiarity".
East Berlin slipping into authoritarianism is a good showcase for this. Most people chose to stay in place for long enough to build a wall. We're talking years in which they saw the reality around them but only the ones who actively suffered from persecution chose to leave. Today plenty of East Germans still look back fondly at those times because they didn't feel the objective pain of persecution, only the subjective general suffering of "I could have better but don't".
Not entirely true. People living authoritarian worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power (even at a local level), they accept a hierarchy of power rather than rights.
I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.
Even if you live in a western country you do all of that anyway. Self-censor at work and online so I don’t get fired or banned from w/e.
Accept elected officials whose policies don’t match up with popular opinion and accept standard employment hierarchy.
That's very different than worrying about going to jail for life or getting disappeared.
So what? Lose your job, lose your housing.
Prison is at least 3 hots and a cot.
> Prison is at least 3 hots and a cot.
Decent prison conditions tend to overlap with countries with decent human rights.
IN authoritarian countries you might very well be starved or tortured in prison.
You might also just disappear and your body may or may not be found in an identifiable state.
Some people value freedom more than comfort.
What freedom?
Anything that can’t be done while in prison, for starters.
so naïve
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This hyperbolic take hurts your causes more than helps them.
I'm against extrajudicial deportations to El Salvador, but those people are not being deported for their political opinions.
As for trans/LGBTQ+ genocide, it does not exist in the West.
Repeatedly denying GAC or banning PrEP as Republicans try to do every few months does indeed lead to death, yes.
Granted we're not under Reagan, but Republicans are practically praying for another AIDS crisis and doing everything in their power to make it happen.
Straight people largely don't know this because, well, it's not their problem.
Calling this genocide is ridiculous levels of hyperbole
This sort of nonsense is why many people do not take LGBT issues very seriously
If there was an LGBT genocide happening in America, there would not be open pride celebrations, come on
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How is that genocide? No one is being killed, no culture is being erased, no community is being wiped out. People might be persuaded to change their viewpoints but they are not forced to or sent to re-education camps.
This seems identical to saying that convincing someone with anorexia that they aren't overweight is "social death", and "social death" is (somehow) genocide.
I.e. it's nonsense.
Using the same word “genocide” for what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the US seems to make language pretty useless.
To say nothing of using the same word as what happened in the holocaust or to the Armenians or native Americans or Rwanda or is happening in Xinjiang....
This is what I have been saying for years. The far-left progressives have literally raped language beyond all recognition.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Men are women.
The obvious difference is that people with anorexia die and people who transition live happily.
Uh, some do.
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dysphoria is certainly a mental illness, transitioning is merely one possible treatment for it (though, pushed as one of the first rather than as one of the last options, which I personally find concerning.)
Body dysphoria is a recognised mental illness.
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Being gay is not generally recognised as mental illness, although it has been in the past. Being trans is less well defined (historically even being gay was not well defined, or defined the same way).
It depends a lot on what kind of authoritarian society it is. It's not a binary, and many are "soft authoritarian" meaning that citizens don't have any effective control over their government, but it doesn't actively try to suppress even minute dissent DPRK-style. In most of those countries, people don't actually worry that much about what they say because it doesn't matter at their level. It only matters if you're a public person saying things in a very public way.
We’ve self censored regarding the state narrative on Israel/Palestine our entire lives in the west
Just because the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, mostly, doesn’t make the day to day any different when you rely on support of the private sector, alongside discretionary support from the state
Visa holders are experiencing detainment for this specific thing, this cycle. And in other western democracies anyone can be fined and imprisoned for it as well
Wishful thinking that there is imperviousness to disagreeing with the state narrative in the west
The reality is that it’s not always on the mind 100% of the time and you learn to appreciate the day to day life under Eastern and Western authoritarian systems
> worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power
Sounds a lot like having a job.
its like what the old east german people said after the wall fell. i forget the exact phrase but its something like: "before, i could criticize my boss but i couldn't criticize the government. now i can criticize the government but i can't criticize my boss"
I agree that is a problem, particular with the concentration of power in small industries and the cultural homogenisation of people in power.
I recall in 2016 British employers who said they would fire any employees they discovered voted for Brexit - of course the only way they could find out is if people said how the voted but that is a free speech issue.
I think we need legal protections for things like free speech that we have traditionally had against governments to apply to employers and service providers. I think legislation that prevents various forms of discrimination proves it is achievable.
In Germany you literally get your house raided if you critize a politician online. A journalist got a suspended sentence because he posted a pic of then-interior minister holding a sign that was edited to read "I hate freedom of speech".
Lots of bad things in the west, certainly, but there is a huge difference between a suspended sentence and getting murdered: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/sri-lanka-failing-to...
Picking on not the worst country in the world, but one I know (and was living in at the time this was at its worst). Things have changed there since, thankfully.
I live in the free and morally righteous West and I self censor all the time. Every single day. My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
> My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
but not landed you in prison or disappeared, I take it?
True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed… which may NOT be the case if you're fired from your job, put on a list, and blocked from the industry.
> True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed…
Not adequately or safely.
https://impactjustice.org/new-report-provides-first-ever-nat...
Still better than the in the average US school.
The linked report describes a case study of a prison where rat droppings were falling from the ceiling into the prison kitchen. It also states 75% of surveyed prisoners reported being served spoiled or rotting food.
Was your school worse than that?
They might, if not now then possibly in the future. See e.g. people in the UK getting arrested for tweets.
If you’re telling people to punch other people in the balls maybe you should be arrested.
Only if it is proved to a criminal standard (i.e. beyond reasonable doubt) to be intended to encourage an act of violence. It it is an expression of anger it is legitimate free speech.
Your comment has deliberately omitted the context needed for honest discourse. Thus, one can only conclude you are trolling.
So did the one they're replying to. They're just replying like-for-like.
It's typical that when someone is arrested for "X action with Y detail" (e.g. buying a knife with intent to kill someone) people who oppose the arrest will only state the X (and for some reason this works). To correct the record when someone says "I don't expect to be arrested for buying a knife", "I do expect to be arrested for planning to a murder" is a correct response.
A lot of US citizens have been imprisoned for their political ideas, though [1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoners_in_the_Uni...
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So basically, you are OK with total authoritarian control over the population as long as its views that you agree with that are being enforced and views you don't like that are being oppressed. Not to mention that you didn't even care to find out what GP's views actually are - no room for nuance, just the fact that they are not socially acceptable is enough for you to condemn him.
Yeah. That's how society works lol.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea that people with morally reprehensible views are shamed and ostracized for it.
Notice he didn't even say what his views were, because he knew he would get no sympathy.
What beliefs are so dangerous in the west today? The supposed leader of the free world is a rapist who openly brags about assaulting women. His mugshot is used on giant banners that he approves of.
Self responsibility and chronic social problems.
Intelligence and genetics.
Genders and gender specific spaces.
Gender and social/professional roles.
Those are topics which have "sky is blue" level ideological certainty, and not open for debate.
Yes. I've been to China, daily life for regular people is mostly fine (bad work-life balance notwithstanding, as in other Asian countries). Nothing like the old stories from Russia (written by Russians, mind you) or even the relative material comfort but heavy-handed state control like in the GDR.
Daily life can also be fine in fascism if you don't belong to any "unpopular" groups and don't care about any. Until the customary war starts, that is...
> Until the customary war starts
It's good to know liberal democratic progressive countries such like the US would never start a war.
Perhaps the larger point is that war conditions are worse for everyone in autocratic regimes. Regardless of how common (or rare) wars are for societies of any given kind.
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> The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.
Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.
Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.
It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.
Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.
However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.
That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.
This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.
All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.
Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.
That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.
Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.
This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.
This is a naive view. Life under the Soviet Union was horrible. Talk to nearly everyone who lived in fear that their neighbors would rat on them.
That affects everyone.
They're probably referring to modern day countries that remain controlled by Communist parties officially. However, these went through a decades long process of privatisation to get where they are today, and there is no guarantee they won't backpeddle.
The horrible life in Soviet Union was due to horrible governmental policies, which are not unique to authoritarian governments. Liberal governments have their fair share of bad policies.
I wonder why people voted for those bad Soviet policies.
> some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble
That's... Sufficiently concerning, don't you think?
Yes thats my point. The average person may feel that they are completely free, because they live their lives within the boundaries of what the ruling party wants.
This is kind of a pointless statement when you make it that broadly. Are you talking about life in North Korea or in China?
And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
> And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
thats why there was that meme going around earlier this year when tik tok people joined rednote that said americans were shocked to learn their media was lying about how bad chinese people had it, while chinese people were shocked to learn their media was telling the truth about how bad americans had it
A quarter of their population doesn’t even have Internet access.
that's simply false. according to cnnic, china has 1.267 billion monthly active users of mobile internet services. that's 89.9% of the population, and about 10% of china is over 70 years old which is very likely a big percentage of the people who arent using the internet
When I visited Shenzhen and then came back to the US recently, I felt like I went back in time 15 years.
I've been saying on HN for years that the commenters here should buy a ticket and go see China for themselves. It's extremely safe. Far safer than any American city/suburb. No, they're not going to detain you and send you to jail. They don't care about you. People are generally friendly even if you're from the US.
“Reminder: On Chinese social media platforms, please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”
"Some Americans reported having their content blocked or accounts suspended for material deemed sensitive by RedNote, as content moderators control what the Chinese audience can see. A search on RedNote for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, comes up blank."
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2025/0129/Ameri...
It seems like the Chinese government works pretty hard to make sure its own citizens don't understand how bad things are in China. Maybe they fail at that but it isn't for lack of trying.
"It's hilarious to me that one side is sharing that Chinese people are convincing Americans that they've been fed propaganda about China, and the other side is saying that no, it's the Americans telling the Chinese that THEY are being fed all the propaganda! This is hilarious and dumb, but not as crazy as what happened on the Tiananmen Square in 1989!"
https://imgur.com/gallery/idea-that-bunch-of-americans-flood...
For all its faults I think I trust America's freedom of speech to make information available better. We should be diligent in protecting it as a principle because although the government is somewhat constrained by the first amendment, others are not.
America's freedom of speech is vulnerable to "flooding the zone". I don't have a good suggestion for fixing that, but I would say that as a result the average American is not any better informed than the average Chinese citizen, despite greater freedom of information.
I think the common US view of life in North Korea and China is probably about 90% distorted, more propaganda than reality.
I'm not vouching for any country, I'm just saying the public perception in the US is completely distorted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese had a slightly more realistic view of the US.
That's a reasonable take. I feel like China has such extreme ends of the spectrum, from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions. It's hard to think of China in any sort of unified, whole way.
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, what I see is current generations completely ignoring what was taught to them during the last decades.
I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.
Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.
Like how Amnesty International came to be,
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/amnesty-inte...
In this case, we are less likely to notice our own countries becoming authoritarian. Because we will compare it to a version that is exaggerated.
This isn't even remotely true. Life is nothing like western countries in most parts of the world, authoritarian or not.There is a reason for such levels of immigration to western countries.
In a lot of cases that reason is that the West has pillaged and/or coup-ed those countries in the past, and doesn't care if it scorches and/or submerges them underwater in the future.
I agree. My country was plundered for hundreds of years. And some now have the gall to say these invaders brought progress to a backward country. However, that is orthogonal to the point being discussed
Well, day to day life is similar until it isn't, then you realize you have no options. Your life is nothing more than bubbles in the pond.
Thats exactly the parents point.
You only realise you can’t do something when you come into contact with trying to do it. Otherwise you live your life blissfully unaware of how free you arent.
Its like how you feel that driving is safer than flying, despite driving being the most dangerous thing most people do… you only realise how dangerous it is when its too late.
As Rosa Luxemburg put it:
> Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Day to day is of course generally the same, until the day it isn't the same, or you want to deal with the government in some way.
Or god forbid you want to have some say in policy ... are concerned about opportunities.
Let alone the fact that how authoritarian varies wildly, just like how free ... but they're not the same.
Okay. But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America. On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding - for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts). But countries like China and Turkey take it MUCH further. You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink. That does change day to day life. You can’t think or act freely. At best you can live a lie and stay quiet.
> But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America.
You absolutely can. The obvious example most frequently talked about is that there are plenty of things you can say, which if the wrong person hears them or they trigger automated alarms, it will get you an unfriendly visit by people flashing badges. They might be there to give you a threatening talking-to, or they might be there to arrest you full-stop.
The less obvious example is that even if you don't cross any lines to trigger a direct response like that, it's recorded all the same. It will shape future interactions with law enforcement agencies. You will be flagged as a person of interest, as a hostile actor, etc. Legal speech can very easily make you suspicious and law enforcement will treat you accordingly before they've ever met you. It's not a recipe for a good outcome when the people with badges start off thinking you're likely to pull a gun on them.
At times, it's been far worse than this. I'll direct you to COINTELPRO, or any of the other mryiad of historical instances where the US government has protected its interests by going after domestic elements it sees as subversive.
> On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding
Europe never had free speech to the degree that America did. In many countries, it's unlawful to speak ill of royal figureheads for example.
> for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts
This absolutely happens in America, as I mention above. You might say it's to a different degree, but the end result is the same.
> You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink.
All it takes is for you and your ideology to be labelled as extremist and terrorist, which is a wholly arbitrary line to draw.
As an outside observer, it absolute looks like that the American government punish people for their speech. Of course, they say something else, like we just kidnap you from the street, or we just revoke your grant, or we just force your university to kick you out. Or simply flat out ban your free speech, like teachers’ one in schools. And even if they do it illegally, and they give you the opportunity to use your rights, lawsuit themselves can be still damaging.
Also, there were several news in the past decades about cases when police was even at the doorsteps of perpetrators before their mass shooting because of their social media posts (but more times, Americans were disappointed that police didn’t prevent the shooting even when there were incriminating social media posts). The problem is not social media posts, it never was. It’s their content. And also, it’s not just social media posts most of the time when the police come to your doorsteps even here in Europe. But that cannot be made to sensationalist headlines.
It’s still worse the law situation in Europe, but an adversarial government can find ways to circumvent even the better laws. And from the outside, it looks like that this would happen exactly in the US.
> The truth is in many countries...day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.
To be fair, the job of infallible dear leader in a major Western democracy is very prone to getting involved in wars, with bad repercussions for the people involved in all sides... (and destabilizing the world in the process). While some people in that country oppose these war adventures, it's difficult to voice because said country has a secular religion of worshipping its own armed forces, and speaking contrary to this can have anyone ostracized.
I'm not talking about Russia, China or North Korea, though of course it can also fit some of those countries.
Unfortunately, day-to-day life is mostly similar to the west in Russia. Other than some unfortunate people getting conscripted, it’s the same as usual.
Russians support Putin on average.
Nobody knows this.
Authoritarian governments wield their economy as a tool for political power, which affects everyone living there.
Authoritarianism rarely feels like a switch flipping — it's more like water slowly boiling
>day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
The "happy path" is, the major differences start when you have any kind of a problem, then not having any functional institutions makes the experience _very_ different from the west.
How different your experience is when diverging from the "happy path" in the West depends a lot on your wealth and your skin color.
Only 1 in 3 are straight white Christians in the US.
Fascism only doesn't have an effect in the early stages in the sense that loading a gun has little effect on those not frightened by it.
Actually using it is going to become impossible to ignore.
I think this is a big reason why Americans (and other "Westerners") tend to say "Look at them, they're Communist!!!", instead of "Look at them, They're Authoritarian!!!".
If you call it what it actually is, too many Americans might actually connect the dots.
Day-to-day life depends on your social class. I wouldn't want to be in China earning minimum wage.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere earning minimum wage for that location.
Earning minimum wage is a very bad situation in many democratic countries, the US included.
There's nothing special to China in this regard.
There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
It's been a little over a decade since I lived there, and yes, it was not all that crazy.
As a foreigner I was generally expected to stay away from big protests when they flared up, and internet connectivity sucked (though this was also a time when the world was less dependent on near-constant internet access). Otherwise it was pretty much like any other "middle-tier" country.
I was a teenager back then, so it was especially nice in certain ways: Tehran was pretty safe, so I had a lot of freedom to get around unsupervised that I later did not have in some other "more free" places.
The problem of authoritarianism is the preparedness paradox.
They are less prepared for problems. And so suddenly problems happen all the time.
But when there are no problems... Things are going well for the average person.
You’re being dismissive about the minority part. I guess it varies from country to country but several minority groups combined can actually be the majority like in Iraq, Rwanda, Eastern Europe, SE Asia etc.
The main problem with living under authoritarian rule is 1. the absenсe of control for the way where the country is going. 2. the value of human life is approaching zero. Today your life is pretty decent (unless you're some kind of minority (c)), but tomorrow you find yourself with a mobilization order because your country decides to start a war. And nobody cares about your surviving.
In non-democratic nations: You are allowed to do almost anything you please, except for speaking up against political power or in any way challenge them.
In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.
Or that's how it used to be.
It's mostly the same for the dominant socio-political group until a moron or psychopath gets into power and then you're all fucked.
Until an asshole comes to power and decides that genociding half of population is ok. Happens al the time.
I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.
You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.
Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.
So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
No, it is not. It seems that way if you are a (s)expat in the honeymoonphase. Then you learn the language and look into the abyss.
In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.
Literally none (0%) of this applies to China.
Burma, maybe. But even that's a stretch. You're exaggerating for dramatic or comedic effect, that much is certain.
But have you considered that China Bad?
Spoken like a Han with a good hukou https://archive.is/lRne7
> Literally none (0%) of this applies to China.
Isn't corruption the reason given by Xi Jinping for removing from their position multiple high ranking CCP members, generals, regional representatives and billionaires?
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> Trust in the justice system has severely degraded.
Among whom? By how much? Since when?
> Trump's deportation program.
The people being deported are not lawful residents. It is not even remotely comparable to the situation the GP is describing.
They’re deporting green card holders now.
“Now” implies that this wasn’t being done before. It has always been legal to deport a green card holder over criminal convictions. Are you suggesting that ICE is rounding up these green card holders for the crime of being Mexican and throwing them back over the wall? This seems to be what you want people to believe. I’m aware of at least two cases where naturalized citizens were deported without having their status revoked, but in both cases these deportations were found to be illegal and damages were awarded. This might look like an indication of malice on the part of ICE until you realize that there is something like 40 million immigrants living in America.
If you have any concrete figures demonstrating the systematic abuse of the deportation process, I’ll encourage you to share them.
It's almost like increasing the speed and discarding process safeguards increases the rate of error! Imagine that! Who could have predicted?
This style of commentary is incredibly obnoxious and doesn’t belong here.
Pardon, I'm a little too distracted by the fascism to care much for decorum these days.
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This is quite an ignorant take with rose-tinted glasses towards autocratic statism.
The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.
This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.
The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.
When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.
Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.
If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.
In China, if you say anything bad about the CCP they will strap you to a chair in a struggle session and force you to admit you were wrong. That alone is terrifying.