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?