The Reasons Authoritarianism Is Growing – and How to Reverse It
scottsantens.comI don't see any reason to believe that authoritarians particularly value equality or absolute sameness. I think that's wishful thinking colored by the desire to think they can easily be made into UBI supporters.
What authoritarians want is a limited number of well-defined roles and scripts for the way thing are to be done. They don't want to have to deal with figuring out every situation anew. In fact that seems to terrify them. But it's OK if there's not just one role, so long as it's clear where everybody stands.
In fact, they usually seem to prefer there to be a strong leader role that's obviously way different from everybody else... either because they see themselves as being that person, or probably more frequently because they want that person to come in and make everything all right for them.
Authoritarians also really seem to want the just world fallacy to not be a fallacy, and seem very willing to accept inequality if they can convince themselves that the people who are getting the better deal "deserve" it.
> A big, strong, middle class is reassuring.
That's what's disappeared - a strong middle class. Not what the WSJ calls the middle class - they mean people with enough money to invest - but what was called the middle class through the 1970s. People who had a secure job, and could afford a house, a car, a family, and a retirement. Those people had a stake in maintaining the status quo.
What we have now is called "the precariat", from "precarious" and "proletariat". There's a job, but you could lose it at any time. You can't afford a house. You can't afford to save for retirement. Just paying the bills is tough. This is the new American normal.
A friend in banking who has access to retail numbers points out that, for most customers, the account balance after they pay rent is at most a few hundred dollars.
Because progressives refuse to make any concessions, even reasonable ones. The border is perhaps the best example. They won't simply concede to having a secure border, with or without comprehensive immigration reform (i.e., amnesty). Meanwhile, the American people see stuff like this, and rightly get angered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7TNP2OTY2g
These are people flying commercial from another continent, and coming from a country, China, that is not only a geopolitical adversary of ours, but is projected to economically overtake us, and are coming here only because their economy has seen some recent slowdown. Purely economic migrants taking advantage of us.
> They won't simply concede to having a secure border, with or without comprehensive immigration reform
This simply isn't true at all.
The "increasing complexity" angle is interesting. I didn't think of it before, but I see a lot of ostrich behavior in other authoritarian political groups.
I don't think it's a good article, honestly. It falls into the same trap that, I believe, Democrats have fallen before - which is to assume that their strategy is perfectly rational and aligns with objective truth, while everyone who disagrees must necessarily suffer some cognitive failure.
Therefore it's enough to analyze the disagreement from a psychological or emotional level and the solution is to simply frame the existing agenda in some way that it is more psychologically palatable for the target demographic.
This misses that there may be a lot of completely rational, fact-based reasons to reject incumbent policy: If your statistics tell you that the economy is fine, but a significant part of the population doesn't know how to pay the bills, then this isn't some psychological error of that population group, it means your statistics suck.
From the perspective of one of the affected, the statement "the economy is fine" will also be understood quite differently: It means that whoever said it obviously doesn't include you in their definition of "the economy" and so is unlikely to alleviate your situation. Of course you then won't vote for them.
As a leftist, I also find the "diversity vs sameness" divide quite superficial. A lot of progressives and left-wing types are promoting cultural diversity while demanding strong economic regulations, while conservatives advocate deregulation and laissez-fair economics but have no problem directly interfering with people's private lives. The ultra-libertarians and ancaps who are so in love with freedom that they would like to abolish the state completely nevertheless have no problem with all-encompassing dystopian megacorps, as long as those megacorps are private enterprises.
Who exactly is the authoritarian and who is the libertarian here?
Well the start isn’t great, just from a scientific perspective:
Before we get into the politics of this argument, let's first go back in time, way back before agriculture, and think about a small band of humans that includes you and me.
The rest is spot on and well written, but I was confused about the tone until the end: this was written before the election, assuming that Trump would lose. It’s all moot now. UBI? Hah, no. RFK Jr is now in charge of “foreign and domestic policy”, even just keeping a few of the consumer protections we have would be a huge surprise; building ones is a fantasy.
There’s only two proven strategies for defeating large authoritarian nations in the modern era, IMO: Cold War and hot war. I recommend anyone who’s read history act accordingly, and choose a place to live unlikely to be targeted by nuclear weapons.
The article mentions "immigration due to climate" - could someone give an examples of such occurrences?
Crop failures in Syria contributed to their civil war which led to a migration crisis in Europe.
Subsistence farmers in Central America can’t grow in a drought and often try to emigrate to US
I left California because it will look like baja in due time.
> Crop failures in Syria contributed to their civil war
I'm sure the US tanks are there to plow the fields, not to guard oil fields. /s
Drought in Africa is probably the most obvious, but other climate change-related migrations are basically guaranteed over the next 50-100 years.
Sea level rise will severely impact low-lying regions like most of Florida - not by putting them actually underwater, but by putting them closer to sea level which will make storm surges, etc more severe. Even if you recover, how many inundations with salt water will it take to have a significant impact? Not to mention salt intrusion into freshwater systems and aquifers.
In areas closer to the equator you'll also get higher heat - not always but regularly enough to render some areas unlivable without artificial cooling, and many of those places are ones that don't have the resources to provide cooling centers.
You'll also get more extremes at both ends - think of increasing the amount of heat energy in the atmosphere as being like increasing the amount of electricity going to a cone speaker. That speaker cone doesn't only move in one direction, what the increased energy does is increase the amount of movement. With the increased energy you also get distortion (extreme weather events vs just gradual change) and if you're really unlucky you get a one-way change of state (severe irreversible climate-driven event or a blown speaker).
Edit: forgot to include "Climate-induced migration in the Global South: an in depth analysis" https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-024-00133-1
Some easy US examples would be the literally destroyed homes from wildfires and floods.
Updated insurance rates are pricing people out of neighborhoods after a history of underpricing insurance.
Surrounding less-risky areas receive surges in prices after disasters that prompt buying/selling. Sometimes landlords sell property and pull the rug from underneath renters, further displacing people.
Adding to costs: FEMA's "50% Rule" requires that it's not enough to simply repair damaged homes in flood zones--you're mandated to tear down the home and rebuild to modern standards at raised elevation if the damage exceeds 50% of the home's value. Some people ignore this and rebuild anyways.
In addition to the other responses ... it's long been predicted and isn't hard to grasp:
Global warming changes many local climates. What was wet is dry, cold is warm, etc.
For 10,000 years, humans have invested in the current locations of productive farmland. They build infrastructure, economies, societies, and grew populations to what the farmland could support.
Now that farmland can't produce as much, so people start becoming poor and starving. They aren't going to sit there and starve and become impovrished; they will move to where there is food and income.
New Orleans population never recovered.
A good read. I was a bit saddened while reading the election thread earlier here on HN - there were more authoritarian voices here than I would've hoped.
indeed! HN has gone way to the authoritarian right. Not just socially but also a lot of HN readers favor economically authoritarian policies like tariffs!
Why do you call tariffs authoritarian? I would generally put them in the protectionist basket but I don't see how a country can be authoritarian towards another or either populations by simply imposing tariffs.
Tariffs are at least anti-libertarian.
Absolutely agree. The libertarian view of tariffs is that they limit free trade, and are often used for inefficiently for market manipulation than as a funding source.
One question this US election cycle has brought up is how to best fund a government. Every reasonable person understands that a government needs funding to operate. But every mechanism employed has trade offs. But I have not found enough information to develop an informed opinion on under what conditions a flat tariff on imports be better than a progressive income tax, a flat income tax be better than capital gains, etc. Tax policy is adhoc, driven by a multitude of factors. If you or anyone can provide an interesting survey on some principle approaches to tax policy I would be grateful.
We can ignore the reasons they give; they're well-established liars. Here are some patterns the tariffs fit afaict:
They like to shift the tax burden away from wealthy constituents and onto everyone else: Republican states tend to use sales tax, which taxes everyone at an equal rate, rather than progressive income tax. Most/much wealthy income comes from capital gains, etc., which are taxed at a relatively low rate. Most of everyone else's income comes from wages, which are taxed at higher rates ('income tax' should be called 'wage tax', to avoid confusion), including welfare taxes like Social Security, etc.
They are populist nationalists and want to increase nationalism and disrupt international institutions and cooperation. Tariffs ideologically do the first and practically do the second.
> The libertarian view of tariffs is that they limit free trade, and are often used for inefficiently for market manipulation than as a funding source.
Also, tariffs are like sales tax: They tax everyone at the same rate.
> If you or anyone can provide an interesting survey on some principle approaches to tax policy I would be grateful.
Sorry, not off the top of my head ...
My guess is the tariff thing is just a fad and no one actually wants a trade war. It's something Trump personally thinks is a good idea, and that sounds good in a stump speech. But all the folks advising him, including the ones from our own subculture (Musk, Ackman, Sacks) know better.
I'm choosing this moment to try to be optimistic: if Trumps turns over the reins of government to a bunch of technocrats... it's not the worst possible thing that can happen.
The real question is who's going to restrain him from turning the DoJ into a revenge organ. The rule of law is historically very hard to get back once its lost.
A major reason for the tariff thing is that free trade has a lot of losers, and those were left out to dry, and even ridiculed.
Another reason is that being economically dependent on foreign countries can be quite risky. E.g. if China gets economically independent from the west but the west is still dependent on China, China will have immense power over the west.
Yeah, I get the arguments. They're just wrong. I'm not aware of a single time in history where a trade war worked to the advantage of the instigator. If you really want this, for the reasons you say, it's because we're already losing and cutting us off from the "enemy" just accelerates the loss.
Trade makes everyone richer, and the cost is that some of the people you don't want to be rich get rich. But willfully choosing to be poor doesn't fix that.
> My guess is the tariff thing is just a fad and no one actually wants a trade war. It's something Trump personally thinks is a good idea, and that sounds good in a stump speech. But all the folks advising him, including the ones from our own subculture (Musk, Ackman, Sacks) know better.
They aren't doing it for economic purposes but for political ones: They are nationalist authoritarians; tariffs are not only nationalistic policy, they undermine international institutions and cooperation.
> if Trumps turns over the reins of government to a bunch of technocrats
That seems like the opposite of Trump's behavior, campaign promises, and plans.
Pretty sure that if Trump learned anything from term one its that he shouldnt rely on technocrats and should try to install as many sycophants as possible.
Well off people are pulling ladder behind them, a tale as old as mass migration become possible.
I realized HN was lost during a thread about having to provide identification to access adult websites.
There we SO many voices in favor. I was shocked. Hackers historically cared a TON about their privacy, yet they were willing to throw it away for the sake of "the children."
Ignoring that there is a huge suite of tools that would allow you to protect children WITHOUT having to register with the government and be tracked to visit a website.
It turns out that "hackers" and "rich boy startups" have much less cultural overlap than the latter would have you believe.
HN is not largely populated by hackers. It's populated mostly by people working for SV-type companies.
People forget - or never realize, if they're new - that the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" refers to startup entrepreneurs "hacking" capitalism. This place used to be called "Startup News," after all.
Age verification that protects privacy can be done using clever cryptographic techniques.
yea but we all know it wont be
Yeah I would be 100% for that, honestly.
I'm not a big anti-adult content person, I don't think it is a big deal. Cockfighting and dogfighting used to be popular pass-times. People used to take their whole family down to the public square for a nice afternoon hanging. Brothels used to be widespread! The old world was so much seedier and dirtier and violent, stuff is tame today by comparison.
But I 1000% respect someone who wants to control their kids access to adult content. I just know there is a lot of danger in implementing a Chinese-style "internet identification system."
I’m very liberal and very much opposed to authoritarianism. I don’t see the problem with forcing online content to be different than offline content. You gotta show ID or otherwise prove age to buy alcohol and pornography offline. Why not for online as well?
Because when you show ID to buy age-restricted things in person, nobody is keeping a record of anything. A clerk looks at your ID and that's the end of it.
Online is a completely different beast on that count.
I don’t think this is a compelling argument for keeping things as they currently stand.
Governments have a terrible track record when it comes to privacy. Everything from the USPS selling your info when you move, to the 2 dozen texts I got yesterday because the government sells[1] your voting records on the cheap. Maybe you don't agree but surely you at least understand why people are widely worried about a future where the government decides to sell your adult website access records to make a few extra bucks.
[1]: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/voter-re...
They should be worried. Bad governance is bad. But people do want something to be done about ease with which children can access pornography online. A solution will eventually be imposed if the industry doesn't clean things up.
I don't disagree. The problem is that the solutions being talked about have a large negative impact far wider than the problem they're intended to address.
It is the parents responsibility to raise their children. It's not my responsibility to have to show ID(I'm a grown adult, there is no mistaking me for someone 18 and below.. though I don't think there is any such laws in any country I would want to live in. this seems to be a fairly US centric world view).
"Think of the children"? That's the argument here?
Do you think a business should be able to sell alcohol to a 10 year child? It’s not the business’ responsibility to raise a person’s kid, afterall.
There is a big difference between storing someones credentials in a porn identification database vs showing your ID to some clerk. These things are not identical.
Of course they aren't identical. The point is that prior to the internet everyone thought it reasonable to prevent kids from accessing pornography. Now it is widely available to them online. Some people think this is not right. There are no perfect solutions.
Could you elaborate further on the problem you see?
I don't see a problem with "things as they currently stand".
As they currently stand anyone, regardless of age, can easily access pornographic content online.
Yes clearly ISPs, OSs, and everyone involved who is making money should provide easier and better tools for protecting kids from adult content.
But a state mandated thing associated with my ID is... iffy.
People have perfectly good reasons for wanting to protect their privacy.
But they have done that and so a government mandated solution is warranted.
Look into the Chinese identification systems associated with internet access to see where this leads. It isn't good.
We don’t have to do it the same way the Chinese do. We can implement it in a bad way or in a good way.
If you really want to buy pornography on the internet as a minor, you will have difficulties doing the transactions.
Aside from that you haven't thought about the implications of an ID system in the current political climate. Some advocates even state their real goals openly.
I don't think you are very liberal here for that matter. It is just a single issue, but it strongly correlates with positions around this particular topic.
It's easy to view pornography online regardless of age. That's what we are talking about.
Here are my leftist views: No one should have more than $10 million of wealth. Everyone should have a place to live, food, and healthcare. Healthcare should be free at the point of usage. The U.S. should stop funding Israel. Higher education should be free. Churches should pay tax on the property they own. Donations to charity should not be tax deductible. Public transportation should be heavily subsidized and greatly expanded. The DOD and CIA and NSA should be greatly reduced in size and scope. Elections should be publicly funded so that each candidate gets an equal amount of funding. Abortion should be legalized everywhere. Homeschooling should be outlawed.
If only you knew why my sweet summer child.
I've been wondering a while, is your username a reference to the comic "stone toss?"
From the perspective of wanting less waste and less pollution tariffs are a good thing.
Why do you say that? Without tariffs, the most efficient producer makes the good or service. With them, someone less efficient may make them.
Efficiency includes, but isn't only, waste and pollution.
By waste I meant the consuming of goods and accompanying trash that comes with it.
How is that made better by tariffs? Do you mean the increased prices will reduce consumption, which will reduce the accompanying waste?
Yes.
Sure but that seems more a clever side-effect than a real policy?
Outcomes are more important than "real policy".
Real policy is about real outcomes; this idea, while interesting to talk about, fails on outcomes.
Hasn’t been implemented so how do you know the outcomes won’t be there? Real policy as you call often times fails to have intended outcome or has lots of unintended consequences.
> Hasn’t been implemented so how do you know the outcomes won’t be there?
That's not a serious policy analysis, or even much of a debate exercise.
Efficiency includes also e.g. child and slave labor.
You could say the same about progressive taxes. Without them, the most efficient do the work. With them, less efficient people below taxable income threshold will do more work.
That's the first valuable, novel insight I've heard about taxation in a long time. While I support progressive taxes for other reasons (fairness), I'd be interested in the economic impact.
(The research would have to use overall tax rate, not just 'income' tax (i.e., wage tax).)
There was a time before income tax… and there maybe a future without income tax. Or you can think of income tax as profit sharing with everyone’s required partner big brother. Remember corporate tax and payroll taxes are flat. the progressive part of income tax is really more targeted at consumption. so it’s really more of a progressive consumption tax. It’s easy to arrange a delay in taxes if you don’t need to consume, and are willing to run a business.
Authoritarianism isn't when your opinions don't align with others.
Authoritarianism is the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. I think we are moving away from this kind of Authoritarianism, and embracing the freedom of diversified opinions.
Trump has said multiple times that certain media orgs should lose their broadcast license and specific people should be put in jail, because they said things he did not like. MAGA has also cancelled many of their own, or Republicans, for speaking out against Trump.
These sorts of things are where the authoritarian associations come from
> I think we are moving away from this kind of Authoritarianism, and embracing the freedom of diversified opinions.
I think the exact opposite.
Any examples? Most of the voices I saw were people who wanted to the government to leave them alone.
More precisely people who want the government to leave them alone but actively harass other people that they don't like.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Almost no one really wants government to leave them alone. Everyone looks to government after a disaster. People rely on government for policing and most people for providing their children education. People rely on government to ensure the food supply is safe. These things are largely forgotten about by the people saying they want less government. There are contradictory views held by the people who say they want government to leave them alone. They have bought into a fantasy narrative that they are under attack by government and liberalism.
A lot of people would like quite limited government that does the basics but otherwise leaves them alone.
Can you give some examples of this “leave me alone” that they want to see enacted?
A sort of example might be Hong Kong when I was there thirty or so years ago under British colonial control. The tax rate was about 15% and the government was active in some areas like maintaining the roads, building housing and basic education and health care but otherwise left things mostly to the market. It did pretty well up until the takeover by China which wasn't due to any desire by the population to have China control things, but due to China wanting to take over and having a large military.
The voters in the U.S. who want government to leave them alone say they want this also want government to regulate aspects of healthcare they don’t like. They want government to regulate private businesses so that they can’t exclude their notion of what “free speech” means. They want government to crack down on all the people and things they disagree with.
Trumpism has proven that most American conservatives don't want that.
Republicans used to have a strong faction of fiscal hawks who advocated eliminating all the expensive non-military government spending: privatizing Medicare, cutting Social Security, etc. But Trump discovered that you can simply promise to eliminate the deficit while also promising to leave all those programs in place exactly as they are, and people will eat it up.
That left politicians like Paul Ryan in a weird place because they were pushing for a limited government that their constituents didn't want anymore.
TLDR; libertarian take that misses a lot of structural and historical factors. save yourself wasting the fifteen minutes on this high school grade evolutionary psychology postulating
AI generated banner image: immediate skip.
Upvoted because rest of the article is nonsensical as well.