"Dictatorships are not what they used to be. The totalitarian tyrants of the past – such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot – employed terror, indoctrination, and isolation to monopolise power. ... The new autocracies often simulate democracy, holding elections that the incumbents almost always win, bribing and censoring the private press rather than abolishing it, and replacing comprehensive political ideologies with an amorphous resentment of the West (Gandhi 2008, Levitsky and Way 2010). Their leaders often enjoy genuine popularity – at least after eliminating any plausible rivals. State propaganda aims not to ‘engineer human souls’ but to boost the dictator’s ratings. Political opponents are harassed and defamed, charged with fabricated crimes, and encouraged to emigrate, rather than being murdered en masse."
I'm not sure their characterization of the past is accurate; all of those tactics have long been practiced widely. Hitler was elected and had genuine support. The Soviets and many others held periodic fake elections, as did many other dictators, and even today there are people in Russia who love Stalin. Saddam Hussein had the Sunnis and Baathists. Every dictator has sufficient genuine support, or they would be overthrown; you can't imprison everyone. Propaganda and harassing political opposition are very old tactics.
> replacing comprehensive political ideologies with an amorphous resentment of the West
Interestingly, isn't that the outlook of the Tea Partiers? The only consistency I see is a rejection of the West: Science, liberty (for groups other than Tea Partiers), tolerance, democratic government (if they are outvoted, government is illegitimate and to be violently resisted), environmentalism, organized labor, secularism, etc.
> The second reads like so much resentment of an amorphous group. I'm not sure why I should prefer your brand to the other.
I don't see resentful language and I built an argument on reasonbaly well-established facts. I understand my point may provoke members of that group; that's not my goal but it may be unavoidable when making a point that critical.
I'd be interested in learning from you where you think the argument falls short. Your comment is only a negative characterization.
Please stop propagating the myth. Hitler did have genuine support, but he lost the 1932 presidential election. The Nazis never achieved a parliamentary majority as a party until all the other parties were banned.
In 1932 Germany, the Chancellor was appointed by the President, who was elected. Paul von Hindenberg won the election. He appointed Hitler to the Chancellorship. Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.
The head of government in a parliamentary system (in the German system of the time, the Chancellor) is usually appointed by the chief of state (in that system, the President), but this is usually constrained by constitutional restrictions governing who the chief of state can ask to form a government and requiring the government to be supported by a majority of the parliament.
The Nazi party was the largest party in both 1932 parliamentary elections, with no party securing a governing majority after the July election (leading to rule by emergency decree by the President and a minority government), but after the November election the Nazi party formed a coalition with various others to form a government (now, those others thought that they'd be able to blunt the Nazi party and their growing popularity more by including them in a government and giving Hitler the chancellorship, but that's not an uncommon reason for bringing trying to bring a party into a governing coalition.)
Hitler was elected in the same sense that Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other head of government in a parliamentary system whose party only directly controls a minority of seats, was, or is, elected.
> Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.
Hitler achieved greater power through those mechanisms, sure, but he was in a position to do so only because of the Nazi parties strong showing in both of the 1932 elections, and the inability of any opponents of the Nazis to form a government without them.
> Hitler was elected in the same sense that ... any other head of government in a parliamentary system whose party only directly controls a minority of seats, was, or is, elected.
Which is to say... not elected. Becoming the head of a coalition government is more akin to a negotiation than an election.
In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.
> Becoming the head of a coalition government is more akin to a negotiation than an election.
Well, except for the whole election to the parliament that is necessary to even be in the negotiation -- the same election that if you won enough seats outright would make you the leader without the need for a coalition -- and which sets the degree of power you have in the negotiation.
> In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.
Arm twisting which was only possible because the Nazis were the largest party in the July election, and then again in the November election, and because there was less common ground between the non-Nazi parties around which to form a majority coalition than between the Nazis and the various conservative parties (who, to be sure, still hated the Nazis, but hated them less than the they hated the other non-Nazi parties.)
You are just confused about how parliamentary democracies with proportional representation work. What you are spreading – this simple truth – is also very much a myth.
The whole story is complex and full of details. Was Hitler’s rise to power fully constitutional within the framework of the Weimar constitution? Probably not. But that’s a complex story where the details matter. One thing is true, and that is that Hitler took great pains to make it at least look constitutional and legitimate. His rise to power was obviously not a democratic one, if for his goons on the streets alone, but he did manage to get the necessary majorities in parliament as long as he needed them (and did that via working together with other, more conventional conservative parties, as is regularly necessary to get majorities in democracies with proportional representation and just normal – well, the stupidity of those other conservative parties in cooperating with Hitler is very much not normal, but they thought they could control him).
I don't think you understand how parliamentary elections worked and how governments were formed in the Weimar Republic.
A critical amount of people voted for the candidates of the NSDAP (33.1% of all votes, the relative majority of the last 1932 election), who in turn formed a coalition, with Hitler als Chancellor. Formally, the president appoints the government and the chancellor, and the party resp. coalition of parties with an absolute majority of seats in parliament is who is normally appointed (and I think there is a certain legal obligation, but I'm not 100% sure on that).
The current German political system is in fact very similar to the one of the Weimar Republic (with details like certain thresholds to prevent dozens of tiny parties). Claiming Hitler was never elected is like claiming Angela Merkel was never elected.
Correct. Angela Merkel was never elected as Chancellor. The Chancellorship is not an elected office in Germany.
US President Obama was not elected, either. He was appointed by majority vote of the Electoral College. This is a hair-splitting, technical, de jure distinction, obviously, but denying that it exists is pretending that the republic is more democratic than it is in fact.
An election is a popular vote. A parliamentary or republican representative vote is not an election, regardless of how much it may superficially resemble one.
> US President Obama was not elected, either. He was appointed by majority vote of the Electoral College.
Except in the U.S., electors are required to vote for the candidate that won the majority of the popular vote in their state. They're honorary officials and rarely have any autonomy, though that is governed by state laws, not national laws.
Following your link, 24 states have no law restricting their presidential electors. They vote as directed, as in the other states, because voting against your party is social suicide. The process resembles an election because that resemblance serves the purposes of the political duopoly in the U.S. It has always been a kludge, working around the nominal autonomy of the states within the federation.
The facts are still the definition of the word "election" and the contents of the national constitutions. There is no amount of rhetorical gymnastics that you can perform to make "Hitler was elected" anything other than a provably false statement.
It doesn't matter. Clearly, there is no specific requirement that a democratic society has to pick its leadership in free and fair elections, nor do elections prevent jerkasses from becoming dictators.
There's a lovely Spanish term of art, "democradura," used to characterize these sorts of illiberal democracies (which are not, contra the article, limited to anti-Atlanticist regimes -- there are plenty of Western allies, and to some degree even Western states, that exhibit some or all of the features of illiberal democracies).
It's a shame that the paper itself is paywalled, but I like the underlying insight that effective authoritarianism is essentially about controlling information, not behavior. What this has to say about states like our own is, unfortunately, an exercise left to the polemicist.
The challenge for an incompetent dictator is, then, to fool the public into thinking he is competent. He chooses from among a repertoire of tools – propaganda, repression of protests, co-optation of the elite, and censorship of their messages. All such tools cost money, which must come from taxing the citizens, depressing their living standards, and indirectly lowering their estimate of the dictator’s competence. Hence the trade-off.
So these states edge towards using soft-power, influence, and PR balanced against the cost of this which must be obtained through taxes to "fool" the people into thinking the leadership is competent if it is in fact not (which if successful will be indistinguishable to the common citizen from actually being competent)?
It seems that like the corrupt mafioso that edges towards legitimate business as his income swells these political systems creep towards something an awful lot like the western "democracies" we have now. As a citizen, how the hell would you be able to tell the difference?
The only real defense that comes to mind is to discourage every governmental attempt at obtaining power that might be, in any way, deemed coercive.
This of course flies against the interests of what most people assume government to be for, and likely, makes it untenable, especially as the masses trend towards government-as-a-solution more and more.
Go take part in local politics--the local stuff has more impact on your day-to-day living, and it's easier to get into and be a part of.
Don't like the government you've got? Get in there and start fixing it. Resistance is irrelevant; government's there and it'll keep being there whether you try and fix it or not.
Hilarious: "This helps to explain why some clearly inept authoritarian leaders nevertheless hold on to power – and even popularity – for extended periods (cf. Hugo Chavez)"
Compare to the US's Bush vs. Gore vote fiasco where a court decided the vote. (And where the winner failed to win a plurality of the popular vote. Not to mention that most votes don't count anyway, due to swing states; and racist voter disenfranchisement.) Also compare to the powerful Bush and Clinton families.
These authors are from France and the US. If they were serious about improving the world, they'd look at their immensely powerful militant nations. Not far weaker ones.
In the same way, the point in the the third paragraph about incumbents always winning simulated elections in these countries is moot. Incumbents also literally almost always win elections in the US! Especially at the Congressional level, which is where real material changes are affected (or not).
None of this is "new". Pretty much everything described has occurred in most past civilizations to varying degrees. The speed at which it happens and the tools used are the only new things.
I highly recommend everyone do this. Spend several years in Europe or South America (the places I went.)
You will quickly come to see-- I expect-- just how much of the media inside the USA is propaganda.
Everything from Law & Order to the nightly news is mostly pro-government propaganda. (Supporting our politburo type government, not a dictatorship, but in the past 100 years the one party has won every single election.)
But you gotta get outside the bubble to really see it.
I like to read international news sources (news.google.com can be a good jumping off point) and, yes, I agree with you that our news in the USA is engineered to tell a story that keeps people in line.
International news sources, especially state-funded ones like Al Jazeera and RT, are just as biased, just in the other direction (US and Europe are teh suxx, Russia and OPEC are your friends!). If you can handle the cognitive load of filtering out the biases from all sources and have the perspective and knowledge to synthesize them into some objective truth, then my hat is off to you because I can't do that.
There is only one list that RT and Al Jazeera belong in together; the "what two news organizations are polar opposites of each other?" list.
Anyway, the point is diversity, not supremacy. Don't watch BBC or Al Jazeera because it's supposedly "better" than US media; watch because its bias is in different areas. All it does is help you in evaluate a different point of view. Worst case, you hear the same thing twice.
RT and AJ are both pro status-quo for their Establishment. So for me, they're in the same league but I always love to check the perspectives for the big players on the world stage from time to time to see what they're up to.
"But you gotta get outside the bubble to really see it."
Actually, it's sufficient just to not be liberal, and to a lesser extent, be neither liberal nor conservative. (But the liberal machine is much better oiled and more generally competent, moaning about Fox News notwithstanding.) It's hard to see propaganda that you currently agree with. (I do not exclude myself from that general statement, it's just that what I find harder to see is quite different than what the general US news is currently propagating.)
But I'd also observe that even standing outside the mainstream of US political propaganda, I'm not convinced there's necessarily a cabal of insiders sitting around in their smoke filled rooms figuring out how to "keep the masses in line". I think instead you've got people figuring out how to push their agendas, often in groups, and through a process of natural selection on the agendas in question you end up with agendas that tend to satisfy people to some extent and "keep them in line". You need not "conspire" to push fairly popular ideologies on people, you need only let the adherents of those ideologies do the things they naturally will do anyhow.
Edit: Look, downvoters, you might not like to hear it, but the US propaganda machine is liberal, or at least, Democratic (if you are more liberal than the Democrats and consider them "conservative"). Look at the political affiliations of the media, Hollywood, the bureaucratic apparatus, the University and academic system, and to believe that the propaganda system isn't Democratic is to believe that all of these things are peopled by 90%+ Democrats yet somehow transcend their political orientation to push... what, exactly? It's not even close... it's not like it's 60-40, it's 90%+ plus on every survey ever taken of those groups in recent times. Note my claim here is an objectively verifiable fact, not merely an abstract partisan snipe job. Ask yourself, what else would they be pushing?
If you don't see this, well... it's probably because you're not seeing the Democratic propaganda as propaganda, leaving you seeing only what gets through that isn't.
Further edit: Would someone care to post and explain the social mechanisms whereby the media et al is populated by Democrats yet is pushing some other form of propaganda on us all the time? Evidence would suggest it will get you highly upvoted. (Personally I'd suggest the fact that people just downvote but aren't posting suggests that this is either not possible, or very hard. This probably means something.)
I have noticed that advertisers motivations are laid bare when seen by people outside the target audience. The underlying narrative, hidden from the target group, is shockingly clear to non-targets. This car will make me sexy again, this cereal will transport me to a magic land. I hate advertising.
I suspect that if it were easy to merely filter out the music, but leave the voice audio, that would work as well. I think of music as basically a brain hack. It can affect your mental state against your own will, even if you are aware of what it is doing and why.
An example of this is horror movies. Suspenseful scenes will be suspenseful, even without any accompanying visuals. Even if you realize on an intellectual level that the music is engineered to make you feel stressed or nervous, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent yourself from feeling those things when you hear the music.
Or maybe that's all just me. I am very wary of the use of music because of this (primarily in situations where somebody else is subjecting me to the music; I'll listen to it voluntarily when I get to control what it is, but I try to avoid it as much as possible in any commercial setting).
The emergence of internet based video propaganda is particularly interesting to me, since it typically bypasses copyright law to use whichever music it pleases. Lots of popular pop songs being used in the background of blatant propaganda videos. Here is one rather extreme example (in terms of music use, not really content): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqw0VE5SUY My understanding is that the Russians made it.
And you have groups of people (i.e., those in the same industry) generally adopting similar ideologies - so you have say, Silicon Valley people tending towards a certain viewpoint.
Which doesn't mean it's part of a propaganda machine, it just is.
Maybe they are not pushing propaganda. Just because News Corp. (owners of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc.) ignores journalistic and societal ethics, and simple honesty, doesn't mean that others do the same. It's an interesting argument, to set their own standards so low and then persuade their audience that everyone else is equally dishonest.
Much to the misfortune of the nation and world, the current conservative establishment built its power on propaganda that overcomes any level of absurdity with aggressiveness. Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are good examples. For example, they led the nation to war over WMD in Iraq, they deny climate change, they talk about death panels, Obama's citizenship, etc.
I don't see that elsewhere on the political spectrum. There are fringe left-wing outlets, but they aren't the top-rated cable news channel and leading newspaper.
There are significant numbers of people who have seen it without physically leaving the bubble. But in this, the Internet is critical, as is a healthy reservoir of skepticism, paranoia, and introspection.
From an engineering perspective, the media bubble is beautiful. The control over the message is elegant and masterfully done. Generally speaking, it is like equal parts stage magic and martial arts.
Any attack against the power structure is simply deflected away from the center line and bounces off. When necessary, a burst of flame from some unsleeved flash paper distracts the attention of the audience just long enough for the real targets to be lost.
As someone who has seen it, living inside it feels almost oppressive. Almost. You have to continually remind yourself that it's there, and it's there to control your behavior.
Agreed entirely on the necessity of travel for mind expansion, but I would say that an inattentive person probably wouldn't spot the difference between foreign and the US media. Propaganda is the subtle knife of social control, and it is ubiquitous in the world.
A way of seeing through the propaganda is what I would call realism-based-education. By that I mean reading "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann, "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky, and "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, to start. Reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli would also be a good companion to these, though its focus is quite different. Reading these quick and easy to understand books has done more for my worldly education than going to college when it comes to building critical thinking.
People need to understand that mass media is for placing ideas into your head for the purposes of influencing future actions-- no more, and no less.
Ah yes, I'm aware of those articles as well-- they are fascinating. I didn't think to add them to the list in my comment but they'd be a good addition for sure.
I'm of the opinion that a lot of these propaganda/political realism topics belong in the same general category, and I'd like to make a syllabus of sorts eventually.
For those with the time and interest to browse I had previously compiled an incomplete list of domestic propaganda activities by the United States. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856218
There is also some compilation done for international propaganda, although mostly the programs, anecdotes and news links are scattered and still need compiling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709976
Some things almost sound like science fiction, like the DoD program to predict successful overseas propaganda by observing brain scans of test subjects: http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf
If you want to see authoritarianism, you don't have far to look. Various western agencies have already 'secured' the populations in most western countries, and in some (USA), the 'ruling' class is very narrow, representing a single set of interests.
In the USA's particular case, you have 2 parties which, despite the claimed differences, wind up representing the exact same interests. Obama, far from being a reversal of Bush's policies, continued and expanded all of them.
And no matter who comes into power, will likely expand on every repressive law and strategy that's in effect right now.
I doubt that most politicians or mustache twirlers are terribly concerned that marijuana legalization distracts people from, say, domestic spying or military interventions.
You're ignoring the history of prohibition (of alcohol and drugs) and the 'war on drugs'. Not to mention the 70's, the connection between recreational drugs and 'hippies' (a subversive anti-war class). Not to mention the fact that up to now the 'war on drugs' has also been used to restrict the rights of certain social classes (it's been well documented how the laws are designed to criminalize certain classes/ethnicities disproportionately).
Or a million other things the monied interests fight and have lost like the ACA, EPA regulations, OSHA, privatizing social security, invading Syria and Iran, etc.
When it comes to politics HN is conspiracy kiddie central. The US has a real two party system on top of dozens of state and local jurisdictions, all part of a larger checks and balance system. Sadly, I see a lot of criticism from Chinese and Russians who want to badly equate their broken autocratic system with our system, and that just isn't correct.
If you want to see democracy look at western countries that have more than 2 parties, where minority governments are viable, and where there's actual representation. Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, etc... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#/media/File:EIU...
Just because you have more than two parties doesn't mean you have more "freedom" or more "democracy." Most of those nations fall into a two party system with marginal 3rd, 4th, and 5th parties often on the very far extremist end. So we have politics like one of the larger parties courting white supremacists and fascists to get the votes they need, with some terrible concessions involved.
In a two party system, the small extremists can't win enough seats to be of note. That's a feature, not a bug. As we have seen many times before in the US's history, small movements move up through the party primary process. So you have the best of both worlds: a lack of easy access to government by extremists and a path to changing one of the larger parties via the very democratic primary system.
I don't think the US system is perfect, but its good; it solves a lot of problems of governing very nicely. The framers did their homework. The idea that Euro-style parliamentary systems are unequivocal better is a questionable premise, especially since it did nothing to stop the rise of Nazism in Germany (or even protect the lives of the Jewish minority) and other lesser but significant social failures (Greece's white supremacist Golden Dawn winning 22 seats in parliament recently for example.)
Not to mention, the States are fairly autonomous by Euro standards, so the state level legislature/courts/constitution are actually important and not just the bureaucratic/administrative arm of the national government. That gives a lot more local representation than the generally top-down decrees of Euro states - and that's on top of whatever the hell the EU is and all of its trans-national top-down decrees.
> In the USA's particular case, you have 2 parties which, despite the claimed differences, wind up representing the exact same interests.
They aren't exactly the same interests. Because real preferences are multidimensional and the US electoral system has strong structural features which promote a two-party system (with differences that lie on a single dimension), for people whose most important issues don't lie on the axis of variation between the parties, they can seem similar, but they don't represent the exact same interests.
The Washington Consensus cast a long shadow. With regard to high finance, international politics and military activity the parties are effectively the same (though the GOP may have closer ties to OPEC). Most American voters feel very strongly about these issues.
This article reminds me of a question I've thought about a lot recently:
When did elections become the norm? It seems like every despotic nation needs at least some kind of elections. Even in totally authoritarian countries, like say, Saddam's Iraq or North Korea, elections are held even if the leader always wins in a landslide and it's clear to any outside observer that the results are pre-determined.
200 years ago, there was no need for such things. Monarchy was considered a perfectly legitimate form of government. Voting was considered dangerous, and people often argued that democracy would be "mob rule" or "tyranny of the masses". Systems like the electoral college (and representative democracy) were created to put a check on such fears.
Even without Monarchy, "enlightened despotism" was advanced by many in the 19th century. Consider the words of (19th century general) Santa Anna: "[The Mexican people] do not know what [liberty] is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one."
But at some point along the way, it became clear that to have any legitimacy, you have to have some kind of election. I wonder why? Or when?
> 200 years ago, there was no need for such things. Monarchy was considered a perfectly legitimate form of government. Voting was considered dangerous, and people often argued that democracy would be "mob rule" or "tyranny of the masses".
By 1815, even many monarchies had elections of some form.
> Consider the words of (19th century general) Santa Anna: "[The Mexican people] do not know what [liberty] is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one."
Yeah, but Santa Anna said that to justify his actions at replacing an federal representative system (which he himself had also been instrumental in creating) with a centralized dictatorship, an act which provoked much of the country to revolt with three breakaway republics declared, and a massive civil war.
So, in context, its not really support for the idea that people even at that time didn't see elections and democracy as important. Indeed, arguably, the results of things like Santa Anna's efforts are why later authoritarians often prefer at least an illusion of democratic accountability.
Perhaps the timeframe of 200 years may have been a bit short - given that the French Revolution had just wrapped up, and despite the conservative victory, the idea of absolute monarchy was on the decline. If you want to pick the French Revolution as the point in time where the world (the Western world, anyway) started to really think that at least some form of election was necessary - I'd be willing to accept that. Though the monarchist victory in that war proved it was still holding sway, and it's very debatable.
Yes, Santa Anna was no saint, and clearly the Mexican people didn't think so much of abolishing the elections. The point of my using the quote, though, was to illustrate that in an international context saying "Elections are a bad idea for the people" was at least a vaguely reasonable thing to do at that point in history.
You don't usually see dictators today saying "The people can't handle elections; my enlightened rule is much better without the turbulence." Instead they say "Everyone loves me! I won the election with 99% of the vote!"
So I wonder - when did that change? Is it because the view of the people changed? I feel like it's more of an "international legitimacy" thing, like governments are supposed to represent the people.
Over a long period of time. It was the case in much of the world by the time 200 years ago that you point to, but its progressed further since (and was well established in some places long earlier.)
> Is it because the view of the people changed?
Yes. The single biggest factor in spreading this expectation was probably the British Empire and its global reach.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread"Dictatorships are not what they used to be. The totalitarian tyrants of the past – such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot – employed terror, indoctrination, and isolation to monopolise power. ... The new autocracies often simulate democracy, holding elections that the incumbents almost always win, bribing and censoring the private press rather than abolishing it, and replacing comprehensive political ideologies with an amorphous resentment of the West (Gandhi 2008, Levitsky and Way 2010). Their leaders often enjoy genuine popularity – at least after eliminating any plausible rivals. State propaganda aims not to ‘engineer human souls’ but to boost the dictator’s ratings. Political opponents are harassed and defamed, charged with fabricated crimes, and encouraged to emigrate, rather than being murdered en masse."
https://therionorteline.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/huxley-v...
> replacing comprehensive political ideologies with an amorphous resentment of the West
Interestingly, isn't that the outlook of the Tea Partiers? The only consistency I see is a rejection of the West: Science, liberty (for groups other than Tea Partiers), tolerance, democratic government (if they are outvoted, government is illegitimate and to be violently resisted), environmentalism, organized labor, secularism, etc.
The second reads like so much resentment of an amorphous group. I'm not sure why I should prefer your brand to the other.
I don't see resentful language and I built an argument on reasonbaly well-established facts. I understand my point may provoke members of that group; that's not my goal but it may be unavoidable when making a point that critical.
I'd be interested in learning from you where you think the argument falls short. Your comment is only a negative characterization.
Please stop propagating the myth. Hitler did have genuine support, but he lost the 1932 presidential election. The Nazis never achieved a parliamentary majority as a party until all the other parties were banned.
In 1932 Germany, the Chancellor was appointed by the President, who was elected. Paul von Hindenberg won the election. He appointed Hitler to the Chancellorship. Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.
The Nazi party was the largest party in both 1932 parliamentary elections, with no party securing a governing majority after the July election (leading to rule by emergency decree by the President and a minority government), but after the November election the Nazi party formed a coalition with various others to form a government (now, those others thought that they'd be able to blunt the Nazi party and their growing popularity more by including them in a government and giving Hitler the chancellorship, but that's not an uncommon reason for bringing trying to bring a party into a governing coalition.)
Hitler was elected in the same sense that Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other head of government in a parliamentary system whose party only directly controls a minority of seats, was, or is, elected.
> Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.
Hitler achieved greater power through those mechanisms, sure, but he was in a position to do so only because of the Nazi parties strong showing in both of the 1932 elections, and the inability of any opponents of the Nazis to form a government without them.
Which is to say... not elected. Becoming the head of a coalition government is more akin to a negotiation than an election.
In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.
Well, except for the whole election to the parliament that is necessary to even be in the negotiation -- the same election that if you won enough seats outright would make you the leader without the need for a coalition -- and which sets the degree of power you have in the negotiation.
> In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.
Arm twisting which was only possible because the Nazis were the largest party in the July election, and then again in the November election, and because there was less common ground between the non-Nazi parties around which to form a majority coalition than between the Nazis and the various conservative parties (who, to be sure, still hated the Nazis, but hated them less than the they hated the other non-Nazi parties.)
The whole story is complex and full of details. Was Hitler’s rise to power fully constitutional within the framework of the Weimar constitution? Probably not. But that’s a complex story where the details matter. One thing is true, and that is that Hitler took great pains to make it at least look constitutional and legitimate. His rise to power was obviously not a democratic one, if for his goons on the streets alone, but he did manage to get the necessary majorities in parliament as long as he needed them (and did that via working together with other, more conventional conservative parties, as is regularly necessary to get majorities in democracies with proportional representation and just normal – well, the stupidity of those other conservative parties in cooperating with Hitler is very much not normal, but they thought they could control him).
A critical amount of people voted for the candidates of the NSDAP (33.1% of all votes, the relative majority of the last 1932 election), who in turn formed a coalition, with Hitler als Chancellor. Formally, the president appoints the government and the chancellor, and the party resp. coalition of parties with an absolute majority of seats in parliament is who is normally appointed (and I think there is a certain legal obligation, but I'm not 100% sure on that).
The current German political system is in fact very similar to the one of the Weimar Republic (with details like certain thresholds to prevent dozens of tiny parties). Claiming Hitler was never elected is like claiming Angela Merkel was never elected.
US President Obama was not elected, either. He was appointed by majority vote of the Electoral College. This is a hair-splitting, technical, de jure distinction, obviously, but denying that it exists is pretending that the republic is more democratic than it is in fact.
An election is a popular vote. A parliamentary or republican representative vote is not an election, regardless of how much it may superficially resemble one.
Except in the U.S., electors are required to vote for the candidate that won the majority of the popular vote in their state. They're honorary officials and rarely have any autonomy, though that is governed by state laws, not national laws.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/e...
The facts are still the definition of the word "election" and the contents of the national constitutions. There is no amount of rhetorical gymnastics that you can perform to make "Hitler was elected" anything other than a provably false statement.
It doesn't matter. Clearly, there is no specific requirement that a democratic society has to pick its leadership in free and fair elections, nor do elections prevent jerkasses from becoming dictators.
http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php
[English translation of] the Weimar Constitution, Chapter 3, Article 53.
It's a shame that the paper itself is paywalled, but I like the underlying insight that effective authoritarianism is essentially about controlling information, not behavior. What this has to say about states like our own is, unfortunately, an exercise left to the polemicist.
Kinda depressing.
So these states edge towards using soft-power, influence, and PR balanced against the cost of this which must be obtained through taxes to "fool" the people into thinking the leadership is competent if it is in fact not (which if successful will be indistinguishable to the common citizen from actually being competent)?
It seems that like the corrupt mafioso that edges towards legitimate business as his income swells these political systems creep towards something an awful lot like the western "democracies" we have now. As a citizen, how the hell would you be able to tell the difference?
This of course flies against the interests of what most people assume government to be for, and likely, makes it untenable, especially as the masses trend towards government-as-a-solution more and more.
Go take part in local politics--the local stuff has more impact on your day-to-day living, and it's easier to get into and be a part of.
Don't like the government you've got? Get in there and start fixing it. Resistance is irrelevant; government's there and it'll keep being there whether you try and fix it or not.
Take former US president Jimmy Carter: "As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world." (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/03/why-us-...)
Compare to the US's Bush vs. Gore vote fiasco where a court decided the vote. (And where the winner failed to win a plurality of the popular vote. Not to mention that most votes don't count anyway, due to swing states; and racist voter disenfranchisement.) Also compare to the powerful Bush and Clinton families.
These authors are from France and the US. If they were serious about improving the world, they'd look at their immensely powerful militant nations. Not far weaker ones.
I highly recommend everyone do this. Spend several years in Europe or South America (the places I went.)
You will quickly come to see-- I expect-- just how much of the media inside the USA is propaganda.
Everything from Law & Order to the nightly news is mostly pro-government propaganda. (Supporting our politburo type government, not a dictatorship, but in the past 100 years the one party has won every single election.)
But you gotta get outside the bubble to really see it.
Anyway, the point is diversity, not supremacy. Don't watch BBC or Al Jazeera because it's supposedly "better" than US media; watch because its bias is in different areas. All it does is help you in evaluate a different point of view. Worst case, you hear the same thing twice.
Except RT. That's just trash.
Actually, it's sufficient just to not be liberal, and to a lesser extent, be neither liberal nor conservative. (But the liberal machine is much better oiled and more generally competent, moaning about Fox News notwithstanding.) It's hard to see propaganda that you currently agree with. (I do not exclude myself from that general statement, it's just that what I find harder to see is quite different than what the general US news is currently propagating.)
But I'd also observe that even standing outside the mainstream of US political propaganda, I'm not convinced there's necessarily a cabal of insiders sitting around in their smoke filled rooms figuring out how to "keep the masses in line". I think instead you've got people figuring out how to push their agendas, often in groups, and through a process of natural selection on the agendas in question you end up with agendas that tend to satisfy people to some extent and "keep them in line". You need not "conspire" to push fairly popular ideologies on people, you need only let the adherents of those ideologies do the things they naturally will do anyhow.
Edit: Look, downvoters, you might not like to hear it, but the US propaganda machine is liberal, or at least, Democratic (if you are more liberal than the Democrats and consider them "conservative"). Look at the political affiliations of the media, Hollywood, the bureaucratic apparatus, the University and academic system, and to believe that the propaganda system isn't Democratic is to believe that all of these things are peopled by 90%+ Democrats yet somehow transcend their political orientation to push... what, exactly? It's not even close... it's not like it's 60-40, it's 90%+ plus on every survey ever taken of those groups in recent times. Note my claim here is an objectively verifiable fact, not merely an abstract partisan snipe job. Ask yourself, what else would they be pushing?
If you don't see this, well... it's probably because you're not seeing the Democratic propaganda as propaganda, leaving you seeing only what gets through that isn't.
Further edit: Would someone care to post and explain the social mechanisms whereby the media et al is populated by Democrats yet is pushing some other form of propaganda on us all the time? Evidence would suggest it will get you highly upvoted. (Personally I'd suggest the fact that people just downvote but aren't posting suggests that this is either not possible, or very hard. This probably means something.)
An example of this is horror movies. Suspenseful scenes will be suspenseful, even without any accompanying visuals. Even if you realize on an intellectual level that the music is engineered to make you feel stressed or nervous, it is exceedingly difficult to prevent yourself from feeling those things when you hear the music.
Or maybe that's all just me. I am very wary of the use of music because of this (primarily in situations where somebody else is subjecting me to the music; I'll listen to it voluntarily when I get to control what it is, but I try to avoid it as much as possible in any commercial setting).
The emergence of internet based video propaganda is particularly interesting to me, since it typically bypasses copyright law to use whichever music it pleases. Lots of popular pop songs being used in the background of blatant propaganda videos. Here is one rather extreme example (in terms of music use, not really content): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqw0VE5SUY My understanding is that the Russians made it.
Which doesn't mean it's part of a propaganda machine, it just is.
Much to the misfortune of the nation and world, the current conservative establishment built its power on propaganda that overcomes any level of absurdity with aggressiveness. Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are good examples. For example, they led the nation to war over WMD in Iraq, they deny climate change, they talk about death panels, Obama's citizenship, etc.
I don't see that elsewhere on the political spectrum. There are fringe left-wing outlets, but they aren't the top-rated cable news channel and leading newspaper.
From an engineering perspective, the media bubble is beautiful. The control over the message is elegant and masterfully done. Generally speaking, it is like equal parts stage magic and martial arts.
Any attack against the power structure is simply deflected away from the center line and bounces off. When necessary, a burst of flame from some unsleeved flash paper distracts the attention of the audience just long enough for the real targets to be lost.
As someone who has seen it, living inside it feels almost oppressive. Almost. You have to continually remind yourself that it's there, and it's there to control your behavior.
A way of seeing through the propaganda is what I would call realism-based-education. By that I mean reading "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann, "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky, and "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, to start. Reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli would also be a good companion to these, though its focus is quite different. Reading these quick and easy to understand books has done more for my worldly education than going to college when it comes to building critical thinking.
People need to understand that mass media is for placing ideas into your head for the purposes of influencing future actions-- no more, and no less.
I'm of the opinion that a lot of these propaganda/political realism topics belong in the same general category, and I'd like to make a syllabus of sorts eventually.
There is also some compilation done for international propaganda, although mostly the programs, anecdotes and news links are scattered and still need compiling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709976
Some things almost sound like science fiction, like the DoD program to predict successful overseas propaganda by observing brain scans of test subjects: http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf
In the USA's particular case, you have 2 parties which, despite the claimed differences, wind up representing the exact same interests. Obama, far from being a reversal of Bush's policies, continued and expanded all of them.
And no matter who comes into power, will likely expand on every repressive law and strategy that's in effect right now.
What we're 'allowed' to do is basically anything that keeps us too occupied to overthrow the ruling class...
You're just rationalizing.
When it comes to politics HN is conspiracy kiddie central. The US has a real two party system on top of dozens of state and local jurisdictions, all part of a larger checks and balance system. Sadly, I see a lot of criticism from Chinese and Russians who want to badly equate their broken autocratic system with our system, and that just isn't correct.
The US is NOT the paragon of democracy.
In a two party system, the small extremists can't win enough seats to be of note. That's a feature, not a bug. As we have seen many times before in the US's history, small movements move up through the party primary process. So you have the best of both worlds: a lack of easy access to government by extremists and a path to changing one of the larger parties via the very democratic primary system.
I don't think the US system is perfect, but its good; it solves a lot of problems of governing very nicely. The framers did their homework. The idea that Euro-style parliamentary systems are unequivocal better is a questionable premise, especially since it did nothing to stop the rise of Nazism in Germany (or even protect the lives of the Jewish minority) and other lesser but significant social failures (Greece's white supremacist Golden Dawn winning 22 seats in parliament recently for example.)
Not to mention, the States are fairly autonomous by Euro standards, so the state level legislature/courts/constitution are actually important and not just the bureaucratic/administrative arm of the national government. That gives a lot more local representation than the generally top-down decrees of Euro states - and that's on top of whatever the hell the EU is and all of its trans-national top-down decrees.
They aren't exactly the same interests. Because real preferences are multidimensional and the US electoral system has strong structural features which promote a two-party system (with differences that lie on a single dimension), for people whose most important issues don't lie on the axis of variation between the parties, they can seem similar, but they don't represent the exact same interests.
When did elections become the norm? It seems like every despotic nation needs at least some kind of elections. Even in totally authoritarian countries, like say, Saddam's Iraq or North Korea, elections are held even if the leader always wins in a landslide and it's clear to any outside observer that the results are pre-determined.
200 years ago, there was no need for such things. Monarchy was considered a perfectly legitimate form of government. Voting was considered dangerous, and people often argued that democracy would be "mob rule" or "tyranny of the masses". Systems like the electoral college (and representative democracy) were created to put a check on such fears.
Even without Monarchy, "enlightened despotism" was advanced by many in the 19th century. Consider the words of (19th century general) Santa Anna: "[The Mexican people] do not know what [liberty] is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one."
But at some point along the way, it became clear that to have any legitimacy, you have to have some kind of election. I wonder why? Or when?
By 1815, even many monarchies had elections of some form.
> Consider the words of (19th century general) Santa Anna: "[The Mexican people] do not know what [liberty] is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one."
Yeah, but Santa Anna said that to justify his actions at replacing an federal representative system (which he himself had also been instrumental in creating) with a centralized dictatorship, an act which provoked much of the country to revolt with three breakaway republics declared, and a massive civil war.
So, in context, its not really support for the idea that people even at that time didn't see elections and democracy as important. Indeed, arguably, the results of things like Santa Anna's efforts are why later authoritarians often prefer at least an illusion of democratic accountability.
Yes, Santa Anna was no saint, and clearly the Mexican people didn't think so much of abolishing the elections. The point of my using the quote, though, was to illustrate that in an international context saying "Elections are a bad idea for the people" was at least a vaguely reasonable thing to do at that point in history.
You don't usually see dictators today saying "The people can't handle elections; my enlightened rule is much better without the turbulence." Instead they say "Everyone loves me! I won the election with 99% of the vote!"
So I wonder - when did that change? Is it because the view of the people changed? I feel like it's more of an "international legitimacy" thing, like governments are supposed to represent the people.
Over a long period of time. It was the case in much of the world by the time 200 years ago that you point to, but its progressed further since (and was well established in some places long earlier.)
> Is it because the view of the people changed?
Yes. The single biggest factor in spreading this expectation was probably the British Empire and its global reach.