Hey, MAGA Fascists: Dictatorships Always Fail - Pt. 1

Photo by SaiKrishna Saketh Yellapragada on Unsplash

The Premise of Authoritarianism

The premise of authoritarian governments is that greater centralized control over the policy-making process means that dictators should be able to enjoy greater freedom of action and faster political results than democracies.

Without the democratic attributes of constant partisan infighting, competing special interests, reliance on electoral approval via public opinion, or protections of minority rights, autocracies ought to be, in theory, streamlined paragons of governmental success and straight line policy implementation. That’s what wannabe dictators and their bootlickers insist.

Authoritarian regimes also should, in theory, benefit from the advantages of state-sponsored corruption of all aspects of political life, such as tight control over the media, loyal police and paramilitary forces, rubber-stamping legislative bodies, and willingly partisan judicial courts.

Yet the theoretical advantages of authoritarian systems leads one to ponder, where are the successful authoritarian governments in the world today? Just like the Fermi Paradox, which asks a similar question of a universe that probabilistically should be teaming with life, there appears to be an “Authoritarian Paradox.” A casual view of history in the modern era shows autocracies regularly falling far below liberal democracies in most political, social, economic, and cultural indicators. Modern authoritarian governments also often end in spectacular failure.

The obvious example of authoritarian collapse is, of course, Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s “Triumph of the Will” and vowed thousand-year Reich ended in ruin after only twelve. Nazi Germany and its little brother autocracy of Mussolini’s Italy are the quintessential authoritarian case studies: a strongman manipulates a democracy to smother it, and a dictatorship takes control with delusions of grandeur huffing its own supply of scapegoating propaganda to stifle any opposition until resistance is effectively futile, and soon the dictator refuses responsibility for the problems created by the dictator’s bold action, and must distract the people with militaristic belligerence and regional dominance abroad until the lies needed to justify the increasingly brutalist totalitarianism become so great that reality can no longer be obscured or ignored while bombs fall from the sky courtesy of the arsenals of allied liberal democracies the authoritarians maligned as decadent, effeminate, and frail, democracies before they raced each other to Berlin and on the way forced German civilians across the country to dig up the mass graves surrounding concentration camps to see and smell the pyrrhic results of their propagandized ideology.

Having your city bombed and occupying soldiers force you to clean out clogged up crematoriums is a real wake up from the dream of Aryan supremacy and Germanic Lebensraum.

Why Do Authoritarians Fail?

Authoritarians are almost always doomed to fail because of the surrealist paths they take toward power.

To consolidate control, an aspiring dictator generally must launch a campaign of some form of quasi-absurdist, populist (usually ethnic or religious) nationalism that claims the nation’s greatness is achievable if only the citizens homogenize, and blindly follow a specific set of xenophobic policies only the strongman and his loyalists can lead them through for the alleged benefit of the majority — at the expense of all the various minorities. The authoritarian and his hangers-on puff themselves up engineering a soft, state media apparatus that only heaps praise on themselves for anything remotely positive, while shielding themselves of all criticism, accountability, or any other hint of weakness — political, economic, or otherwise.

But having gone to such effort to idealize the foundation of a “strong” state, failures and defeats will always inevitably come. A fundamental contradiction of nationalist movements is that no societies are totally coherent conglomerations of hive-minded individuals willing to endure any hardship for the good of the leader or fatherland. All societies, even small ones, are at least politically pluralistic (if not racially and religiously), and contain a multitude of beliefs, ideologies, and lifestyle predilections.

In classical liberal democracies, this political pluralism often means “good politics” and effective public policy are highly paradoxical endeavors, as even the best intended efforts to improve society and citizens’ lives quickly runs into the variety of electoral obstacles and bureaucratic failures that stem from a populace full of wildly differing opinions and perspectives about what government ought to be doing and for whom.

Every policy and bureaucratic choice inherently creates winners and losers to a varying degree, both literally in socio-economic outcomes and figuratively inside the minds of offended and disgruntled individuals within electorally weak demographic factions. The concepts of the “public good” and the “national interest” are subjective, and policies proposed as “economically efficient” by some might be deemed ethically or morally repugnant by others. Even the most experienced technocrats within liberal democracies lament that their benevolent-intended policies sometimes turn out to be nothing more than wishful thinking or faulty logic once implemented in the real world.

Every political leader and policy expert makes mistakes or oversights, even when crafting the smallest, seemingly most targeted policies. That the same would not be true when authoritarians are attempting large-scale, centralized social transformation would be quite literally irrational. Yet, when these failures come, very rarely can a self-obsessed dictator trying to meticulously maintain a cult of personality cope with the public embarrassment of being wrong about something, or anything for that matter. In theory, rational, intelligent dictators should be able to quickly and effectively course-correct toward better policies, but the types of personalities who become dictators tend not to be capable of admitting error. Instead, the narcissistic, sociopathic kinds of people who become dictators often care less about the policies than how the policies affect their public image.

This more often than not leads dictators to doubling-down, and then tripling-down on bad policies, often followed with more severe scapegoating of the state’s alleged enemies at home or abroad to avoid owning up to a mistake. Unfortunately for humans throughout all of history, this usually means persecution of ethnic or religious minorities, belligerence toward external states that dictators claim must be conspiring against them, or both. Whatever it takes to preserve the dictator’s shallow ego and the party’s image.

However, phantasmagoric scapegoating ultimately cannot solve a nation’s fundamental problems, and dictators’ “I alone can fix it” mythology necessitates escalating commitment to whatever flawed national programs they promised would bring greatness, with a tighter grip on the media to hide the evidence that the national goals are not being met. Critics who publicize the cracks in the strongman facade get punished with corrupt applications of state power, followed by increasingly conspicuous lies, self-destructive purges of the few still-loyal dissenters capable of problem-solving, and, eventually, desperate Hail Mary policies of outright political sadism such as the “Final Solution” of European Jewry, or “fight to the last man, woman, and child” end game military tactics.

Autocracies also fail because they consistently extend their goals of national rejuvenation to things no government can reasonably deliver on, such as utopian schemes of cultural primacy, and authoritarians waste lots of money, time, and attention on. It’s one thing for authoritarians to relatively easily spend a lot of resources trying to make the trains run on time, especially if the trains previously did not run on time, but authoritarians tend to get bogged down building Potemkin monuments to their self-aggrandizement, such as needlessly grand architectural buildings for government offices, or elaborate choreography of Olympic ceremonies and other international events, or massive portraits displaying pictures of dear leader in every neighborhood.

A much harder goal, of course, is territorial revanchism, and the taking back of land a “nation” (actually or just conceptually) once owned, or controlled, or had influence over at some point in history. Recorded history is a nearly 6,000-year-old story of kingdoms and empires ebbing and flowing in power and dominance so almost any group of people can look back and point at some time in the recent or distant past to emulate in order to make the nation great “again.”

This means it’s easy for authoritarian regimes to resort to external military campaigns with the goal of finding a short-term fix for any declining domestic approval, souring public morale, and/or growing economic malaise. Ginned up patriotism in honor of suffering and dead soldiers is a powerful domestic distraction, and, since at this point many competent political rivals, advisers, or bureaucrats willing to speak truth to power has long been silenced, the war is badly managed by the remaining yes-men who have been promoted past their competence on account of their brown-nosing rather than any expertise or intellectual sagacity. The basic factors that allow political unilateralism to occur inevitably create the bureaucratic culture of fear, lies, paranoia, backstabbing, and hubris that ultimately help bring it down.

This is why personalist authoritarian states rarely last longer than their dictators — for which North Korea’s extremely rare hereditary, communist dictatorship is an odd, historically unique outlier — because when state power is controlled largely according to the whims and foibles of one characteristically narcissistic eccentric, a power vacuum is inevitable when the dictator dies. Often nations adopt more liberal governance following the death of a personalist dictator, and, when they don’t, the succeeding dictators typically feel compelled to institute a big, murderous purge to both eliminate potential political rivals and install their own loyalists to inject their own personalist whims and foibles into the application of the state’s power, which quickly puts their own, new totalitarian regime on borrowed time according to the same principles described previously.

Read part 2 here

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