Problems with dictatorship
From dKosopedia
Problems with Non-Democratic Governments
While many people in democracies begrudgingly (or enthusiastically) seem to tolerate Dictators and Non-Democratic Governments because it seems to 'work' better in times of emergency, dictatorships have numerous, numerous problems associated with them. For the purposes of this list, 'dictatorship' refers to any anti-majoritarian government such as monarchies, theocracies, oligarchies, etc. (Many of these traits are also found in corporations).
- Dictatorships have regularly had violent competitions for power either on behalf of the dictator or the would-be usurper. To the victor goes the spoils and when the prize is absolute power, there's very little people wouldn't do to protect or obtain it. Many examples abound through history from Josef Stalin's Great Purges to the many wars of succession for the British crown in the pre-Industrial era. Even if the dictator lays out clear rules about who is supposed to succeed him or her, oftentimes rivals or pretenders just flat-out ignore it and you have conflict anyway. Democracies by contrast have much more peaceful transitions of power.
- Going with the above problem, dictatorships also waste enormous resources on establishing security. In order to prevent challenges to their rule, dictators must obtain control of the media, army and police force, spy on the populace, etc. Classic example: North Korea. That state police and hundreds of thousands strong standing army ain't paying for itself, ya know. The money needed to keep a democracy functioning (polling places, franking privilege, etc.) is much lower in contrast.
- A corollary of the above two problems is that dictatorships rarely select for competence or vigour in the leadership below the dictator -- quite the opposite. An underling who is too competent, too popular, too effective, or too vigorous will usually be eliminated, leaving incompetent nonentities. This creates security for the dictator -- no rivals for power -- but it plays merry hell with succession and the period after.
- Also going with the first problem, the skills required to successfully seize power and to actually govern successfully are rarely guaranteed to reside in the same person. Mao Zedong for example was a downright brilliant guerilla and military leader, but was a catastrophe as a peacetime political leader.
- Because dictators have absolute power, they often find themselves completely unable to forgo using their own power to enrich themselves and their supporters at the expense of their subjects. See: the disgustingly sybaritic buildings of the Catholic Church at a time when folks didn't even have closed sewers (even the Indus Valley civilization that came thousands of years before that had that!) or the special Communist Party shops or the opulent palaces of the tsarist government that they used as a hypocritical justification for overthrowing. What makes this especially ironic is that even though dictatorships benefit in the short term by looting their subjects and hoarding the wealth, in the long term they'd be even richer by letting a portion of that capital escape to their subjects. Monarchs in Medieval Europe and governors in pre-modern China held ridiculous amounts of power and wealth relative to their kingdoms, but an upper middle-class Westerner from this era would laugh right in their faces at how small and weak their wealth really is. Regardless, the ruling class in dictatorships just can't break the cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul once it's established, so even after an initial period of increasing the welfare of the populace above and beyond the base trickle the march of technology allows the average prosperity hits a brick wall. Democracies put a hard limit on how much wealth the government is allowed to accumulate, voting in policies such as progressive taxation to funnel some of the money back down to the masses.
- It's downright impossible for dictators to get a handle on the entire government. It's no accident that as history marches on dictatorships steadily grow more incompetent; that's because government (and business) has become increasingly more complex both in form and the number of people they need to serve. To 'solve' this problem dictators have to end up delegating some of their power to underlings. It's already bad enough in democracies where people are encouraged to scream at bureaucratic fuck-ups--John F. Kennedy was famously completely floored at Nikita Khrushchev's demand to remove missiles in Turkey, since he had ordered them removed a long time ago and they hadn't gotten around to it. If it's that bad in democratic governments, how much worse do you think it will be in a government where delegates are immune to criticism from the masses, have the ability to reward themselves at the expense of the group, AND have an incentive not to piss off Dear Leader by doing something contrary to the wishes of their leader for the good of their people?
- Elaborating on that last clause some, making the delegation problem significantly worse is that underlings are tempted to sugarcoat bad news and avoid criticizing the dictator's plans or interventions and thus shield them from the truth. Which leads to the next problem:
- Dictatorships invariably come to believe in their own propaganda and become increasingly separated from reality. You'd think that they would have the sense to keep their prolefeed separate from the reality of their situation, but - George Orwell's Party strawmen in Nineteen Eighty-Four aside - few dictators actually want to hear news that their policies are making people desperately unhappy for no good reason. Furthermore, this effect combined with the effect of dictators almost automatically trying to inflict their personal delusions and viewpoints onto the populace (rather than collecting it from the masses/bureaucracy) leads to cognitive dissonance and ignorance both self-inflicted and not. Again picking on Stalin and Mao because they really really deserve it, this descent into a fantasy world leads to catastrophic events like the the great Soviet famine or the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Democracies are much better about knocking some sense into the people that rule them, both because the trustees have to listen to them to know what they want and also to knowingly avoid taking actions that will piss off the populace. Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush were very rudely jolted out of office in their succeeding elections because of ideologically-driven groupthink that led them to make unpopular decisions. This doesn't happen in dictatorships short of extraordinary crises such as the February Revolution - long after years or even decades of misery and which have a high chance of tearing the country apart.
- Let's have a quick aside for a second. While the 'tyranny of the majority' is often cited as a problem with democracy, the oppression of minorities is exponentially greater in dictatorships. In democracies everyone belongs to a minority group of some form (white male middle-class heterosexual Protestant, while a majority in individual categories, is a minority demographic taken as a whole) and have to form alliances to protect their rights; this is why, for example, Italians and Irish in the United States are viewed as 'white' even though they weren't in the late 19th century. It's no accident that, for example, the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s saw an explosion in rights for the underclass and minority as a whole because they formed alliances. Which unfortunately broke down going into the 70s, but that's another story. In a more contemporary example, even though in the 1990s American racial minorities had a more negative opinion of gay marriage than their white counterparts, recent polls in the 2010s show them as having more support for it than whites. It's not hard to see that, for example, if a surge of dominionism were to infect a portion of the populace it'd be crushed at the polls not only by non-Christians but by women and minorities who saw their rights threatened next. Sexism and racism are greatly reduced because political actors, if not exactly wanting the votes of the minority groups they're opposed to, don't want them to align with other factions and crush them and in the process ruin unrelated interests like tax cuts.
- By contrast, persecution of minorities is always worse in dictatorships. Dictatorships just plain do not need the support of anyone other than a small proportion of the population; rulers find it absolutely irresistible to persecute and crush rivals and minority groups perceived as a threat in some way or another. To make this problem significantly worse, after one minority group is disposed of dictatorships tend to look for the next minority group they can separate and crush, which allows them to steadily shape the populace in the form that they want. This process is almost inevitable in dictatorships, either by design (such as with the Nazi Party) or by trying to look for new enemies to keep the politics of fear gravy train going.
All in all, want to know why religious persecution is much less intense in Turkey than in other Middle Eastern countries despite having a similar religiosity index? Because it's a democracy.
Links
This page uses content from rationalwiki
![[Main Page]](../../../../upload/banner-blue-135.jpg)