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Comment by StrauXX | Hacker News Reader

No they don't. The issue with dictatorships is that your powerbase rurns from "the people" (or a wealthy subset of the people, depending on how well your democracy works), to a small group of powerfull supporters. Army generals, police chiefs and so on. Even if you were an angel, the power dynamics of dictatorships don't give you the ability of doing all too much for the general populace. Thats the beuaty of democracy. Your power base is (indirectly and delayed, but still) the people. This aligns incentives and power dynamics between power holders and regular inhabitants much more than in any kind of autocracy.

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>Your power base is (indirectly and delayed, but still) the people.

In almost any democracy the power base are political parties who have the obligation and ability to control what politics are allowed to manifest in the country. Very few democracies (a notable exception might be Switzerland) actually allow for the general population to act against what the political parties want.

The population exists as a feedback mechanism, which should enforce competition between parties. But the actual manifestation of the power is in the party representatives of the population, not in the population itself. If you want to tell me that the population just can create a new party, look how well that works in the US...

Most democracies are representative democracies. Where instead of army and industry leaders the government has to deal with party leaders and the representatives. Certainly there are different power dynamics there, but just as certain they exist and impact the actual policies. And just as certain there are misalignment of interests between population and party representatives.

> If you want to tell me that the population just can create a new party, look how well that works in the US...

This is a problem of a particular voting system. The majority reprentation system has a very strong tendency towards two party systems. In countries with proportional representation it is significantly easier to create new parties and even rise to power. On the level of local governments this happens all the time. But even on the state level it is definitely possible. Just think of the various green parties in Europe that have been founded in the 1980s and 1990s. Or to give a more recent example: the rise of the AFD in Germany in recent years.

> If you want to tell me that the population just can create a new party, look how well that works in the US

Most European countries have new popular parties come into existence regularly. Regularly.

Your voting system in the US is broken.

A proper dictator will immediately remove all potential power from army generals, police chiefs, political party leaders and so on. He will not even remotely allow any potential challengers that are capable of consolidating enough resources to even think of causing any trouble.

On the other hand, he will allow his establishment to feed off the system, so they become dependent on him and remain interested in maintaining status quo and stay within the line. Of course, this is reinforced with brutal crackdowns on any form of dissent. He makes everyone worthless and replaceable, and makes it seem that it is very easy to lose everything if you show any disloyalty or try to push for your interests in a wrong way.

In the country where I'm from, military chief commanders were just some planted nobodies that were rotated every year or so. All political establishment was fully loyal and were too weak to even have fantasies on grabbing power.

Which works in long time scales as long as the players agree that they will play by the rules of democracy, aka respect the institutions.

So democracy suffers from 2 main issues: 1) timeliness: some problems need to be solved now, not in 10 years. Example, need to decide your stance against Russia. 2) fragility from the inside: A malicious player can manipulate democratic institutions and convert it to an autocracy. See Russia, Turkey and Jan 6 USA.

Not sure how one can design a system robust to these two threats.

> Not sure how one can design a system robust to these two threats.

The US at various time has had a system robust to these threats. A prerequisite has been an educated and well-informed electorate with at least a large majority committed to a shared set of national values.

See: list of things that I’m clueless about.

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