The new authoritarianism
voxeu.org
voxeu.org
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.