Benevolent Dictator
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Benevolent Dictator
If we succumb to dictatorship, will you even notice? Will you be allowed to?
The Hitler analogy continues to do us a great disservice when it comes to predicting dictatorships. Few dictatorships are as vile and murderous. Expecting Hitler makes it hard to recognize a dictatorship unfolding in front of our eyes. After all, a dictator would just have to be obvious, right?
Dictatorship as a concept wasn’t always burdened with connotations of such evil. A simple case for dictatorship was that any system of government becomes encumbered by accretions of power and constricted by rigid, immutable rules. These obstructions need cleaned out, but the system of government impedes reform. The dictator merely steps in to take unrestricted powers for a time, suspending constitutional restraints so as to do some needed reforming.
One particularly strong case for dictatorship from the dictator’s perspective might be: “Only I can fix it.” Now, not everyone who believes himself indispensable is a dictator, surely. But believing such a thing about oneself enough to boast of it publicly would have to count as a harbinger.
There’s always going to be a significant portion of the populace who believe the government system is hopelessly blocked and bottled up, that it requires to be forcibly reset. They might not result in calls for dictatorship. But if it is offered, it will seem like the only method left to achieve the ends. If the traditions of government need to be suspended in the meantime, that is a price worth paying. A dictatorship is as simple as that: suspending the rules that place limits on power, that define boundaries, that limit terms of office and spell out succession schemes.
Accepting the means of dictatorship to achieve the ends of drastic reforms brings with it a different problem: It attracts the wrong people. It draws the ones whose egos permit them to dispense with personal restraint, the ones who see traditions of checks and balances as unnecessarily restrictive.
The dictator doesn’t worry about majority support, but rather assumes it. An excessively large ego enables him to believe himself always right, always justified. Dissent is (or should be) criminal, according to this reasoning. The rules must be changed to make it so, and enforced to set examples.
If we are sliding into a dictatorship, I would be on the lookout for signs of criminalized dissent. If we’re waiting to see concentration camps and gulags, we won’t see them—not even when they arrive, should they do so. Speculating publicly about their existence would be a crime by the time they were erected, after all.
If we are sliding into dictatorship, I would watch out for efforts to thwart elections as illegitimate, as unreasonable obstructions across the path of getting things done for the greater good, in the name of lasting reform. Suppressing dissent is a means to that end. Writing new rules to criminalize it may be too difficult, so encouraging the dictatorship’s ardent supporters to harass and threaten dissidents might suffice do the trick.
Status quo bias makes it hard to spot dictatorships. Today looks like yesterday. And yesterday looked a lot like the day before—and so on, ad infinitum. The worrywarts loudly warning about dictatorship have always warned of dictatorship. At least they always have done so when politicians and reforms they opposed were on the agenda. It’s just another day of the week whose name ends in “day”.
Alarmists are just alarmists, and you can get used to the alarmism as part of the status quo. The ones whose oxen are about to be gored are alarmed. It’s to be expected.
How can we tell when dictatorship is no longer a threat, but a reality? Will we recognize it when it arrives? Will enough people care? Will it matter if they do?
One of the characteristics of the suppression of dissent that we've seen over the past decade or so is that the rules change very quickly. Among the Very Online, or people in government or academia, it seems that people don't realize they're "dissenting" until they're attacked by peers or threatened by management for something they thought was perfectly reasonable.
It's the, "Don't miss a memo," regime.
It seems to me that people with a wide variety of political perspectives are eager to make it illegal to disagree with them. If that mechanism is unavailable, there are others, such as professional organizations that issue official rulings against certain opinions. For example, it's career suicide to be a "Zionist" in a growing number of fields, and "Zionist" is assumed to include all Jewish people, just for convenience.
Good morning.
I found a 1949 Silvertone radio going through my Mom's stuff. I plugged it in to see if it worked and experienced the extent to which "warming up" impacted performance.
And I broke it. Turned the tuning knob too far.
And I fixed it - the tuner is driven by a string and I broke the string. Reassembling it was like threading a sewing machine without a diagram.