The US, which has an incarceration rate roughly 5x that of China and the single largest prison population in the world, is notably absent from your authoritarian examples (other than blaming it on Trump of course lmao)
The US, which has an incarceration rate roughly 5x that of China and the single largest prison population in the world, is notably absent from your authoritarian examples (other than blaming it on Trump of course lmao)
we can’t agree that there are fundamental differences between what is commonly intended as authoritarian government (let’s say Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, …) and the average western country.
Yeah there’s differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That’s a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the “authoritarian governments” you list.
In fact, the way you choose Trump’s US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.
Society is constantly evolving with huge differences even noticeable in a lifespan. It means that obviously 100+ years ago, something unacceptable for modern standards was the norm. It also means that it’s ridiculous to bring up events of 100+ years ago to criticize the modern world.
To make an example: 80 years ago Europe was literally bombing Germany and Italy and their nazi-fascist regimes, but just a couple of decades later they were forming an alliance that eventually led to the EU. Even if today there are still nazi-fascist movements in the EU, and neo-fascist parties are even leading countries, one must be blinded by ideology to deny that there was an improvement. Improvement does not imply perfection.
Trump is a step back and I find his term horrifying. However, even in Trump’s America, even with all the regressions in terms of civil rights, even with the changes to shift even more money towards billionaires, even with what ICE is doing, even with all of that, it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world. Failing to acknowledge that in the name of pure ideology is simply nonsensical. “US = authoritarian regime” or “they exploit the south” may have some truth in it, but it’s such an extreme position to be unreasonable and, frankly, childish. It works only here, in a bubble in a corner of internet where everyone reinforce each other’s ideas and violently reject any different opinion.
Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?
Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?
Some people in my instance have been trying to argue against that point, but I honestly think that there’s a contradiction many leftists are bad at confronting, where they simultaneously believe that capitalism is an absolute evil that has never done anything good for anyone except for the top 0.001%, but at the same time the reason people in the imperial core accept capitalism is because they benefit from capitalism? ↩︎
What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
You can’t be serious. Iran checks all the marks of a dictatorship: there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy, there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
I’m not a fan of the US, but it would be dishonest to put them on the same level.
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
The Supreme Court is appointed by the President and the Senate, both elected democratically. Also the Supreme Court is part of the Judiciary power which is rarely directly elected. Judges do not make the laws but can give binding interpretations of existing laws or sentences. I can agree with you that the Supreme Court may have a political bias, but it’s not supposed to be ideological.
There are reports about press freedom. It’s not 100% in the US, actually the score is quite low for a western country, but it’s not as bad as in authoritarian regimes.
The representatives that people can vote for are already selected for by the bourgeoisie. Both parties represent capital, not the worker. It’s meant to give the impression of democratic input while maintaining the same brutal system of capitalism. Same with the press, it’s only “free” so far as the wealthy can buy and use it however they like.
All states are authoritarian. What matters is which class is in control of the state, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie. In the US, the imperialist bourgeoisie rule with an iron fist.
So every candidate of every party in every country is just a puppet of the capitalist overlords that rule the world and occasionally concede small victories to the blue collars to create the illusion that they are in charge. There is no way out through the system, because it’s all rigged.
Something like that?
Then I presume that you advocate for the proletarian revolution but are unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.
I understand your objection. I hope you understand that appointing judges is a strategy to guarantee their independence. Of course that presumes a level of moral integrity that not all presidents have, which is a weak point.
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The US, which has an incarceration rate roughly 5x that of China and the single largest prison population in the world, is notably absent from your authoritarian examples (other than blaming it on Trump of course lmao)
That’s because the US is not an authoritarian regime: there can be regular elections, there is freedom of speech, separation of powers, etc. It’s true that it’s far from being perfect https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2024
Now please don’t reply that it’s a single-party state with two options. It’s an old joke, it has some truth in it, but it’s just a joke.
Yeah there’s differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That’s a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the “authoritarian governments” you list.
In fact, the way you choose Trump’s US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.
Don’t put words that are not mine in my mouth.
Society is constantly evolving with huge differences even noticeable in a lifespan. It means that obviously 100+ years ago, something unacceptable for modern standards was the norm. It also means that it’s ridiculous to bring up events of 100+ years ago to criticize the modern world.
To make an example: 80 years ago Europe was literally bombing Germany and Italy and their nazi-fascist regimes, but just a couple of decades later they were forming an alliance that eventually led to the EU. Even if today there are still nazi-fascist movements in the EU, and neo-fascist parties are even leading countries, one must be blinded by ideology to deny that there was an improvement. Improvement does not imply perfection.
Trump is a step back and I find his term horrifying. However, even in Trump’s America, even with all the regressions in terms of civil rights, even with the changes to shift even more money towards billionaires, even with what ICE is doing, even with all of that, it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world. Failing to acknowledge that in the name of pure ideology is simply nonsensical. “US = authoritarian regime” or “they exploit the south” may have some truth in it, but it’s such an extreme position to be unreasonable and, frankly, childish. It works only here, in a bubble in a corner of internet where everyone reinforce each other’s ideas and violently reject any different opinion.
Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?
Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?
Some people in my instance have been trying to argue against that point, but I honestly think that there’s a contradiction many leftists are bad at confronting, where they simultaneously believe that capitalism is an absolute evil that has never done anything good for anyone except for the top 0.001%, but at the same time the reason people in the imperial core accept capitalism is because they benefit from capitalism? ↩︎
You can’t be serious. Iran checks all the marks of a dictatorship: there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy, there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
I’m not a fan of the US, but it would be dishonest to put them on the same level.
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
The Supreme Court is appointed by the President and the Senate, both elected democratically. Also the Supreme Court is part of the Judiciary power which is rarely directly elected. Judges do not make the laws but can give binding interpretations of existing laws or sentences. I can agree with you that the Supreme Court may have a political bias, but it’s not supposed to be ideological.
There are reports about press freedom. It’s not 100% in the US, actually the score is quite low for a western country, but it’s not as bad as in authoritarian regimes.
The representatives that people can vote for are already selected for by the bourgeoisie. Both parties represent capital, not the worker. It’s meant to give the impression of democratic input while maintaining the same brutal system of capitalism. Same with the press, it’s only “free” so far as the wealthy can buy and use it however they like.
All states are authoritarian. What matters is which class is in control of the state, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie. In the US, the imperialist bourgeoisie rule with an iron fist.
So every candidate of every party in every country is just a puppet of the capitalist overlords that rule the world and occasionally concede small victories to the blue collars to create the illusion that they are in charge. There is no way out through the system, because it’s all rigged.
Something like that?
Then I presume that you advocate for the proletarian revolution but are unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.
I understand your objection. I hope you understand that appointing judges is a strategy to guarantee their independence. Of course that presumes a level of moral integrity that not all presidents have, which is a weak point.
Lol: “there’s no point having this discussion if you’re not going to agree I’m right!”
Why are liberals such massive cowards?