On Autocracy: Trump, Putin, the renewed strongman fetish, & the moral limits of autocratic rule

Erdogan is not an ideologue by any definition I would use, and Hitler wasn't really any more of an ideologue than Stalin: probably less in fact. Hitler really showed himself to have no actual policy outside of ethno-nationalism and anti-Marxism. He openly said that his economic policy was the lack of coherent economic policy.

Erdogan history and publically says that Islam is first for him. He praises and worships hardline Turkish nationalism and Islam. If you dont think Hitler who was friends with goebbles and himmler was not an ideologue then I dont know what to tell you. Racialism and world domination and hating jews was all him. Economix policy of Hitler is different he wss arrogsnt and also not a good military leader but he thought he was. and all his hardcore followers committed suicide rather then live in world without nazism. Stalin idk he did live frugal it is said but I dont think he was as true as Lenin was or Trotsky so the cause.
 
I should have specified: I am working under the presumption that the West is now fertile for autocrats to entrench themselves.

My question: if one were to take hold and shortcut the liberal democratic organs (like Trump seems to desire to do), what would the "the line" at which the liberal democratic institutions, presumably with popular support, reaffirmed themselves? Or, is such a line was especially elastic, what exactly would the regime look like?

I tend to say Putin and Erdogan would be more likely systems to develop than China.



You're preaching to the choir. I lectured him about their outdated economy, shit birthrates, and insufficient public investment, but all he could say was "GDP isn't everything: at least they'll have a nation state. Germany is doomed!" (I had mentioned Germany as positioning themselves to be a dynamic and powerful economic region leader). I didn't even bother with the response that, throughout history, GDP is as close to "everything" as can be said of any metric.

It depends what people want. Everyone is different. The mistake non religious non racial or tribal westerner seem to make is think the entire world thinks like they but they dont not everyone just care about economic and material wealth and ignore demographic and religious part of society. Which I am sure you see because like 45% your country voted for Trump I am guessing along lines of race, civil nationalism and anti social liberal politics. In my part of the world 90% of people easily would not fit in or be considered liberal by western standards people are nuts in 2nd and 3rd world countries. And in many 1st world to.

If someone really hate gay marriage and trans and other stuff it dont matter how good UK economy is they would prefer live in there own ethno state with no trans or gay people on TV or whatever. Some people want live in society were they can hear call to prayer everywhere and where all stores close down 5x a day for prayer.
 
But the point was specifically about the modern world. What you're talking about is a kind of pre-modern idea of society, and I'm pointing out that the specific example is spectacularly unsuited for modern challenges.
Well to be clear I'm not defending Russia as suited to the modern world but rather just trying to explain why someone might perceive it as that. Putin has crushed dissent in his home country in such a way that allows him to project an image of Russian consensus, not subjugation, and the sustained nature of his rule and propaganda has paid off as it seems people have come to buy, both domestically and internationally among those who are sympathetic to what he purports to represent(national unity, conservative family values etc).

Its a house of cards though and one wonders what will happen to Russia after Putin.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying social media sparked the unrest, there are a ton of social and economical reasons it took place in Egypt and Tunisia instead of the subzidized population of the Gulf. I'm just saying communications, through social media and other means like cellphones, were invaluable tools in organizing and keeping the protests going. Maybe I'm seeing this through a personal lens because I know people who went down to participate in the protests at Tahiri square just to hand out unlocked cellphones, so people could communicate, when the regime scrambled to keep the lid on the protests in the early stages.

I still believe the internet played a vital role in getting the word out. This might be too anecdotal true and certainly less important in Yemen, that was already volatile and conflict-ridden. But even then there was something unique about the Arab Spring, never before has the world and in extent the region been flooded by such a massive amount of information, text, photos etc. about ongoing developments. Personal videos of the protests reached across the world in an instant and didn't have to be smuggled out in secret. Twitter was more up to date than the biggest newspapers and so on. It kind of swept across the middle east in that way. Certainly, it came with its own amount of lies, distortions and misinformation but this aspect of the protests shouldn't be undervalued. In many ways it was result of the old middle eastern regimes losing control over the information flow. How do you organize protests in North Korea?
Fair enough, you don't seem to have as exaggerated a view of the role of social media as some and I figured as much from the beginning which is why I wasn't trying to point the finger at you.

That said, I think the role of social media over there has some similar issues to what it has in the West when it comes to protest movements. The ease of communications makes mobilization very quick and easy on a scale never before seen but I think the major drawback is that these networks are too fluid and spontaneous and thus not as durable.

Look at the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The dream that a generation of tech savvy, Western oriented youths was going to topple the old regime and inherit the Middle East has mostly evaporated. Even in Tunisia elements of the old guard are creeping back into power as the economic decay and the security issues regionally draw people back to the safety blanket of the law and order authoritarians.

I'm just very cynical about the practical possibilities that the internet and social media bring to social activism and I think there is something to be said for more traditional forms of organizing social movements and I suspect that is one reason why the Brotherhood movements have been much successful in the power vacuums that have opened up. And in Yemen they were able to topple the state by relying on traditional forms of social organization which I think are more effective in the long run than the newer, tech based ones.

To try and keep this related to thread, I don't think we should count on the internet and social media and the youth to keep us safe from despots, it didn't work in the Middle East and I have a feeling it'd fail harder in the West.
 
Erdogan is not an ideologue by any definition I would use, and Hitler wasn't really any more of an ideologue than Stalin: probably less in fact. Hitler really showed himself to have no actual policy outside of ethno-nationalism and anti-Marxism. He openly said that his economic policy was the lack of coherent economic policy.
I agree and its why I think characterizing his rise and the backsliding to authoritarianism in Turkey as a slide to Islamism misses the point. He of course did advance certain policies related to religion, like lifting the ban on the hijab for university students and civil servants. But he was primarily a neoliberal during his rise and early rule, he just played some Islamic identity politics to gain and maintain power. In that sense he is more like Modi in India than Khomeini or even Morsi.

Both(Modi and Erdogan) railed against an entrenched, corrupt, secular elite by rallying voters around a religious identity and advocating liberalizing economic reforms(though it seems that Erdogan's early policies were more effective than Modi's). Erdogan's authoritarian tendencies reared their head as he seemed to become independent of the AKP and established himself as an actor above even his own party(for instance he even broke a party rule concerning term limits) and so in that way he's more in line with the paternalistic authoritarian tradition established by none other than Ataturk himself. In way, he's the Ataturk of the 21st century.

The likes of Erdogan and Modi are as bad as I think the US can get. You inklings of it in Trump but we're at least well before the point that Turkey is. I can't imagine a Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin coming to power here, we wouldn't tolerate it. Either we'd have the people revolt and remove them before it gets that bad or, and this is more likely, some elite faction displaces them with more tolerable authoritarian rule.
 
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@Trotsky

Zizek talks about this a lot and in his mind, the model is Modi and Erdogan and Putin so I'm bouncing off his thoughts here. You have a leader who is a nationalist populist in terms of rhetoric but who has no qualms accepting and working within the global capitalist system. In hindsight it makes sense that we got to this point, its hard escape or effectively resist the global system but its also a hard sell to get people to accept it through cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The people who do accept it are already cosmopolitan and multicultural and, often, well off under the system and then they wonder why the rest of their countrymen can't see things the way they do.
 
I agree and its why I think characterizing his rise and the backsliding to authoritarianism in Turkey as a slide to Islamism misses the point. He of course did advance certain policies related to religion, like lifting the ban on the hijab for university students and civil servants. But he was primarily a neoliberal during his rise and early rule, he just played some Islamic identity politics to gain and maintain power. In that sense he is to more like Modi in India than Khomeini or even Morsi.

Spot on (from what I can gather, which is probably substantially less than you). Erdogan just seems to hedge himself with Islamism: I don't think he is meaningfully invested in it (like, as you said, Khomeini).

Both(Modi and Erdogan) railed against an entrenched, corrupt, secular elite by rallying voters around a religious identity and advocating liberalizing economic reforms(though it seems that Erdogan's early policies were more effective than Modi's). Erdogan's authoritarian tendencies reared their head as he seemed to become independent of the AKP and established himself as an actor above even his own party(for instance he even broke a party rule concerning term limits) and so in that way he's more in line with the paternalistic authoritarian tradition established by none other than Ataturk himself. In way, he's the Ataturk of the 21st century.

The likes of Erdogan and Modi are as bad as I think the US can get. You inklings of it in Trump but we're at least well before the point that Turkey is. I can't imagine a Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin coming to power here, we wouldn't tolerate it. Either we'd have the people revolt and remove them before it gets that bad or, and this is more likely, some elite faction displaces them with more tolerable authoritarian rule.

Very well said, and all that you just expanded on seems to support the parallelism of Trump and Erdogan as just power hungry faux-populist reactionaries who hedge themselves with traditionalism, religion, etc.
 
Putting trump alongside Erdogan and Putin is buttfucking retarded.



And I try to never use that word, but in cases like this, there’s no other word that describes it better.


You’re better than this OP.
 
A "benevolent' dictator would only last while the going is good. Would be a slippery slope to more and more autocracy.
Well I mean the two parties tried to run a Clinton and a bush again. How far off are we? Hell people are still experiencing hypovolemia from vaginal bleeding after the Clinton loss. Maybe we should run a Kennedy or two
 
Well I mean the two parties tried to run a Clinton and a bush again. How far off are we? Hell people are still experiencing hypovolemia from vaginal bleeding after the Clinton loss. Maybe we should run a Kennedy or two



They tried, his disgusting cum covered face was a national embarrassment.
 
Erdogan is not an ideologue by any definition I would use, and Hitler wasn't really any more of an ideologue than Stalin: probably less in fact. Hitler really showed himself to have no actual policy outside of ethno-nationalism and anti-Marxism. He openly said that his economic policy was the lack of coherent economic policy.

Hitler was a fanatic. Stalin was a gangster. Morally, there is little to choose between them. Stalin was responsible for more Russian deaths than Hitler. Both were utterly repellent human beings. The only clear daylight between them was their motivations.
 
@Trotsky

Zizek talks about this a lot and in his mind, the model is Modi and Erdogan and Putin so I'm bouncing off his thoughts here. You have a leader who is a nationalist populist in terms of rhetoric but who has no qualms accepting and working within the global capitalist system. In hindsight it makes sense that we got to this point, its hard escape or effectively resist the global system but its also a hard sell to get people to accept it through cosmopolitan multiculturalism. The people who do accept it are already cosmopolitan and multicultural and, often, well off under the system and then they wonder why the rest of their countrymen can't see things the way they do.

Yes, I think that's an astute observation, and yes, that is the archetype for autocrats in developed countries (pure communists would have a hell of a time nationalizing private equity in a developed country).

I am not a Leninist, but his quote "fascism is capitalism in decay" always returns to my mind when I see these right-wing authoritarian movements, as fascism does seem to me to be the necessary eventual product of insufficiently regulated private capital and allowance of its influence on the state.

Where are you from again, if you don't mind my asking?

Hitler was a fanatic. Stalin was a gangster. Morally, there is little to choose between them. Stalin was responsible for more Russian deaths than Hitler. Both were utterly repellent human beings. The only clear daylight between them was their motivations.

Yeah, I think, superficially at least, those are accurate characterizations. However, I do question the famed sincerity of Hitler's beliefs given that his doctrine was rather lazy and his policies shapeless. While I certainly agree that Stalin was just a thug, I think Hitler had his own fair amount of pure power hunger.

Their respective rises to power, however, are fascinatingly dissimilar. Stalin would have never risen to the top as a politician, as he was an introverted and outwardly unimpressive 5'5, foreign-born bureaucrat with zero speaking charisma. He could only have risen through a merit-based system. Meanwhile, Hitler could never have risen through solely through a party apparatus as he was hysterical, dim-witted, unpleasant, and lacking in social tact. He could only have risen by appealing to the masses.
 
Erdogan is not an ideologue by any definition I would use, and Hitler wasn't really any more of an ideologue than Stalin: probably less in fact. Hitler really showed himself to have no actual policy outside of ethno-nationalism and anti-Marxism. He openly said that his economic policy was the lack of coherent economic policy.

Of course, Hitler had an ideology he was a National socialist. You could probably make an argument that he was the biggest ideologue in recent history.
He believed in his version of National socialism or Nazism if you so will all the way. To an extent that he thought it was necessary to put people to death on an industrial scale.
That is some commitment to the cause.
 
Putting trump alongside Erdogan and Putin is buttfucking retarded.



And I try to never use that word, but in cases like this, there’s no other word that describes it better.


You’re better than this OP.
I think OP means it more in terms of kind than degree. If there is an authoritarian scale of 1-10, than Trump is a 2.5, Erdogan a 5, Putin an 8, and Stalin/Saddam a 10.

So when we're comparing them we're grading them on a curve that is a little rough on Trump. Like I said earlier I think there are parallels between Trump and Erdogan but I wouldn't want to overstate it. Trump hasn't jailed thousands of dissidents or fired tens of thousands of civil servants or amended the constitution in his favor through a slanted referendum.

And even compared to Erdogan Putin is on another level.
 
Well I mean the two parties tried to run a Clinton and a bush again. How far off are we? Hell people are still experiencing hypovolemia from vaginal bleeding after the Clinton loss. Maybe we should run a Kennedy or two

Putting trump alongside Erdogan and Putin is buttfucking retarded.



And I try to never use that word, but in cases like this, there’s no other word that describes it better.


You’re better than this OP.

I originally didn't have Trump in the title. But none of you right-wingers post in threads that have to do with philosophy, political theory, dense issues, or really anything that doesn't involve Trump/Hillary/Muslims/BlackLivesMatter.

So, after 12 hours, I changed the title and put in "Trump" and, wallah, I attracted two of you within an hour.

Also, Trump is much, much more openly desirous of autocratic ability than Putin ever was. And his supporters are idolizing the two simultaneously.
 
I agree and its why I think characterizing his rise and the backsliding to authoritarianism in Turkey as a slide to Islamism misses the point. He of course did advance certain policies related to religion, like lifting the ban on the hijab for university students and civil servants. But he was primarily a neoliberal during his rise and early rule, he just played some Islamic identity politics to gain and maintain power. In that sense he is to more like Modi in India than Khomeini or even Morsi.

Both(Modi and Erdogan) railed against an entrenched, corrupt, secular elite by rallying voters around a religious identity and advocating liberalizing economic reforms(though it seems that Erdogan's early policies were more effective than Modi's). Erdogan's authoritarian tendencies reared their head as he seemed to become independent of the AKP and established himself as an actor above even his own party(for instance he even broke a party rule concerning term limits) and so in that way he's more in line with the paternalistic authoritarian tradition established by none other than Ataturk himself. In way, he's the Ataturk of the 21st century.

The likes of Erdogan and Modi are as bad as I think the US can get. You inklings of it in Trump but we're at least well before the point that Turkey is. I can't imagine a Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin coming to power here, we wouldn't tolerate it. Either we'd have the people revolt and remove them before it gets that bad or, and this is more likely, some elite faction displaces them with more tolerable authoritarian rule.

you guys have very high criteria of what is ideologue and what is not. I think ideologues are less common in 1st world countries but in coutnries were race, tribe, ethnonationalism, and religion are really strong which is all this part of world. Then i think ideologues of varrying types are the strong majority of politicians. At least most are ideological bias to there religion or race or both whatever.

How you do not think erdogan is not idealogue does not make sense to me. Trotsky said he did not think Hitler was eitehr which just is i dont understand. Hitler was willing to die for his cause and did. Will Erdogan ever admit Islam is wrong and that turkish nationalism is wrong? If not then is he not ideologue?
 
Of course, Hitler had an ideology he was a National socialist. You could probably make an argument that he was the biggest ideologue in recent history.
He believed in his version of National socialism or Nazism if you so will all the way. To an extent that he thought it was necessary to put people to death on an industrial scale.
That is some commitment to the cause.

I actually think this is, at least partially, a considerable misconception. Hitler and the National Socialists never really had an actual ideology for governance: all they had was anti-Jews, anti-Communists, anti-Social Democrats and nationalism, trailing into authoritarianism. Hitler really didn't show any commitment to any governmental principles throughout his reign. I have very little doubt he would have spanned the entire governmental spectrum to sustain power.

Stalin, on the other hand, despite perhaps having no ideology himself, was seriously limited by the dictates of the Bolshevik bureaucracy.
 
I originally didn't have Trump in the title. But none of you right-wingers post in threads that have to do with philosophy, political theory, dense issues, or really anything that doesn't involve Trump/Hillary/Muslims/BlackLivesMatter.

So, after 12 hours, I changed the title and put in "Trump" and, wallah, I attracted two of you within an hour.

Also, Trump is much, much more openly desirous of autocratic ability than Putin ever was. And his supporters are idolizing the two simultaneously.
Literally hitler imho. We’re all just too blind. We gotta believe! The truth is out there.


Or


Maybe he’s a populist


Probably hitler though
 
Would we stop at a relatively benevolent and minimally oppressive dictator like Josip Broz Tito? Would we stop at a more generally oppressive dictator with benevolent populist aims like Muammar Gaddafi or Fidel Castro? Would we slide further yet to permit a purely nationalistic dictator with little ideology like Putin, Erdogan, or Hitler? Or could we even be fertile for a more tyrannical, violent, and non-ideological dictator like Stalin, Mussolini, or Hussein?
I think it would end up like modern day China. The west has too much money invested around the world to become fully nationalistic or communist. And little will to policy every little aspect of human existence. I also don't see the culture of the strongmen being that prevalent. But a dictatorship led by a faceless party or a group of corporations focused on economical growth and the suppression of dissent is a possibility.
 
Spot on (from what I can gather, which is probably substantially less than you). Erdogan just seems to hedge himself with Islamism: I don't think he is meaningfully invested in it (like, as you said, Khomeini).
Khomeini wasn't messing around, compared to him I'd say even the Egyptian Brotherhood are simply playing Islamic identity politics with some general economic social justice notions derived loosely from the religion.
Where are you from again, if you don't mind my asking?
Born and raised in the good ole US of A.
you guys have very high criteria of what is ideologue and what is not. I think ideologues are less common in 1st world countries but in coutnries were race, tribe, ethnonationalism, and religion are really strong which is all this part of world. Then i think ideologues of varrying types are the strong majority of politicians. At least most are ideological bias to there religion or race or both whatever.

How you do not think erdogan is not idealogue does not make sense to me. Trotsky said he did not think Hitler was eitehr which just is i dont understand. Hitler was willing to die for his cause and did. Will Erdogan ever admit Islam is wrong and that turkish nationalism is wrong? If not then is he not ideologue?
For me an ideologue is someone who is committed to an ideology and in the case of a politician someone who is committed to putting that ideology into practice. Erdogan seems to me more of a self serving authoritarian type. He'll use Islamic identity politics when it suits him, as it did early on in his career, but he can switch to something like Turkish nationalism, as he has done recently.
 
Well to be clear I'm not defending Russia as suited to the modern world but rather just trying to explain why someone might perceive it as that. Putin has crushed dissent in his home country in such a way that allows him to project an image of Russian consensus, not subjugation, and the sustained nature of his rule and propaganda has paid off as it seems people have come to buy, both domestically and internationally among those who are sympathetic to what he purports to represent(national unity, conservative family values etc).

Its a house of cards though and one wonders what will happen to Russia after Putin.

Fair enough, you don't seem to have as exaggerated a view of the role of social media as some and I figured as much from the beginning which is why I wasn't trying to point the finger at you.

That said, I think the role of social media over there has some similar issues to what it has in the West when it comes to protest movements. The ease of communications makes mobilization very quick and easy on a scale never before seen but I think the major drawback is that these networks are too fluid and spontaneous and thus not as durable.

Look at the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The dream that a generation of tech savvy, Western oriented youths was going to topple the old regime and inherit the Middle East has mostly evaporated. Even in Tunisia elements of the old guard are creeping back into power as the economic decay and the security issues regionally draw people back to the safety blanket of the law and order authoritarians.

I'm just very cynical about the practical possibilities that the internet and social media bring to social activism and I think there is something to be said for more traditional forms of organizing social movements and I suspect that is one reason why the Brotherhood movements have been much successful in the power vacuums that have opened up. And in Yemen they were able to topple the state by relying on traditional forms of social organization which I think are more effective in the long run than the newer, tech based ones.

To try and keep this related to thread, I don't think we should count on the internet and social media and the youth to keep us safe from despots, it didn't work in the Middle East and I have a feeling it'd fail harder in the West.

Without taking this thread more off-topic I agree with your main points here. Especially how the Arab Spring was painted in Western media as a "new generation" reshaping the region; they would be the drivers of a new "western-friendly" Middle East. I mean Egypt is a giant country; the middle class of Cairo can't represent the interests of the entire population. There is a chasm between Istanbullus and the cities of eastern Turkey just like there is a clash of interests between different parts of America.
That said it's a bit unfair to not aknowledge this aspect as it was in many ways driven by youth who was tired of corruption and lack of opportunities where social media, with it's quick spread of information, played an essential part. Then again I agree with you about its drawbacks, established movements like MB certainly capitalised on the lack of cohesion of the protest movements(the voter turnout was very sad also). I shall keep on being optimistic.
 
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