Astral Codex Ten

authoritarianism

4 min read

authoritarianism

Article

authoritarianism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 09, 2021 and April 06, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “They don’t even map cleanly to libertarianism vs. authoritarianism”; “when authoritarianism finally came for it”. It most often appears alongside Soviet Union, America, American consulate.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: April 06, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great. This was the vibe I got from Gabriel Over The White House (sorry, subscriber-only post), the movie exhorting FDR to become a fascist dictator. So many obviously good policies had built up behind the veto point that we needed a Great Man to come in, sweep them away, and satisfy the people's cries for justice. Obviously at its worst this thread can lead to authoritarianism.
Inline links: vetocracy, Gabriel Over The White House
These threads don't cleanly map to the modern left-right political spectrum. The first contains Jane Jacobs and anti-colonialists coexisting uneasily alongside religious fundamentalism and wisdom-of-repugnance-style arguments against homosexuality. The second contains Lenin, Mussolini, the Equal Rights Amendment, and neoliberal reformers. They don't even map cleanly to libertarianism vs. authoritarianism; the first has a libertarian streak, but could presumably justify various monarchies and theocracies; the second has clear authoritarian elements, but would also include extreme libertarians who want to abolish the state and run everything on market principles.
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism? Deng Xiaoping was a really smart guy, he put a lot of effort into trying to build a multipolar oligarchy, and . . . it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. Xi just walked in and took over.
Reading about Xi increases my confidence in democracy relative to other forms of government. As non-democracies go, China under Deng, Jiang, and Hu seemed like one of the best. But under the surface, it was sprouting factionalism, patronage, and corruption, and when authoritarianism finally came for it, it put up such a pathetic fight that the whole thing ended behind closed doors and we’ll never really know what happened. RIP multipolar oligarchic China, you deserved better.