From Vox: Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable

We discuss the various forms of government in 2305, one of which is authoritarianism, which has the following definition in wikipedia:

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms. Individual freedoms are subordinate to the state and there is no constitutional accountability under an authoritarian regime.

 They don't quite rise to the level of totalitarianism - again, Wikipedia:

Totalitarianism is a political system in which the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible, without any respect for human rights.

This is largely due to authoritarian government being limited by some external force, a strong church for example. Recent commentary has focused on the possibility that the United States - and much of western Europe - might be slipping into authoritarianism. For a good look at this argument, see:
The rise of American authoritarianism.

This article looks at life within an authoritarian regime actually looks like. What is a little frightening is that some of what he describes sounds like political life in the United States:

When Americans think of authoritarianism, they conjure the grimmest totalitarian states

The mental image that most Americans harbor of what actual authoritarianism looks like is fantastical and cartoonish. This vision has jackbooted thugs, all-powerful elites acting with impunity, poverty and desperate hardship for everyone else, strict controls on political expression and mobilization, and a dictator who spends his time ordering the murder or disappearance of his opponents using an effective and wholly compliant security apparatus. This image of authoritarianism comes from the popular media (dictators in movies are never constrained by anything but open insurrection), from American mythmaking about the Founding (free men throwing off the yoke of British tyranny), and from a kind of “imaginary othering” in which the opposite of democracy is the absence of everything that characterizes the one democracy that one knows.

Still, that fantastical image of authoritarianism is entirely misleading as a description of modern authoritarian rule and life under it. It is a description, to some approximation, of totalitarianism. Carl Friedrich is the best on totalitarianism, and Hannah Arendt of course on its emergence. But Arendt and Friedrich were very clear that totalitarianism is exceptional as a form of politics.

The reality is that everyday life under the kinds of authoritarianism that exist today is very familiar to most Americans. You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family. There are schools and businesses, and some people “make it” through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly investigate crimes and solve cases. There is political dissent, if rarely open protest, but in general people are free to complain to one another. There are even elections. This is Malaysia, and many countries like it.

Life is pretty normal, except that elections — which often exist — change nothing.

Everyday life in the modern authoritarian regime is, in this sense, boring and tolerable. It is not outrageous. Most critics, even vocal ones, are not going to be murdered, as Anna Politkovskaya was in Russia; they are going to be frustrated. Most not-very-vocal critics will live their lives completely unmolested by the security forces. They will enjoy it when the trains run on time, blame the government when they do not, gripe about their taxes, and save for vacation. Elections, when they happen, will serve the “anesthetic function” that Philippe Schmitter attributed — in the greatly underappreciated 1978 volume Elections without Choice — to elections in Portugal under Salazar.

Life under authoritarian rule in such situations looks a lot like life in a democracy. As Malaysia’s longtime Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad used to say, “if you don’t like me, defeat me in my district.” That this could never happen was almost beside the point

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Authoritarian Populism

That's term the authors of the Monkey Cage use to describe the Trump phenomenon. They think it is a growing trend.

- It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why.

Populist authoritarianism can best be explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term, ongoing social change.

Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class. That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive forms ofdemocratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for agencies of global governance.

This long-term generational shift threatens many traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries.

Pew Research Center: Super Tuesday showcases electorate’s growing racial, ethnic diversity

This might be what sets off the authoritarian minded part of the electorate.

- Click here for the article.

The U.S. electorate this year will be the country’s most diverse ever, and that is evident in several Super Tuesday states holding primaries or caucuses on March 1 in which blacks could have a significant impact.

In five of 12 Super Tuesday states, blacks account for at least 15% of the electorate, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 2014 census data. Black eligible voters have the largest footprint in Georgia (31%) and Alabama (26%), while Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas also have sizable black electorates.

In a reversal of historical migration trends, Southern states have seen their black populations increase more than twice as fast as non-Southern states since 1990. From 1910 to 1970, 6 million blacks left the South, with many pursuing industrial jobs in Northern cities in what is called the Great Migration. But since then, blacks haveincreasingly chosen to live in the South.

. . . Hispanics have a large presence in the Super Tuesday states of Texas and Colorado. In Texas, Hispanics make up 28% of the electorate and outnumber blacks 4.8 million to 2.2 million. In Colorado, Hispanics make up a rising share of eligible voters, standing at nearly 15% in 2014, up from nearly 13% in 2008. Overall, Hispanics favor the Democratic Party, but to a lesser degree than blacks. Exit polls in 2014 in some states showed significant shares of Hispanic voters supporting Republican candidates in races for governor and U.S. Senate.

Several other Super Tuesday states have largely white electorates. For example, whites make up 95% of eligible voters in Vermont and 88% of eligible voters in Minnesota.

From Vox: The rise of American authoritarianism

Some researchers think this is the key to understanding Trump supporters. Until recently each party contained supporters with authoritarian tendencies. Now it seems they are drifting towards the Republican Party.

Authoritarianism is a term we cover in 2305 when we look at ideology.

- Click here for the article.

Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.Trump embodies the classic authoritarian leadership style: simple, powerful, and punitive

These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.

From Politico: The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter And it’s not gender, age, income, race or religion.

They are authoritarians!

At least according to the author.

Authoritarianism happens to be one of the terms I want student to become familiar with in the early sections of the class, so here's a good introduction to the used in context.

- Click here for the article.

Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow.

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State

A peculiar take for our discussion of governing arrangements.

A recently published book argues that alcoholism in Russia has been promoted by the state - be it tsarist, communist, or whatever you choose to call it now - as a deliberate means of keeping the population in check and preserving autocracy.

Vodka has a political purpose. Its an interesting argument, because generally its held that nations like Russia tend to have populations that prefer iron-fisted autocratic rule, but seldom is there an explanation about why that's the case. According to this theory, the population doesn't really choose it at all. They are lulled into accepting autocratic -authoritarian rule. It's a twist on the bread and circuses that kept the Roman population entertained during the Roman Empire.

It was also a consistent source of revenue for the state.

- Click here for vodkapolitics.com.

- Here's a review of the book.

The work’s author, Mark Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, deftly weaves sociological data into a rather alarming portrait of a country brimming with binge drinkers. Presenting the book recently at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, Schrad cited World Health Organization data to show that Russians’ annual consumption of pure alcohol is roughly 15.7 liters per capita. Excluding children and abstainers, Schrad says that this figure boils down to the average Russian male drinker consuming two bottles of vodka and 13 beers per week.

Placing Russia in a broader context, Schrad suggested that Russia bucks geographic trends. Generally, as one travels northward, wine consumption turns to beer consumption. But Russians, who readily admit that wine and beer taste better, favor vodka since “it is something you do to get drunk. You down it as quickly as you can” since it tastes “horrible.”

Schrad contended that alcoholism is not “hard-wired” into Russian society. Instead, he argued that Russia’s problem with alcoholism is “an outcome of generations of autocratic government that has reaped the benefits of the intoxication of the population.”

Noting how Stalin tried to get his colleagues inebriated in order to manipulate them, Schrad argued that Russia’s rulers have applied this approach to their population for centuries. They see mass alcohol consumption as a means of keeping the population “discombobulated” and “off-balance” and “unable to mount a challenge to the government itself.”

Was the Crimea referendum legitimate

We will be discussing elections this week in 2305 and start off with a talk about the role of elections in different governing systems. In legitimate democracies they are intended to help connect the actions of government with the preferences of the general population - or at least the electorate.

In authoritarian systems they generally serve to provide a veneer of legitimacy to decisions made by governing authorities. There are suggestions that that might be what occurred a few days back in Crimea when an overwhelming majority of voters decided to break with the Ukraine and join the Russian federation.

Here's a skeptical take on the results:

To the surprise of absolutely no one, yesterday’s Crimean referendum on secession from Crimea and joining Russia resulted in a “yes” vote. What is, perhaps, somewhat striking is that the official results state that an incredible 96.7% of the voters voted yes. A 96.7% is almost never seen on anything at all controversial outside of places like North Korea – or, of course, the old Soviet Union, which Russian President Vladimir Putin served as a high-ranking KGB officer.

It is highly improbable that 96.7% would have voted yes in a genuinely free vote, since the Crimean population includes large Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar minorities that are overwhelmingly opposed to a return to Russian rule. Crimean officials are also reporting a high 83% turnout. If that figure is correct, it makes it unlikely that the 96.7% result is explicable by selective turnout. If, on the other hand, officials are lying about the turnout, they could be engaging in deception about the vote margin as well.

Thus, it is likely that the referendum result was “achieved” by fraud and/or intimidation – tactics which the Putin regime had previously resorted to in Russia itself. The likelihood of fraud is also suggested by the fact that even some Russian journalists were forcibly prevented from observing the vote count and had their camera smashed by officials.

Given Putin’s repression of opposition in Russia itself, Crimean residents inclined to vote “no” might have been scared into voting “yes” or just staying home. Even if Putin was not actually planning to punish those who voted against annexation, prudent Crimeans had no way of knowing that, and might understandably not be willing to accept even a small risk of punishment or official harrassment once Russian rule officially returns.

And here's a suggestion that the entire election was rigged to get a positive outcome. People may have only had the option to vote to join Russia:

For a start, no real choice was offered on the ballots, as many in the Western media took pains to note. At least, there was no choice to vote in favor of keeping the Crimean region as a semi-autonomous part of Ukraine, as it has been for many decades. Rather, the voters' choice was to either join Russia or allow the Russian-leaning Crimean legislature to decide for themselves who they would like to align with.

"Residents of Crimea, up to 60% percent of whom are Russian, were given a choice of either joining Russia or opting for more autonomy from Ukraine under the 1992 constitution. The status quo, in which Crimea is a semi-autonomous region of Ukraine, was not an option," reported USA Today.

Reuters offered more details, explaining that "there is no room on the ballot paper for voting 'Nyet' to control by Russia."

So, for a start, while the ballot offered two different questions, only one of which voters were allowed to check (or their ballots were to be considered "spoiled"), a Yes/No paradigm seemed to be offered, but wasn't really. The ballot question(s) themselves were rigged in favor of Russia.

Still, if the first option on the ballot, asking about reunification of Crimea with Russia as a part of the Russian Federation is considered "Da", and the second option, calling for "restoring the 1992 Constitution" was considered "Nyet", that still leaves a lot of voters who are said to have voted to join Russia, according to the officially reported results. The lack of an option to keep the status quo as is certainly tipped the entire affair towards Russia, but it doesn't tell us whether or not the "Da" option actually received 97.6% approval from voters.

No Free Press in Africa

Mohamed Keita, the Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, argues that China's increased influence in Africa is making the news media less able to report on problems across the continent and more likely to "focus on collective achievements and mobilize public support for the state."

Speaking of Ethiopia he states:

. . . today, journalists are denied independent access to sensitive areas and risk up to 20 years in prison if they report about opposition groups designated by the government as terrorists. “We are not supposed to take pictures of obviously malnourished kids,” an Ethiopia-based reporter recently told me. “We are effectively prevented from going to areas and health facilities where severely malnourished kids are, or are being treated.”

This silencing in turn frustrates the ability of aid groups to quickly mobilize funds when help is needed. And with civil society, the political opposition and the press severely restricted, there is hardly any domestic scrutiny over how the government uses billions of dollars of international assistance from Western governments.

Rwanda is another worrisome case. The volume of trade between Rwanda and China increased fivefold between 2005 and 2009. During the same period, the government has eviscerated virtually all critical press and opposition and has begun filtering Rwandan dissident news Web sites based abroad.

He tells us that following China's ascension as Africa's biggest trading partner, its news agency has infiltrated the continent and ensured that China's vision of the role of the press in society trumps that of the West:

Then there’s the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

In January, Beijing issued a white paper calling for accelerated expansion of China’s news media abroad and the deployment of a press corps of 100,000 around the world, particularly in priority regions like Africa. In the last few months alone, China established its first TV news hub in Kenya and a print publication in South Africa. The state-run Xinhua news agency already operates more than 20 bureaus in Africa. More than 200 African government press officers received Chinese training between 2004 and 2011 in order to produce what the Communist Party propaganda chief, Li Changchun, called “truthful” coverage of development fueled by China’s activities.

In 2301 this week we are covering the freedom of the press and the role a free press plays in fostering and maintaining individual freedom. This may help make that point. Limits on the press enable government to keep certain stories out of the public eye and retain an authoritarian character.

Adaptive Authoritarianism in China

The New York Review of Books has an analysis of how China's authoritative system has adapted in order to more effectively calm local rebellions.

. . . “adaptive authoritarianism.” As Peter L. Lorentzen of the University of California, Berkeley, has written, officials view protests as way to gauge popular discontent. Small-scale protests function as a feedback mechanism for the government of a country without an active civil society or elections. Far from being a harbinger of regime change, Lorentzen argues that, in China at least, they can stabilize the regime.
So while the regime overall remains repressive, it is taking a more nuanced approach to dealing with discontent. Bending, not breaking -- if that's an appropriate analogy. Limits still exist on what peopel can protest however:

. . . the government only allows the discussion to go so far. It’s okay to say that local officials are corrupt or that the real estate deal in question was wrong. But it is not acceptable to have protesters link up with each other in a national network. And it is certainly not acceptable to criticize the root cause of Wukan’s problems—China’s lack of checks and balances that allow local officials to rule like warlords for decades before local finally explode and the problems are finally addressed. These deep-structure issues are still taboo.
The greater degree of economic freedom allowed in China over the past two decades has led many to wonder when - not it - calls for political freedom will be heard throughout the nation. Western political theorists have always held that economic freedom precedes political freedom and that the latter inevitable follows the former. Perhaps this is a way for the regime to delay that transition, if not prevent it altogether.

As Chinese have become wealthier and better educated, they are demanding more control over their lives. In a more mature political system, civil society—the press, courts, non-governmental organizations, and civic associations—could help address situations like a village protest before they require the direct intervention of one of the country’s most powerful politicians.
It’s no coincidence either that the Wukan uprising was spurred by another growing worry in China: the country’s mounting economic challenges. China’s real estate bubble is deflating, inflation remains stubborn, and exports are facing new competition. These can only add to tensions in society, forcing leaders to stick more and more of their fingers in the political system’s holes. But given the élan of China’s millennia-old bureaucracy, the system itself does not seem at risk, at least in the absence of some far larger precipitating event. In the meantime, the lessons of Wukan may be that the country’s leaders can leap from wall to wall, plugging leaks and keeping the system working far longer than westerners can imagine.

The regime may be more solid than we think.

Authoritarianism in Equatorial New Guinea

For 2301, as we get comfortable with the various systems of government that exist around the world, here's an example of an authoritarian system: Equatorial New Guinea. The NYT points out that we have a tendency to work with authoritarian regimes depending on how doing so affects our strategic interests:

Officially and unofficially, Americans do business with one of the undisputed human rights global bad boys, Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s fourth biggest oil exporter. Its widely criticized record on basic freedoms has offered little barrier to broad engagement by the United States, commercially or diplomatically.

American oil companies have billions of dollars invested here. One American diplomat, using language that makes human rights advocates fume, praised the “mellowing, benign leadership” of the dictator in power for more than 30 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in 2009 cables released by WikiLeaks. And a leading American military contractor with strong Pentagon ties has a multimillion-dollar contract to protect his shores and help train his forces.

The country is an example of a common occurrence: oil wealthy nations that are also among the world's poorest. Somehow the resources flow into the hands of the leadership and do little to address the needs of the poor. 2301's might also want to note that the current leader of the country was overwhelmingly reelected last year.

Will the Tunisia Revolt Spill Over?

It seems that it already has - in Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen - but no telling if anything really changes in these countries and if any change comes close to democracy. Still, it seems interesting that the movement in one country is spilling over to its neighbors. Here's a comparison between these events in 2011 with those in 1989.

If Tunisia Becomes a Democracy, Will Other Arab Countries Follow?

Here's an argument that they will not, and it touches on what factors cause countries to become democratic:

How to explain the Tunisian revolution? By consulting Samuel Huntington—not the Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame, but the author of The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, published in 1991. His model is too complex to be laid out here in all of its subtleties. But the basic message, to borrow from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, is: “It’s the economy, stupid!” We should also add education, urbanization, and globalization—all those items that go into the tale “The Making of a Middle Class.” Tunisia has it all, and that is why it now sticks out like a bloody thumb from the rest of the Arab world, that vast arc from Rabat to Damascus where politics remains frozen, where the birth rate keeps dwarfing economic growth, and where King or Colonel is despotism’s name.

The Tunisian revolt fits Huntington’s model to a T. Looking at the third wave of democratization between 1974 and 1989, he found that rising wealth spells falling tyrants. How much money did it take? A per-capita income between $1,000 and $3,000, which would now be adjusted for inflation. Of the non-democracies which moved into that range in the 1970s and 1980s, three-quarters got rid of their overlords.

. . . why are the other Arab and Maghreb African countries—police states all—proving so immune to regime change (unless there is a little help from the U.S. military, as in Iraq)? Because they don’t make Huntington’s cut.

Not counting the petro-potentates (more about them later) and strife-torn Lebanon, Tunisia is the richest of them all. Its per-capita income is almost twice as high as neighboring Morocco, and it is ahead of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria by similar margins. The country is more urbanized (67 percent of the populace) than either Morocco (56 percent) or Egypt, (43 percent). Tunisia is also more educated: Its literacy is a bit higher than Egypt’s and a lot higher than Morocco’s, and it spends much more on education—7.2 percent of GDP, while Egypt devotes about half as much, and Morocco comes in at just 5.7 percent.

. . . If you are poor, you have neither the time nor the energy to engage in politics. If you are not educated, you lack the cultural skills to articulate your demands—to agitate and organize. And, if you are poor, uneducated, and thus isolated, as much of the Arab world is, then you have no benchmark against which to measure your misery. Sociologists call this the “demonstration effect.”

So don’t count on a Tunisian “demonstration effect” to set the rest of the Arab world aflame.

Zimbabwe Votes

The Christian Science Monitor covers the election in Zimbabwe and, given that there is only one choice available for voters asks:

Why hold a vote at all?

"Since liberation, the [ruling] ZANU-PF has see elections as a ritual that has to be gone through to give them legitimacy in the eyes of the region, the continent and the international community," says Ozias Tungwarara, a senior analyst for the Open Society Institute in Johannesburg. The ruling party is now desperate to have that legitimacy, after having lost the first round to Mr. Tsvangirai.

But, he says, "if you give the people even 20 percent of a chance to express themselves, there is no way the Mugabe regime would survive a vote," and thus, the regime uses violence to seal off any chance of legitimate political expression.

This touches on one of the reasons why nations hold elections, but not one of the more legitimate ones.

Lessons in Authoritarian Rule

Robert Mugabe gives an effective lesson in how to hold onto power despite solid opposition. Kill them and deny them the right to hold political rallies.

The UK hits him where it hurts.

The Trouble With Openess

As we discussed last week, the decision by Burmese military leaders to delay foreign aid and deny entry to foreign aid workers makes perfect sense from the perspective of a totalitarian regime that wishes to stay in charge. Foreign workers bring with them foreign ideas which can loosen your control. Efforts--successful-- to eradicate interior social institutions with their own values have the same effect.

Chinese decisions to allow aid, limited workers, and especially the foreign press put it in a different position that may cause the country to open up in ways and at a rate its leaders were not counting on. In a sense this is its own fault since the foreign press had been invited into the country in an apparent effort to ensure that coverage of the country prior to and during the Olympics was favorable.

The comes the earthquake. There's some bad timing for you. Thirty years ago, there would have been measures of tremors, official denials of severe damage and spotty reports of widespread damage. The reasons is obvious, no government wants to seem weak because that makes you vulnerable. This only works if a regime wishes to be isolated. Now that China wants to act on the world stage, the dynamic changes and can create problems for the continuance of the regime.

This is the subject of a worthwhile read in today's NYT:

A dash of openness can be a dangerous thing in an autocratic state.

Mikhail Gorbachev discovered this two decades ago when his campaign to inject some daylight into Soviet society doubled back on him like a heat-seeking missile.

Now China’s leaders are playing with the same volatile political chemistry as they give their own citizens and the world an unexpectedly vivid look at the earthquake devastation in the nation’s southwest regions. The rulers of cyclone-battered Myanmar, by contrast, are sticking with the authoritarian playbook, limiting access and even aid to the stricken delta region where tens of thousands of people were killed by the storm.

While China’s response to its natural catastrophe is certainly more humane, and is only a small step toward openness, it could set in motion political forces that might, over time, be unsettling. That’s especially true in an age of instant communications, even in a nation like China, which tries to control Internet access.

“When you start opening up and loosen controls, it becomes a slippery slope,” Jack F. Matlock Jr., the American ambassador to Moscow during much of the Gorbachev period, said last week as he watched the events in China. “You quickly become a target for everyone with a grievance and before long people go after the whole system.”

The author compares China's current situation with Russia's 23 years ago:

Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out of control.

As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union under Mr. Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet empire and dissolution of the Communist Party were not exactly what he had in mind when he took power in 1985 and launched his twin policies of glasnost (greater openness) and perestroika (political reform).

As events unfolded, it was like watching a scientist start a nuclear chain reaction that races out of control, eventually consuming him and all those around him.

Mr. Gorbachev realized his country was rotting from within, paralyzed by repression and ideological rigidity, a backward economy and a deep cynicism among Russians about their government. “We can’t go on living like this,” he told his wife, Raisa, hours before he was named Soviet leader, he recalled in his 1995 memoirs.

But he clearly had no inkling of where his initiatives were headed when, shortly after taking office, he broke new ground for a Kremlin leader by mingling with citizens in Leningrad and giving unscripted interviews.

In those early days of glasnost, it was hard to tell whether the changes were purely superficial or the start of something more profound.

He suggests that a tipping point was the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl when the regime first downplayed the event, then was forced to reveal what had happened over time. The forces that allowed a small degree of openness were then forced by outside pressures to allow more, which they could not control. This was exacerbated, ironically, with a second tipping point precipitated by an earthquake:

A striking moment of glasnost [openess] came with the killer earthquake in Armenia in December 1988. Faced with the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet citizens, and desperate for outside aid, the Kremlin lifted restrictions on travel to Armenia. Western reporters in Moscow were stunned to discover that they could just go to the airport and catch a flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, no advance government approval required. Foreign relief flights, including American military planes carrying food, water and medical supplies, were welcomed in Yerevan.

Sounds a lot like China today.

As the old regime frayed, Mr. Gorbachev wasn’t prepared for the assault of long-repressed political forces let loose by his reforms. The most potent was nationalism, the fierce pride in nationhood that Stalin and his successors had tried to suffocate in places like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; Armenia and Georgia; and throughout Eastern Europe.

Once uncorked, nationalism essentially overwhelmed Mr. Gorbachev, who, to his credit, choose not to try to hold together the Soviet empire by force.

He was rewarded for his efforts with the clumsy but wrenching coup attempt in August 1991 that gravely weakened him and empowered Boris Yelstin, who had broken with Mr. Gorbachev in 1987. Within months, the Soviet Union dissolved and Mr. Gorbachev was out of work.

Russia today, despite the restoration of authoritarian rule by Vladimir Putin, enjoys a degree of freedom that was inconceivable at the height of Communist rule. Glasnost helped make it that way.

China’s leaders may not take comfort in that thought.

As Mr. Matlock said last week, “If you remove the power of repressive state organs while stirring up a nation with many problems, you will get a process you can’t control.”

We will see, and it may be sooner than later. China has a history of brutal repression, but it has placed itself in a position where such repression will no longer by tolerated internally or externally.

Free market economists, notably Milton Friedman, have long held that economic freedom precedes political freedom. Some of this is due to the political strength given to those made rich by economic freedom and their increased ability to lobby for change. Some also has to do with the McDonald's rule we've discussed in class. A certain level of economic prosperity leads one to oppose military solutions to social problems that can compromise quality of life.

The Expanding Executive

Are we creeping towards authoritarianism?

The Political Impact of the Internet

Some posts in the Ethical Blogger underscore the unique impact of the web on politics and political evolution overall.

The first points out an upcoming article in Parade Magazine--the Sunday supplement--designed to introduce the older generation (even older than me) to the political impact of the the web. I'm not sure they are as out of touch as the article claims. Retirees have lots of time on their hands to figure out new ways to stay in touch with the grand kids. They have to be aware of the political uses of the web, but the article points out the impact of generations on political attitudes, which is a subject we will be broaching soon.

A handful of others show how the web makes official oppression more difficult to sustain, be it Chinese corruption, blogging under martial law, or providing opportunities for anonymous dissenters to challenge the system.

There's a good reason why repressive regimes try to limit access to the Internet.

The Clampdown Begins

Soldiers in Myanmar have begun clamping down on the protests. They've been shooting into crowds and dragging away troublesome monks.

It's standard totalitarian procedure. The monks apparently are a strong enough organization within the country that they believe they have the ability to force limits on the country's military rulers--which would make them mere authoritarians.

The rulers, if they are to keep the status quo, must demonstrate that they cannot be limited, thus the clampdown.

So that's were we are.

Authoritarianism in Venezuela

Hugo Chavez seems bent on establishing an authoritarian regime in Venezuela.

Aside from his recent decision to close Radio Caracas Television because of its critical stance towards him, he has sought to

- extend the amount of time he can serve as president.
- rule by decree.
- nationalize the energy sector.
- rewrite the Venezuelan Constitution to expand his power.

Authoritarian regimes are noteworthy because their efforts to expand power are checked by external forces. What external forces might check Chavez?