A clarification for my haters
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Illiberal democracy
1 min read
The article describes a political system where elections still occur but authoritarian control is exercised through informal violence and intimidation rather than formal state capacity - this is the defining characteristic of illiberal democracies where democratic forms persist alongside erosion of liberal rights
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Sturmabteilung
12 min read
The author explicitly describes uniformed fascist stormtroopers who carry sticks, attend paramilitary training camps, control neighborhood businesses, and engage in political violence - directly paralleling the SA's role in Nazi Germany, which the article's Declan character openly admires
In the comments for my last post, someone asked, “If your country is so fascist, why aren’t you in a concentration camp?”
Well...our country has a problem with state capacity. We have a problem of chronic absenteeism in our schools—teachers draw a paycheck and don’t show up to school for months on end. Everything in our country is slow and creaky and inefficient, even our fascism. We are not rich like the U.S.: we do not have the ability to put millions of people in jail.
Instead, control is exerted in an ad-hoc fashion. Basically, if an individual fascist decides to kill you, then they can. They can do it either solo, by coming to your house and beating or stabbing you to death—or they can incite some kind of mob to come and do it for them. And they will almost never be punished for this crime, if they do it in the name of the cause.
But they select their targets judiciously. I am from a highly-educated upper-middle-class family, and I belong to the Trinitarian faith, so it’s unlikely that a fascist would decide to kill me. People like me often get doxxed, deluged with hate mail, etc, but we usually don’t get murdered. There are various reasons for this, but mostly it’s because of class-deference. Both demagogues and stormtroopers have some vestigial respect for the former ruling class. This is why, in the United States, you have Ben Shapiro and Peter Thiel going on New York Times podcasts—they want the approval of the old liberal elite.
Not that people like me can’t get punished in various ways. We can definitely lose our jobs, lose our housing, get socially ostracized. But people generally expect folks like me to hate the regime, and if we talk shit on this regime that’s somewhat acceptable. After all, there still exists an opposition party that continues to contest these elections that are, to a large extent, conducted democratically. Fascism has decisively beaten mainstream liberalism, and as a result the fascists aren’t particularly afraid of people like me.
In fact, because this regime is fueled by dissatisfaction with the old ruling class, the regime needs people like me—liberals—to stick around, as a pinata they can beat upon rhetorically.
And that’s the real reason why most people of my class don’t critique this regime. We are demoralized. We are unpopular. We had our ...
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