I’m just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc… Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they’ve done? What do they exactly like about them?
Aren’t these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?
The short answer is that they think the authoritarian is on their side.
The long answer is that people in groups are stupid and they have been manipulated into thinking the authoritarian is on their side
Those leaders offer simple answers to complex social problems and claim to restore their country to the halcyon days of yore. The days when there were no immigrants, liberals, degeneracy or whatever “came later to ruin the country.”
Also the voters may believe that voting against their interests somehow benefits them.
Some other factors that I have noticed -
- Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
- The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
- Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.
Point 1: Yes, FPTP is totally shit in most if not all situations. Point 2: Yes, it is like “I better vote for someone who wants to fuck me, but is good at it, than for someone who wants to do good, but might not be as good in it.”
I think it comes down to not understanding who they are and what does, infact, benefit them. This state is induced by design. These are professional human traffickers, and they deal in trading suffering for power.
The covid lock down in North Korea for example. Why? My understanding is that it is just to hold the seat of power, whatever that means to the ruling people. Letting in food or people or medicine would introduce am outside factor that offers something the current ruling class can not offer. So shut it down.
It’s greed…average, kind, simple people are screwed over all in the name of ego or what have you.
I’m not really sure there is an answer at all anymore. People suffer, because we are conscious beings. That is a pretty unnatural state to be in, when you think about it.
All we can really do is alleviate the suffering we encounter in our everyday lives at the end of the day, and try to be better people, and maybe one day far from now, we will all have this understanding of ourselves
Demagoguery, something that Socrates critiqued as a product of democratic systems.
Socrates imagined an election between a doctor and a candy store owner. The doctor would tell the populace what they didn’t want to hear.
As Socrates described it, the candy store owner would say of the physician that he works many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions, tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like. What fun is that? The candy store owner, however, would offer sweets and tasty things. He would appeal to what people wanted, not what they needed. He would provide easy and popular answers to all their difficult problemsunfortunately we have too many candy store politicians across the globe.
Or, distilled into a modern cliché: “What is popular is not always right; what is right is not always popular.” Elections are contests of popularity, not contests of thoughtfulness or morality.
In Spain the government decided that housing is a basic human right. Sounds awesome, right? But the population voted for its right-wing opposition anyway because immigrant bad.
Problem is that people disagree on who’s the candy store owner. “Let’s make housing a human right” may look like candy if you don’t fully believe in their actual plans to make housing available at reasonable prices.
It’s always wild seeing reading about ancient civilizations having the same exact conversations and challenges we’re still having today.
Well, in Russia, Putin is having his opponents killed/thrown in jail. It’s not a democracy, like in NK where Kim have 99.9% of the vote.
Went here to write this.
Source: I’ve left Russia, where I’ve been born, after war started. Left there my whole family and all friends.
Must be hard, hope you’re doing ok 👍
Not as hard as for people from Ukraine, so, nothing to worry about.
Putin and his government has been killing and putting their opponents to prison since 2000-s. At the same time they were telling older people, that if they chose anyone from opposition, Russia will return to its darkest ages.
While doing this, they closed or took under their control all indepent media and made it illegal to say something, that doesn’t fit their narrative.
And now people wondering why Russians aren’t protesting or fighting that regime.
A bigger problem is that most of the people in Russia actually support Putin. It is a democracy, just not a liberal one.
Russians who live in other countries support Putin and vote for politicians who support Putin. Nobody will throw a Russian in jail for protesting against Putin in my country. But few Russians actually do that.
The same reason Republicans still manage to win elections… through massive amounts of fraud and “gaming the system”. People don’t understand how thoroughly “representative democracy” is rigged - it can barely even be called “representative,” never mind “democratic.”
You also have Democrats willing to work with Republicans to carve out their own gerrymandering districts. Jim Clyburn was recently exposed for helping the Republicans in his state carve up the biggest black majority city into small sections diluted by the suburban white voters. This created only one black majority area which is where Clyburn runs.
If it were properly sectioned off then maybe two or three districts could be made with higher black populations that would have to compete to maybe have black friendly candidates.
Jim Clyburn is an Uncle Tom like traitor to democracy. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-rep-james-clyburn-protected-his-district-at-a-cost-to-black-democrats
Democracies work when the voting populace is educated and informed. Unfortunately, humanity willfully avoids being either in favor of opinion and bias.
It’s not “humanity ignoring” it’s propaganda and misinfo.
Might as well be both.
💀
Step 1. Take control over all types of media Step 2. Eliminate opposition Step3. ??? Step 4. Profites !
People keep voting for them because they foster and environnement where there is no one else to vote for.
Last election in Turkey may have looked like a close call for Erdogan. But during the campaign he got over 85% of media coverage, while the other candidates have to share the crumbs (I am pulling those numbers out of my ass).
The simple answer is people are stupid, and half of them are even stupider then you might think they are.
I would specify a bit, “stupid” is so broad and not really easy to see what’s actually going wrong.
People are biased and irrational by default. Beliefs do not require evidence, they are mostly formed just by hearing about things from an authorative voice, e.g. your parents, friends, or the media.
People also are by default all in on a belief, or all out. In their minds, admitting even one good thing about the opposite side is unforgivable treason, admitting just one bad thing about your own beliefs is admitting total defeat.
So if you don’t grow up in an environment where rationality is being taught, you’re simply not rational and thus fall victim to all these biases.
The same is by the way true also for democrats or whoever is not voting for the fascists. Just their beliefs were filled by other authorative voices around them. True rationalists knowing about their biases and actively trying to work against them and trying to get to the truth are very rare.
People like authoritarians. Especially one they agree with, which many do.
Even in the US we have children’s programming replete with kings and queens ruling over people. How many people watch things like Black Panther and think “this would be so much better with a Congress debating what direction to take”? I mean other than me…
Dictators get things done compared to committees and legislatures. Nobody likes compromise.
There is a whole system of media devoted to getting normal folks to vote against their own interests. In the regimes you list (and I’d argue also in western so called liberal democracies too but to a lesser extent) the capitalist class and political class are so intertwined due to influence and corruption, that whatever the needs and whims of the leading politicians, the media machine will distract and manipulate. The same tactics that they use are the ones which have worked since the start of mass media, they know how human psychology works.
Appealing to emotional arguments, external threats, racism, nationalism. Remember these are political tools, unfortunately very effective ones, as we saw in fascism in the 1900s. A curious consequence is that often, the worse things get for the normal people, the easier it is for these malicious actors to spin and manipulate and blame it on an external force or political enemy which deflects blame or allows for more extreme political ideology to rise in a society. So you get an accelerated political extremism.
They control the media, so they are able to redirect blame for the drop in quality of life to other sources
Once a competent authoritarian leader takes root, it becomes very hard to remove him: the necessary mechanisms, formal or informal, tend to be sabotaged - not at once, but more and more over the years. It also helps when some of opposition have their lives broken, when uncertainty about one’s own life is high, the value of human life low, when loyalty is placed above both competence and the law, and the law above competence, when the reputation of any possible contenders is questionable or made questionable, when people are used to the thought of futility of resistance (with fresh examples produced all the time) and being alone before the oppression, when somewhat educated people are made to think their views are in minority (independently of whether it’s the case) and some of less educated people have some of their misery alleviated (and are occasionally given some power they did not deserve) in return for voicing the pro-government position (even if a good measure of said misery is a consequence of the government’s actions).
I’d say the average person just doesn’t want to deal with politics. Instead, they choose the easy way out and vote one or a small group of authoritarians to rule the whole system. Plus, authoritarians have historically been equated to social stability and security. Can’t have violent political demonstrations or “problematic speech” under people like Putin or Kim Jung-un; everything is “politically correct.” And once the authoritarians are in power, the people have no say or power anymore, and at the very least the people FEEL powerless against the government, and again choose the easy way out by keeping their head down and refusing to instigate a fight against the government force that would easily and brutally overpower them.
Plus, the authoritarian governments are quick to blame their enemies for the problems of the people, utilizing propaganda, and the people are either obediently putting their trust jn their government (many people in every nation, both liberal and authoritarian, tend to trust the “credible source” that is their government), or the people stay quiet to avoid becoming an enemy of the state. I could go on, but I think I’ll just say I digress right here. Feel free to chip in and let me know what y’all think! :)
Because compromise is messy and progress is incremental and sometimes hearing someone yell words that sound true will make you feel like you’ve found the answer to all the political bullshit.
In Hungary, one big reason is that the government has all the media coverage, and they basically created a false narrative that if Orbán loses, then a) the previous government will come back and no matter how bad things are right now, it will be WORSE, b) migrants will come and wreak havock, c) our sons will have to go to war (in the last election, the opposition lost a lot of votes because there was a billboard campaign stating that the new PM candidate would send soldiers to Ukraine), d) there will be some kind of woke dictatorship.
People also think that the bad quality of life is mostly the fault of the EU and the previous government (which was in power over a decade ago…), and that it’s okay that Orbán and his party steals from them because at least they’re “on their side”.
The government also provides some help to parents, which people find valuable, so they keep voting for FIDESZ.
