Additional Information to Rules for Rulers Video - Types of Dictatorships

 

I often cite CGPGrey's video, Rules for Rulers in my articles. The video does offer good insights on how power structures operate. However, there are certain deficiencies with that video. Not per se inaccurate statements, but rather omissions that lead towards misunderstanding.

The most important of these is the statement that both most ruthless dictatorships and most complex democracies are incredibly stable and between them lies valley of revolution. That is not incorrect per se, but one will be forgiven if they would come to believe that so called valley of revolution is small with only a few countries falling there. Meanwhile stable plateaus around them are large and most countries fall on either one or the other side of the said valley. In reality it is the other way around. Ultra stable countries completely on one of the other ends are rare, most countries fall someone on the slopes and most famous and talked about fall right in the middle.

To begin with, as Grey explained, a stable dictatorship is the one with just two roads, one between the resource and the shipping port and the other between presidential palace and the airport. That is correct, but what are the real-life examples of such a dictatorship? It cannot be Russia or China as they have many educated people and many roads, infamous for its brutality North Korea does not fir either, they have enough education to build weapons and nukes and enough roads to move parts between plants. Not even Cambodia during Pol Pot could readily be called that. Before I give you the example in the next paragraph try to guess one? I doubt you will manage as they are so obscure, they never make the news.

An example of two road dictatorship would be Equatorial Guinea or Brunei Darussalam. 

Equatorial Guinea is a particularly good example. A very small country, that delivers all its income from oil. It never makes any news at all. Ever since oil was discovered there it was ruled by a single leader who ruled since 1982 and holds second place in terms of length of rule among the non-monarchial leaders. While before oil was discovered it was known for certain brutality, afterwards it became rather peaceful. Its leader is not only fabulously rich but also gets to shake hands with various global leaders. There is no particular censorship or restrictions, because there is no particular need. There is a single brutal prison, but virtually no instability or risk of instability. Why censor anything when population cannot read or write anyway. It is not known for good human rights record, but neither it is a repression mill that sends millions to concentration camps like China or North Korea.

A somewhat nicer example is a Brunei. An absolute monarchy rather that dictatorship, it too is very stable, and its ruler ruled even longer than Guinean dictator. Economy consists entirely of oil exports. There is no democracy in Brunei but there is plenty of money and low population. That allows ruler to simply placate people with money and not to worry about anything. There are no opposition or any protests in Brunei or any instability at all.

A stable two road dictatorship is by definition very primitive; they have no instability but also no crazy cults of personality, weapons, elaborate propaganda or censorship, not even cohesive repression system or secret police. They do not need any of that as they are already stable and have nothing to fear. Their population either too backward to even understand what a democracy is or too rich to care. It's the slopes of the valley of revolution, where crazy news making things started to happen.

Population that could not read or write cannot revolt, but neither it could build anything. Sometimes they might even have trouble operating weapons made by others. Needless to say, such a country could never be a challenge to liberal world order.

A slope (slippery slope) between the valley of revolution and a two-road dictatorship plateau is where crazy things begin. This is where people are somewhat educated and somewhat connected, thus more able to revolt. However, they are not too educated so can be misled by a relatively crude propaganda machine. To prevent them from revolting dictators, invent various insane ideas, cults of personality and so on. It is there where leaders declare themselves living gods, master of beasts, prophets, warriors and so forth. 

Uganda, Zaire, Central African Republic and Libya under Ghaddafi are good examples of such states. Each were famous for their colourful dictators who made outrageous claims about their history

In addition to insane cult of personality there is also a crude police state to suppress occasional protests and opponents of the regime. Sometimes there are paramilitaries to cause genocide, or a civil war though sometimes it is done by regular military. 

The amount of repression and abuse is clearly higher, not lower than in a stable two road dictatorship. Brutality of the regime is a response to ever increasing discontent among ever more educated public. In a stable two road dictatorship overly extensive police state was wasting money on irrelevant as public was not inclined to revolt anyway. In a slippery slope one however it becomes a necessity as without it the regime will be overthrown. Just as Grey correctly stated, some roads and some education makes people more likely to revolt. This government in such dictatorship has to constantly struggle against all forms of protest and opposition to its rule. 

All these extra structures, like secret police, regular police, paramilitary, censorship office, propaganda office and so on add to the number of keys to power. because of that rules of sloppy dictatorship do not rule as long as their two road counterparts. Too much hassle to constantly juggle all the crazy ideas to keep public at least distracted if not content. Unlike the two road dictatorship rulers, the sloppy dictatorship rulers typically do not die natural death in office. Instead, they either, assassinated, die fighting to keep power, die in prison after being overthrown or die in exile.

Regimes like these are much more common than two road dictatorships. Few countries could enjoy unlimited money from a very lucrative resource. Most preside over mixed economies with some rudimental private sector and foreign trade that spreads modern ideas of freedom and democracy. 

The exact nature of each country's economy determines how far or close it is to a stable two road dictatorship or the center of the valley of revolution. More income from resources, the closer it is to stability. More diversity, private sector and education, closer it is to the very bottom of valley of revolution. When dictators deliberately destroy certain sectors of economy or drive educated people to emigration it is not because they are stupid and do not understand economic value of the things they destroy, it is because they know these things push their country towards valley of revolution and endanger their own rule and life.

Sloppy dictatorships sometimes have some domestic industry, but more often than not they are dependent on western democracies even for weapons they need to keep their power. Because of that such dictatorships will never be able to compete with western democratic world. 

There is one final type of dictatorship that treads the tightrope over the valley of revolution. All the big names, such as Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea are of this type. These countries want to have the same level of technological development as western world without compromising on dictatorial nature of their regime. That is a contradiction in itself as people educated enough to build spaceships or nukes will by definition be educated enough to understand that democracy is better than autocracy. I wrote an article about such situation, specifically in Russia, but I will expand on it in this one.

I called this type a tight rope dictatorship because running such a country is a careful balancing act, not akin to walking a tightrope while dodging curveballs, that occasional liberals throw in your direction. One slip-up can cause the whole system to come crashing down like a house of cards. Collapse of USSR was one such event.

In such a complex regime just some propaganda and some form of police state will not do. Propaganda should be so 3d chess level advanced so that even literal rocket scientists would be fooled by it. Police state should be clever and careful to act like they merely go after criminals and not pursuing opponents of the regime. When someone arrested for something, the whole criminal case is carefully fabricated around them to make it look like they actually broke a law and not just repressed due to their political stances. Censorship too not just ban things but forge fakes to fool people. 

Broadly speaking tight rope dictatorships are like a country size reality show or a theater. Nothing there is what it seems, telling lie from truth is nigh impossible. Fake news rule, the day. Real information is either suppressed of portrayed as fake. 

Good example of this is how war is portrayed. USSR used to get out of their way to claim that all combat reports from Afghanistan are made up by CIA and in reality, soviet soldiers and Afghani people get along just well. Modern Russia depicts it war in Ukraine in much the same way, no information about shelling of casualties, but lots of footage of Russian soldiers repairing this or that buildings in the occupied territory. 

Every dictatorship always insists that the bad guys are always them, not us. And when some information to the contrary emerges, then these dishonest foreigners (typically Americans) fabricated it to smear out glorious benign and humane system. If you watch or listen to tight rope dictatorship media, then you will be led to believe than all these foreigners ever do is plot to destroy glorious dictatorship X, rape its women and drown all their men and children in wells. (from actual North Korean propaganda). That supposed to convince the population that tough defence measures and strong dictatorial leadership are necessary for very survival no less.

Then those Americans not always play their part of bloodthirsty villains and sometimes say things like would not it be great if we and X be friends instead or come down the capital with a reset initiative. Leaders then has to host them, while secret police and loyal media forge top secret fake memos, allegedly stolen from Department of State that prove it's all a ruse and Americans still plan to destroy that nation X. Whole a lot of work that has to be constantly done to keep it all from falling into the valley of revolution.

Then there are occasional curveballs like Alexey Navalniy, who releases videos about Putin's Palace and then claims that great defender does not spend all their time and money protecting the nation from foreigners but rather spends on their personal vanity projects while country goes without.

Number of keys and their unique skills needed to keep a tightrope dictatorship together is rather huge. Actually, competent secret police, professional propagandists, plenty of actors to make fake news. To top it all you need a director and scriptwriters who will manage all this this open-air theater to perform a cohesive plot together. You cannot have it when secret police arrests people for working for Japanese intelligence when propaganda claims that it is Americans who is plotting to destroy the nations. Coordination is needed. 

All the people used by sloppy dictatorships are needed here as well, all a lot of agencies and people. Tight rope dictatorships typically have bloated public service, both formal and informal. Many organisations that would be private and independent in a democracy are actually secretly part of government in a tightrope dictatorship. For example, in Russia complex networks of ownerships connect every single TV channel and even newspaper to the government.

Economically there is certain parity between resource extraction and other industries. That is typically achieved by adding various weapon making factories as well as prestige projects, like space industry, to an existing base of resource extraction. As much as these dictatorships relish the opportunity to make their own weapons and spaceships to be independent of "collective West", each such industry produces educated people, who in turn make democratic revolution more and more possible. To pre-emptively combat potential revolution, a complex theater state is built on top of the police state and other repression structures. This unwieldy house of cards is held together by a delicate balancing act much akin balancing on the tightrope; hence I called it such.

Tight rope dictatorships could be somewhat advanced technologically, but they are always very unstable. That is why leaders constantly talk about stability. If balancing act is subverted by either opponents of the regime, external actors or a domestic scandal, the regime collapses and falls down to the bottom of the valley of revolution.

When dictatorship either runs out of lucrative natural resources to sell, income dwindles, or a scandal provokes revolution that takes down the regime French Revolution style. Post revolution the country has two options, either try to build new even more elaborate tightrope dictatorship or finally accept the inevitable and start moving towards democracy. Being right in the middle between two extremes, both options are equally possible at this point. 

A country with a solid resource rich base will most likely choose the dictatorship option. That is why Iran or Russia ended up even worse dictatorships after revolution compared to what they were before.

A country too poor of resources will have no other options but to move towards democracy. When you cannot sell oil, you have no other choice but to produce wealth the same way, Westerners do, by producing added value. That require educated citizens who in turn will progressively have more and more power compared to traditional keys, such as military, police and bureaucrats. Police and military will have no choice but to accept civilian control and limitations on their power, typical of liberal democracy. Bureaucrats, who until recently saw themselves as privileged almost aristocratic class, would be called and treated as public servants instead. Servants as in serving people, not bossing them around like medieval villeins. To say that "forces" and old keys are not too thrilled by the whole prospect will be an understatement.

Because of that nascent democracies all suffer from a risk of authoritarian backsliding. Old keys to power, unwilling to part with their old privileges will keep thinking of ways to cling to them. New added value democratic economy still does not produce enough wealth to make destroying it equivalent to destroying everything. It is still possible to return to old ways and old keys will not stop trying until they exhaust all their options.

As for the options, then poor dictatorship has only one truly viable path, that of becoming a client state of a larger dictatorial power. Syria (under Assad) and Belarus are that kind of regimes. Old Warsaw Pact Eastern Bloc was also of that type. To make it happen there of course has to be a willing patron with some money to spend. 

As to why would some country just spend their money to prop an ailing brutal dictator from across the world there could be several reasons. One is to simply increase number of dictatorships around the world. Geopolitics often revolve around ideological strife so by increasing number of dictatorships around the globe, dictators could boost their numbers relative to collective West, represented by NATO and OECD. 

To top it up, there are certain non-material benefits a patron can extract from a client state. For example, basing rights or espionage assistance. Russia is propping Venezuela or (until recently) Bashir Assad of Syria because Russia wants to retain its ability to base military there as well as to afford its spies a friendly territory where could enjoy full support of local authorities. Recruiting locals for Russian espionage efforts is also an option. 

Drawbacks however are obvious as well. Not only each client state costs a lot of money to maintain, but they also add to the overall complexity of the regime structures. Sure, patron gets near unrestricted use of client's land and population but in exchange the client becomes an extra domestic key to power that sometimes can meddle in affairs of the patron. Belarussian Lukashenka once tried to become leader of Russia itself and managed to build certain support among Russian population. Client's state different culture, language, religion and remoteness could occasionally cause further complications and misunderstanding.

For a client state it's also a rather shaky arrangement. Sure, elites get to keep their privileges and power over people, but in exchange to bowing to foreigners. A patron knows that client has no other choice and might want to flex their power in cruel and insensitive way, purging certain sections of client's elites if they feel like it. Cultural misunderstanding could lead towards ever accumulating offences. 

Most importantly however general public will be even more outraged than they already were, keeping them, from revolting might require interference from patron's own military, like in Budapest in 1956 or Prague 1968 or most recently in Syrian civil war. Such occurrences are drain on client and patron alike. Sure, you could try to keep exact relationship between your states secret, but if public is smart enough, they will figure out, especially if patron extracts wealth from a client (or perceived as such), like in Warsaw pact.

I originally wanted to also add sections about types of democracies, but this article became so long, I eventually decided against it. Maybe I will write a separate article about democracies later. I still need some time to think of more content for democracies to make it informative enough.

Dictatorship alone ended up both much larger than I originally envisioned and much more informative. By now it's a comprehensive guide to dictatorships. I however still think that watching CGPGrey's video first would be useful to understand this article better.

This is how dictatorships really work. You should understand that idea that people admire strongman is mostly a fantasy. What determines whether a country is a dictatorship, or a democracy is not people or dictator's own charisma, but the underlying economy of the country in question. Resource rich countries are dictatorships and added value economies are democracies. Read my article about Paradox of Nation's Wealth to understand more.

Political Realignment of People

 

Recently I watched a video that declared that UK's Conservatives are doomed. It was broadly correct when it came to facts, but I felt that it missed to the overall trend behind this phenomenon. After all, not only Conservative party is failing, but new parties spring left and right and become popular near overnight. The whole political system is in disarray.

However, why it is in disarray? Why now suddenly public became discontent with two main parties and frantically jumps at almost any alternative? What have suddenly changed.

To put it short, the traditional political alignments of different segments of population have changed. Original party system was built around idea that poor and working class are left wing while rich business owners are conservative. Nowadays however rich have become increasingly progressive on social issues while continuing to be conservative on fiscal ones. On the other hand, working class became increasingly conservative on social and pretty much every other issue with exception of workplace relationships. An alignment most parties and politicians struggle to understand and by extension find their way to work with.

To explain how or why that happened we need to look at history. Throughout the 20th century what we mean by left and right was constant and did not change much at all. However back in 19th century political landscape was rather different.

For example, in Australia, before Labour party became a thing, politics were a contest between Protectionist and Free Trade parties. Neither of these two parties could be conventionally classified as either left or fight. Both represented business interests, just Free Trade represented those who import and trade in foreign goods whole Protectionists instead represented local producers. None of these two parties were more conservative or progressive than the other, these monikers only came later. Neither could be called left or right wing in a conventional sense of the word.

Things have changed when Labor became a thing and eventually won its first government. Both traditional parties found it expedient to put their former differences aside and unite against Labor. That is when we first got now traditional left vs right division. Labor that brought sweeping change was dubbed left and their opponents right.

At first these divisions were only about economic interests. Labor represented hired labor, and their policies represented interests of this social class. Both Protectionists and Free Trade represented employers instead. With advent of Labor, this unifying factor allowed them to unite into one party to oppose Labor. When in power Labor will expand powers and protections for the working people and limit the power, their bosses have over them. Labor's right-wing opponents (that changed their name several times in Australia) would instead try to roll at least some of these provisions back to bring back power in the hands of management.

However, as time went on, each side of politics were adding more and more policies to their agendas. Since Labor was more open to changes, regulations or raising taxes, most reform minded people of all flocks favored them over the right wing. Labor was the "cool" party that gets things done while "boring" tories only oppose things. So, if one wanted any kind of social change, Labour was the party to join. Government bureaucrats too prefer labour as it was more open to taxes compare to right wing. Eventually this transformation left original values, and both parties bases far behind, and they got completely engrossed into their own bubble.

Throughout the 20th century this worked. Shell-shocked by power of labour movement, rich business owners had no agenda beyond crawling some of their former power back. Labour remained the progressive force.

However, that does not mean that these alignments are natural: that working class is naturally progressive and change minded or business owners are naturally conservative and averse of change. Already in early 20th century Gregor Strasser and Benito Mussolini proven that working class is fully open to support a conservative nationalist agenda so long as their economic interests are looked after. However, fascism was defeated in WWII and these facts were forgotten. Strasser's and Mussolini's experience was dismissed as abnormality. Traditional alignment continued throughout the 20th century.

As time went on, both major parties were further departing from their roots, Labor started seeing itself as a party of change, fighting against backward tories, who do not even have policies to speak of. Tories were too lazy to even refute it as their anti-change do nothing policy of no polices were winning them elections anyhow. 

As parties stagnated, further and further petrified into their molds, their core bases evolved as economy and technology changed. From the start not very attached to the whole progressive thing, working class gradually became more and more conservative as time went on. Technological transformation and resulting automation put many jobs in jeopardy. Immigration, that is often seen as left-wing policy, actually benefited rich business owners while exposing working class to increased competition for jobs and housing. Pro-LGBT policies also do not benefit working class that much as most of them straight and wish their children will be so as well. It is rich who can benefit from more colourful and diverse cast of people. 

Working class instinctively reacted by opposing change and insisting that jobs and workplace privileges have to be preserved. That put them at odds with their own "progressive" party that by that point so used to be pro-change and progressive, getting back to roots seemed too alien to even consider. The reaction in Australia was a formation of One Nation. While media dubs this party far-right, it is actually closer to Labor's base than to Liberal one.

As working class became more conservative, rich went the other way around. They became more and more progressive. Not only technological change opened new avenues for them to manage their business better and differently but many of progressive social changes came to appeal to them as well. From opposing the change Labor brought in early 20th century, rich came to advocate many new ideas from progressive playbook. Some even coined a term SPEC (socially progressive, economically conservative) to mark this change.

Despite change in social values and attitudes, the core economic interests of each class remained the same. That somewhat anchored electoral system to traditional allegiances. No matter how socially progressive rich has become, they still prefer low taxes and fiscal conservatism of the right wing. At the same time working class still needs its trade unions and workplace laws to protect their economic interests.

However, when leaders like BoJo, Liz Truss or Starmer in UK take their negligence of the base too far, the base finally decides enough is enough and goes shopping for alternatives. Current British 5 party and more coming extravaganza is direct result of this realignment of political system. It is the same in the US where Trump won working class with his socially conservative but economically syncretic policies. 

In Australia so far traditional alignments still holds as parties have not moved too far from their bases yet. Yet the same underling factors exist here as well. Parties are still either broadly left or right on both social and economic issues. Meanwhile voters are increasingly either, socially progressive and economically conservative (SPEC) or socially conservative and economically progressive (anti-SPEC). There are parties somewhat corresponding to new alignment as well: If teal independents are SPEC then PHON or NXT is somewhat anti-SPEC. Who knows how long this mismatch between parties' policies and electorate alignment will continue.

In the end of the day parties will have to realign themselves with the economic realities on the ground. A socially progressive, pro-immigration, pro-LGBT, fiscally conservative party will represent rich business owners as well as the minorities in question. At the same time anti-immigration, traditionalist, nationalist, but economically hard left distributist party will represent working class and poor. The question is how long it will take for parties and politicians to fully grasp these current political alignments. So far there is no party that meaningfully represent either side of this debate, some get certain bits and pieces correctly, but none fully aligned with this new political reality. 

This re-alignment of parties is hard to understand because its cuts across the usual divides. New parties will be stitched out of parts of old ones, like Frankenstein. Nonetheless it is a very likely future we all have to deal with. However, if it would be different, then it likely will be even more strange that what I have described. Voters have changed and parties have to adapt of their will lose to those who will get new political realities better than them.