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Rome. When congress is powerless for years, and bad things start happening, congress will give all of its power to the executive branch, and be cheered for doing so. Phase two is the executive selecting their own successor. I don't think Rome was ever a brutal dictatorship, but it turned into something like a monarchy.

It's not a thing that'll happen today, or perhaps even in five hundred years, but that's the historical flight plan. We're obviously structured for the executive branch to soak up all the power, eventually. (at least it has so far) The executive branch has pretty much completely taken the power of declaring war.

Congress can't really pass a budget any more. i kinda think in the next 50 years they'll give up that power and just rubber stamp whatever the executive throws at them.

> I don't think Rome was ever a brutal dictatorship

Well, they weren't exactly choirboys from what I've heard.

(I understand what you meant, but that quote out of context is just great)

No, you're right. I kept thinking of the 20th century. They couldn't aspire to the scale of say, Stalin. But the whole thing with the crosses, yeah. yeah they're pretty brutal.

"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance."

In the US, the idea of freedom is valued highly. I am not from the US, and I don't live there, but I agree with them that freedom is worth fighting for.

Much of the government in both the US and many other countries are becoming more authoritarian with new technology allowing them greater possibilities of surveillance, even though there isn't a dictator.

the idea (or name) of freedom is valued highly here in the US of A. But, for the average American, I don't think "freedom" means what they think it means...

It's strange, isn't it?

As a Brit looking from a distance, I see three roots to it:

- immigrants from actual authoritarian countries. The most prominent of these is probably Cubans or Holocaust survivors. For them it's a very real thing that happened elsewhere, and they talk about it a lot. Including passing it down as family lore.

- Southerners who mourn the loss of the civil war, the destruction and imposition that resulted. This seems to connect with hate specifically against the federal government, tying in with "states rights" and so on.

- Non-white people and others who are paying attention to how the US is authoritarian, but only towards certain people. The root of "black lives matter" is authoritarian policing. The US is the only "civilised" state to retain the death penalty, but also has a very high rate of fatalities caused by police with little or no accountability. The various US foreign interference agencies (CIA, State Department) also have a bad reputation for supporting authoritarian US-friendly governments over democratic socialist anti-US governments, especially where money is at stake (Iran, "banana republics"). Then there's the drone strikes and ongoing death toll. The US also maintains a tiny little gulag on Cuba specifically to keep certain prisoners away from due process of law.

(Edit: ironically while the second and third groups both worry about authoritarianism, they'd generally take opposite sides on any specific incident!)

(I had a Romanian tell me his stories of the anti-communist revolution once. A brutal, suspicious time by his account - everyone knew that there were enemies but could not agree on who they were)

I wish Europeans were more afraid of it, because trusting your government too much is dangerous. The thing with governments is that they change. They may change for the better, for worse, or somewhere in the middle; you can never be sure.

For every piece of data you collect, you should weigh the benefits of keeping it with the risks of doing so. Any personal data you keep represents a privacy risk, and the importance of privacy can not be understated.

Before WW2, the Netherlands had an innocuous field in its citizen database: Religion. Nothing really wrong with that, not particularly useful either. Then came the invasion, the government fell, and Nazi Germany took its place. They were looking for Jewish people...

Honestly, it's because sometimes I read comments on HN that remind me that there are people that look at life like it's an optimization problem. And, I'm pretty sure that I don't score well in their objective function

And, I guess that freaks me out, especially when it's probable that some of these same people will oneday control the tech and data that run the world.

Maybe that vigilance is why the American Republic has been uninterrupted for over 200 years while freedom and democracy in continental Europe only still exist because the US won and imposed it.

> freedom and democracy in continental Europe only still exist because the US won and imposed it.

This is a ridiculous assertion. Back it up with some facts and sources.

The Second World War and the Cold War. American military inolvement in Europe is the only reason why the entire continent wasn't permanently controlled by either the Nazis or Soviets.

I would guess you are from the US?

In the UK, we are taught that the plucky Brits won WWII. I guess you are taught that US won the war. I cannot speak for other countries, but I guess there is more of the same.

For the record, Russia won the war I think it can be argued quite correctly

The Brits put up a valiant and effective effort, but they didn't have the ability to retake the continent. The massive industrial capacity of the American economy, and the large number of young healthy American men available to fight, was necessary to win the war.

when US feet touched the european soil, german army was already devastated on the east where most of the force was concentrated. you guys did your homework in pacific for sure, but in europe, whole western front just shortened the war and inevitable defeat (plus preserved democracy in the western part).

this comes from person strongly disliking russia, but it's a simple fact that they won the european theatre and paid horrible price in casualties.

Very true, but domination by the Soviets wouldn't have been much better than domination by the Nazis.

Actually, the more I read this, it has to be missing a \s.

>> 200 years of freedom and democracy [for some]

>> the US won and imposed it

Imposed freedom and democracy, by force, lethal force. Something doesn't ring right there

The Second World War was quite deadly. And the implied threat of nuclear war should Soviet troops cross into Western Europe was also quite a lethal threat.

> why are Americans so paranoid about falling under a authoritarian regime?

Ah, the age-old question. It's one of the most prominent differences, if not the most, between mentalities on the opposing sides of the Atlantic.

The answer that I've come up with - having touched on this topic in my political science studies and as an American - is that not only was the US founded on the notion of breaking away from an authoritarian regime, but personal autonomy, freedom, and rights are very strongly valued and this narrative gets drilled into us from a young age.

We're taught in elementary school (up unto 5th form) about the glory of the American Revolution and how our Founders, praise be unto them, birthed our nation with the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, laying out an infallible system of government with intrinsically limited powers. /s

In middle school (6th to 8th form, give or take), this view is more or less reinforced; in high school (9th to 12th form) this is pretty much never revisited, since you move on to learning about world or European history. Maybe you'll take a class on government and do a slightly more in-depth survey of the structure of US political institutions, but it's superficial at best. And in university? Well, there's no obligation to take a history class. That's for people who care about history, and jeez, who cares about history?

Because in Europe, we exercise our right of protest often and we get results often. So there is high confidence in our ability to make an unpopular government resign.

In the US, protesting doesn't work.

Can't believe this is not higher up. Some countries in Europe have a working democracy that involves people into decisions and allows to successfully protest against them as well. Obviously there is less need for paranoia

The problem with protesting-based government is that the loudest and most violent are prioritized over the interests of people who aren't loud or violent. Case in point: farmers hijacking and spilling Spanish wine on the road get 'heard' while the normal consumer who wants lower priced wine doesn't get heard. So a loud violent consortium of 500 French winemakers achieve legislative priority over millions of people who are harmed by protectionism but aren't harmed enough to walk out of their jobs to burn tires. Bolsheviks were a tiny minority in pre-Soviet Russia but since they had violence and "protest" on their side, they got to own Russia for 70 years. Nazis were a tiny minority as well and through their 'protest,' they took control of Germany.

I don't trust protest as a means for political change. There's a dangerous concept when 1000 people throwing rocks can make decisions for 80 million who aren't out in the streets. That isn't democracy, that's a lynch mob.

Well, those 80 million ought to get out in the streets, oughtn't they?

Or perhaps vote?

I'm not an expert of the history of Romania and possibly I misunderstand a lot of details but external pressure doesn't really explain the Iron Guard/Mișcarea Legionară.

The Iron Guard as I understand it was an entirely homegrown and popular fascist movement in Romania which in the early days of WW2 was brought into government but then quashed by the assassination of its leadership and broken up through use of extra-judicial arrests by the Romanian government.

Romania seems to have brutally managed to avoid crossing that "very thick line" but the Iron Guard had a lot of support and could have taken over.

The line is actually razor thin as can be seen repeatedly in countries worldwide (I lived under a military dictatorship in Latin America in the 1970s and almost lost my father to a shakedown by soldiers on a roadside).

Sadly the populace can and will support totalitarianism given the right circumstances.

There was support for the Iron Guard, don't get me wrong. But it's very doubtful they would have taken over the government without strong German pressure.

So even in bad circumstances popular support was not enough for them to become the majority party.

As for the Communists, they literally couldn't become the majority party even with Soviet tanks in Bucharest. They had to rig the elections to win the vote.

With regards to later developments yes, but your thesis that Romania was democratic except for external pressures isn't tenable.

Yes, Romania eventually was put under the heel of both Nazi Germany and the Soviets, both had to use force to impose their control, but it looks to me like it was becoming a totalitarian state before that.

As I read more, King Carol II played off different factions within the country to advance his own dictatorial control of Romania. The 1938 coup seems to have been entirely internal and it may have been planned as early as 1937.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_II_of_Romania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Constitution_of_Romania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Renaissance_Front

To quote from your last link:

> Largely reflecting Carol's own political choices, the FRN was the last of several attempts to counter the popularity of the Iron Guard, itself a fascist and antisemitic movement.

The fact that Carol was able to seize power to such a degree was a problem. As was Carol itself. But I don't think it's a coincidence that his dictatorship coincided with the post-Great Depression period and the rise of Fascism and Nazism (i.e. external pressures). Or with the power struggles in the region between pro-French/British factions and pro-German ones.

Notice how, Americans are paranoid about it and it hasn't happened, and as you said, Europeans aren't paranoid about it and it's happened to every country?

Technology may completely eliminate the lines altogether. Privacy is extremely leaky now. I just can't believe it is a thick line, or at least, I won rest on it being true. Quality of life in quasi-authoritarian governments is lower.

Technology changes much and I would rather be the individual who was careful and asked everyone to be a little paranoid. Look at how poorly supposedly free governments react to cryptography.

It wasn't always this way, according to this in-depth polling analysis by Pew [1]. Interesting cross-country polling seems to suggest distrust in government is loosely linked to distrust in others, and linked to inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient; there might be a social cohesion metric buried somewhere in those findings [2].

[1] http://www.people-press.org/2015/11/23/beyond-distrust-how-a...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/trust#cross-country-surveys

Europeans I know in the USA are terrified of it. I don't know any that supported Trump. But maybe that's selection bias.

EDIT: Correction. Romanian I know supported Trump.

US gov't beats it into our heads at every opportunity.