Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.

Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously favored cooperation with a monarch, changed allegiances once the newly-empowered third estate (borgeoisie) gained enough economic power. Top-down power was effectively strangled by the combination of nobles + business owners collectively bargaining, refusing to e.g. build the monarch's war machine for wars they had no say in.

Western democracies looking at this historical model of democratization, expect that the best thing to do for a country's democratic freedoms is to economically enrich the country's borgeoisie, to the point that the existing dictator-empowered oligarchs see more value in supporting the borgeoisie than they do in supporting the dictator.

>Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.

Historians would be making the classic correlation|causation fallacy. Your French example is apt because China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy. Historians might say that China has learned from history and ensured that their powerful class cannot be usurped.

I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them. Chinese values are miles apart from French values, and their citizens are just much more comfortable with submitting to authoritarian rule. I base this on living in the country, as well as cultural research such as this: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/china/

> I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them.

There's some truth to this, but you can do event studies to show that economic conditions play a very large causal role too. e.g. the massive quantitative spike in Hitler's popularity 1 year into the depression (this is the main data point I want to bring up, because it's quantifiable by polling numbers), or the 1917 Russian Revolution which only was successful because of the dire conditions brought about due to WW1, or the CCP only getting into power because of Japanese occupation and degradation of the KMT.

> China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy

I don’t think you understand the functional meanings of these terms.

People like the modern Russian “oligarchs” or their Chinese equivalents are, in function, nobility, whether they are granted any formal titles or not. You’re a noble in function if 1. you helped the current regime gain power; 2. you can use your ongoing necessity to the regime’s hold on power to coerce the current regime into granting you more semi-sovereign autonomous power; 3. this semi-sovereign autonomous power (the classical example being private armies; the modern example being control of state industries) could be used to topple the regime if enough of it were concentrated.

To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state. Rather, the borgeoisie have such power as a block — they could, together, strangle the economy — but they are by definition not monopolists, and so none of them has any chance of starting or winning a coup on their own.

To put it another way: if Facebook was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would still be a member of the borgeoisie of America. However, if Boeing was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would be a functional noble — an “oligarch” — title or no.

This was a very interesting clarification, but I don't get the last part. Why would Boeing be nobility?

presumably because boeing has influence over government policy.

The American military needs Boeing (and Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.) to supply parts for their jet fighters, missiles, etc.; enough so that if these companies were owned by selfish individuals rather than profit-driven corporations; and those selfish individuals pressed the issue of "maybe not making any more missiles for the military" at just the right time, then they'd not only not be charged with treason, but instead would get whatever they wanted, up-to-and-including having laws rewritten to serve them.

As well, such a hypothetical individual owner of Boeing, together with a few other such individual owners for other military industries, could independently declare a "vote of no confidence" in their country, and "hand over" power to some foreign nation invading them, simply by cutting off war-time logistical supply at just the right time.

These types of power, are exactly the sorts of power that made classical aristocrats, aristocrats, rather than just courtiers.

"To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state"

Just need to become a donor and provide campaign contributions. You get semi-sovereign autonomous power pretty soon.

Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.

I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/China tits″, rights of women are openly contested and dimnished, and they are on the slippery slope to the actually worrying part of the far-right spectrum.

> Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains

These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status. It's misleading to evaluate one by the standards of the other. Also, why no mention of comparative success stories like the Czech Republic?

> These things have long been super typical of growing middle-income countries on their way to First-World country status

Except these things aren't even true, at least not in Poland. Corruption in the classical sense hasn't been a problem here for decades. Nepotism at the upper level of governance (especially in state-owned companies) – true, it's re-emerged. Mixing it up with supposed wealth-amassing, however, makes even less sense because the most egalitarian shift in Poland's economic policy – with empirical observable effects – has so far, for the last 7 years, precisely coincided with the EU-sceptic right-wing populism.

Look, I'm Polish, I'm critical of the current Polish government for a variety of reasons (including its stance on European Union), but your description of what Poland is today is just outrageous.

> wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population

Yeah, right. /s https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=P...

> their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″

No, it can't, it's more complicated than that. I think your language alone says a lot about how much thought has gone into your statements.

In short, Poland has seen a shift in its policy towards the EU after around 2015. A lot of it can be attributed to pre-Brexit Conservative Party-style anti-EU populism (and, if that's the case, why make it appear like a post-Soviet phenomenon alone?), but a part of it is genuinely related to the general debate about the future of the EU and its policies. The last words quoted, aside from their vulgarity, are just totally inaccurate. One thing to consider is the cohesion funds (which, by the way, the European Commission has blocked, and rightly so, from Hungary) and the pandemic recovery fund (which it has barred Poland from, also rightly so), but you can't reduce the discussion to those, especially in the recent weeks when Poland has shouldered the lion share of the European cost of welcoming Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.

And, of course, the Polish political parties include a very significant pro-EU liberal opposition stronghold, usually just slightly trailing the populist ruling party in the election polls. So, no, your description of the spectrum is far from the truth.

I mean, even the three countries mentioned are vastly different from one another in where they stand. Today's Hungary, admittedly, has gone the farthest in terms of limiting the freedom of media and dismantling the judicial system. Poland's ruling party has not gone that far, and I would say it's very unlikely it will, for historical reasons – the anarcho-democratic political traditions are just too strong, as is the civil society.

So, in short, I'm all for being alarming when that's warranted, and there are things to be alarmed with, to various extent, when looking at last years' developments in Poland (can't speak for other countries). But one needs to stay truthful at the same time.

Though as you also mention, grandparent commenter’s words are sort of true of Hungary unfortunately.. (I live there)

Sure, it worked in Central-Eastern Europe during the early 2000s.

"As of late" we're getting democracy-flavoured populism with the governing party restricting free media and repeating divide and conquer campaigns to create a voting bloc that gives them absolute majority.

Hungary and Serbia are probably a lost cause at this point. Poland is slowly getting there.

To be honest, the same seems to be happening over here in America.

A dictatorship has the need to define an enemy or threat so that people are fine to compromise on self-determination. It can be another culture or corruption or anything most people will align themselves against.

If that is absent, criticism towards government increases and its legitimacy is questioned if it cannot provide stable growth anymore.

But I fully agree that democracy is still the most successful model and still striving. A mistake western governments often make lately is to be too afraid of it.

> Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.

Historians didn't have anything to do with all the decisions that were made by politicians making deals with China. It was the financial industry and the politicians they finance who came up with bullshit PR to convince the public opinion that China would magically become a democracy if the west started free trade with China. No historian was ever consulted unless it was to give credit to that PR campaign.

Now did a significant part of the chinese population become wealthier as the result? Yes, it doesn't change the fact that China was, is and will be a bloody dictatorship, for a long time, by western standards.

The west needed to outsource slavery for economic purposes, as always, the west got them slaves.

While true for England, things went a little differently in France with the French Revolution. I'm not sure if it started as you say, but it ended not much differently than a violent overthrow of the ruling class in other countries.

To be clear, the French Revolution is exactly in line with the example, and part of the definition of it; bloody revolutions are often how the middle class takes power to enact democracy.

Note, though, that the means by which overthrow occurs is mostly orthogonal to its consequences; the important thing is instead who's doing the overthrowing. Most coups are done by a small group, who become a new aristocracy after the coup succeeds. Democratization occurs when, instead, 1. the overthrow is populist in nature, but 2. no power vacuum is created for new aristocrats to step into, as the populace (esp. the borgeoisie) have managed to install a new governmental structure that doesn't require dynasty-driven statesmanship and foreign diplomacy policy.

This is historically accurate, sure, but from what I have seen the current ruling class in the West has used this as a cheap excuse at best. It certainly seems to me that they have simply been selling our cultural and technological heritage away to line their pockets. The fact that a lot of these people would prefer a society run the way China is run also helped in getting them to support China too.

> Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.

Like what happened in Nazi Germany? /s

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