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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

Sri Lanka is not a dictatorship. They have regular elections. The Rajapakshas might have been authoritarian, even corrupt. But they won the last election in a landslide. Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

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Are the two mutually exclusive? I don't see why a democracy can't elect a dictator, even a different one every couple of years. In ancient Rome the title dictator was a short-term thing.

In Rome there were two periods when the title of Dictator was used. First during the Republic where it indeed was a temporary role with limitations, then resurrected during the Empire as title only to justify authoritarianism.

You’re not right. What Rome called a dictator is not the modern definition of the term. An elected autocrat can have similarities to a dictator, but they aren’t one. Unless they rig the elections!

You're arguing against something that wasn't said. They said the "title of Dictator" was used, and that is correct, it was used in Roman history as they said.

The Roman title of Dictator is different from a modern day dictator, agreed — but if you read carefully no-one argued otherwise. The Roman title of Dictator more aligns with the modern concept of "emergency powers."

Doesn't dictator means the one who have total control & power over a country? So, by definition, I think srilanka is not a dictatorship.

>>Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

If you have bigoted populace, it's dead easy to bait them into voting for some immediate emotional relief. Sri Lankan's wanted to have fun watching Tamils and Muslims get hurt, so it wasn't all that hard for some politician to get the people vote for him. The worse thing is they even put up with his bad decisions for the same reasons. And they did this for years.

The population is entirely responsible for this.

As it turns out they ran out of time, there's always that one point after which everything comes melting down.

i think its an unfortunate combination of many things, covid being the main. this shows that democracies are not immune to leaders resorting to populist measures to win elections.. hope its a good lesson to lankans and rest of us.

democracy isn't just about elections (otherwise even the totalitarian fascist Russia could have been called democratic :). Elections is just a basic necessary condition of democracy, a starting point. Many of those populist regimes aren't democracies really, they are more like ochlocracies naturally hijacked by authoritarians.

Yes - exactly. Genuine democracies are a complex patchwork of competing interests which somehow balance to generate policy that benefits most of the population.

As soon as you have a government run for the benefit of a small group, you no longer have a democracy.

Elections don't change this. Not even nominally free and fair ones.

The problem - as always - is that any system of government trends towards capture by Dark Tetrad types. No matter what decisions they appear to make, and no matter whether they're left/right populist/monarchist democratic/authoritarian, the consequences are always disastrous.

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