Bad Definitions of “Democracy” and “Accountability” Shade into Totalitarianism

I believe the article makes a fundamental mistake with its inferred description of democracy. In a healthy democratic system there is not just one single central authority to which all democracy has to be driven. A healthy democracy has many layers and overlapping institutions, most/all of which are democratic in nature.

Thus, decisions to make things "more democratic" don't necessarily lead to giving more and more authority to "the government".

Shade into a bad definition of "totalitarianism", more like.

> Here I’m using the word “totalitarian” to mean “the government controls every aspect of life”; I use the alternative word “authoritarian” to mean “the government is a dictatorship without checks and balances”. The opposite of “totalitarian” is “libertarian” or just “free”, the opposite of “authoritarian” is “democratic”. I think totalitarianism and authoritarianism are correlated, but represent two different concepts, and that it’s coherent to rate democracies on how totalitarian they are. My ideal form of government would be mostly democratic and mostly not totalitarian, in the sense that the government would control some limited part of life (“the public sphere”), and decide what it did with that part through the democratic process.

How convenient that the writer relegated this precise technical definition of an emotionally-charged word to a footnote, where it's so easily missed. It's almost as if he was setting up a kind of a duplicitous argument where he can always say to be making only a boring, narrow claim (using the technical definition he provided), while simultaneously making a much stronger implicit claim (using the everyday understanding of the word). If only there were a snappy term for this kind of thing…

I don't think anyone can seriously use the word totalitarian without having read Hannah Arendt and showing some knowledge of her assessment of it. It's definitive, and a doorstop that is hard to ignore. Even just the addendum essay "ideology and terror" summarizes a lot of it. Making up a definition for it for the sake of a blog post is dumb. It's a term of art in political theory and history, and not a placeholder for whatever you think is bad. I can't quite believe I'm calling Scott Alexander (whose work I have always loved) an idiot, but on this, I think his idea would benefit from the feedback.