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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Um, yes?

But the article seems to be written from within a "here & now" microverse - oblivious to (say) European history of a century-ish ago: When things seemed bad to the common man, his future worse, and a bunch of democratic elections didn't seem able to change that - the people (effectively) replaced their democracies with dictatorships.

No, that didn't end well. But it did imprison, impoverish, or kill much of the dysfunctional pre-dictatorship ruling classes, which had wretchedly failed to meet common man's basic needs.

Yes, I've noticed that America's current ruling classes seem to be eagerly downgrading, marginalizing, and hamstringing the teaching of history.

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I think this typically happens when a democracy is already very sick, as otherwise the people with Caesar-ambitions simply wouldn't have much of a platform.

Democracy gets taken for granted. It's not enough simply to have elections. That is necessary, but not sufficient. A lot more is needed for a healthy democracy.

> It's not enough simply to have elections.

The elected representatives also need the power/will to change things, which has unfortunately not been the case in my voting lifetime.

The King of England is technically the king on paper, but has 0.5% of the power Henry VIII had. President Biden has 1% of the power FDR had.

A lot of things, in the US at least, are more and more dictated by unelected (and unfirable) bureaucrats in agencies.

What presidential powers have changed from FDR to Biden?

Bureaucrats certainly can be a problem (and make great scapegoats), but I'd put the real blame on America's ruling classes. Once the existential-seeming threats of Axis victory and Communist-block victory had faded - 1970's-ish - they went from caring quite a bit about America's long-term health & welfare (needed, to prevent enemy victories) to chasing each other down a "Greed is our One-and-Only God, and the purpose of political power is self-enrichment" rabbit hole.

If you look at history, that's a very old pattern. Ancient China, Rome, pre-Revolutionary France - you name it.

Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated how important the competition with the communists was in terms of aligning the interests of the political classes with society at large during the cold war.

The population needed to feel that western society was superior to the communist alternative hypothesis in order to keep communism from getting a serious foothold in the west. Things didn't need to be perfect, but they needed to be much better than on the other side of the wall.

That tension was very much load-bearing to the western democracy and with the gradual breakdown of the Soviet union in the late '80s, something just snapped.

I've watched this annually for the last fifteen or so years as a macabre wellness check for America:

https://www.britannica.com/video/213840/Encyclopaedia-Britan...

Every year, I've thought to myself "it can't possibly get worse" but somehow it does.

Just bear in mind that dictatorships tend to have broad (and arbitrary) definitions of "pre-dicatatorship ruling classes" that could include you, your loved ones, your friends, etc...

True - but what dictatorship has tried to limited its purges to just the "pre-dicatatorship ruling classes"? Most of 'em go after broad groups of "harmless and useful, if only the dictatorship was rational" people, just for the evil LOL's.

Then there are all the folks who end up destitute/maimed/dead from the wars & famines & stuff...

Coming back to today's voters, they all seem to think they will end up in the "good" group. History says many of them will be so very wrong...

All the more reason for our short-sighted narcissist ruling classes to discourage the teaching of history, eh?

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