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Comment by foobarbazqux | Hacker News Reader

All of those criteria, plus I think an extra criterion that they have to happen to so many people that it reaches some kind of tipping point where there's a mass consensus that things are authoritarian. Just to be clear, I'm not excusing the abuses you've listed.

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The thing about rule law is that it's not about critical mass. It's the edge cases that are important. It's easy to have justice the majority of the time. If the state can arbitrarily subvert the rules just because they think it's really really important, that's not rule of law.

I know you're not arguing that it is, you're more talking about public opinion. I think you're probably right. But I wish that weren't the reality.

Well, perhaps we can see things on a line from perfect rule of law to perfect authoritarianism, with the understanding that no state is ever completely at one end or the other. I think we're still less than half way to authoritarianism.

All governments demand obedience. That's why they have a monopoly on violence. Any entity which wields a monopoly on violence for the purpose of controlling the actions of others is authoritarian in nature.

I can't imagine what you mean by "perfect rule of law", but I do know it isn't the antithesis of authoritarianism. The opposite of strict obedience to authority is no obedience to authority -- meaning no hierarchy -- or anarchy.

My point is, we're judging how authoritarian a dictator is based on how benevolent they are. While a dictator is capable of ruling.. "equitably", the fact is you still have a dictator who could change his mind tomorrow. So it's not that we're mad about having a dictator, we're just mad this dictator is being a bigger ass hole than yesterday.

That's a good point about anarchy. Although anarchy and authoritarianism are opposites, they behave in very similar ways: the people with power call the shots as they please. In the middle, you could say we have perfect rule of law. This means that no officials act as if they are above the law, and that every moral injustice is handled by some law or another. Clearly we'll never have that.

So the first continuum I proposed is actually one half of the continuum between anarchy and authoritarianism.

Well, the obvious answer is that the rule of law is a fiction.

As you point out, even if it's true for most of us, most of the time, it's the edge cases (abuses) that matter most.

The problem is, by the time it affects enough of the general public, it's already to late. It's the classic "First they came for..." problem.

Exactly. Right now the "in your face" abuse is happening to a relatively small portion of people (privacy of millions being violated but they don't all feel it yet). Easy for everyone else to sit back in comfort and think it won't happen to them or the others somehow deserved it. When it happens to more people then an outrageous edge case can serve as the tipping point.

First they came for the brown people, but I did not speak out because I was not a brown person...

Do you seriously think that classic examples of XX century authoritarian states had mass consensus that they are authoritarian? That would be a post-modern authoritarian state.

I suppose it has to be mass consensus among the persecuted class and the friends of the persecuted class.

But all of those criteria are already true in both the US and the UK. I think that was his point.

I don't believe there's a mass consensus that it's an authoritarian regime. I'm not even sure there's a mass consensus that it's heading in that direction, regardless of what I personally believe.

No, and I don't think that a mass consensus is in any way relevant to determining whether something is an authoritarian regime or not.

There was never a mass consensus in the USSR that it was authoritarian, because it was not permitted.

When I say not permitted, I do not mean that they had people with guns going "THINK THIS!", but that social pressure and group-think were utilised to ensure that nobody broke ranks - just like media control in the US and UK ensures.

It's very easy to rule people by pitting them against one another, and putting them in a state of fear, envy or suspicion of their fellow cit.

So, okay, how do you determine it then? If those things listed each happened once, it wouldn't be authoritarian. (Would it?) What about twice? Three times? There has to be some threshold. I couldn't think of a better threshold than some kind of consensus, because it's essentially a value judgment. But, it's a good point about group-think. Maybe there has to be a consensus among people outside of the marginalized group? Maybe the fact that people are even openly questioning whether we have an authoritarian regime in the US means that we don't?

Perhaps things are authoritarian when a wide range of people expect abuse from the people in power, whether or not they recognize it as such.

Or, maybe it's more sinister than that, and we only truly recognize authoritarianism in retrospect.

> Or, maybe it's more sinister than that, and we only truly recognize authoritarianism in retrospect.

Bingo, you get it. Put a frog in a pan of cold water, bring it to the boil. It'll stay there, perfectly content, until it cooks.

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