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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26809 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Russia is transitioning from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, which typically increases corruption, not decreases it. At the same time, Russia is devoting more resources to fighting the West, so it's entirely plausible that it's becoming both more dangerous and more corrupt simultaneously.

deleting old posts for privacy

I don't really see any evidence that authoritarianism is the sole variable when it comes to corruption.

It's easily one of the biggest factors, if not the single biggest factor period. Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic, while many of the most corrupt are authoritarian or totalitarian. Look at the differences between Taiwan and China, or between the two Koreas. Same cultures, but different governing styles make a huge amount of difference. Look at Post-Soviet states that escaped Russia's orbit vs those that didn't, like Poland vs Belarus. The entire Ukraine conflict that's been going on since 2014 is in large part because Ukrainians want to be more like Poland than Belarus. DEI, while being a terrible ideology, is worlds apart from actual dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela or North Korea.

Dictators are never entirely secure, and totalitarian dictators can freely devote more of the state's resources towards maintaining their own positions than authoritarian ones can. They accomplish this largely through corruption.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

This is just a right-wing version of whig history, and relies just as much on cherrypicking historical datapoints as liberal whig history does.

Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic.

They're also geographically and/or culturally clustered together indicating that them all being democracies is a historical coincidence more than anything else. Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.

The east Asian democracies are quite far from the Western democracies, and many have similar cultures to eastern autocracies, yet the corruption of the autocracies is far, far worse. Again, look at South Korea vs North Korea, or Taiwan vs China.

That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.

Left wing authoritarianism is still authoritarianism. Further, modern China isn't particularly communist, and hasn't been since at least the 80s. It's more like Fascism With Chinese Characteristics. Openly fascist countries like Nazi Germany also pretended to be nominally democratic by carrying around the corpse of the Reichstag, but the illusion fooled nobody.

The corrupt democracies are mostly the ones that have shaky democratic fundamentals, i.e. ones that are either hybrid regimes, or the ones that wobble in and out of coups.

Left wing authoritarianism is still authoritarianism

I'll grant that, but either way communism seems to be unique in the amount of scars it leaves on a country, and should be treated uniquely, rather than to make a general point about authoritarianism.

The corrupt democracies are mostly the ones that have shaky democratic fundamentals, i.e. ones that are either hybrid regimes,

That's starting to sound like any democracy that's not performing well is not a true democracy.

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