Third wave of autocratization
As many people have discussed recently, a bunch of governments in the world seem to be on a trend towards autocracy. (Some are also on a trend towards more democracy, but they are fewer and less populous, so the overall picture is going backwards.) Eg., here is a recent report by the V-Dem Institute .
I don’t think it’s axiomatic that non-democratic = bad, but looking at the characteristics of these governments, they do seem overall less competent and well-intentioned than random democratic governments like Germany’s or Australia’s, so this trend does seem bad. They do seem importantly different from a stereotypical “dictatorship” like that in Myanmar or Belarus, in which a small clique that everyone hates but that controls the military rules over the country with an iron fist; this model appears to be confined to a small number of economically and globally marginal states. Rather, these countries are careful to maintain a substantial degree of genuine popular support, and then use that in combination with the state to suppress opponents and the institutions that democracies use to encourage fairness to everyone (equal justice, equal free speech, fair elections, etc.). So there are two big questions here; where this is headed, and what anyone can do about it.
The first big possibility is that this will turn around eventually, and governments will start getting better overall. This would be great, of course. It has substantial historical support; throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, big political trends (good and bad) haven’t lasted indefinitely, they have come and gone every decade or two and been replaced by a subsequent trend. But it doesn’t seem to be happening yet as of 2019 (long-term effects from the pandemic aren’t clear yet).
It seems likely that the 2020s will have a wave of technologies (renewable energy, biotechnology, narrow AI, etc.) that influence this process. I don’t think anyone has a clear idea of whether this will overall help democracy, help autocracy, or lead things off in a third, unexpected direction, although the latter option seems under-explored.
The second possibility is that autocratization will continue, but that autocrats will mostly keep using the current model, which requires them to maintain significant support among their own populace. This is still bad and very worth avoiding, but not catastrophically bad; it would prevent them from starting major wars, crashing their economies, killing too many people, shutting down the Internet or otherwise making life too painful for too many.
The third possibility is the really bad one, in which the average autocracy follows the Venezuela model; starting with substantial popular support, the autocrat entrenches themselves, makes catastrophically bad decisions, and then turns into the Myanmar/Belarus model, where there’s a small clique that everyone hates ruling over a wrecked economy but nobody can easily do anything about it. A major war would also do this, at least to anyone who lost or got invaded, and possibly to every participant. This happening to major countries would be really really bad, the world hasn’t seen such a thing since the 1980s and it shouldn’t come back.
The final question is what to do about it; there are various default actions to take in the short term (donating, protesting, advocacy, journalism, etc.) that have been fairly well explored, but none of them seem likely to move the needle that much per person-year of effort expended. So the obvious thing to explore, both to figure out what might happen and where the big leverage points might be, is the interaction of government and new technology. Hope to explore this more soon :) One follow-up thought: a lot of these autocrats seem to draw strength from the idea of a national identity, national pride, belief in the country as an ingroup and those of a different citizenship/race/religion as dangerous outsiders. This playbook is older than dirt, of course ( Know Nothing ). But the Internet continues to grow exponentially along various dimensions and become more and more all-encompassing, machine translation will keep reducing language barriers, and the whole idea of the Internet is orthogonal to the idea of nation-states. The computers don’t care about lines on the map, and on a place like Discord or Reddit it’s unclear where people even are. A country like Turkey can block websites it doesn’t like or censor political critics, but keeping the whole Internet out while having any economy seems really hard; only China has built a fully parallel Internet with parallel institutions, and they had the advantages of massive scale and rapid economic growth and a totalitarian government and competent execution and a massive language barrier. Are these two forces fighting each other, and if so, what’s the ultimate endgame of that?
(One more aside: game theory seems to say that you should reward countries for getting better and punish them for getting worse, since you only have limited resources. Saudi Arabia is a hard autocracy, but they were also one ten years ago, and civil/economic liberties for citizens seem to have improved quite a bit since then.)