I've been thinking about it a lot recently and I realized that the incentives for political change are reducible to basic supply and demand for government services. So from this I realized that if a politician becomes too unpopular then he will be removed by some method. But if he is too popular he also creates an incentive for others to compete with him to supply more gov.
From this I thought of other things: Stalin was a successful tyrant primarily because he could keep the state expanding and Hitler was less successful precisely because he was too popular early on and that excited emulators in the form of his supreme commanders. But take someone like Saddam Hussein who didn't expand his state (spent on himself only in the form of palaces and golden guns) and his regime was easy to destroy.
So I think this is an exciting idea worth pursuing anyone else?
I lost track of some thread here about the strategy of making a government too expensive to be worth governing, or something to that effect. I do remember this concept mentioned though. (Disclaimer: just for discussion )
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.—Karl Kraus.
It has very little to do with popularity. It is all about legitimacy. And legitimacy hinges on the question of 'what is the alternative'.
If the people can not come up with an alternative which seems just as or more legitimate then no upheaval can take place no matter how unpopular the present rulers.Stalin kept in power by making sure there never was any alternative to his rule in the physical sense. Other unpopular rulers (monarchs and political parties) stay in power by convincing people that of all the people desiring power they are the only ones with the right (legitimacy) to rule. The French Revolution could have never taken place a century earlier not because Louis XIV was any more popular than Louis XVI, but because before republican ideology the populace could not imagine a legitimate alternative to his rule. In a sense a state which fits Lenin's definition of dictatorship is the least with odds with anarchism because it (in theory) leaves out all pretension of legitimacy, instead it talks about an order built solely on force. If all states defined themselves in this manner, instead of masking themselves, then our task would be considerably easier.
for me legitimacy is a function of competition. If Stalin is out competing his opponents (supply more government then they) then Stalin will rule. A part of this is convincing people that he is legit. The same can be seen in the French Revolution -the king wasn't supplying enough state so people turned to competitors who (no surprise) said that his gov. was illegitimate and that theirs was. Some evidence for this is that after the kingship was limited the French republic began to massively extend the supply of gov. or the power of the state until the state entered the "reign of terror".
Terror is present where the state fears it does not command legitimacy. Where it commands legitimacy there is no need for terror.The US government terrorised the people of occupied Iraq, but it never had to terrorise the people of America. With the latter it commanded legitimacy, but the former rejected its claim that it could legitimately be their colonial master and legitimately install a marionette, intermediary government.
Terror is used to eliminate competitors while at the same time, boosting the supply of gov. In the US the state used terror -just on a lower margin then what was done in Iraq. For instance the 1919 red scare where anarchists were deported or the new laws and reforms promulgated during the progressive era -all to reduce political competition while trying to supply enough gov. to eliminate the basis for competitors. The 1928 communist party platform included calls for a national minimum wage -In the 1930s the democrats gave them a such a wage. In 1880s there was the Greenback party but in the early 1900s the calls for loose money was answered by the Federal Reserve System of the Democrats.
Let me get this straight... people actually want to be terrorised?
Marko: Let me get this straight... people actually want to be terrorised?
Bureaucrats and special interests want to use terror and sell it to the people as being necessary -whether or not they feel terror at this prospect is psychological but not praexological.
I don't think terror is something that is sold to the terrorised. That would sort of ruin the purpose.
Marko: I don't think terror is something that is sold to the terrorised. That would sort of ruin the purpose.
some people want taxes -increases in taxes and such or more laws: how many times have people thought "there should be a law about x"? Whether or not this leads to terror or whether or not people want to be terrorized is psychological but there is a demand for this sort of thing.
We are not talking just any government programmes. So far you have mentioned Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and the Reign of Terror.Don't tell me there was actually a constituency for the GULAG. It is not medicare. It wasn't a programme mandated by the public opinion. You can not just explain away everything the government does as government doing things to increase its popularity with the public always thirsty for more government. You can not say the US occupation threatened Iraqi towns to enact collective punishment and cut utilities because Iraqis actually like going without water and electricity and demanded this programme be enacted.
For me constituency for the Gulag =KGB or anyone who wants his neighbor gone, especially in the case of Hitler whose Gestapo rounded up victims through citizen-informers.