Because democracy is certainly the enabler of everything you describe.
Particularly, it's democracy that transforms worthless politically-impotent peasants into the majority the would-be dictator needs to first capture power. Democracy made the masses valuable to the powerful and the wannabees, and locked them into the eternal dance led by demagogues.
I've described the right wing authoritarians who are the natural followers, and it's democracy that makes them useful to the other actor in this dynamic, the social dominators, the people happy to step up to be the authority the RWAs crave. For a price. But the RWAs have been rewarded with prosperity for their loyalty, and became the core of the middle class.
I finally found the link to an extensive paper by Bob Altemeyer, a psychology professor who's been studying all this intensively. Now retired, I think, and it's a pretty readable summary of his life's work.
Some of the people studying the RWA phenomenon have gone so far as to suggest that there might be a gene for it, but I think that's a stretch (but what about artifact Neanderthal DNA? That's a real thing!). I tend to think that the RWA mindset is in most people, dormant, like an unexpressed gene. It can be brought out by stress and fear; that's why the population of RWAs in America seemed to explode after 9/11, and again after the economy crashed in 2008. It's not a cheerful thought.
So is a dictatorship of the middle class arising from democracy inevitable because of human nature?
Flame » in reply to Fascism is the Dictatorship of the Middle Class
Is it the inevitable outcome for democracy?
The whole thread (36 posts)
- Fascism is the Dictatorship of the Middle Class
- Truth
- I give this thread four Sheds.
- This is more along the lines of what I think....
- And when the middle class is eliminated?
- Is it the inevitable outcome for democracy?