[tc]

In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail. We've seen so many examples of fallen tyrannical states. But many ideas fail the first few times they're tried. China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work."

It's hard to think of any more dangerous invention. Even nuclear weapons aren't as dangerous as a sustainable model for modern tyrannical government.

This is an invention that would be exported and widely adopted.

The liberal democratic model of government spread around the world not just because the people saw it work in America and decided that's what they wanted, but also because the ruling aristocrats saw that it would be net better for them. The French Revolution probably helped convince them it compared favorably to the guillotine.

If another model is pioneered and proven that's better for the ruling class, it won't be difficult to find regimes eager to adopt it.

[Laforet]

I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.

What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive them.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_intensity_conflict

[imglorp]

Technology is making the price plummet of policing a large population. Natural language recognition, face recognition, location tracking, pattern-matching, deep packet inspection, graph traversal, and of course AI can all run unattended pointing out dissidents to the authorities who just have to go round them up and reeducate them. Oh and guess what China is making a big investment in lately?

[Laforet]

TBH, AI worries me because it removes much of the human cooperation required to keep such regimes in place, however it is probably still a few decades ahead of us.

[Balgair]

The false-positive/negative rates are the key here. If they are not too bad, then yeah, it may 'work' in the short term. If they are sky high, like most facial recognition is today, then it's not going to work. Word will leak out very quickly that the surveillance is worthless.

[imglorp]

For an authoritarian police state, false positives are fine as a show of force.

If the system mistakes you for someone else, you might get your door kicked down, your dog shot, and get dragged in and interrogated. Then you will come to realize what will happen if you really run afoul of them. So maybe you think twice if you're planning an infraction in the future.

So they may well want to round up the top N suspects, knowing that N-1 are innocent.

[Balgair]

Yes, but this is a separate issue than surveillance. You can have totalitarianism and surveillance just as well as with democracy (not ever typical though).

[cabalamat]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable

Autocratic regimes have lasted for as long as 3000 years (pharonic Egypt).

I'm sure lots of people want to believe the Chinese system won't work; but that doesn't make it true.

[Laforet]

Ancient Egypt seems to be the exception in history. Such reliable agriculture and continued population concentration around the Nile are very peculiar situations that have no parallels elsewhere.

If Egypt was truly superior, it really should not have been so easily conquered by Ptolemy and then Rome which both had a much less authoritarian society.

[true_religion]

The arguement was that it was sustainable, not that it made Egypt superior to all less authoritarian countries everywhere, for all time.

[kinsomo]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.

Why do you think the Chinese government can't sustain the cost? Intensive policing is manpower intensive, and China presently has manpower to spare. They also don't have to deal with democratic pressures to contain the cost and redirect the savings to programs that benefit the general public.

[analog31]

In my view, they are not sustaining the cost. We are, by buying their products. If totalitarianism becomes universal, that's when it ceases to be sustainable.

The ruling class has luxuries that they could not have developed for themselves without them being broadly available. I'm thinking of things like cell phones, the Internet, and possibly the money system.

Parasites need a viable host.

[Can_Not]

I love that we're talking about how bad totalitarianism is meanwhile we literally have the upperclass exporting jobs to China for a quick buck and president who campaigned on bringing them back who just betrayed his base (and his country) by helping a Chinese company keep their jobs... Living in the free-ist country in the world apparently means you're free to sell out your fellow man to the totalitarian state overseas.

I think _that_ is the sustainability problem we need to talk about. We're feeding them and starving ourselves.

[graeme]

As automation reduced societal labour requirements, will that make societal repression via human labour more feasible?

[Laforet]

>China presently has manpower to spare.

And in twenty years they will not, that is the crux of the issue.

[woodandsteel]

That's correct. Due to the one-child policy and other causes, China is already suffering a worker shortage, and the demographers say it will get much worse in the future.

[jhanschoo]

Your argument does not preclude selective policing; if for example policing on Han ethnicities remains sufficiently light, this can remain indefinitely. Slavery as well as oppression of minorities used to be seen as part and parcel of human society; one should not doubt so easily that oppressive regimes can be sustainable

[guelo]

If technology is able to repress resistance in more powerful ways than was previously possible then things like Northern Ireland won't be possible.

[peteretep]

> then things like Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland (in the 1900s) was less about resistance to a tyrannical state, and much more about a population split 50/50ish who had hated each other for a few hundred years. British action there was far from exemplary, but had the people of Northern Ireland woken up one day to find they were part of the Republic of Ireland, precisely no problems would have been solved.

[SN76477]

I also doubt it is sustainable.

China has a social credit system that is locked in with this totalitarian system. Based on how irrational humans are I fully expect a huge spike in suicides. Once people get into so much social debt that people stop associating with them and they are locked out of work and simple things such as garbage collection they will start to end their lives.

I want to be wrong about suicide and right about social credit systems though....

[landryraccoon]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable.

What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

> What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict

This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict? The examples in Wikipedia are distinct identities or states. What identities are in contention in China?

[Laforet]

>What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

I am not in the clairvoyant business. Expressing doubt is as much as I could do.

>This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict?

Armed insurrection has been ongoing on since the early 90s[0] loosely organised by ETIM[1] as well as various affiliated Islamist groups in neighboring countries especially of late. They are backed by sympathetic donors in the Gulf states, Turkey and (allegedly) the CIA. Since then there have been several high profile riots and terrorist attacks both in[2] and out[3] of Xinjiang.

Obviously they are fighting against the police and the army loyal to the government. In addition there are local entities known as Bingtuan[4] that are best described as a military-industrial complex with several company towns at strategic locations throughout the region. They are under the direct command of the state department and are expected to counter the provincial leadership should they become insubordinate.

There are also smaller groups of Hui (Chinese Muslims) seeking to consolidate their identity and Kazakh irredentists seeking reunification with Kazakhstan, but they are much less significant and tend to be allied with he government against the Uighur.

[0]：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baren_Township_riot [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkestan_independence_mo... [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio... [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Production_and_Constr...

[ajross]

> What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

There's not enough data to make predictions like that. But one very good reason for optimism is that China's current totalitarian stability is an unstable false vacuum. It's sustained by the outrageously rapid economic growth seen in the decades since the cultural revolution.

Basically: if you're Chinese, your grandparents (if they were lucky) survived a devastating world war and invasion by Japan, an even more devastating civil war, and a yet more devastating still famine forced on them by the nutjobs who won the civil war.

And now their grandkids are all running around with smartphones in their pockets, collecting college diplomas and international graduate degrees, vacationing in Thailand and Hawaii, and generally dancing on the world stage like the Americans do.

That kind of success pays for a lot of totalitarian angst. But it won't forever. These folks' kids aren't going to be happy with only 2% GDP growth as payment for their political dominance by a corrupt elite. The proletariat never has been.

[laretluval]

The Chinese proletariat isn’t running around the world colecting foreign graduate degrees; they are working in factories in Shenzhen to feed their children back in the village. But you’re right in that it’s typically privileged young people who are behind liberal revolutions.

[rtpg]

"Only sustainable for a couple decades" is , to a first order, the same as "sustainable" when you're looking at a 20 year time span

" Oh don't worry this nightmare will stop in about 2 decades"

[brianpgordon]

An existential threat to freedom in human societies is scarier than just tyranny in our lifetime.

[robotkdick]

I totally agree.

China seems to want to create a monoculture with norms that don't bend from locale to locale. I think the saying is: if it don't bend, it will break.

[slowburning]

http://read.gov/aesop/011.html The Oak and the Reeds, Aesop 'Better to yield when it is folly to resist, than to resist stubbornly and be destroyed.'

[mc32]

I think if the state enlists and coopts a sufficient percentage of the local population, then it can work indefinitely, if the gov't provides enough in terms of basic needs. The idea of local administrative committees and youth organizations as an arm to make others toe the line is not a foreign concept to the CCP.

[Laforet]

There really isn't one when most of the Uighur population is impoverished if not otherwise disaffected, and the local Han population are effectively incentivised to leave Xinjiang for better prospects elsewhere. Between 2010 and 2013, there have been 400,000 fewer Han Chinese living in Xinjiang through a combination of natural population decline and emigration[0]; this represents a solid 2% of total population and there is no evidence to suggest the trend is slowing down.

Heavy policing may put a lid on the problem for now but in the long run it will only undo several generations of hard work pacifying the region.

[0]:http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83491x/201503/665772571.html, the text is paywalled but a short excerpt containing relevant information can be viewed at https://www.1xuezhe.exuezhe.com/Qk/art/591377?dbcode=1&flag=...

[mc32]

I see what you are saying. I think there are ways to do it. The Soviets were successful in their central Asian and Caucasus "Republics". They tended to coopt a local leader and got them to do their bidding. Even Russia now with Chechnya has been able to use the same formula. It's not impossible for the CCP to do the same.

[oblio]

One could argue that “totalitarianism” was the default government form for most of history.

The problem is, the higher we go on the Maslow pyramid, the more likely it is for it to fail. You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

And totalitarianism by definition has problems accepting criticism.

The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.

Regarding China, let’s see. These kinds of regimes don’t fail immediately. Just the cracks get bigger and bigger. From what I heard there’s a consolidation of power going on, that’s generally a sure sign of the first cracks appearing.

[cf498]

>The only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole and also benevolent.

I dont think thats realistic anymore. Once they are able to hit first and hit hard when opposition forms, they are pretty much untouchable.

The whole argument, of autocratic regimes having a higher chance of collapsing the longer the reign looks like a naive outdated approach to me. It bets on a critical mass of opposition forming. With total surveillance this wont happen.

A successful mass protest has to start somewhere. If you arrest those first people willing to risk everything you quell the entire thing. Its the basic concept of 1984. The only thing holding back this dystopia was the lack of a big brother state with sufficient insight.

[pram]

We had many totalitarian, mass surveillance states collapse practically overnight less than 30 years ago.

[cf498]

There mass surveillance back then was child's play in comparison what is possible today. There is a tipping point which is hopefully still in the future, where dissent is detectable and predictable enough that regimes are no longer at risk to collapse.

If you look at collapses of authoritarian regimes due to public pressure, they happen to a similar pattern. A small group of people start a protest and depending on how hated the regime is and how bad the living condition for most people are, others will join in, the more the less likely it becomes for them to be individually picked out.

This only works if the initial small group has enough time to motivate enough people to join in so that it snowballs. Earlier approaches were to minimize the time the small groups had to snowball with quick and hard actions, but with more and more surveillance, it becomes possible to target people even before they join. At a certain point it becomes possible to watch over every last citizen and target anyone who might be willing to start something like this in the future.

[s4vi0r]

The amount of protests in China has been exploding over the past decade(s). I didn't even know until someone mentioned it on here a few months back, but iirc its gone from maybe a few thousand per year in the 90s to well over 100,000 in recent years.

The Chinese rich I've interacted with are also (in my experience, at least - I don't have stats to support this) really ignorant of how bad a lot of their countrymen have it. A friend of mine's father is some sort of government official in a tier 1 or 2 city, and he's told me that the rich and poor are segregated enough that he himself didn't even realize his family was anything other than middle class until he came to Canada and saw it wasn't exactly normal to have parents who can afford 100k+ annual tuition, luxury cars and apartments, etc.

[robocat]

> You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

You create an upper middle class for the "creatives" and you restrict the areas of creativity to military and industrial use.

Most well off people that I know are happy to think the poor deserve to be poor and repressed (different people have different reasons for justifying it. Few seen to really care).

[siidooloo]

Nothing is forever. The current regime in China won't be forever either. The question is how long.

After Augustus Rome still had a couple of hundred years of expansion where a nationalist could argue, “hey look at that! Things are still going good.” But they couldn’t outrun the rot in the system forever.

After Xi will China get another strongman? I think this is the key. If there are a series of total dictators things will decay. Whatever justifications a dictator uses for their rules, ultimately they are going to try to implement policies that keep themselves on top first.

[pm90]

This is a great point. Xi is a strongman dictator and has arguably harmed Communist rule a lot more than he realizes by eliminating term limits. If the next ruler is some fool who cannot handle the crises that a country inevitably faces... it could lead to the country's undoing.

Which is why I am personally a lot more alarmed at the current US Presidency than most of my peers. Inept rulers have historically been the best predictors of a civilization's downfall. The fervent opposition to the administration by ordinary US citizens gives me hope but if Republicans continue to hold on to power after November, I really do feel that all will be lost.

[em3rgent0rdr]

> "only way for totalitarianism to “work” is if the rulers are both much smarter than the population as a whole"

The party can pick the smart people from population to join.

[siidooloo]

That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China? As long as some things are off limits / as long as people know they arn’t alowed to research this or that, then they’ll be at a long term disadvantage to those that do.

China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.

[kinsomo]

> That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China?

The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets.

> China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.

That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.

[siidooloo]

If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.

[kinsomo]

> If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.

They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

[woodandsteel]

But once the smart people are in, which person eventually winds up on top is determined by party politics.

[kazagistar]

Do we actually need creative inventive people? Maybe at some point we run low on truly innovative new ideas that are truly practical. Maybe we just start re-skinning the old ideas and selling them for no real benefit, and could do without the whole process. Maybe that's already in the process of happening.

[oblio]

Basic research needs those people. And in the end they win. That’s how we got the alphabet, iron working, etc.

[robocat]

> You just can’t have a huge mass of creative, inventive people without them complaining about leadership (and wanting to improve it).

You could split a country economically into a wealthy economic zone and a zone for the working class.

Or you could have a wealthy country that helps another country to be totalitarian, for the right economic gains.

[threatofrain]

It's one thing to invoke Abraham Maslow for aesthetic purposes during flowery discussion, but Maslow isn't followed much or at all by current researchers.

[oblio]

I can’t say I follow modern economics too closely, but does anyone really dispute that the need for food is a lower level one than the need for academic achievements, for example?

[nicodjimenez]

You've hit the nail on the head. But I think there are two separate issues at play here. The first issue is the re-writing of the social contract that can only be done by implementing mass surveillance. This approach is arguably justifiable and gives the government more control to optimize how things work. The second issue is having one party government where there is not opposition. To me this approach is definitely dangerous long term. Complete tyranny is fantastic when you have a great dictator, however there's just no evidence that this model is sustainable. If China gets too crazy, the best and brightest will want to leave the country. It's definitely a crazy and bold experiment and it's definitely working in the short term.

[perl4ever]

Successful "tyranny" could be analogous to successful multicellular life. We could be witnessing a similar development in the history of life. But note that multicellular life never wiped out single cells, and in fact we live symbiotically with a large number. Plus, cancer is apparently not something that can be eliminated.

[BurningFrog]

I don't even agree that this is totalitarianism. Most of China does not live like this.

This is mainly colonialism. The Han Chinese state is subjugating the Uighur people and taking their now strategic land.

[adventured]

There are good reasons to believe China's situation is in fact quite unique among totalitarian concepts and very difficult to replicate. China's situation represents a very complex, multi-generational cultural-political totalitarianism, and it required a unique context economically for it to occur. I've never seen another nation come even remotely close to replicating what it takes to set that up.

Take Turkey for example, under Erdoğan. Let's say he is, or wants to be, a traditional dictator. He's probably gone in 10 or 20 years due to age. His regime ends with him, very likely, because there's no broad cultural underpinning to his regime and legacy. That's the case in most totalitarian examples of the last century.

The cultural reformations that enabled the China boom, starting with Deng Xiaoping, are being systematically rolled backwards.

The economic gains from the late 1970s to ~2009, were very easy compared to the challenges that come next to continue pushing the per capita results ever higher. When you're starting from $175 GDP per capita in 1980, just about any meaningful improvement at all in the system will get you to $1,000 or $2,000 per capita.

My point being, only when the tide goes out do you see who is swimming naked, to borrow a line from Warren Buffett. China's vast growth no doubt masks immense problems that only become clearer in their scope and risk as their 30 year economic expansion matures (as it is now).

The people of China will tolerate a lot of things if you take them from $200 GDP per capita to $10,000. China is not going to be able to replicate that climb again, from here forward. That will have consequences, as the social contract in China requires perpetual, preferably rapid, improvement.

What China has done is extraordinarily expensive. They paid for it with a unique, historically singular export machine and trade surplus and starting from a context of a near zero welfare state (diverts capital from investment & growth) and from a setup with nearly maximum economic slack (easy to fill in for decades).

What other nations have anything like that setup to replicate from? Russia (fascist dictatorship, long totalitarian history) for example doesn't have that sort of extreme economic slack, its GDP per capita is already up where China is at today; the same goes for Turkey. The Russian system is mature, slow growth, with considerable existing structural financial demands that prevent the vast free use of capital as in China.

China's rules today are not the same as China's rules in 1996 or 2006. Culturally they've lost a lot of the modest freedom gains that were acquired over decades, in just the last five or six years. How does that impact the ability of their economic system to continue to scale over time, as the oppression ramps up?

These are two different systems - Deng vs Xi - not a continuing of the same system. Xi gets to ride on the accomplishments of the Deng revolution, including the financial capabilities it made possible. I think it's a fair question as to whether China can keep moving forward as they previously were, while simultaneously removing the Deng approach that made it all possible in the first place.

[ahartmetz]

Don't ignore the different philosophical foundation of Asian societies. Confucianism is quite different from the Western line of tradition starting from the Greeks. Confucianism emphasizes community and obedience more, which is more compatible with mass surveillance.

[woodandsteel]

What Xi is doing is not Confucianism. Confucianism had an elaborate set of rules that everyone, from the top down, was required to follow. Xi is basically making up the rules as he goes along.

[ahartmetz]

We're also not exactly following Socrates and Locke here, but the balance of values we have today is influenced by them.

[cabalamat]

> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.

The West has had, for the last 200 years (and arguably for the last 500) the advantage that its economic system is better than its rivals. This is a massive, game-changing advantage. But it's not obvious to me that the West is still ahead economically -- look at China's growth rates over the last 40 years. Admittedly they are coming from behind, but because of their population they only need 1/4 of the GDP per head of the USA to be ahead on total GDP.

I would say there's about a 50% possibility that China will make an authoritarianism that works, that's at least as successful economically as the West. And if that comes about it will be a real game-changer. And frankly, I don't think the West is up to the task of meeting the challenge; certainly I would not bet on Trump, Merkel, May et al doing the right thing.

[imbokodo]

The Marxist/Maoist idea of the Chinese would be that the government is just part of the superstructure on top of the base. The base being the current state of the forces of production in their continual self-evolution and reinvention, and the relations of production flowing from that.

In other words, the economic system determines the political system. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, the political system changed. When farming as the center made way for manufacturing and industry, the political system changed (as did culture).

I don't see this as much different than Americans driving Lakota onto the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Just two years ago the US federal government arrested and injured many on that reservation. Or Americans driving Vietnamese onto strategic hamlets. Or locking Japanese up in the 1940s. I don't see what innovation the Chinese have made.

[amaccuish]

You're being downvoted because what you've said is an inconvenient truth for a lot of Americans it seems.

[s2g]

also because it's whataboutism containing references to things widely regarded as stains on American history.

[StellarTabi]

You're never allowed to mention anything bad that's ever happened in the West, that's whataboutism. Randomly bringing up extremist scenarios like Mao's genocide of landlords or Stalin's gulags to prematurely shut down moderate pro-left discussions like "let's make healthcare a little more socialized in the US"? That's not whataboutism™.

[nomass]

Very well put and also very true. Most people are absolutely unaware how fast big shifts happen. The invention of national-socialism with the foundation of the NSDAP happened 1920. A few years later a highly weaponized and aggressive Germany invaded Poland in 1939. 19 years from zero to war.

[pm90]

Considering how much more technology has evolved since then, it isn't far-fetched to think that this pace of devolution into totalitarianism could happen much faster today.

In fact, this is precisely what happened with ISIS. I shudder to think what might have happened if the powers to be had not put aside their differences to fight a common foe.

[madengr]

Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.

[krapp]

> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.

The 2nd Amendment specifies that a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state, and that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be abridged by the Federal government.

Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government. That's a modern interpretation, albeit one currently upheld by the Supreme Court.

[kinsomo]

> Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government.

You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons.

To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."

[madengr]

The entire Bill or Rights is to prevent “misconstruction and abuse of powers”.

[arbitrary_name]

If you genuinely believe this argument, wouldn't the logical parellal thought be to starve the government of manpower and weapons? Instead, most who espouse the '2 amendment is needed against tyranny' position are often voting for massive increases to defense and policing budgets. Not picking a fight, it just seems ineffective and incongruous to think that holding on to an AR15 in your home will help you against billion dollar integrated policing and surveillance systems...

[kinsomo]

> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.

Exactly. If America has learned anything from the past half century of foreign military adventures, it should be that a big modern Army can't easily defeat a motivated insurgency that has the support and sympathy in the local population.

The 2nd Amendment may have a lot of costs, but the private gun ownership it provides for would definitely make it much more difficult for a domestic totalitarian regime to establish itself in the US.

[mr_toad]

Successful insurgencies these days are supplied with heavy weapons and training by outside powers. You’re not going to do anything against armour and air power with small arms.

[kinsomo]

> Successful insurgencies these days are supplied with heavy weapons and training by outside powers. You’re not going to do anything against armour and air power with small arms.

An insurgency has a lot of freedom in choosing its targets. If they don't have the weapons to directly attack armor or air power, they can avoid them. And with armor, there are other options, such as IEDs.

Also, I'd bet that an American insurgency against a totalitarian American government would get outside arms and support, as well as sympathy, support, and defections from actual US Army units. I don't think the US military would be able to maintain the same level of cohesion it has during foreign wars in a civil war.

A totalitarian regime would probably repeal the 2nd amendment as one of it's first acts, the the existing stock of small arms and ammunition would be enough for an insurgency or rebellion to start. I'd be much harder for a disarmed population to begin resistance.

[arbitrary_name]

I think that's a pipe dream. If it was a right wing totalitarian government, which is imho the likely lean of any totalitarian government in the us, there would be little defection or protest from folks in uniform.

Think about any standoff between protesters and police or national guard in the us. Lefty students or unionists or whatever get shot or peppersprayed by cops or national guardsmen with a family to feed and a career defined by obeying the rules - that equation will not change with scale.

[maxerickson]

I wonder if the winning side of a US military civil war would capture territory "nation building" style or if they would just use asymmetric reprisals. If it's the latter, civilian gun ownership is just going to get neighbors of insurgents blown up.

I'm also pretty sure that Iraqi civilians didn't have much access to small arms prior to the destabilization of the country. Didn't slow down the insurgency any.

[ihsw2]

I think you overestimate the appeal of modern liberalism and the negativity of totalitarian rule.

[obelix_]

Yup Trump, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the 2008 meltdown, Zuckerberg turning the internet into his private sewage factory etc etc are all shining achievements of western wisdom and deep thought. The poor unimaginative illiterates of the Orient just don't get it. If only they understood what magic freedom can produce.

Btw I suggest you reread your French Revolution history. The aristocracy was very much back in power within a year of the king getting his head chopped off. And then they propped up Napoloen who decided he needed to conquer the world. The next 100 years were spent with the elites of one European country or another colonising and pilaging most of South America, Africa and Asia. So much for freedom and equality and the aristocracy learning any lesson. They are still more of less in power with the same mindless global ambitions unless you haven't seen the inequality numbers and have your head buried deep in the sand.

[siidooloo]

Within a few decades of the French revolution half of the European governments were overthrown and replaced with constitutional Monarchies. The other half that resisted were forced into increasing totalitarianism and in a few more decades themselves overthrown in year zero revolutions.

The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.

[dragonwriter]

> The one country to avoid this, Britain, learned the lesson of the French Revolution. They maed enough reforms that there was no constituency for revolution.

Er, Britain had been a constitutional monarchy for a long time before the French Revolution, and many of the others made reforms rather than being overthrown, and in many cases, like Britain, well before the French Revolution.

Your version of history is badly distorted.

[boomboomsubban]

Both of you are somewhat right. The various events of the late seventeenth century helped prevent revolution from popping up around the French Revolution, but their political system at the time prevented most of the country from having a role in politics. This was a wide issue in Europe, and the Revolutions of 1848 were largely about that issue. Britain had addressed that issue with the Reform Acts, allowing their government to stay stable through the period.

[KSS42]

Britain had learned these lessons before the French Revolution : i.e. the English Civil war and the Glorious Revolution.

[Karishma1234]

> In the West we have a false sense of security that totalitarianism will inevitably fail.

At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse while Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed. It is a bubble boy vs Sewer Rat thing. The bubble boy looks extremely clean and insulated from bad things until one day it just dies of common cold. The filthy NY sewer rat however survives carrying in itself 10 different types of plagues.

> China seems committed to making totalitarianism "work."

We need to take a backseat and realise that American media simply does not get China, India or Japan. They are judging the world from their own spectacles which might be wrong. An average Chinese today is freerer than an average Chinese 30 years ago despite all efforts by their government. An average American today is less free than an average American 30 years ago.

I am incredible hopeful for India and China in upcoming efforts. I recently spoke to a Chinese attache at local embassy. He was as ecstatic to be outside China as now he could access Youtube and Facebook. He considered his own government moves to ban these services in his country absolutely stupid and saw them as a hindrance to help China emerge as a soft power.

[iamthirsty]

> At the height of civil war the western classical liberal democracies looked weak and near collapse w hile Soviet looked too strong and awesome until one day it just collapsed.

FYI the American Civil War ended in 1865 while the first Soviet was in 1905. And the first ~10 years after the ‘17 revolution were absolutely terrible in the Soviet Union. So your statement just isn’t correct.

[endisukaj]

They probably meant the Cold War.

[s2g]

Which doesn't make sense. At what point during the cold war was America close to collapse?

[CryptoPunk]

Communism was rapidly spreading at the height of the cold war.