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by fmnxl 475 days ago
No, my point is Trump isn't bad because he's "authoritarian". He's bad because he's completely mismanaging the country, and putting oligarchs in charge of the government.

Even for "authoritarian regime", that'd be a horrible way to run a country.

It's not like the democrats aren't full of oligarchs themselves, like the likes of Pelosi.

1 comments

> No, my point is Trump isn't bad because he's "authoritarian".

But, you're wrong, he is wrong for that reason.

> He's bad because he's completely mismanaging the country

He's also wrong for that reason, which is also not completely unrelated to the former reason.

> and putting oligarchs in charge of the government.

And for thet reason, which is mostly a rephrasing and slightly more specific form of the first reason.

> Even for "authoritarian regime", that'd be a horrible way to run a country.

Actually, its pretty typical of authoritarian regimes to (1) have a narrow elite (oligarchs) making decisions with no effective accountability for their own benefit, and (2) for this to, from any other perspective but the immediate perceived self-interest of those decision-makers to be complete mismanagement. (It’s also pretty typical for it to be mismanagement from any reasonable view of the elites actual interests, and paranoia driven by fear of being displaced either by outsiders or other members of the elite leads to suboptimal elite decision-making, because authoritarianism does not support conflict resolution processes that enable trust, and makes losing intra-elite disputes very high stakes.)

That's what I'm trying to say. You judge based on the denomination first, like how protestants use to think all catholics are inherrently evil. That was the ideological war of the 16th century, and looking bad do you see how pointless it was?

Sure the Pope and the catholic clergy were corrupt, but they weren't bad because they're catholics or authoritarian. Corruption was the issue, not catholicism itself nor authoritarianism. To think so is to force a narrative.

> You judge based on the denomination first

“Authoritarian” isn't, and isn’t analogous to, a religious denomination like “Catholic" or “Protestant”.

> Corruption was the issue, not catholicism itself nor authoritarianism

“Authoritarian” as a descriptor is more like “corrupt” than it is like “Catholic”. Not that the claim that being Catholic—or, for those positively inclined toward Catholicism, Protestant or Muslim or Secular Humanist or Satanist (Church of Satan) or Satanist (The Satanic Temple)—is not bad in and of itself is an uncontroversial pillar on which to rest an analogy,

Who downvoted this?