Is there “good” dictatorships?
My personal opinion is there is no good dictator (ok, in HN context, BDFL in a SW project)
I like no totalitarian regime. No one.
A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent.
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law
- They can't forbid competition or alternatives
- Every participant can leave at any time
- If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.
How is a dictatorship different from a monarchy? There have been plenty of good monarchies throughout history. Frederick The Great, created the Prussian State. Stuart’s were well loved that they ended parliamentary democracy to restore the Stuarts. Victorian, Elizabethan era were also prosperous and well known. Ceasar was the final monarch who united the enmity between the nobles and plebs.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
I'm going to assume that you're speaking of monarchies in which the monarch is the actual ruler, rather than UK, Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada for instance, right?
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
There's a little fear in France, because the head of the far right party is the daughter of the former head, and the aunt of the rising star. Since that party seems not unlikely to win the next Presidential elections, we might end up with a monarchy in France.
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
