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No, it just seemed even sillier to me to recategorize the founding examples of totalitarianism as not totalitarian. Plus I seem to remember some neoreactionary stuff about "demotism", which put those regimes in the same category as liberal democracy.
But okay, your choice. So in nazi germany, where every civil association was forcibly absorbed into a nazi church, a nazi youth group, a nazi union; where every film and radio was spewing pure nazi propaganda, that regime did not care about public opinion, and wasn't totalitarian?
That's lame. Politics is more complicated than "Politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism".
What despotic nations are you talking about? Africans? I think even the dictators don't care about politics in africa. China? The rulers care what the people think.
Sounds like a made-up pseudo-freudian theory.
But if they thought they were going to lose to a superior enemy, wouldn't they "let go of their power willingly"?
Approximately 99% of defeated nations do not fight to the last man in war. Does that mean that they are in fact the stronger party, and only a weak will can make them lose?
If it's so silly it's because you imagined it. Nowhere have I ever claimed that War Communism or National Socialism aren't totalitarian ideologies.
Hence the rest of my analysis. Your insistence on reductionist dualism in this conversation is striking though. And totally irrelevant to a pragmatic school of political analysis.
Morocco, Belarus, Oman, Cuba, I've traveled quite a bit, how many examples do you want?
I'm not quite making up one of the most influential sociology works of all time but so what if it is?
If there is a superior enemy then you are not the ruling class because you have already been circulated.
What we're talking about here is a continued laxist or incoherent policy which then ends up at a crossroads where you either have to repress opposition in a bloodbath or be deposed. People who commit to the bloodbath are very seldom deposed. People who hesitate past the Rubicon always are.
Consider Louis XVI or Nicholas II, striking examples of this behavior.
So both lion regimes and fox regimes result in totalitarianism? Which is more totalitarian? Those two, or liberal democracy, or late soviet union?
I see, the apathetic kind of shit government. What I’ve noticed is the people want to get out of there.
It’s likely nonsense, that’s all. Freud wrote influential books around that time, too.
No true scotsman. Elites can never really lose, because if they’re beaten, you just mint new elites and call it circulation, say the old elites weren’t really elites, or imagine they could have fought harder. The circular logic of circulated elites theory.
Nicholas killed 15,000 in 1905, that was a bloodbath. Charles I fought two civil wars. I don’t think you can say he gave up a winning position because he was demotivated.
Of course. This is the destination of all power. Both concentration and the inevitable collapse that comes with it.
Democracies do tend to get there faster, however, because of the aforementioned effect. This has been observed on independently by enough people (Aristostle, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Lenin, etc) throughout enough eras that I think it's a relatively uncontroversial statement historically speaking. Of course modern liberal democracies tend to believe otherwise, but all regimes think themselves immortal and stabilizing. Let us grant ourselves some perspective.
I'm glad we can agree that despotism indeed doesn't necessarily involve mass politics.
And that's because...?
This would be circular logic if it was an argument to prove that only elites rule, this is just analysis that follows on from that proposition, mere implication.
If you want to discuss the axiomatic claim of elitism, we can certainly do that: I shall ask you to provide one (1) example of a government without an identifiable elite class.
Michels' core argument and the famous "iron law oligarchy" is that all human organization naturally create these out of structural necessity. So you shouldn't be able to find a single one given non trivial scales.
Given the scale of the October revolution as a whole (around 10M dead), and this being the upper bound of death toll estimates from Tsarist repression, this is ridiculously low. This is Russia we're talking about. There are battles that killed more people than this upper bound of all repression since Bloody Sunday. I don't see how that could honestly qualify.
Compare this to Stalin's purges (around 6M), an honest attempt to keep one's seat at any cost, and then let's talk of blood baths.
You'll notice that despite a troublesome interregnum, this did not mark the end of the British absolutism which would eek out three more decades. The end is typically set to the Glorious Revolution and James II's acceptation of the Bill of Rights and escape to France, which I believe fit the motif of renonciation pretty well.
I don’t dispute the claim that elites exist and have disproportionate power. I make the following claims:
A) The average, non-elite man, has some, non-zero amount of power
B) Ruling elites can lose power, and not only by “weakness of character, insufficient brutality”.
A is why liberal democracies, nazism, communism, care about and attempt to shape what he thinks. Russia or Belarus take a different knack, in that their propaganda seeks to keep the average man apathetic, but that model still recognizes his power.
Yeah, white elites fought and killed millions to hold on to their elite status, and lost.
So the guy who lost his head somehow won? Classic unbeatable elite move.
James II’s army disintegrated. They remembered the whooping his father had gotten in his civil wars and it wasn't going to get any easier with a catholic monarch. He tried again and was defeated at the battle of the boyne. This is not renonciation, it's capitulation of the weak.
I think your objection is more to the scope of the lens than to the content, that's the only way I can make sense of your arguments.
Elitism is by nature a class analysis, and postulates that power derives from coordination, not any individual's specific actions. In this it's opposed to Great Man and other individualistic theories of history.
You concede then that they are not totalitarians? Or are you going to attempt to stretch the definition of total to include absence?
I see no difference.
I mean James II is weak 'physically', his is the weaker party, militarily speaking. He did not give up out of "cowardice", he lost and would have kept losing, no matter how ruthless he got.
I don't think modern russia, belarus, or liberal democracies are totalitarian. Nazism, stalinism are. That is the mainstream view/usual definition of totalitarianism.
Here again, you speak of individuals, when that's not the level of analysis at play.
But when you talk of the weakness of Nicholas II and Louis XVI, you speak of individuals too.
Anyway, if you're not going to disagree with my claims, I'll interpret our differing views thus: You're kind of a disappointed idealist, and you see the flaws of liberal democracies (disproportionate elite influence, messy politics) as disqualifying for that form of government. I don't.
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