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Species of Tyranny and their Hallmarks (Part I: The Theory)
(c) Feb 3, 2025, by J. Nelson Rushton
Webster's dictionary defines "woke" as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Notice that this definition doesn't mention identity politics, or censorship, or cancel culture, or radical progressivism. Indeed, it does not mention anything that is associated with wokeness in the commonsense understanding of the word. That is because today, even the dictionary is woke.
To be woke in the Webster's sense is a noble thing indeed; it is to be a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the defining characteristic of a storybook hero -- like Superman, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf and rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old, grandma. Not coincidentally, and probably because it is sine qua non of a storybook hero, "defending the oppressed" has also been the stated agenda of some of the most murderous demagogues in modern history. Practically every murderer is also a shameless liar; thus, not being constrained by the facts, they naturally toward the loftiest possible story about their motives.
A tyrant's rise to power is often paved with woke-sounding platitudes. For example,
These are the words of Hiter, Stalin, and Mao Zedong-- who, between them, murdered tens of millions of their own people, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance, all in the name of "social justice". When you see a political leader rising to power on a fanatical message of standing up for the little guy, it's best to keep your rifle clean.
And how do such wolves rise to power? In many cases they are propelled by the will of the people. It is often believed that tyranny and democracy are opposites -- but the fact is that some of the most brutal dictators have risen to power on waves of broad popular support, in some cases through legal democratic processes, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. For this to happen, the tyrant must be shiny and slick enough to fool many people into complicity, and far more into complacency -- and they must keep their predatory intent in the realm of plausible deniability until it is too late for them to be stopped. It might be hard to believe this could happen, if it hadn't happened so many times.
So, how do we avoid being fooled, by leaders of our own party or those of another party? Are there signs that can be used to spot a rising tyranny in its formative stages, while it is still in its sheep's clothing? If so, those signs must be subtle -- or else it would not have been possible for so many intelligent, well-meaning people to be taken in by tyrannical movements through history.
Nonetheless, while they may be subtle, I believe there are certain hallmarks, or "tells", that tyrannical movements tend to exhibit even early in their stages, before they have gathered power, risen up, and bared their fangs. I hold that these hallmarks include, for example, the following:
The thesis of this essay will be that
Species of Tyranny
Tyranny can be defined as oppressive government rule. As I have discussed in a previously post, Plato wrote about the forms of tyranny that he and his forebears had observed in Classical Greece, but today we have more history to look back on. From our perspective, we can see that while many of Plato's observations are timeless, not all forms of oppressive government conform to the same model. It seems, author James Lindsay has put it, that there is more than one species of tyranny.
The tyrannical movement described by Plato is populist in nature. That is, in its rise to power, the tyrannical regime of The Republic derives its strength from broad public support. Generally speaking, this support need not come from an absolute majority of the population -- but it must come from a vocal and militant minority, that is large enough, and has enough allies, in the presence of enough passive bystanders, to seize power on the impulse of a "people's movement". Thus, Plato's tyrant is a demagogue: one who rises to power by stirring up and appealing to rash, angry sentiments that are festering among the population.
A demagogue can take office through a legal election or appointment (as with Hitler), through a revolution (as with Mao Zedong), or through a popular coup d'etat (as with Lenin). But not all tyrants are demagogues. A hereditary monarch, such as Mary I ("Bloody Mary") of England or Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") of Russia, might indeed lead a cruel and oppressive regime, but their ascension to power does not rest chiefly on popular support, either of themselves or of their agenda. So, typically, a monarch's path to power does not resemble that of Plato's archetypal tyrant, even if they are, in fact, a tyrant.
On the other hand, despotic hereditary monarchs are not the sort of tyrant we need to worry about much in the West these days. From this point forward I will focus on populist forms of tyranny: those in which the tyrants take office on the strength of their public support, whether by legal means, illegal means, or a combination of the two as in Plato's Republic.
Even after restricting focus to populist forms of tyranny, not all of these have the same character. On top of being populist in nature, the tyranny described in The Republic is marked by radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and values. But not all populist tyrannies are radically progressive, or even progressive at all. For example, the path from democracy to tyranny in The Republic begins with weakening household patriarchy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took steps in the same direction -- but the Ayatollahs have not weakened the patriarchy in Iran (au contraire!). For another example, Plato’s tyrannical regime advocates open borders and a liberal immigration policy, much as the woke left has in recent times -- but such a program would not characterize the Nazis, to say the least.
On the other hand, while not all populist tyrannies are left-leaning in nature, it does seem that practically all, if not all, left-leaning tyrannies are populist in nature. This is empirically observable as well as naturally logical: if a tyrant, as such, has the power to impose his will upon the people without their consent, one doctrine he is not likely to impose is that of egalitarianism. He is more likely to impose a pitiless, top-down pecking order, with himself at the apex.
In light of all this, I submit the following:
In summary, populist tyranny is a species of tyranny, and leftist tyranny is a sub-species of populist tyranny. What follows from that?
Populist Tyranny
The first consequence of the claim that populist tyranny is a species of tyranny is something that is obvious to any student of history, but evidently not obvious to many people: that populist tyranny is a thing in the first place. It seems to be widely believed that democracy and tyranny are opposites, and that tyranny can only take hold by being ruthlessly imposed from the top down. In fact, Webster's (now woke) dictionary lists democracy and tyranny as antonyms. But on the view I propose here, de facto democracy is not the opposite of tyranny at all. On the contrary, it is an essential prerequisite for the very kinds of tyranny we need fear most, viz., tyranny of a populist variety.
At a minimum, there is nothing logically contradictory about democracy and tyranny. The will of the people as a whole, at least in principle, could be to welcome over them a cruel and oppressive dictator -- so long as he is cruel and oppressive chiefly to a well-defined minority. So a democratic tyranny is possible in theory; the question is whether it could happen in real life. Philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau -- a key figure of the Enlightenment -- seemed to think not. Rousseau wrote that democracy is practically infallible, so long as it truly reflects the will of the people:
I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.
The plain fact of history is that the population as a whole often supports leaders who cruelly oppress certain individuals or demographic groups -- and, in many cases, supports those leaders because they promise to oppress those people or groups. It might be difficult to know what the majority silently felt about, say, Lenin, or Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini -- but what the majority silently feels is not worth spit. In the real world, it is what a majority of active and vocal citizens feel that makes the will of the people -- in proportion to how active and vocal they are, and regardless of whether they assert their will by counting heads or by cracking heads. Formal democracy can soften the effect of this law of realpolitik, but democracy just-on-paper cannot soften anything much when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity [cf. Yeats: "The Second Coming"]. Germany was a formal democracy as Hitler was rising to power, as was Russia during the rise of Lenin. Yet, in the practical sense of rule by the people, Germany welcomed Hitler over them, as Russia welcomed Lenin -- in substantially the same way that Iran welcomed in the Ayatollahs, even though Iran was not a formal democracy at the time. Each of these leaders rose to power by winning a contest for popular support, one way or another, Rousseau's pipe dream bedamned.
Hallmarks of Tyranny
So, how do we recognize rising tyrannical movements before they reach full bloom?
To draw an analogy in zoological terms, consider, for example, how usually know a mammal when we see one. A mammal is defined as an animal that nurses its young with milk. But when you see a mammal in the wild, even of a species you have never seen before, you usually don't have to wait until you see it reproduce and feed its young to recognize it as a mammal. This is because mammals have a certain cluster of diagnostic traits -- that is, features that co-occur together in most mammals, and co-occur for the most part only in mammals. The diagnostic traits of mammals include having hair rather than scales or feathers, and being warm blooded -- as well as certain hidden anatomical features such as having three middle ear bones, a diaphragm for breathing, and a neocortex brain structure.
Each category of tyranny -- if we have chosen our categories in a way that reflects nature (or in this case human nature) -- should also have certain collections of diagnostic traits. I will refer to the diagnostic traits of each species of tyranny as its hallmarks. Below I will list what I believe are some hallmarks of tyranny, followed by additional hallmarks of populist tyranny, and the further hallmarks left-leaning populist tyranny. For readers familiar with the history of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century, these hallmarks may strike a chord of familiarity. The same goes for readers who have seen wokeness unfolding in the West in recent years.
The hallmarks of tyrannical government of all sorts include authoritarianism, extremism, and identity politics, defined and illustrated as follows:
Populist tyrannical ideologies -- from that of Plato's Republic, to Soviet and Chinese communism, to Nazism -- exhibit the hallmarks of tyranny in general, with two modifications. First, the identity politics of populist forms of tyranny tend to be based on a narrative of historical class exploitation (e.g., by the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", or straight white males). Second, in populist tyrannical movements, the characteristics of authoritarianism, identity politics, and extremism emerge in a decentralized form, imposed by partisans of the ideology in any spaces, institutions, and jurisdictions where they hold sway. This process begins long before the movement consolidates central power, as we have seen happen with the woke movement in recent years.
Leftist tyrannical movements -- including all of the above except Nazism -- share all of the hallmarks as populist tyranny, with the stipulation that their extremism takes the form of radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and longstanding laws. Elements of radical progressivism (common to the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China, to Plato's archetypal tyrant, and to the woke movement) include things such as negating gender differences, rejection of traditional religion, aggressive wealth redistribution, disarming private citizens, gutting the pre-existing legal system (e.g. legacy police departments), negating meritocracy, and denigrating traditional culture and cultural icons.
My next few posts will illustrate how these hallmarks were visible in the early stages of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century -- Russian and Chinese Communism, and German Nazism -- and how they are also visible in the woke movement today, in case you haven't noticed.
You need to reference more past work here. Since the 1940s, countless thinkers have drawn parallels between Communism and Fascism, trying to identify a common element that causes societies to descend into tyrannies, usually with the idea that it might pre-emptively prevent such an outcome. Here are some examples:
Karl Popper and "The Open Society and Its Enemies", where Popper traces tyranny back to Plato, Hegel and Marx. He identifies historicism, a belief in a predetermined historic destiny, as one similarity. Fascism has the inevitability of racial struggle, while Communism had stages of history where society was destined to progress through capitalism, socialism, and then to communism.
Hannah Arendt and "The Origins of Totalitarianism". More or less the foundational text of the entire idea of "totalitarian studies". Blames mass society, pan-nationalism, racism, and the collapse of traditional sources of authority in the Kaiser and Tsar as the key similarities that enabled the rise of Fascism and Communism.
Even Ayn Rand, who identifies "altruism" as the cause, can fit here. Specifically, her criticism that Auguste Comte's version of Altrusim, which demands that individuals should live not for themselves, but for others, leads to tyrany. Whether that other be the proletariat, the state, the nation, or the race.
As for the idea that you need to look for the precursors of Nazism/Communism, and that by drawing parallels between this and Woke, you can also identify Woke as being tyrannical, is nonsense. Because you don't even need to look there. Whatever you want to call the current ideology, it already has totalitarian outcomes. To beat my usual drum, it was the lockdowns. No need to fret about what they might do in the future when the past already has an example.
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I hate that every long form essay now comes under suspicion of being generated by AI. But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits. The amount of effort to write multipage screeds like this, just to farm AAQCs from fellow woke-haters on the Motte, is characteristic of either a monomaniacal obsession not displayed by even our most dedicated and prolific polemicists, or someone who's testing his prompt engineering skills.
So, really man, did you write all this?
I don't see this as such a bad thing. Maybe it'll make people to actually get to the point faster instead of doing a Scott and spending pages and pages of pointlessly waffling around the periphery.
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For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.
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Haha. Yes I really wrote it.
My goal is not to farm AAQC's. I am writing a book and serializing it on TheMotte to get feedback. The AAQC's are nice, but the feedback is invaluable. The working title of the book is They See Not [cf. Proverbs 135:16].
I do not believe it looks like it was written by AI. But, if you know of an LLM that will generate sourced evidence for the malignancy of the woke mind virus without being hacked, please do let me know.
I have a suggestion: when you post parts of your work-in-progress and want feedback, start with a personal note that says so. I've been skipping these posts (sorry, by now something that looks like LLM doesn't get my attention), but I won't if I know that there's a human who is developing thoughts and welcomes feedback. Best of luck on the book!
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