Global tyranny update: Russia transitions into full-blown dictatorship

A few weeks ago, I posted about Putin's crackdown on the internet, musing that "it is surprising that it took Putin this long to get serious about clamping down." Putin has finally started shutting down access to undesirable content in the form of politically, including personally, inconvenient facts, truths and logic. 

An article in the Economist explains why this is happening now. It includes an interesting description of the difference between an autocracy and dictatorship. The Economist writes in an article, Manacled in Moscow, that Russians are starting to distrust and oppose Putin's authoritarian kleptocracy. Russians were turning away from state TV, radio and print propaganda to online content that was still free and uncensored. In response, Putin is moving toward full blown police state dictatorship, including a crack down on the internet. 

The drop in Putin's trust has been significant, going from about 60% in 2015 to about 30% in 2020-2021.

Two points the Economist touches on merit mention, (i) autocracy vs dictatorship, and (ii) the enormous value to authoritarians of keeping a society ignorant, which amounts to lying by omission:

Vladimir Putin has shifted from autocracy to dictatorship. 

Grigory Okhotin of ovd-Info, a media and human-rights organisation that monitors political repression and provides legal help to its victims, notes a shift in the government’s tactics. Once it wanted to contain, and by doing so deter, political threats. Now it wants to eliminate them. Political power has shifted from civilian technocrats to militarised and often uniformed “securocrats” happier with violence. The regime has moved from being a consensual autocracy supported by co-option and propaganda to a dictatorship resting on repression and fear.

Though Mr Navalny had support in Moscow and some other places, only 20% of Russians approved of him. But 80% now knew who he was. One of the key assets of any autocracy—the apparent absence of any alternative—had been lost. The Russian elite started to talk about succession. So Mr Putin changed the constitution to let himself stay in power indefinitely and reinforced that change with repression.

In 2019 Mr Putin signed a “sovereign internet” law which forced internet providers to install special equipment that allows the state to block, filter and slow down websites. Gregory Asmolov, an expert on the internet at King’s College London, says the goal is not to build a Chinese-style firewall but to influence people’s choices. If people don’t know what they are missing, they will not look for it.

For now the Kremlin seems to have succeeded in applying enough repression, and thus generating enough fear of worse to come, to accomplish its needs. But the screw continues to be turned. .... And Russia’s securocrats are not going to pack their bags and go home when they control a significant and growing chunk of public expenditure. More than 10% of the national budget is spent on internal security. There are a third more police and security staff than active-duty soldiers.

This 15 minute video, How Putin is Silencing his Opponents, describes what Putin is doing to Russians and how he is doing it.

This is just one example of how much worse the situation can get if American authoritarians take control here and are able to complete to their satisfaction the ongoing destruction of democracy the rule of law, free and fair elections, etc. 

Time for a cheerful thread, and just in time for Christmas

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Updates on a couple of the ex-president's escapades

Gutting federal agencies and diversity

Remember when the EXP (ex-president) moved the Interior Department to Colorado a couple of years ago? Yes, we all remember it. A Washington Post article points out some of the ramifications. For context, the EXP and ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) both hate the Interior Department and its Bureau of Land Management, along with most of the rest of the federal government except the military, courts and law enforcement. The WaPo writes:  

As Trump officials were moving the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C., to Colorado two years ago, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, issued a stark warning to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt: The department risked a “significant legal liability” by driving Black employees from an agency that was overwhelmingly White.

The agency’s major reorganization was also done without a “strategic workforce plan,” laying out how the changes would advance the agency’s goals, the report added.

As a result, “BLM lacks reasonable assurance the agency will have the workforce necessary to achieve its goals in managing millions of acres of public lands,” the report said.  

While Trump administration officials argued that moving the BLM West would put employees closer to the lands they manage — primarily located in 12 Western states — current and former employees have described how, in fact, the move derailed the agency by breaking up teams that once worked closely together and scattered people across several Western cities. Most of those ordered to move West chose to quit or retire rather than accept new jobs.

So, as usual for the EXP, there was no plan and the agency's ability to do its job was probably significantly impaired. It was just more seat of the pants ARP anti-governance in the name of tearing democracy down and discrediting it. That stunt gives the ARP an excuse to (i) criticize BLM for failing to do its job, and (ii) push for outsourcing the work to private companies who will be free to fleece the taxpayers. As an added bonus, it got rid of some Black employees. It was a twofer for the EXP and ARP! 

The creepy, scary memo

2nd to last bullet point:

When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical
(In American Democracy, the military is supposed to be apolitical) 

In a truly creepy, scary story, the WaPo reports on a memo that a young, inexperienced but raging authoritarian extremist, Johnny McEntee, in the White House wrote. The WaPo writes about the memo in an opinion piece:

[The] evidence comes courtesy of ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, who has unearthed a memorandum from Johnny McEntee, Trump’s director of presidential personnel, listing 14 reasons for ousting Esper. That document was dated Oct. 19, 2020. Three weeks later Esper was fired by a Trump tweet.

The very premise of McEntee’s memo was both sinister and ludicrous — a 30-year-old of no professional or intellectual distinction, whose path to power was carrying Trump’s bags, was making the case for getting rid of a senior Cabinet officer for insufficient loyalty to the president. This revealing and chilling document deserves to be read not as a historical curiosity but as a terrible portent of what could be in store if Trump wins another term. He appears determined to turn the military into his personal goon squad.

One of McEntee’s first complaints was that Esper had “approved the promotion of Lt. Col. [Alexander] Vindman, the start [sic] witness in the sham impeachment inquiry, who told Congress that the President’s call with Ukraine ‘undermined U.S. national security.’”

The next item in the indictment of Esper: “Publicly opposed the President’s direction to utilize American force to put down riots just outside the White House.” This was a reference to Esper’s brave decision in June 2020 to resist Trump’s desires to deploy active-duty troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests.

The most damning and telling grievance against Esper was near the bottom of this pathetic document: “When he assumed his role, he vowed to be apolitical.” Normally being apolitical is a sine qua non for leading the armed forces. That’s why President Biden chose retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary and President Barack Obama decided to keep Republican Robert M. Gates in the post. But Trump tried to destroy the professional, apolitical ethos of the armed forces — and if given the opportunity, he will almost certainly do so again.  

Well, the next time around, Trump would want to ensure that the “guys with guns” are on his side. If he wins a second term, Trump’s next defense secretary (Johnny McEntee perhaps?) would almost certainly be somebody more devoted to him than to the Constitution. For anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy, that should be a cause of considerable alarm at a time when Trump and Biden are running almost neck and neck in polling matchups.

This is more clear evidence of the deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the EXP, and arguably the ARP too, most of which still supports the guy and his politics and policies. The EXP demanded loyalty to himself, not the Constitution, the rule of law, truth or anything else. That is a key marker of a full-blown tyrant including a fascist tyrant. 

Questions: 

1. Is this more clear evidence of the deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic character of the EXP, and/or the ARP, which has not criticized the memo or its anti-democratic implications? If not, what is it evidence of, just harmless politics as usual?

2. When the EXP stated that he would hire only the best people, is it reasonable to now believe that by 'the best people' he meant people most loyal to him, not the most competent or devoted to democracy or the Constitution? 

3. Should anyone concerned about the future of U.S. democracy be considerably alarmed, or is this just another the EXP's harmless exploits, even if he did fire Esper after the McEntee memo came to his attention?  

The political polarization tar baby snags the gerrymander rabbit

To reduce polarization and political extremism, some states got rid of gerrymandering by the party in state power and transferred power to independent commissions. The tactic is apparently backfiring and failing in at least some states that tried the experiment. The New York Times writes:

Independent commissions to oversee the redrawing of electoral maps were thought to be the solution to an age-old problem. Instead, they have become bogged down in political trench warfare.

In Wisconsin, a court battle over redistricting is already unfolding between Republicans who control the Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.

In Virginia, members of a bipartisan panel were entrusted with drawing a new map of the state’s congressional districts. But politics got in the way. Reduced to shouting matches, accusations and tears, they gave up.

In Ohio, Republicans who control the legislature simply ignored the state’s redistricting commission, choosing to draw a highly gerrymandered map themselves. Democrats in New York are likely to take a similar path next year.

And in Arizona and Michigan, independent mapmakers have been besieged by shadowy pressure campaigns disguised as spontaneous, grass-roots political organizing.

[A]s this year’s once-in-a-decade redistricting process descends into trench warfare, both Republicans and Democrats have been throwing grenades at the independent experts caught in the middle.

In state after state, the parties have largely abdicated their commitments to representative maps. Each side recognizes the enormous stakes: Redistricting alone could determine which party controls Congress for the next decade.

In some states, commissions with poorly designed structures have fallen victim to entrenched political divisions, leading the process to be punted to courts.

New York Democratic state legislators, who can override the state’s independent redistricting commission with a supermajority vote, have disregarded the draft proposal that the commission made public in September. In New York, Democratic state legislators are likely to ignore recommendations made by the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission. 

Last week, Utah Republicans adopted their own maps, ignoring proposals from a redistricting commission that voters approved in 2018. On Monday, Washington State’s redistricting commission missed a deadline to finish its maps, sending drawing authority to the State Supreme Court.

For decades, well-meaning people saw independent commissions as a crucial way to eliminate gamesmanship that exasperates many voters and distorts American politics: the incumbency protection, the devaluing of people’s votes, the polarization and stridency that it all fuels.   

The poisonous divisions and intolerance that decades of toxic dark free speech has fomented has come home to roost. Extremists got what they wanted, including anti-democratic toxins such as deep social division, a broken democracy, lost of trust and legitimacy in democracy, the press, experts and political opposition, loss of compromise, and loss of political good faith in day to day operations. Included on the list casualties is partisan hostility to transparent, competitive, fair and honest elections. 

In at least 17 states that the ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) controls have passed laws intended to suppress non-Republican votes, and/or to allow state politicians, officials or legislatures the freedom to simply overturn election results the ARP dislikes. The lie behind that, the "stolen" 2020 election, fools no one maybe except some of the ARP elites and most of its rank and file supporters. America's radical right hates free and fair elections and it has been that way among elites at least since the 1980s. The 2020 elections were probably the last transparent, free and fair nationwide elections this country will have for a very long time, maybe forever. The ARP will not make the mistake of allowing that kind of election again as long as it holds power.

In their 2016 book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels pointed out that well-intended attempts to make democracy better and more responsive tend to either fail to work, or have the opposite of the intended effect. Power in politics is elusive, subtle and it quickly flows wherever there is room for it. For example, in the case of term limits that many voters supported, power tends to flow from termed-out elected politicians and newly elected politicians to career bureaucrats and special interests, making governance outcomes even less responsive to the will of the people. 

In another example, ARP deregulation of businesses is always falsely sold by the ARP, the business community and radical right anti-government ideologues, as means to increase personal freedom and free markets to do good things like trickling prosperity down. In fact, the opposite is the norm. Power flows from government protecting personal freedoms via regulations to the special interests who were regulated. The newly freed business and religious interests (i) reward the politicians who freed and protected them, and (ii) become free to do bad things such as screwing consumers or trampling on civil liberties, which they do not hesitate to do.

Non-partisan means to draw non-partisan voting districts to try to keep elections more competitive and candidates less extremist is failing if the NYT analysis is basically correct. It seems to be correct. Given the stakes and how close the US is to becoming some sort of an aggressive Christian authoritarian autocracy-plutocracy, maybe it is time for blue states to get rid of the experiment. Red states sure as death and taxes are not going to protect transparent, free and fair elections -- they are clearly moving in the opposite direction of building the legal infrastructure for opaque, unfree and unfair elections.

So, for example, if California repealed its independent redistricting commission law and went back to the good old days of the gerrymander rabbit running free and wild, districts could be drawn to obliterate mendacious authoritarian freaks such as Devin Nunes and Kevin McCarthy from the House of Representatives. What is left of the ARP in California could be decimated and wiped out, which happens to be exactly what it would love to do to those evil, tyrannical, socialist-communist Democratic pedophiles, sinners, atheists, minority people and other deplorables. 

Questions: 

1. Should the CA legislature get rid of independent redistricting, return to the gerrymander and use it to push toxic authoritarian radicals like the mendacious, treasonous Devin Nunes and the mendacious, treasonous Kevin McCarthy out of the House? Or are those two politicians just valiant patriots fighting the insane tyranny and cannibalistic pedophilia of deep state, false flag, socialist-communist-atheist Democrats (or is that wording a bit over the top, if so, how much so?)?

2. Should Blue states pass Republican voter suppression and election rigging laws like the 17 Red States have already done and will continue to do if election results are not to the ARP's liking, or, are the laws the 17 states passed either (i) not voter suppression or election rigging laws, or (ii) actually necessary due to actual proven widespread voter and election fraud in the 'stolen' 2020 election? 

3. Does power really flow to wherever there is room for it and whoever has the wealth and/or power to take it, such as power to gerrymander voting districts or power to abuse consumers who were previously protected by regulations that got taken away?