It might even be true of… Dun dun dun… Senator Bernie Sanders. Is that a risk you’re willing to take?
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If Bernie is the nominee, Bloomberg is gonna fund Trump’s PAC.
Yeah, Trump in the US really opened my eyes to how this all works actually. Don’t need a majority but do need to have a good chunk of the population supporting you under pretty much any system.
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ITT dictatorship == democracy now?
I suppose if you define constituency as “enough mass murderers for hire” then sure, OK. But I don’t think anybody thinks that’s what that word means.
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I do think that even the most brutal dictators can face popular pressure from common folks if things get too out of hand.
Just no.
Jfc has nobody the slightest sense of history anymore? All you need is an army. Ask the British empire.
Yes, then they kill them until they shut up
Is Xi Jinping going around killing everyone himself… if not, who is doing it and why? The way I see it, all these dictatorships have to have their MAGA equivalent true believers actually supporting them or there is no chance of survival with maybe the exception of a far stronger foreign power carpet bombing their enemies and civilian populations for a Pyrrhic victory.
Again, they don’t need a majority support, but spitballing %s need maybe at least 20% MAGA equivalent true believers with another 20-30% indifferent and/or having a “BOTH SIDES” attitude between them and their opposition.
Yeah this is a Keeeeeeed take if ever there was one. The population breakdown in Haiti for like 200 years was literally 90% slave and 10% colonist. Sure they eventually revolted, but whole generations lived and died under that regime with no major movement to change.
Interestingly the British Empire is exactly the type of operation that stopped working with the widespread miniaturization of military technology. This is the same reason we couldn’t pacify Iraq and can’t pacify Afghanistan.
The more training it takes to be an effective soldier and the more people you need to do a meaningful amount of damage the bigger the advantage you get from having large numbers of professional soldiers. We live in a world where a member of Seal team 6 can get blown sky high by an IED or eat a sniper bullet to center mass just as easily as anyone else. The more powerful the weapons get the less possible it is to hold territory without the support of the local population.
You’re 100% wrong about this. Without the support of the local population no amount of military power (short of killing literally every person in the area or creating some kind of ‘everyone watches everyone else’ NK dystopian police state which is itself a form of involuntary support from the local population) will allow anyone to hold ground long term ever again. Your control vanishes as soon as your gun is no longer trained on the people you supposedly control. And that’s not an exaggeration.
We live in a world where a bullet fired by a 14 year old is exactly as dangerous as a bullet fired by a member of Seal Team 6 once it leaves the barrel and is headed at your body. This is a massive change from back when soldiers fought each other with swords encased in expensive metal.
They revolted with late 18th century technology. That day would have come a lot sooner with AK’s and RPG’s. They were also a major source of cash flow for a global super power and still managed to expel them. The world has changed an enormous amount since then.
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Liz going negative.
On Bloomberg.
https://twitter.com/ShaneGoldmacher/status/1232297214900350976?s=19
Slavery didn’t have tremendous support in the halls of power in France, and the slaves had help of the Spanish, and the French military couldn’t devote overwhelming force because they were doing a bunch of other shit. Also most French troops died of tropical disease.
The specific example isn’t really important though. A people can be deeply dissatisfied and not revolting.
That first sentence is patently false. They didn’t support ‘slavery’ but they sure as fuck supported the massive amounts of money being generated from the Hatian plantations.
Revolts always have support from whoever your rivals are. In Afghanistan there’s no shortage of weapons flowing in to the Taliban from people who don’t like us. They’re also probably getting logistical and training support.
I agree that a strong level of dissatisfaction can exist without a violent revolt, but once you cross that line military force sure as fuck doesn’t help fix the problem. If anything it accelerates the process of being overthrown unless you’re willing to commit really significant atrocities like they have in Syria… and honestly the Syrian regime may never see peace again and would have collapsed without massive outside intervention from Russia and Iran.
So military support from other regimes doesn’t count, it’s inevitable, when it’s helping the people, but it does count, special exception, when it’s helping the authoritarian. This is all just bullshit to explain a feel you have that it’s impossible for a regime to maintain power against the will of the people and all exceptions like modern Syria, colonial Haiti, inf others don’t count because reasons.
Colonial Haiti fell and Syria isn’t out of the woods yet. Overwhelming outside support can win you an insurgency yes, but there aren’t many examples of that. NK is the only one I can come up with where it actually worked… and that itself can be explained as a popular uprising since it was a communist revolution.
I can come up with dozens of examples of popular revolts where the clearly militarily superior side lost vs the population from the last century.
Fun fact: Bernie has received the most donations from active military members.
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It turns out most members of the military are enlisted, most enlisted people are young poors (and very diverse) and young poors love Bernie.
No regime holds in perpetuity. When you say things like Xi has to answer to his constituents, you are presuming successful revolt in the near term. If you just say an authoritarian police state China can’t last forever, I mean, maybe, it’s unfalsifiable, and it’s not really saying anything.
The Chinese Communist Party remains pretty damn popular and far from the edge of a popular uprising everywhere but Hong Kong where it recently got a pretty massive black eye and was forced to back down.
Coronavirus might strain it a little bit, but yeah I don’t think they are anywhere close to the line yet.
None of that means Xi isn’t a dictator, and the people who say that dictators don’t have to answer to anyone are being silly. They don’t answer to voters, but they definitely answer to the people under them in the power stucture.