Peter Berger of “Poor Elijah’s Almanack” renown recently asked VTDigger readers “Can a government of Boeberts, Greenes and Trumps long endure?”
The answer to this question is that sometimes racist, violent, authoritarian governments will endure, but even when they do, it’s no better than when they fail.
The father of modern-day fascism, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, rose to ultimate power during economic upheaval in 1922. Two decades later, Mussolini’s corpse was being publicly displayed in an Italy that had been physically decimated by war. And Italy had to continue fighting
only because Mussolini’s dream had left the Italians at the mercy of the next racist, bigoted authoritarian leader of mention.
Adolph Hitler was Mussolini with a sped-up calendar. It took Hitler and his Nazis a mere 15 years to take Germany from the depths of economic depression to absolute and total destruction.
On the other hand, we could offer Joseph Stalin, the infamous despot of the old and failed Soviet Union. Stalin clawed his way to absolute power during the 1920s and ‘30s and, unlike Mussolini and Hitler, was on the winning side of World War II. Stalin managed to die of natural causes while still in office, and the authoritarian, single political party/viewpoint governance managed to crawl forward until its ultimate demise in the late 1980s. I never imagined the old USSR as a place I wanted to live.
We could also offer other examples of surviving authoritarian systems in North Korea and Iran, and I’ll shortcut it to: Would you want to live there?
Saudi Arabia might offer an example. It certainly fits the bill of racist, violent and authoritarian, yet it seems to be thriving with near-unanimous global approbation. The Saudis’ success has been due to their easy to access oil, or course, but other failed authoritarians have had control over meaningful amounts of resources so that can’t be the full answer. I think it’s because Saudi Arabia has operated as a gated community that heavily restricts who is let in, much less what is said about the nation. Again the question: Live there?
China is a relection of its history. It always has had authoritarian governance, regardless whether home-grown or empire-imposed. So I’ll shortcut the necessary complexities and simply ask: Would you want to live there?
So yeah, a government made up of bad people can endure at least long enough to make life really miserable.
Rama Schneider
Williamstown
