I’m just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc… Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they’ve done? What do they exactly like about them?
Aren’t these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?
Those leaders offer simple answers to complex social problems and claim to restore their country to the halcyon days of yore. The days when there were no immigrants, liberals, degeneracy or whatever “came later to ruin the country.”
Also the voters may believe that voting against their interests somehow benefits them.
I think it comes down to not understanding who they are and what does, infact, benefit them. This state is induced by design. These are professional human traffickers, and they deal in trading suffering for power.
The covid lock down in North Korea for example. Why? My understanding is that it is just to hold the seat of power, whatever that means to the ruling people. Letting in food or people or medicine would introduce am outside factor that offers something the current ruling class can not offer. So shut it down.
It’s greed…average, kind, simple people are screwed over all in the name of ego or what have you.
I’m not really sure there is an answer at all anymore. People suffer, because we are conscious beings. That is a pretty unnatural state to be in, when you think about it.
All we can really do is alleviate the suffering we encounter in our everyday lives at the end of the day, and try to be better people, and maybe one day far from now, we will all have this understanding of ourselves
Some other factors that I have noticed -
- Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
- The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
- Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.
The short answer is that they think the authoritarian is on their side.
The long answer is that people in groups are stupid and they have been manipulated into thinking the authoritarian is on their side
The simple answer is people are stupid, and half of them are even stupider then you might think they are.
Well, in Russia, Putin is having his opponents killed/thrown in jail. It’s not a democracy, like in NK where Kim have 99.9% of the vote.
Went here to write this.
Source: I’ve left Russia, where I’ve been born, after war started. Left there my whole family and all friends.
The same reason Republicans still manage to win elections… through massive amounts of fraud and “gaming the system”. People don’t understand how thoroughly “representative democracy” is rigged - it can barely even be called “representative,” never mind “democratic.”
You also have Democrats willing to work with Republicans to carve out their own gerrymandering districts. Jim Clyburn was recently exposed for helping the Republicans in his state carve up the biggest black majority city into small sections diluted by the suburban white voters. This created only one black majority area which is where Clyburn runs.
If it were properly sectioned off then maybe two or three districts could be made with higher black populations that would have to compete to maybe have black friendly candidates.
Jim Clyburn is an Uncle Tom like traitor to democracy. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-rep-james-clyburn-protected-his-district-at-a-cost-to-black-democrats
Once a competent authoritarian leader takes root, it becomes very hard to remove him: the necessary mechanisms, formal or informal, tend to be sabotaged - not at once, but more and more over the years. It also helps when some of opposition have their lives broken, when uncertainty about one’s own life is high, the value of human life low, when loyalty is placed above both competence and the law, and the law above competence, when the reputation of any possible contenders is questionable or made questionable, when people are used to the thought of futility of resistance (with fresh examples produced all the time) and being alone before the oppression, when somewhat educated people are made to think their views are in minority (independently of whether it’s the case) and some of less educated people have some of their misery alleviated (and are occasionally given some power they did not deserve) in return for voicing the pro-government position (even if a good measure of said misery is a consequence of the government’s actions).
Because compromise is messy and progress is incremental and sometimes hearing someone yell words that sound true will make you feel like you’ve found the answer to all the political bullshit.
Step 1. Take control over all types of media Step 2. Eliminate opposition Step3. ??? Step 4. Profites !
People keep voting for them because they foster and environnement where there is no one else to vote for.
Last election in Turkey may have looked like a close call for Erdogan. But during the campaign he got over 85% of media coverage, while the other candidates have to share the crumbs (I am pulling those numbers out of my ass).
In Hungary, one big reason is that the government has all the media coverage, and they basically created a false narrative that if Orbán loses, then a) the previous government will come back and no matter how bad things are right now, it will be WORSE, b) migrants will come and wreak havock, c) our sons will have to go to war (in the last election, the opposition lost a lot of votes because there was a billboard campaign stating that the new PM candidate would send soldiers to Ukraine), d) there will be some kind of woke dictatorship.
People also think that the bad quality of life is mostly the fault of the EU and the previous government (which was in power over a decade ago…), and that it’s okay that Orbán and his party steals from them because at least they’re “on their side”.
The government also provides some help to parents, which people find valuable, so they keep voting for FIDESZ.
I’d say the average person just doesn’t want to deal with politics. Instead, they choose the easy way out and vote one or a small group of authoritarians to rule the whole system. Plus, authoritarians have historically been equated to social stability and security. Can’t have violent political demonstrations or “problematic speech” under people like Putin or Kim Jung-un; everything is “politically correct.” And once the authoritarians are in power, the people have no say or power anymore, and at the very least the people FEEL powerless against the government, and again choose the easy way out by keeping their head down and refusing to instigate a fight against the government force that would easily and brutally overpower them.
Plus, the authoritarian governments are quick to blame their enemies for the problems of the people, utilizing propaganda, and the people are either obediently putting their trust jn their government (many people in every nation, both liberal and authoritarian, tend to trust the “credible source” that is their government), or the people stay quiet to avoid becoming an enemy of the state. I could go on, but I think I’ll just say I digress right here. Feel free to chip in and let me know what y’all think! :)
There is a whole system of media devoted to getting normal folks to vote against their own interests. In the regimes you list (and I’d argue also in western so called liberal democracies too but to a lesser extent) the capitalist class and political class are so intertwined due to influence and corruption, that whatever the needs and whims of the leading politicians, the media machine will distract and manipulate. The same tactics that they use are the ones which have worked since the start of mass media, they know how human psychology works.
Appealing to emotional arguments, external threats, racism, nationalism. Remember these are political tools, unfortunately very effective ones, as we saw in fascism in the 1900s. A curious consequence is that often, the worse things get for the normal people, the easier it is for these malicious actors to spin and manipulate and blame it on an external force or political enemy which deflects blame or allows for more extreme political ideology to rise in a society. So you get an accelerated political extremism.
People are seeing a massive drop in their quality of life before they vote for an authoritarian.
That’s why they vote for strongmen - the neoliberals that were in charge before fucked everything up, and without any understanding of why that happened they just react by electing the opposition.
Except that leaders like Orban or Erdogan have been in power for like a decade already.
Sure, once these types get in to power they’re hard to dislodge.
Quality of life declines, people vote for a strongman. Then, once he’s in, he just has to make sure he isn’t the one that gets blamed for continuing declining quality of life. They usually control the media and suppress political opponents, and it doesn’t help that the alternative being offered is just a return to the previous neoliberal politics that oversaw the start of the decline in the first place.
Eventually people get fed up and turn to more radical solutions, but they have to lose faith in voting first.
I think most people are just trying to live their day to day and don’t see long term, or just can’t because of their station. It’s back to nature/nurture I guess.
What you head is filled with determines how your brain is wired.
Most people want the same things. And no one wants to go fight a war. People do the best they can with what they are given. It’s a sad truth of human history. We can never quite avoid tripping over our very own nature. And that fact is taken advantage of. Over and over again.
The idea of someone that strong to make a change persuade people to vote them or they just already spreading fear to the people but not just that, this one is a bit unique, I think. Well, in El Salvador they got Bukele which basically a dictator, you can search it. In his term, democracy is decreasing but the homicide feel down drastically on country that so dangerous before, now they just could walk on the street without afraid getting shot and die.
