James Loxton on Democracies and Dictators

For all of human history, pretty much, or at least post um hunter-gatherer societies, uh, the vast majority of polities have been under some form of non-democratic rule. Democracy is really the exception. And the fact that we now think of this as kind of like the natural way of being, personally, I believe that. democracy is a is a better form of government than authoritarianism, but the fact that we think of it as being sort of the natural form of government, that's actually a really new idea. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

On this podcast we talk a lot about democracy. Well, we don't really talk as much about the flip side of the coin, about dictatorships, about authoritarian regimes. And yet that is a fascinating field of study. How should we think about the different kinds of authoritarian regimes that exist in the world? How do they tend to perform?

Are they more successful economically than democracies, as some people claim, or does that turn out to be a myth? Why is it that By definition, dictatorships have a lot of power concentrated in the hands of one person or in the hands of a few people, and yet many of them turn out to be quite unstable, many of them turn out to be short-lived, to experience frequent breakdowns. And what does all of this mean? for the United States and other countries that, according to some, are now at risk of democratic backsliding, perhaps of authoritarian breakdown.

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