> Rather, the best case against Bukele is that he has created severe systemic political risk in El Salvador by converting the government from a democracy to a de facto dictatorship
then hes in a good place to introduce some kind of monarchy, or personal transfer of power, someday. people want him to be dictator for life and he seems to be loved enough to receive it. democracy doesn't deal with gangs well enough to make a country like this functional. hes a wise person whose made good investments for his country.
As a cynical idealist, I once tried to find 1 country of decent size that could escape the poverty/mis-governance trap while being a democracy.
I found zero success stories.
Every 20th century economic success story was a defacto autocratic nation. They only transitioned to democracy after they'd reached a certain level of development. (I excluded preexisting high HDI nations and ones that accidentally hit mineral gold)
It's similar to how commitees have never built successful startups. At the early phases, you need a decisive and singular leader.
I continue to be on team democracy for poor nations. But I'm well aware that data is not on my side.
This is not true. Japan and South Korea both experienced the majority of their growth as democracies. Eastern Europe only took off after the fall of the USSR. Chile experienced most of its growth after Pinochet. India is the largest Democracy on earth and it is growing at a very fast clip.
That being said, there simply aren’t very many countries and even less ones that made the successful leap to rich world status regardless of the political regime. There’s a huge small sample problem here. And then of course there’s also a huge endogeneity problem. The literature in general has found a weak positive association between democratization and growth. And that’s about the most we can say. Stop worrying about the data not being on your side; it isn’t on anyone’s side.
The dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for most of the post-war period has led to critiques regarding the vibrancy of political competition and the effective functioning of democracy.
The chaebols, those massive family-run conglomerates, have essentially been the architects behind South Korea's economic renaissance since the '60s. Think Samsung, Hyundai, LG - these giants spearheaded the transformation from a post-war economy to an industrial powerhouse, under the guidance of policies favoring heavy industrialization and export-led growth. It's fascinating to see how the government played matchmaker here, doling out financial support and monopolistic privileges like candy at a parade. This strategic play birthed the "Miracle on the Han River," flipping the script from poverty to prosperity.
But, as with all tales of meteoric rise, there's a darker subplot. The symbiosis between the chaebols and political elites isn't all roses. Issues of corruption, nepotism, and economic dominance cloud this success story, leading to a wave of calls for corporate governance reform and efforts to dilute their power.
On a different note, South Korea's journey to democracy is a saga of its own. Decades of authoritarian rule gave way in the late '80s, thanks to the collective might of students, intellectuals, and labor activists. The June Democratic Uprising in '87 was a game-changer, forcing the military regime's hand to pave the way for democratic reforms and the country's first free presidential election later that year.
Quite true - and even with democracies like Japan and India, it is quite apparent from their early history that they were kind of autocratic democracies with one large party / leader / family in power for a long period. In India, the Indian National Congress ruled for nearly 5+ decades since independence, and 3 of its Prime Ministers were dynasts (Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi) from the same family. Note also that in Japan and South Korea, the US had a vested interest in not allowing democracy to thrive.
I'm Indian, I would seriously question anyone who considers India to be an 'economically successful' democracy. 400 million Indians still make less than many sub-saharan African nations.
India is admittedly stable. But it was very much an economic failure. Things only started turning around in the mid-90s.
Let's not forget that before the 1990s, there were the partitions with Pakistan and Pakistan-Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi's seizure of power ...
> 400 million Indians still make less than many sub-saharan African nations.
Yes, and they are more important than all the programmers in Bangalore. Also, non-Hindu Indians, including those who are Muslim, are relegated to second-class status (which also must affect their economic opportunity).
Perhaps you'd like to offer some more depth? There is lots and lots of evidence otherwise. For example, India's program of 'reclaiming' Muslim land for Hindu temples.
I mean that much of the focus on India is on the "programmers in Bangalore" (which I'm using as a metaphor for the general economic boom). The people who remain in poverty are much more important, a much higher priority, IMHO.
I'm not criticizing the economic boom per se - it provides resources that have allowed huge numbers to escape poverty.
> I would seriously question anyone who considers India to be an 'economically successful' democracy.
I am an indian too.
I consider Modi to be a useless, corrupt, duffer of a Prime Minister with no role in India's economic growth. His regime will be known as the "lost decade" of India where it failed to seize the momentum and even damaged India's economic prospects with his idiocy that also pushed a lot of people back to poverty.
However, India's economic development under capable governments are just as visible as the poverty that remains. PM Nehru laid a solid foundation for our country's democracy and created the foundational infrastructure for manufacturing, defence, and scientific research. PM Shastri and Indira Gandhi focused on self-sufficiency in food production and India today is the largest producer of grains, oils, vegetables, milk, livestock etc. etc. that it can feed its 1+ billion population. Indira Gandhi boosted our military and gave extraordinary impetus to our defence, space and nuclear industries. Rajiv Gandhi focused on creating the foundation for India's electronic and IT infrastructure. PM Rao, based on the plans of his predecessors, implemented the policies for private enterprises to thrive. Dr. Manmohan Singh created and implemented one of the largest rights-based welfare scheme in the world to reduce the wealth-gap in India, while fostering economic growth with a focus on services. During his administration, and due to the continuing momentum of the economic growth that he nurtured 270 million indians were lifted out of poverty between 2005-6 and 2015-16 – the most in a global study of 75 countries ( https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-lifted-270-m... ). (I suspect Modi's policy have sent half of them back again to poverty).
It's all easy to say that economic growth happened only from the 90's. That belays an understanding of both state craft and indian history. We chose to focus on building a sustainable and strong nation-state because of our colonial history, at the expense of faster economic growth (and an emphasis on ensuring everyone benefited from the economic growth). On the other hand look at South Korea and Japan. Their economic policies were certainly better than ours at one point. But look at other aspects of their state - they are even today totally dependent on the US to safeguard their borders and thus having to sacrifice some of their sovereignty (on foreign policy) to the US. Korea even has had a history of military rules.
My point is that everything is not as simple as it appears and you have to consider the whole system - due to our democratic system and our huge population, we are operating on whole different level compared to the rest of the world. We have actually done quite well with the handicaps we have ...
> Eastern Europe only took off after the fall of the USSR
The Balkans maybe don't count as Eastern Europe, but before ww2 we were predominantly agrarian. 75% of the population worked on farms[1]. By the 1970's Yugoslavia was a modern industrial economy with all the accoutrements you would expect from a European nation (power, sanitation, roads, etc). Only 29% of the population worked on farms[2].
Then in early 1990's the country fell apart, democracies came out of the ashes, and by 2004 the first bits of former Yugoslavia started joining the EU and NATO[3]. Overall a great success.
Iceland is also the oldest democracy in the world, so it's less they went from "incredibly crappy existence" and more "they were always stable, and just became more wealthy".
I'm taking the OP as talking more about "you can't democracy your way out of being Haiti" kind of things.
It is well worth a watch. Anyone with an interest in democracy (or corporate politics or dominance hierarchies) definitely should watch it. I feel that his discussion of the making of the video was even more interesting (although long winded): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo
The interesting conclusion that he draws in the discussion of the video is that all systems of governance are dependent upon responsible people getting into positions of power and then choosing to act responsibly rather than selfishly. The key insight is that getting into the position of power is corruptive and you have to make personal sacrifices to not be corrupted.
The US became absurdly wealthy during the 20th century. Canada did well too. Poland, Czechia, Estonia and a few other recently independent democracies are thriving as well.
>The US became absurdly wealthy during the 20th century.
Yes, but it was bootstrapped by the biggest land takeover in history, along with all of its natural resources. It also benefitted from all the western big players of the 19th/early 20th century being exhausted after 2 wars that never touched continental US soil. Neither is easily replicated without a rich in natural resources continent full of easy targets, or massive remote wars.
Can you really disregard its imperialistic history here - the foundation of the American economy was built on slave labour and colonisation (even if it was a late player), and you wish to completely ignore the role of the early western settlers in America.
> the foundation of the American economy was built on slave labour and colonisation (even if it was a late player)
I thought the slave states were significantly poorer than the free states, a major advantage of the North in the Civil War? I'm sure it's been examined, but would the South have been better off with paid labor of free people? Countries using that model do far better. Imagine someone trying to compete with slave labor against a modern enterprise.
For colonization, that seems to have played a minor role in the US economy?
My understanding of the pre-industrial or non-industrial US economy is that it's most powerful engine was the Mississippi River basin, which is something like the largest continguous amount of farmland in the world with navigable waterway access to the sea (and thus a way to get goods to market, as overland transport was much too expensive - compare a barge to a horse, or even a train).
The US represents a certain mythology around the Enlightenment principles that were most popular at its founding: one of the big ones was Bentham/Smith utilitarian market thinking, resulting in a conflation between "pursuit of happiness" and "pursuit of property" that the founders were not exactly encouraging of, but which many contemporary authors, inspired by John Locke's writings on property, were considering.
I believe that's at the heart of the Civil War discussion, because downstream of that mythology, alongside the "life and liberty" parts, are the compromises of slave vs free states. What took place from the founding into the 19th century was the experiment in following the myth and seeing where it led, which favored industrialization. The South had the wealth when the nation was agrarian, but the founding principles gave a political edge to industrialists, enabling the development of roads, canals, and eventually rails, while also using cheaper immigrant labor to build those things; using slaves to do these projects creates a less favorable balance sheet for the owner, because bodies that you own and are mandated to take responsibility for cannot simply be fired and replaced with new ones if they are too weak to work.
This tension of old vs new wealth also propelled western expansion, since it led to the "1 free state per slave state" dynamic to maintain political consensus, only for it to hit an abrupt ending in the 1850's when expansion reached the West Coast.
The 'mythology' is an attempt to dismiss it - ironically using Enlightenment concepts. The Enlightenment was the escape from mythology, using actual fact and reason, which is the foundation of democracy.
Much more than mythology, democracy, the US, and the Enlightment generally have been overwhelming successes in reality. Nothing in the history of humanity comes close.
The 'mythology' is that somehow dictatorship is somehow 'natural' or necessary or inevitable or even reasonable.
Yes, one way (and the best way, IMO) to look at the Civil War is that the industrialized part of a country overcame the non-industrialized part. Most of the industrial successes in oil, trains, steel, etc. had their roots in or were dramatically accelerated by the war.
You need a monarch to breed an aristocracy that takes care of its home by virtue of having skin in the game. A fake democracy immediately dissolves into an oligarchy which is self interested and will take whatever it can for itself up until the point a strong king rises up and smashes it. In this case Bukele.
I think democracy needs a “Deep State” to succeed.
This can be imposed by a time of autocracy gradually evolving into democracy - see the UK, imposed during colonialism and then taken over after independence - see the Indian Civil Service, Courts, etc, or imposed by an occupying force - see Germany.
Without that “Deep State” it will degenerate in alternating bouts of violence until people cry out for autocracy - See Roman Republic.
Can’t speak to the original comment, but I think part of a “deep state” is institutional inertia/tradition.
A state without that deep-rooted sense of continuity is much more fragile. Having a civil service without political allegiance seems to be critical to preservation of a democratic system.
Why are you under the impression that the bureaucracy class does not have a political leaning/allegiance? We know it does, 95% of DC votes for the people that want larger government.
Allegiance is not the same thing as a tendency. And the fact that one party uses smaller government as part of its sales pitch may not last forever.
In the U.S. I would say that Trump’s takeover of the GOP has generally de-emphasized smaller government as a plank of the party. He certainly doesn’t care about it.
Whether the bureaucrats lean towards one party or the other doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t compelled out of fear for their jobs to break the law at the president’s command.
> Whether the bureaucrats lean towards one party or the other doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t compelled out of fear for their jobs to break the law at the president’s command.
I’m thinking about all of the politically motivated “leaks”, the weaponization of institutions like the FBI, DOJ, IRS and I’m just wondering how you are seriously saying above.
The “deep state” or “the state” or “the elites” or “ the bureaucracy class” or whatever you want to call it and whatever you want to claim it exists for… is a different topic than “they don’t break the law”. I’m thinking I must be really misunderstanding your text, because that’s just ridiculous.
The thesis that started this thread: the deep state protects democracy.
Obviously if you interpret “deep state” as “secret cabals of evildoers” then yes, that’s a nonsensical argument.
My personal interpretation of the “deep state” argument that Trump has been bandying around is that he means “people who resist my desire to do whatever I want as President”.
In any organization there will be a minority group of highly organized people with most of the power. We call them elites.
But there’s a difference between aristocrats and oligarchs. When people reference the deep state they are referencing what they believe are oligarchs that are self interested and use the state to advance personal goals of power and wealth. What they want but can’t usually communicate is an aristocracy that takes care of them and the country.
Oligarchy decays into populism eventually (years, decades, more?) as we see in many places now. Populists will call for a monarch. This has happened in El Salvador.
And it does makes sense, in a way it would be similar to letting children (developing persons) make their own decisions.
The interesting question would be what is then, the best form of government for developing nations. Or even better, what are the required skill-set for leaders to bring development?
The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today. The failures (USSR, Republic of China for example) where democracy doesn't take on a wide scale are probably also interesting studies.
The key problem in setting up a democracy is that people are, on average, pretty dense. Doing things by vote doesn't cause stupid people to make good decisions. There is a real cultural element where the people involved have to be strongly against solving domestic problems with force, for evolution over revolution and also big believers in general liberty (otherwise you just get two factions fighting to use the big stick of government against the other).
Re: France and the United States, you have the timeline mixed up a bit. France & the French intellectuals of course played a large role in the American revolution, but it was America that became a democracy first. Lafayette, one of the key players in the French Revolution, served under Washington and lead troops in the US before coming back to France and playing a key role in the founding of the First Republic.
I don’t think France successfully became a democracy at all during the Revolution; the First Republic quickly fell into the mass murdering reign of terror under Robespierre, who was ousted by the Directory, who remained in power for four years until Napoleon’s coup. Lafayette himself was basically driven out of France by the radicals.
On the other hand, Britain itself was already fairly democratic by 1776, and the thirteen colonies had their own representative government institutions. The point of complaint was that the British were simply ignoring those institutions and flagrantly violating the traditional rights that Englishmen were entitled to. And a lot of the British were sympathetic to this viewpoint so there wasn’t the political capital to crack down on the rebellion as harshly as Britain would do in various other colonies at other points in time.
And aside from Lafayette, the French monarchy—the same absolute monarchy the Revolution sought to overthrow—was the regime that supported American independence, mostly out of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” considerations.
Just to go further down the historical-nuance rabbit hole: France had been an absolute monarchy, under Louis XVI's grandfather. Both Louis XV and Louis XVI were reformers (which arguably created the conditions for revolutionary sentiment to coalesce), and XVI accepted (more or less willingly, depending on your point of view) a role as a constitutional monarch modeled on the British crown. That whole governmental model / regime fell apart, of course, and cue the reign of terror, but the First Republic was an attempt by most of the power bases in France at something more enduring.
> The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy
The more interesting one is how often a democracy can survive against democratic superpower wishes. I.e, during the cold war era, the US helped taking down more democratic governments than the USSR itself. That is a bit of ironic remark. People tend to forget that the US didn't like democracies outside its sphere of influence in the last century.
I am sure this legacy gets blind eye when people usually talk about democracy and why many people doesn't like it. The scars are still alive til this day (Iran is the prime example here).
Iran had already ceased to be a democracy by the time the coup happened. That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time. Mossadegh was essentially a dictator ruling by means of emergency powers at the time he was overthrown, and even before that point, he had also interfered with the 1952 parliamentary election by stopping the counting of votes once the minimum quorum of MP’s had been elected.
No, and if you hadn’t disingenuously quoted me out of context, that would have been obvious. The complete sentence you should have quoted was: “That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time.” By which I meant popular support within Iran.
It turns out that Iranians have agency of their own and don’t just do whatever the CIA tells them to do. In fact the role of the CIA in the 1953 coup has been deliberately overstated by multiple sides, including the CIA itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
But even if you still want to blame the CIA, they still needed enough supporters inside of Iran who were angry at Mossadegh, and one of the reasons they were angry at Mossadegh is because he had turned himself into a dictator.
I quoted the important part of your point. Adding that it did have popular support is a fact that is not established. The CIA and US media propaganda spread false reports about the situation then and still to this day. i.e this article you attached is a pure piece of western propaganda. And even if that was a reason, the reason why US abd CIA involved is much more obvious. It is the oil right getting nationalized. All other points are just cover up.
I’m not arguing about why the US and UK supported the coup. I’m pointing out that Iran was no longer a democracy when the coup happened regardless. I’m also pointing out that if Iran had remained democratic, the shah and the military would have had no reason to carry out the coup whether or not the US wanted it to happen.
> The CIA and US media propaganda spread false reports about the situation then and still to this day. i.e this article you attached is a pure piece of western propaganda.
That claim is completely inconsistent with the CIA and US government repeatedly and publicly claiming responsibility/taking credit for the coup.
>> The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today.
I'm not sure that you could say that France was a democracy in the late 18th century (1770's, 1780's) - the critical time for the creation of the US and its form of government.
The thing is, naive democracies believe that the IMF is giving them advice in their best interest, but in reality most countries that sent from developing to developed status had to break most of the IMF rules. I'm talking about countries like Japan.
I believe this was one of Machiavelli's big arguments in The Prince – that sometimes a country in crisis needs a single strong leader/monarch/dictator, using cruelty if necessary to keep control and bring stability.
There are endless success stories: Brazil, India, much of China's economic boom came from liberalizing and moving toward democracy (a process reversed by Xi), Eastern Europe, Japan, much of Taiwan's and S Korea's boom's. Singapore was mostly (but not sufficiently) democratic.
In fact, there is no other form of government that is remotely close. All the wealthiest, most free countries in the world are democracies.
Also, we have become so steeped in nationalism that we miss the true goal and point of it all: The freedom and prosperity of individuals. Raising aggregate wealth is not the goal - as we have seen recently, that means nothing to the people it doesn't benefit. Dictators and their syncophants say, 'only we can just ignore human rights, property rights, etc. and do X'. That doesn't help their victims. Democracy ensures that everyone has a seat at the table (imperfectly, and we can do it better - and we will do it faster if you'll help).
I assume they're counting South Korea. Singapore is probably also up there, although I don't know enough about the country to know just how democratic it's democracy really is today.
FDR. Packed the courts and ignored congress by way of emergency powers. Created countless agencies to perpetuate power in democratically and in perpetuity by virtue of the managerial state. Completely changed how America is run.
Not saying it was bad either. Just that he was an autocrat and extremely successful. The moment they could congress weakened the executive branch to the point of near uselessness as we see today.
> then hes in a good place to introduce some kind of monarchy
I'm quite skeptical that that's the case. The basic problem is that a monarchy has an entirely different source of legitimacy from a modern popular dictatorship like Bukele's. What examples are there of this transition happening successfully? I guess you could maybe count North Korea, but even they haven't actually declared a monarchy... I could perhaps imagine it happening there, but that's a real extreme special case. A much more ordinary case like Bukele, I don't see it.
The practical experience of 20th century Latin America countries, and their history, both regarding domestic politics and dynamics and external influence and meddling?
This makes sense. Latin America is incompatible with democracy and the reason for that is history; such a conclusion is so obvious it is a surprise that anyone would support the idea of democracy anywhere in the continent
In a democracy, over the long term, short term interests win out over long term interests. This is true of both the citizens and the politicians.
In a monarchy, long term interests win out over short term interests because they're dynastic and stay within a family. There is a natural incentive for long term thinking that comes with a monarchy.
This makes sense. Kings are smarter and more selfless than bodies of democratically elected officials. One needs look no further than King Maha Vajiralongkorn for a contemporary example of a man that benevolently liberated his country from the hassle of managing its wealth
then hes in a good place to introduce some kind of monarchy, or personal transfer of power, someday. people want him to be dictator for life and he seems to be loved enough to receive it. democracy doesn't deal with gangs well enough to make a country like this functional. hes a wise person whose made good investments for his country.