The Dictatorship Problem

I don't see support for the key claim of the article.

This post aims to show that, over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships - this is not a tail risk, but the most likely overall outcome.

How do we get to "most democratic Western countries"? Which ones should I expect to fall? What's a rough timeline for them falling?

I don't even see what parties are supposed to be those fascist dictatorships. The three main examples given of fascism are "Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, and Orban in Hungary".

But:

1. Erdogan just narrowly won an election, one in which he was fully expected to step down if defeated. He has repeatedly lost important elections at the local level.
2. Modi is a popular leader who is widely expected to win reelection, and yet opposition parties control a great many states. Indian democracy still functions, despite the many failures of the main opposition. 
3. Hungary also still has elections and viable political opposition.

Other examples include:

1. Trump, who has been president without significantly weakening American democracy and whose 3 appointed judges have proven willing to rule against him, particularly as democratic norms go (and he will get no more judges).
2. A variety of European countries, including Italy, France and Sweden, in which far-right origin parties have grown and even (in Italy's case) gained power. But they gained power, to a large extent, by repudiating those parties' past beliefs. Le Pen even has to boot her own father from the party. 

Context is important. It's not given in the article, but you could well point to Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada as another far-right populist party that emerged in recent years. But so were the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties that existed 30 years earlier, which emerged in reaction to the Progressive Conservative's move towards the center.  Those parties moved towards the center, gained power, lost it, and elected even more centrist candidates. Hence, the appearance of the PPC, a far-right party that will need to capture far more disaffected conservatives if it's ever to win seats.

Yes, Le Pen is doing well, but the Republican have been so crushed in recent election that Macron (a former Socialist) has become the de facto center-right leader. Le Pen has been working to make herself more acceptable for decades, even as France has had significant blowback against the refugee influx. There are a lot of things working in her favor, but still little evidence that France would transition to a dictatorship under her rule (say, having won 35% in a hypothetical round one and 55% in round two, and controlling very little in terms of states or parliament). What's the process here?

I think a lot more needs to be done in order to support the article's thesis, including:

1. Elucidating what counts as a fascist dictatorship, with modern examples.
2. Giving examples of countries that could reasonably become fascist dictatorships within the next decade, with some discussion of how. (This is a time-consuming process, but even just discussing how they could begin the transition over the next ten years would support a weaker, but more defensible, claim.)

This is a nitpick that doesn't really affect the overall message of the post (which I upvoted), but:

The Economist's Democracy Index shows a sharp decline over the last decade:

That chart has a cut y-axis; the decline looks much less sharp in a graph that shows the full range:

This box from Wikipedia also suggests that the overall average going from 5.55 to 5.3 isn't that significant, as the whole scale is used and everything between 4 and 6 is considered to be within the same category of regime:

Man, it is so bizarre living in a red tribe area, and absorbing red tribe perspectives, and then seeing a post like this, and being forced to try to bridge the gap between the two perspectives...

They live in a world where the authoritarian revolution already happened, and the 2020 election being 'obviously stolen' is the greatest indicator of such, and now that the blue elite learned they can get away with using social media censorship and shadowbanning to make any discussion of election security seem extremely low-status, we'll probably never have a real election again

And like, on the one hand, game theory tells me that I really ought to be immediately suspicious of election security that was thought up in the 18th century and not really updated since, especially given my job as someone who tries to secure linux servers and knows security is impossible. and yet on the other hand, even though i'd consider the lesswrong crowd to be far more sympathetic to the red tribe than most intellectual elites and definitely worth assuming good faith, even they reject Trump's complaints about election security as an attempt to manipulate the election itself, not anything to actually do with real fraud or security

it makes me feel like i've got my political compass out and it's spinning around like the second hand on a clock

But it makes me wonder what visible features obviously-rigged elections actually present in dictatorships? If we went and looked at some of erdogan's middle year elections, the ones that seemed most likely to be rigged, how did things play out? Did the opposition challenge the election's validity in court, but then the courts are specifically designed to only convict specific people of election fraud when serious evidence exists against that specific person, rather than being designed to rule on whether or not a crime is likely to occur... so the cases just sorta end up fizzling out, and then the pro-erdogan side announces that the courts failed to reach the preponderance of evidence needed to convict any specific person of election fraud, therefore no fraud occurred? Because I wouldn't be surprised if that's how it generally tends to shake out in those countries that have fake elections, and yet my red tribe friends tell me that that's pretty much exactly how it shook out here in America in 2020.

And it's not exactly that I believe them, it's just that when I go ahead and execute my 'active disbelief' circuitry, i get a very, very bad feeling, like i'm being horribly naive

It makes me want to do away with all the social nonsense, like the pressure i feel from respecting the hell out of Alyssa and other rat celebs and therefore wanting to agree with this if it feels like the reasonable consensus, or the pressure i feel from my family where they're red tribers who are undeniably beset on all sides by blues who have clearly seized control of the entire culture from top to bottom and are now using that control to make the ground crumble beneath the reds' feet, and now they're falling into the chasm, and screaming at me to give them a hand and pull them up to safety, and instead i'm here like "i dunno man, twitter is private property, if they want to shadowban people and then gaslight the entire platform into thinking shadowbanning is just a conspiracy theory i'm not sure i want to write laws that would stop them"

Like, which of these issues are actually existentially important, and which aren't? The control of information spread sure feels important and like the sort of thing that might snowball into authoritarianism very quickly, and i'd feel naive if i tried to dismiss it, but is it a 'real' issue the way determining if our elections are secure is 'real'? or the way establishing norms around not flipping the table when you lose an election is 'real'? Or the way establishing norms that all claims of election fraud are to be taken seriously and never brushed off as conspiracy theorizing is 'real'?

Back in 2020 when I was originally trying to figure this out, I ended up deciding that the only thing that should really matter was, who respects rule of law and who doesn't. and then it became apparent that actually nobody has ever respected rule of law; everyone treats the tenth amendment as an obstacle to be creatively routed around, everybody treats achieving their own political platform as being far, far more important than obeying the restrictions that everyone agreed to back in the beginning. And from studying history, it seems like this has always been the case; 1800s america was absurdly willing to ignore the principle of rule of law in ways that seem bizarre to us now. the global history of the 1900s is basically a bullet point list of all the times the american state decided to ignore its own rules, from the new deal to the civil rights act to vietnam, the birth of the 'executive agency', etc. and the current century seems to be faring no better.

so then the question becomes... why haven't we become an authoritarian state already? Why do we continue to pretend like rule of law is an inviolable feature of our government, when it never has been and we can all see thousands of examples? and yet, how come sometimes it actually does seem like one of the parties actually is willing to restrict themselves and go against their own platform, in order to maintain the sanctity of rule of law? Why are red judges so careful about the potential precedent caused by allowing physicians to refuse to prescribe abortions, and seem to actually give a lot of thought and care to thinking through whether such a ruling would affect other rulings regarding the FDA approval process, while other red judges are upholding qualified immunity without comment? Why the hell is civil asset seizure still a thing, where the government literally prosecutes actual piles of currency, at the same time lawyers and judges seem to genuinely treat the law as being Serious and Solemn and Mocking It Is A Crime? If anything mocks the idea of rule of law, it's the state stealing money from citizens without even accusing them of crimes, and instead prosecuting the money itself, forcing the citizen to prove the money's innocence since non-people aren't afforded innocent-until-proven-guilty! How can anyone involved in this system take themselves seriously while this is going on?

The sort of predictive model that I think I've inherited from Scott Alexander says that this sort of absurdity can't go on, it either swiftly devolves into naked authoritarianism where the state just steals your money without even bothering with the absurd excuse, or the Serious and Solemn judges stop it asap to stop making the law seem like a circus. And frankly, the predictive model I've inherited from my red environment says exactly the same thing, this kind of slippery slope should be much more slippery than this.

I feel like both of these models have to be wrong. Like we must have basically no idea what actually causes authoritarianism, because i'd expect both the blues and reds to have been ringing the authoritarianism alarm since... i mean, gosh, probably sjnce 1781. and from my hazy model, the complaints would seem really really valid. And yet it just keeps not happening.

I feel like any examination of this problem that doesn't try to figure out why, is missing an important part of the picture.

sorry for rambling, i kinda worked on this comment all day and it's definitely more 'rant' than intelligent contribution, but reading the OP gave me such a strong feeling of "wow, we live in such different worlds, how can we ever bridge the gap" and i felt compelled to put to paper something that tries to convey that distance. but i was much more motivated to type it all out than I am to go back and edit it down. :/

I don't actually see very much of an argument presented for the extremely strong headline claim:

This post aims to show that, over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships - this is not a tail risk, but the most likely overall outcome.

You draw an analogy between the "by induction"/"line go up" AI risk argument, and the increase in far-right political representation in Western democracies over the last couple decades.  But the "by induction"/"line go up" argument for AI risk is not the reason one should be worried; one should be worried for specific causal reasons that we expect unaligned ASI to cause extremely bad outcomes.  There is no corresponding causal model presented for why fascist dictatorship is the default future outcome for most Western democracies.

Like, yes, it is a bit silly to see "line go up" and plug one's fingers in one's ears.  It certainly can happen here.  Donald Trump being elected in 2024 seems like the kind of thing that might do it, though I'd probably be happy to bet at 9:1 against.  But if that doesn't happen, I don't know why you expect some other Republican candidate to do it, given that none of them seem particularly inclined.

What do we expect to see at year 5 for the prediction to be true at year 10?

Noting that the author deleted a critical comment which was somewhat rude but IMO made some reasonable points. That's fair enough, but in conjunction with the way the site handles deletions this strikes me as bad, since there's no way of (a) seeing which user posted the deleted comment (this might be a bug?) (b) examining the text of deleted comments. Together this means that you can't distinguish cases where a post attracts no criticism(an important signal) and cases where there were critical comments that were deleted, and you can't examine deleted criticisms.

    I notice that you cite Freedom House, and Richard Hanania goes into why that NGO in particular is pretty institutionally captured and a biased source.  Citing Freedom house is akin to circular reasoning or is too close for comfort with regards to the question of "Democracy". (link) Also, for better or worse every institution of the US is very liberal, including the government (link) so it's hard to imagine how in any real sense the US could become an actual right wing dictatorship. 

   Furthermore,"The Dictator's Handbook" actually researches this exact question, with an eye toward selectorate theory, on how stable democracies vs dictatorships are, and actually digs into the numbers on this. And the punchline is that if you actually look, once you get past a certain threshold of keys, needed to obtain or stay in power, Democracies become very, very, very stable. And that in the entire history of democracies, no democracy past that threshold has ever backslid into dictatorships, short of being conquered by a foreign power or going completely bankrupt. (It goes without saying the US is well past this point)

↑ comment by Garrett Baker (D0TheMath) · 2023-06-11T23:26:04.701Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The relevant section of The Dictator's Handbook is the following

Given the complexity of the trade-off between declining private rewards and increased societal rewards, it is useful to look at a simple graphical illustration, which, although based on specific numbers, reinforces the relationships highlighted throughout this book. Imagine a country of 100 people that initially has a government with two people in the winning coalition. With so few essentials and so many interchangeables, taxes will be high, people won’t work very hard, productivity will be low, and therefore the country’s total income will be small. Let’s suppose the country’s income is $100,000 and that half of it goes to the coalition and the other half is left to the people to feed, clothe, shelter themselves and to pay for everything else they can purchase. Ignoring the leader’s take, we assume the two coalition members get to split the $50,000 of government revenue, earning $25,000 a piece from the government plus their own untaxed income. We’ll assume they earn neither more nor less than anyone else based on whatever work they do outside the coalition.

Now we illustrate the consequences of enlarging the coalition. Figure 10.1 shows how the rewards directed towards those in the coalition (that is, private and public benefits) compare to the public rewards received by everyone as more people enter the coalition. Suppose that for each additional essential member of the winning coalition taxes decrease by half of 1 percent (so with three members the tax rate drops from 50 percent to 49.5 percent), and national income improves by 1 percent for each extra coalition member. Suppose also that spending on public goods increases by 2 percent for each added coalition member. As coalition size grows, tax rates drop, productivity increases, and the proportion of government revenue spent on public goods increases at the expense of private rewards. That is exactly the general pattern of change we explained in the previous chapters.

I can't find a section of the book talking about how often empirically democracies backslide into dictatorships, but literally zero of them seems false. I don't know much about the history of democracy or dictatorships, but Germany was a democracy before it became Nazi Germany, so the claim of literally zero backsliding seems false.

Replies from: CitizenTen, D0TheMath

↑ comment by CitizenTen · 2023-06-12T14:01:38.554Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Short of "a foreign power or going bankrupt."  Germany was forced to pay for all damages that occurred during WW1.  They were pretty bankrupt as countries go.  And then the great depression happened.  So I think Germany counts as democratic backsliding on account of "going bankrupt."  And it doesn't claim all democracies.  Just democracies that reach a large enough numbers of keys.

Replies from: ege-erdil, D0TheMath

↑ comment by Ege Erdil (ege-erdil) · 2023-06-13T06:31:13.134Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't have a source for this claim off the top of my head, but I've previously read that Germany was actually a net beneficiary of international financial transactions in the 1920s. Essentially, the flow of funds went like this:

• Germany paid war reparations to the UK and France.
• The UK and France paid off their war debts to the United States.
• The United States made loans to Germany, and Germany defaulted on a good fraction of them.

It would be nice if someone could check whether this is true or not, but the impression I got from reading the history here is that the role of war reparations in causing fiscal problems for Germany was inflated by propaganda, especially by German politicians who tried to blackmail the Allies into lowering the amount of reparations to be paid by raising the specter of economic collapse in Germany.

↑ comment by Garrett Baker (D0TheMath) · 2023-06-12T14:50:31.543Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh yeah, good point about Germany. I’m still pretty skeptical about the claim. Even if the claim ended up being true, I’d be worried its just because democracy is a pretty new concept, so we just don’t have as much data as we’d like. But far less worried it’d be non predictive as I am now.

The particular argument why democracies are so stable does not seem robust to the population wrongly believing a dictatorship would be better in their interests than the current situation. Voters can be arbitrarily wrong when they aren’t able to see the effects of their actions and then re-vote.

↑ comment by Garrett Baker (D0TheMath) · 2023-06-11T23:28:39.700Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh also, I'd expect this analysis breaks down once the size of the essentials becomes large enough that people start advocating policies for fashion rather than the policy will actually have a positive effect on their life if implemented. See The Myth of the Rational Voter, and I expect that for a bunch of pro-Trump people, this is exactly why they are pro-Trump (similarly with a bunch of the pro-Biden people).

You write: "Stalinism is also very bad, but is not a major political force in 2023."

Why do you think this?  In western countries, the "left" has control of most of the levers of power and influence - eg, look at who gets censored by social media corporations, what sort of stuff academic job applicants have to write to get hired, how much money is spent by governments on left-oriented projects. And there are clear signs of increasing authoritarianism on the left - for example, the Canadian government reaction to the "Freedom Convoy", invoking the Emergencies Act in response to an annoying, but peaceful, protest, and freezing bank accounts of people whose only crime was donating money to the protesters.  Some left-wing policies seem almost designed to provoke the right, such as (in the US) giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness, and proposing to give away trillions of dollars in "reparations".  Such huge wealth transfers break the social compact, and are likely to trigger a conflict that might in the end result in right-wing authoritarians taking power, but presumably are seen by their advocates as more likely to result in a left-wing authoritarian regime.

Thanks for this—I agree that this is a pretty serious concern, particularly in the US. Even putting aside all of the ways in which the end of democracy in the US could be a serious problem from a short-term humanitarian standpoint, I think it would also be hugely detrimental to effective AI policy interventions and cooperation, especially between the US, the UK, and the EU. I'd recommend cross-posting this to the EA Forum—In my opinion, I think this issue deserves a lot more EA attention.

Can you explain why "most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships" specifically is the most likely outcome? I'm not quite following the "line go up" reasoning.

Just to give some concrete illustrations: Western Europe has dropped by 0.08 points on the Democracy Index over the last decade. If that happens again, it will fall to 8.28, so about as democratic as the UK is now. Definitely not fascist dictatorship territory!

If we pessimistically assume that Western Europe will decline faster in line with the world average, we get to 8.13, a bit more democratic than France. Also nothing close to a fascist dictatorship.

If Western Europe declines twice as fast as the world average, we get 7.9, a bit more democratic than the US. Three times as fast, we end up just above Belgium. Double that, and we'd be about level with Poland and India: not functioning democracies, but still democratic enough that upsets can happen (e.g. Modi's BJP just lost a major state election in Karnataka). I certainly wouldn't call either of those countries fascist.

Let's assume the decline in democracy speeds up ten times over the next decade: then Western Europe still looks more democratic than Mexico, Ukraine and Peru. A sudden tenfold speed-up in current trends sounds like a tail risk to me, but it doesn't come close to the outcome you're predicting. How do you get to a prediction as strong as that one given the data you've presented?

Here is a much weaker version of this argument.

Sam Altman, the quintessential short-timeline accelerationist, is currently on an international tour meeting with heads of state, and is worried about the 2024 election. He wouldn't do that if he thought it would all be irrelevant next year.

Whilst I do believe Sam Altman is probably worried about the rise of fascism and its augmenting by artificial intelligence, I don't see this as evidence of his care regarding this fact. Even if he believed a rise in fascism had no likelihood of occurring; it would still be beneficial for him to pursue the international tour as a means of minimizing x-risks, assuming even that we would see AGI in the next <6 months.

[Facism is] a system of government where there are no meaningful elections; the state does not respect civil liberties or property rights; dissidents, political opposition, minorities, and intellectuals are persecuted; and where government has a strong ideology that is nationalist, populist, socially conservative, and hostile to minority groups.

I doubt that including some of the conditions toward the end makes for a more useful dialogue. Irrespective of social conservatism and hostility directed at minority groups, the risk of fascism existentially is probably quite similar. I can picture both progressive and conservative dictatorships reaching essentially all AI x-risk outcomes. Furthermore, is a country that exhibits all symptoms of fascism except for minority group hostility still fascist? Defining fascism in this way makes me worry that future fascist figures can hide behind the veil of "But we aren't doing x specific thing (e.g. minority persecution) and therefore are not fascist!"

My favored definition, particularly for discussing x-risk would be more along the lines of the Wikipedia definition:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

But I would like to suggest a re-framing of this issue, and claim that the problem of focus should be authoritarianism. What authoritarianism is is considerably clearer than what fascism is, and is more targeted in addressing the problematic governing qualities future governments could possess. It doesn't appear obvious to me that a non-fascist authoritarian government would be better at handling x-risks than a fascist one, which is contingent on the fact that progressive political attitudes don't seem better at addressing AI x-risks than conservative ones (or vice versa). Succinctly, political views look to me to be orthogonal to capacity in handling AI x-risk (bar perspectives like anarcho-primitivism or accelerationism that strictly mention this topic in their doctrine). 

AI policy, strategy, and governance involves working with government officials within the political system. This will be very different if the relevant officials are fascists, who are selected for loyalty rather than competence.

It's not obvious to me that selection for loyalty over competence is necessarily more likely in fascism or bad. A competent figure who is opposed to democracy would be a considerably more concerning electoral candidate than a less competent one who is loyal to democracy assuming that democracy is your optimization target. 

A fascist government will likely interfere with AI development itself, in the same way that the COVID pandemic was a non-AI issue that nonetheless affected AI engineers.

Is interference with AI development necessarily bad? We can't predict the unknown unknown of what views on AI development fascist dictatorship (that mightn't yet exist) might hold or how they will act on them. I agree that on principal a fascist body interfering with industry does obviously not result in good outcomes in most cases but not see how/why this appeals to AI x-risk specifically. 

The Trump section makes a few assumptions that aren't defended. They might be right, they might be wrong, but even the most basic counterarguments aren't addressed.

First, you call questioning the election "overthrowing democracy," which implies that questioning it wasn't in any way justified. What's your prior that an election is sound? This is a genuine question; I'm not sure what's appropriate. Many, many elections throughout human history have been various degrees of rigged. I have no idea what prior to use, and I have no idea what level of fraud/questionable behavior occurs every election, so it's hard to analyze both the prior and the update. That said, you're ascribing bad faith to anyone questioning the results, when most of those truly believe the democratically chosen vote was different. Rigged elections that the media covers up are an equally valid way to abolish democracy, and you provided just as much defense of that claim as you did of yours (none).

If anything, what happened with Gore and Bush in '08 was more egregious than this, and that didn't destroy the republic, at least not to the point of property rights vanishing. Contested elections are par for the course for as long as we're using this ridiculous half the people hate every president system.

Second, you act like leaving NATO is authoritarian in some way. If anything, leaving NATO would create more decentralized control over the globe, not more centralized control of it. If it weren't for NATO, Ukraine and Russian wouldn't be at war right now. I could be wrong about those things, but that's not the point. The point is that, if you want to change the mind of someone like me, this claim about the US being in NATO being universally good has to be defended. 

Third, your reference to "despite having a minority of the popular vote;" are we still doing this? Why should California and New York City govern the entire country? The electoral college is a necessary compromise for making the bad system of voting a little less bad.

Lastly, there's a very visceral reaction on the "new right" to race based ideology. So much of Trump's support comes from what we'll call the "Joe Rogan Internet" (and offshoots like Jordan Peterson, Daily Wire, etc), and that entire apparatus is extremely sensitive to and against racial superiority ideology. So perhaps far-righters in the US could swing some sort of class based change up, instead of using race, the way the communists did, but far-right racially motivated ideology has so little power in the US it's laughable.

Again, I'm open to having my mind changed on any of these. The issue is that they're cruxes, and they weren't addressed in the piece at all.

Good post. You changed my mind moderately (and somehow did so without presenting many new-to-me facts/arguments, but perhaps by combatting an irrational sense of it couldn't happen here [edit: or more charitably to myself, perhaps just by causing me to think about it]). Focusing on America, thinking about it, I have credence ~40% in a Republican trifecta in 2025 and credence ~30% that Republicans do wild bad stuff in 2025–2026 (mostly from Republican-trifecta worlds but also some from Republican-president-but-no-trifecta worlds). I probably shouldn't try to do anything about this but it's worth Noticing.

only 8% who would vote for a "woke", left-wing AOC party. American conservatives far outnumber liberals, and "woke" policies like defunding the police and affirmative action are very unpopular even in left-wing areas, with the latter being defeated by huge margins in deep-blue California. Hence, even though there are both left-wing and right-wing radicals, it is vastly easier to imagine fascist dictatorship than a "woke" dictatorship, especially as the latter movement now seems to be in decline.

Honestly I think anyone who seriously envisioned a "woke dictatorship" must have had listened way too much to right wing propaganda. The problem with the "woke" movement (which doesn't want to be called that but also refuses to give itself any other name in a desperate and generally failed bid to market itself as the default) is instead exactly that it's this unpopular. It elicits fanatical loyalty in a minority and leaves everyone else baffled or repulsed, dividing the left's ability to push back against the right while offering the latter a perfect strawman to point at for all of left wing ideas. Worse, since lots of people don't have the mental space to separate "this cause is quite important" from "the specific person who advocated it to me is a sneering, annoying git", it's probably actively harming support for fighting racism, sexism or homophobia. I would say there's a decent chance it's actually a concurrent cause in the rise of fascism you mention, because of this. In fact, hopefully, the left turning back to a more pragmatic discourse, focused on individuals and realism (in the philosophical sense) rather than group identity and idealism, might be a source of inversion of some of these trends.

I think this post makes a very important and useful claim, but one that is obscured by the use of the word 'fascism', which -- as the post itself admits -- has for decades had a very charged meaning and has been used in inconsistent ways. It seems as though it is usually used to draw an analogy with the WW2-era Axis powers, but the movements that you're highlighting lack some very important characteristics that those regimes had. Most importantly, under Modi/Orbán/Erdogan, control by the ruling party has never been total; opposition parties control the capital cities in all three countries, and are generally permitted to participate in elections which may not be fair because of media policies but are fairly free. (Also, the movements you highlight are usually not militaristic: Erdogan has had a famously strained relationship with the Turkish military, and most 'populists' in other nations have won running against the entire old elite, which includes the military leadership. They are also rarely or never expansionist.)

But it is very clear that there is a global trend away from rule by a set of 'cosmopolitan' elites (...the details of these elites actually differing a great deal between different countries) towards parties which deliberately try to contrast themselves with those elites. This has usually only resulted in actual dictatorships in Latin American left-populist countries (cf. Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua), but the most common presentation globally is as right-populism which strengthens enough to begin changing the country's constitutional framework (true for all of Modi/Orbán/Erdogan) in ways that tend to strengthen its own hold on power. 

Part of the danger here might be that many voters are inclined to vote for people or groups who have histories of being 'really' opposed to the establishment, which might select for extremists because anyone who wants to change the system but is not an extremist will probably choose to work within it. (This explains the military hostility, since it is usually the loudest defenders of the status quo who seek military careers; this may be far-right in certain contexts, but it is conspicuously not the kind of far-right which is gaining power, which is moderately to greatly hostile to status quo politics and therefore predictably has conflicts with the military. 1920s and 1930s-era fascists, who wanted to conquer neighboring countries, were able to get around this by explicitly giving the military more power and making it higher-status, but this would be very counterproductive for today's far-right governments.) Thus, today's paradigmatic parties are ones like the National Front in France (which originated as a Vichy-nostalgist organization) and the Sweden Democrats in Sweden (...originally very literal neo-Nazis), both of which moderated in response to getting closer to power. It's very noticeable that taboos on cooperation with both of these parties broke in 2022, and the same year Brothers of Italy (for whom the taboo broke long ago) became the dominant party in the Italian government.

The cause of the trend appearing at once in many different countries is tough to pinpoint; it may be that some degree of authoritarianism has always been popular and modern communications networks have made it easier for ordinary people to organize. (I think David Shor has written that in the modern social-media environment the civil rights movement may have failed, for instance). The sum of all authoritarian tendencies in developed democratic countries may be constant (it feels kind of tough to say that 2010s/2020s Republicans are really more authoritarian than the government which did MKUltra/Tuskegee/suppressing dissent with the fairness doctrine), and it may be that it is now harder to get away with that sort of thing unless your supporters really do not care, in their heart of hearts.

Hopefully this comment is useful.

I do indeed agree this is a major problem even if I'm not sure if I agree with the main claim. The rise of fascism in the last decade and expectation that it will continue is extremely evident; its consequences for democracy are a lot less clear.

The major wrinkle in all of this is in assessing anti-democratic behavior. Democracy indices not a great way of assessing democracy for much the same reason that the Doomsday Clock is a bad way of assessing nuclear risk: they're subjective metrics by (probably increasingly) left-leaning academics and tend to measure a lot of things that I wouldn't classify as democracy (eg rights of women/LGBT people/minorities). This paper found that using re-election rates there has been no evidence of global democratic backsliding. This started quite the controversy in political science; my read on the subsequent discussion is that there is evidence of backsliding, but such backsliding has been fairly modest.

I expect things to get worse as more countries get far-right leaders and those which already have far-right leaders have their democratic institutions increasingly captured by far-right leaders. And yet...a lot of places with far-right leaders continue to have close elections. See Poland, Turkey, Israel if you count that. In Brazil they even lost election. One plausible theory here is that the more anti-democratic behavior a party engages in the more resistance they face - either because voters are turned off or because their opponents increasingly become center or center-right parties seeking to create broad pro-democracy coalitions - and that this roughly balances out. What does this mean for how one evaluates democracy?

Finally, some comments specifically on more Western countries. I think the future of these countries is really uncertain.

For the next decade, it's really dependent on a lot of short-term events. Will Italy's PM Meloni engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Le Pen win election in France, and if so will she engage in anti-democratic behavior? Will Trump win in 2024? How quickly/far will the upward trend in polling for Germany and Spain's far-right continue?

I know the piece specifies the next decade, but more long-term, the rise of fascism has come quite suddenly in the span of these last 8 years. If it continues for a few decades (and AI doesn't kill us all) then we are probably destined for fascist governments almost everywhere and the deterioration of democratic institutions. But how long this global trend will last is really the big question in global politics. Maybe debates over AI issues will become the big issue to supplant fascism? IDK. I'd love to see some analysis of historical trends in public approval to see what a prior for this question would look like; I've never gotten around to doing it myself and am really not very well informed about history here. 

how are you personally preparing for this?

Everyone seems to find the most striking claim here 

over the next decade, ... that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships ... is ... the most likely overall outcome

pretty outlandish. That right-wing, nationalist, conservative parties might win power in a lot of places, seems a reasonable projection (though very far from assured); that they will all turn their countries into "fascist dictatorships" where "there are no meaningful elections" is the outlandish part. That would seem to require something like the Spanish civil war, but throughout Europe and North America, perhaps after a catastrophic collapse of NATO under Trump 2.0 - which might be Putin's dream, and the nightmare of liberal-progressive Americans, but I wouldn't bet on it ever happening. 

I noticed one oddity among the references cited. There's this graph about how populists "rarely lose power" peacefully. But if you add up "reached term limits" and "lost free and fair elections", that's actually larger than the other bars. And "still in office" doesn't distinguish between those who have been in office for a year and those who have been there for 25 years. 

Furthermore, if you look up who the Blair Institute regards as a populist (half way down this page), it's an odd mixture - Indonesia's Widodo, Israel's Netanyahu, Japan's Koizumi are there alongside the usual names from left and right. In the academic literature on populism, Koizumi has been described as a neoliberal populist, something I wouldn't have thought possible - though once the combination is allowed, I can imagine someone trying to put Barack Obama in that category, or even Tony Blair himself. Perhaps it just goes to show that politics varies a lot across time and space, as well as demonstrating again the nebulousness of many political categories. 

Your link for "The V-Dem Institute's tracker" does not point to that, it points to DWB which is giving its own take on a link to the V-Dem Institute, which in turn is broken so I can't check it. This might be the one intended: https://www.v-dem.net/documents/12/dr_2021.pdf ?

Umberto Eco's list is extremely low quality. Several of its items are stock traits of bad government; if you mean bad government you should say "bad government" and not "fascism". Eco is a rhetorician, please stop citing him as though he's a political scientist.

I think this post is engaged in significant sleight of hand, between claims that a dictator will murder thousands of people, and claims that an abstract rating will decrease below X points. This is aggravated by the fact that the bet has a clause for "If The Economist Democracy Index [...] significantly changes its methodology" when to my knowledge the EDI does not publish its methodology other than a very brief summary.

Side note -- France isn't a great example for your point here "France, for example, is a very old, well-established and liberal democracy." because the Fifth Republic was only established in 1958. It's also notable for giving the president much stronger executive powers compared with the Fourth Republic!

This post would greatly benefit from quantitative forecasts on precise claims that are at least in principle falsifiable.

I also strongly disagree with Erdogan's characterization as a dictator under the definition of "a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections". Perhaps under some "softer" definition, you could classify him as a dictator; but that makes what I said above all the more important. What is a "dictator", and how do we know if we're in a world where "dictatorship" is becoming more widespread?

I'm especially worried about the US going forward.  In general presidential republics don't have a good track record.  Luckily the US has benefited from strong notions of democratic legitimacy over most of its history.  Also, except at the very beginning, for a brief period around the birth of the Republican party, and recently with the introduction of open primaries US political parties haven't had strong ideological partisanship but were mostly very ideologically mixed with most partisanship being over spoils rather than ideology.  

In How Democracies Die the authors argue that the most worrying sign for a democracy is an escalating pattern of constitutional hardball where contestants continue to adhere to the written rules but more and more break unwritten norms.  Within the last couple of decades we've seen filibusters go from a rarely deployed emergency break to a routine legislative tactic, repeated showdowns over the debt ceiling, a breakdown in norms around supreme court appointees, etc.  I don't expect any disaster imminently, but the trends are very bad.

fascism is usually established through a process of democratic backsliding under a populist leader. Essentially, the steps are:

1. A charismatic figure emerges to lead a new populist movement, focusing on opposition to the existing political system and its "elites".
2. Eventually, average people become dissatisfied with the existing democratic government or leader. Possible reasons range from corruption, to scandals, to economic decline, to a hostile press. As of 2023, most leaders of developed countries have poor approval ratings; opinions vary on whether this is because of changes in the media landscape, or whether society overall just sucks more than it used to.
3. In the next election, ordinary people vote for the new populist movement and its leader, and they win democratically.
4. Once in power, the new leadership uses state institutions to slowly, one piece at a time, give themselves electoral advantages. They gerrymander districts, take over the media, punish any opposition, and purge or abolish outside institutions or checks on their authority (courts, electoral commissions, local governments, etc.), until democracy is gone.

I'm not sure I follow how this model applies to the examples you give later. In France especially, as you show on the graph, the far-right movement, which hasn't seized power (yet), was already there 50 years ago, and already had a big electoral share 35 years ago. So even if it wins the presidential election in 2027, it is not a "new populist movement" as you put it. Even the current leader of the movement (Marine Lepen, I don't know if she is a charmismatic figure) is the daugther of the founder of the movement. 

For Italy, you cut the graph at 2008, which may mislead the reader to believe that the share of far-right in italy went from 0 in 2003 to almost 40% in 2023, (which is already 20 years, but faster than France I guess). This is not true. Looking at the composition of the italian parliement on wikipedia, there was already 17% of far-right in italy in 1994 (110/630), then it kind of declined and was replaced by a new movement. Actually, I cut the graph in 1994 but, if you go on the page, there has always been between 5% and 10% of far-right in the parliement in Italy since WWII (with a litteral fascit party until 1992). 

I haven't checked every other example, but rather than a new party with a charismatic figure, it seems to me that far-right parties are rising slowly and over time.

Disagree with this and might write up a more thorough response than the one I have in a bit, but for now, here are some manifold markets around this topic area:

https://manifold.markets/group/weird-doomsday

The V-Dem Institute's tracker shows that, after widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s, many more countries are now becoming autocratic than democratic, especially weighted by population:

The V-Dem tracker you show doesn't show "widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s." It shows a giant explosion all of a sudden starting in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and then an equally sudden reversion from about 2000-2004.

It's tracking autocratization, the sign of the direction of change, rather than the magnitude of autocracy or of its rate of change. If the world saw a wave of democratization (as during the USSR's collapse) followed by even a minor systemic reversion to the mean, we would observe this as a giant spike in democratization followed by a giant spike in autocratization.

That said, V-Dem does appear to be a pretty large, serious, thoughtful and data-backed organization, and they have enough examples of autocratization trends in their report that I am updating to say yes, it does look like there's some sort of genuinely concerning autocratization process going on globally.

This post is interesting, but I think it fails to do enough to provide possible causal mechanisms to help folks really think about this. It's a lot of worrying trends, which are good to worry about and an important start, but for me this post is missing something it really needs. So, let me see if I can provide a simple story that might make sense of the trend and give us some clues about how much to worry.

Lately, times have been getting harder for a large number of folks in Western countries. There's less slack in the system. Historically, left-coded positions have existed only when there's sufficient slack, since people don't care about equity or even equality when they aren't sure if they'll have enough grain to survive the winter—all they want is to at least get by. We may not be on the verge of actual famine, but despite rising absolute wealth, relative perceptions of wealth are falling among the working class and some of the professional class.  Some of this is real, and some of this is hedonic treadmill, failing to recognize the tide that has lifted all boats. Regardless, the experience of decline, even if it is only relative to other people in the same society, leads to a loss of purpose and a desire for a return to the good old days. The political implications follow naturally.

I think it's great that you took a stand to present your independent observations and relay some information people here may not have encountered on the subject, especially since political discourse is a minor LW taboo. This is good for epistemics IMO.

The key argument for why we'd predict 18+ Western fascisms in the next decade is that we should by default extrapolate current trends, while rejecting the appearance of stability.

I find this contradictory. Why are current derivative of fascism something we should view as "stable" and likely to hold constant over the long term, while the current amount of fascism is something we should view as "unstable" and easy to change?

Obviously, both can't be true - we can't have a stable amount of fascism and also a stable rate of change. I'm just not clear on why you think we ought to assume the rate of change is the statistic that is stable and the absolute level is the statistic that is unstable.

My intuition is the opposite. The level of autocracy appears pretty stable over long time periods in most countries, with occasional shocks and constant wobbles. It seems likely to me that we are having a wobble.

A secondary issue is the underlying causal model. The USA spied on its own citizens. Many of its citizens also celebrated storming the capitol and trying to overturn the 2020 election. I think the former is mainly a symptom of autocracy. The latter contributes to a culture of celebrating autocracy that I think contributes to its growth. Do you think we can distinguish symptoms from causes of autocracy in the data you cite?

Perhaps related: Is democracy a fad? [EA · GW]

The rise in in authoritarianism in the west is very real and concerning and we should strive to counter it. But I think you overstate some of your points.

In the US, the most recent midterm served as a rebuke to trumpism and election denial. Despite having the highest inflation in recent memory and low favorability scores for biden, democrats actually won a senate seat, barely lost any seats in the house and defeated all AG and governors in swing states that run on election denial. This is not what a normal mid term looks like, and it is certainly not what a midterm in which authoritarians are gaining broader mainstream support would look like. In every special election, democrats overperform too, sometimes to very large extents.

Polls are important to gauge the current public opinion, but especially this far out to an election, they need to be interpreted cautiously. The general election polls are predominantly from low quality and/or republican pollsters. Higher quality pollsters do show Biden leading Trump, but even they don't tell you very much because their numbers of undecided people is so high. This are predominantly people who disapprove of both Biden and Trump, but who have in recent election broken more favourably towards dems. Negative polarisation means that almost any politician will have a negative favorability rating, and does not tell you very much how an election will go. 

In europe, authoritarians do seem to have more electoral success in some nations, sometimes forming the current governments or gaining large swells of grassroot support. But their success is fickle, with large swings both towards, but at other times away from them. Just before covid, it seemed that the far right had been beaten back after their original post-2015 surge. These swing are in itself dangerous, but they also mean you can't just extrapolate their current success forward, they are just as likely to falter than the are to continue to be successfull. 

Another thing is that most of these movements had to deradicalise to a certain extend to  get to their current position. This is most visable in their stance on the EU: hard euroscepticism is now completely gone from the (successful) far right, and many have even adopted soft pro-EU positions. Transitioning from that into a more general anti-democratic and authoritarian direction is hard. 

The key thing you don't address is how unelected bodies like the military and the judiciary may pushback against fascists. On January 6th the legislative branch was able to address the issue alone (a kind of blow into your thesis). Anyway, I wouldn't expect Roberts to show up on January 20th to sworn in Trump. And I see at least 5 Justices willing to protect America. The judiciary branch actually is working hard to incarcerate Trump.

Also, you don't address important G7 countries like Japan and the United Kingdom. Because during the far right uprising the Conservative Party kept power, the far right never had a chance there. Japan is a one party system, unlikely to fall.

I would go this way for a second post: -How'd this work in each of the G7 countries? -How'd this works smaller richer countries like Israel, Italy, and Mexico? I understand that Erdogan is an autocrat, but how can Nethanyahu, Meloni, and Obrador become autocrats themselves? -How international institutions would react? For example, during Brazil's transition of power, the U.S. had the navy near our shores to remember the military not do anything silly and the U.S. Senate approved in consensus a motion congratulating Lula. Also, many rich countries live under the rule of Brussels.

I think that as the Trump years have shown, the international system can endure some years without Washington. I'd be worried were D.C., Paris and London to fall at the same time.

A large part of your evidence is that "far-right" parties, like the Sweden democrats, are growing. But ~none of the western parties you mention are running on an explicitly anti-democratic platform, which was a fairly unifying feature of the worst dictatorships throughout history. "Marine Le Pen is a fascist and will start democratic backsliding if she wins" is a pretty odd assumption to just leave unsubstantiated.

AI policy, strategy, and governance involves working with government officials within the political system. This will be very different if the relevant officials are fascists, who are selected for loyalty rather than competence.

The way you tell the story suggests that loyalty to the left is very important to prevent the political right from getting power. This dynamic means that people who sit in powerful chairs are more selected due to loyalty than competence.

The narrative of the importance of fighting fascism led to a media landscape where loyalty to leftwing thought is more important than it used to be a decade ago.

A system that selects for cognitive performance also doesn't put a 80-year-old on top of its hierarchy. 

I would expect that Xi's China is better at selecting for competence in high-level positions than the current United States even if it's worse than previous Chinese administrations. 

I'm not really a fan of "woke" ideas, but in democracies, they are made much less dangerous by being a movement run by small numbers of highly educated elites, who may influence various institutions but lack a solid electoral base.

The whole problem of dictatorships is that they don't need a solid electoral base. Pinochet didn't get into power by winning an election and having a solid electoral base. 

Those elites are already strong enough to do a lot of censorship of inconvenient reporting like that about Hunter Biden's laptop or about lab leak at the current power balance.

This conversation might be better if we taboo Hitler and recent politics. On the askhistorians subreddit they have a 50 years rule, and here we say that politics is the mind killer.

In any case, it seems to me that this approach extrapolates current trends, but I suggest that it might be more reliable to look at history for priors. Extrapolation can lead us to predict wild swings, while history puts bounds on the swings and sometimes suggests a return to the mean.

There certainly have been a lot of dictatorships in history and not all of them fascist. But there have also lots of examples of swings from the left to the right, from centrist to extremism, peace to war, stability to inflation, and elitism to popularise, but democracy has survived many of them.

My favourite book on this subject is the very short "Lessons of History" by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I'd recommend it to anyone thinking about these issues in order to quickly develop priors.

I think this is a bit overstated in terms of likelihood and severity.  Political predictions deeply suffer from reference class problems - it's unclear which past events or trends are indicators of future outcomes.  Nobody votes in the same election twice.  Not legally, at least.

Just my opinion: the concerns are valid but exaggerated.

Perhaps exaggeration is justified in order to get people's attention since most americans are still treating this as a normal election.

I don't see this as being distinct from or better than any typical left wing "republicans are a threat to democracy" article. If there is anything that isn't fit for LW it's this post.