Ordinary Tyranny

Totalitarianism is not the nearest danger

The great fear is that “it could happen here.” We could become Orwell’s Oceania. We could be living ordinary lives one day and find ourselves shipped off to the gulag the next. Totalitarianism could, indeed, happen here, or anywhere. It could, but it is not likely to. Liberal democracies are fragile, as all regimes are fragile. But their failure modes are very rarely totalitarian, because truly totalitarian regimes are very rare in general. 

It is difficult to establish any sort of regime in the first place. Liberal democracy is perhaps the second hardest type to establish, but once established it is the hardest to get rid of. Totalitarianism is the hardest by far to establish, but also the hardest to maintain. Totalitarian regimes mobilize their populations the way that any modern country does when engaged in a total war, but maintains this in peacetime as well. 

Few have truly risen to the standard set by Stalin, who took over a regime that had been battered by the Great War, by a civil war, and by a war with Poland, and of course eventually was on the defense in an even greater and more existential war. After a major war, demobilization takes actual work; the entire society has been forcibly warped around a singular purpose and at least some of it must be forcibly unwarped again. When he was not actively at war, Stalin did not demobilize; instead, he mobilized against internal enemies, inventing them where necessary. He mobilized in pursuit of grain harvests, and industrial production, without caring how it was achieved or whether people were actually fed or there was much use for what was produced.

Stalin kept his foot on the gas, and anyone who lightly suggested he might let up a bit found themselves dead and deleted from history altogether. Once he died, the system began to unclench. The leadership of that system could not continue to perpetuate something that was so lethal to themselves, and so the Soviet Union became less totalitarian. By the standards of most nations in history, the “destalinized” USSR was extremely totalitarian. But it was much less so than it had been, and it began a long (but not that long) drift towards simple authoritarianism.

Ordinary tyranny today is just that, ordinary. It is not Orwellian, it is not Stalinist, it is in fact a great deal like life in a middle income liberal democracy, but without meaningful political competition and with greater suppression of public expression. These regimes may be ruthless about preserving their hold on power but in general prefer society to remain politically apathetic rather than constantly mobilized towards some collective end. They may be violent, they may even be mass murderous, but they do not reach the scale of the 20th century horrors and the people outside of the targeted groups may live relatively unnotable lives which never come into contact with the regime’s sharp edges.

Without the weight of the Russian political tradition and the constant mobilization for war that Russia and its successor state faced from 1914-1945, it is quite hard to rise above ordinary tyranny—thank goodness. The danger that liberal democracies face is that they will degrade into ordinary tyranny. In America, our compound republic has always provided ample opportunity for this, as specific states but especially localities find ways to sandbag their electoral competitions and cater to narrower interests than the general public. Among our neighbors in the Americas, presidents who decide they’d rather not have their term come to an end, or military leaders who decide civilian rule isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, have been a dime a dozen. 

Liberal democracy is fragile. But the most proximate danger that “can happen here” is much more ordinary than we imagine. That does not mean that we ought not to read our Orwell. It does mean that we ought to make sure not to miss the garden variety strongman while standing on guard against hostile ideologues seeking the complete transformation of society.