>Brad, you can do much better than this. For the most part, you have listed a
>number of charges that can be levelled at most anti-democratic countries.
Not so. The regimes we have seen in the twentieth century are
different and new. Hannah Arendt was not dumb, and was not stupid in
thinking that the concept of "totalitarianism" was worth
investigating...
Most anti-democratic countries claim to be moving toward multi-party
parliamentary democracy. Only fascists with their emphasis on the
leading role of the leader and communists with their emphasis on the
leading role of the party rejected parliamentary democracy and
multi-party elections as the ideal that they were "working toward."
The cult of personality has definite similarities with the
semi-divine status that monarchs attempted to establish for
themselves, but in previous and in most contemporary anti-democratic
regimes the attempt by the paramount leader to create a full-blown
cult of personality is effectively blocked by the rest of the
leadership.
The purge as we know it today--in which those who were the leader's
closest associates yesterday are revealed to have been for a long
time his mortal enemies--might be seen as a product of the French
Revolution, but I suspect that Hitler's treatment of Roehm and
Roehm's allies played a big role in Stalin's use of the purge, which
then became the much-copied model for other communist regimes.
Rejection of the idea of an independent judiciary, of citizen rights,
and of due process is found in many non-democratic regimes. But it is
not found in all: even Justinian Basileus et Autokrator believed that
he had an obligation to publish and then to follow the law.
And it is simply an error to confuse New Deal or Keynesian attempts
to supplement the market in the interest of full employment and
economic stability with Nazi and Soviet attempts to create a
Permanent War Economy in which direct command-and-control over
resource flows played a large part...
Brad DeLong
