> It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality.
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
I think this is an artifact of any large organization of people.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them.
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
For sake of not derailing the discussion, I think the more appropriate reading would be "people act in what they believe to be self-interest", however flawed the notion of the benefit
Smokers don’t seem to be under any illusions about whether it’s bad for them? When people have conflicting desires, I think what even counts as “self-interest” gets complicated. Often people are acting at cross-purposes to some of their desires.
I suppose the 'self-interest' of desiring a cigarette outweighs the 'self-interest' of preserving your health.
Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc...
Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
Also a little bit of Stanislaw Lem, I remember in one of his books he mentions a service that matches people who want to die with people who want to kill ;)
Now you have weakened the generalization to the point it's meaningless.
What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
If you want an example, I guess the enthymeme would be:
a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest
b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc.
c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety
I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
The generalization only works if it's weak enough to be meaningless. Thus, the generalization is bad. Examples don't make it useful.
"People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article.
> I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people
The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
I didn't propose it, just clarified what I believe to be their point.
I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
Belief is categorically not rooted in reality. That's why it's called belief and not fact.
Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy.
You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives
This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.
The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do, because of course what he wants is best for everyone. He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all. Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things and in all the same ways as he himself does.
So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill.
If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
Not all humans act in their long-term self interest, but those that do will be disproportionately represented in positions that allow themselves to enrich their long-term self interest. The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves.
"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
I'd like to think humans perform more selfless than selfish acts, but their impact is not evenly balanced. Per act, it is far easier to harm than to help. In a day, if ten people do you a kindness like holding a door open for you and an eleventh spits in your face, you'll be thinking about and telling your acquaintances about the eleventh.
Humans are terrible at doing what's best for them. They are pretty good at following local gradients, though. Smoking might kill you in 30 years, but right now it lets you fit in with the cool kids, or feels good once you're hooked. Not brushing your teeth might be terrible for them and your gums, eventually, but right now it saves you from having to do something.
At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
One reasoning flaw I've seen in this type of discussion is the assumption that the person has the same value system as you / the experts. In your example, it is assumed that the subject values a very long life. Maybe they don't, maybe they value smoking way more than a long life.
I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
We live immersed in an industrial society that highly values productivity and individualism. All we can say is that large organizations of people in these circumstances are observed to default to doing what's best for them, maybe because that's what they were raised to think.
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
The large organization also breeds more selfish behavior. When you see clear misbehavior near you, and you know reporting it will achieve nothign but get you in trouble, then it's difficult to behave well yourself. Eventually the large organization is just layers upon layers of misaligned incentives. The same complaints people correctly made about the soviet system also applied to the Japanese zaibatsus and the modern US conglomerate. It eventually shows us that the modern product enshittification isn't really a matter of a company maximizing its long term profits, but some middle manager pissing the company reputation away to meet some badly aligned KPI that hands them an extra bonus. And the only time execs are better off intervening is when the product line is already on the brink of being destroyed by competitors. It's principal agent problems all the way down.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
This is the default capitalist view. Anthropology disagrees. For much of human history we’ve exhibited altruistic behaviour towards one another. There are plenty of instances of that today: coalitions, unions, mutual aid groups, community volunteer groups… not to mention the individual choices people make in the interests of others over their own.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.
Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.
I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.
Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.
Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.
Unfortunately she had the wool pulled over her eyes by her primary subject. Eichmann was absolutely every bit the monster you'd assume for the Architect of the Holocaust. He played up being "just a functionary" incredibly well during Nuremberg, but if you look into his history, perhaps he wasn't as flamboyant as some of his contemporaries like Himmler or of course, Hitler, but he very much held similar views.
This is not to say she got it wrong, I think the banality of evil absolutely holds up in a number of readings of historical events. I just don't think Eichmann was a good example.
> When he took the stand in his own defense, he portrayed himself as a mid-level functionary following orders.[32] He repeatedly claimed he was "merely a little cog in the machinery" of genocide, not a policymaker.
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
I think you are painting Heidegger in an undeservedly bad light (not all Nazis were the same. There were shades of grey), and even if you consider Heidegger's thoughts as worthless by contamination (which would be a tragedy), you are adding a contact guilt to one of the most influential philosophers for having known him 10 years before he turned brown.
Not 'defending' Arendt, as I don't know enough about her or Heidegger to do so. But doesn't her relationship with Heidegger underscore her point? At the time it would have seemed like two adults indulging everyday human impulses.
When you're looking to get laid you don't ask a lot of questions about politics. Same goes when you're looking for a job. Soon enough, you -- or your offspring -- are part of the machine. And that's the banality of evil.
Non-related? The article is about institutional actions under authoritarianism and the holocaust is the bureaucratic apex of the most studied authoritarian regime in history.
TFA mentions Hannah Arendt in the introduction and discusses the holocaust (if briefly, because most of its focus is on more modern regimes.
I find this kind of research and political science to be ill-equipped for explaining how people and society work. Fiction like Nabokov's Bend Sinister is able to get much closer to the truth of totalitarianism because it isn't shackled by having to present a thin veneer of data and science, and is more clearly influenced by the author's experiences and POV. Social Science often acts as a cover to smuggle these personal experiences into academia and the news.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
Interestingly, this was a major subplot of Harry Potter, seen in the Dolores Umbridge character among others. I'm not saying anything further than that I think this is a pattern that people have long observed.
I'm reminded of the classification of military officers by Karl Von Hammerstein-Equord. The people described in this article seem to fall into the "stupid and industrious" catagory, which are classified as the most dangerous.
This is the OC classification of this type? I've seen it before but applied to corporate workforce. Also, clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it.
This was an interesting read. I mean isn’t it obvious what they are doing with the immigration system? Immigration has parallel and much more restrictive civil rights; far less accountability; less institutional history.
I thought it was yet more interesting what this piece left out, which is the administration’s partners in private industry. There are private companies who provide the surveillance equipment, the data, the tear gas, the uniforms, the maintenance of vehicles, etc etc. private industry is what provides the weapons of state power. The engine of authoritarianism exists outside of government in the places where it can be truly unaccountable. Thyssen Krupp, Beyer, BMW, and so on.
Historically, the entity that has most effectively resisted authoritarianism is organized labor. This article doesn’t even mention labor which is truly intellectually retarded. Gee, NYT, I wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to stop coercion of line level employees by a tiny, democratically unaccountable ruling class? Wish we could figure out what that might be in a moment like this.
I mean, yeah? Those of us who generally sit on the polar opposite of the scale have been parroting this for decades, now, to no real avail. I’m glad research is finally backing up what we already knew, but it’s also still targeting a specific bullseye rather than broader generalizations necessary for meaningful organizational reforms.
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve
never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
Thank you for sharing this. I have a thing to say that may help. First, I'm glad to hear that your experience pushed you to the left, because a lot of people who experience this injustice tend to go hard right and keep going right.
I agree that extreme individualization in the last few decades has resulted in some really bad actions. We're starting to see Western societal decline because of this, whereas collectivist cultures are thriving. It takes tremendous emotional labor to care for the well being of your community, so it's easier to just worry about only yourself. This is unsustainable just like you mentioned that enablers of authoritarians are never protected. Leaning right and being selfish will eventually hurt that person. It may not hurt them now, or tomorrow, or until 1-2 generations from now, but that course will be corrected. They are prioritizing short term gains over long term benefits, and the good part about this is that a lot of smart hard working people are choosing the long term.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK
On another note: I wanted to shared something about the word "mediocre". I once made a comment to a coworker and friend that we are all just average mediocre people doing mediocre things at work and that is OK. During this same time, another coworker called me a superstar for solving his problem.
The original coworker I had made the mediocre comment to was so offended that they went home, designed a T-shirt and wore it work "Mediocre man. Because not everyone can be a superstar". I saw it. I felt bad and commented to him that I did not mean to call him mediocre or offend him, but the damage was already done. At this same time, I kept getting called superstar by everyone on the team, including by the manager of our team (in retrospect, yikes!). We had a (toxic) culture of nicknames, and this too was going to stick for a while.
At some point, the coworker who made the t-shirt had raised concerns with the manager and eventually the manager pulled us all aside and said "no more superstar, it ends today, we're done with that nickname". Ok, cool.
However, in subsequent conversations, the tshirt coworker would share some of his views of the world with me. He had a very difficult life growing up, so one of his takes was "why do black people get to say black lives matter, but why can't I say white lives matter, my life is difficult too, do I not matter?". I was shocked, but also unsurprised by this. I work in tech, and these kinds of takes are widely prevalent. I don't remember how I tried explaining to them, but I walked away disappointed that they had taken all of the injustice and difficulty of life and instead decided to take something away from a group of people who faced the same :(
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
Let's note that while we celebrate democracy in government, business often runs as autocracy or oligarchy. Imposing "business"-mindedness encompasses not just taking care of finances and outcomes but also running things the way the leader demands.
> The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
HR exists to protect the company by leaving a paper trail they can point to to burn you at a moment’s notice while projecting the idea that they care about your well-being
So faced with the normal process of up or out, low performers choose to join the secret police and engage in torture etc to 'thrive'.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
Very few things scare me much more than cold, unfeeling bureaucracy.
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
I’m pretty sure Hannah Arendt examined this pretty extensively in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in the relevant chapters in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She described several ways the typical loyal party member is mediocre and eager to follow orders merely for career advancement.
At least in America, HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos. The common saying is "HR is not your friend".
> HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos
Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.
Disagree with the last one. Back when unions were more common in my country, union officials were the gatekeepers of career progress or even entering the profession, and they were taking bribes. I've never seen an HR department half as bad as an average union from that era (when was the last time you heard someone bring $1000 in cash to a job interview?).
That said, in the USA the pendulum has swinged too far the other way so as of now, unions don't have any capacity to be this bad. Unionizing would be a huge improvement for every employee in pretty much every situation.
The problem with Unions is its just the labor. Its the people who do the work. They don't have the money or the political power.
The Bosses and Owners have the money, the property, the machines, and political connections.
And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
The real solution here isnt socialism or communism. Its Worker Cooperatives. This makes the worker = the boss. And the previous conflict between the 2 go away. And the workers can make better decisions with all the information.
For example, when a dictatorial company announces layoffs, it just happens. But losing people also loses knowledge of the company, which is bad long term. In those cases, a worker cooperative could explain the situation, and make a decision together to temporarily cut wages INSTEAD of laying people off.
> And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
Unions used to solve this issue by occasionally dragging a boss out of their home and killing them in the street, or kneecapping scabs. To end such violence, we enshrined in law pretty strong protections for unions, so that they could fight in the courts rather than in the streets. A couple generations of prosperity later, business folk and their bought politicians who wouldn't know Chesterton's fence if it fell on them decided those protections were inconvenient. And so here we are.
Human Resources. In olden time it might have been called Personnel. The department that will manage pay, hiring, contract, firing, that sort of things.
Here is the problem. The "liberal" parties in Europe are pursuing exactly this policy of H.R Enshittification for the entire public sphere. More surveillance, more regulation, more state over-reach, less political freedoms and less free press. I don't see the difference between what's happening in the US and the supposedly good guys that rule me. It feels like they want to return to serfdom where your entire life is dependent on the lords (state) blessing.
> We don't need to submit a history of our social media accounts before crossing a border
Americans don't have to do that when crossing between states either. Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe?
This is not very different from what is exposed in Hanna Arendt's book, "The Banality of Evil" (english translation from the title most known in my country for Eichman in Jerusalem).
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
It seems to me that this suggests that providing diverse career opportunities and strong social safety nets may be a valuable tool in fighting fascism.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
My wife had a brief career in state-level politics and this article resonated with me. Rather than national politics or media narratives, I thought of specific state level senators, representatives, and administrators she had to interact with.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
> He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses.
I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.
Absolutely. A state senator in my state was a strategy consultant for a cutthroat consulting firm whose major client was a hedge fund and happily did that for a while. Then she decided to get into politics. She is the right gender, but had to become a progressive to fit in. So she did that, and career has advanced accordingly.
My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.
It's a representation of power, and reality is that some people are leaders, and some are loyal vassals or subjects. Most legislative people are idiots and are really supposed to be idiots. Typically an executive cares about a set of issues or objectives, and puts the A-Team there.
At a state level, you may have 3-5,000 appointments to make in a big state, so there's a hierarchy of need. The A-players go to the priorities, the more professional "players" go to the operationally critical entities (Think your DMV and Tax Collections) and loyal idiots get scattered around the various places where the staff keep the plane flying.
The cult of personality around MAGA brings more different people. They'll absorb into the system or go away eventually.
> they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Any sort of extremism can be fought if you provide all people with opportunity. Its not just a social saftey net but also a purpose and jobs and the idea of a better future.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
On your first phrase, you can look at how the actual proper-name Fascism and its friends happened. Or at any anti-democratic movement from the current ones all the way back to the ancient Rome's rise of the empire.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
> Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the ... social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
I bet you are someone who can't believe why Trump keeps winning. And yet you continue to whine about "mediocre white males" and wonders why white men vote for the other guy.
In other words, democracy dies when it no longer serves the interests of capital.
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
Everyone farms the idiots, the liberal establishment over the last 50 years sold working class jobs overseas and imported labor to devalue their wages. Don't be surprised when another faction uses these "idiots" against you.
Instigating an armed insurrection to try and prevent vote certification and now trying to undermine voting ahead of the midterms isn't a glowing endorsement of his support for democracy.
He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election.
He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016. Campaigns spend their money trying to turn out voters to win the electoral college, because that’s what counts. That’s especially true of Republicans, whose voters are spread out across rural areas. The smallest PA city Harris visited the last week of the election was Scranton, which has 76,000. In the last week, Trump was in Lilitz PA, which has under 10,000 people. Butler PA has 13,500.
In 2024, Trump made a deliberate play for the popular vote, holding rallies in California and New York City. And there was a major swing in his direction in both states. E.g. Biden won California by 29 points. Harris won California by only 20 points. Trump also targeted immigrant communities in blue states. Biden won foreign born voters by 26 points. Trump won them by 1 point. That swing alone accounts for half the 2020-2024 swing.
It came out later that the internal polling available to both campaigns had Trump ahead the entire time. So he likely felt comfortable taking a risk and spending time in California and New York. But you’ll notice that he parked his surrogates in places like Pennsylvania the entire time. The popular vote has marketing value but it doesn’t count and nobody is trying to win it.
> He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election
You generally can’t tell what the popular vote would have been in past elections because nobody was trying to win it. It’s like saying the Eagles would have won the 2022 if we decided who won based on net yardage instead of touchdowns. We don’t know that because nobody was trying to win on that metric. It’s was only indirectly relevant to getting touchdowns, which is what counts.
Elections that are so close that the popular vote and electoral college vote go in different directions are almost by definitions ones that are so close that, if the campaigns were playing to different rules, the outcomes could have been different. Note that, in both cases where the presidential popular vote has diverged from the electoral college vote, the president’s party still won the congressional popular vote.
There’s a ton of focus on the electoral college, but the real problem is that a winner-takes-all vote for the presidency is stupid where voting is close enough that the results come down to voter turnout and chance.
> We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016
You can’t brag about his popular vote for one election then disregard it for another. He lost if by a lot more in 2016 than he won it by in 2024. Both elections were decided by the electoral college and the popular votes we are comparing both happened in that context. 2.7% margin vs. 0.5% is a stark difference.
Republicans had the stones to call his victory margin “a mandate” yet they would never say Hillary Clinton had one. You’re playing funny with numbers here.
My post was responding to someone who expressed skepticism in U.S. elections. I wasn’t “bragging” about anything, I was pointing out that elections work. I mentioned the popular vote only to preempt a counterpoint from people who don’t like the EC.
Everyone understands the EC decides elections and you’re the only one talking about the popular vote. You explicitly stated that instead of the one that actually matters and is relevant in the other comment. And again, he barely won it.
Either way you can’t selectively use it in conversation and then dismiss it when others use it.
> and won the popular vote to go back into office.
By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.
> It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality.
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
I think this is an artifact of any large organization of people.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them.
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
Human behavior is much more complex.
For sake of not derailing the discussion, I think the more appropriate reading would be "people act in what they believe to be self-interest", however flawed the notion of the benefit
Smokers don’t seem to be under any illusions about whether it’s bad for them? When people have conflicting desires, I think what even counts as “self-interest” gets complicated. Often people are acting at cross-purposes to some of their desires.
I suppose the 'self-interest' of desiring a cigarette outweighs the 'self-interest' of preserving your health.
Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc...
Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
This thread is starting to remind me of Stalker.
Also a little bit of Stanislaw Lem, I remember in one of his books he mentions a service that matches people who want to die with people who want to kill ;)
Now you have weakened the generalization to the point it's meaningless.
What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
If you want an example, I guess the enthymeme would be:
a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest
b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc.
c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety
I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
The generalization only works if it's weak enough to be meaningless. Thus, the generalization is bad. Examples don't make it useful.
"People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article.
> I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people
The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
I didn't propose it, just clarified what I believe to be their point.
I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
Belief is categorically not rooted in reality. That's why it's called belief and not fact.
Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy.
You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives
This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.
The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
It has more to do with the psychology of the person who talks about others that "don't vote in their self-interest". That person, invariably, thinks of others as robots that should do what he wants them to do, because of course what he wants is best for everyone. He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all. Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things and in all the same ways as he himself does.
So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill.
If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
Not all humans act in their long-term self interest, but those that do will be disproportionately represented in positions that allow themselves to enrich their long-term self interest. The gamblers, smokers, layabouts, drunks, druggies, are fodder for former group to enrich themselves.
"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...
I'd like to think humans perform more selfless than selfish acts, but their impact is not evenly balanced. Per act, it is far easier to harm than to help. In a day, if ten people do you a kindness like holding a door open for you and an eleventh spits in your face, you'll be thinking about and telling your acquaintances about the eleventh.
Humans are terrible at doing what's best for them. They are pretty good at following local gradients, though. Smoking might kill you in 30 years, but right now it lets you fit in with the cool kids, or feels good once you're hooked. Not brushing your teeth might be terrible for them and your gums, eventually, but right now it saves you from having to do something.
At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
One reasoning flaw I've seen in this type of discussion is the assumption that the person has the same value system as you / the experts. In your example, it is assumed that the subject values a very long life. Maybe they don't, maybe they value smoking way more than a long life.
I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
We live immersed in an industrial society that highly values productivity and individualism. All we can say is that large organizations of people in these circumstances are observed to default to doing what's best for them, maybe because that's what they were raised to think.
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
I’ve built a career specifically not joining organizations that do evil (by my definition). It’s a privilege, I suppose.
But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.
That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.
The large organization also breeds more selfish behavior. When you see clear misbehavior near you, and you know reporting it will achieve nothign but get you in trouble, then it's difficult to behave well yourself. Eventually the large organization is just layers upon layers of misaligned incentives. The same complaints people correctly made about the soviet system also applied to the Japanese zaibatsus and the modern US conglomerate. It eventually shows us that the modern product enshittification isn't really a matter of a company maximizing its long term profits, but some middle manager pissing the company reputation away to meet some badly aligned KPI that hands them an extra bonus. And the only time execs are better off intervening is when the product line is already on the brink of being destroyed by competitors. It's principal agent problems all the way down.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
This is the default capitalist view. Anthropology disagrees. For much of human history we’ve exhibited altruistic behaviour towards one another. There are plenty of instances of that today: coalitions, unions, mutual aid groups, community volunteer groups… not to mention the individual choices people make in the interests of others over their own.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
>Anthropology disagrees.
Survivorship Bias.
Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.
Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.
Anthropology also shows widespread cannibalism.
I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.
Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.
Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.
> but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil
That's why the article actually mentions it.
I read a second time and didn't find it, had to search it with the browser. Oh eyes...
I’d also recommend reading Modernity and the Holocaust as a good intro to studies of the Holocaust through a similar lens. None of this is new
Right the functionalism-intentionalism debate is certainly glossed over in middle school history studies, and makes it all a little less Hollywood.
Unfortunately she had the wool pulled over her eyes by her primary subject. Eichmann was absolutely every bit the monster you'd assume for the Architect of the Holocaust. He played up being "just a functionary" incredibly well during Nuremberg, but if you look into his history, perhaps he wasn't as flamboyant as some of his contemporaries like Himmler or of course, Hitler, but he very much held similar views.
This is not to say she got it wrong, I think the banality of evil absolutely holds up in a number of readings of historical events. I just don't think Eichmann was a good example.
I don't know how accurate is what you explain, but the fact that Eichmann was not tried at Nuremberg certainly does not help your credibility.
Eichmann escaped from custody in 1945 and successfully hid until Mossad tracked him down in Argentina in 1960.
Looks like it was the Israelis who put him on trial:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_trial
> When he took the stand in his own defense, he portrayed himself as a mid-level functionary following orders.[32] He repeatedly claimed he was "merely a little cog in the machinery" of genocide, not a policymaker.
Well,
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Marburg_(1924%E2...
And naturally this is a controversial take since Arendt and Heidegger have defenders to the present day.
Heidegger became a Nazi -- literally, he joined the party -- but he was not a "Nazi ideologue" for any reasonable definition of "ideologue".
And the idea that Hannah Arendt needs "defenders" because she had an affair with Heidegger is just bizarre.
In which ways do you think it might have colored her analysis? Was she maybe "too soft" for current standards?
I think you are painting Heidegger in an undeservedly bad light (not all Nazis were the same. There were shades of grey), and even if you consider Heidegger's thoughts as worthless by contamination (which would be a tragedy), you are adding a contact guilt to one of the most influential philosophers for having known him 10 years before he turned brown.
Not 'defending' Arendt, as I don't know enough about her or Heidegger to do so. But doesn't her relationship with Heidegger underscore her point? At the time it would have seemed like two adults indulging everyday human impulses.
When you're looking to get laid you don't ask a lot of questions about politics. Same goes when you're looking for a job. Soon enough, you -- or your offspring -- are part of the machine. And that's the banality of evil.
The banality of mentioning the holocaust in a non-related thread. That should be Hannah's title
Non-related? The article is about institutional actions under authoritarianism and the holocaust is the bureaucratic apex of the most studied authoritarian regime in history.
TFA mentions Hannah Arendt in the introduction and discusses the holocaust (if briefly, because most of its focus is on more modern regimes.
I find this kind of research and political science to be ill-equipped for explaining how people and society work. Fiction like Nabokov's Bend Sinister is able to get much closer to the truth of totalitarianism because it isn't shackled by having to present a thin veneer of data and science, and is more clearly influenced by the author's experiences and POV. Social Science often acts as a cover to smuggle these personal experiences into academia and the news.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
> New research sheds light on how mediocre employees help would-be authoritarians maintain power.
https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...
The article is apropos of the NPR show This American Life "Give a Little Whistle"
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/give-a-little-whistle
People being asked for blind loyalty or to step aside.
It is ironic hear people whose whole life was dedicated to chase immigrants being surprise when it evolved to chase each other: police state.
Interestingly, this was a major subplot of Harry Potter, seen in the Dolores Umbridge character among others. I'm not saying anything further than that I think this is a pattern that people have long observed.
I'm reminded of the classification of military officers by Karl Von Hammerstein-Equord. The people described in this article seem to fall into the "stupid and industrious" catagory, which are classified as the most dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
This is the OC classification of this type? I've seen it before but applied to corporate workforce. Also, clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it.
> Also, clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it.
Simple example… they get others to do the work while they reap the rewards. That’s clever and lazy.
funny that he put "cleaver" and "lazy" at the top :D
Obviously. The more unethical the work, the more you have to pay.
Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.
This was an interesting read. I mean isn’t it obvious what they are doing with the immigration system? Immigration has parallel and much more restrictive civil rights; far less accountability; less institutional history.
I thought it was yet more interesting what this piece left out, which is the administration’s partners in private industry. There are private companies who provide the surveillance equipment, the data, the tear gas, the uniforms, the maintenance of vehicles, etc etc. private industry is what provides the weapons of state power. The engine of authoritarianism exists outside of government in the places where it can be truly unaccountable. Thyssen Krupp, Beyer, BMW, and so on.
Historically, the entity that has most effectively resisted authoritarianism is organized labor. This article doesn’t even mention labor which is truly intellectually retarded. Gee, NYT, I wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to stop coercion of line level employees by a tiny, democratically unaccountable ruling class? Wish we could figure out what that might be in a moment like this.
>he entity that has most effectively resisted authoritarianism is organized labor.
And you wonder why the billionaire class despises unions and is furiously trying to implement more AI everywhere.
I mean the communist dictatorships of the 20th century (including those still around today) had their roots in labor movements.
Follows from the article, those who had little to lose who stand to benefit from overturning the system
I mean, yeah? Those of us who generally sit on the polar opposite of the scale have been parroting this for decades, now, to no real avail. I’m glad research is finally backing up what we already knew, but it’s also still targeting a specific bullseye rather than broader generalizations necessary for meaningful organizational reforms.
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
Thank you for sharing this. I have a thing to say that may help. First, I'm glad to hear that your experience pushed you to the left, because a lot of people who experience this injustice tend to go hard right and keep going right.
I agree that extreme individualization in the last few decades has resulted in some really bad actions. We're starting to see Western societal decline because of this, whereas collectivist cultures are thriving. It takes tremendous emotional labor to care for the well being of your community, so it's easier to just worry about only yourself. This is unsustainable just like you mentioned that enablers of authoritarians are never protected. Leaning right and being selfish will eventually hurt that person. It may not hurt them now, or tomorrow, or until 1-2 generations from now, but that course will be corrected. They are prioritizing short term gains over long term benefits, and the good part about this is that a lot of smart hard working people are choosing the long term.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK
On another note: I wanted to shared something about the word "mediocre". I once made a comment to a coworker and friend that we are all just average mediocre people doing mediocre things at work and that is OK. During this same time, another coworker called me a superstar for solving his problem.
The original coworker I had made the mediocre comment to was so offended that they went home, designed a T-shirt and wore it work "Mediocre man. Because not everyone can be a superstar". I saw it. I felt bad and commented to him that I did not mean to call him mediocre or offend him, but the damage was already done. At this same time, I kept getting called superstar by everyone on the team, including by the manager of our team (in retrospect, yikes!). We had a (toxic) culture of nicknames, and this too was going to stick for a while.
At some point, the coworker who made the t-shirt had raised concerns with the manager and eventually the manager pulled us all aside and said "no more superstar, it ends today, we're done with that nickname". Ok, cool.
However, in subsequent conversations, the tshirt coworker would share some of his views of the world with me. He had a very difficult life growing up, so one of his takes was "why do black people get to say black lives matter, but why can't I say white lives matter, my life is difficult too, do I not matter?". I was shocked, but also unsurprised by this. I work in tech, and these kinds of takes are widely prevalent. I don't remember how I tried explaining to them, but I walked away disappointed that they had taken all of the injustice and difficulty of life and instead decided to take something away from a group of people who faced the same :(
Some other interviews/blurbs from the authors (from their Universities):
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...
https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
> "We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them"
To badly paraphrase some guest on a half-remembered economics podcast on debt forgiveness:
To really understand a system, you have to study its waste pipelines. What is discarded and why? What do those discarded things ultimately become?
What you and the article captured is that the argument that the civil service and military is not a "4th branch of government".
An effective, professional workforce is important, but ultimately professionalism and process can only enhance or blunt power.
Let's note that while we celebrate democracy in government, business often runs as autocracy or oligarchy. Imposing "business"-mindedness encompasses not just taking care of finances and outcomes but also running things the way the leader demands.
> The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
HR exists to protect the company by leaving a paper trail they can point to to burn you at a moment’s notice while projecting the idea that they care about your well-being
It can be both too. It's entirely possible to protect a companies best interests and promote employee well-being.
HR is but the legal department with a sticker smile.
Borrowing that one
It would be more surprising if dictators could maintain power without any human resources.
Maybe with AI? In the future?
So faced with the normal process of up or out, low performers choose to join the secret police and engage in torture etc to 'thrive'.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
Very few things scare me much more than cold, unfeeling bureaucracy.
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
I’m pretty sure Hannah Arendt examined this pretty extensively in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in the relevant chapters in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She described several ways the typical loyal party member is mediocre and eager to follow orders merely for career advancement.
Which is the exact same mechanism non-dictatorships use, which was precisely her point. Just change the metrics of success and the rest will follow.
HR?
Human Resources
At least in America, HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos. The common saying is "HR is not your friend".
> HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos
Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.
Disagree with the last one. Back when unions were more common in my country, union officials were the gatekeepers of career progress or even entering the profession, and they were taking bribes. I've never seen an HR department half as bad as an average union from that era (when was the last time you heard someone bring $1000 in cash to a job interview?).
That said, in the USA the pendulum has swinged too far the other way so as of now, unions don't have any capacity to be this bad. Unionizing would be a huge improvement for every employee in pretty much every situation.
The problem with Unions is its just the labor. Its the people who do the work. They don't have the money or the political power.
The Bosses and Owners have the money, the property, the machines, and political connections.
And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
The real solution here isnt socialism or communism. Its Worker Cooperatives. This makes the worker = the boss. And the previous conflict between the 2 go away. And the workers can make better decisions with all the information.
For example, when a dictatorial company announces layoffs, it just happens. But losing people also loses knowledge of the company, which is bad long term. In those cases, a worker cooperative could explain the situation, and make a decision together to temporarily cut wages INSTEAD of laying people off.
> And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
Unions used to solve this issue by occasionally dragging a boss out of their home and killing them in the street, or kneecapping scabs. To end such violence, we enshrined in law pretty strong protections for unions, so that they could fight in the courts rather than in the streets. A couple generations of prosperity later, business folk and their bought politicians who wouldn't know Chesterton's fence if it fell on them decided those protections were inconvenient. And so here we are.
"Human Resources" is some grade A unintentional comedy name-wise. Dead giveaway that it's an NPC creation
Human Resources, an entire department whose main function is to keep the company from being sued by its employees.
Human Resources, an entire department whose main function is to keep the company from being sued by its human resources.
Human Resources. In olden time it might have been called Personnel. The department that will manage pay, hiring, contract, firing, that sort of things.
"Human Resources" department.
Here is the problem. The "liberal" parties in Europe are pursuing exactly this policy of H.R Enshittification for the entire public sphere. More surveillance, more regulation, more state over-reach, less political freedoms and less free press. I don't see the difference between what's happening in the US and the supposedly good guys that rule me. It feels like they want to return to serfdom where your entire life is dependent on the lords (state) blessing.
> I don't see the difference between what's happening in the US and the supposedly good guys that rule me.
Many EU countries' current obsession with E2EE and age verification is fucked, but we are still (thankfully) a way from the state of the States.
- We don't need to submit a history of our social media accounts before crossing a border
- (Most) of our libraries aren't having to make joint statements about free speech (https://www.orbiscascade.org/free-speech-statement/)
- And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
> We don't need to submit a history of our social media accounts before crossing a border
Americans don't have to do that when crossing between states either. Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe?
> And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
Weird example. Stars and Stripes is a government-created periodical that covers the military.
This is not very different from what is exposed in Hanna Arendt's book, "The Banality of Evil" (english translation from the title most known in my country for Eichman in Jerusalem).
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
That’s why the same book is discussed in the article itself.
It seems to me that this suggests that providing diverse career opportunities and strong social safety nets may be a valuable tool in fighting fascism.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
My wife had a brief career in state-level politics and this article resonated with me. Rather than national politics or media narratives, I thought of specific state level senators, representatives, and administrators she had to interact with.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
> He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses.
I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.
Absolutely. A state senator in my state was a strategy consultant for a cutthroat consulting firm whose major client was a hedge fund and happily did that for a while. Then she decided to get into politics. She is the right gender, but had to become a progressive to fit in. So she did that, and career has advanced accordingly.
My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.
Politics is an art and science in of itself.
It's a representation of power, and reality is that some people are leaders, and some are loyal vassals or subjects. Most legislative people are idiots and are really supposed to be idiots. Typically an executive cares about a set of issues or objectives, and puts the A-Team there.
At a state level, you may have 3-5,000 appointments to make in a big state, so there's a hierarchy of need. The A-players go to the priorities, the more professional "players" go to the operationally critical entities (Think your DMV and Tax Collections) and loyal idiots get scattered around the various places where the staff keep the plane flying.
The cult of personality around MAGA brings more different people. They'll absorb into the system or go away eventually.
Cultures of patronage are fertile ground for mediocrity.. very much a running theme in the history of human organization.
> they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Hope that provides some context.
[delayed]
Any sort of extremism can be fought if you provide all people with opportunity. Its not just a social saftey net but also a purpose and jobs and the idea of a better future.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
On your first phrase, you can look at how the actual proper-name Fascism and its friends happened. Or at any anti-democratic movement from the current ones all the way back to the ancient Rome's rise of the empire.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
> Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the ... social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
I bet you are someone who can't believe why Trump keeps winning. And yet you continue to whine about "mediocre white males" and wonders why white men vote for the other guy.
Spread the blood libel on one page, pontificate about the death of democracy on another. Stay classy, nyt.
In other words, democracy dies when it no longer serves the interests of capital.
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
Everyone farms the idiots, the liberal establishment over the last 50 years sold working class jobs overseas and imported labor to devalue their wages. Don't be surprised when another faction uses these "idiots" against you.
Democracy lets you change laws in congress AND elect a new president.
Or at least it used to.
Said about a man that was literally voted out of office, left, and won the popular vote to go back into office.
Instigating an armed insurrection to try and prevent vote certification and now trying to undermine voting ahead of the midterms isn't a glowing endorsement of his support for democracy.
Whether he cares about democracy or not is irrelevant to the fact that democracy worked in electing him.
> Instigating an armed insurrection
That’s an interesting claim. What part of the Jan 6 protests were armed? Do you have sources for such a concrete accusation?
Also, enough evidence of election irregularities has since surfaced since about the 2020 US election to more than justify the protests.
You’d want your democratic elections to be properly audited before certified, right? Right?
You omitted an important stage between “voted out of office” and “left”
He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election.
He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016. Campaigns spend their money trying to turn out voters to win the electoral college, because that’s what counts. That’s especially true of Republicans, whose voters are spread out across rural areas. The smallest PA city Harris visited the last week of the election was Scranton, which has 76,000. In the last week, Trump was in Lilitz PA, which has under 10,000 people. Butler PA has 13,500.
In 2024, Trump made a deliberate play for the popular vote, holding rallies in California and New York City. And there was a major swing in his direction in both states. E.g. Biden won California by 29 points. Harris won California by only 20 points. Trump also targeted immigrant communities in blue states. Biden won foreign born voters by 26 points. Trump won them by 1 point. That swing alone accounts for half the 2020-2024 swing.
It came out later that the internal polling available to both campaigns had Trump ahead the entire time. So he likely felt comfortable taking a risk and spending time in California and New York. But you’ll notice that he parked his surrogates in places like Pennsylvania the entire time. The popular vote has marketing value but it doesn’t count and nobody is trying to win it.
I'm not as concerned with internal polling as I am with him attempting to undermine elections and his history of sexual assault.
I’m responding to OP:
> He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election
You generally can’t tell what the popular vote would have been in past elections because nobody was trying to win it. It’s like saying the Eagles would have won the 2022 if we decided who won based on net yardage instead of touchdowns. We don’t know that because nobody was trying to win on that metric. It’s was only indirectly relevant to getting touchdowns, which is what counts.
Elections that are so close that the popular vote and electoral college vote go in different directions are almost by definitions ones that are so close that, if the campaigns were playing to different rules, the outcomes could have been different. Note that, in both cases where the presidential popular vote has diverged from the electoral college vote, the president’s party still won the congressional popular vote.
There’s a ton of focus on the electoral college, but the real problem is that a winner-takes-all vote for the presidency is stupid where voting is close enough that the results come down to voter turnout and chance.
> We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016
You can’t brag about his popular vote for one election then disregard it for another. He lost if by a lot more in 2016 than he won it by in 2024. Both elections were decided by the electoral college and the popular votes we are comparing both happened in that context. 2.7% margin vs. 0.5% is a stark difference.
Republicans had the stones to call his victory margin “a mandate” yet they would never say Hillary Clinton had one. You’re playing funny with numbers here.
My post was responding to someone who expressed skepticism in U.S. elections. I wasn’t “bragging” about anything, I was pointing out that elections work. I mentioned the popular vote only to preempt a counterpoint from people who don’t like the EC.
Everyone understands the EC decides elections and you’re the only one talking about the popular vote. You explicitly stated that instead of the one that actually matters and is relevant in the other comment. And again, he barely won it.
Either way you can’t selectively use it in conversation and then dismiss it when others use it.
The US doesn’t, and has never, elected their president on the popular vote
And that contradicts my point how?
My point is that if we took democracy more seriously, we'd be in a better spot right now.
> and won the popular vote to go back into office.
By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.
Can you expand on this? It's not clear to me how it is related to the article.
It did until oligarchs bought it.