authoritarian

Wonderful news from Hungary

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 19 JDN 246150

Hungary’s recent election results were just about as good as they could possibly have been. Victor Orban was not only defeated, but crushed; Magyar’s party didn’t just win, they won a supermajority. They now have the power to implement sweeping reforms that could prevent authoritarians like Orban from ever taking power in Hungary again.

Already Magyar has suspended Hungarian state media broadcasts and released $90 billion in EU aid for Ukraine that Hungary had been holding up. These are immediate, concrete results from just his first few days in office.

I have two goals for this post:

First, I just want to celebrate.

This is a huge victory for democracy, not just in Hungary, but across Europe and indeed around the world. It brings hope in a time when we needed it most. It proves to the world that authoritarians can be toppled, and democracy can be restored—sometimes even without bloodshed.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. We must keep pressing forward.

Second, I want to use it as a model.

I think the biggest thing that this event teaches us is that democracy and nonviolence can succeed. This is something we should already have recognized from the empirical evidence, but rarely do we see such a clear, unambiguous example of a triumphant victory by nonviolent, democratic means alone.

Hungarians protested, and lobbied, and voted, and they did so in a united voice against Orban’s tyranny. But there was very little violence—and most of what there was, was instigated by the government against peaceful protesters. (Remember, nonviolence doesn’t mean nobody gets hurt.)

And once he took power, Magyar already began the process of reform. It will no doubt be a long and difficult process, and may take years to complete. Orban and his party are defeated, but not destroyed, and they will continue to mount resistance. But Magyar did not wait. He did not try to reconcile or compromise. He immediately set out to make things better.

This is what the Democrats must do when they win the midterm elections this year. They must not be timid and careful, not taking any bold moves to avoid upsetting “moderates”. (Anyone who still thinks Trump belongs anywhere near public office at this point is not and never was a moderate. At best, they might be a low-information voter who literally doesn’t know what’s going on.) They must act swiftly and decisively to repair the damage Trump has done and fix our system so that no similar maniac can do such damage again in the future. This is exactly what Biden failed to do when he took office in 2020. (Yes, I know that Congress and the Supreme Court fought him on a lot of things. But there was definitely still more that he could have done and didn’t, and people are suffering now because of it.)

Ideally, in fact, they would impeach and remove Trump before 2028. (And if it’s not too much trouble, try him at the Hague for all the children he starved?) But if they don’t manage to do that, at the very least, they must ensure that they continue to have such a strong campaign for Congress and the President in 2028 that they take both of those branches of government—and then, they need to pack the Supreme Court in order to secure the third. This damage will not be undone until Republicans are completely removed from the seats of national power, and stay removed for at least a decade.

Of course, in order for that to happen, the Democrats are going to need to win a lot of elections. And that isn’t just on them—it’s also on us. They need to run better candidates, we need to vote for those candidates, and we need to hold those candidates accountable for taking the bold measures necessary to repair America after this disaster. They need to stop taking their own electoral victories for granted: Yes, Clinton and Biden absolutely deserved to win all three elections. But they only actually won one of them, and that is what matters. The Democratic Party should be looking long and hard at what went wrong in 2016 and 2024, and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not even saying the Democrats are perfect; they are not. (Neither is Magyar.) But we need a powerful party to defeat the Republicans and restore American democracy, and only the Democrats are currently in a position to fulfill that role. After the Republicans are totally destroyed and only a distant, unsettling memory like the Nazis, then you can start voting for the Greens or the Libertarians.

And since “Magyar” basically just means “Hungarian”, maybe we should run a Presidential candidate named something like John T. American, just in case.

The rise and plateau of China’s economy

PNRJ current events, development economics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Sep 3 JDN 2460191

It looks like China’s era of extremely rapid economic growth may be coming to an end. Consumer confidence in China cratered this year (and, in typical authoritarian fashion, the agency responsible just quietly stopped publishing the data after that). Current forecasts have China’s economy growing only about 4-5% this year, which would be very impressive for a First World country—but far below the 6%, 7%, even 8% annual growth rates China had in recent years.

Some slowdown was quite frankly inevitable. A surprising number of people—particularly those in or from China—seem to think that China’s ultra-rapid growth was something special about China that could be expected to continue indefinitely.

China’s growth does look really impressive, in isolation:

But in fact this is a pattern we’ve seen several times now (admittedly mostly in Asia): A desperately poor Third World country finally figures out how to get its act together, and suddenly has extremely rapid growth for awhile until it manages to catch up and become a First World country.

It happened in South Korea:

It happened in Japan:

It happened in Taiwan:

It even seems to be happening in Botswana:

And this is a good thing! These are the great success stories of economic development. If we could somehow figure out how to do this all over the world, it might literally be the best thing that ever happened. (It would solve so many problems!)

Here’s a more direct comparison across all these countries (as well as the US), on a log scale:

From this you can pretty clearly see two things.

First, as countries get richer, their growth tends to slow down gradually. By the time Japan, Korea, and Taiwan reached the level that the US had been at back in 1950, their growth slowed to a crawl. But that was okay, because they had already become quite rich.

And second, China is nothing special: Yes, their growth rate is faster than the US, because the US is already so rich. But they are following the same pattern as several other countries. In fact they’ve actually fallen behind Botswana—they used to be much richer than Botswana, and are now slightly poorer.

So while there are many news articles discussing why China’s economy is slowing down, and some of them may even have some merit (they really seem to have screwed up their COVID response, for instance, and their terrible housing price bubble just burst); but the ultimate reason is really that 7% annual economic growth is just not sustainable. It will slow down. When and how remains in question—but it will happen.

Thus, I am not particularly worried about the fact that China’s growth has slowed down. Or at least, I wouldn’t be, if China were governed well and had prepared for this obvious eventuality the way that Korea and Japan did. But what does worry me is that they seem unprepared for this. Their authoritarian government seems to have depended upon sky-high economic growth to sustain support for their regime. The cracks are now forming in that dam, and something terrible could happen when it bursts.

Things may even be worse than they look, because we know that the Chinese government often distorts or omits statistics when they become inconvenient. That can only work for so long: Eventually the reality on the ground will override whatever lies the government is telling.

There are basically two ways this could go: They could reform their government to something closer to a liberal democracy, accept that growth will slow down and work toward more shared prosperity, and then take their place as a First World country like Japan did. Or they could try to cling to their existing regime, gripping ever tighter until it all slips out of their fingers in a potentially catastrophic collapse. Unfortunately, they seem to be opting for the latter.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that China will find its way toward a future of freedom and prosperity.

But at this point, it doesn’t look terribly likely.