Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Dictatorship Problem, published by alyssavance on June 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, not that of any movement or organization.)

This post aims to show that, over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships - this is not a tail risk, but the most likely overall outcome. Politics is not a typical LessWrong topic, and for good reason:

it tends to impair clear thinking;

most well-known political issues are not neglected;

most political "debates" are simply people yelling at each other online; neither saying anything new, nor even really trying to persuade the opposition.

However, like the COVID pandemic, it seems like this particular trend will be so impactful and so disruptive to ordinary Western life that it will be important to be aware of it, factor it into plans, and try our best to mitigate or work around the effects.

Introduction

First, what is fascism? It's common for every side in a debate to call the other side "fascists" or "Nazis", as we saw during (eg.) the Ukraine War. Lots of things that get called "fascist" online are in fact fairly ordinary, or even harmless. So, to be clear, Wikipedia defines "fascism" as:

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

Informally, I might characterize "fascism" as:

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

(The last point is what separates fascism from, say, Stalinism. Stalinism is also very bad, but is not a major political force in 2023.) So by "fascism", I specifically mean a radical change in the basic form of government, not simply a state doing dumb things like making immigration hard or banning Bitcoin. Not all fascists are the same - eg. Mussolini's Italy was initially opposed to Nazi-style racism - but their movements, ideology, rhetoric, and leaders tend to share many common characteristics (see also eg. here).

Fascism is very bad, and therefore, it would be really great if it were unlikely to happen in well-established democracies like the US. Unfortunately, as with AI risk, most arguments for that scenario being unlikely tend to resemble this comic from XKCD:

or this comic about AI risk:

The first argument goes, essentially, that things are basically fine now, and are unlikely to become bad immediately (next week or next month), so therefore we have nothing to worry about. The counterpoint, of course, is that if existing trends continue progressing - and there's no convincing reason why they must stop - the future a few decades from now will become very different from the present. The second argument is that the relevant scenario would be pretty weird by the standards of our current lives (as rich, educated Westerners living in 2023), so we should assume it's unlikely. However, our contemporary lives and civilization are themselves very weird historically (vs. the more typical peasant farming), and there's no fundamental reason why they have to keep on going forever.

Indeed, them continuing forever is in some ways a contradiction, since current society relies on economic growth and innovation; we can't coherently forecast "everything stays the same, including the derivatives".

Present Trends

What do the deri...