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What are those things that he's conflating? Personally, I don't see a sharp dividing line between illiberal "democracy" and dictatorships and surely both label
by ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
What are those things that he's conflating?
Personally, I don't see a sharp dividing line between illiberal "democracy" and dictatorships and surely both labels could apply.
- loudmax 2y agoViktor Orban's Hungary is illiberal. North Korea is a dictatorship. One is bad, the other is worse. The danger of conflating the two is that you're setting people up for false expectations. If you go around telling people that Hungary is a dictatorship just like North Korea, and then they visit Hungary, they might away with the notion that Orban is not so bad. Nobody is starving, and they won't happen to notice the reporters in prison. You run the danger of undermining your own credibility.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoI'm not convinced that you can have one without the other. A dictatorship is when you have a leader or group of leaders with almost no limitations on their power. That would seem to apply to both Hungary and North Korea (and also the U.S. if the courts are powerless to enforce law abidance by the leader). I suppose that I consider illiberal "democracies" to be a flavour of dictatorships.
- garaetjjte 2y agoI think the difference is that in "illiberal democracy" there are still non-falsified elections, so the leader can technically lose.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoGoing from the definition in Wikipedia (though it does mention a lack of consensus on the exact definition): > Elections in an illiberal democracy are often manipulated or rigged, being used to legitimize and consolidate the incumbent rather than to choose the country's leaders and policies