9 ms·

Actually, democracy dies in H.R.

340 points by mitchbob 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/RKltX https://archive.ph/RKltX

mitchbob 5mo ago
> 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/2026/05/18/world/americas/actually-democracy-dies-in-hr.html https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...
- oulipo2 5mo ago
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  - Helloworldboy 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - cindyllm 5mo ago
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  - harimau777 5mo ago
    I'm a leftist and have little agreement with conservatives; however, I think that's actually kind of the opposite of what the article says. At least as I read it, the whole point of the article is that despiration for career or social advancement comes BEFORE any ideology. That's actually not that different than the way that leftists tend to view crime as, to a significant degree, a symptom of poverty and discrimination; as opposed to seeing certain people as inherently criminal.
    - cpill 5mo ago
      I guess with crime you have both going on. the majority is crime born from economic circumstances, but there are a small percentage which are just crazy mf
  - elzbardico 5mo ago
    Maybe this is the case in the United States, and the United States is the only system you know in deep. But let me tell you, as much as this may seem likely, even obvious to you, this is not always the case. I've seen and once has been part of plenty of leftist organizations where completely useless incompetente people reigned on the party/union/ngo organization as a way to keep their unearned privileges.
    - hackable_sand 5mo ago
      I don't agree with the grandparent's swipe, but you can be conservative and leftist.
NordStreamYacht 5mo ago
HR?
- apopapo 5mo ago
  "Human Resources" department.
- baud147258 5mo ago
  Human Resources. In olden time it might have been called Personnel. The department that will manage pay, hiring, contract, firing, that sort of things.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  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".
  - Qem 5mo ago
    > 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.
    - nekusar 5mo ago
      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.
gchamonlive 5mo ago
> 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.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
  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.
  - enriquto 5mo ago
    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.
    - dcrazy 5mo ago
      Eichmann escaped from custody in 1945 and successfully hid until Mossad tracked him down in Argentina in 1960.
    - gertlex 5mo ago
      Looks like it was the Israelis who put him on trial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_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.
dataflow 5mo ago
> 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.
harimau777 5mo ago
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.
- zoobaloo 5mo ago
  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.
  - a34729t 5mo ago
    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.
  - 5mo ago
amelius 5mo ago
It would be more surprising if dictators could maintain power without any human resources. Maybe with AI? In the future?
dionian 5mo ago
Democracy lets you change laws in congress AND elect a new president.
- cdrnsf 5mo ago
  Or at least it used to.
  - percivalskunk 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - rayiner 5mo ago
    Said about a man that was literally voted out of office, left, and won the popular vote to go back into office.
    - lenerdenator 5mo ago
      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.
      - Helloworldboy 5mo ago
        The US doesn’t, and has never, elected their president on the popular vote
        lenerdenator 5mo ago
        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.
torcete 5mo ago
[flagged]
christkv 5mo ago
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.
- lmc 5mo ago
  > 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/ https://www.orbiscascade.org/free-speech-statement/) - And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor-talks-about-pentagons-takeover-of-the-newspaper https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    > 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 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.
    - lmc 5mo ago
      > Americans don't have to do that when crossing between states either. That's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. > Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe? Yes. > Weird example. Stars and Stripes is a government-created periodical that covers the military. Which typically had editorial independence - exactly the kind of free speech Americans used to be proud of.
lenerdenator 5mo ago
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.
weregiraffe 5mo ago
Spread the blood libel on one page, pontificate about the death of democracy on another. Stay classy, nyt.
icegreentea2 5mo ago
Some other interviews/blurbs from the authors (from their Universities): https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-brutal/ https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru... https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ordinary-people-do-dictators-dirty-work 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.
- Spooky23 5mo ago
  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.
- randusername 5mo ago
  > "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?
DrScientist 5mo ago
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?
elzbardico 5mo ago
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.
- otterley 5mo ago
  That’s why the same book is discussed in the article itself.
wagwang 5mo ago
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.
cratermoon 5mo ago
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.
- stephbook 5mo ago
  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.
stego-tech 5mo ago
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.
- jpadkins 5mo ago
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mlsu 5mo ago
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- pixl97 5mo ago
  >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.
- someperson 5mo ago
  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
quantified 5mo ago
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.
Forgeties79 5mo ago
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
- penguin_booze 5mo ago
  HR is but the legal department with a sticker smile.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    Borrowing that one
- Peroni 5mo ago
  It can be both too. It's entirely possible to protect a companies best interests and promote employee well-being.
  - jjk166 5mo ago
    HR exists exclusively for the numerous situations where the company's interests and employee well-being are in conflict. In any situation where the interests are aligned, there's nothing for HR to do - left to their own devices people will just do the thing.
tombert 5mo ago
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.
analog31 5mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
- cpill 5mo ago
  funny that he put "cleaver" and "lazy" at the top :D
- aeve890 5mo ago
  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.
  - neutronicus 5mo ago
    > Also, clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it. Guess you didn't come up writing Perl
  - csa 5mo ago
    > 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.
  - gottorf 5mo ago
    > clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it. Being clever and lazy forces you to determine what should not be done, as opposed to just doing everything because you can because you're clever and industrious. As you climb higher and higher in decision-making, it becomes clear that the things you say no to at some point becomes more important than the things you say yes to.
    - _doctor_love 5mo ago
      The other odd thing is that as a person ascends the leadership ladder, the rank-and-file expect less and less of them. Really good intent-based leadership can be shockingly difficult to discern from someone who truly has no idea what they're doing.
stephbook 5mo ago
Obviously. The more unethical the work, the more you have to pay. Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.
javier_e06 5mo ago
The article is apropos of the NPR show This American Life "Give a Little Whistle" https://www.thisamericanlife.org/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.
everdrive 5mo ago
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.
- TimorousBestie 5mo ago
  And now Rowling has invested a great deal towards making real that aspect of her fictional world. “Anything is acceptable when it’s used against my enemies,” is another moral espoused by the series.
sp1nningaway 5mo ago
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.
slackfan 5mo ago
We've said this for years, but were shouted down (by the HR class).
_doctor_love 5mo ago
> When he was a young Ph.D. student, Mr. Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.” At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers. Let me just cue up Jesse Welles and Join ICE real quick...
- asdff 5mo ago
  Police are a great example of this. The biggest police departments all struggle to recruit today. They are always hiring and have dropped standards to reach out for more candidates. Why? Anyone with a brain knows the best job in policing is some little wealthy suburban pd where your biggest situations will be dealing with teenagers partying when their parents leave them the house for the weekend. Versus you know, dealing with people on meth or actual organized crime. As such those small town PDs are very difficult to join, and can enforce higher standards namely in education (such as a B.S. requirement) and still have plenty of good candidates. Probably also explains when you see something real happen in these small towns, like a school shooting, and the cops are just clearly too scared to go into the school themselves. Just not what they were expecting to deal with at all when they signed up for the doctor and lawyer suburb pd.
  - willis936 5mo ago
    Or is it positions that enable petty tyranny or other antisocial behavior are more likely per capita outside of cities?
- skue 5mo ago
  It’s frustrating to see the top commenters all trying to provide original takes, while only demonstrating they did not read the article which already makes *the exact same points!* Seriously, it’s a good article. Read it. And yes, it explicitly discusses ICE.
cyberjerkXX 5mo ago
Banality of evil. The state has a monopoly on coercive force and therefore it is important to have limiting principles in government. Otherwise, government will perpetually use its force to expand and impose on liberty.
pessimizer 5mo ago
This article is pretty awful. It's almost impossible to extract any information about the paper and its findings within the endless litany going through the NYT's enemies list and calling each of them stupid. The most embarrassing example is Hugo Chávez, who took over a country with paramilitary death squads and brought the living standards of the indigenous and lower classes higher than they'd ever been in history, and they accuse him of "crushing" protests that were constant and allowed during his entire rule (even when they resulted in civilians hung from streetlights.) The NYT finds it important to refer to the Colectivos, made up of civilians, as stupid. Evidence that the National Guard was dumb? A single sentence from some anti-Chavista NYU professor. The only reason they mentioned Argentina is because they had to; it was the actual subject of the paper. The NYT didn't know that Argentina was bad at the time though, because Argentina wasn't a CIA enemy like everyone else mentioned in this article. Democracy dies when upper middle-class people write articles for the NYT supporting Argentina. edit: it's so evil that this starts with Putin and Iran, for no particular reason, never mentioned again. Then it goes Hitler -> Stalin -> Dirty War -> Orban (?) -> Chávez/Maduro (?) -> Trump. Pretty sure that Hitler murdered like 40 million people, Stalin liquidated millions, the Dirty War disappeared tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Orban is simply someone that they don't like, Maduro they claim killed "dozens," and they support Trump's wars and genocide (Putin! Iran!), they're actually pretending to be upset about ICE.
wormius 5mo ago
Democracy dies in a corporation, of which HR is a part of. FTFY
dxs 5mo ago
Further reading: (1) "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust", Richard Rhodes, 2002. "Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These 'special task forces,' organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943." (2) "Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich", Richard J. Evans, 2024. "Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?"
mannyv 5mo ago
How does this fit into the "you're too dumb to be in the armed forces" idea? https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-illegal-for-the-us-armed-forces-to-hire-someone-whose-iq-is-less-tha#37493 https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...
- mcmoor 5mo ago
  I've heard that dictator's military is usually weaker than democracy's, mostly because dictator don't want their troops to be too smart lest they rebel. But modern military tactics is too sophisticated for dumb people so it results in ineffective military.
ragall 5mo ago
It's interesting that one of the lessons learned in Europe from the 1918-1945 era is that that the army, law enforcement and the judiciary body must be self-governing and the government must oversee their functioning bust must not be allowed to directly influence the membership of said forces except for the top national leadership. This is to ensure that the country has centers of power strong enough to oppose an attempt to dictatorship. For example, in Italy the judiciary has a governing body of its own whose members are partially elected by the parliament, but also partially by the judges themselves. Lower judges are exclusively appointed by the judiciary governing body or through a civil service exam, and neither the government nor the parliament have any say on it.
jstrieb 5mo ago
The best exploration of this that I have seen in media is one of my favorite movies: Nightcrawler (2014), starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie doesn't touch on the government/democracy aspect of the article, but it very much captures the notion that desparate people can be pressured to do horrible things when their job is at stake. In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great. Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

340 points by mitchbob 5mo ago

https://archive.ph/RKltX https://archive.ph/RKltX

> 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/2026/05/18/world/americas/actually-democracy-dies-in-hr.html https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...

oulipo2 5mo ago
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- Helloworldboy 5mo ago
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- cindyllm 5mo ago
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- harimau777 5mo ago
  I'm a leftist and have little agreement with conservatives; however, I think that's actually kind of the opposite of what the article says. At least as I read it, the whole point of the article is that despiration for career or social advancement comes BEFORE any ideology. That's actually not that different than the way that leftists tend to view crime as, to a significant degree, a symptom of poverty and discrimination; as opposed to seeing certain people as inherently criminal.
  - cpill 5mo ago
    I guess with crime you have both going on. the majority is crime born from economic circumstances, but there are a small percentage which are just crazy mf
- elzbardico 5mo ago
  Maybe this is the case in the United States, and the United States is the only system you know in deep. But let me tell you, as much as this may seem likely, even obvious to you, this is not always the case. I've seen and once has been part of plenty of leftist organizations where completely useless incompetente people reigned on the party/union/ngo organization as a way to keep their unearned privileges.
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    I don't agree with the grandparent's swipe, but you can be conservative and leftist.

NordStreamYacht 5mo ago

HR?

apopapo 5mo ago
"Human Resources" department.
baud147258 5mo ago
Human Resources. In olden time it might have been called Personnel. The department that will manage pay, hiring, contract, firing, that sort of things.
harimau777 5mo ago
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".
- Qem 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - nekusar 5mo ago
    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.

gchamonlive 5mo ago

> 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.

ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
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.
- enriquto 5mo ago
  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.
  - dcrazy 5mo ago
    Eichmann escaped from custody in 1945 and successfully hid until Mossad tracked him down in Argentina in 1960.
  - gertlex 5mo ago
    Looks like it was the Israelis who put him on trial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_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.

dataflow 5mo ago

> 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.

harimau777 5mo ago

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.

zoobaloo 5mo ago
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.
- a34729t 5mo ago
  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.
- 5mo ago

amelius 5mo ago

It would be more surprising if dictators could maintain power without any human resources. Maybe with AI? In the future?

dionian 5mo ago

Democracy lets you change laws in congress AND elect a new president.

cdrnsf 5mo ago
Or at least it used to.
- percivalskunk 5mo ago
  [dead]
- rayiner 5mo ago
  Said about a man that was literally voted out of office, left, and won the popular vote to go back into office.
  - lenerdenator 5mo ago
    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.
    - Helloworldboy 5mo ago
      The US doesn’t, and has never, elected their president on the popular vote
      - lenerdenator 5mo ago
        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.

torcete 5mo ago

[flagged]

christkv 5mo ago

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.

lmc 5mo ago
> 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/ https://www.orbiscascade.org/free-speech-statement/) - And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor-talks-about-pentagons-takeover-of-the-newspaper https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - lmc 5mo ago
    > Americans don't have to do that when crossing between states either. That's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. > Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe? Yes. > Weird example. Stars and Stripes is a government-created periodical that covers the military. Which typically had editorial independence - exactly the kind of free speech Americans used to be proud of.

lenerdenator 5mo ago

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.

weregiraffe 5mo ago

Spread the blood libel on one page, pontificate about the death of democracy on another. Stay classy, nyt.

icegreentea2 5mo ago

Some other interviews/blurbs from the authors (from their Universities): https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-brutal/ https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru... https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ordinary-people-do-dictators-dirty-work 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.

Spooky23 5mo ago
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.
randusername 5mo ago
> "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?

DrScientist 5mo ago

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?

elzbardico 5mo ago

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.

otterley 5mo ago
That’s why the same book is discussed in the article itself.

wagwang 5mo ago

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.

cratermoon 5mo ago

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.

stephbook 5mo ago
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.

stego-tech 5mo ago

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.

jpadkins 5mo ago
[flagged]

mlsu 5mo ago

[flagged]

pixl97 5mo ago
>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.
someperson 5mo ago
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

quantified 5mo ago

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.

Forgeties79 5mo ago

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

penguin_booze 5mo ago
HR is but the legal department with a sticker smile.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  Borrowing that one
Peroni 5mo ago
It can be both too. It's entirely possible to protect a companies best interests and promote employee well-being.
- jjk166 5mo ago
  HR exists exclusively for the numerous situations where the company's interests and employee well-being are in conflict. In any situation where the interests are aligned, there's nothing for HR to do - left to their own devices people will just do the thing.

tombert 5mo ago

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.

analog31 5mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

cpill 5mo ago
funny that he put "cleaver" and "lazy" at the top :D
aeve890 5mo ago
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.
- neutronicus 5mo ago
  > Also, clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it. Guess you didn't come up writing Perl
- csa 5mo ago
  > 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.
- gottorf 5mo ago
  > clever and lazy at the very top? I don't get it. Being clever and lazy forces you to determine what should not be done, as opposed to just doing everything because you can because you're clever and industrious. As you climb higher and higher in decision-making, it becomes clear that the things you say no to at some point becomes more important than the things you say yes to.
  - _doctor_love 5mo ago
    The other odd thing is that as a person ascends the leadership ladder, the rank-and-file expect less and less of them. Really good intent-based leadership can be shockingly difficult to discern from someone who truly has no idea what they're doing.

stephbook 5mo ago

Obviously. The more unethical the work, the more you have to pay. Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.

javier_e06 5mo ago

The article is apropos of the NPR show This American Life "Give a Little Whistle" https://www.thisamericanlife.org/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.

everdrive 5mo ago

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.

TimorousBestie 5mo ago
And now Rowling has invested a great deal towards making real that aspect of her fictional world. “Anything is acceptable when it’s used against my enemies,” is another moral espoused by the series.

sp1nningaway 5mo ago

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.

slackfan 5mo ago

We've said this for years, but were shouted down (by the HR class).

_doctor_love 5mo ago

> When he was a young Ph.D. student, Mr. Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.” At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers. Let me just cue up Jesse Welles and Join ICE real quick...

asdff 5mo ago
Police are a great example of this. The biggest police departments all struggle to recruit today. They are always hiring and have dropped standards to reach out for more candidates. Why? Anyone with a brain knows the best job in policing is some little wealthy suburban pd where your biggest situations will be dealing with teenagers partying when their parents leave them the house for the weekend. Versus you know, dealing with people on meth or actual organized crime. As such those small town PDs are very difficult to join, and can enforce higher standards namely in education (such as a B.S. requirement) and still have plenty of good candidates. Probably also explains when you see something real happen in these small towns, like a school shooting, and the cops are just clearly too scared to go into the school themselves. Just not what they were expecting to deal with at all when they signed up for the doctor and lawyer suburb pd.
- willis936 5mo ago
  Or is it positions that enable petty tyranny or other antisocial behavior are more likely per capita outside of cities?
skue 5mo ago
It’s frustrating to see the top commenters all trying to provide original takes, while only demonstrating they did not read the article which already makes *the exact same points!* Seriously, it’s a good article. Read it. And yes, it explicitly discusses ICE.

cyberjerkXX 5mo ago

Banality of evil. The state has a monopoly on coercive force and therefore it is important to have limiting principles in government. Otherwise, government will perpetually use its force to expand and impose on liberty.

pessimizer 5mo ago

This article is pretty awful. It's almost impossible to extract any information about the paper and its findings within the endless litany going through the NYT's enemies list and calling each of them stupid. The most embarrassing example is Hugo Chávez, who took over a country with paramilitary death squads and brought the living standards of the indigenous and lower classes higher than they'd ever been in history, and they accuse him of "crushing" protests that were constant and allowed during his entire rule (even when they resulted in civilians hung from streetlights.) The NYT finds it important to refer to the Colectivos, made up of civilians, as stupid. Evidence that the National Guard was dumb? A single sentence from some anti-Chavista NYU professor. The only reason they mentioned Argentina is because they had to; it was the actual subject of the paper. The NYT didn't know that Argentina was bad at the time though, because Argentina wasn't a CIA enemy like everyone else mentioned in this article. Democracy dies when upper middle-class people write articles for the NYT supporting Argentina. edit: it's so evil that this starts with Putin and Iran, for no particular reason, never mentioned again. Then it goes Hitler -> Stalin -> Dirty War -> Orban (?) -> Chávez/Maduro (?) -> Trump. Pretty sure that Hitler murdered like 40 million people, Stalin liquidated millions, the Dirty War disappeared tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Orban is simply someone that they don't like, Maduro they claim killed "dozens," and they support Trump's wars and genocide (Putin! Iran!), they're actually pretending to be upset about ICE.

wormius 5mo ago

Democracy dies in a corporation, of which HR is a part of. FTFY

dxs 5mo ago

Further reading: (1) "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust", Richard Rhodes, 2002. "Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These 'special task forces,' organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943." (2) "Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich", Richard J. Evans, 2024. "Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?"

mannyv 5mo ago

How does this fit into the "you're too dumb to be in the armed forces" idea? https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-illegal-for-the-us-armed-forces-to-hire-someone-whose-iq-is-less-tha#37493 https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...

mcmoor 5mo ago
I've heard that dictator's military is usually weaker than democracy's, mostly because dictator don't want their troops to be too smart lest they rebel. But modern military tactics is too sophisticated for dumb people so it results in ineffective military.

ragall 5mo ago

It's interesting that one of the lessons learned in Europe from the 1918-1945 era is that that the army, law enforcement and the judiciary body must be self-governing and the government must oversee their functioning bust must not be allowed to directly influence the membership of said forces except for the top national leadership. This is to ensure that the country has centers of power strong enough to oppose an attempt to dictatorship. For example, in Italy the judiciary has a governing body of its own whose members are partially elected by the parliament, but also partially by the judges themselves. Lower judges are exclusively appointed by the judiciary governing body or through a civil service exam, and neither the government nor the parliament have any say on it.

jstrieb 5mo ago

The best exploration of this that I have seen in media is one of my favorite movies: Nightcrawler (2014), starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie doesn't touch on the government/democracy aspect of the article, but it very much captures the notion that desparate people can be pressured to do horrible things when their job is at stake. In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great. Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)