[FRIAM] Democracy & Autocracy

[Jochen Fromm]

The countless indictments against Trump remind me of the innumerous indictments against Navalny in Russia. The indictments against Trump look to me totally justified. He tried to undermine and to destroy the democratic system by all kinds of lies and deceit and treachery, by the things that Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls the authoritarian playbook - by violence, corruption, lying, election fraud. Now the democratic system is strong enough to protect itself and strikes back. https://open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/to-escape-prosecution-mussolini-hadThe indictments against Navalny on the other hand are similar in magnitude, but they are clearly fabricated. Again we have a system - this time an autocratic and authoritarian one - which defends itself. In Navalny's case we can observe a deceitful autocratic system that fights against an opponent by using unjustified indictments and deceitful accusations. In Trump's case we can observe a democratic systems that defends itself against a deceitful opponent by using truthful and justified indictments.What's interesting to me is that democracy and autocracy as a system are apparently both resilient and resistant to change. If the system is threatened, then it tries to protect itself. This could be observed also in the protests in 2020 in Belarus after the election and in the protests in 2022 in Russia after the invasion that have been squashed by mass imprisonments. The protests in Iran in 2022 have been silenced by mass imprisonments and capital punishments as well. Democratic backsliding can happen, but it doesn't have to as long as the democratic system is able to defend itself. Similarly a collapse of an autocratic system is not happening if the system is able to silence protests by mass imprisonments and capital punishments. This blog article from last year still seems to fit.https://blog.cas-group.net/2022/05/modeling-democratic-backsliding-into-authoritarianism/-J.
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