Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[zompist]

There can be reparations for specific government actions and policies as well, but the key thing is that those paying should be those with responsibility, either direct (as in the case of still-existing institutions) or indirect (as in the case of inherited wealth derived from slavery).

(You could argue from this that slavery in general was a 'specific government action or policy', but as I mentioned I think that a blanket government payment would effectively absolve those with responsibility while effectively making the people of America foot the bill unless it was funded at least in part by expropriating such ill-gotten wealth from those who possess it.)

I don't think responsibility can be divided up the way you suggest. The problem, as I alluded to, is that the direct culprits are mostly dead. We could track down "still-existing institutions", but your idea still seems to be that if an institution disappears, its responsibility poofs away though the harms remain.

Do you apply this logic to other harms? Should the government not pay for disasters because no human caused the flood or wildfire or whatever? Should unemployment insurance be paid only by the company involved? (If so, what if it went out of business?) If a city still has lead pipes, is it unable to replace them because the people who installed them are dead and the living bear no responsibility?

Furthermore, though there are specific harms (policeman X murders Black teenager Y), there are also systemic ones that, yes, you personally benefit from. The whole country is built on stolen land. Nobody's ever going to undo that, but Native Americans are still poor. Racism meant that you and your ancestors benefited from better schooling, better economic opportunities, better neighborhoods, better policing, better medical care, a better social safety net, better representation in the media, products more suited to your needs. None of this is a matter of whether you personally ever did anything racist.

FWIW, redistribution is not zero-sum. Government reparations would benefit the whole country a lot more than the current policy of enriching only the 10% forever.

Perhaps we could agree, though, that this whole mess is the fault of the British and they should pay.

[Travis B.]

There can be reparations for specific government actions and policies as well, but the key thing is that those paying should be those with responsibility, either direct (as in the case of still-existing institutions) or indirect (as in the case of inherited wealth derived from slavery).

(You could argue from this that slavery in general was a 'specific government action or policy', but as I mentioned I think that a blanket government payment would effectively absolve those with responsibility while effectively making the people of America foot the bill unless it was funded at least in part by expropriating such ill-gotten wealth from those who possess it.)

I don't think responsibility can be divided up the way you suggest. The problem, as I alluded to, is that the direct culprits are mostly dead. We could track down "still-existing institutions", but your idea still seems to be that if an institution disappears, its responsibility poofs away though the harms remain.

Do you apply this logic to other harms? Should the government not pay for disasters because no human caused the flood or wildfire or whatever? Should unemployment insurance be paid only by the company involved? (If so, what if it went out of business?) If a city still has lead pipes, is it unable to replace them because the people who installed them are dead and the living bear no responsibility?

Furthermore, though there are specific harms (policeman X murders Black teenager Y), there are also systemic ones that, yes, you personally benefit from. The whole country is built on stolen land. Nobody's ever going to undo that, but Native Americans are still poor. Racism meant that you and your ancestors benefited from better schooling, better economic opportunities, better neighborhoods, better policing, better medical care, a better social safety net, better representation in the media, products more suited to your needs. None of this is a matter of whether you personally ever did anything racist.

FWIW, redistribution is not zero-sum. Government reparations would benefit the whole country a lot more than the current policy of enriching only the 10% forever.

Perhaps we could agree, though, that this whole mess is the fault of the British and they should pay.

The US government is a "still-existing institution", and while I think that those who have actually quantifiably benefited from these past wrongs should pay first and foremost, as after all they possess stolen wealth that should be returned to those from which it was taken (just in the way that, say, art stolen by the Nazis is returned to those from whom it was stolen regardless of who came to possess it after them), the US government could pay the balance after them if we so took the route of enacting reparations.

And I would give that if the US government would pay beyond what could be expropriated from those who have quantifiably benefited from said past wrongs it should at least be done through a progressive wealth tax so those most able to pay -- and those most likely to have benefited from such wrongs in less quantifiable fashions -- would pay the most. This would avoid saddling the average American, and especially those who have benefited from such oppression the least, with the bulk of the burden of paying for such reparations.

[zompist]

And I would give that if the US government would pay beyond what could be expropriated from those who have quantifiably benefited from said past wrongs it should at least be done through a progressive wealth tax so those most able to pay -- and those most likely to have benefited from such wrongs in less quantifiable fashions -- would pay the most. This would avoid saddling the average American, and especially those who have benefited from such oppression the least, with the bulk of the burden of paying for such reparations.

You do understand that this would just be a trick of nomenclature to make people like yourself happier? Federal money is federal money. It's already collected by a progressive tax, though that tax is far less progressive than it used to be (and than it should be). This sort of thing is common in tax policy— e.g. there's a collective pretense that Social Security taxes go into a special fund— but it doesn't actually mean anything. You can make the rich pay more, but you can't make them pay more for some programs and not others— it all comes down to whatever specific sum they pay.

[Travis B.]

And I would give that if the US government would pay beyond what could be expropriated from those who have quantifiably benefited from said past wrongs it should at least be done through a progressive wealth tax so those most able to pay -- and those most likely to have benefited from such wrongs in less quantifiable fashions -- would pay the most. This would avoid saddling the average American, and especially those who have benefited from such oppression the least, with the bulk of the burden of paying for such reparations.

You do understand that this would just be a trick of nomenclature to make people like yourself happier? Federal money is federal money. It's already collected by a progressive tax, though that tax is far less progressive than it used to be (and than it should be). This sort of thing is common in tax policy— e.g. there's a collective pretense that Social Security taxes go into a special fund— but it doesn't actually mean anything. You can make the rich pay more, but you can't make them pay more for some programs and not others— it all comes down to whatever specific sum they pay.

The problem is that current US taxes aren't a wealth tax, and thus don't take the full sum of the value of all their assets -- including assets like stocks -- into account.

[Raphael]

Perhaps we could agree, though, that this whole mess is the fault of the British and they should pay.

That would, however, mess up your earlier calculation proving the financial feasibility of reparations, to wit:

The Japanese-Americans were paid $20,000 each— not exactly generous, but it's a baseline. What if every Black American got the same? That would be a one-time cost of $960 billion. That's a lot of money but it's hardly unaffordable. It's about what we spend on Medicaid every year; also about the size of the military budget. Also just 1/4 the size of Trump's tax cut for the rich.

There's no way Britain is going to afford paying US $20,000 to everyone who has a historical or living memory claim for compensation against the British Empire.

On a global scale, things would get even more shaky. Let's assume that out of the more than 8,000,000,000 people on Earth, 7,500,000,000 have ancestors who survived, or got killed in, serious atrocities or persecutions or large-scale oppression at some point in the last 1000 years. I'd say that's a very generously low estimate, but let's go with it. US $20,000 for each of them would be US $150,000,000,000,000, or US $150 trillion. That's almost twice the 2020 gross world product of US $84.705 trillion.

[zompist]

On a global scale, things would get even more shaky. Let's assume that out of the more than 8,000,000,000 people on Earth, 7,500,000,000 have ancestors who survived, or got killed in, serious atrocities or persecutions or large-scale oppression at some point in the last 1000 years. I'd say that's a very generously low estimate, but let's go with it. US $20,000 for each of them would be US $150,000,000,000,000, or US $150 trillion. That's almost twice the 2020 gross world product of US $84.705 trillion.

If you're making estimates like that... 7.5 billion people also have ancestors who perpetrated those massacres. So they owe $150 trillion, for a net change of $0.

[Raphael]

If you're making estimates like that... 7.5 billion people also have ancestors who perpetrated those massacres. So they owe $150 trillion, for a net change of $0.

As far as I can tell, you're not arguing for a net payout of $0.

[zompist]

If you're making estimates like that... 7.5 billion people also have ancestors who perpetrated those massacres. So they owe $150 trillion, for a net change of $0.

As far as I can tell, you're not arguing for a net payout of $0.

You're the one expanding the idea to the whole world and the last thousand years; I don't think you're making a serious argument. But if you are, the question of who owes who is certainly way more complicated than you are probably imagining. A glance at the linguistic map of the world should show that the vast majority of humanity descends from conquerors. And I'd remind you that over 1000 years, your direct ancestors will encompass a large fraction of the planet.

[Travis B.]

The thing to also remember is that this implies a very broad notion of inherited guilt, beyond actual traceable possession of stolen wealth or institutional responsibility and encompassing mere descent from past conquerors up to a millennium back or living on land that someone took from someone within the last thousand years.

In the very least it is practically infeasible, and it is probably morally objectionable because of its conception of inherited guilt and its conflict with the concept that someone has a right to live in the country in which they were born (yes, I strongly believe in ius soli). It implies that people descended from European colonists or like across the world ought to be driven into the sea, and that we are only magnanimously making them pay money instead.

[Richard W]

the concept that someone has a right to live in the country in which they were born

Well, last I heard, the UK allows one to remain within it so long as one has never been outside it. This is a loophole. I don't know whether illegal forcible removal removes that right.

[Raphael]

You're the one expanding the idea to the whole world and the last thousand years; I don't think you're making a serious argument. But if you are, the question of who owes who is certainly way more complicated than you are probably imagining. A glance at the linguistic map of the world should show that the vast majority of humanity descends from conquerors. And I'd remind you that over 1000 years, your direct ancestors will encompass a large fraction of the planet.

I was extrapolating from your idea that the British should pay for having introduced slavery to colonial North America. If you assert that they should pay for that, that it becomes hard to argue that they shouldn't pay for their various other historical crimes. And once you say that they should do that, why shouldn't other historical empires of the same time period? And all that adds up to quite a lot.

Yes, going back 1000 years was over the top. But if the crimes you are the most concerned about are those of European colonialism, then the cutoff date should arguably be the beginning of European colonialism. That's usually said to be the Spanish conquest of and subsequent genocide in the Canary Islands, over the course of the 15th century. Which is already more than half of the distance to 1000 years ago.

[zompist]

You're the one expanding the idea to the whole world and the last thousand years; I don't think you're making a serious argument. But if you are, the question of who owes who is certainly way more complicated than you are probably imagining. A glance at the linguistic map of the world should show that the vast majority of humanity descends from conquerors. And I'd remind you that over 1000 years, your direct ancestors will encompass a large fraction of the planet.

I was extrapolating

Never a good idea.

from your idea that the British should pay for having introduced slavery to colonial North America.

Which was jocular.

[Travis B.]

from your idea that the British should pay for having introduced slavery to colonial North America.

Which was jocular.

I myself read zompist's proposal as deliberately non-serious.

[alice]

the concept that someone has a right to live in the country in which they were born

Well, last I heard, the UK allows one to remain within it so long as one has never been outside it.

This is the case, although there are those (and they are noisy about it) who think the colour of one's skin or one's religion is what matters, not where one was born. But that's another matter.

[Travis B.]

the concept that someone has a right to live in the country in which they were born

Well, last I heard, the UK allows one to remain within it so long as one has never been outside it. This is a loophole. I don't know whether illegal forcible removal removes that right.

So a child of members of the Windrush generation whose documentation was destroyed can be denied re-entry if they ever exit the UK?

[Richard W]

So a child of members of the Windrush generation whose documentation was destroyed can be denied re-entry if they ever exit the UK?

If they're foolish enough to leave the UK on a foreign passport and were born on or after 1st January 1983, yes. They could also find their British passport rejected as invalid on return - I believe this has happened. The Passport Office has become more thorough in checking claims to British citizenship of those born in the UK.

I do wonder on what basis, if any, the British-born children of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall are British. It might depend on the mother being duped into believing that she and the father were married - or perhaps their birth certificates are fraudulent! The English law on invalid marriages and legitimacy is quote tolerant. (I can't speak for Scottish law.)

Of course, dual nationals are at risk of having their British nationality revoked however British their roots are. A lot of dual nationals don't know that they are dual nationals.

[Raphael]

Any more thoughts one the original post of the thread?

[Torco]

I have some. overall, I agree with the basic idea that authoritarianism, the word as it is empirically used anyway, kind of doesn't mean much.

as it so often happens, these things exist if what we mean by that is "it means something to say that X is authoritarian" but it doesn't exist in the platonic sense of "there is an objective prototype of what authoritarianism is, and things are more authoritarian the more they resemble it". There is no single, ideology independent platonic ideal of authoritarianism.

moreso, it is an inherently disputed concept, and also one of those words I tend to dislike on account of its meaning containing value judgements inherently. for the anti-abortionist, it is not authoritarian to ban abortion, whereas for someone who is pro-choice, it is, on account of nothing else than the substantive position for or against. Similarly, for the capitalist, private property of the means of production is not authoritarian, whereas for the anticapitalist, it obviously is. For an "extreme" example, pro-slavery people used to argue that banning slavery was an authoritarian incursion in the individual right to private property. the etymological notion that authoritarianism means something like 'appealing to authority' simply does not work: there is nothing authoritarian, for example, in claiming that a particular species of dinosaur exists on the simple basis of "a peer reviewed paper says so" [an appeal to authority].

this is why I think it's clearer to speak about things promoting egalitarianism or hierarchy, reinforcing or reducing social stratification, promoting everyone's freedom or promoting the power of those who are already powerful, and so on and so on.

__

then again, there's something to be said for the opposite position, that is to say, that when the slaver says it is authoritarian to deprive him of his property, he is in some concrete way incorrect. But this requires a narrower conception of authoritarianism than the general way the word is used. one can refer to the technical definition of it in the social sciences, but even then we find ourselves with concepts that are less about capturing a particular feature of reality and more about defending a particular ideology: for the most part, socsci people use authoritarian to mean contrary to the principles of Liberal Democracy: you know, things like

-- no Separation of Powers, I use the uppercase here intentionally, in general you wouldn't get political scientists to call not-authoritarian a regime that has a different separation of powers than that established by the european movement called the Enlightenment.
--no Freedom of the Press, i.e. this may sound uncontroversial for the liberal, but if looked at from outside the pro-capitalist position, it is synonymous with the lack of recognition of the "right" of the wealthy to own media.
-- no Economic Freedom, as in not recognizing the "right" of the wealthy to own workplaces
-- no Political Freedom, as in not recognizing the "right" of the wealthy to, basically, buy politicians

and like... if authoritarianism means distinct from a historically discrete political ideology, then it's no good as a concept. if you met Pericles he insisted that what the concept of dikaiosynē, translating to "fairness" (i think) means is the particular political system of Athens during a certain year, and that unfairness just means something different from what the athenian democracy aspires to be, you may be interested, but you wouldn't take the concept seriously in an etic sense.

[Ares Land]

Bob Altermeyer defined it as a personality trait, as psychology:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

I find the idea this is to a large extent about psychology, not politics. Though of course, there is a lot of overlap with conservative and reactionaries, but not entirely. There are leftist authoritarians and non-authoritarian conservatives, though this is rarer than the opposite combination.

-- no Separation of Powers, I use the uppercase here intentionally, in general you wouldn't get political scientists to call not-authoritarian a regime that has a different separation of powers than that established by the european movement called the Enlightenment.

Do you have any examples of such a regime in mind?
My first reaction would say that enlightenement philosopheres weren't wrong either -- I think it's hard to picture a non-dictatorial regime without an independant judiciary, for instance.

[rotting bones]

I think we should ask people what they want and help them achieve their goals. You could describe this as supporting an authority I like, but only in the sense that anything can be described as anything else.