I’m just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc… Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they’ve done? What do they exactly like about them?
Aren’t these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?
Democracy doesn’t work. People don’t have a fully free will and don’t make informed decisions in a world where the rich dictate the narrative by being able to dictate what narrative gets put out to the people. Most voters I’ve interacted with are single issue voters. In many regions there is no real choice. Usually political options are someone who promises not to do anything at all, someone who obviously lies about potentially making some irrelevant stuff better but definitely won’t and then someone who panders to some manufactured social issue and promises to handle it (they usually implement the most changes, for better or mostly worse). In most regions there is only right wing parties available to vote for and you can choose your flavour of religious right wing, hip right wing or eco-fash right wing. I always want to vote but then actually research the options and find there is literally no person I agree with the program of so at best I can choose the one I least disagree with. It’s really sad. The world will never be fixed through democracy or voting. If either had the power to improve it, it would long had happened. The world is as it is because of people who aren’t suited for power being in power, be it politics or through money.
While I agree with this assessment, I don’t think dictatorship (or authoritarianism more generally) is a solution to this problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but I can speculate about various properties a solution might have, and one of them is that citizens/members of a community should be encouraged to participate in domain-specific politics that they know and care about without requiring them to form opinions about things they don’t know much about.
We are all ignorant about things we don’t spend time trying to understand and we should learn to respect that fact. This applies to leaders as well; no dictator or small group of people – no matter how many advisors they have – could possibly make informed decisions pertaining to all aspects of running a society. Glorifying or worshipping a leader or a party is madness we’re all prone to as we seek simple answers that are consistent with our preconceived notions of how the world works.