Anything Can Happen
Authoritarians hate liberal democracy, with its deliberate diffusion of powers throughout the society.
By Ryan McGreal.
501 words. Approximately a 1 to 3 minute read.
Posted March 11, 2025 in Blog.
Among Canadian football players, it is sometimes joked that CFL stands for “Can’t F—ing Lose”, thanks to the three-downs rule and the field size. The winning team can’t easily run out the clock and so fortunes can change suddenly.
Politics can sometime feel the same way. Three months ago, if you had insisted the Liberal Party of Canada had a real shot at winning the next election, most people would think you were delusional.
Yet here we are, with a new Liberal leader who can credibly campaign on an outsider’s change mandate, and a dramatic reversal of the polling trend that so recently saw the Conservatives cruising to a blowout victory.
I’m not making any firm predictions, only noting that an outcome which seemed inexorable mere weeks ago is now very much up for grabs.
Anything can happen.
In an open society where power is distributed widely, no single agency has the power to determine and enforce an outcome.
This, of course, is precisely why authoritarians hate open society.
Authoritarians hate liberal democracy, with its deliberate diffusion of powers throughout the society.
Authoritarians hate independent news media who exercise editorial freedom to report unfavourably on them. Instead, they want obedient regime media who curry favour and access with the authoritarians through fawning, dishonest coverage.
Authoritarians hate an independent judiciary that tries to enforce constitutional principles fairly, accusing the judiciary of being “activist” when it rules against them and trying to stack the judiciary with shameless loyalists.
Authoritarians hate professional, nonpartisan government employees who are dedicated to the principles of public service and loyal to uphold the law. Authoritarians seek to replace them with loyalists and sycophants who will do the authoritarian’s bidding.
Authoritarians hate competing political parties who dare seek to win power away from the authoritarian, and they abuse their power over the electoral process to stack the deck against their rivals. In extreme cases, they seek to destroy the careers of their opponents by manufacturing scandals and controversies.
Authoritarians hate independent NGOs organized by groups of citizens who believe they have a right to try and shape public policy. Authoritarians accuse such groups of being illegitimate, foreign-controlled, even treasonous, and they seek to use the power of the state to bully the groups into submission.
The goal, in an authoritarian system, is to close the space of possibilities, to exercise deterministic control over outcomes, to ensure that nothing can happen outside the authoritarian’s control.
A politics of certainty is necessarily a politics of tyranny. The only way to accrue enough power to determine outcomes is to strip-mine so much power from the rest of society that it ends up closed, illiberal and servile.
And by contrast, the only way to maintain an open, liberal, democratic society of independent citizens with agency over their own lives is by working together ensure that no authoritarian is able to consolidate and hoard all the power to himself.
Authoritarians want you to accept their absolute control. But their control is just an illusion.
When people get organized and creative, anything can happen.