Authoritarian Red Flags At Home
What to do about authoritarianism within our own systems.
No one should reach the age of eighteen without understanding how their vote works or how to recognise when it doesn’t. That so many of us from working class communities hit voting age without this basic education is as embarrassing as it is dangerous. To be clear, we aren’t at fault here; it is the academic and political elite who gate-keep knowledge or hide it away behind paywalls, subscription fees and institutional-login requirements.
It’s not only the money that keeps us locked out, but the language. All too often, academics speak a language that only others within their field will understand. A case in point is the first section of this article, which explains how we can figure out who and where the “regime” of a country is before deciding if it is democratic or not. The way academics use this term is a world away from how the media use it — generally only when talking about dictators and “backwards” nations.
It’s taken me nearly ten years to learn this language and I still struggle with it. But, having now been both an 18-year-old with no idea who or what “democracy” is and a trained political scientist specialising in certain forms of modern authoritarianism, I feel that I’m in a decent position to give some knowledge back to my…
