so again these aren't Universal truths or anything these are are abstractions about the kind of systems we have now in order to best understand what we've got at the moment um so again this is why it's politics right um the broader ones we can you know divide them the current nation states again so abstractions of abstractions the current ones we could divide in three broad categories first are authoritarian systems um which we could see as monarchies to dictatorships which has a concentrated very much in that old kind of Machiavellian tradition of a prince a single
Prince that that runs the show right and that they do it in their interests and blah blah um there's you know a few constitutional constraints on power this is yes and no I mean we have the emergence of what are called constitutional theocracies where they embed kind of the religious Authority religious rulers as political authorities and rulers the idea of a separation of a religious and political Authority doesn't make a ton of sense historically um I clearly the orange Revolution that we've got we've got lots of examples throughout even the Western European experience of the
role of the church and the the papacy and the pope and which church you believed in and which one you didn't as linked to the modern nation-state system and so there have been I mean we've see it in the U.S now this this push back towards a kind of merging of religious and political authority of which there's a long tradition of never separating in the first place so um the problem of course is that these use force and repression and largely arbitrary or hierarchical ways so if you if you're in favor of the Monarch forces
on your side and if you're against the monarch it's not these systems can be particularly unstable because of the transition of power from one to another right this is why succession is so important um is that the transition the peaceful transfer of power from one system and one structure to another is really complicated for structures in institutions like this and so the the impetus towards authoritarian um authoritarianism is kind of always there I've used some stupid examples here but it it's the idea that like we know at this point that that everyone ignores a car
alarm so at this point it's just annoying all of us for no reason because they accidentally go off like 90 of the time right it's like Android phones are calling 9-1-1 all the time um it used to be blackberries would if you had blackberries the little ball would accidentally call 9-1-1 it creates a nuisance and doesn't actually achieve what it's trying to achieve so then why do we allow it so the impulse towards authoritarianism is always to be let's just let's just use the law and the power and authority to get rid of these things
I was back in the day there was a bunch of activists pushing forward listen there's only five banks in Canada why do Canadians pay ATM fees we can just pass a law right so the passing a law is very easy in an authoritarian system to just say no we're not going to allow that and so you have to have structures and institutions and constitutional mechanisms placed to say no you know I'm a private bank you can't steal my money by just passing a law I should be able to charge a fee even though I make
a billion dollars a quarter I should be able to charge a fee for the service I'm providing in order to maintain that service upgrade the service provide you a newer better performance of the service right there we understand that um you know my one is that like I would you know if if I had an authoritarian system it would be like illegal to to slow down to for a fender bender on the side of the road because you are now inconveniencing everybody else in the system because you're unable to control looking at it I mean
I think in Singapore they put up um like little tents over car accidents so the traffic can continue people are unable to control themselves and when those people are unable to control themselves and it causes everyone else harm the easiest thing for us to do is just say well let's pass a law um and so authoritarian systems come from that kind of impulse that idea that well I've got power and authority and I don't like that let's get rid of that um so there's a distinction here it's a kind of slippery one between authoritarian and
totalitarian systems we don't have a ton of examples of these and I'm not sure we ever really did you know North Korea is the most obvious example read the GTA ideology and that that people in North Korea don't have even exposure to the outside world every the minutia of their life is controlled um that everything about them has surveilled that everything is about the authority of the state and it's the extreme authority over all aspects of economic and social life which may or may not be the case um I only say that because the use
of force and ideological control is never 100 so the reason that we know North Korea is awful is because people escape which means can't be that totalitarian maybe it's 99.9 effective but that point one percent is getting out and telling us how horrible it is and so that's a counter narrative against that narrative and so the other danger of this is that any ideology is going to claim it's the best against all the others um and so you you know the question is how effective are ideologies does not the Persistence of dissidents escapees and subversive
accounts undermine the very concept of totalitarian so again it's it's trying to be The Logical extension of sovereignty to every aspect of human lives to do you know Paul pot regimes where we want to remake Society in the image of the ideal State a stalinous state that's going to reframe everything except it doesn't work states states aren't humans um you know even though there is a famous States or people's two argument that we won't get into you might get into later in politics but it becomes these the the question of how ideological do you want
your system right so do we want consistent belief in a single Authority in a way in which we do things and everything else is a derivation of that um you know I'm not getting into them but clearly the proliferation of conspiracy theories with this rise of social media underpins a a greater problem that the ideological coherence that we have is a society or as dominant groups in society never really holds that long right and it's easy as letting everybody have access to their own YouTube page to produce their own content that results in well I
unless it's algorithmically driven because if you want advertising you have to be as Extreme as possible but and so extremism breeds you know radical ideas or things like Flat Earth or whatever that become a counter current to the dominant ideological framework and so the question of totalitarianism is to does totalitarianism ever exist or is it an idealized version of the nation-state where it controls every aspect of life thought and belief which we don't have again a ton of evidence that that's happened what we do have as the dominant ideology is the liberal democratic system so
it is the most proliferate we would say it is built into the structures the embedded liberal structures of the United Nations of our current model rules of liberal Institute internationalism of the ways in which states interact with one another the idea of States not using Force to interfere with one another that breeds this idea that that they are are liberal they're tolerant of each other's ideas of each other's differences and that the more tolerance of those ideas and differences breeds democracy um they're generally rule-based government they generally have some form of constitutionalism in the rule
of law though that rule of law is different right British common law famously doesn't have a constitution and so part of the reason that brexit was so wonky was that they said we're leaving the European Union except they didn't ever have like a constitution of what it was to be European they just had a whole bunch of trade agreements and so then they're like What's Trade Agreement Supply and which ones don't right and so the idea is is that as these nation states don't go to war it breeds more and more cooperation which breeds by
definition cooperation as liberal we agree on things and those agreements then reform more and more forms of agreements and those agreements become these kind of normative understandings that we should have a free individual free freedoms and rights and that we should have um mechanisms that allow people to participate in their political processes and that the Democracy part and the liberal part have always kind of been in tension so the liberalism is the Cooperative between states and it can also be the idea of a rules-based government um but the Democracy part is just I want my
leader and I have these authoritarian Tendencies and so I like the authoritarians because then you know people will stop looking at the car crash on the side of the road if if that person gets elected and it tells me that the car crash on the side of the road is illegal so they can Pander to the the democracy and undermine the liberalism right so they can move away from that and so the textbook uses the United States Center Donald Trump I mean I guess I guess we can call that as illiberal um I mean Charles
W Mills has a kind of better argument is that like the liberal democracy that set up the U.N and created all these sectors the U.S also allowed slavery in its Inception Jim Crow and ongoing forms of racial oppression segregation how can you on the one hand claim to be the protector of individual freedoms and rights and have such a deeply entrenched system of laws and governance that allowed this stuff to happen right so and this goes all the way back to the liberal inceptions of these states 1789 and democracy and freedom and and all of
these questions is that you allow absolutely absolutely you say these things but they're all clearly structures and institutions that are happening alongside those structures and institutions that seem to make those claims a little bit suspect um and so yes they we we like the the I don't know to counterpose these to say they're the same to exemplify the differences between them I have no idea anyways if we're going to typologize the the kind of forms of nation state we have we can use those three if we had more Communist States if we used Cuba as
an example we could call it authoritarian or totalitarian or communist but we don't do that anymore um is it objectively true no these are typologies they're we are picking things in order to analytically get organized the world as it is not establish Universal theoretical truths political science
