ON THE COMFORTS OF AUTOCRACY

Watching The Founding of the Republic got me thinking about how people feel about their leaders and the way they lead. It made me think of three things in particular, which I will share with you sequentially, for human brains remain more random and sometimes even more interesting than the internet.

1. The Sylvia Plath line “Every woman adores a fascist” in her poem "Daddy". Could this explain why I kind of want to stroke Mao’s shellacked coif?
2. The Erich Fromm book Escape From Freedom, which posits that it is terrifying to be in control of one’s own destiny and appealing to submit to an autocrat.
3. A scene from the Chinese television series 蜗居 (Narrow Dwellings), in which Su Chun tenderly asks his wife Hai Ping to treat him dictatorially. Screenshots and translations are below.

Don’t be too democratic towards me

I wish you'd treat me a little more dictatorially

People living under a dictatorship

have a sense of security, a feeling of dependability

[nuzzle and cut to bedroom scene]

Personally I’m a big fan of democracy, even if I wish it worked better sometimes, but I simply refuse the facile logic that everyone craves freedom. I also think one must account for statements like the above, even if one sees nothing vaguely comforting about living under a dictator. My travels and studies have not convinced me that people all over the world are fundamentally the same; quite the contrary: I think people all over the world are profoundly different from one other, across axes of culture, ethnicity, gender, and class, but I also think it doesn’t take too much to try and bridge those gaps and understand how and why. I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine the appeal of autocracy (a relatively enlightened one at least). Democracy takes a lot of work after all, and it would be nice if instead we could all just relax and leave it up to a godlike, all-knowing figure who could really lead us through troubled times, rather than relying on poll numbers to figure out how to fumble on through. The fact that such persons do not exist are one reason I won’t be rooting for a dictatorship any time soon.

This does not preclude, however, that some people might actually prefer living in a dictatorship, or at least see it as inevitable and tolerable. In the lead up to the Iraq war, it was treasonous to even whisper that maybe, just maybe, democracy wasn’t for everyone, and even if it was the best system, maybe it couldn’t be forced. I wish I could say that Americans have learned something from our failures there but I fear that instead many are just blaming the Iraqis for not taking advantage of the marvelous opportunity they were presented with.

Assumptions of the inherent superiority and “naturalness” of democracy, in the sense that it is assumed that democracy will always flourish when given the opportunity because people, by nature, love freedom, are embedded not only in foreign policy but in scholarly work. Although I tried to separate my own research project from this discourse, I still suspect that one reason I got funding was that many people are forever seeking out the sprouts of democracy, insisting that in some pocket of resistance somewhere, the Chinese people are asserting their rights and that this will inevitably lead to regime change. This is not my own opinion.

The parents of one of my teachers here, now in their late 60s, have been making frequent trips to Beijing from their home in the north to take care of her while she is pregnant. Each time they come to town they insist on visiting Mao’s mausoleum at the south end of Tiananmen Square. I would have thought one viewing of the Chairman’s embalmed body would be enough for a lifetime but my teacher tells me that it really means something to them to visit, that they have very strong feelings for the man.

There’s a well-known dictum that Mao's actions were 70% right and 30% wrong. I don’t know how this number was arrived at, but Chinese people are invariably delighted that I've heard the formula; saying it aloud is a failsafe method of winning a toast in your honor and just about any banquet.

Regardless of the numbers, and even, apparently, regardless of a great deal of misery (many history books now judiciously state that Mao “erroneously” started the Cultural Revolution), Mao Zedong has an undeniably strong place in the hearts and minds of the older generation who were raised memorizing his words, singing his songs, collecting badges that bore his image. He was George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, and Pokemon all rolled into one. For visitors of this generation to Mao’s Mausoleum, being so close to the man, even in death, must be quite a feeling.

China’s current leaders can never hope to inspire such devotion, but as long as they can keep delivering big growth numbers, corresponding infrastructural development, and a smattering of social welfare programs to even out the growing inequalities, their positions should be perfectly safe. I get the sense that sometimes people here just don’t want to have to think about the government -- they just want it to do its job -- and as of yet, that job doesn’t include safeguarding political or civil rights. They think we Americans are the one with a cult of personality, fawning all over our tall, young, handsome, charismatic president. Do you think any Chinese person would ever wear a Hu Jintao t-shirt with a clever slogan?

It would make an interesting social experiment at the very least - though not one I’d be willing to end up in jail for.