By Comson Cao
Welp, folks, it’s here again. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes again, just like we’re told for all the past election cycles. If we don’t vote now, it will be all over for democracy, and we will all be living in a fascist dictatorship. Some may have grown skeptical and tired of hearing this narrative constantly, but it seems to work well enough that it gets people riled up every time election day approaches. This is especially true now with the beloved Orange Man having a very seemingly real chance to make a comeback and get his revenge for the last four years. But in all honesty, who cares about preserving “democracy”? Think it’s a bold statement? Maybe, but I’m certainly not the first one to make it on this campus. During the Second Great Debate between College Democrats, College Libertarians, and College Republicans that was held during the autumn of 2023, libertarian panelist Siddharth Gundapaneni took the contrarian stance of discouraging the audience from voting. “I implore all of you to be there for one another. Go sit next to the person sitting alone, talk to them, have a real conversation instead of wasting your time spending an hour in an election poll.” Indeed, it was such an unorthodox stance for the political mainstream that the Center for Civic Engagement coordinator, Trevor Fornara, dismissed it during his final words for the night and encouraged everyone to “please vote tomorrow.” In line with their disdain towards democracy, College Libertarians opted out of the mock election event that the Center for Civic Engagement held on March 18th of this year which College Democrats and College Republicans partook in. Libertarians are not the only critics of democracy, of course; many other political ideologies have long held grievances towards this political system of governance. Might there actually be validity in their arguments and valuable takeaways that can be had by being open to hearing them out? You can decide for yourself after reading this.
This will be a long article, and as such, it will be divided into four sections:
1. Democracy and Its Assumptions
2. Bad Arguments for Democracy
3. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Political Engagement
4. The Reality of the Situation
- Democracy and Its Assumptions
For democracy to be a system worth its praise, the several assumptions underlying it must be true. Unfortunately, this largely seems to be false. The first of these is that the voter is rational. To be clear, “rational” here does not mean “correct” but rather that a voter will make the best-perceived choice based on the available information presented. Because it is assumed that the voter acts in his or her own self-interest, the aggregation of this results in policies that generally leaves everyone better off, or at least most people. This is false.
The first issue here is simply tribalism. It should be no surprise that humans are extremely tribal and we find all sorts of reasons to create fault lines between “us” and “them.” This is obvious when it comes to things like religion, race, culture, etc., but political affiliation is just as pervasive as all of these. You might have heard terms such as “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” before. Well, it definitely manifests in the world of politics. Cohen et al. (2003) conducted multiple studies on the role of political tribalism in influencing support for welfare. The participants would rate themselves on their political leanings and were then given a welfare policy proposal and told whether it was supported by their party or their rival’s. It was consistently found that people would support whatever policy their political party supported, so much so that conservatives would be pro-welfare if the Republican party supported it and liberals would be harsh on welfare if the Democratic party was against it.
Unsurprisingly, Cohen found that both sides had a tendency to think their adversaries would be influenced by their political group whereas they themselves wouldn’t. Findings like these are not exclusive to the United States either. Denmark is part of the frequently praised “Nordic model” and ranks highly across most measures of socioeconomic well-being. In Slothuus & Bisgard (2020), the researchers exploited abrupt changes made by two major political parties in the country on two policies: unemployment benefits and early retirement from 2010-2011. In this case, both the Liberal Party and the Danish People’s Party shifted towards supporting reducing unemployment benefits at around mid-2010, and the Liberal Party supported the abolishment of early retirement in early 2011. The same individuals were surveyed five times during this period, and thus the authors were able to see whether or not the policy shift made by the two parties induced shifts from their voters. The results speak for themselves. The first image here shows the change in support for reducing unemployment benefits among voters for the Liberal Party and the Danish People’s Party, as represented by the black dot, while the gray dots represent other voters.
Here is the same image but this time for abolishing early retirement among Liberals:
As can be seen, the sudden shifts in policy stances made by those parties caused shifts in support for that stance among their voters, whereas there was no observed effect for voters of other parties.
Political tribalism is not the only sort of irrationalism that voters display, however. Consider the results from Granzier et al. (2023) on the existence of “bandwagon voting,” or, to put it more simply, voting for a candidate because you think everyone else is going to do so. As it turns out, having a higher rank has a causal effect on increasing candidates’ chances of winning in future rounds, so long as they remain in the race. The first study was done in France, but the authors were also able to replicate the results beyond France to several different countries throughout the globe that used a two-round plurality voting system. Let’s think of the implications of this for the United States. If bandwagon voting exists for every country that has this voting system and the effects persisted for each rank, as the authors themselves found (1st vs. 2nd, 2nd vs. 3rd, 3rd vs. 4th), then it’s very likely that a similar effect exists in the United States, and arguably, the effect size would be larger because our voting system is winner-take-all. So no, voters are not rational and we cannot simply expect them to make decisions solely based on what they perceive as good or bad because it’s evident that there are factors that override this.
What about “wisdom of the crowds”? This is the notion that the aggregation of the opinions of many produces a collective wisdom. As economist Bryan Caplan explains in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, this argument is non-applicable to democracy for a simple reason: random errors versus systematic errors.
In many cases, the “wisdom of the crowd” is indeed true, and Caplan himself gives many examples of such instances. When a large crowd of people are told to make a guess on something, such as the weight of an animal, the average of their guesses will come extremely close to the actual answer. Or, financial markets often make better predictions than individual experts do. Why is that? Well, when you make a guess, you have a general sense of where the value lies. Beyond that, the guessing is just picking a number that seems reasonable. You will most likely be off by some amount, but so will everyone else in varying directions (both underestimating and overestimating the real value). These measurement errors from different individuals are independent and random and therefore cancel each other out such that the mean (average) will be largely unaffected, producing an estimate very close to the actual answer. In the case of democracy, however, those errors are not random, but systematic, or biased largely in one direction. Here is an illustration to conceptualize this:
In chapter three of the book, Caplan consistently demonstrates that voters are biased in one direction on various policy issues, most notably on economics. The average voter has a significant anti-market bias compared to both economists and knowledgeable voters. Even when asked about questions where the answer is literally just “supply and demand,” there is a tendency among the public to blame it on some malevolent force. But say you don’t really care about economics, or say maybe you’re an obviously bright communist and think this is a good thing, why does the bias matter? Well, because it applies to more than economics, a lot more. There are a whole bunch of different types of biases that the public are susceptible to, some of which are quite telling. In one example of what is known as unreasoning deference, public faith in the government sharply increased shortly after the 9/11 attack happened, which is paradoxical considering that the incident is clearly a demonstration of government failure. This sudden upshot in faith in the government is similar to the religious fervor that occurs when fundamentalists feel that their end-of-the-world prophecies are being fulfilled.
- Bad Arguments for Democracy
Some might push back against everything I’ve said so far. Perhaps you’re an economics major and you recall reading somewhere that democracy was good for economic growth. Colagrossi et al. (2019) meta-analyzed 188 studies and purportedly found a positive effect of democracy on economic growth. A closer look, however, tells us a different story. Firstly, the standardized correlation was extremely weak, only 0.04. More importantly, however, this relationship was not even robust because, in models that controlled for human capital, it became statistically insignificant. Meanwhile, a highly influential and cited paper by Acemoglu et al. (2019) found that democratization allegedly has an astonishing effect on economic growth. According to their results, democratization apparently increases GDP growth by 20% over a 25-year period. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. This massive effect size is in reality just a statistical artifact. Their results are upwardly biased by including democratic transitions that were triggered by economic crises. This is because, after a crisis, there is a catch-up effect whereby the economy recovers and returns to normal, but the method employed by Acemoglu et al. cannot distinguish between permanent declines in GDP and temporary ones. An earlier study from Ruiz Pozuelo et al. (2016) vindicates this. They used models similar to those of Acemoglu et al., but some models included all democratic transitions while others excluded transitions caused by an economic crisis. Like Acemoglu et al., their former models found that democratization had a positive effect on economic growth, but the latter models found no effect, meaning that the results of Acemoglu et al. was driven from modeling economic recoveries after a crisis as growth.
So fine, voters are irrational, they’re prone to various biases that affect their judgment, and democracy isn’t actually some magical formula for the economist’s green line going up. Maybe we should just accept democracy as being “good enough”? The question here, of course, is how do we know if it’s “good enough”? Well, since democracy is just the lowest common denominator of its constituents, the simple answer is to just look at the constituents. In simple terms, how politically literate are people? In the book Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, the numbers are brought forth. Some examples include that only a minority of Americans in 1964 knew that the Soviet Union was in fact not a NATO member right after the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, 73% of Americans don’t know what the Cold War was about, 40% of Americans do not know who the United States fought in the Second World War, most Americans during the 2000 election knew that Al Gore was more liberal than Bush but did not know what the term liberal even meant, and Americans generally do not know anything about which administration enacted which policies or how the federal government spends its money. Keep in mind that even these numbers are likely to be overstating the public’s political literacy because these are fairly simple individual questions, but voting for a candidate is voting for a whole bag of policies, so we can expect the average person to be even less politically literate in practice.
Another argument that gets used sometimes is the “Switzerland argument,” which is simply where you point to Switzerland and go “See? It works for them, it will work for us!” Hopefully, most people can see the logical flaw in applying the systems of very small countries to the world superpower that spans two oceans. Liechtenstein is a hereditary constitutional monarchy and they’re doing pretty well too, so why shouldn’t we become a hereditary constitutional monarchy as well? Singapore is a parliamentary republic with authoritarian characteristics, but it’s rich, safe, and has cool infrastructure, so can we adopt their system for the United States? It’s a silly argument. Treating Switzerland’s success as being attributable to democracy is the same as treating correlation as causation (in this case, a literal sample size of 1, amazing). Switzerland also has abnormally low levels of voter turnout compared to other “democratic” countries (Pew Research Center, 2022a):
What this means is that in all likelihood, the affluent Swiss are the ones who are disproportionately voting. Consider that in the United States, non-voters are poorer, have less trust in the system, and are less likely to identify with either of the two main parties (Thomson-DeVeaux et al., 2020). So, low Swiss voter turnout means that it’s likely just giving more affluent Swiss even more say, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it shows that reality is very different in practice from the glorified notion of Swiss democracy. Switzerland works because the average person doesn’t care enough to vote in major elections, they just worry about local referendums instead where it has the most direct and immediate impact on their lives, and leave national politics to the passionate and more politically literate citizens. This isn’t just speculation either. Blais (2014) compared attitudes towards voting among the citizens of Switzerland versus Germany and examined the factors which might explain low Swiss turnout. One of the major findings was that compared to Germans, the Swiss are less likely to vote if they perceive politics as being complicated, while there is no relationship between complexity of politics and probability of voting among Germans.
So, what would happen to the functionality of the Swiss model if their voter turnout rate was like the United States? The most likely outcome would be that Swiss exceptionalism would just gradually change to resemble the lowest common denominator of its entire population and lose its exceptionalism.
Perhaps the last argument used in favor of democracy can simply be boiled down to “it’s a human right.” Brennan actually discusses this notion in his book and has a very different conclusion. To put it simply, political liberty is not the same as other rights. When you have the right to choose, say your own job or which sandwich you want to eat, those are concerned with yourself directly. There is more than a mild difference between that and voting for someone who will start a war. The choice that gets made in a democracy is the consequence that everyone, including those that didn’t agree to this choice, has to bear with.
An analogy that Brennan gives in the book is a hypothetical capital punishment trial with five jurors. The first one is ignorant and ignores the evidence, the second one is irrational and evaluates the evidence in a clearly biased and nonscientific way, the third one is impaired and does not understand the case being presented, the fourth one is immoral and decides the defendant is guilty because of some characteristic that is perceived as undesirable, and the fifth one is corrupt and gets bribed to declare the defendant guilty. If we knew that this was the jury’s behavior, would we accept their authority and enforce their decisions, knowing that everything about the defendant is on the line here? For most people, probably not. Here, it is implicitly understood that having these characteristics delegitimizes the jury’s authority. Indeed, American law has mechanisms that allow for appealing or outright overturning decisions if a jury’s case was like the one just provided. Yet, in a democracy where the outcome decides the livelihoods of everyone, suddenly we have to just go along with it.
Aside from what Brennan says in his book, it is also self-evident in the real world that as much as some people like to claim that every voice matters, they do not actually believe this. When we are warned of the dangers of “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” or “political extremism” by the media, it is pretty obvious that this is an attempt to encourage us to disregard and disengage with a certain political belief, socially excluding people from the mainstream political discourse by attaching a pejorative label onto them. It is also safe to assume that they would strongly prefer it if said conspiracy theorists or political extremists did not vote or have any actual influence in politics.
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Political Engagement
A major aspect of democracy is political engagement. Politicians put in all sorts of efforts to try and convince people that they are the right choice. How well does all of this work? Not very. When it comes to political campaigns, the effects of contact and advertising are extremely small, with one meta-analysis by Kalla and Broockman (2017) of 40 different field experiments and 9 original experiments both finding an average effect of literally zero. There were only two instances in which persuasive effects emerged, and neither are particularly useful for the average person who wishes to encourage political engagement. As the researchers themselves explained for these two instances, “First, when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable voters. Second, when campaigns contact voters long before election day and measure effects immediately—although this early persuasion decays”. Similarly, Cappock et al. (2020) conducted 59 real-time randomized experiments using 49 political advertisements. The meta-analyzed estimate for the effect that political advertisements had on candidate favorability was just 0.049 scale points (the scale being used here is from 1 to 5), and on voter choice it was just 0.007, or 0.7 percentage points. These effects are extremely small regardless of the context, message, sender, or receiver.
There is reason to believe that the lack of a substantial effect from political engagement isn’t just a recent development either. In Pennec & Pons (2022), the researchers looked at the effects of televised debates on voter choice formation in 10 different countries since 1952 and found, surprise surprise, no effect. It is important to note that Pennec and Pons also find that while voters can change which issues they find the most important, their actual policy preferences remain stable.
None of this is to say that there aren’t ways to change people’s political views or attitudes. What it is to say, however, is that the circumstances in which there actually are plausible effects are not encouraging because most of them are not at all applicable for the average citizen. For instance, media messaging does have a real effect in shifting political attitudes, as demonstrated in a massive 2022 dissertation by Zach Goldberg. Obviously, that means most people can’t do anything about it because most people are not journalists with a communications degree. Another example was one I discussed in a previous article titled “How Not to Win: A Case Study of American Conservatism.” In it, I presented some of the evidence against the university indoctrination hypothesis, finding instead that the vast majority of people retain their political views throughout their time in university, and that when there are changes, this was an effect of peers and not professors. Okay, so peers could have an effect; now we’re getting somewhere. But here comes the question: where did your peers get their beliefs from? Three major possible answers: their parents, early school years, and/or the internet. In all three cases, very little can be done about it.
This is going to come to the dismay of political activists who throw rallies and marches because chances are, those aren’t going to do anything, and the things that will actually have an impact are out of the reach for most of them. One thing I want to point out here is that the people who engage with politics the most and are thus most likely to be knowledgeable about it are the radicals and not moderates, as shown from Pew Research Center (2021):
There are important implications that come from this. Firstly, it means the people who are not as likely to vote are themselves less engaged with politics in the first place. Downstream from this, it means that if the voter turnout were to increase, then the boost would come from people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re doing and are blissfully unaware. Not a good look.
Aside from that, there’s another takeaway to be had from this section: we do not actually live in a democracy. And no, I don’t mean it in the sense of when a conservative says “erm, actually we are a republic, not a democracy,” because a conservative will still agree that the government is democratic in structure (i.e., it’s designed to reflect the interests and needs of the populace and put them first), I mean it in the sense that we do not actually live under a government that represents and cares about its own citizens. Think of it this way: if the tools that can affect the way people think and vote are relegated to a subset of the population such as teachers, academics, or journalists, then is our system truly catering to the people or to that subset and their interests? Yet, even they do not actually have the most say in our government, and that brings us to the last section of this already incredibly long article.
- The Reality of the Situation
At the bare minimum, in a democracy, the average citizen matters. Those of us living in the West, if nothing else, take pride that we live under a system of government that represents the average citizen and not a select few. With all of its flaws, at least we’re not dictatorships, we represent the free world, or so I’m sure that’s what many of us think. But reality paints a very different picture. I’ve already provided many examples of the left-wing skew that academia and the media in the United States have in my article “How Not to Win: A Case Study of American Conservatism”. So rather than restating what’s already been said, I instead present these two images from a 2020 Bloomberg report:
In the United States, it is evident that the political left holds the elite position while the political right doesn’t. As such, consistent with the basic intuition of most people, society over the last several decades has become relatively more left-wing as time progressed. Despite this, there are all sorts of attempts at obfuscating the obvious. Pew Research Center (2022b) produced this infamous image:
The way this was created was through a method known as DW-NOMINATE, which is highly faulty for measuring ideology over time. This method assumes that legislators in Congress don’t change their voting tendencies and it assigns equal weights to all proposed legislation, meaning that it would treat wanting to lower income taxes by one percent as being equally radical to wanting a one hundred percent income tax rate. It does not take a genius to figure out why this is absurd. The easiest way to measure political changes across time is the average stance on various issues between the two parties. This is precisely what Lasala Blanco et al. (2021) did, and they found most of the “divergence” in political views between the two parties is actually just a result of Democrats liberalizing much faster than Republicans on many issues such as spending on healthcare, homosexual marriage, environmental spending, and support for diplomacy. Republicans did grow more conservative on a few issues, but they also largely liberalized, whereas Democrats grew more liberal on every single issue:
So fine, academia, journalism, and corporations skew heavily leftward, but does elite opinion actually matter? Yes, and in fact, it matters more than anyone else’s. In 2014, a highly famous paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked into 1,779 policy changes from 1981 to 2002 and the way various subsets of the American population had influence over those policy changes. Astonishingly, they found that policy changes were driven almost entirely by the preferences of economic elites, and there was almost no effect from the preferences of average citizens. Interest groups also had an effect, but they seemed to be the most important at the threshold of either net supporting or opposing a policy. The results look like this:
In 2015, a follow-up study was done by Martin Gilens which expanded the number of policies looked at to 2,245 and the time span from 1964 to 2006. This study basically showed the same results: in policies where low- and high-income Americans disagreed, the correlation between the policy’s support and its likelihood of adoption was far greater for high-income Americans.
Expectedly, these findings did not go unchallenged, and various criticisms have been levied against Gilens. What’s important to realize here is that almost none of these criticisms actually invalidate the findings. One criticism comes from Branham et al. (2017) who, using win rates, demonstrates that in instances where those with middle income and those with high income disagreed, the middle income won 47% of the time, which is close to 50%. This number is misleading, however. A 47-53 win-loss ratio does not imply that those with middle income and those with high income are roughly equally influential because it ignores the margins of victory. To put it simply, it could instead be the case that, each time the average American achieved a policy victory, this required a far more overwhelming level of support from them than what the elites needed. Another problem with using win rates is status quo bias, which, as its name implies, is the finding that the American government prefers to change nothing rather than to make a change, even when said policy change is fairly popular. Win rates are sensitive to the definition of disagreement used and the difference in disagreements helps to explain a large deal of the difference in findings, as demonstrated by Bowman (2020).
Using policy change rates (which overcomes status quo bias because it’s only looking at cases where policies actually did change), Bowman finds that the likelihood of policy change, if affluent Americans supported it, closely matched the trend for if both affluent and average Americans supported it, whereas the likelihood of policy change if average Americans supported it closely matched the trend for if neither affluent nor average Americans supported it, suggesting that affluent Americans indeed hold nearly all of the influence on policy changes.
It’s usually pretty obvious and easy to tell when a government is authoritarian. What is less obvious, however, is how authoritarian governments respond to public opinion. Do they not care? Do they simply silent all dissent and pretend that everything is business as usual? That certainly seems to be how it is in our popular imagination, but if you’ve learned anything by now, it’s that popular imagination can be very very wrong. Authoritarian regimes also aren’t all the same and come in many forms. One study, Miller (2015), looked at the responsiveness of “electoral authoritarian” regimes in 269 elections from 1975 to 2004. This is a type of hybrid regime where elections and representatives exist, but the executive has total independence from all other branches of government, making it a soft dictatorship. Miller finds that suffering a 20% electoral loss in the legislature results in slight increases in both social welfare (+0.26%) and education spending (+0.29%) by electoral authoritarian regimes, although it should be noted that this only holds true in states that are not rich in natural resources. Miller speculates that this is because resource-rich electoral authoritarian regimes have the ability to cheaply satiate both elites and the public. Another study by Lueders (2023) looked into how responsive the communist German Democratic Republic (AKA East Germany) was to petitions sent to the government. Now, the German Democratic Republic was a closed autocracy, meaning that its elections were uncontested and the voters could only choose whether or not to support the candidates that were handpicked by the regime itself, making it even more authoritarian than the electoral authoritarian regimes examined by Miller. So, even though these regimes didn’t even bother to pretend to be democratic, Lueders finds that right before the uncontested elections happened, government response times to petitions were, on average, 31% shorter, and the petitions were more likely to be successful (the average success rate was 14.3% and the rate of success increased between 7.7 and 9.1%, thus making it anywhere between a 54-64% increase). In another paper, Hilbig et al. (2024) looked at the role of petitions in influencing housing construction in East Germany. In 1971, East Germany began its largest housing program, making it a perfect test of government responsiveness to public demand, and indeed, the authors found that the East German government allocated more resources for housing construction in regions that sent more petitions, though the effect did seem to wane as the years went by. The People’s Republic of China is yet another variant of an authoritarian regime. Zeng et al. (2024) explored the effect of voter perception on candidate competence and voter share via local congressional elections in the country for 78 independent candidates. They find that constituency service—long-term engagement with and support for local communities—increases the vote share of the independent candidate by 19% after implementing all the control variables in their regression analysis, and 34% of the effect was mediated by electoral manipulation. In other words, the Chinese government seemingly responded to the fact that voters liked independent candidates that engaged in constituency service by reducing electoral manipulation against said candidate. So, it seems that public opinion matters even in authoritarian regimes, but apparently it almost doesn’t matter at all in the United States.
In academic Hans Hermann-Hoppe’s book Democracy: The God That Failed, he discusses the incentive structure underlying autocracies and democracies. A dictatorship or absolute monarchy makes it obvious who is in charge of the government; from the perception of the people, the dictator or absolute monarch is responsible for their prospects. The leaders in these types of government only have so much wiggle room to blame anyone and anything else but themselves when there’s a screw-up because it’s evident they’re the ones with all the powers for policy making. A politician in a democracy, however, is not as intimately tied to the well-being of the country. A politician has the ability to deny faults and pin the blame on others whenever something goes wrong. He or she can claim that other officials hindered his or her efforts or that others didn’t implement the policy correctly or what-have-you. The president can simply blame Congress or the Judiciary for attempting to place constraints on his orders, or claim to be a victim who inherited the mess and failures from the previous administration. In a democracy, you can get away with a lot by playing the game well and you can make your excuses sound believable. In democracies, politicians also serve for a relatively short period of time and so they have an incentive to maximize their legacy. Consequently, there is no harm in passing a reckless policy that seems good now only to come crashing down on everyone years later once you’re out of office. Dictators and absolute monarchs do not enjoy such benefits; their mistakes stay with them and there is no one else to hide behind.
“Go out there and vote! Our democracy is at stake!” We are constantly told this every election cycle, and every time, Americans come out to the voting booth to drop in a slip of paper, naïvely hoping that their voice would have the chance to be heard. Going beyond blindly believing every word we are told by the media, it becomes rather apparent that democracy is not worth any of the hype we give it. It is as flawed a system as any, but rather than working towards potential solutions that can amend these flaws, we are just expected to mindlessly throw our support behind it without question, lest you expose yourself as some political extremist. But that aside, the democracy debate is not even meaningful in the context of the United States because it isn’t one. In authoritarian states like the People’s Republic of China or North Korea, the government does not bother to pretend that elections matter. Maybe the people support the strongman approach or maybe they don’t, but they certainly understand that a sheet of paper in a box won’t change anything. In hybrid regimes, people go about their lives quietly knowing that the elections are a sham and they, the average citizen, do not hold much power. Russians living in Russia know that Vladimir Putin is probably here to stay as their eternal president. But, suppose there exists a regime which has such effortful control over its own people that it was able to convince the citizenry into believing wholeheartedly that elections, and by extension, themselves, genuinely mattered, that they truly had a say in the system. Such a regime would have a level of control unrivaled by any other both in history and contemporary times; it would be fitting to call it the perfect authoritarian state. Fortunately, this is just an interesting hypothetical left up for us to speculate upon and no such regime actually exists.