So, America wants a dictator

Are we doomed to repeat history—or can we build something better first?

Imagine it’s the near future, and America elects its first dictator.

First, let’s imagine he’s an evil dictator. He uses our satellite networks to control internet access globally, silencing journalists, politicians, and entire nations who disagree with him—neighborhoods that resist are plunged into digital darkness. Noncompliant citizens find their autonomous vehicles rerouted to detention centers or locked in place after curfew. Humanoid robots listen, record, and intervene in households that dissent, and home assistance soon becomes tantamount to home control.

Social media breeds polarization, with citizens fighting amongst themselves as our dictator controls the narrative, promoting falsehoods that support his views and shadow-banning those that don’t. Citizens believe they are voting freely, but they’re already sufficiently brainwashed by the time they reach the polls. Computer-brain interfaces filter thoughts before we can even have them, and rebellious thoughts trigger migraines or seizures—our dictator’s party always seems to win.

Armies of humanoid robots now patrol cities, enforcing laws governed by Terms of Service, not constitutions. Bandwidth, electricity, even car routes are rewards for obedience, while lack of access is doled out as punishment. Pretty soon, a new nobility emerges, where loyalists earn premium connectivity and robot helpers and dissidents live offline and isolated with no way to communicate with one another or fight back.

This is a pretty dystopian future, and it’s one we should avoid.

But let’s also think through the inverse: This time, let’s imagine we elect a benevolent dictator.

Satellites become a universal commons—internet access is free, global, and treated as a human right. No one is cut off, no matter how remote they are, and totalitarian leaders lose their chokehold on communications. Autonomous vehicles enable shared mobility, and individuals no longer need private vehicles to get around. A fleet of electric, self-driving taxis mean traffic fatalities plummet, congestion dissolves, and parking lots turn into parks and gardens. Humanoid robots care for the elderly and disabled, and help with household chores. Computer-brain interfaces restore sight, hearing, movement, and memory. They facilitate easy translation between languages and foster empathy between cultures.

Social media acts like direct democracy platforms, a sort of “suggestion box” for America, with citizens able to weigh in on the issues most pressing to their lives. AI tabulates responses so governors can see a dashboard of where local needs are greatest. The code is open source and rigorously reviewed by citizens—corruption becomes digitally impossible. Thanks to automation, robots run our manufacturing, build our buildings, and manage food production—there’s little humans need to do apart from work a 10-hour work week to make sure everything is running ok, fix problems in the code, and make adjustments that better our lives. Because it's so cheap to make everything, the cost of goods goes down. Our satellites, autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, AIs, and all other automatons that run our world are heavily taxed, with earnings redistributed to citizens as a UBI. A new Renaissance emerges as people use their leisure time for artistic pursuits, and we create a large market for premium human-made goods.

That’s a pretty utopian future, and it’s one we should aim to achieve!

The difference between these two futures is one thing: Benevolence. In either case, we are relying on our dictator’s moral code and whether he will run the country in his own interest or the interest of society at large. As much as we may not like what a tyrannical dictator may do, there’s a real attraction to what a benevolent dictator could do, and modern thinkers are reviving that allure.

Philosophers have long hailed the “benevolent dictator” as the ideal governance model. Plato’s Republic held the “philosopher-king” as the gold standard. Aristotle’s Politics ranked monarchy as the best form of government, so long as monarchs were virtuous. Voltaire later admired “enlightened despots” like Frederick the Great of Prussia, who promoted arts, science, and reform. A good leader with carte blanche can get a lot done and do a lot of good—why wouldn’t we want that? The problem, of course, is that a bad leader with carte blanche can do a lot of harm, and we’ve seen many more of those.

The benevolent dictator is rare and fragile, and can easily devolve into tyranny in our despot’s hunger for power and money. That’s why later thinkers turned to checks and balances, institutions, and democracy. That doesn’t stop modern philosophers from romanticizing the enlightened despot or trying to bring him back. Last week, I attended an event called “Should the US be ruled by a CEO dictator,” in which

Curtis Yarvin

argued that yes, it should. His take has become popular in an era where political chaos and polarization has led many to believe that democracy is not working, that there are too many checks and balances for leaders to get anything done, and what we really need is an authoritarian with absolute power who can clean it all up and make progress. Like many, he points to Singapore, China under Deng Xiaoping, Dubai, and Hong Kong as proof points that autocracy outperforms democracy.

Those countries have achieved incredible things under an autocratic leader, but they are four of, according to V-DEM, 91 total autocracies in the world. Singapore is a textbook example of a benevolent dictator, with founder Lee Kuan Yew architecting the utopian city of Plato’s dreams. Deng Xiaoping’s China, as well as Dubai and Hong Kong, were economic marvels, boosting their countries out of poverty in record time. Yarvin believes that if we just remove democracy—abolish the press, abolish the courts, abolish Congress—our dictators will naturally behave the way those countries do. They don’t! Many, many more autocracies are crashing and burning under the same model. Think: Vladimir Putin’s Russia that poisons and kills political opponents, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria that responds to protests with mass violence and casualties, and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea which takes advantage of mass surveillance and forced labor camps.

The track record for democracy is much better—the higher a country scores on democracy, the more likely they are to have a strong economy, a stable government without violence or corruption, and higher human welfare. Almost every democracy has a strong economy, while only a handful of autocracies do. If you had to choose to be born into a democracy or autocracy without being able to pick which one, you’d pick democracy. Your odds of a good life are better by nearly every metric. As scholar William Easterly put it, “autocracy is a gamble that could either yield a Lee Kuan Yew or a Mobutu.” The latter being the DRC dictator who famously enriched himself while impoverishing his country.

That doesn’t mean our democracies can’t learn from Singapore and China, they desperately need to! China produces 29% of the world’s manufacturing output, and is already on a fast track to full automation. While American unions and labor laws block automation, China’s “dark factories” don’t even need the lights on—there are no humans in the building. The country churns out 31.2 million cars each year compared to the US’ 10.5 million, and produces 12.8 million EVs to the US’ 1.56 million. As a result, consumers can buy a new electric car in China for less than $10,000 while Americans struggle to afford a used gas-guzzling one. Despite being an incredibly large country like the US, China has also been laying record-breaking miles of high-speed railways while America looks like a bunch of bumbling idiots who can’t even build a train track between LA and San Francisco.

If the downside to a dictator is that 90% of the time they have terrible effects on their countries, the downside to democracy is that we will never have the benevolent dictator—that shining beacon who could get a lot done without Congress blocking them at every turn, who could build trains and automate everything and make incredible progress for our country. It’s no wonder we cherry-pick the benevolent and crave what they can achieve with their dictatorship! I too would have given Barack Obama carte blanche to establish universal healthcare in my country; instead it was compromised to death! I too would have given Bernie Sanders carte blanche to fix wealth inequality in our country; instead the wealthy gave themselves tax cuts.

Yarvin probably wouldn’t be happy with those dictators—his arguments favor Trump and Maga talking points, and said his ideal dictator would follow Roman Civil Law or the Napoleonic Code. This is the inherent problem with dictators—most of the time you don’t end up with the kind you like.

Yarvin’s debate counter

Glen Weyl

argues, instead, for seeing what democracy could do if it caught up technologically to the Singapores and Chinas of the world. There’s no reason a democratic country couldn’t fully-automate or build trains like China, or even build new cities like Dubai. He points to Taiwan as a better model, which has used technology to streamline democracy and outperform the world in areas like semiconductors, R&D, and precision automation. The country dominates the global semiconductor industry, valued at around $115 billion, while being a much better place to live than China. Taiwan’s GDP per capita is twice as large as China’s and, comparing major cities Taipei and Beijing, Taipei residents are richer, live longer, enjoy better quality healthcare—Taiwan’s healthcare system is ranked highest in the world—and experience safer streets and less air pollution.

China may have a dictator who can get a lot done, but Taiwan’s digital democracy can outpace them on nearly every metric while operating in the best interest of citizens.

Weyl’s vision isn’t for democracy as it currently exists in America—far from it. He has no interest in allowing democracy to remain as messy as it is, but instead wants to innovate democracy so that it becomes incredibly organized and efficient using online and technological solutions. Would voting be this messy if, instead of picking between two candidates we dislike, we each had a number of votes that we could allocate across people or policies—giving ten votes to a “wealth tax,” for instance, two votes to “universal basic income,” and zero to the things we don’t care about? Would making a budget be this messy if, instead of Congress members giving tax breaks to wealthy funders, every dollar of public funding was steered toward projects that citizens allocated their dollars for? Would the government better represent our interests if, instead of “calling our senators,” we could share feedback anytime through a state-sponsored app and governors could see a live dashboard showing the top priorities of their communities?

Weyl’s organization RadicalxChange champions these kinds of democratic innovations, and pilots real world experiments in them. In 2018, Colorado used “quadratic voting” to decide which policies to fund—representatives received 100 virtual tokens each that they could use to vote for the projects of their choice. Brazil uses “quadratic budgeting” in more than 200 cities, with citizens ranking how public dollars should be spent. One Japanese politician recently used “broad listening” to create policy based on input from his constituents. And Taiwan already uses "participatory democracy” to collate feedback from citizens through their vTaiwan & Polis platforms. Citizens use these “X-like” apps to deliberate on issues like Uber regulation and same-sex marriage, with AI clustering areas of consensus, and then informing policy decisions. Many countries in the EU, as well as Canada and Seattle, are now trialing similar platforms.

In fact, while crafting the speculative scenarios that began this post, I used every one of these democratic innovations to craft the utopian scenario. Our “evil dictatorship” is a pure dictatorship, but our “benevolent dictatorship” is actually a reformed democracy.

Our democracy of the future doesn’t have to look like the democracy of the present. It shouldn’t! And we can absolutely catch democracy up to the times rather than abolish it altogether and regress to a dictatorship. China and America are not the only governance models available to us. We can create something much better than both—something that has all of the power and authority we want an autocracy to have, but with an innovative and technologically advanced democracy that ensures leadership acts benevolently to us all.

The technologies we are inventing now can be used for great good or great harm depending on whose hands they fall into.

Using them for democracy will assure they fall into ours.

Thanks for reading,

Elle Griffin