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Fun fact: there are actual scholars of authoritarianism out there who study hegemonic party systems. I’m talking real experts who spend real careers doing real research on their origins, logics, and strategies for survival. Hot tip, @nytimes!
Chinese history is, among other things, one of rebellion, civil war, palace coups, and peasant resistance. But please go on with your Confucian-deference-to-leaders argument.
There’s an old Yahya Sadowski article I read in grad school that seems relevant here. For decades, western analysts had argued that the shah’s survival, where so many other Muslim monarchies had fallen, was due to the essential quietism of Shi’a Islam. 1/
Shiites, went the theory, regard all earthly sovereignty as equally corrupt and therefore equally tolerable. No point in rebelling against an unjust shah when his replacement will be equally unjust, right? Then 1979 happened. 2/
So they wised up, right? Wrong! Suddenly - I mean, literally without missing a beat - they decided that Shia were, and always had been, especially rebellious because all earthly rule is corrupt, and therefore must be overturned. 3/
The point is that they were not performing analysis. They were telling stories. Literally, they were storytellers, making use of whatever raw resources they had around them.
Cultural arguments, done right, can be extremely rigorous. But they are also very, very hard. 4/4
Cultural arguments, done right, can be extremely rigorous. But they are also very, very hard. 4/4
