was feeling tempted by left-wing authoritarianism for a hot second while eating a shitty salad and thinking about the situation in the States, and thinking how much even in a liberal context could be accomplished if a left-leaning government was willing to go even Trump-tier authoritarian and the only reason it never happens, however authoritarian the discourse in the public gets, is Capital’s genuinely scared of that in a way it’s not of many things
and then remembered how unlikely it would be to last - in a liberal context or one of full scale regime change.  I mean tankies always sell “actually existing socialism” as the ~realistic~ thing that’s ~demonstrably had an effect~ but it’s demonstrably only ever had an effect that’s been reversed.  of course, once you put all the power of the people in the hands of a single person or a few people or an institution, even if they genuinely and selflessly use it on behalf of the people, it’s trivially easy just to take out that person/institution and then nobody else has any defenses again.  even if they were installed by a popular revolutionary energy, that’s already been diffused or even suppressed by the authoritarian program.  and I know that historically I have no ground to stand on because there is no actually existing socialism any more and there’s never been a libertarian/democratic/horizontal leftist society or achievement that hasn’t been co-opted or suppressed any more than there are left-authoritarians who haven’t been co-opted or subverted or assassinated, but speaking from writer’s intuition it feels like structurally, narratively, there’s a reason the story of Julius Caesar is perennially a tragedy
in fact - I can’t help but wonder if the form of tragedy is necessarily political in a way that speaks to this?  not the “tragic worldview” sense endorsed by conservatives now and in ancient Greece, where tragedy represents the futility of the Best men’s attempts to challenge Gnon as the highest possible hope of human achievement.  that model is disproven aesthetically imo by the mere existence of internally consistent and aesthetically successful genres, not to mention human experience, in which Gnon is challenged successfully - trickster myths, fairy tales, shonen manga.  even in high school I remember noticing how many scenarios I encountered in Shonen Jump were like these classic tragic setups where you insert a comic hero who treats it as a comedy and sabotages the carefully calibrated narrative clockwork.  the genres I listed are always, especially relative to tragedy, the aristocratic genre par excellence, regarded as popular/folk/lower genres.
the tragic thesis - that a good king is always laid low by fate or hamartia (though the appetites of a folk hero always eclipse those tiny temptations that inexplicably shatter the fragile plot armor of the tragic king), ending his just rule and plunging his people into the miserable Iron Age in which the play is presented - is solemnly delivered by the representatives of the polis to the assembled citizenry as a demonstration of the power of Gnon even over kings - justifying their failures at the same time as satisfying ressentiment through a nihilistic hypostasis of equality: “Gnon is the great leveller”.  its affective power to sway the audience towards this message derives from a subversive grain of truth revealed by the narrative form: that the king cannot rule justly in the name of the people while being a king - his downfall is made inevitable by the contractual power Gnon holds over kings specifically.  the rules of tragedy acknowledge as much: tragedy can only be written about kings or aristocrats (which democratic Athens still had), and movement conservatism’s Death of a Salesman attempts to retcon it into a mythology of surplus labour inevitably ring hollow.
then I realized I was poasting about Fate/Stay Night again.  the Fate route modulates Arthurian tragedy into Ayn Rand into this (with Agamben twisted through everything).  the Randian case for socialism is that egalitarian mutual support - “friendship, effort, victory” - is the only way you avoid the most productive members of your society wasting their energy clawing resentful defectors off their coat-tails forever.  Rand’s entire case for the virtue of selfishness is already predicated on a culturally conditioned appeal to selflessness: good Christian souls, think of the poor rich!  the Nietzschean slave-moralist, conditioned by the selfishness of his masters, thinks of them burning in hell, and laughs.  Shirou’s an obnoxious dick but he’s not wrong about Saber’s self-defeating self-reliance, or about the paradoxical-tautological moral form of the alternative.  Japan, of course, knows what going Galt actually looks like: going NEET.  and then, true, producing the disproportionate bulk of a dynamic generational culture - and sharing it communistically on the internet, or at least in economies radically less hierarchical than the zaibatsu (Comiket).