Actually, democracy dies in H.R.

mitchbob

> New research sheds light on how mediocre employees help would-be authoritarians maintain power. https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...

gchamonlive

> It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.

dataflow

> The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two. Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.

harimau777

It seems to me that this suggests that providing diverse career opportunities and strong social safety nets may be a valuable tool in fighting fascism. Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.

amelius

It would be more surprising if dictators could maintain power without any human resources. Maybe with AI? In the future?

dionian

Democracy lets you change laws in congress AND elect a new president.

christkv

Here is the problem. The "liberal" parties in Europe are pursuing exactly this policy of H.R Enshittification for the entire public sphere. More surveillance, more regulation, more state over-reach, less political freedoms and less free press. I don't see the difference between what's happening in the US and the supposedly good guys that rule me. It feels like they want to return to serfdom where your entire life is dependent on the lords (state) blessing.

lenerdenator

In other words, democracy dies when it no longer serves the interests of capital. This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state. Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.

icegreentea2

Some other interviews/blurbs from the authors (from their Universities): https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru... https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord... Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much: * Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement." * Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them." In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.

DrScientist

So faced with the normal process of up or out, low performers choose to join the secret police and engage in torture etc to 'thrive'. I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'. ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play. And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?

weregiraffe

Spread the blood libel on one page, pontificate about the death of democracy on another. Stay classy, nyt.

elzbardico

This is not very different from what is exposed in Hanna Arendt's book, "The Banality of Evil" (english translation from the title most known in my country for Eichman in Jerusalem). The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.

wagwang

Everyone farms the idiots, the liberal establishment over the last 50 years sold working class jobs overseas and imported labor to devalue their wages. Don't be surprised when another faction uses these "idiots" against you.

cratermoon

I’m pretty sure Hannah Arendt examined this pretty extensively in Eichmann in Jerusalem and in the relevant chapters in The Origins of Totalitarianism . She described several ways the typical loyal party member is mediocre and eager to follow orders merely for career advancement.

stego-tech

I mean, yeah? Those of us who generally sit on the polar opposite of the scale have been parroting this for decades, now, to no real avail. I’m glad research is finally backing up what we already knew, but it’s also still targeting a specific bullseye rather than broader generalizations necessary for meaningful organizational reforms. Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same. This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point. I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years. I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.

quantified

Let's note that while we celebrate democracy in government, business often runs as autocracy or oligarchy. Imposing "business"-mindedness encompasses not just taking care of finances and outcomes but also running things the way the leader demands.

Forgeties79

HR exists to protect the company by leaving a paper trail they can point to to burn you at a moment’s notice while projecting the idea that they care about your well-being

tombert

Very few things scare me much more than cold, unfeeling bureaucracy. I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself. At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.

analog31

I'm reminded of the classification of military officers by Karl Von Hammerstein-Equord. The people described in this article seem to fall into the "stupid and industrious" catagory, which are classified as the most dangerous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord