Where things are going next (the Authoritarian Funnel)

After Descent: Stages of Entrenched Authoritarian Rule

This draws from comparative politics, genocide studies, and historical case synthesis (e.g., Levitsky & Ziblatt, Arendt, Snyder, Linz, and Straus).

✅ Stage 4: Consolidation of Loyalty and Erasure of Alternatives

  • One-party rule (formal or functional)
  • Electoral theater with no legitimacy
  • Forced oaths, ideological tests, or loyalty-based resource access
  • Independent institutions (judiciary, education, military) absorbed or collapsed
  • Propaganda becomes the primary epistemology
  • National narrative rewritten in real-time

“If you want food, medicine, or safety—you play the role.”

✅ Stage 5: Selective Targeting of Broad Groups

  • Journalists, teachers, immigrants, academics, disabled people, LGBTQ+ communities, and non-loyal faiths increasingly targeted
  • Censorship becomes internalized: people self-monitor
  • Political opponents are arrested, exiled, or disappeared
  • Dissidents are labeled traitors or enemies of the people

“First they came for...”—but not all at once. Gradually. Selectively. Covertly.

✅ Stage 6: Mass Suppression and Economic Reordering

  • Assets seized or restructured under state-loyal oligarchs
  • National currency destabilized or replaced by loyalty-controlled systems
  • Black markets form for medicine, tech, information
  • Social hierarchies restructured: loyalists get housing, healthcare, jobs
  • Re-education or labor programs for “unproductive” citizens

The goal is compliance through scarcity, and obedience through isolation.

✅ Stage 7: Eugenics and Demographic Engineering

  • Medical experimentation, sterilization, and exclusion from care
  • Denial of treatment to disabled or chronically ill groups
  • Propagation of “superior” citizen types through pronatalist or racial purity policies
  • Erasure of non-aligned cultural groups via language, education, or religious bans

Often cloaked as “cost savings,” “public health,” or “cultural pride.”

✅ Stage 8: Expansion or Escalation

  • Invasion or destabilization of neighboring countries
  • Refugee creation weaponized to collapse external democracies
  • Cyberwar, targeted assassinations, or disinformation used as foreign policy
  • Domestic war footing: conscription, rationing, loyalty tests for troops

“We must defend ourselves” becomes the moral justification for global aggression.

Authoritarian Rule Funnel: Historical Progression Estimates

Stage 1–3: Descent

(100%) of authoritarian states go through this path—it’s the on-ramp.
(This is my initial tracker; see previous posts)

🟥 Stage 4 (current stage as of 4/23): Consolidation of Loyalty and Erasure of Alternatives

📉 ~85% of regimes that complete the descent reach this stage.

  • This is the most “stable” phase for autocrats: control of elections, courts, civil society.
  • Many regimes pause here for years or even decades (e.g., Turkey, Hungary).
  • They tolerate pockets of dissent as long as they don’t affect control.

▶️ Major drop-off point: Regimes that can’t consolidate here often collapse or revert to instability.

🟧 Stage 5: Selective Broad-Group Targeting

📉 ~65% make it to this stage

  • Widespread targeting of civil society, minorities, journalists, and educators.
  • Often includes surveillance states, re-education policies, or press cleansing.
  • This is where regimes become more overtly repressive, but often still maintain international legitimacy.

▶️ Example stall points: Brazil under Bolsonaro (partial targeting but no full state suppression)

🟨 Stage 6: Mass Suppression and Economic Reordering

📉 ~40% of authoritarian states reach this

  • State begins rewriting the entire socioeconomic order.
  • Property seized, industries nationalized or oligarchized, healthcare and food used as leverage.
  • Digital currency, labor programs, social credit systems may emerge.

▶️ Examples: Russia, Iran, China, Syria

⚫ Stage 7: Eugenics and Demographic Engineering

📉 ~20% reach this stage

  • This includes forced sterilizations, racial/nationalist purity programs, population control by neglect or design.
  • Medical denial or forced procedures often take place quietly first.
  • International red lines can sometimes stall full execution—but not always.

▶️ Examples: Nazi Germany, Myanmar, China (Xinjiang), early 20th-century U.S. (eugenics laws)

🔴 Stage 8: Expansion and International Aggression

📉 ~10–15% reach this

  • Open military aggression, expansionist wars, or campaigns to destabilize other governments.
  • Global destabilization becomes a defensive justification (“We must act first before they do”).
  • Almost always requires full internal control first.

▶️ Examples: Germany (1939), Russia (Ukraine), Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy

“Just because they’re not doing everything doesn’t mean they’re not authoritarian.
They’re just stalled at a stage—for now.”

And…

“Not every authoritarian regime invades other countries or builds camps.
But those that do? Always started at the top of this same funnel.”

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