Authoritarianism, Democracy, and the Modern World
“Democracy is essentially anti-authoritarian – that is, it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves.”
– John Dryden
In the Canadian education system democracy is an important topic to cover, from elementary school, all the way to secondary school and beyond. It is the foundation of our country’s political system and, as children are the future of our society, it’s important that everyone knows why we support it. But what is the opposite of democracy? In this project we have been working on for the past several weeks, we have centralized our focus on authoritarianism. A government which is under authoritarian rule is one that is typically in a dictatorship, often run by someone with revolutionary political views, either to the extreme right (fascist), or to the extreme left (communist). Exploring how authoritarians use of speech, psychology and historical context leads to a takeover will help us understand the threat of the rise of authoritarianism today.
One of the first important steps we took on our journey to discovering the stories of history’s most famous authoritarians, was collecting some vocabulary that we would most likely need later on.
To cumulate collective knowledge of authoritarians, each person in the class was assigned one dictator to do research on, then, after reading and listening to all of the research, we made conclusions on commonalities between them.
The Authoritarian I Researched
Commonalities Between Autoritarians
That was only 1/3 of the puzzle pieces for this project. Next was to understand the psychology of why people follow authoritarian rule, and elect these guys. In the modern age, most authoritarians are actually elected and then they dismantle the system of government afterwards, there must have been a reason why they gained so much support in the first place.
The Psychology of Authoritarianism
The last piece of the puzzle was to understand the persuasive language of authoritarians, to see how their speeches made a difference. We watched several speeches and learned about parallel structure, and then it was time for the final products.
The slideshow
Our first final product was to, with a partner, create a slideshow on how we would take over a country, using the tactics and conditions we had been discovering and discussing.
Erin and Indy Take Over America
The speech
The final final product we created and crafted, was a speech. With our partner, in our case, we made a debate style speech with an authoritarian (republican) and a democrat both trying to convince an audience to elect them as president of the United States. This part was most likely the biggest challenge/ part of the project, as it was truly a way to creatively demonstrate all that we had concluded and taken out of the project.
In reflection, I think this project was really a way to showcase creatively surrounding a historical but also relevant topic. The rise of authoritarianism is still a threat to many countries, and being able to understand authoritarianism vs. democracy will be very important when attempting to speak in an educated way about current events and politics in the future.
indiras • November 19, 2023