Status Updates From Imitation Democracy: The De...

he just talked shit about chavez and we're not even past the intro.

in an authoritarian society with a corresponding bureaucratic system of mobility, the principle of ‘survival of the weakest’ is constantly at work.
Bosses making appointments can never really escape the fear that their subordinates might ‘steal their jobs’ by appealing over their heads. [...] Bureaucratic social mobility therefore tends to promote more and more faceless drones to the top.

An identical effect can be achieved by perusing the records of the Congress of People’s Deputies or the Supreme Soviet from the start of the Yeltsin era, and then the transcript of a discussion in today’s Duma – whose speaker, Boris Gryzlov, recently uttered a phrase that will resonate through Russian history for centuries: ‘The parliament is no place for discussion.'

Under a regime of imitation democracy, it is not the constitution that establishes the inflexible rules of the game by which winners and losers exchange positions. Those rules are set by whoever comes to power, who will quickly establish new rules that suit them, subject to periodic change, guaranteeing their perpetual victory.