I’m partial to the theory that liberalizing institutions and culture happens first, and liberal democracy can come only after that.

Fareed Zakaria is a proponent of this theory from the left: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...

Jonah Goldberg is a proponent of this theory from the right: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/off-the-shelf-suicide...

It’s not an assumption, but a conclusion based on the evidence. I’m not aware of any Asian, African, or middle eastern country where freedom and democracy led to prosperity. There’s lots of democracies in these places that haven’t been able to translate that into prosperity. On the flip side, China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore are all examples where authoritarian rule has led to prosperity. I’d include Bangladesh these days as an example of that also.

If the country you’re using as an example is in Eastern Europe, I think you may be overlooking key differences. Fareed Zakaria addresses this in his book “the Future of Freedom.” https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re.... He explains that many of the foundations of liberal democracy were put in place during autocratic regimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom. Eastern Europe had many building blocks of democracy in place hundreds of years ago. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks.

With all due respect, if this is the best the anarchists have (and this article is from a respected individual and is decently written), you're fucked. These critiques are not new or without response. The problem is, this is 1000+ words of arguments about human nature, special pleading, etc, with NO sources. They describe known phenomena like control of the agenda and never call it that, I'm not sure if that's because they aren't aware of that term or they just fon't feel like attributing hundreds if not thousands of years of research before them. It'd be like if someone cloned Signal and acted like Moxie didn't exist.

Cite something, anything that scholars who study politics and democracies have written, don't put forward these vague critiques with nothing backing it up. Many arguments that seem intuitive are wrong when faced with evidence, and this article and anarchists in general seem to forget that democracies have certain features (and misfeatures) that are responses to real world situations.

Anarchism is a political ideology that's never met the real world, like a lot of ideologies on HN and elsewhere. This might convince the random Internet reader, but it's not going to convince anyone who has studied the topic.

Here's a few politics 101 cites that are decent:

https://www.amazon.com/Models-Democracy-3rd-David-Held/dp/08...

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Its-Critics-Robert-Dahl/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Second-Robert-Dahl/dp/03001...

https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...

Could tech people stick to what they are good at, or at least acknowledge the wider world of experience when they are making arguments?