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Boots are stamping on faces, but the trains are not running on time. The estimable Noah Smith brings the receipts…

The selling point of authoritarian rule has always been that dictators, oligarchs, and strongmen are competent and purposeful — that democracies dither while authoritarians act. When people tell you that “Mussolini made the trains run on time”, this is what they mean.

I’m not prepared to render a verdict on whether and when democracies or autocracies are more effective at governance (there is a very long academic literature on this, but few solid conclusions). I would certainly never claim that only democracies can govern effectively — Park Chung-hee, Deng Xiaoping, and Lee Kuan Yew certainly put that notion to rest. But I want to push back on the notion of authoritarian effectiveness in two concrete ways…

The authoritarians of the world are making a pretty good case for liberal democracy simply by being incredibly incompetent: “Authoritarians are not governing effectively,” from @Noahpinion.

* George Orwell, 1984

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As we contemplate competency, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, gave in to the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism (and to charges of extortion, tax fraud, bribery and conspiracy) and resigned.

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