I often see Tsai Ing-wen at campaign rallies or DPP gatherings hanging the words “die-hard” on her lips, with audiences below beaming with excitement and stupid smiles, their eyes revealing an intoxicated, dreamy gaze.
“Die-hard” means being willing to maintain loyalty even unto death—this is the most standard language of authoritarian tyranny. Yet those who often pride themselves on supporting democracy and freedom express genuine reverence and glory for it.
From this you can see that so-called support for democracy and freedom is in reality just blindly pursuing a lie woven from pseudo-progress.
There’s always been a misconception in Taiwan’s political arena that the DPP is good at elections but terrible at governance.
Perhaps the reason is simply that they only need die-hard followers.
Once people are die-hard, they give up their right to question and become blind followers.
Those in power not only need their supporters to be die-hard, but even their subordinates must demonstrate loyalty, because people with different ideas only become stumbling blocks to power.
But people who abandon their belief in truth for the temptation of power and money tend to be incompetent their entire lives.
For an authoritarian government, incompetence is actually not the worst thing.
Because incompetent people are easy to manipulate, can be used and discarded, and can serve as scapegoats when things go wrong. Even with small bribes, they’ll rush to take the blame, fearing others will beat them to it and rob them of the master’s affectionate gaze.
However, over time, as incompetent die-hard followers rise to power in succession, a country’s government system gradually decays. Corruption reigns top to bottom, constant problems with unscrupulous public works projects, forcing out and even driving decent civil servants to suicide. Ultimately, to protect their own regime, they won’t hesitate to attempt to prohibit people’s freedom of speech.
And all of this is because someone is die-hard.