So basically a real life Brave New World?

Well... Sort of... Just less cartoonish.

The reason I said the POD should be early is because I want a political ideology like this to have enough time to develop, and to develop into something else than the OTL currents we've known in the ca last 200 years.

Something like what happened with Thande's Diversitarians and Societists in his LTTW timeline - they're both world-changing ideologies, but neither of them is based on the mostly-economic incentives that the big ideologies developed in the OTL 19th century were based on. They're based more on cultural and social worldviews rather than one's of an economic nature. They're very original but in no way implausible ideological engines of geopolitics.
 
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It's

Banned
I know the idea sounds like an oxymoron at face value, but let's not be lazy and try to imagine how such a regime or society could come into existence. Because this is AH.com, we've made weirder concepts work in the past.

Basically, my general idea is that we have a state/regime which is very socially liberal and would seem progressive and enlightened to our minds, but is at its core fundamentally anti-democratic (and democracy-phobic, for lack of a better term). Civic liberties of a certain sort are allowed and encouraged, but they are kept on a tight leash and every citizen who the regime deems a threat is dealt with by either subtle or more blatant intimidation. Minorities within the society are treated well, in order to prevent revolution or the majority symphathizing with their plight and rising to their defence against the regime. Again, the regime doesn't treat these minorities of all sorts well out of conviction, but out of sheer pragmatism and self-serving cynicism. The single most important tenent of this regime is "give the people bread and circuses, give them a feeling of sophistication and an illussion of dissent against the regime, and quash any efforts to undermine the system in place".

On the foreign relations front, a country with this kind of regime/ideology is also imperialistic, xenophobic and has a clumsily concealed "messianic complex" about slowly changing the rest of the world - by diplomacy or force of arms - to their way of seeing and running things.

It is an oxymoron, as you say initially. "Liberal", in the popular idiom, is a lovely label that social permissives and activists like to use to describe themselves. Beyond a relaxed attitude to sexual mores, they have a deep authoritarian streak that seeks to regulate behaviour, speech and thought of the great unwashed to an often extraordinarily detailed level, to save them from themselves (of course).

Given marginal support openly politically correct (I.e. "Liberal") candidates achieve in elections, I'd say they would have to be anti-democratic as democracy is their enemy.
 
Fits the USA since 2001 like a well worn shoe.

I said on the previous page: No contemporary politics. Please stop. Take this to PolChat, we don't need this here.

Weren't plenty of "modernizing" dictators of this stripe? Like Ataturk or the Shah?

They, and perhaps also Tito (as mentioned earlier in this thread) could be rather accurate OTL examples. Maybe not entirely in the way I've been looking for, but they do tend to fit the overall idea. (Though one could also entertain the thought of them being "enlightened absolutists born two centuries late".)
 
I think such a regime would pay at least lip service to "democracy" or even have apparently democratic structures, but in fact limit the acceptable bounds of expression or deviation to fairly narrow confines. The repression might be more meta-political rather than a straight admission that whoever's being targeted threatens the stability of the regime.
 
I think such a regime would pay at least lip service to "democracy" or even have apparently democratic structures, but in fact limit the acceptable bounds of expression or deviation to fairly narrow confines. The repression might be more meta-political rather than a straight admission that whoever's being targeted threatens the stability of the regime.

Yes, pretty much.
 
Some day I'm going to write a constitution for an "anarchist" "dictatorship" that will defy all categorization! So far, all I've decided is that they, at least nominally, reject all violence, and have no official military. They do have a police force, but they are (officially) unarmed and adhere to a policy called "non-coercive containment." Opponents of the regime, of course, refer to it as "non-coercive coercion."

Now, before you cry ASB, remember there have been more dysfunctional systems of government that last lasted for longer! (e.g. Rome in the time of Caligula).
 
Should we get into the differences between what could be socially liberal authoritarianism versus the socially progressive variety?
 
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