In the novel Persepolis Rising, author James S.A. Corey takes the opportunity to do precisely this, when one character in the book endorses a totalitarian government because parliamentary processes can become bogged down and stuck in discussions. Impatient with such legislative processes and eager for quick and decisive action, the character says, "There has to be a way to come to a final decision."
In response, the interlocutor offers this epigram:
No, there doesn't. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It's messy and undignified, but it's when we're at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there's just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.
James S.A. Corey, which is actually a nom de plume for a two-man writing team, offers an analogue to Winston Churchill’s famous quote:
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
Churchill spoke in 1947; Corey wrote in 2017. The sentiment holds. People who are otherwise reasonable and rational can be seduced into totalitarianism in several different ways; one of them is the simple desire to see things done in an orderly way paired with a distaste for squabbling chaos. Thus it is that totalitarianism sometimes sneaks in under the disguise of being scientific or technically proficient: “let the experts decide.”
But the price of order achieved by means of dictatorship is too high.
By placing the word “final” into mouth of the character who advocates totalitarianism, Corey alludes to Hitler’s National Socialism and its Endlösung — the “final solution.” The word Nazi is simply an abbreviation for the German phrase for “National Socialism.”
As a fiction author not constrained by the academic’s duty to insert all manner of qualifications and cite relevant antecedents, Corey is able to move on with his plot after briefly reminding the reader of a truism about freely elected representative bodies, and of the need to patiently endure annoying and even painful political processes: the alternative is far worse.
