Dude. What? "Time-honored"? C'mon. You're training to become an economist and the best you can do is glib comments that don't bother to question why this is a pattern that perhaps can be tied to economics or other social sciences?

You can't honestly think that these people are simpletons who just happened to "end up" in power and that they alone are responsible for the circumstances that are now unfolding. Oh, no doubt they played their roles and did at a minimum, their fair share of awfulness but Genghis Khan didn't alter the course of history on his own, you know what I mean?

That governments overreact to peaceful protest time and again is terrible, but it is also worth puzzling out. Clearly, at least some of the people in those governments are very capable people and certainly capable of high level thought and discourse. By reducing them to mere idiots is to make light of what they've done. It's a much greater offense to purposefully engineer a situation where people then believe that they've accumulated enough wealth and power through illegitimate means to simply crush any opposition that rears its head, than for a fool to act without understanding any of the stakes.

Clearly, these are people who were interested in becoming powerful and I have no doubt that they studied history and the history of powerful figures. There is something about that that creates monsters. Finding out what that is, is essential for the progress of human governance.

We already know how to deal with stupid.