For the record, Potemkin, like Dracos, got a bad rap from history.
Excerpted from the Ecospohia essay "Potemkin Nation", August 18, 2021:
One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove just discussed. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789 and the equally abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are two of the most famous examples, but there have been many others. In every case, what happened was that a government that had stopped solving its nation’s problems, and settled for trying to manage appearances instead, discovered the hard way that governments really do derive their power from the consent of the governed—and that this consent can be withdrawn very suddenly indeed.
When things start to crumble they can crumble fast.
This is exactly the point made by Vaclav Havel in "The Power of the Powerless" and by Timur Kuran in his writings on preference cascades. If interested see:
Lessons From Communist Eastern Europe On Virtue Signaling and Other ThingsAnd
Politics: I Am Told I Should Read Professor Timur Kuran To Understand Current American Politics
