Not OP but of the same persuasion. Personally, I’m working on emigration plans. I don’t really want to live in an authoritarian state. And if I ever have kids, there’s no way I’d want to raise them in this environment.
I should point out, though, that authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily mean that QOL drops for the average person (if you’re not part of a targeted group). Many people live quite happily in Hungary, Turkey, Russia. Local government will chug along as before, stonks might still go up. But you have to internalize a certain resignation over things you can no longer change or talk about, unless you wish to become a dissident and put yourself in danger. I’m not brave enough for that, so I’m opting out of the whole thing.
You're not at all wrong, but you've successfully described my entire life living in the US as a citizen born here. For that whole time we've incarcerated an absurd percentage of the world's prison population. I watched the crackdown on the Seattle WTO protests and Rodney King on the evening news.
Perhaps the defining feature of the modern nation state is a monopoly on violence and power. Been that way my whole life.