I went the other way - 2016-2020 I truly believed the US was sliding into dictatorship, but the constant cries of "Nazi" and "fascism" followed by nothing of the sort taking place have completely desensitized me to these accusations. I've also taken time to listen to the opinions of supposed "fascists" like Jordan Peterson and found them reasonable even if I don't always agree with them. The vaguely dictatorial vaccine mandate policy pursued by the Democrats and the way the trucker convoy was handled didn't help either.
Now I read every comparison to the Nazis with a huge grain of salt and I'm "somewhat neutral" on Trump.
Out of curiosity, what would your rubicon[1] be in the current circumstance? I've found it useful to draw specific internal lines instead of trying to pull apart tit-for-tat reactions between two belligerents.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs
Yeah, and as of a month ago, I was in exactly the same position.
The extrajudicial enslavement of legal immigrants into foreign prisons, "crosses the rubicon". You cannot have presidential power operating in this way. It's not the immigrant part, it's the extrajudicial part. If trump has this power against anyone, he then has it against everyone.
Against that backdrop you have the targeting of law firms that have represented political opponents of the president; the attempt to totalise control of universities, and so on.
The whole thing is now tettering on the edge of what was previously just hysteria.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin for me has been seeing online how credulous the right has been about the government's propaganda. This tells me that the conditions for totalitarianism are here in the people -- a mass of people identify with trump, uncritically believe the propaganda. The dismantling of rival power centres in all of american society and government is taking place whilst a large number of people applaud.
People havent yet seen the transition that has taken place within the Trump government. Before the Musk programme, the deportations, etc. were all on the extreme-side of constitutional presidental power.
We are actually now past that, and his supporters are operating as if we're not. They don't realise they're applauding what they will severely come to regret. They think they're applauding the end of DEI, of elite power, of the stock-owning class. When in fact, it's pretty clear now, these are just the grievances benig used to establish unlimited intrusion of the presidency into all aspects of civil and political life.
The next mass protest will precipitate a crisis of the legitimacy of the federal monopoly on violence in the US. Unless some means can be deployed soon to constrain the president, america is in a very dangerous position.
> the attempt to totalise control of universities
What, exactly, do you think the left has been doing for the last ~10 years? The universities are basically captured by one party and their ideology and I suspect Trump's hamfisted attempts to counter that will only make a small dent.
Universities are at a point where getting a job often requires including a DEI statement in your CV[1]. In my opinion, this is not compatible with academic freedom.
The overall feeling I get is one of despair. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are fundamentally interested in "freedom". They just choose to nibble away at different corners of the constitution.
[1] https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...
The problem becomes when the president does it; and how he does it.
Since the president has vast formal and informal powers, any use of his power to achieve a totalisation of his ideology into society is "alarms going off territory".
When he has taken down the law firms, suspended the licenes of the media companies, sequestered the national guard against protestors, and deported political opponents --- at that stage, what will be left to protect you?
The president, as one man, cannot wield the full power of governmenrt -- this is tyranny. And, esp. cannot weild it against civil society, this is totalitarianism.
>Universities are at a point where getting a job often requires including a DEI statement in your CV[1]. In my opinion, this is not compatible with academic freedom.
Why?
>The universities are basically captured by one party and their ideology and I suspect Trump's hamfisted attempts to counter that will only make a small dent
How were they captured? What evidence do you have?
>Democrats nor the Republicans are fundamentally interested in "freedom".
Which one is less interested in freedom?
>What, exactly, do you think the left has been doing for the last ~10 years?
Which single person is "the Left" here? You're basically proposing establishing a personalist dictatorship to combat a bureaucratic para-party. Your solution to authoritarianism is intensified authoritarianism.
The Nazi / Hitler comparison was always a poor fit, in my view. But what most people were actually saying was just "this person does not care about the laws and values that keep our government from being a tyranny".
And what happened is like Y2K: People who recognized the risks successfully worked to mitigate the worst of them. It's not really surprising, but it is frustrating, that just like with Y2K, many people thus concluded that it was not necessary to mitigate the risks.
For many people, mitigating risks provides evidence that there were never any risks in the first place. (You can probably think of more examples of this.)
But unfortunately, people were correct when they identified that Trump's character combined with increasing control over one of the two political parties could pose a that to our system. And now it's harder to mitigate the problem, because the control over the party has advanced significantly further.
The thing with the US Presidency is that in the first term, you have to be at least somewhat motivated to doing things that could get you a second term...
The second term rolls around, and now you can do whatever you like, because you're done at the end of that. At least in theory.
Suppose they are not Nazis nor fascists, but mere authoritarians like Putin. Does that make it any better?
I grew up in Russia at the time when we had a brief stint with democracy. I remember how people elected Putin because he was supposed to fix everything that was wrong, and how they laughed at those of us who said that it would be a dictatorship before soon.
Incidentally, I rolled my eyes whenever people called fascism/Nazism during 2016-2020.
There was some political fuckery, but nothing out of the ordinary for a populist srong man type politician.
What happened then is definitely not what is happening now.