> unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
Sure; I think his point was that people much less likely to even notice/acknowledge the slide towards authoritarianism when their own individual experience isn't changing much. Not that it changes authoritarianism's moral standing.
There isn't an "authoritarian bit", it's not binary. When I was young the idea that your own computer would spy on you, or the one in your phone, or in your car? That was a William Gibson novel, wiretaps happened to mob bosses, you didn't worry about it happening to you as part of a dragnet. Security camera? You mean in a bank right?
Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off from chasing drug dealers and terrorists and came within an inch of being split up if it didn't back the fuck off on strangling the web. Financial fraud on Wall St or in the boardroom? Skilling, Fastow, Ebers. Hard prison time. Clinton lied about chasing skirt in the office, ended his career, real consequences.
Even once the Internet was becoming common, the idea that something typed into it might get you fired? Preposterous!
I don't know what being a "western liberal" government means to you, but this thing where all the walls have ears and billionaires do fucking anything they want and no scandal can damage a politician and all the surveilance and technology is an ever-tightening noose and everything is on a permanent record?
Sounds pretty damned Soviet to me.
I haven't seen anything more authoritarian than the fact that, when you travel, someone will open your suitcase, rifle through your stuff, then close it again, and maybe leave you a little "you are being watched" note, just to make sure you know you shouldn't try anything funny.
What sounds pretty damned Soviet is people having to carry their papers around with them in case the gestapo or ICE stop them.
And the papers don't matter because the brownshirts signed up to crack skulls, not check paperwork
I think we’re in violent agreement about what is bad and what we should fight for.
My point is that there is a difference and throwing your hands up and saying everywhere is bad obscures what is being lost and how democracies allow nonviolent ways to seize it back.
Okay but no scandal can damage a politician because you the American people are currently choosing to let that be the case.
Same with the billionaires.
The entire problem gets painted as "other" but it's you: you're actually promulgating it by your very choice of language here!
I'm not saying that the decline of Enlightenment values and the rise of crony-nepo-central-committee surveilance nightmare is "other", I'm saying it is indifferent to the stated political system, it's about the de facto political system no matter what you call it.
What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.
And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
You could explain any authoritarian regime this way, but how much of what we believe and do is some kind of pure, unconditioned-by-our-surroundings choice?
Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant.
This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.
The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.
There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
Authoritarianism is not a left v right thing, and failing to recognize this is a big part of the problem.
The left is completely comfortable with censorship. It is completely comfortable with DEI statements being required for college admissions or with establishing issues related to gender or race discourse that the population doesn't agree on as a matter of law.
A rule doesn't stop being authoritarian just because you agree with what is being pushed. Nor does it stop being authoritarian when it doesn't come explicitly from the government. I do believe the right has worse intentions on these matters, but the left has so, so, so much more power that it's absurd to even try to draw a comparison. The idea of college requiring statements aligning with right-wing values being tolerated in any way, shape or form for example is just unthinkable.
The left has… vastly less power than the right, especially the christian right, because the right has money.
Money? More money than Hollywood? California? Both of which lean left pretty hard? It's not 1980 anymore.
"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
People who are afraid of the "left authoritarians" seem to think that you can just sum up human history and cherry pick some great "left-branded" authoritarian and equate that to todays.
You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.
It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
Sorry but I can't take this seriously. I've given more than enough contemporary examples, if you want to dismiss the whole of it and pretend nothing makes sense, that's a choice and I can't help you.
All your examples were social movements that did nothing or virtue signaling from massive corporations owned by right wing billionaires.
I’m not gonna convince you of a thing. Who’s your favorite youtuber?
What do you think leftist means? I think we can divide it loosely into social and economic elements, and while aspects of social leftism have (sort of) made serious advancements in the last 50 or so years, the US has become more economically right over that same period. We’ve deregulated and allowed vast consolidation among corporations and wealth and income inequality have exploded. Leftists typically share many opinions with socialists economically, and typically don’t get along with the growing class of the uber-wealthy (they want to take their money). They don’t get along with huge companies so they don’t get campaign funding from them. The democrats are centrists with some progressive social policies (because they need to be to get money). They hardly ever do useful leftist things like tax corporations or the wealthy. Leftists have been screaming about palestine, dems hardly give it a peep and some are proudly, openly zionist.
> Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
I’m baffled by your detachment. All three branches of the US government. Fox news for the olds. Joe rogan, the largest podcast I think, is moderate and constantly brings on righties. The corporations that make all our stuff and heavily influence our government aren’t exactly socialists. Academia might be the least right wing institution I can think of, and it’s a glorified jobs training program that rakes in money and holds enormous investment portfolios. If left means not lynching gays then sure, but otherwise our society is quite right wing in the ways that matter. Do you think a corporation putting up a pride flag for a month to make more money makes them leftists?
>Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
>"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
Frankly, do you care about any issues that matter? Literally issues made of matter. Point me to material shit that affects lots of people. I can point at plenty of real, material issues that are produced and sustained by right wing economic and social policy. Homelessness, disproportionate incarceration, high recidivism, housing costs, soon power costs from datacenters, shit pay, pay not tracking productivity gains, shit infrastructure, tons of drug overdoses etc.
>Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right?
Maga?
>You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Yeah they do it out of the kindness of their fucking hearts right? I bet uber cares a ton about the minorities while they pay shit, deny you benefits, and raise prices.
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The current difference in the US context is bureaucratic authoritarianism vs autocratic authoritarianism. They're both authoritarian, and they're both oppressive and stifling. But their actual specific dynamics/mechanisms/effects can be quite different. For example autocratic authoritarianism has a much higher variance (for better and for worse) - look at the current autocrat in the White House coming up with idiotic ideas by the week/month, It's done in the name of unchaining greatness, and it would be nice if that were indeed the outcome. But in reality the chaos from the unrestrained terrible ideas is actually quite stifling. Whereas bureaucratic authoritarianism is more of a beige tyranny of the mediocre, which creates a drag on greatness, but at least provides a stable foundation for building on (as long as you can outrun the bureaucrats)
(disclaimer: I've gotten more conservative as I've gotten older. It will happen to you, too)
Yeah sure, but todays market is monopolized by the right.
The bogeyman of authoritarian left is just amusing.
Well, if you're in this category in the US (equivalent is being on some kind of arbitrary list that you're not allowed to see and have no way to appeal) your life will also be horrible.
The US being imperfect, or currently on an authoritarian swing, in no way makes it equivalent to countries that are all-in on authoritarianism. The US is still among the very best places in the world to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble.
I think you are greatly underestimating how hard it has been, historically, in the US, to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble. Note that in the Cold War, many people, especially minorities, were indefinitely imprisoned with show trials (e.g. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier) or extrajudicially killed (Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Marsha P. Johnson, the victims of the MOVE bombing) because of being politically active.
Let's not perfect be the enemy of good. OP is making a relative judgement, not an absolute one. And in authoritarian countries, figures like Jack Ma are dissappeared for far less, while radicals like you mention are just shot and silenced. You are not going to be allowed to build a alternative power structure that can challenge authority regardless if your views are valid or not.
Might be a hard metric for some people to confront, but the USA is one the least racist countries in the world. The gridlock in many ways is strongest signal of excessive plurality and minoritarianism (of marginalized groups) than of single power groups unilaterally controlling things.
Jack Ma was not, in fact, disappeared, though? He lay low for several months while being investigated for financial crimes. He is still the largest stakeholder in Alibaba, and still has a net worth around $27B. It's not even like his assets were frozen.
Disappearing for 6 months immediately after making a controversial speech about the financial system dosen't look good to investors. And we all know it's because of his speech, not because of "financial" crimes when the Ant Group is heavily works with the CCP given the scale of its activities.
How is US being a good place to be at if you are in legal trouble? It is super expensive, trial penalty is huge so you are severely motivated to sign plea deal and not push it. The punishments are huge and incarceration rates among highest in the world. Protections seems to be largely theoretical - technically you have them, practically they do not do much but make you pay more money.
"It's super expensive" is still different from "you disappear". Yes, the US system is flawed, but the difference really matters.
People have started being disappeared by ICE. They've been kidnapped off the streets with no access to a lawyer until after. The difference does matter, but it seems we're uncomfortably close to there now.
Yes and this makes the US just not an example of liberal democracy anymore, so you can't use it as an example for "the West" when using very recent examples.
But it is not "The US is still among the very best places in the world"
And the incidence of 'being in legal trouble in USA' vs 'being disappeared in BAD COUNTRY XXX' is quite different, for almost all bad countries.
Despite the noted slide, it feels accurate. I, for one, would not want to move back to EU despite some QoL notables. At this time, it is still hard to find a better spot for a random nobody ( when you have money and/or power, 'where you can live well' calculus changes ).
I mean I live in the US and people are getting persecuted right now for being a minority, being politically active, or being in legal trouble.
So not seeing a huge difference between liberal democracies and authoritarians.
Yes, because we’re sliding into authoritarianism and we need to criticize and correct course
Sliding in? Your head of state declared themselves to be a dictator, declared the end of the rule of law, and ignores the constitution. They openly take bribes without consequences. They, or their handlers, unilaterally decide on the application of justice and the progress of investigations. They unilaterally control international relations (eg tariffs) without oversight. They put armed military on the streets. They have taken action to prevent ongoing democratic elections.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
if mid-term elections and the next presidential election are cancelled then i'll call it authoritarian. Until then you're just trolling.
Trolling? They were stating facts.
We might get a peak much sooner if the supreme court shoots down his tariffs.
So Putin isn't authoritarian because he stages elections. And you require two _cancelled_ elections before declaring someone authoritarian?
Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjev2j70v19o
Perhaps the US is no longer a liberal democracy?
Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today, with people getting arrested for their political views instead of just deported. not to mention segregation and such.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today,
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
>Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt
"Eventually discarded when no longer useful" would be a more accurate phrasing. The witch hunts continued under other schemes and for other targets.
>As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
Well, isn't that the case with every government?
it was a good witch hunt. we very much almost lost the Cold War to the soviets. the US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR. The majority of intellectuals glazed the Soviet Union.
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
Not witch hunts.
> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
> Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular.
isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?
Democracy? Yes. Liberal democracy? No.
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Or popularity rather.
Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.
I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
Yes they are trying to change the laws to be more oppressive which I don't like, but at least they aren't doing that illegally.
I feel the EU level is not very democratic since its more removed from voters, similar to the US federal level, I see the same kinds of problems in both. As long as the EU doesn't get the same level of power as the US federals I am happy though since local lawmakers can fix things.
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Yes, never happened under Biden. Completely new and unheard of.
I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference. Just imagine the difference in the level of fear that you would feel about 1) getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power, vs. 2) getting up in a public square in Russia and yelling that Putin is a terrible person who should be removed from power.
> getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power
I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with different circumstances than yours. At least to me, it seems pretty likely that if a country were to slide into authoritarianism, not everyone would feel the effects equally all at once, so the fact that you haven't felt a change in your level of concern about this doesn't necessarily mean that a shift isn't happening.
To be clear, I'm definitively not saying that it's impossible for anyone to know whether it's happening or not because we can't know the experience of literally everyone, or that I'm 100% positive what we're experiencing will end up in undeniable strict authoritarianism for everyone. My point is that I do think there's been a genuine shift in how safe a large number of people feel from persecution in the past year and a half that's based on things happening to them or people in similar circumstances to them. It's certainly possible that I'm in a bubble where I'm associating with a lot more people than average who have these concerns, but the reverse is equally true for someone who hasn't been noticing these things, and I do think there's sufficient evidence that the concerns are real. The implicit assumption that everyone feels equally comfortable in their rights protecting them just isn't something that seems accurate right now.
> I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now.
don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).
If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace.
I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.
And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.
That distinction really matters.
A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
> It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
In the 90's, DARE got kids to narc on their parents for drug related crimes. You can discount that as being drug related and oh just don't do drugs, but let's not pretend you're not gonna get reported to the unsecret police called the DEA or the FBI if it would be sufficiently to your friends and family's benefit.
Have you heard of what ICE has been doing for the last six months? And that Trump has militarized Washington DC?
Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions, and I would have very little to no fear about going to Washington DC right now, standing up on a podium, and yelling that Trump sucks while there are 100 National Guardsmen across the street from me.
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
See Mahmoud Khalil's case. They're trying to and would continue to have done so if they weren't blocked. What is there stopping them from changing the rules and doing it again?
> See Mahmoud Khalil's case
they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.
I disagree with what has been done in the Mahmoud Khalil matter. But it is a far distance between that on the one hand and what happens in places like Russia on the other.
I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of Trump. My point is that there is a huge difference in the level of authoritarianism between today's US and what I consider to be actual authoritarian countries. Today's US is one of the freest countries on the entire planet. We should keep it that way. I don't see what good it does to act as if today's US is anywhere close to actual authoritarian countries.
Have you decided what your personal red line is after which you would conclude that we've entered an authoritarian regime? Have we crossed the neofascist Rubicon yet? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs
The distance is closing, it's already closer than many Americans would have considered possible. How close does it need to get before we should be concerned?
Blacks were once slaves. Women couldn't vote. Japanese-Americans were put in camps. Worker strikes were met with guards killing people. Rousevelt had amassed all kinds of extra executive powers and control of all aspects of government that would seem over the top excessive before him.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
Is it really worse than McCarthyism era? I feel that time was much worse than currently.
I'm already somewhat concerned. I've been concerned since long before Trump. And Trump has added some new concerns. For example, with that strike against the Venezualan boat today. But that doesn't mean that I believe that we're anywhere actually close to it. Those are two separate questions.
People really should try to understand that if someone says "I think that the US is vastly freer than Russia", it does not mean "I think that there is no reason for concern" or "I think that the US is going in a good direction".
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions.
Actually, they do. If you have the wrong color, they take any reason as a pretext for action.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
Not yet? Currently, they are only imprisoning and deporting legal permanent residents and people on student visas for their political opinions. But denaturalization is clearly on the table.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.
I'm happy for you as a privileged US citizen, enjoying your privilege as someone who's at least currently on the right side of the line, but anyone who's a legal immigrant doesn't feel anywhere near the same degree of security that you do.
The administration recently announced that it will review the visas of 55 million immigrants, and factors like political opinion are on the table when it comes to their choice of who to go after.
"First They Came"[1] was written to try to wake up people like you, whose privilege blinded them to the significance of the events around them. You need to start paying attention before you lose the country you thought you knew.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
Go do it then. See if you can get a permit in DC right now to have a rally and shout that Trump sucks. If you can, try actually doing it. You will not be doing it for very long until some excuse is made to stop you and punish you.
yet.
right now they are "deporting" (without due process it's kidnapping/trafficking) in order of skin colour. they will work their way down towards you.
It's exactly these comments the OP is talking about. This is what they are trying to do, what they said they would do, and it's the kind of authoritarian shit that Trump has publicly praised and envied Putin for.
Liberal in words. If you don't follow the rules you are expelled anyway. There is a reason why 99% of all politicians and CEOs are coming from the same universities and bubbles.
In certain things it can be better.
Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.
And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.
And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
Prevalence of masked gangs (ostensibly a Gestapo, but without uniform or id) kidnapping people in government buildings without police intervening appears (as an outside observer) to be ~100% higher than under recent USA administrations.
Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Of course it didn't happen as much, but the fact that we already had active black sites and people getting pulled off the streets and abused at all paved the way towards apathy about its expansion now. If city or state police forces can do such things to random citizens for decades before now, why would we expect federal agencies under the direction of the president and his cabinet to not be able to get away with it too?
>Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?
As for your strawman:
--
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/
--
No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).
But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
Yes, due process is important. Habeus corpus is important. Rule of law is a cornerstone of democracy. People acting for the state, such as border police, should act lawfully; they should identify themselves, wear the proper uniform, get the proper warrants and so on.
Why? Because you're breaching innocent peoples rights and removing their ability to get justice.
The fact that prior administrations did this on a large scale without the need to have gangs of thugs shows that the lawlessness of the administration is unnecessary to meet the ends of managing immigration.
Could you explain why you consider this a strawman? It sounds like you're onboard with the dismantling of USA democracy?
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We've banned this account for abusing HN for political, ideological, and religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>In china, there is a murder wagon with a crematory. Nobody ever finds you..
In China there are portable vans to serve as execution places for executions that are ordered by court - in lieu of having special buildings. No crematory and no 'nobody finds you' nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van
Still bad, but same for the "land of the free" that still has and carries the death penalty (for comparison, no EU or European country has it).
Right, other places also have evil people in charge and lack of rule of law. Agreed.
This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time".
I'm unmoved by the argument. If the choice comes down between "the trains run on time" and "I can arbitrarily imprisons for my speech", I'd happily live with trains that don't run on time.
>This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time"
No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".
Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.
That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
Setup a site to stream Pixar's latest movie, or post some CSAM, and see if you don't get imprisoned. It's not like totally arbitrary, just don't criticize dear leader. Where the US is though, is that Trump wants to make criticizing him online a crime. We know this is true because of the actions taken by him against people who are immigrants who have been critical of him online. So I'll let a tiny bit of doom out, but he way the US is headed, the trains won't run on time and you can't run your mouth about shit the people in power don't like as well.
Yes, I agree