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.
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.
[dead]
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.