Sure. It also helps to accurately characterize the place we are at today if you want people to take the estimation of trajectory seriously.
Part of the problem is that some part of the country has been calling (perhaps accurately) people fascist for years—hell, just last week people were hysterically chanting that Trump is Hitler at a dinner, which is ridiculous in the particulars (even if there are obvious similarities in mass dehumanization and use of indiscriminate state violence) while simultaneously making it harder for the rest of us to convince others to see those real similarities—while other parts look around and just see the same old country they always did, just with more insane people. If we cannot overcome the massive cultural differences that characterize our broad society and communicate well with each other, we have little hope to fix the underlying problems enabling these people to perpetrate evil.
But, I don't have much hope for this coming decade, frankly. We are all too addicted to finding comfort in our little cultural bubbles to collectively find the will to pull our heads out of the media machines that surround us and reassemble around some sense of the very real shared values that should bind us together: feeding ourselves and our families and finding healthy lives pursuing happiness.
The 'media machines' are pretty much all owned by oligarch allies of the administration.
I agree about not getting too hand-wavy, but it's tough... the trajectory is pretty bad even if we're not all the way down it so far. Maybe it "only" ends up being like Turkey or Hungary or Russia rather than countries in 1930ies era Europe. Still pretty bad though.
Again, I don't think this is as useful as you're implying (although I do agree in magnitude of severity). We aren't Turkey or Hungary or Russia, and the place we're going is uniquely American. Some people who read this and look around expecting to see Turkey or Hungary or Russia are going to conclude you're being unreasonable, and like it or not, they still have as much say as the rest of us and are worth trying to reach.
And yes, this does require we adjust our understanding of politics to disengage with many or most media sources. On the upside I suspect that one person making a concerted effort to reach out to those who see the world differently can have enormous impact. I myself have many friends who have voted differently than me, and effectively communicating my specific concerns with them is not as difficult as e.g. social media interactions might have you believe. It does, however, require meeting them where they are today.
USA is getting there. There is already a private gulag in Salvador for executing people and labor camps (prisons with enforced labor) in USA. Head of state slowly takes over legislative branch of government via some bullshit excuse, and that branch just silently folded under him. He is now eyeing judicial branch and pondering replacing judges with pocket ones. Also slowly taking over media if they stray too far from the party line.
Sounds like a good progress in only half a year. He'll get to troika's and stazi a bit later.
We may never go that direction. I'd guess our flavor of evil will be uniquely american—performative cruelty, benign neglect, feigned helplessness, sporadic senseless violence, and everyone for themselves. Trump (nor, I suspect, Vance, or Thiel behind him) strike me as very much like Mao or Stalin at all.
There is no political movement with any weight in this country remotely comparable to either the bolsheviks or the maoists. The closest we got to that in living memory was probably the black panthers and they were successfully (and bloodily, brutally) put down and scattered to the wind.
Now we are all trapped in highly personalized crazy houses, halls of mirrors, where nothing is real and our very views of reality are too warped for us to assemble into coherent organized political movements. The exception, perhaps, being capital itself, able to whip masses of people into hysteria or discombobulated confusion while rich vampires suck the life out of this country and leave us a schizo husk muttering to ourselves about free speech, the constitution, and cancel culture.
So excuse me if I roll my eyes anyone tries to compare anyone in this country to "left" movements around the world. We are too insane and don't have the spine to move that way.