[LeoPanthera]

Republicans are not on the side of liberty and privacy. So emphasizing that he's a republican makes the case even more strongly.

You can argue that this shouldn't be about politics, but how many years of living under an authoritarian government do you need?

Everything is about politics now.

[tedggh]

I grew up under an authoritarian government. The US is not an authoritarian government.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should.

We're a backsliding democracy, and risk backsliding into fully consolidated autocracy, unless we mount effective resistance.

[tedggh]

But this isn’t new. Government overreach has been a long recurring pattern throughout US history literally since we were born as a country. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, et al, exercised powers and authoritarian tactics that shocked their contemporaries just as much as Trump is doing today. Not using history as an excuse, just to point out that this is a feature of US politics not a bug. We have managed to remain a free society for 250 years despite all the horrible, anti democratic sometimes barbaric things our leaders did, because 1) every generation got organized to defend civil liberties and 2) our “system” was cynically and explicitly engineered with competing centers of power, among other things, under the assumption that every single leader would eventually try to grab power.

[SmirkingRevenge]

Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine".

I don't think things are working as intended, even if they've sort of worked by accident so far.

I think it's better to look at more contemporary backsliding democracies and fascist regimes from the 20th century onward to really understand our trajectory. Russia (Putin), Hungary (Orban), India (Modi), Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco), etc.

The American Right has trying to Orbanify the country by explicitly copying his model. Hungary was able to eventually oust him, dealing a blow to that whole project, but time will tell whether they will be able to keep him and his allies out for good. Our wanna-be Orbans are still there.

The corruption we're seeing in the Trump admin has no precedent in American history, and is the kind of large scale open corruption only seen in autocratic regimes or failed states.

The founders envisioned that branches would jealously guard their power, but congress right now is essentially a duma. The judiciary is still mostly standing, but the Trump admin is defying court orders at an alarming rate, and the longer these guys hold power, the more they will be able to work on the courts.