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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
So not seeing a huge difference between liberal democracies and authoritarians.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.
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.
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.
"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?
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
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.
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.
isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).
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.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
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'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.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
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".
Actually, they do. If you have the wrong color, they take any reason as a pretext for action.
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.
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.