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It’s why the first move of the administration was to replace senior FBI and military leaders with cronies. To hold the pendulum back.
They absolutely know there will eventually be consequences (by default), which is why they work so hard to throw other people under the bus and make a giant confusing mess of things. To try to avoid them.
I do not think it is. The story of the US contains all those things. And just as the story of the US contains Abu Ghraib, it also contains functioning courts sending Abu Ghraib perpetrators to jail. You can call it the permanent struggle between good and evil. There is no country in the world without evil. But there is a difference between evil being present and evil dominating. When functioning courts are dismantled, the perpetrators rewarded, you are forbidden to even talk about it, and there is no recourse left, it will be different. People who have not lived through a totalitarian regime sometimes miss that distinction. I also grew up in a communist Czechoslovakia, and I did not idolize the US because I was blind to the bad parts. I idolized it because you had evil, but not evil fully controlling the game. Even now, you can still simply move out of the US. Sure, there might be some bureaucratic hurdles, but you can fly away on a plane - your only way out is not to try to crawl under barbed wire and risk getting shot.
I will be honest - when people say something like “it’s all the same, Russia, the US, all are bad”, I think to myself... óóóh, you have no idea what you are talking about. Unfortunately, the current US is going in that direction, so you might find out. Not that I wish that on anyone.
And besides, "One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc" is an essential part of why the working class had a good quality of life in the decades following WW2, particularly white people.
It's easy to build up a good lifestyle when you exploit foreign countries for resources and outsource your labor to poor people across the world because you're not the one paying the bill. But how do you sustain that when those people start demanding the same quality of life that you have? You don't, as we're seeing now.
That's quite an oversimplification of the prosperity of the US middle class, particularly given most of the gains happened prior to globalization.