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With respect, and since I generally enjoy reading what you have to say, I don’t think this is a very good take. In fact, it seems more accurately to be a description of how a government will always act with private organizations: it will, in one way or another, become influenced by them or try to tell them what to do. Only in rare circumstances can they be persuaded to leave one another alone.
This is because the government in question is not totalitarian; that is, society is ordered in some manner by organizations that are outside of the government. Nominally their spheres of influence do not overlap, but practically, they almost always do. This problem gets worse the more powerful the private organizations get, and the more they disconnect from either the implicit organization of the government or the roots of its power. In cases where the government and organizations see eye to eye with one another and with the power base, disagreements can be managed with a simple request or negotiation. When they cannot, the government will try to coerce the organizations, and the organizations will try to subvert the government. These are nothing more than the straight-line solutions to the inevitable conflicts which arise, much in the same vein as war.
Of course, it is possible to define areas of responsibility and depend on the good character of leaders on both sides of the divide, which results in a better society. But I won’t beat on the drum of culture this very second.
So what characterizes an authoritarian government, or organization? Simply that people low on the totem pole have few avenues for independent action or redress. This has a very limited relationship to collusion between private and public parties; correlation, not identity. (The army has always been authoritarian, even in very free societies.)
Now, what I think is really wrong with your post is that it sparks a comparison with the Obama presidency, like an allergic reaction. So instead of talking about Trump, now this forum is back to relitigating how awful Hillary was. That’s a bad thing. We shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of petty chuddery over past resentments. I don’t think this was intentional, but it’s a pretty bad outcome regardless.
Moreover, on the logical front, it’s temporally fraught. This is responding to Trump 2, but TDS began before Trump was even inaugurated, before he was even elected. And - I’m not sure about everyone else, but TDS feels a lot calmer this time around, people talk about the guy less. So this doesn’t work as an explanation.
If we’re just talking TDS, the most charitable explanation has to include the fact that it is clearly deranged, that its worst predictions have not come true. The basic claims, back from 2016, are that Trump would set himself up as dictator (didn’t happen, made a half-baked attempt that actually set much of the country firmly against him, and he’s looking too old for a second shot now), and that he was a pawn of Russia (in reality he’s just a little naive about Putin, like some other right-wingers are, but hasn’t conceded anything major). The evidence then was weak, but the certainty was absolute. I believe it to have been a simple translation of the underlying sentiment of shock when Trump won. It meant that victory in elections was not assured, when all their information had told them it was. The support for Trump had come from somewhere totally illegible, which is why they could not foresee it. These emotions should rightly have been translated into a new awareness, a new zeitgeist, in which the challenges of America under globalization took the forefront, where previously the meaning-making institutions of left and right had made their existence impossible (to understand). But this was too much for almost anyone to handle. Instead, the emotions got repressed into insane but still easier to manage forms: it’s not Americans, it’s Russians; also this elected official is undemocratic and authoritarian. Now it’s safe. The move on the right, FWIW, was more cynical: “oh, these are the new wacky Christians, just say the right things and they won’t pay attention to the more complicated parts of policy, like tax breaks.” And, from what I can tell, they were totally right, so one point to them.
Anyway, people have had a lot more time to digest, and developments under Biden have made the anti-globalist complaints way more legible, so there’s less TDS this time. And the current complaints are about what he IS DOING (usually: playing really fast and loose with the law; ignoring second-order consequences), and while these are sometimes factually a little shaky, they’re not nearly as crazy as hypothesizing wildly about what he MIGHT DO. So I’m not sure I’d describe it as a major force in America any longer, if that means anything.
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