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There is lefty overreaction/derangement to actual issues. Just because they would complain at anything doesn't mean everything they complain about is nothing.
An unreliable source crying wolf doesn't actually give you a lot of information on whether there is a wolf one way or the other.
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
American leftists and their transatlantic hangers-on have been warning everyone and their dogs against this since at least the days of G.W. Bush.
If that wolf eventually does come and eat us all, it'll be a welcome relief from the incessant and fraudulent and outright weaponized crying.
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Way to miss the whole point of the story. What enabled the wolf to come and eat everyone is exactly the fact that the boy lied so many times before. So the first step is to make really sure it's the wolf and only then cry, otherwise you are fucking it up for everyone. And if you are about to sound the alarm, you need to make really, really sure that it's indeed a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime, and not just an elected politician enacting policies you happen to dislike. You need to work extra hard if you already sounded multiple alarms which are on record as false. In fact, in this case it's better to just shut up and let somebody else, who doesn't have such a horrible record with alarm sounding, to do it.
American leftists falsely warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. That's the word you missed, "falsely". So your question is "how can you make somebody who lied many times before to sound believable this time?" And the answer is "you don't".
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They warned about it because they considered any possible policy that they didn't like authoritarian.
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Yes I recall the hysterical cries about how Romney was like a Nazi, going to put black people back in chains, etc. Endless warnings about the existential threat of Mitt Romney.
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You make the case persuasively.
Democrats cannot do this because Obama and Biden did their own, more authoritarian, things that are very similar to Trump's power grabs, and they just point to minor differences why this time its different, when it is not. The things often cited by his opponents are just not persuasive. Blowing up drug boats? Presidents have been blowing people up for decades at this point, Obama even added the "even people with American citizenship" flavor to that pie. Prosecutions that appear political? Biden is you #1, and in fact, Trump tried promulgating EOs in his first term that attempted to depoliticize the DOJ, particularly around its controversial methods of "Sue & Settle" wherein they would force people to payoff progressive NGOs in class actions. Biden, of course, reversed that. Tariffs? Nobody knows what they actually do. I dont like it, its most likely kinda bad. Serious people don't hang their hat there when shit like dishonorable discharges and court martials were handed out to soldiers over covid vaccines, killing a pipeline, attempting to cancel student loans, etc.
OTOH, Trump's pseudo-impoundment is much more timid. Firstly, I'm fairly confident that the Impoundment control act is unconstitutional under original meaning. The founders were basically penny pinchers, and they imagined that Congress's power over the executive was impeachment and refusing to fund him, not forcing him to fund things. In fact, the latter is impossible from a logical perspective because the executive cannot spend money that is not in the treasury, and if congress passed a bill in 1805 that said "the president shall give every American $100" that would have been impossible, so obviously he could have refused. Thus, again fairly obviously, all appropriations are discretionary because they cannot be guaranteed to be fulfilled.
And one of the other major complaints relates to ICE and the National Guard. What is the president to do, realistically, when local law enforcement is aiding and abetting persons impeding federal law enforcement. If the Iowa State police prevent FDA inspection of all Iowa corn fields would Barack Obama just give up? If they let rioters around the farms do the same? Obviously not. Trump has been much more measured than ole Barack would have been in such a situation, because in that situation the Governor of Iowa would have been in custody. Gavin Newsom amd Karen Bass are not in custody, thus the light touch of Trump is revealed.
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"American leftists" (I'm not sure exactly who you mean by this) warned everyone against this in completely bad faith while actively voting for and implementing the surveillance state required for any kind of authoritarian regime. Obama was out there drone-striking weddings and supporting the NSA's total warrantless surveillance system. Hell, he even turned it on candidate Trump in order to help out Hillary - and I'm not going to take people complaining about the executive being authoritarian seriously when they supported the use of intelligence agencies to surveil domestic political opposition and spuriously prosecute former opposition leaders. The left in no way has clean hands here.
I think that's uncharitable. I lived in Oregon at the time, where I also grew up, and I remember quite a few (though definitely not a majority!) of leftists quite upset at the drone-strike era Patriot Act stuff only getting worse under Obama. The problem here is that in general, privacy-minded people are small minorities in both parties (there's pretty notably only a single Rand Paul in the Senate, for example). In fact leftists were the ones most loud and annoying about hating the TSA stuff, as a smaller example, and leftists also the ones feeling more warm towards Snowden even though it also happened on Obama's watch, but again libertarians are a weird cross-axis group (almost a horseshoe theory thing)
J Edgar Hoover era stuff also doesn't map neatly onto modern political orientations, so I don't want to overemphasize it in that sense, but it's nevertheless worth noting that in that era the leftists also were eventually targeted the most by his apparatus (and which was far, far worse than the kiddie shit everyone gets worked up about regarding the like, two lower level dudes in the Trump campaign getting wiretapped. And I mean for heaven's sakes Nixon had people literally break into the Democratic headquarters). So maybe my more broad point is that I'm often confused by people being so accusatory about anti-authoritarians being too loud or annoying...
...because virtually the entire history of the United States is one giant concern about authoritarianism! Think what you will about the modern No Kings rallies, but the idea is super-duper-mega-American. Modern people are often very surprised at how passionately Americans often felt about the issue. Even now-beloved people like Lincoln were very, very often accused or suspected of being tyrants in disguise.
In that sense, it feels like a partisan psy-op that so many people are convinced that it's purely a partisan TDS thing alone. It's not. Sure, I absolutely and completely agree that Biden and Harris over-milked it as a talking point, to the detriment of their own ideas for governance. There is an element of chicken and egg too (is Trump's far more extreme second term a counter-reaction to alleged Democratic misdeeds, or was this his true character all along that Democrats were warning about? Even granting that binary presentation of the question, causality is not so easy to tease out). Yet still, saying it's all bad faith is a severe misattribution error.
I actually agree almost entirely with what you've said, save for the part where you accused my post of being uncharitable. I was one of the left wingers protesting against this sort of thing (though in a different country) - it's just that I took "American Leftists" to mean the DNC and actual politicians. Candidate Obama was actually really strong on all of these issues and made all the right statements... but then you look at President Obama and I don't feel like I'm being uncharitable at all when I saw that he and his campaign acted in bad faith.
I'm sorry for giving such a meager reply to such a nice post, but I think our actual disagreement here is largely on the basis of how we interpreted the term American Leftists. Hell, the one thing you brought up that I'd want to get angry and generate heat over was prefaced with "think what you will about them".
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They were crying wolf. Remember when he met with Kim Jong Un? It was supposed to be the start of WW3... And the rhetoric kept getting amped up after that.
You want to talk about authoritarianism, great! Can we talk about some of the things that happened during covid? Or are we just not supposed to talk about that... Or how about the overt lies about Biden's mental state? My point is that there are a lot of examples, and this has been the tactic for a while now.
How many times can someone get caught lying before people stop believing them? Until they own up to some of it, it's kind of on them for no one believing them.
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Alarm fatigue setting in wasn't a force of nature. It was created by the behavior of the American leftists observing how their alarm wasn't getting the alarmed response they wanted and then doubling down on the alarm in the apparent belief that the level of alarm of the response would be proportional to the level of alarm that they're raising. This, of course, led to a vicious cycle where they would keep doubling down on the alarm, which would further reduce their credibility, which would further lead to less alarmed responses, which would further lead to American leftists doubling down on the alarm, etc. As best as I can tell, we're still in this cycle.
I'm not sure how to break the cycle, but to prevent the cycle, presuming for the sake of argument that Trump is a dictator who had been slowly installing an authoritarian regime in the USA since his first presidency in 2017, I think preventing alarm fatigue by carefully calibrating the alarm raised to be exactly appropriate to Trump's behaviors would have done it, such that the odds of Trump succeeding in his quest to install authoritarianism in the USA with himself as dictator would be significantly lower now in this alternate universe. Unfortunately, we don't live in this alternate universe, but fortunately, we don't need to believe the presumption that we took for the sake of argument.
The alarm should be quieter because people didn't pay attention to it because it was too loud is an interesting way to say the "vicious cycle" was just a lot of rationalizing away the concerns.
The real problem isn't that leftists pulled the fire alarm, it's that your social media bubble didn't, your "epistemic bubble," from Nate Silver to Elon Musk, grew specifically around the narrative of the absence of fire.
Blaming the people who pulled the fire alarm for making it loud is one hell of a take.
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