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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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