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I recently came across this video from the NYT. It is titled: "We're experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the U.S."
Not to boo my outgroup too much here (and that's not the point of this), but holy shit this video is bonkers. The logical jumps these people are making, their inability to understand or recognize that they are explicitly not living in a fascist dictatorship when they work for the largest newspaper in the country publishing content about how the leader of the country is a giant fascist. This video is frightening to me for the following reason:
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
These people (not necessarily the ones in the video, but the ones who might watch this type of video earnestly) seem convinced that we are living in a society which is comparable in some way to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
I guess I have to stop myself here to check my biases: are we? Just to look at the most obvious thing here, the press, the answer is unequivocally: no, or perhaps even "fuck no, lol".
Or the military? It seems like we have the most powerful military on earth, and are essentially not using it at all.
As far as ICE: ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense, and the response was that the Federal Government largely pulled out of the area (Minnesota) where they were deployed. This is while local residents are doing things like stalking federal law enforcement, setting up various checkpoints, and delaying "rapid response forces" to track their movements.
Would Hitler have tolerated this? Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
So deprogramming: has there been any serious discussion about what this will look like? It's been on my mind for a little over a year now. Here was the positive realization I had about it: it's not necessary. The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs. This is not part of a larger system of beliefs that all build on top of one another. These ideas are mostly just sitting on their own. They are a collection, not a system.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
Realistically this was a happy realization to me. Am I wrong to think this?
It seems to be almost a Reddit left wing consensus that the year is 1933 and you should do whatever you would have done then if you consider yourself a good person. It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in. I've never seen it in my whole life in any political domain.
The next election. That's all it's going to take. A liberal candidate will win and everybody will think they saved the world by showing up to vote (but won't ever think they were overreacting by calling the US a fascist state).
Dismantling the idea won't happen before the election, it can't happen before Trump is gone. Because Trump is literally Hitler, or at least trying to be. There can't be catharsis until he is gone and the threat is over. Don't let your guard down!
I'm just so dismayed at how the left is handling the current situation I just can't read anything online anymore. I actually logged back in here for the first time in years to get away from every subreddit I love becoming a home to normies wigging out. Even fucking movie review channels that have never said a political word in their lives had emergency panic threads stickied in their subreddits.
You are being deliberately obtuse here. A man who tried to stay in office after losing the 2020 election including (definitely) by sending goons to the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the results and (probably) by meeting with generals to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe was re-elected in 2024, as the candidate of a party which has sought to eject the people who allowed Biden to assume office. The goons sent to the Capitol got out of hand and the resulting riot meant that 2020 was only the 2nd election since the Founding when the votes of the electors could not be counted on the appointed day*. He has just ordered federal law enforcement to seize Georgia's voting records based on (if you take his public statements literally) an obviously false theory that Italian satellites were used to alter the results or (if you take his public statements seriously but not literally) a gish gallop of fraud allegations that were adjudicated false at the time. His supporters online are currently boasting about how he is going to get a kidnapped foreign head of state to falsely confess to rigging the 2020 election.
People think Trump is uniquely dangerous to American democracy because Trump speaks and acts like a man who is uniquely dangerous to American democracy.
For the usual thermostatic reasons, I think a mainstream Democrat will be on the ballot in 2028 and will probably get more valid votes than the Republican in states representing a majority of the electoral college. But to shut down the "this is 1933" memeplex they would have to be allowed to assume office without a 2020-style attempt to prevent certification of the result. Given that Trump has, with the co-operation of the MAGA movement in the country, successfully turned "2020 was rigged and Democrats routinely rig elections" into a loyalty test for Republicans, the chance of this happening is minimal.
* The other case being Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The 1800 election didn't elect a President in a timely fashion, but the delay was in the House after the electoral college vote was tied.
Has Trump shown any real inclination at all to push for a third term? Whilst I'm sure there'll be efforts on the back end of this electoral cycle in order to 'secure the integrity of the 2028 election' that will inevitably be heavily criticized by Democrats I'm pretty skeptical if anything in the realm of the 2020 election happens since it'd ostensibly be Vance running the show.
He's selling Trump 2028 merchandise in the official White House gift shop. Administration staffers don't feel able to say "Of course Trump won't run in 2028 - the constitution limits presidents to two terms" on the record, because Trump wouldn't like it.
Trump is deliberately maintaining strategic ambiguity about whether he will run for a third term. (Even if he wants to, he won't, because age is catching up with him). That is a good reason for people who care about the survival of American democracy to be worried.
In addition, Vance running the show doesn't fix the problem if Vance is also committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy. And Vance was chosen because he is, indeed, committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy.
Dammit, stop making me like him! I don't want to like him! I disapprove of him! He's a vulgarian and worse!
But he has a sense of humour in contrast to the wokescolds (imagine President Kamala's merch - a fake plastic cocoanut tree?) and makes me laugh even when I don't want to.
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He's literally just trolling. One time he was meeting with Dem congressional leadership and offered them the hats.
If true it makes a difference but not that much of one. It's a divisive strategy that is contemptuous of democracy and makes him an enemy of democracy.
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Which is also what you would do if you really were planning to run for a third term and trying to normalise the idea.
If anyone who wasn't Trump was selling official merch with "Candidate Year" on it, you would say they were running.
Nothing about Trump running again is credible. He has none of the institutional support required to take such a big step, he's already old as hell and would be considerably older by the time it is relevant.
Such a sweeping thing for the most widely criticized president of all time would require things like the military being on board and they simply are not and there is no credible path for them to become so.
It makes no sense.
Thinking it is likely (regardless of his interest or lack) is a sign that he's broken your brain and you need to take a step back and think about actual motivations, priors, and so on.
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You are the kind of person Trump is trolling.
It isn't bad to be annoyed by stupid shit. If someone who is your ideological foe says stupid shit for malign reasons you probably get irritated too, whether they're trolling or not, especially if they are very powerful. Be honest with yourself.
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Greenland was joking until it wasn't. Gaza was joking (really funny joking, actually) until it wasn't. Since the patterns were the same, Canada and Panama were likely not joking either.
It's the same thing I've noticed /pol/ or even certain communists on Discord do. Make "jokes" targeted in a certain direction. If you press on it at all, it's announced that it's just a joke. It's really boundary pushing, and if circumstances ever became more favorable, you'd find that the sentiments were real.
After Greenland, I am pretty tired of the "just trolling" defense. If he is trolling, it's fundamentally indistinguishable from when he is not trolling. He's lost all right to be trusted about whether he's "trolling" or not. I'm not even entirely opposed to getting Greenland, or other expansions, but in hindsight, it obviously was not just jokes, and I hate the lies being peddled about that.
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@aldomilyar is the person who brought up the third term, not me. I explicitly said I think Trump is too old to run for a third term.
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If you think there's the slightest chance he'll run, bet me about it.
I just said I think he won't, because he is too old.
But the thread isn't about betting odds - it is about why people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not. A 10% chance that Trump is Hitler is a good reason for Americans who don't want to live under Nazi rule (or foreigners who might have to fight a future Nazi America - the main reason why Hitler is the worst is the aggressive war) to be worrying, but I still wouldn't want to bet on it.
"Trump probably won't do the bad things he says he is going to do" is not very reassuring to someone who saw Jan 6th, and is currently watching him do much more of the bad things he said he was going to do than he did in his first term. Even if true, "The President probably won't send troops to interfere with the certification process if his party loses the election" (which Trump has said he should have done in 2020) is a very, very low bar.
The OP claimed not to understand why people were worried. I think it is very obvious why people are worried, even if you disagree with their judgement about the odds. The idea that Trump is so clearly trolling that only a fool or a lunatic could take him seriously, even though his supporters say they take him seriously (but not literally), doesn't seem tenable to me after January 6th, and even less so after the Fulton County raid.
I think it's pretty much always rational to worry about government authoritarianism, it's just a question of proportionality.
What I think codes as irrational is that the people who claim to be worried about Trump Hitler don't seem interested in stopping him through normal democratic means.
Let's take the recent ICE stuff discussed in another post in this week's roundup. Democrats could sweeten the deal for Republicans by saying something like "we want to pass a bill to pare down ICE's authority. In exchange, we will delete the National Firearms Act and defund the ATF."
This would be a HUGE win for (some) righties, and might be able to pull off enough Tea Party types to pass in Congress (I haven't done a headcount). Obviously the NFA might be a good piece of legislation (it isn't, but for the sake of argument) - but if you think Trump is Hitler, removing a bunch of sworn, armed federal agents from his control is...actually a good thing? So it would be two birds with one stone for the left and something that righties could spin as a win - in other words, a good political play that would go beyond mere grandstanding. Furthermore, it could actually split the GOP coalition since there's a chance Trump would come out swinging against it and that would sour all of the pro-gun right on him.
You can repeat the thought experiment with whatever else you like - abortion, perhaps, or economic regulations.
But that's actually not what you see (or at least not what I've seen). Instead lefties seem extremely concerned about the very specific things Trump is doing that impact them right at the moment and not at all concerned about his ability to exercise federal power in ways that tribally code "left" even when those things are tools that could be used against them. If you're on the right, the left is showing basically zero interest in compromise. The message righties get from the left is whining about how Trump is mean and then how righties should lose and get nothing. That's not a palatable message.
I'm sure due to my media bubble and such there's some stuff that I am missing. Probably I am not being entirely fair. But if Trump is actually dangerously authoritarian, for crying aloud, work with Republicans to disarm as many federal law enforcement agents as you can! Be concerned about how the FBI treated him - go further and suggest they be punished by slashing their funding! Demand more investigation into how Tulsi was treated by DHS and go after their funding too! Pivot towards the IRS next. Map comprehensively every single thing the federal government does that could be turned against lefties but has been used against righties and work with them to defang that power.
By and large, I don't think that is what is happening. The left seems quite content to leave the massive (and often armed) federal bureaucracy in place, even though it would be turned against them if a right-wing authoritarian seized power. Which is why righties think that leftists (at least in power) aren't sincere in their concerns, or (alternatively) are incompetent.
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As gattsuru pointed out, I'm happy to offer 10:1 odds. I just flat out don't believe that anyone actually thinks "Trump is Hitler" is even remotely likely, and I don't think they are actually worried about that.
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If you thought there was a 10% chance for anything, you should be willing to take a bet, just one at steep odds. (Modulo ethical objections to gambling in general, lump value risks, yada.) Even with counterparty risk, I'd take a 10% chance at 50x returns and smile all the way to the bank.
But no one actually believes that number. I'm not sure many people buy 1% as a number.
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