>Six months in, it’s looking an awful lot like soft authoritarianism.
>Remember when the Biden administration arrested a judge for actions in her own courthouse? Or when Obama threatened to arrest, and deport, a Republican mayoral candidate? How about that time when Bill Clinton had border agents scrutinize the writing of conservative journalists and subject them to humiliating airport interviews?
This article does a great job of pulling together the different threads of illiberal actions by the government the last months and considering the consequences / implications.
The individual actions have been gnawing at me for a while, so I’m happy to find this post that brings them all together.
I also appreciated the comparison to the breakdown of the fledgling liberal ideas of Russia in the early 2000s. While America’s will take a more concerted effort to break down, the author (and me) argue that the government is clearly trying.
I also appreciated the note about wartime exceptions – the author was prepared for the counter arguments.
What do you think? Does the author have TDS as the comments accuse?
I do expect this article to get a lot of knee-jerk downvotes. I believe there is a lot of denial and “it can’t happen here” on this subject – even from liberals.
FuckFashMods on
Los Angeles is literally being occupied by Republicans simply for being a Democratic city that didnt vote for Trump.
Not sure how the Author missed the most glaring example of Authoritarianism.
The next 3.5 years are going to have a ton of civil rights abuses, and it will only escalate over the next 3.5 years.
Jokerang on
> By 2011, *The Moscow Times* would describe one parliamentary session as “a rubber-stamp ruling frenzy.” Khodorkovsky himself would, in 2010, delineate the somewhat subtle way by which civil liberties disappeared in Russia. “Theoretically you have a free press, but in practice there is self-censorship,” he said. “Theoretically you have courts, in practice the courts adopt decisions dictated from above. Theoretically there are civil rights enshrined in the constitution; in practice you are not able to exercise some of these rights.”
Early 2000s Russia is a frighteningly good comparison to make. Weaponization of the courts, cowing the media into de facto censorship and ring-kissing, political opposition castrated in all but name, rampant cronyism centered around the big boss – sound familiar, anybody?
3 Comments
>Six months in, it’s looking an awful lot like soft authoritarianism.
>Remember when the Biden administration arrested a judge for actions in her own courthouse? Or when Obama threatened to arrest, and deport, a Republican mayoral candidate? How about that time when Bill Clinton had border agents scrutinize the writing of conservative journalists and subject them to humiliating airport interviews?
This article does a great job of pulling together the different threads of illiberal actions by the government the last months and considering the consequences / implications.
The individual actions have been gnawing at me for a while, so I’m happy to find this post that brings them all together.
I also appreciated the comparison to the breakdown of the fledgling liberal ideas of Russia in the early 2000s. While America’s will take a more concerted effort to break down, the author (and me) argue that the government is clearly trying.
I also appreciated the note about wartime exceptions – the author was prepared for the counter arguments.
What do you think? Does the author have TDS as the comments accuse?
I do expect this article to get a lot of knee-jerk downvotes. I believe there is a lot of denial and “it can’t happen here” on this subject – even from liberals.
Los Angeles is literally being occupied by Republicans simply for being a Democratic city that didnt vote for Trump.
Not sure how the Author missed the most glaring example of Authoritarianism.
The next 3.5 years are going to have a ton of civil rights abuses, and it will only escalate over the next 3.5 years.
> By 2011, *The Moscow Times* would describe one parliamentary session as “a rubber-stamp ruling frenzy.” Khodorkovsky himself would, in 2010, delineate the somewhat subtle way by which civil liberties disappeared in Russia. “Theoretically you have a free press, but in practice there is self-censorship,” he said. “Theoretically you have courts, in practice the courts adopt decisions dictated from above. Theoretically there are civil rights enshrined in the constitution; in practice you are not able to exercise some of these rights.”
Early 2000s Russia is a frighteningly good comparison to make. Weaponization of the courts, cowing the media into de facto censorship and ring-kissing, political opposition castrated in all but name, rampant cronyism centered around the big boss – sound familiar, anybody?