The thing about authoritarianism is life just mostly goes on

[dorchadas]

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here.

Most Americans, having not lived under authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, don't actually know what they're like. They imagine doors getting kicked in, social chaos, constant warring gangs or warlords, that kind of thing. But the truth is that society basically functions the same way it does everywhere else. People go to work, they go to the movies, they meet up at restaurants and go to religious services and form clubs. Very few people just disappear.

But everyone knows that people do disappear, and that if they're not careful, it could be them, and they act accordingly.

Americans mostly haven't internalized that yet because they think it can't be them. Oh, those people being sent to foreign prisons were foreigners/criminals/radicals/communists/antisemites/American-haters/whatever, there must have been some reason. This is America and we love freedom, the government wouldn't just scoop someone off the street and bundle them out of the country for no reason. There must be a reason. If there's no reason that would mean that it could happen to me, and for my own psychological safety I cannot consider that I am subject to having my life ruined in an instant due to things I have no power to affect, so there must have been a reason.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.[...]

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.[...]

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

I wrote after the 2016 that we were in the final days of the Republic, it would just take some time for the country to die. Maybe we'll find a miracle cure, but I suspect not.

Appropriate ("appropriate") that this all happened on Pesaḥ, the holiday where as part of the Seder we repeatedly say "Once we were slaves, but now we are free."

Comments

[symbioid]

I wish I even had a thing I could say besides sigh and say "yeah :("
The fact so many only seemed to give a shit when the economic stuff was happening, that we can't rely on a moral conscience but just "self-interest" - when the right to due process (hey I'm not a criminal - but as the meme going around explaining it says "prove it" oh no due process) but they know they're one of the safe class of people.

I reiterated the Niemollers poem to mom and she was like yeah I know this. Like not getting my point.
I am afraid to even talk to my nephew, he's drunk the libertarian-fash kool-aid. Guess so long as he can tend his little garden up in the U.P. and act like he's doing his job to "tear down the system, maaaaaan" without asking what is replacing it... IDK. I feel like I failed.

Oh I thought I didn't have anything to say. Sorry. Guess I did. It's depressing. I wish this all would implode, the biggest "hope" I have is that the rest of them aren't nearly as well known or able to hold the attention the way Trump has. Or the Dems finally present someone who can get the majority and they will be willing to FIGHT for something that transcends the contradictions of the old ways, while still retaining the spirit of rule of law, and I"m not sure the American system is setup for that; I'm too much a commie to think it can be transcended without some radical restructuring, and this will be a continuing phenomenon due to our white-supremacist history.

I'm not even touching on your key points. It's like... just watching in horror as this unfolds, each step. I joked the other day to my roommate "Can we just have one constitutional crisis a day? I don't wanna leave the house and come back to a second one" Of course, that's the same thing "one step at a time"

When the dow was tanking I was hoping that this would be the thing. I still think the only answer is China and the EU making us suffer. I worry the wrong lessons will be learned in that process and only more grievance. And I think - the only way to stop this is to crush it, and it will end up requiring a full on invasion but then from who? Who is even "liberal" enough to invade us and enforce a new order the way the US did w/Germany & Japan. *sigh* :(

And I"m fucking "privileged" (well not class wise, but race/gender-presentation (but not self-defined gender-wise, which I have kept hidden because... well even before this when it was more acceptable, I still have a lot of cowardice/fear...)

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>They imagine doors getting kicked in, social chaos, constant warring gangs or warlords, that kind of thing.<<

Oh, America has those too, just limited enough that most people can ignore it. Door kicking is routine with white police on people of color. Some cities have serious gang problems. Increasingly as the Growth Ponzi Scheme progresses, cities are failing to keep the lights and water running. And so on.

>>This is America and we love freedom, the government wouldn't just scoop someone off the street and bundle them out of the country for no reason. There must be a reason.<<

Of course there's a reason, and it's usually that the government doesn't like what someone is doing. That might be a crime like murder, but it also might be protesting the government's lawbreaking or environmental destruction. That's the part people don't think about.

>> -Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45<<

I think he's also the one who pointed out that there was no time to fight back, because people's time and energy was all tied up with newly demanded paperwork. That sounds familiar too.

>>I wrote after the 2016 that we were in the final days of the Republic, it would just take some time for the country to die. Maybe we'll find a miracle cure, but I suspect not.<<

Yyyyeah. Not good.

>> Appropriate ("appropriate") that this all happened on Pesaḥ, the holiday where as part of the Seder we repeatedly say "Once we were slaves, but now we are free." <<

At the present moment, the tyranny likes Jews, and prefers to pick on other people; but that could change at any moment.

[dorchadas]

The polls keep showing that a lot of people are, in aggregate, okay with what's going on. Trump is at like -4.7 disapproval (though he started his term at +10, so the trend is good at least).

I think about how Yad Vashem's list of the Righteous Among the Nations is 28,217 people. That seems like it's a lot but it's 0.01% of the population of Nazi-occupied territory. Most people like to think they'd be hiding the Franks but the truth is they'd be reporting on their neighbors. The lessons learned from Jewish history are mostly that the people around us will never have our backs no matter what we do.

I worry the wrong lessons will be learned in that process and only more grievance.

This is basically inevitable if that's the route it goes. Barring total military defeat, occupation, and re-education (which won't happen), people will just get annoyed. Which makes total sense to me--if you feel like everyone else is against your group, it brings the group tighter together.

[conuly]

When the dow was tanking I was hoping that this would be the thing.

Oh, yeah, I get it.