Oh? Really? Has this madness been happening in the other 23 of the 24 years since its passage? At this scale? Were there a lot of masked men disappearing people in broad daylight?
I'd have figured that if you were looking at historic examples of the US being a police state, the Jim Crow South would have been a better one, or if you were a homosexual, really, any time prior to the 90s.
yes, since uniformed people have gained legal rights to touch my junk in order for me to be allowed to board the plane (not to mention that they took my toothpaste twice) - every year since then. we have lost every ounce of freedom after 9/11 and this “madness” today is nothing new, we just take for granted now what our own “freedoms” have been reduced to
What is with this tendency to downplay the current drastic escalations? It feels like a kind of hipster denialism - "I was complaining about the US being a police state before it was cool" but also if it's this is "nothing new" then there's nothing to really earnest worry about, right?
How hard is it to acknowledge that we have been gradually losing our rights AND that the Trumpist bonfire is a marked departure into something much more rapid?
Surely you can see the difference between a society where occasional flagrant abuses happen but the majority can still speak out about them, versus a society where abuses are routine and anybody who speaks out becomes a target at scale?
Well, I think the point it is even beyond "how many grains of sand is a pile," which seems like a legitimate point to me. If we don't understand how we got here, it's really hard to figure out hat to do, so pretending as if someone flipped a switch in January of 2025 is not helpful.
I say this as a person who has been pepper sprayed by DHS while resisting ICE:
the conditions to led to the current bonfire have a lot to do with centrist folks piling up wood as if could never be lit.
If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
> If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
Exactly this is core issue with a lot of people here on HN. The argument goes “oh shit, look what the current 2025 looks like, OMG so bad, we were this amazing bastion of freedom before this and now this administration is doing _____” so shortsighted and un-educated
I'd say someone did flip a switch in 2025 - the rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of all three branches of government. The government has always been authoritarian. But it had been predominately bureaucratic authoritarianism, while now it's driven by autocratic authoritarianism.
I say this as a libertarian who's right there with you on the "piling up wood".
There are many angles from which to analyze how we got here. Yes, the "centrists" supporting lazy authoritarian laws and agencies because they couldn't bother thinking one step ahead to how they'd be abused. The sprawling surveillance industry pointed out by a sibling comment. Narrower issues of destruction of the fairness doctrine and campaign finance limits. Even many of the refrains of the Trumpists point to problems that were slowly allowed to fester until they reached a breaking point (although as usual for Republicans, the answer they've been stage-managed into is completely self-defeating).
For all of these things it's understandable to want to say "I told you so" - for catharsis, and trying to establish some authority of having a larger context of what direction we need to head in.
But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with.
(also re being pepper sprayed: what's left of your country thanks you for your service)
"But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with."
Maybe we read things differently- I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
As I've written here before, there is a difference between "hey, welcome to the party" (radicalization) and "hey shut up, this is a thing we've always done" (normalization).
I take issue with (and find very frustrating) the idea that somehow things have just now reached a breaking point.
I find that incorrect-to-me idea worrisome on two levels.
First of all, if Clinton or Harris had been elected we'd still be walking down this same road but liberals would be at brunch and telling us that nothing is wrong. But Ferguson and Standing Rock both happened while Obama was in office. And we don't need to run another experiment to see how it would have run under Harris, as she explicitly was moving to the right from Biden.
The flip side of your suspicion that folks in my position are just perversely enjoying some kind of schadenfreude might be that folks who believe this situation to be new and unique is to note that while this violent empire has been violent-empire-ing for far longer than any of us have been alive, the violence hasn't been overtly staged within the spectacle confronting the "middle class" folks until very recently.
The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Or to say the same thing in a different way, for the same reasons you might point to some perverse enjoyment by hipsters, you might look at your own psyche here:
to admit that the US has always been violent is to admit that you didn't care because it wasn't happening to people about whom you care.
However, that possible reading of your position is -wholly immaterial- to the folks who are pointing out "it's been bad for a long time".
The catharsis you seem to be projecting isn't really there for the people who could see there was a problem before it became visible even to middle class liberals. So an aside, nobody cares that folks ignored the problem until we are where we are, so feel your feelings about your blindness and then get to work, and stop projecting.
Do, however, consider that the lines of thought which lead people to directly and painfully confront power in a physical way can only come from the idea that the power being confronted is not and has not been legitimate.
I only dive into the phrenology of your position because it seems funny to me, but I do think that position is an active and harmful impediment to actually doing anything- if we could just vote our way home, why bother walking?
That is, if it really was okay a while ago, why not just do the blue version of making America great again?
And that leads to a second level at why I find the idea that "things have just gotten worse this year" to be almost dangerous:
the situation can and likely will get more authoritarian.
The reality to me is that these systems have been violent in the past- I live on land next to the Southern Ute folks' reservation, and I have had Navajo roommates, and I can see a former residential school every time I drive to town.
There is no amount of being white or tall or "well-educated" that would save me if the ancestors of the folks who built those things decide I am no longer a "citizen" because "reasons" and burn my corpse so it ascends to some gulag in the sky.
But if these systems haven't been incredibly harmful, abandoning them seems foolish and dumb. Any action to undermine their authority takes on the same character of a "rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of [the] government".
I wholly understand why anarchists and communists seem stupid and dangerous to the folks who have historically been able to ignore the harms of these systems.
For that reason, though, folks are going to have to give up some of their ideological attachments to those systems if they are going to work against them.
So from my position, actively being unwilling to admit the past harms cause by those systems is a very easy way to prevent oneself from coming to a position where you actually have to do anything material.
Sorry for writing a novel (as an aside I dislike AI because writing things like this is how I think through things and I think the adoption of AI writing says a lot about the willingness of folks to think). But as a person incredibly worried about the very real shift in character of the current political spectacle, I think that "it's new and improved" is a harmful idea that you should reconsider.
There is a lot to chew on here and while I generally appreciate that, you completely missed where I am coming from. I had tried to acknowledge enough in my previous comment that you'd see I wasn't fresh to the larger topic, but I guess that didn't work.
I had never voted for either major party in a national election until 2020, when I consider myself having voted for the conservative option of Biden. In 2016, I completely understood why people voted for Trump - I was the one telling my aghast blue tribe friends that he was speaking to people's longstanding frustrations and had a good chance of winning.
I do constantly examine whether I've reverted to my latent tribe or have become caught in a filter bubble, but I still do not think so. I've always been allergic to groupthink, and the Trumpist groupthink is still overwhelming at this point, whereas the opposition groupthink is much more narrowly-scoped. (and I hate it as well, as it makes for poor opposition)
So back to the main argument -
I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
To me, it often does comes across this way. Note how the comment I initially responded to put "madness" in square quotes, as if we're supposed to believe the concerns are just all in our heads.
It's adjacent to the Trumpist talking point that everything being done isn't any worse than what "the left" already did, which is clearly coming from a place of wanting to downplay. And there is a long pattern of Trumpists abusing appeals to lofty ideals and liberty in general to get people to support the openly fascist agenda [0]. It's not a matter of being "unwilling to admit the past harms", rather it's about bringing them up in the appropriate context - Trumpism revolves around a long litany of real grievances and hypocrisies, but then channels that anger into highly destructive "solutions".
And as far as the caricature of "middle-class liberals" that you were addressing? If people are just now waking up, I do not see this as something to condemn! To me the actual concern is preventing them from falling back asleep (eg that "just vote Democrat" fallacy)
> The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Care to elaborate on this? My initial reaction is that we should take such legibility as a universal goal, in the sense that we should aim for everyone to have this legibility. We often shit on the idea of bureaucracy, but if it's the best way we've found to neuter autocratic power, then maybe we need to stop taking it for granted? (FWIW me of 15 years ago is screaming at current me for having written that)
[0] actually I just glanced at the poster's comment history and this is exactly what they're doing.
DEA? ATF? The fact that the "Patriot" Act was basically written and ready long before it was put up for a vote?
But of course now I'm on the other side of the argument. The point is that even though it's a long arc, this doesn't invalidate the current urgency. "Slow at first, then all at once"
If you set your metric at targeting and marginalizing racial groups, you undermine your point even harder re "Patriot" Act being the start.
But also, am I supposed to come away with the conclusion that this is all in line with business as usual and there is nothing to worry about as long as I am white?
You are conflating America being racist as hell with the establishment of the surveillance state post-9/11, which was largely focused on Arabs.
America has been a racist cesspool for hundreds of years, but since 2001 it has also become a highly advanced surveillance state that has militarized its own police force.
You may not like it, but this has been developing for 25 years and has just now started to (barely) affect white people.
You've skipped over my two counterexamples of the DEA and the ATF, and their supporting laws criminalizing substances and tools. Those have been around much longer than merely 2001, and had already created some pretty totalitarian spectacles of government attacking the People.
Also driving this conversation towards race reeks of race-to-the-bottom "privilege" politics. Which is why I facetiously asked if your intention is to encourage white people to become less concerned.
I did no such thing. I said "libertarian" - note the small 'l'. The capital-L party has preemptively defeated itself with an over-indulgence in axiomatic rightist thinking. This makes it so its large scale effects will only ever result in a changing of the government to autocratic corporate rule.
And FWIW I only threw that out to make a speed bump for the fascists who want to write off everyone disagreeing with them as some blue haired progressive. You can try actually addressing my points, either in this tiny thread or in the more substantial branch above. I promise I will try to not dump knee jerk reflexive dismissals at you the way "Libertarians" often to.
Cause what you are doing is sensationalism and exaggeration. “Abuses are routine” - back this up with actual numbers vs. making a crazy blanket statement like that cause you saw 13 clickbait articles in December.
You are 100% right, we have been (not so) gradually losing our rights and Trump et al isn’t really lighting any bonfires, the country has been burning for decades… it is just that the current fires are broadcasted to a wider audience with minute-by-minute play-by-play. and while most people are falling for this shit again (see 2016-2020) the current admin is lining their pockets (which is the one and only goal they have…)
Have the TSA disappeared a lot of people? Flown them out to foreign torture prisons, and thrown away the key? Ignored judicial orders to return them?
(I'm also not entirely sure why they are touching your junk, I've not had that happen in any of my security checkpoint experiences.)
Look, while I'm as happy as the next person to bitch about how awful the TSA is, if they are your best example of the US being a police state... It's not particularly persuasive. Most police states don't limit their capacity for repression to throwing you out of an airport without a refund for your ticket.
