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@sethackerman's right. Complacency's fine in that enough laws exist, rioters arrested, and Trump's denounced his own on camera and promised (again) peaceful exit. I think the real complacency lies elsewhere: in how Trump/Right used to consolidate authoritarian liberalism. /thread https://twitter.com/SethAckerman/status/1349141191430795264
Here is a list of the elements I’m calling authoritarian liberalism, concentrated around incoming administration. It’s not exhaustive and I think also reflects thinking/political orientation of some who are to the left of liberalism.
1. More militarization of collective life in name of fighting ‘domestic terrorism’ including extension of already wildly permissive anti-terrorism laws. https://on.wsj.com/3oUJB0h https://on.wsj.com/3nBJULO
2. Normalization of new protest-policing tactics, developed in early 2000s, extended under Obama. Works not by direct suppression but extensive surveillance/taping/info gathering on all participants, then tracking them down later using Facebook/Google. https://abcn.ws/3i8tx8u
3. Also includes deputization of population at large. Asking everyone to use their cameras and google searches to track down/identify law-breakers, rather than leaving the policing to the police. Web-version of neighbors spying on neighbors under Cold War communism.
Eg. “More arrests are expected in the coming hours and days. The investigation is sweeping and ambitious, and it has enlisted the help of the public.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55578092
4. Support for criminalizing new areas of activity and giving law enforcement even more powers to arrest people based on vague connections to illegal activity. https://bit.ly/38I6gqK
5. Permissiveness towards, even celebration of, censoring individuals and removing them from central arenas of public communication, like Twitter banning Trump.
6. Growing calls to rewrite free speech laws, introducing new limits on the First Amendment. https://nyti.ms/38GGKlJ
7. All the while maintaining a studied indifference to the ways in which private economic actors already constrain and coerce speech, especially given lack of free speech protection for workers vis-à-vis their employers. https://bit.ly/3i8FDyt https://bit.ly/3nECTd7
8. Support for corporations broadly using their outsized power to constrain and marginalize politicians who run afoul of official views (eg using threat of campaign contributions, or economically punishing groups and businesses) https://yhoo.it/3nHgpbp https://bit.ly/3nHSWXR
9. The emphasis on Trump-as-exception and the terrorist rabble puts weight behind distrust of the public and a rallying around the ‘normal’ institutions of American politics, like the security apparatus, Senate, Electoral College, and Supreme Court, as sources of ‘stability.’
10. Continued evasion, or even celebration, of the deeply undemocratic features of the Constitution that operate as a much more severe, embedded and enduring constraint on democratic politics. This includes institutions like the Senate, Supreme Court and Electoral College
11. Coupled with indifference to the authoritarianism of less formal elements of our constitution, like legal repression of third parties, the massive and enduring deep state, gerrymandering,
12. Finally a generally more punitive attitude towards ‘extremism’ and ‘incivility’ + hardening of view that criticism of liberals is sympathizing with rightists. This is a carry over from the Lesser Evilism of the election – if you don’t vote Biden you’re aiding Trumpists.
Lasch said that the establishment turned against McCarthyism when its ‘vigilante anti-communism’ became a threat to ‘official anti-communism.’ So too, liberal authoritarianism will try to draw moral authority in the name of ending the clownish vigilantism of Trumpism.
I think there is greater danger of complacency towards all this than towards what is left of Trumpism. It works, not through perpetual outrage or on fringes of the acceptable, but through the normal operations of mainstream institutions: Constitution, workplace, the economy. /end
