Yes this administration definitely has strong, disturbing authoritarian tendencies. The censorious tendencies of the "far left", though, took us a meaningful di

Yes this administration definitely has strong, disturbing authoritarian tendencies. The censorious tendencies of the "far left", though, took us a meaningful distance here. Executive power and Congress's uselessness has been accelerating for decades now, but it's not hard to see the place we're at as an extension of where we were. Jimmy Kimmel's attempted cancellation was just a more state-sponsored attempt at cancelling than the social pressure cancellations of the late 2010s. Sure state-sponsored is what makes it technically censorship but the practical difference it makes for the individual and their platform is almost none. Generating massive amounts of outrage over calling the default git branch "master" is how you get Anduril and Palantir virtue signaling to the right about how their work is keeping America safe and competitive. College student bodies insisting on their administrations doing land acknowledgements is what brought contrarian shit-stirrers like Charlie Kirk to colleges in the first place. And as a result the modern Democratic party is broken. The "far left" has been obsessed with destroying the Democratic party's coalition because of their insistence on ideological purity. The center left moderates have been vilified and alienated and are too shy to endorse populist left candidates like Mamdani because of how much they've been punched. Free speech advocates have been exiled as progenitors of "hate speech", only for the current administration to use the same "hate speech" rationale to silence the opposition (labeling something as stupid as "Antifa" dangerous.) Left libertarians have been sneered at for so long as agents of greed and enemies of state capacity that now that the state is trying to quash the freedom of those on the left, the left libertarians don't want to speak up. So yes we're in bad shape, very bad shape. But I have zero confidence that it's the "far left" who is going to save us. If anything I think if the "far left" and the MAGA-ites continue the way they do we're going to end up in an American version of the Spanish Civil War. I think the MAGA-ites just realized that nobody is willing to adhere to historical American norms on liberal democracy; the emperor has no clothes. Might as well push liberal democracy as far as it can go since nobody is willing to fight for it. EDIT: I'm expecting downvotes for this opinion and it's one I don't share on lefty social media spaces because it's always a very disliked one but I'd welcome actual discussion on this. The closest I've seen to a rebuttal is "if we need to moderate our positions then we become as bad as the other side, so what's the point?" which I also disagree with. An inability to talk about this is yet another mark that shows how far the gulf between the sides are in the US.