Would you please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? Regardless of ideology, that's not allowed here, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
Here's a quick test I just derived to assess how authoritarian the country you currently live in really is: you go to a main square in your country's capital on a busy day and start declaring in a loud voice that, in your opinion, the country's current leader has no idea what they're doing, that all her/his political ideas are idiotic, and that the people of the country would be better off with almost anybody else in his/her position.
Keep doing this for a little while.
The level of authoritarianism of your country can then be measured by the reaction of government officials.
I find this incredibly one dimensional. Apply your rule to a country where government officials are smart enough to leave in the release valve of a little bit of protest and you'd let them get away with basically anything.
Certainly one way authoritarianism manifests itself is through blatant restrictions on freedom of speech.
America, being a nation of highly evolved authoritarianism, has found better ways. Nobody on earth does better marketing than the USA. Nobody. And what else can we call marketing when a government does it other than propaganda? Get someone leaking that the government was doing illegal spying? No worries, he's a Russian agent! Got some upstart kneeling on a football field to protest police brutality? Champagne socialist, race baiter, disrespectful of the American flag, boom, done, we can keep doing police brutality. And bonus, we now have a new angle to culture war: pro and anti cop. Tie being pro cop to owning a pickup truck and just like that you've got people making it their entire identity. Easy! Didn't have to arrest a single person (other than a couple hundred peaceful protestors of course).
No need to arrest the person shouting that the president is an idiot, or a fascist, or whatever. That doesn't matter because the American electoral system is rigidly locked into two parties that serve the true electorate regardless of which is in power: billionaires and corporations. Shout all you want! It doesn't matter all that much.
But should you challenge the true electorate, that's an entirely different story. Why is stealing from the cash register come with a quick trip to jail, yet the largest form of theft in the usa is wage theft, the punishment for which is at worse a fine? And that's if you can hire a lawyer to do the hard work for you: unlike when you steal from the cash register, the State is unlikely to send an attorney general to launch an investigation on your behalf.
Authoritarianism can manifest itself in many ways when you're smart about it. Try to repair a John Deere tractor on your own, lemme know how it goes. Try to grow what you want on your farm, lemme know how it goes. Try to get a medical procedure, well the State might let you, unless you're a woman or transgender.
Grow your own marijuana and then smoke it, lemme know how that works out.
You may be allowed to protest the president, but stand in front of a courthouse with a sign that says "Google jury nullification," let me know how it goes.
Stand in front of a police station with a sign that says "Black Lives Matter," tell me how it goes.
Stand in front of a Whole Foods with a sign about pissbottles, let me know how far the cops force you to move on threat of arrest.
I triple dog dare you to walk into an American police station and request to make a complaint against an officer. I quadruple dare you to change your mind and try to leave if they ask for ID during the process.
Ever driven in South Texas? Lemme know what happens when you try it and refuse to stop at the random border patrol points that aren't on a border, despite being constitutionally "guaranteed" to not need to randomly show proof of citizenship to jackboots asking.
So you can shout about the president. Big deal. You can do that in many places. The power of the authoritarianism isn't vested in that office in the usa. The president is an agent of those interests. The tricky thing about the usa, and the reason it's not a fully fascist state, is those interests are just diverse enough to be unable to collude fully. I think it's on that path though.
Do you think the only measure of authoritarianism is number of prisoners per capita?
At any rate, I was reading that countries like China have alternatives to prison called “administrative detention”. Maybe we should just change the name of our prisons so we can goose the stats?
The US (at least the Republican party & some supporters) possesses other authoritarian traits as well, such as using excessive force to quell protests, pushing a narrative which alienates outgroups (Mexicans, Muslims...), or widespread surveillance.
Obviously it's not as bad as China or Russia, but it's not exactly a bastion of hands-off governance either.
Indeed, it's a matter of degree. I wouldn't call it autoritarian relative to the world, but it's lagging behind Western Europe and a bunch of other countries.
No I think we meet all other reasonable measures also. The experience of freedom in the US is the freedom to make increasingly virtual and arbitrary consumer choices. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the experience of freedom of speech in practice, not free time, not freedom from usurious debt, not the freedom of rising prosperity, not freedom from opaque government interference and meddling.
When people use the word “authoritarian” they are just signaling that they believe the narratives that our media speaks with one voice about those bad, bad other countries.
