In your experience (and others who directly experienced similar repression and violence), how did age demographics play into it? I get the sense that in China and early Nazi Germany, a lot of it was driven by (in one author’s words) “roving gangs of teens and young adults, murdering with impunity”. Some revolutions seem to include very young children as soldiers and enforcers.
I wonder if that’s one of the stronger signals of the shift from “worrisome trend” to “get out now”—when we see significant (an order of magnitude worse than the summer protests) non-state, non-regulated youth violence.
That makes sense, but doesn’t pattern-match very well onto the concerns people like Wei_Dai have about our present moment. What are the trends that people tend to focus on when they’re worried about “where this is all heading?”
Bottom-up
Attacks on reputation: cancel culture, conspiracy-peddling
Street violence: some significant looting, occasional murder, arson, not with impunity but sometimes treated with tolerance by those not directly responsible for enforcing the law
Polarization: accusations against individuals, institutions, and groups within society as being evil/complicit in evil or inherently good/trustworthy due to their label/affiliation/demographic/job; calls for radical restructuring of society; open division of civil society
Top-down
Grasping for power: major political rule-breaking, disparaging basic democratic process, open attempts at voter suppression, cult of personality
Division and disorder: between generals and President, constant churn in the White House
Encroachments: Federal law enforcement getting involved in local protests
Questionable loyalties: the President’s refusal to divest and upcoming debts, “Putin’s puppy” meme
It’s tempting to jump to the worst-case nightmare scenario, but it’s a more tractable and, to me, more interesting question to ask “what does one step worse look like?”
Here are some possibilities:
Bottom-up
Weaponized false/manufactured accusations against high-status people increase in frequency and acceptance
Protests intensify. Shaming people in their houses at night for not joining protests turns to trespassing and home invasions. Property destruction and looting is the norm, not the exception. The rate and size of protests, the frequency of deadly protests, and the number of deaths increases 50% over the course of 6 months to a year, assassination attempt
Polarization intensifies: Defaming categories of people becomes a part of official school curriculums a la “teach the controversy,” more intense restrictions/bans/grassroots censorship on taboo topics or more categories of taboo topics, colleges see increasing proportions of local students as regional differences solidify
Top-down
Grasping for power: open rejection of election results, major violent counter-protests by defeated side even with landslide victory, shocking repeat victory by Trump drives unprecedented protests and counter-protests along with continued corruption within the White House
Division and disorder: disputed election leads to unanswered questions about military’s role in settling a dispute
Encroachments: Surprise Trump victory/election stealing leads to state of emergency declaration ongoing in multiple states
Questionable loyalties: selling of state secrets by insiders in the Trump White House, Trump defects to Russia
Having done this exercise, my two main fears are:
A surprise Trump victory leading to military policing in liberal states. This will be obvious.
Intensification of protests and polarization. Less immediately concerning, but also sneakier. I would like to see attempts to quantify size and scale of violence at protests and track it over time, shifting curriculums and academic norms, and examples of accusations of violence that seem manufactured not for attention but to eliminate a specific political figure.
Another factor is the policy drift. The US congress doesn’t pass much policy anymore, and budget negotiations tend to fail. So money keeps going into policies that made sense decades ago, but are now nonsense. The electoral gridlock is likely to continue or worsen, so the policy drift will only become worse. That could intensify the dissatisfaction with the political system and vulnerability to populism.
Many presidential regimes just solve this through the president openly bribing the legislature.
In thinking about this, it seems to help me to use the following framework:
“What does one step better/worse look like in category X?”
“How fast could we take those steps?”
It’s tempting to try and describe a variety of worst case scenarios and the winding paths by which we might get there. There’s a sort of Sorites paradox behind Wei_Dai’s fear. When do we go from “things are getting worse” to “it’s probably to late” to you’re on a train to the gulag?
That’s impossible to say. It’s also impossible to sum all the negative trends and say “how bad is it?” Since each trend is hard to compare, we also can’t say “are things getting worse or better overall?”
But there are two things we can do.
One is to designate an arbitrary threshold at which we commit to making a plan for fleeing the country and opening that conversation with our loved ones, and another one at which we actually follow through on it. A good threshold needs to be simple to determine and compelling enough to motivate action—your own and that of others. It might be a good conversation to pre-game without being too serious or specific about it.
The other thing we can do is pick one or two individual trends that we happen to care about, and monitor for whether they’re individually getting better or worse. I think part of why politics kills minds is because we try and take in everything, all at once, and synthesize it all.
Edit:
In that endeavor, perhaps the US Crisis Monitor can be a useful tool.
In your experience (and others who directly experienced similar repression and violence), how did age demographics play into it? I get the sense that in China and early Nazi Germany, a lot of it was driven by (in one author’s words) “roving gangs of teens and young adults, murdering with impunity”. Some revolutions seem to include very young children as soldiers and enforcers.
I wonder if that’s one of the stronger signals of the shift from “worrisome trend” to “get out now”—when we see significant (an order of magnitude worse than the summer protests) non-state, non-regulated youth violence.
That makes sense, but doesn’t pattern-match very well onto the concerns people like Wei_Dai have about our present moment. What are the trends that people tend to focus on when they’re worried about “where this is all heading?”
Bottom-up
Attacks on reputation: cancel culture, conspiracy-peddling
Street violence: some significant looting, occasional murder, arson, not with impunity but sometimes treated with tolerance by those not directly responsible for enforcing the law
Polarization: accusations against individuals, institutions, and groups within society as being evil/complicit in evil or inherently good/trustworthy due to their label/affiliation/demographic/job; calls for radical restructuring of society; open division of civil society
Top-down
Grasping for power: major political rule-breaking, disparaging basic democratic process, open attempts at voter suppression, cult of personality
Division and disorder: between generals and President, constant churn in the White House
Encroachments: Federal law enforcement getting involved in local protests
Questionable loyalties: the President’s refusal to divest and upcoming debts, “Putin’s puppy” meme
It’s tempting to jump to the worst-case nightmare scenario, but it’s a more tractable and, to me, more interesting question to ask “what does one step worse look like?”
Here are some possibilities:
Bottom-up
Weaponized false/manufactured accusations against high-status people increase in frequency and acceptance
Protests intensify. Shaming people in their houses at night for not joining protests turns to trespassing and home invasions. Property destruction and looting is the norm, not the exception. The rate and size of protests, the frequency of deadly protests, and the number of deaths increases 50% over the course of 6 months to a year, assassination attempt
Polarization intensifies: Defaming categories of people becomes a part of official school curriculums a la “teach the controversy,” more intense restrictions/bans/grassroots censorship on taboo topics or more categories of taboo topics, colleges see increasing proportions of local students as regional differences solidify
Top-down
Grasping for power: open rejection of election results, major violent counter-protests by defeated side even with landslide victory, shocking repeat victory by Trump drives unprecedented protests and counter-protests along with continued corruption within the White House
Division and disorder: disputed election leads to unanswered questions about military’s role in settling a dispute
Encroachments: Surprise Trump victory/election stealing leads to state of emergency declaration ongoing in multiple states
Questionable loyalties: selling of state secrets by insiders in the Trump White House, Trump defects to Russia
Having done this exercise, my two main fears are:
A surprise Trump victory leading to military policing in liberal states. This will be obvious.
Intensification of protests and polarization. Less immediately concerning, but also sneakier. I would like to see attempts to quantify size and scale of violence at protests and track it over time, shifting curriculums and academic norms, and examples of accusations of violence that seem manufactured not for attention but to eliminate a specific political figure.
Another factor is the policy drift. The US congress doesn’t pass much policy anymore, and budget negotiations tend to fail. So money keeps going into policies that made sense decades ago, but are now nonsense. The electoral gridlock is likely to continue or worsen, so the policy drift will only become worse. That could intensify the dissatisfaction with the political system and vulnerability to populism.
Many presidential regimes just solve this through the president openly bribing the legislature.
In thinking about this, it seems to help me to use the following framework:
“What does one step better/worse look like in category X?”
“How fast could we take those steps?”
It’s tempting to try and describe a variety of worst case scenarios and the winding paths by which we might get there. There’s a sort of Sorites paradox behind Wei_Dai’s fear. When do we go from “things are getting worse” to “it’s probably to late” to you’re on a train to the gulag?
That’s impossible to say. It’s also impossible to sum all the negative trends and say “how bad is it?” Since each trend is hard to compare, we also can’t say “are things getting worse or better overall?”
But there are two things we can do.
One is to designate an arbitrary threshold at which we commit to making a plan for fleeing the country and opening that conversation with our loved ones, and another one at which we actually follow through on it. A good threshold needs to be simple to determine and compelling enough to motivate action—your own and that of others. It might be a good conversation to pre-game without being too serious or specific about it.
The other thing we can do is pick one or two individual trends that we happen to care about, and monitor for whether they’re individually getting better or worse. I think part of why politics kills minds is because we try and take in everything, all at once, and synthesize it all.
Edit:
In that endeavor, perhaps the US Crisis Monitor can be a useful tool.