I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2021-03-06.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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I know you're responding to a tankie, but just to be clear... the US is about as authoritarian as it gets - they don't call it the Prison-Industrial Complex for nothing.
That's due in part to lengthy prison sentences and the war on drugs. I expect those things will improve going forward and it's really not hard to avoid committing crimes. That aside, we get to openly mock our own leaders on public TV. We have local governments that can in many cases override the federal government. And like it or not, we have pretty unrestricted access to just about anything. Power is not centralized here and I like it that way. Much harder for dictatorships to take root. Unfortunately it's also the reason we don't move in lockstep when it matters.
Yeah... it doesn't get any more authoritarian than that.
Doesn't look like it from where I'm standing. I'd say the US is pretty much on a one-way street to more authoritarianism - not less. Or, to put it more accurately, US authoritarianism will start more and more affecting certain groups and classes that have thought themselves free from it up until now - it's like they say... fascism is just colonialism coming home to roost.
US authoritarianism works very differently than the model China is chasing... but that doesn't make it any less authoritarian. China simply doesn't have the ability to "drown out" narratives that pose a threat to the status quo in the way that the US media machine does. No other country except the US can do that - though China is making strides in that department. Once they do, it doesn't matter if a small minority of people knows the truth - a large (and vocal) part of the population has been immunized against it. That's the core characteristic of the US propaganda model.
I don't know where you live but as a US citizen the idea of it being authoritarian is just really funny to me. It's about as libertarian as it gets from what I've seen. If we all decided to decriminalize drugs we could. Weed has come a long way in the last decade and I can only imagine further progress will be made.