Fund the police

[Era Might]

In other words, the Civil Rights Act ended discrimination, but it didn't end black men getting police knees to their necks and bullets to the head from police. These ppl are Americans too. This country does not belong to the middle class. The political agenda will no longer be determined from a mainstream mass market. As in South Africa, black ppl in America have a right to their own country.

[Ice_nine]

Era might, long time no see. What brought you back here?

Any way I don't know if I am too much of a dunce, but I am having a hard time distilling what you're trying to say. What is your main argument if you could summarize it to a few points?

[Era Might]

6 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

Era might, long time no see. What brought you back here?

Any way I don't know if I am too much of a dunce, but I am having a hard time distilling what you're trying to say. What is your main argument if you could summarize it to a few points?

That we don't need more police. 

[Ice_nine]

5 minutes ago, Era Might said:

That we don't need more police. 

so we should get rid of the police? Reform the police? Disarm the police?

Who is saying we need more police? We need better police imo.

[Era Might]

Just now, Ice_nine said:

so we should get rid of the police? Reform the police? Disarm the police?

Who is saying we need more police? We need better police imo.

See the OP:

"The BLM movement has destroyed all respect for the rule of law and respect for police.   Defunding will not solve anything, except for fanning the flames of HATE"

The argument is that BLM represents a breakdown of law and order that requires increased police power. This is the Trumpist propaganda right now, that America is undergoing a leftist revolution, etc. The same tactics were used during Civil Rights, trying to discredit the movement as a trojan horse for foreign influence, etc. Ppl saw MLK as a sower of lawlessness. This is part of the American playbook when it comes to racism.

[little2add]

4 minutes ago, Era Might said:

MLK as a sower of lawlessness.

Said no one 

MLK is a great American hero and Patriot

[Era Might]

4 minutes ago, little2add said:

Said no one 

MLK is a great American hero and Patriot

For the FBI he was a subversive political threat. And he was, because the Civil Rights movement was the beginning of the decolonization of Africa from the British and other European powers. A black man talking about equal rights was a national and local scandal.

[little2add]

I don’t know Who killed JFK, but it certainly was  not Oswald.  

I suspect it was same entity who killed MLK. 

[Ice_nine]

35 minutes ago, Era Might said:

See the OP:

"The BLM movement has destroyed all respect for the rule of law and respect for police.   Defunding will not solve anything, except for fanning the flames of HATE"

The argument is that BLM represents a breakdown of law and order that requires increased police power. This is the Trumpist propaganda right now, that America is undergoing a leftist revolution, etc. The same tactics were used during Civil Rights, trying to discredit the movement as a trojan horse for foreign influence, etc. Ppl saw MLK as a sower of lawlessness. This is part of the American playbook when it comes to racism.

well, if you don't believe that some of our important institutions (academia, hollywood, news media) are drifting farther and farther left I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I am aware of COINTELPRO and the efforts of the US government against black civil rights and black power groups. In truth the Panthers were socialist AND there were a lot of racist policies in place. It's pretty hard for me to tease out how much of the resistance to MLK and Malcom X was due to racism vs how much was due to socialism/Marxism.

So you may say "see the government attacked Black people under the guise of resisting socialism and they're doing it again," as they say, history repeats itself. However, it doesn't appear to me to be a guise at all. America was much more institutionally racist, and there were groups and people actually pushing socialist ideology as a remedy to our social ills. Both can be true at the same time. The FBI came in and murdered Fred Hampton, probably because of both racism and anti-socialism. Neither justifies murder. Just like an anti-racist motivation does not justify murder. However, I think at the core, resisting Marxist ideology is a good thing that gets messy due to its association with various Black political movements. I don't think you're treating the topic with the nuance it deserves. Maybe because you see racism and anti-Marxism as both contemptible things? Or you don't find Marxist ideology an actual threat?

Again, maybe I am just super daft, but I do think there are Marxist actors trying to transform our society. Call me a wild conspiracy theorist or say I've fallen to the propaganda, but there is a BLM leader on record saying she and her comrade are "trained Marxists." And their statement of faith on their website IS far-left ideology.

Now to be fair, I think that they genuinely believe tearing down our society and replacing it with a Marxist, godless, and classless religion will remedy our social problems. In other words, I think they mean well. But I also think there's enough dead bodies stacked up in communist countries that might make you want to pump the brakes a bit.

 

[Aloysius]

blindly throwing money to the police won't solve the crime problem

blindly taking money away from police departments won't solve police brutality problems

we do need some creative, thoughtful, and intelligent measured approaches to these issues.  sadly I'm not optimistic that will happen.  this moment has the potential to be another swing in our cyclically swinging pendulum, where we got softer on criminal enforcement in the 70s and 80s leading to a situation where we got too tough on crime (in ways that unfairly impacted African American communities, though in many ways it was black leaders calling for some of that, though there were also many in the black community warning against it, it was complicated but overall most Americans, black and white, had a sense that crime was out of control and they wanted the country to get tough on crime) with the 90's crime bill, steadily increasing in militarization of the police after 9/11, and here we go again swinging back against policing.  now, IF we actually do some radical and creative things in terms of non-violent alternatives and building civil institutions that could be preventative, it would break the cycle maybe, but my bet is we're just going to see the criminal justice reform movement consumed by political actors in favor of neoliberal austerity whose ears have been perked up by the call of massive mobs "defund the police" to which they have heard "cut money from the budget!!! woohooo!!"

a smart and reasoned approach that seeks to put as much resources as possible into proper training of the police to deal with (especially violent) crime while also working on more programs that help build up civil society is the direction we ought to be going in.

personally I think the narrative attacking the whole American ideology of liberty as a "white" ideology is wrong.  American history has been a history of relative increases (though also from time to time setbacks) in liberty, with an expanding circle; yes, there were winners and losers and atrocities galore, history is messy, but from an historical perspective we can see certain ideas that took root in the American revolution were a significant step forward.  Frederick Douglass toyed with that idea of being totally against the American founding myth for a while but eventually came to the conclusion that the foundational principles of liberty are tools to be expanded, not some kind of thing to be burned down, using the Constitution as a tool to be "wielded on behalf of emancipation".  Echoed by the likes of MLK who also clothed his statements in American ideals and ideology of liberty.

there are things to improve.  there will always be things to improve.  shall we burn it all to the ground and start over?  I remember when I was younger I used to think the Catechism's position about just wars that "there must be serious prospects of success;" and that it "must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated." (CCC 2309) were weasel words... shouldn't we fight no matter what, if our cause is just?  against all odds?  there's probably a post on here somewhere of me saying something like that when I was younger lol.  That kind of youthful outrage and the 'first political emotion'--that is, anger, is something that fuels a lot of passion but we do need principles like that to consider... because the veneer of peaceful and stable civilization is much more fragile than we realize, so we do have to be careful with how many core elements of it we actually tinker with or dismantle.  no system is perfect, there is no utopia coming, we need to figure out what is good in what we have and how to improve it.  that's the kind of language that I know when I was younger and more fiery I'd find a bit too defensive of the status quo, but yeah, I really think we've made a ton of progress since the 1960's and we are risking throwing all of those away right now, unfortunately I see no wise or seasoned statesmen out there with reasonable and creative ways to explore how to deal with these problems.

I hope this isn't just a swinging pendulum, as GKC said "The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings."

[Era Might]

14 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

well, if you don't believe that some of our important institutions (academia, hollywood, news media) are drifting farther and farther left I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I am aware of COINTELPRO and the efforts of the US government against black civil rights and black power groups. In truth the Panthers were socialist AND there were a lot of racist policies in place. It's pretty hard for me to tease out how much of the resistance to MLK and Malcom X was due to racism vs how much was due to socialism/Marxism.

So you may say "see the government attacked Black people under the guise of resisting socialism and they're doing it again," as they say, history repeats itself. However, it doesn't appear to me to be a guise at all. America was much more institutionally racist, and there were groups and people actually pushing socialist ideology as a remedy to our social ills. Both can be true at the same time. The FBI came in and murdered Fred Hampton, probably because of both racism and anti-socialism. Neither justifies murder. Just like an anti-racist motivation does not justify murder. However, I think at the core, resisting Marxist ideology is a good thing that gets messy due to its association with various Black political movements. I don't think you're treating the topic with the nuance it deserves. Maybe because you see racism and anti-Marxism as both contemptible things? Or you don't find Marxist ideology an actual threat?

Again, maybe I am just super daft, but I do think there are Marxist actors trying to transform our society. Call me a wild conspiracy theorist or say I've fallen to the propaganda, but there is a BLM leader on record saying she and her comrade are "trained Marxists." And their statement of faith on their website IS far-left ideology.

Now to be fair, I think that they genuinely believe tearing down our society and replacing it with a Marxist, godless, and classless religion will remedy our social problems. In other words, I think they mean well. But I also think there's enough dead bodies stacked up in communist countries that might make you want to pump the brakes a bit.

I don't see any murals of Marx in black communities. I see murals of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, etc. BLM is a movement and an organization, but it is not the basis of black politics. I can point you to plenty of black activist organizations that have nothing to do with Marxism. Personally, I think the infatuation with Marx is a white ppl thing. That's why Marcus Garvey was wary of black socialists as well as the black bourgeoisie, because he believed in one God, one aim and one destiny. He was for his people, not for dead European philosophers.

[Era Might]

49 minutes ago, Ice_nine said:

However, I think at the core, resisting Marxist ideology is a good thing that gets messy due to its association with various Black political movements. I don't think you're treating the topic with the nuance it deserves. Maybe because you see racism and anti-Marxism as both contemptible things? Or you don't find Marxist ideology an actual threat?

For more nuance, I highly recommend the Stephen Kotkin video I posted before. He discusses the failure of communism and the paradox that the West won the Cold War, but is at risk of losing the post-Cold War. But Kotkin argues that just as the USSR was not brought down from without (it was reformed by Gorbachev from within), so the West can only destroy itself from within, and Trump is doing just that. Kotkin points out that populist authoritarianism is a way for the "losers" in society to have their voice heard. Trump didn't invent the role he's playing, the strong man who is above the corrupt system and comes to rule in the name of the ppl. Kotkin argues that America has a deficit of democracy that is making its political system unworkable as Trump erodes institutions like the press. Very nuanced, I had to listen to the lectures twice but they're worth the time.

[Luigi]

Trump has not eroded the press. The press has been eroding itself for decades. 

[Era Might]

8 minutes ago, Luigi said:

Trump has not eroded the press. The press has been eroding itself for decades. 

It's been changing. Social media is now the press. Hashtags become political campaigns or vice versa. Trump himself has adapted and made Twitter his press room. But as in everything else, Trump sees the actual press as a swamp, a leftist swamp. That's how authoritarians operate, outside institutions. They create a direct "contract" with the "ppl." I respect Trump a lot, he learned from Vince McMahon, I really think Trump is playing a role like a wrestler, like in the old days when they had good guys and bad guys like the Shah character or Hulk Hogan the Patriot. I think Trump sees all this political theater in that way, he'll say any racist thing he can because he's developing a storyline. But the wink at the camera is that he's Vince McMahon, he's the man behind the scenes orchestrating it all. Very clever.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Era Might

[Norseman82]

https://www.gocomics.com/stevekelley/2020/07/02

Edited July 9, 2020 by Norseman82

[Aloysius]

yeah marxism is not particularly popular among the average black man any more than it's really particularly popular among the average white man.  Orwell's Wigan Pier is a great read for some scathing rebukes of the out of touch middle class socialists who deep down actually don't like the working class people they claim to represent and are actually just fueled by jealousy and hatred of the upper classes.  but anyway, it is usually small and committed people that drive movements, so we shouldn't ignore its influence on the leadership of some of these movements and organizations, either.

you can see with some of the leaders of these movements that they are definitely coloring it with marxist agendas, we can't deny that.  actually a few high level members of one of the BLM organizations recently resigned in disgust at this kind of hijacking.  there are people who want to just focus on the goal at hand, and others who argue that x, y, or z other cause that they're invested in is a necessary component of achieving that goal.  there's a kind of semantic overload happening on these phrases like "BLM" where a bunch of other causes are tacked onto it, and then anyone who opposes even one of those other causes is caught in a discursive trap where they can be accused of being against a movement just aimed at pushing back against police violence.

we're going through a bit of what seems to be, at least in part, a moral panic right now, not a baseless moral panic as there are definitely problems that need to be addressed, but the pattern of a moral panic where individual incidents get inflated to the point where instead of just talking about some problematic sides of policing and racial relations in America, it's being treated like police are just out there gunning down black people at random, and it would be helpful to point out that this is just not true--killings by police of unarmed black people are actually declining, and add to that it's hard to parse out which cases are or are not justified, but not all of them are unjustified.  any unjust killing by police is something that we should be spurred to outrage about, but keeping those injustices in perspective would go a long way to ensuring we don't fail at our task of balancing public safety concerns with these very necessary reforms.  just look at the huge uptick in violent crime in NYC and Chicago, etc, in the last couple weeks as the police seem to be pulling back from their previously more proactive roles.  there is a legitimate role for a police force in massive modern cities and we are only seeing a tiny foretaste of the disaster that would come if we act too rashly.  it's nice to imagine we could get by without a large number of cops but the realities of the modern atomized city are that the peacefulness of it is largely held together by some degree of force.  normally I have always hated when people bring up chicago death rates, etc, in response to problems with police brutality or police unjustly killing someone, but in this case when we are now talking about a potential massive cut to policing, it's a valid point when ppl like Terry Crews point it out because now we're talking about balancing different things--create vacuums where there has been a police presence keeping the peace in some of these major cities, and it's very predictable you're going to see death rates skyrocket (as they already have started to)

1 hour ago, Era Might said:

For more nuance, I highly recommend the Stephen Kotkin video I posted before. He discusses the failure of communism and the paradox that the West won the Cold War, but is at risk of losing the post-Cold War. But Kotkin argues that just as the USSR was not brought down from without (it was reformed by Gorbachev from within), so the West can only destroy itself from within, and Trump is doing just that. Kotkin points out that populist authoritarianism is a way for the "losers" in society to have their voice heard. Trump didn't invent the role he's playing, the strong man who is above the corrupt system and comes to rule in the name of the ppl. Kotkin argues that America has a deficit of democracy that is making its political system unworkable as Trump erodes institutions like the press. Very nuanced, I had to listen to the lectures twice but they're worth the time.

@Era Might, I actually have a hard time calling trump an authoritarian for the principle reason--what authority has he actually accumulated for himself?  He has not actually expanded the powers of the executive branch in any meaningful way that I can see, certainly not compared to his most recent predecessors in the office... his principle executive actions have seemed to be cancelling past executive actions and trying to withdraw troops from places to the large wailing and gnashing of teeth of the military industrial complex and intelligence agencies.  am I missing something?

what I have seen you describe is mostly something I could describe more as populism.  but authoritarianism should mean that he is at least trying to accumulate more authority for himself to rule.

[full disclaimer: arguing he is not accurately described as an authoritarian should not be seen as an endorsement of him, lol, I am not a Trump supporter, just think it's good to try to be accurate about what one criticizes him over]

[Era Might]

21 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

yeah marxism is not particularly popular among the average black man any more than it's really particularly popular among the average white man.  Orwell's Wigan Pier is a great read for some scathing rebukes of the out of touch middle class socialists who deep down actually don't like the working class people they claim to represent and are actually just fueled by jealousy and hatred of the upper classes.  but anyway, it is usually small and committed people that drive movements, so we shouldn't ignore its influence on the leadership of some of these movements and organizations, either.

you can see with some of the leaders of these movements that they are definitely coloring it with marxist agendas, we can't deny that.  actually a few high level members of one of the BLM organizations recently resigned in disgust at this kind of hijacking.  there are people who want to just focus on the goal at hand, and others who argue that x, y, or z other cause that they're invested in is a necessary component of achieving that goal.  there's a kind of semantic overload happening on these phrases like "BLM" where a bunch of other causes are tacked onto it, and then anyone who opposes even one of those other causes is caught in a discursive trap where they can be accused of being against a movement just aimed at pushing back against police violence.

we're going through a bit of what seems to be, at least in part, a moral panic right now, not a baseless moral panic as there are definitely problems that need to be addressed, but the pattern of a moral panic where individual incidents get inflated to the point where instead of just talking about some problematic sides of policing and racial relations in America, it's being treated like police are just out there gunning down black people at random, and it would be helpful to point out that this is just not true--killings by police of unarmed black people are actually declining, and add to that it's hard to parse out which cases are or are not justified, but not all of them are unjustified.  any unjust killing by police is something that we should be spurred to outrage about, but keeping those injustices in perspective would go a long way to ensuring we don't fail at our task of balancing public safety concerns with these very necessary reforms.  just look at the huge uptick in violent crime in NYC and Chicago, etc, in the last couple weeks as the police seem to be pulling back from their previously more proactive roles.  there is a legitimate role for a police force in massive modern cities and we are only seeing a tiny foretaste of the disaster that would come if we act too rashly.  it's nice to imagine we could get by without a large number of cops but the realities of the modern atomized city are that the peacefulness of it is largely held together by some degree of force.  normally I have always hated when people bring up chicago death rates, etc, in response to problems with police brutality or police unjustly killing someone, but in this case when we are now talking about a potential massive cut to policing, it's a valid point when ppl like Terry Crews point it out because now we're talking about balancing different things--create vacuums where there has been a police presence keeping the peace in some of these major cities, and it's very predictable you're going to see death rates skyrocket (as they already have started to)

The biggest obstacle to any real change IMO is the inability to admit black ppl not merely into the political process but into the political agenda. To even recognize that black ppl have something like national status, equal to the natives. The Liberal programming of the Great Society is dying off. White ppl don't have to save black ppl anymore or pretend that black ppl and white ppl are integrated. Malcolm X was remarkably simple and direct about what he wanted. He didn't want integration, he wanted black ppl controlling those areas where they were a majority. As long as black ppl owned and controlled their own communities, they would not be economically or politically dependent on white money. This is the same principle that defeated apartheid in South Africa. But Americans don't see black ppl in the same way they would see black South Africans. White and black can easily coexist as long as black ppl control their own communities. That requires political existence, black ppl have to think black, not merely American. But black ppl have been here longer than white ppl, they have more interest than anyone to see America thrive. But they won't be disregarded anymore.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Era Might

[Aloysius]

Well, sorry but I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that kind of segregationism.  I'm all for subsidiarity and local power and local control, but defining that based on race and making it a separate nation?  No, not a chance.  Integration is the present and the future.  We're more than half a century from the Loving decision, and there are plenty of 'mixed race' families, including a few friends of mine, where do they fit into this?  Sorry but no, black Americans are about 13% of the population, there is zero way to disconnect them from the completely intertwined way they are embedded in American society.  Trying to divide the nations instead of us all coming together as Americans?  Sorry, but that's a non-starter for me.

[Era Might]

25 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

yeah marxism is not particularly popular among the average black man any more than it's really particularly popular among the average white man.  Orwell's Wigan Pier is a great read for some scathing rebukes of the out of touch middle class socialists who deep down actually don't like the working class people they claim to represent and are actually just fueled by jealousy and hatred of the upper classes.  but anyway, it is usually small and committed people that drive movements, so we shouldn't ignore its influence on the leadership of some of these movements and organizations, either.

you can see with some of the leaders of these movements that they are definitely coloring it with marxist agendas, we can't deny that.  actually a few high level members of one of the BLM organizations recently resigned in disgust at this kind of hijacking.  there are people who want to just focus on the goal at hand, and others who argue that x, y, or z other cause that they're invested in is a necessary component of achieving that goal.  there's a kind of semantic overload happening on these phrases like "BLM" where a bunch of other causes are tacked onto it, and then anyone who opposes even one of those other causes is caught in a discursive trap where they can be accused of being against a movement just aimed at pushing back against police violence.

we're going through a bit of what seems to be, at least in part, a moral panic right now, not a baseless moral panic as there are definitely problems that need to be addressed, but the pattern of a moral panic where individual incidents get inflated to the point where instead of just talking about some problematic sides of policing and racial relations in America, it's being treated like police are just out there gunning down black people at random, and it would be helpful to point out that this is just not true--killings by police of unarmed black people are actually declining, and add to that it's hard to parse out which cases are or are not justified, but not all of them are unjustified.  any unjust killing by police is something that we should be spurred to outrage about, but keeping those injustices in perspective would go a long way to ensuring we don't fail at our task of balancing public safety concerns with these very necessary reforms.  just look at the huge uptick in violent crime in NYC and Chicago, etc, in the last couple weeks as the police seem to be pulling back from their previously more proactive roles.  there is a legitimate role for a police force in massive modern cities and we are only seeing a tiny foretaste of the disaster that would come if we act too rashly.  it's nice to imagine we could get by without a large number of cops but the realities of the modern atomized city are that the peacefulness of it is largely held together by some degree of force.  normally I have always hated when people bring up chicago death rates, etc, in response to problems with police brutality or police unjustly killing someone, but in this case when we are now talking about a potential massive cut to policing, it's a valid point when ppl like Terry Crews point it out because now we're talking about balancing different things--create vacuums where there has been a police presence keeping the peace in some of these major cities, and it's very predictable you're going to see death rates skyrocket (as they already have started to)

@Era Might, I actually have a hard time calling trump an authoritarian for the principle reason--what authority has he actually accumulated for himself?  He has not actually expanded the powers of the executive branch in any meaningful way that I can see, certainly not compared to his most recent predecessors in the office... his principle executive actions have seemed to be cancelling past executive actions and trying to withdraw troops from places to the large wailing and gnashing of teeth of the military industrial complex and intelligence agencies.  am I missing something?

what I have seen you describe is mostly something I could describe more as populism.  but authoritarianism should mean that he is at least trying to accumulate more authority for himself to rule.

[full disclaimer: arguing he is not accurately described as an authoritarian should not be seen as an endorsement of him, lol, I am not a Trump supporter, just think it's good to try to be accurate about what one criticizes him over]

The Trump situation is unique because as you point out, he doesn't actually control the country's institutions. But if you compare Trump with other authoritarians around the globe, he fits the model. Kotkin discusses this, he breaks authoritarianism down to a formula. You don't have fascism anymore because you don't need it. You don't need outright violence to exercise authoritarian control anymore. With populism more generally, you just need democratic deficit, democratic mechanisms, political entrepreneurialism and stories that you can keep going back to, like immigrants or black ppl or leftists. This is the formula for populism. Authoritarianism is more about institutions. Trump has not eliminated institutions because he can't. But his entire campaign is built on extra-institutional power and capital. He bypassed his own party and is independently wealthy. Trump has said the press is an enemy of the ppl. That's the kind of authoritarianism he exercises, he discredits and muddies and embarrasses. He learned long ago how to play the media.

3 minutes ago, Aloysius said:

Well, sorry but I deeply and fundamentally disagree with that kind of segregationism.  I'm all for subsidiarity and local power and local control, but defining that based on race and making it a separate nation?  No, not a chance.  Integration is the present and the future.  We're more than half a century from the Loving decision, and there are plenty of 'mixed race' families, including a few friends of mine, where do they fit into this?  Sorry but no, black Americans are about 13% of the population, there is zero way to disconnect them from the completely intertwined way they are embedded in American society.  Trying to divide the nations instead of us all coming together as Americans?  Sorry, but that's a non-starter for me.

Integration is a national myth. It's not about having mixed families. Black ppl are a nation unto themselves, with their own history. White ppl only deal with middle class black ppl. In reality, America is very segregated. Black ppl live with black ppl. White ppl with white ppl. The idea of an American "nation" only works when the nation works for everyone. Black ppl are as American as anyone else, but being American doesn't require the ideology of integration. Black ppl are still black ppl and that is not a biological statement it's a political recognition. I think conservatives would prefer to deal with black ppl as black ppl rather than as Democrats.

[Aloysius]

he seems to fit a 'pattern' except with none of the actual content that makes 'authoritarianism' actually what it is.  he doesn't even seem to WANT to accumulate more authority to himself.  it just seems like the kind of criticism of Trump that's destined to spin up his opponents and leave his supporters and a certain number of independents rolling their eyes because they don't see him as being authoritarian because he's not accumulating (or even attempting to accumulate) more authority for himself over the institutions.

his pattern of fighting with the media conglomerates also fits the pattern of a populist.

MAYBE one could convince me he has proto-authoritarian tendencies.  maybe.  but generally speaking looking at the actual kinds of policies he does and tries to get done and the means by which he does them and tries to do them, he is actually relatively normal except with some belligerence, some crass and problematic rhetoric, and a streak of populism.  where's the authority that would make it authoritarian?  I really think this is the kind of hyperbolic argument that fuels greater support for trump because people see it and think it's just not gelling with what they're observing about his actual actions.

although who knows, maybe it's a successful strategy, I can't be sure how it's falling on the general public's ears.  but what it isn't is something that I've been at all convinced is true, because to me the fundamental aspect of an authoritarian has everything to do with the authority they attempt to accumulate and wield (outside of institutions, of course)