I just find it profoundly doubtful that there is a real constituency for autocracy in this country. I could believe a story about people being too bored or demoralized to care but the theory of MAGA having some broad mass appeal, that I feel you slip into sometimes, is extremely unconvincing to me.
Also, I should make clear that I come from this from a libertarian angle too and that's partially what's informing this. I think (and maybe I'm wrong!) that a lot of the laggard response to Trump is less that people like and want autocracy when its terms are made clear
and more that after these various breaks from the constitution didn't result in out and out authoritarianism people really just can't conceptualize that it can happen here.
This also ties back to Buckle's point about an unwillingness to fight at least as far as government is concerned (I concede there has been plenty of fight in civil society). The electorate should have taken seriously the threat to democracy and the rule of law seriously when the political
elites also didn't seem to take that seriously. And again, I think this points more towards people taking liberalism for granted rather than there being a deep upswell of support for autocracy.
My thread today deals with this a bit, but: I didn’t challenge the autocracy/fascism framing because A: I was Toby’s guest and B: it’s the lingua franca here on Bluesky. But this is an area where I think it leads people astray. There are so many regime types between here and fascism.
I studied Latin America in grad school, and to bring in one of my favorite terms from that literature, there isn’t a constituency in the US for autocracy, but there’s definitely a constituency for plebiscitarian superpresidentialism. And it’s not confined to the right, which makes the problem worse.
This is a valid fear I also think this shows that your "liberalism is the historical exception that might not be long for this world" fear is unfounded if modern autocracy (which I consider this to basically be) needs to be wreathed in the forms, trappings, and legitimizing stories
of liberal democracy. Like it just seems obvious to me that that doesn't happen if liberalism as the justifying political story hasn't put down some deep roots in the population.