Trump is not creating an authoritarian America. This kind of garbage is fundamentally stupid.

(Usual disclaimer: I did not vote for Trump. He will make a terrible president. I wish he’d never run. Yadda yadda.)

And the reason Trump is not creating an authoritarian America is that we already had one and it was getting more severe without Trump all by its lonesome. I’ve been writing about that for a while.

That’s completely ignoring what I think is the largest factor in these user-hostile decisions, which is the increasing authoritarian mindset of our society that influences every milieu.

Kendzior who for identity reasons cannot face what’s really happened and is happening (like many others) is getting the analysis precisely backwards: Trump is only like all political candidates surfing existing trends and tendencies.

Yeah, he’s gonna make them worse, but this didn’t emerge do novo just in time for Trump. It’s been kicking around a while, and enabled by people like Hillary Clinton and yes even Sarah Kendzior herself in her own small way.

I’m often stunned speechless by all the facile analysis and simply delusional thinking emerging lately from people that I used to trust and whose sites I used to frequent daily. Now I never or only rarely visit dozens of sites who have been left behind by actual events and are struggling poorly to make sense of a world they no longer understand.

In the America of today, authoritarianism is not some innovation of Trump and Trump is not its forerunner. No, he is merely its avatar, embodying and amplifying what America — even the blue parts — has been lurching towards for many years now.