We Americans don’t know what it means to live in an authoritarian state unless we are first generation immigrants who came from one or are privileged visitors, researchers, diplomats, and expatriates in such lands . We don’t know what it means to have every word monitored, to have books banned, visas yanked, and people, fired, deported, imprisoned, and killed just because they said something contrary to the views of the authoritarian ruler. Having university administrators forced to resign or dismissed, faculty fired, and students expelled for speaking a truth contrary to the words of a dictator is textbook un-American in most of our views but such is quite common elsewhere . We don’t, know unless you are not white,what it is like to have the military and intelligence in our streets repressing citizens, even killing them though it is not unusual outside our borders. Bribing your way out of a traffic ticket or jail time or to get treated in a hospitals or to get government service is a public norm elsewhere in so many other countries but delusionally we, those who live “Alice in Wonderland” lives assume “never in America” without severe consequences. This is all why the No King movement in the last week has emerged in such unprecedented force.
But with all this massive fear suddenly crystallizing across political asiles that our democracy is making a stern right towards authoritarian rule we have yet to understand this is how most in the world actually live. Unlike us, most in the world live in societies where they are told what to do with no norms for debate, dialog, or otherwise freedom of _expression_ due to the authoritarianism of some monarch, politician, religion, tribe, or caste let alone class.
As we Americans, including the historically degraded with at least the right to speak out though detrimentally, have rested in our bed of freedom of _expression_ ease, most in the world don’t know what it is like to be free to say and do what they want. The pressure to conform in everything from what you eat to what you wear and who you befriend and marry and to hide your true political, religious, and social preferences is the norm in most places in the world. Even when those long standing democracies in the West and developing democracies in the Non-West, scrap off the public relations rhetoric what you have in most cases is authoritarianism which punishes those who dare to be different, exiles those who risk speaking up to authority to the outskirts and exclusions of families, communities, and societies.
This is what most Americans are beginning to feel but don’t know what it is but know it does not feel good. But it is happening, we are becoming like so many in the rest of the world due to voter choices based upon the manipulations of our fears about dramatic racialized ethnic and gendered demographic changes rather than facing our demons and developing a truly racialized multiethnic gender equality democracy.
No King Movement or not, due to our own fears upheld by massive ignorance about ourselves, our constitution, and the broader outside world, we will slide into permanent autocracy in our personal lives as well as in our politics like most others are confined to in the world if we don’t take note and put on the societal brakes.
Already the MAGA cracks are beginng to show since it is disguising the last ICU gasps for breathful White Supremacy impossible to survive 21st century and domestic and global multiethnic and gendered life characteristics and its political and economic demands. Even if in the realm of ANTI-MAGA judiciary, economic, and electoral efforts, there is the defeat of this White Supremacy effort, the deep authoritarian culture of fear will be sustained and even deepen unless authentic restorative justice measures are implemented to make America what it is supposed to be but has never been for everyone of different skin colors, ancestries, creeds, and religion.
That will require a different kind, bolder, restorative justice oriented leadership than what we are used to seeing and respecting in America since we remain, for the most part, so cozy in our mythological “race” and gendered boxes. But if we want this authoritarian culture trying to incarcerate all of us to melt into oblivion as we re-capture who we are and continue the journey to being a positive productive respectful multiethnic and gendered democracy, let us shed our chains of fear and become ourselves restorative justice oriented people everywhere in our reach in private and public spheres and encourage and support the new kinds of restorative justice oriented government, business, media, legal, education, and non-profit leaders we need to step forward.