https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1qmfv45/trumps_presidency_the_tempering_of_political/

Despite the lib hysteria of his first term that amounted to nothing really actionable, this second term is so nakedly brutal and coercive that everyone on both the international and domestic stage have just dropped any pretense of upholding the contradictory rhetoric of justifying global imperialism or capitalist inequality via the ideological principles of liberal democracy.

Regime supporters are justifying state violence not because it follows their ideological principles, but because they can now unrestrainedly wield state power to pursue whatever ends they want. They sound more like Trotsky writing Terrorism and Communism or Lenin in The State and Revolution than Bush-era regime apologists. The veil of ideology has been lifted and they are now conscious to the naked mechanics of state power, as Marxists always have been.

Increasingly the libs are also becoming similarly conscious. On the global scale you have leaders like Carney calling this out and domestically the events in Minnesota are radicalizing them. I don’t think this is entirely Trump’s fault or will and can see a throughline from COVID-Ukraine-Gaza to this moment in terms of the erosion of the fiction of liberalism and trust in its institutions.

I don’t think there is any precedent or analogue for the current situation. What is next? Civil war? Martial law? Elections becoming a cycle of retribution? Will nothing ever happen?? Who knows