part of the reason watching Donald Trump and the Republican Party do their thing makes me so crazy is i watched Hugo Chavez and the PSUV do theirs for many years and it completely destroyed the country.

people think you get an authoritarian country with some big world-historical event like a military coup or a revolution. no. it comes in dribs and drabs.

court rulings, little rule changes, steady erosion of local authority, shifting money around in budgets to help your friends, then it gets a little harder to vote, the opposition has to hustle harder and harder, there are weird legal barriers, maybe we'll fix things next election

verbal attacks on independent media turn into regulatory action, licenses aren't renewed, government allies buy the independent voices and turn them into government megaphones.

eventually, police forces are politicized, intelligence services are politicized, the military is politicized, the central bank is politicized, in every decision at every level of government the question is "how can this benefit the ruling political party or hurt the opposition?"

politicization -> incompetence, and basic government services break down, but you can't vote the bums out because you can't register, or your vote doesn't matter, and no one knows what's true because all the information left is rumors, accompanied by a blizzard of bullshit.

also, just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. here's the thing to remember for the next 20yrs: it can always get worse.

this is exactly what i'm talking about. this kind of stuff is filling me with dread. https://twitter.com/GregWeeksCLT/status/1053298876000714752

this kind of thing. dread. https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1053299663342841857