When I ask myself what trajectory this country is on, the most likely answer seems to be Orbán’s Hungary. How much in this thread sounds familiar?
1. The ruling class, wallowing in corruption, enjoys total impunity. Meanwhile, peaceful protest and other freedoms are criminalised.

2. No political scandal is a sacking offence.
3. A complicit media so distorts the reporting of government action that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish truth from lies.
4. Apparently endless rule is sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering.

5. Politics proceeds by means of the grand gesture. Billions are spent on major infrastructure, while basic services are allowed to wither and die.
6. Public agencies are repurposed to direct money into the hands of chums.

7. People trying to defend minority rights and liberal values are bated and provoked, as the government seeks new enemies and revels in its illiberalism.
8. Policies that would once have made you gasp are normalised, as the frontier of acceptable outrage is constantly extended.

9. Immigrants are demonised and blamed for problems for which they bear no responsibility, even as their numbers fall.
10. The government inventively discovers endless scapegoats for its own failures.

11. Patriotism and flag-waving are used to advance an agenda that destroys the very fabric of public life and the meaning of the nation state as a shared polity belonging to all its citizens. The worse the state of the nation, the more national greatness is invoked.

Any of this ring a bell?