> So long as people keep seeing the capacity for evil only in the Other, and not an innate, universal outgrowth of their own nature, humanity will keep producing Neros and Maos and Stalins and Hitlers and Pots and Mobutus. And also Clintons and Bushes and Bidens and Trumps
You just reiterated the vagueness you were complaining about. But, in my opinion, that vagueness is inevitable without assessing matters of scale, method, and perspective. There’s nuance.
While Obama-Biden accreted and shifted a surprising amount of power into unaccountable bureaucracy and NGOs, and the Clinton-Bushes to a lesser degree did the same, Trump, so far, seems to be dismantling that power instead of replacing it with something new. These are ALL autocratic responses to a diminished legislative branch that appears to have abdicated its responsibilities and become more and more arthritic over the decades.
For example, to pick a hot button issue, Biden implicitly managed to bureaucratically redefine “woman” to mean something other than “no Y chromosome”, and therefore arguably gutted Title 9, while Trump has been steadily (autocratically) restoring Title 9 back towards its original intent. (This analysis is obviously based on my “biased” empirical perspective that females are different than males in some important ways).
Ditto for the border, the scale of foreign adventurism, money printing, DEI as the central consideration in federal contracts, using NGOs as proxies of political will, Critical Theory dominating the state department, etc.
Looking at this another way, one can make the polemical demonization argument that ICE is “the gestapo”, and throw around terms like “white supremacy”, as Walz does, but one can also similarly make the argument that Antifa, Code Pink, the DSA, etc, are the democrats tolerated “red guard” or, more accurately, “nascent Stasi” - after all, their philosophy is unarguably far left, and their activities are literally partially funded by unaccountable billionaires, one China based, plus a network of democrat controlled NGOs.
Overall, it’s fair to state that unaccountable bureaucracy, large extreme political movements, and NGOs have shifted largely in one political direction - just look at their political donation records and political activity - whilst organized dismantling of same (using mostly executive branch will power) leans the other way.
