Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline

Unfortunately the levers of power are so captured that it’s likely the only way for things to change is for leadership to mess up so badly that people end up on the streets.

Unfortunately many people don't believe anything or even consider a possibility until some authority/expert figure makes a formal sounding statement about it.

I think the problem is that people are impervious to "knowing" when they don't have a sophisticated enough understanding to realize that it's a team sport divided by class instead of the political party security blanket they've been trained on.

So many people think either that they're on the winning side or that by not taking a side explicitly they're above it all and not losing.

I think some of the best knowledge is reports like this one. The report gives you the feeling of being so obvious when you read it. But the actual claims and facts themselves and their certainty (Some issues have just moderate confidence, others have high) have a lot of credibility and deep analysis.

Additionally the collection, framing and analysis of these events in this intelligence level format using professional techniques and sharing them with the public is good. Multiple sources from different people legitimize and idea and promote it to being more understood. While people (myself included) focus a lot of novelty of ideas, I think novel ideas are the outlier and there is a real need for work like this where data is curated, and analyzed and a simple but clear narrative can be created for readers.

My takeaway from a report like this isn't meant to serve as a "Newsflash" type post where its informing the public of some grave threat we didn't know about. Its to analyze a known trend, provide data and give a deeper level of insights that is digestible to a regular person so they can be more informed about an issue.

For example I didn't know Donald Trump issued 5x the amount of executive orders this presidency than his last. I know he issued a lot, but that figure is new to me.

Honestly people don’t know. My republican friend literally doesn’t know what the word gerrymander means. She just thinks Trump is funny…

The timing makes sense to me