This country has had a lot of closet authoritarians for quite some time. Now they feel they can be loud and proud. This came to my mind recently with Trump's "temporary" Muslim ban. It was signed at the end of business hours on a Friday, so there was no time for clarifications, trainings, or orders of what to do with ambiguous cases or when potential checks and balances come into play. Instead, we saw bottom-up authoritarianism to sync with the top-down:
Attitudes toward democracy are in strong decline. (See this New York Times piece). I think one factor in this rise of authoritarianism is the flip-side of entitlement, consumerism, and the cult of progress. We are conditioned so that each new advance immediately becomes the new baseline, and we must improve on that. So many desires have already been fulfilled that our next set of desires are based on convenience, and we perceive that we need the speed of authority (ideally our own) to get to the new vista of desires.This is an important point. So many Customs agents obediently imposed this cruelty. Hope to see disobedience, resignations, resistance: https://t.co/YQtWpPaUzw— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 7, 2017
Democracy, liberty, and decency all slow down immediate gratification, which is unacceptable for the induced-ADD and impulsivity that Americans are conditioned to have. Under the cult of progress, infinite growth of infinite jest is seen as the key to the way of life.
This entitlement started with the boomers, and has been passed down each generation. At best one could argue that this entitlement has gotten worse, but really, I think that the only thing different with the current group of entitled Americans coming from up through our schools is their complete lack of meta-cognitive towards consumption.
Bypassing the increasingly tedious and overly-reductive Millennial vs Boomer debate (what the hell happened to Gen X?), it looks like this entitlement has cost us our constitutional democracy.
