The old days are behind us. The days of Stalin disappearing people overnight, leaving only a shoe on the street. The days of the Gestapo knocking on people’s doors early in the morning and hauling them out on the street in humiliation, to be thrown onto a truck. The days of the Red Guard hauling out imperialists and counter-revolutionaries to be shot in the street.

We don’t do that any more. Now, in Russia, there’s a softer form of authoritarianism. You just don’t get on the ballot. You get arrested politely (with overwhelming force present but not used) at the airport and charged with minor violations. There is no public humiliation, you just go away.

China has “social capital”. You don’t get loans, you can’t buy bus tickets. If you disappear, it’s very quiet and non-violent and you might resurface later admitting what a mistake you made. No violence, no public humiliation.

In Hungary, Orbàn deliberately misses one checkbox out of 7 that qualifies him as “dictator”, “fascist”, “authoritarian”, “undemocratic”, so he can’t be called any of those things (at least, not on a forum where dozens of tankies will emerge and say “but this missing checkbox”).

And, in the US, we have a soft coup. There are no black helicopters and there may never be. There are no special forces on the ground, at least not yet, and there may never be. Instead, people will lose funding. Door badges will cease to function. Arrests will be made by sheriff’s deputies in most cases.

If we’re lucky and persistent, this soft coup will go down in history as a soft *attempted* coup, maybe a soft putsch. But: softly, softly. Hark! The times have changed.

Ok, afterthought: Failure to act is action. Failure to vote is voting. Which means, by failing to act, by failing to call votes, the Congress which was voted democratically into office is, in fact, carrying out the will of the people, who did, in fact, vote for gerrymandering and a Republican majority. (I didn’t. And you, dear reader, probably didn’t either, but, in fact, all those people who don’t read but prefer to watch video (and they are legion) *did*.

One can argue they didn’t know what they were voting for, and, whether or not they knew, they certainly have the right to change their minds and vote differently (assuming they have viable options in two years), but they voted.

And that democratically-elected Congress has, over the years, along with the democratically-elected President, stacked the Supreme Court with Justices inclined to give Republicans and the Executive Branch more and more power.