How authoritarianism, distrust and bigotry poison societies

The short answer is that, among other bad things, authoritarianism, distrust and bigotry poison societies when at least a significant, persistent minority of society comes to accept them and plays on those emotions and fears to suck other people into their pit of rage and hate. That is especially true when political, religious and business leaders either condone the poison by their silence  and moral cowardice, or actively endorse it by their rhetoric and/or behavior.

The New York Times writes on the growing poison in India. This is about radical right Hindus poisoning society against Muslims. The NYT writes:

HARIDWAR, India — The police officer arrived at the Hindu temple here with a warning to the monks: Don’t repeat your hate speech.

Ten days earlier, before a packed audience and thousands watching online, the monks had called for violence against the country’s minority Muslims. Their speeches, in one of India’s holiest cities, promoted a genocidal campaign to “kill two million of them” and urged an ethnic cleansing of the kind that targeted Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Once considered fringe, extremist elements are increasingly taking their militant message into the mainstream, stirring up communal hate in a push to reshape India’s constitutionally protected secular republic into a Hindu state. Activists and analysts say their agenda is being enabled, even normalized, by political leaders and law enforcement officials who offer tacit endorsements by not directly addressing such divisive issues.

After the monks’ call to arms went viral, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his top leaders remained silent, except for a vice president with a largely ceremonial role who warned that “inciting people against each other is a crime against the nation” without making a specific reference to Haridwar. Junior members of Mr. Modi’s party attended the event, and the monks have often posted pictures with senior leaders.

“You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Indian Supreme Court judge, said in a public lecture. “Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.”

In the face of silence, a spokesperson for a group that supports Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party downplayed and pushed back on criticism of Modi’s silence asking, “Does the prime minister or home minister need to address every small, trivial issue? The accused have already been arrested. The secular groups will always highlight such incidents, but not when Hindus, Hindu gods and goddesses are under attack.”

Small, trivial issues. That is how the political elites in India see hate and bigotry. That attitude is how secular democracies fall to authoritarianism, religious intolerance and discrimination.

The NYT comments that right-wing messages are spreading rapidly through social media and fears that a small incident, e.g., a Muslim man alleged to have seduced a Hindu woman, could incite significant incidents of violence.

The NYT commented on Modi: “After he rose to the country’s highest office in 2014 on a message of economic growth, there was hope that Mr. Modi could rein in the fury. Instead, he has often reverted to a Hindu-first agenda that inflames communal divides.”

Question: Does any of that feel unpleasantly familiar, and if so, what causes that unpleasant feeling?