Documenting the collapse of democracy

It's looking more and more like I was right about DJT and MAGA, and less and less like a hyperbolic crackpot, or whatever. Even the restrained MSM is starting to come to see the ugly vision of kleptocratic authoritarian DJT-MAGA reality that has been staring it in the face since 2016. NYT opinionologist Michelle Goldberg writes:

The Great Capitulation

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, C.E.O. of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.

Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.

Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.

In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote of the current administration’s refusal, at least so far, to renew the humanitarian parole of immigrants from countries such as Venezuela and Haiti to possibly shield them from deportation under Trump. “For a president who considers Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate,” Blitzer wrote.

One of Kamala Harris’s pollsters, Politico reported, recently warned the Democratic National Committee leadership against pearl-clutching over Trump’s transgressions, including the wildly unfit characters he’s announced for his administration. The voters, she said, “don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions.”

Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.

Clearly, the light of kleptocratic authoritarianism is dawning for those who have the guts to see it for what it is. The rest? Still either in head in sand mode, or a mood of elation at what will come, whether it bites them or helps them, or not.

Nietzschean: focused on subjective reality and individual achievement, with rejection of absolute truth.