Where are we headed?

“Trump Isn’t Hitler” Is a Bad Argument — Because That’s Not How Authoritarianism Works

People keep saying “Trump isn’t Hitler” like that ends the conversation.

Yeah. No shit. The U.S. isn’t running death camps.

But that argument misses how authoritarian systems actually form. They don’t start with genocide. They start with patterns: delegitimizing elections and courts, demanding loyalty to a leader over loyalty to law, weakening neutral institutions, attacking independent media as enemies, and scapegoating targeted groups to redirect anger away from the people actually profiting.

That’s why pattern recognition matters.

Democracies almost never collapse all at once. They erode—often quietly, often legally—through institutional capture, loyalty enforcement, and manufactured conflict that normalizes exceptional power. And in 2025, several high-salience disputes are about exactly those guardrails.

What this looks like in 2025: concrete institutional stress points

1) Civil service independence → loyalty-based staffing

A major stress point is whether the executive branch can convert neutral administration into a loyalty apparatus by weakening job protections for career employees.

In January 2025, the White House issued an order titled “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” aimed at shifting certain roles into a category with fewer protections and easier removal procedures. OPM’s implementation guidance made explicit that the order nullified prior procedural obstacles and laid out how agencies should identify and move positions into the new schedule. Congress’s CRS described how the change can mean reduced notice/appeal rights for covered employees.

This isn’t about whether elections can change policy (they can). It’s about whether professional administration gets reframed as “disloyal resistance,” so that competence becomes optional and loyalty becomes the job requirement.

Why it matters:
A neutral civil service is one of the strongest guardrails against personalized power. If agencies become instruments of partisan loyalty, the system stops checking power on its own—even if elections still technically happen.

2) Domestic troop deployments → expanded emergency-style executive power

Another stress point is the expanding use—and litigation—around domestic National Guard deployments and federalization authority for governance disputes.

Even when a deployment is arguably legal, normalizing force posture as a tool for political conflict is a classic institutional stressor: it shifts disputes away from civilian institutions and toward coercive capacity.

Why it matters:
A democracy governs primarily through civilian authority. When political disputes start drifting toward “who controls the uniforms,” you are no longer arguing policy—you are testing the boundaries of constitutional control.

3) Weakening oversight institutions → agency neutering and enforcement paralysis

A third stress point is whether oversight agencies can be crippled without formally abolishing them.

In 2025, Reuters reported major litigation around attempts to carry out mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with courts intervening to block or pause dismissals while the agency’s function was heavily disrupted.

You don’t have to outlaw oversight to kill it. You just have to starve it, paralyze it, or hollow it out until it can’t function.

Why it matters:
Independent enforcement—consumer protection, anti-corruption, labor law, civil rights—is how democracies restrain power without violence. Crippling enforcement is a quiet way to concentrate authority.

4) War powers → executive first, permission later

Institutional erosion also shows up when congressional war powers become effectively symbolic.

In December 2025, the House rejected War Powers resolutions aimed at limiting unilateral executive force tied to Venezuela and drug cartels.

Why it matters:
When Congress declines to meaningfully constrain unilateral force—again—the system drifts toward “executive first, permission later.” That’s not strength. That’s erosion of constitutional balance.

Dismantling the lazy counterarguments

“Courts still exist.”
Courts existing is not the same as courts restraining power. Litigation can slow executive moves, but governance can still be reshaped while cases drag on. The CFPB fight shows how a core enforcement function can be impaired even while judges are still deciding.

“Schedule changes are just efficiency; elections have consequences.”
Elections decide policy direction. They do not justify turning the administrative state into a personal loyalty apparatus. If your “efficiency” reform systematically reduces neutral protections for positions labeled “policy-influencing,” you are structurally increasing the reward for loyalty and the penalty for professionalism.

“Deployments are about safety.”
Sometimes they are. But repeated disputes and litigation about scope and authority are themselves evidence of institutional stress. The question is not “is there ever a justification,” but “are we normalizing coercive presence as a routine tool of governance conflict?”

“Project 2025 is just a think tank document.”
The point isn’t whether every line becomes law. The point is whether there is a coherent governing theory oriented toward centralizing executive control and treating independent institutions as enemies to be dismantled.

The clean takeaway

You don’t need “Trump = Hitler” to see risk.

The responsible question is simple:

Are the guardrails that prevent personalized power—civil service independence, oversight enforcement, legislative constraint, and civilian governance norms—being weakened in durable ways?

In 2025, some of the biggest institutional fights—civil service reclassification, oversight agency hollowing, and war-powers constraints—are precisely about that.

Now add the economic context: why scapegoating works

Political rhetoric doesn’t create economic stress—but it can redirect how people explain it.

When people feel squeezed—housing, healthcare, wages—there are two options:

1. confront who holds structural power, or


2. find an easy target with less power.



Scapegoating is the shortcut. It turns anger that should be aimed upward into anger aimed sideways.

That’s why “migrant crime” narratives are so politically useful: they convert complex economic pain into a simple villain. But the data does not support the story.

Research published in PNAS using Texas arrest data found undocumented immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born citizens across felony offenses. National Academies reviews have also found immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than the native-born, including far lower incarceration rates for key groups. And mainstream reporting has repeatedly noted that evidence does not support a broad “migrant crime wave.”

That doesn’t mean no immigrant ever commits a crime. It means the narrative is built on selective outrage: spotlighting rare horrors to justify sweeping punishment of millions.

If your first instinct when someone commits a crime is to blame their accent, their immigration status, or their ethnicity instead of the actual behavior, then the issue was never “crime.” It was identity.

That’s how democracies erode: not with tanks first, but with training people to see whole categories of humans as threats—and to accept exceptional power as the “solution.”

Because once the guardrails are gone, you don’t need tanks in the streets.

You just wake up one day and realize the system no longer protects you.

That’s how democracies actually die.


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Part II

Why the Lies That Enable It Don’t Hold Up

Authoritarian systems don’t run on tanks at first.
They run on stories.

Stories about who’s dangerous.
Stories about who’s cheating.
Stories about why normal rules “can’t apply anymore.”

Those stories don’t have to be airtight. They just have to feel true enough to justify concentrating power. And when you slow them down—even a little—they fall apart.

This section is about the most common Trump-era claims used to excuse exceptional power, and why they collapse under basic facts.


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1. “Migrants are driving a crime wave.”

This claim is repeated constantly, and it’s doing a lot of political work. If people believe crime is being caused by a specific group, then harsh, collective punishment starts to sound reasonable.

The problem: the data doesn’t support it.

Across multiple large studies, immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. One widely cited paper using Texas arrest data found undocumented immigrants had lower felony arrest rates than native-born Americans. Reviews by the National Academies reached the same conclusion nationally: immigrants are generally less likely to commit crime and are incarcerated at lower rates.

If migrants were driving crime, places with more migrants would consistently show higher crime. That pattern just isn’t there.

How the trick works

Rare, horrific crimes are highlighted nonstop to imply a general trend. But that’s not analysis—it’s emotional substitution. It’s the same logic as claiming flying is unsafe because plane crashes make headlines.

This doesn’t mean immigrants never commit crimes. It means the narrative is built on selective outrage, not evidence.

And selective outrage matters, because it trains people to accept collective blame instead of individual accountability.


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2. “If someone commits a crime, their immigration status matters.”

This sounds like common sense until you apply it consistently.

When a white citizen commits a violent crime, it’s treated as an individual failure: one bad person. When a non-citizen commits one, it’s framed as evidence of a group threat, a cultural flaw, or an “invasion.”

That difference is the tell.

If the real concern were law and order, the focus would stay on behavior. But when identity becomes the explanation, the issue was never crime—it was who committed it.

That shift is dangerous, because once crime is framed as a group trait, extraordinary measures start to feel justified against everyone in that group, guilty or not.


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3. “ICE arrests are basically kidnapping.”

This claim shows up a lot—and it’s understandable why it feels true. But legally, it’s wrong, and using it actually weakens the argument.

ICE usually operates under administrative (civil) immigration warrants, not judicial warrants. These are issued by DHS officers, not judges, and are authorized under civil immigration law.

Because that authority exists in statute, ICE arrests are not kidnapping under U.S. law—even when they’re abusive, mistaken, or unconstitutional.

Where the real violations are

The serious issues aren’t semantic—they’re constitutional:

Fourth Amendment problems: administrative warrants don’t authorize home entry; courts have repeatedly ruled on this.

Due process violations: prolonged detention without hearings, detention of people with legal status, lack of access to counsel, language barriers, and sudden transfers.

Wrongful detention: U.S. citizens or lawful residents being held anyway, which leads to civil liability and settlements.


Calling this “kidnapping” is emotionally satisfying but legally sloppy. Calling it unlawful detention without judicial authorization is accurate, provable, and much harder to dismiss.

Precision matters if you want to win.


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4. “Trump is just enforcing the law—nothing authoritarian about it.”

Law enforcement isn’t authoritarian by definition. Selective, exaggerated, or exceptional enforcement is.

In 2025, the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, framing an “invasion” narrative tied to Venezuelan gangs to justify mass detentions and removals. That move is now being challenged in court, precisely because it stretches wartime-style authority into peacetime immigration enforcement.

Separately, deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison have been documented involving non-citizens, including people without U.S. criminal convictions and cases with disputed gang allegations. These are not proven to involve U.S. citizens—but they raise serious due-process concerns all the same.

The point isn’t that enforcement is illegal by definition.
The point is that the rules are being stretched, reframed, and bypassed in ways that test constitutional limits—especially for politically convenient targets.

That’s how exceptional power becomes normal.


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5. “Immigrants are draining the economy.”

This claim sounds intuitive until you look at how economies actually work.

Immigrants—documented and undocumented—pay billions in taxes. Many undocumented workers pay into Social Security and Medicare systems they can’t access. At the federal level, immigrants are generally net contributors, though costs and benefits differ at state and local levels.

More importantly: immigrants are workers. They fill labor shortages in construction, agriculture, care work, and service sectors. Large-scale deportations and restrictions reduce labor supply, raise prices, hurt small businesses, and slow growth.

So when politicians claim immigration enforcement “helps workers,” they’re skipping the part where:

businesses lose staff

costs rise

output falls

and wages don’t magically increase


Economic pain is real. The explanation blaming immigrants isn’t.


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6. “Tariffs punish China—they pay.”

A tariff is a tax at the border. The people who pay it are U.S. importers, and the costs mostly get passed on to U.S. consumers and firms.

During the 2018–2019 trade war, economists found the costs of tariffs were borne almost entirely by Americans. Manufacturing didn’t surge. The trade deficit didn’t shrink. Farmers were hit so hard that the government had to spend tens of billions on bailouts.

Plain English: if you tax what Americans buy, Americans pay.

The slogan sounds tough. The math doesn’t work.


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7. “The 2017 tax cuts paid for themselves and helped workers.”

They didn’t.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the corporate tax rate permanently and gave individuals temporary cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it added roughly $1.9 trillion to deficits over a decade.

Corporations didn’t use the windfall to transform productivity or raise wages broadly. They used it for stock buybacks, which hit record levels in 2018. That boosts asset prices—not worker pay.

If the cuts had genuinely supercharged growth, you’d see sustained productivity gains and broad wage growth. You didn’t.

What you got was higher deficits and higher inequality.


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8. Why scapegoating works anyway

Political rhetoric doesn’t create economic stress—but it can redirect how people explain it.

When wages lag behind costs, housing is unaffordable, and healthcare is crushing families, there are two paths:

1. confront who holds structural power, or


2. blame someone with less power.



Scapegoating is the shortcut.

It converts complex economic failures into simple villains. It turns anger upward into anger sideways. And once people are trained to see whole groups as threats, exceptional power starts to feel like a solution instead of a danger.

That’s not an accident. It’s the mechanism.


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The connective tissue back to Part I

None of these claims have to be true to be effective.
They just have to be useful.

Useful for:

weakening due process

normalizing collective punishment

excusing loyalty tests

and justifying the erosion of institutional guardrails


That’s how democracies erode—not because people suddenly hate freedom, but because they’re told freedom is the problem.

You don’t need to call anyone Hitler to see that risk.

You just need to ask whether the stories being used to justify power actually survive contact with reality.

Most of them don’t.

And when the lies collapse, so does the excuse for dismantling the rules that protect everyone—including the people cheering it on.
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Part III

The Real Economic Problem Isn’t “The Poor” — It’s Concentrated Wealth and Broken Power

If Parts I and II explain how institutions erode and why the justifying stories are false, Part III answers the question underneath all of it:

> If migrants, poor people, and social programs aren’t the cause of economic pain — then what is?



The short answer: wealth concentration, weak bargaining power, and policy choices that favor capital over labor.

Blaming the poor isn’t just wrong. It’s backwards.


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1. Social programs don’t “drain” the economy — they circulate money

One of the most persistent myths is that programs like SNAP (food assistance) are a drag on growth — money thrown into a hole.

In reality, SNAP is one of the most effective economic stimulators the federal government has.

Multiple analyses by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Congressional Budget Office have found that every $1 in SNAP benefits generates roughly $1.50–$1.80 in economic activity, especially during downturns.

Why this happens (plain English)

Low-income households:

spend benefits immediately

spend them locally

spend them on necessities


That money goes to grocery stores, truckers, farmers, warehouse workers, and retail employees — who then spend it again.

This is called a high fiscal multiplier.

Compare that to tax cuts for the wealthy:

much of the money is saved or invested

a large share flows into asset markets

far less circulates through local economies


So if your goal is economic activity, jobs, and stability, cutting SNAP is one of the worst ways to do it.


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2. Poverty isn’t a moral failure — it’s a bargaining position

People often talk about poverty as if it’s a character flaw.

Economically, it’s not. It’s a lack of leverage.

When workers:

can’t afford to miss a paycheck

can’t risk medical debt

can’t survive a layoff


they have very little power to demand better wages or conditions.

That’s not accidental — it’s structural.

Weak social safety nets don’t “encourage work.” They discipline labor by making unemployment terrifying and compliance necessary.

That’s why countries with stronger safety nets often have:

higher labor-force participation

higher productivity

stronger wage growth


Security makes people more economically mobile, not less.


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3. Wealth inequality changes how the economy behaves

Over the last several decades, the U.S. economy has produced enormous wealth — but it’s become increasingly concentrated at the top.

When wealth concentrates:

consumption growth slows

asset bubbles expand

political influence concentrates alongside money


Why? Because billionaires don’t buy groceries, cars, or services at 1,000× the rate of normal people. They buy assets.

That shifts the economy away from:

wages

production

broad demand


and toward:

stock prices

real estate speculation

financial engineering


This is how you get an economy that looks strong on paper but feels brutal to live in.


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4. Why blaming the poor is politically useful

Here’s the key connective tissue to Parts I and II:

When economic pain is real but structural causes are off-limits, leaders need another explanation.

Blaming the poor does three things at once:

1. Redirects anger downward, away from concentrated power


2. Justifies cutting social programs that increase worker leverage


3. Frames hierarchy as moral, not structural



If people believe poverty is caused by laziness or fraud, then dismantling social programs feels like justice — not extraction.

That’s why myths about “welfare abuse” persist even when fraud rates are extremely low and oversight already exists.

The myth isn’t about money.
It’s about permission.


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5. Social spending vs. elite extraction: a simple contrast

SNAP dollars:

go out quickly

circulate locally

stabilize communities

reduce crime and instability indirectly


Elite-focused tax cuts and deregulation:

inflate asset prices

increase inequality

weaken public capacity

reduce long-term growth


If the goal were truly “helping the economy,” this wouldn’t be controversial.

But the goal often isn’t growth — it’s control.


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6. How this feeds authoritarian erosion

This brings us full circle.

When people are economically insecure:

they’re more susceptible to scapegoating

more willing to trade rights for promises

more tolerant of “strongman” solutions


Weak safety nets don’t just hurt individuals. They weaken democracy.

Because a population living paycheck-to-paycheck is easier to frighten, divide, and control.

That’s why attacks on social welfare, labor protections, and public capacity often accompany attacks on institutions, courts, and neutral governance.

It’s the same project, just from different angles.


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The clean takeaway

Poor people are not the problem.
Immigrants are not the problem.
Social programs are not the problem.

The problem is an economy where:

gains flow upward

risks flow downward

and political stories are used to justify that imbalance


Once you see that, a lot of rhetoric stops making sense.

And once the lies stop working, the justification for dismantling democratic guardrails goes with them.
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Part IV

Crime, Control, and Who the System Actually Targets

Crime is one of the most powerful political weapons there is — not because it’s fake, but because it’s selectively framed.

Who commits crime.
Who gets policed.
Who gets punished.
Who gets labeled a “terrorist.”

Those choices aren’t neutral. They reflect power.


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1. “Red states are tough on crime” — but have higher crime

There’s a persistent story that conservative governance equals law and order.

In reality, many Republican-led states have higher violent crime rates than Democratic-led states. When you look at homicide, assault, and firearm deaths per capita, the pattern is consistent: states with weaker social services, higher inequality, and looser gun laws tend to have worse outcomes.

This isn’t ideology — it’s arithmetic.

Crime correlates far more strongly with:

poverty

inequality

housing instability

access to healthcare

firearm availability


than with how “tough” politicians sound on TV.

“Tough on crime” rhetoric often substitutes punishment for prevention — which feels satisfying, but doesn’t actually reduce crime long-term.


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2. Over-policing creates crime statistics — it doesn’t just measure them

Crime data isn’t a neutral mirror of reality. It reflects where police look.

Poor neighborhoods — especially Black and brown ones — are:

policed more heavily

stopped more frequently

searched more aggressively


So of course they generate more arrests.

If you patrol one neighborhood intensely and barely patrol another, you don’t discover “more criminality” — you discover more recorded crime.

Meanwhile, white-collar crimes that cause massive harm — wage theft, financial fraud, environmental violations — are:

under-investigated

under-prosecuted

rarely punished with prison


The result is a distorted picture where street crime looks like the problem, while systemic crime disappears into spreadsheets.


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3. Property lines were designed to keep people poor — and they still do

Crime doesn’t start with policing. It starts with segregation by design.

Redlining, restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning, and school funding tied to property taxes created neighborhoods where:

Black Americans were locked out of asset building

schools were underfunded by design

housing wealth couldn’t accumulate


Those policies weren’t accidents. They were intentional — and their effects compound across generations.

When people grow up in neighborhoods with:

underfunded schools

fewer job networks

worse healthcare

higher stress and surveillance


you don’t get “moral failure.” You get predictable outcomes.

Calling that “crime culture” is blaming the victims of policy.


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4. Why white mass shooters aren’t called terrorists

This is one of the clearest tells in American crime discourse.

When a Muslim commits violence, it’s instantly framed as:

terrorism

ideology

collective threat


When a white man commits mass murder, it’s framed as:

mental illness

isolation

a “lone wolf”


Even when the shooter explicitly cites racist or extremist ideology, the system resists calling it terrorism.

Why?

Because labeling it terrorism would force society to:

confront white extremism as a systemic threat

apply the same surveillance and prevention logic inward

admit the danger isn’t foreign or “other”


So the narrative shifts from ideology to pathology.

That’s not accidental. It’s protective.


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5. Prisons are not just punishment — they are an industry

Mass incarceration persists not because it works, but because it pays.

Private prison companies, prison-service contractors, and rural counties dependent on prisons all have financial incentives to:

keep beds full

extend sentences

criminalize minor offenses


These entities lobby aggressively at state and federal levels to block sentencing reform, parole expansion, and decarceration.

Meanwhile:

prisoners provide extremely cheap labor

families are drained by fees and phone costs

communities lose working-age adults


This is extraction — not justice.

If incarceration were about public safety, the U.S. — which imprisons more people than any other democracy — would be the safest country on earth.

It isn’t.


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6. Crime narratives are about control, not safety

Here’s the unifying pattern across Parts I–IV:

Crime rhetoric is used to:

justify surveillance

normalize force

weaken due process

excuse unequal treatment


Once people accept that some groups are inherently dangerous, they accept:

fewer rights

harsher punishment

expanded police powers


And once that machinery exists, it never stays confined to its original targets.

That’s the historical pattern.


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The uncomfortable truth

Most people aren’t stupid.
They’re trained.

Trained by:

selective media coverage

fear-based political messaging

distorted statistics

racialized narratives


People don’t wake up wanting authoritarianism. They’re taught that order requires cruelty, and that safety requires surrendering rights — as long as it’s happening to someone else.

That’s how you get a public that demands protection from imaginary threats while ignoring real ones.


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The clean takeaway

Crime is real.
Violence is real.
Suffering is real.

But the way crime is framed in America is designed to:

hide structural causes

protect concentrated power

and keep people fighting sideways


If you want less crime, you invest in:

stability

housing

education

healthcare

dignity


If you want control, you invest in:

fear

punishment

surveillance

and division


The tragedy is that too many people are told those are the same thing.

They’re not.

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Philosopher's Cat Political December 21, 2025 at 11:54 pm 1 0