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Authoritarian Coups Are Gradual Then Sudden

Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.”

The Chilean government had been run democratically since 1923, the longest in South America, but Pinochet (with a little help from our CIA and ITT) had already infiltrated and gotten the loyalty of both the police, the army, and the civilian paramilitaries he’d spent the previous few years nurturing. Trump had previously proclaimed his desire to change the nation’s libel and slander laws so he could sue or imprison his political opponents and those in the media who opposed him; that would have happened by now, and people like me (and maybe you) would be in jail. Private prisons would expand to take in the hundreds of thousands of people arrested protesting in the streets or speaking out on social media; for most Americans who voted Republican or were completely apolitical, though, life would go on as normal (just like in the early years of the takeovers of Chile, Russia, and Hungary — or Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1930s).

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