"This thing we're feeling right now; it is rage, sadness, often with a sense that nothing we do can stop this. We're watching innocent men, women, and even children marched into camps, never to be seen again. We're paying for it with our taxes, paying for whatever is happening behind the walls of the growing number of ICE facilities. I know I'm not alone hoping that when people disappear it's deportation flights, because the alternative is too much to bear."
"Much of America is hurting right now, and that pain is real. Autocracies are always times of moral injury; no one is innocent under fascism, everyone is implicated somehow. We can't feel virtuous, as long as we have this unhealing wound throughout our society. The situation we are in now forces us into painful compromises, because all authoritarians seek to debase their people in order to control them."
America faces a growing danger of sliding toward autocracy as democratic norms and institutions are eroded. Many people feel rage, sadness, and helplessness while witnessing mass detentions, deportations, and the expansion of ICE facilities. State actions inflict moral injury across society, implicating ordinary citizens and undermining collective virtue. Authoritarian leaders seek to debase social bonds, drive division, and compel painful compromises to maintain control. The moral and social changes produced by this debasement are enduring, and even the restoration of democratic structures may not return society to its previous character.
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