The United States as a police state:

[underlankers]

One thing that tends to come up in discussions of police states is the idea of a fine line between democratic states and police states/authoritarian dictatorships and totalitarian states. I believe in the case of at least the United States this line is not entirely as fine as it's been generally made out to be.

Comments

[kylinrouge]

So is the US getting more authoritarian as time goes on, or is it less authoritarian since the days of slavery and more recently the Civil Rights Act?

If the word 'authoritarian' does not properly convey the changes the country has gone through, what does? I would say the increase surveillance of citizens counts as authoritarian, and would a system that inhibits the actions of its citizens, even if the actions inhibited is lynching and other hate crimes, more or less authoritarian? The state exerts more power by taking away individual liberties, but disenfranchised groups are protected. Yet, a society where its citizens are free to lynch while the government stands by and does nothing, a more 'free' society for the majority, is that less authoritarian?

Tell me if my questions are silly.

[underlankers]

None of them are silly.

I'd put it as more that the politics of areas in the USA that were dictatorial are having difficulties adjusting to democracy (which is why some aspects of politics there actually verge into semi-fascist territory as this was one element of historical fascism). The reality of such adjustment is unpleasant and the attempts of course can also fail.

I would definitely say that the Federal system as a whole is tilting ever further into authoritarianism but the shifts at a Federal level and those at a state level don't always intersect (after all for much of the period of totalitarianism in separate states the US central government was like the priest and the rabbi who saw the man on the road and passed him by, there was no good Samaritan for a century at that).

[sophia_sadek]

You could say that for the white middle class mainstream, America presents a free and just society. For poor people of color, America comes across as a police state. It is a "mixed" system.