life under authoritarian regimes is like war: most Americans don’t know that it’s often really normal and boring, up until the rarer, horrible moments when it isn’t
Pretty much. What it mostly boils down to is that most Americans really don’t have the faintest idea what living under modern authoritarian regimes actually looks like, and how it’s often at the same time way more boring and way more scary than they’d imagined.
It’s not about the question of whether you are actually guilty of wrongdoing or “wrong thinking”; it’s about keeping you in awful jail conditions and torture long enough for you to break down and make up your crimes just so that you’re released (whatever that means at that point)
