They are not stupid. Neither are you.
Every time you turn on Hasan Piker or Charlie Kirk, someone calls the audience gullible, cult members, rubes.
They’re not. Most of you could out-argue the pundits paid to attack you. Nobody in either audience has been asked the question that actually matters, and it isn’t whether you’re right.
We’re Having the Wrong Argument
Ask the right where authoritarianism comes from and they’ll point at DSA, campus intolerance, abolition movements. Ask the left and they’ll point at MAGA, January 6th, executive power, nationalism. Both make the same mistake: they define extremism by what the other team believes.
Stop asking how radical a belief is. Start asking what a movement thinks it’s entitled to do to the people who reject that belief. Wanting lower immigration isn’t authoritarian. Wanting socialism isn’t authoritarian. The question starts the moment a court, a voter, or a political opponent says no.
The Permission Slip
Extremism only turns dangerous once it acquires power without restraint. Every movement believes its moment is the exception. Authoritarian behavior never introduces itself honestly, it shows up wearing a different word: national security, stopping fascism, protecting democracy, restoring order. Most of those describe a real problem underneath, which is what makes the mechanism dangerous instead of obviously fake.
Authoritarianism doesn’t need you to stop loving freedom. It only needs you to decide your current emergency is finally the one that earns an exception.
You can watch that exception get sold in culture before it ever gets sold in government. Influencers learn the same incentive politicians do: outrage pays better than restraint, and the person who admits uncertainty rarely becomes the algorithm’s favorite. Piker and Kirk built audiences around opposite ideologies, but the incentive structure underneath them is the same.
The Cascade
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with dictatorship. It begins the moment you decide some group of people no longer deserves the protection of the rules. It rarely shows up as tanks in the street. It shows up as a cascade, and the cascade is short enough to memorize.
Opponents become dangerous. Rules become obstacles. Exceptions become normal. Institutions become corrupt. Courts become illegitimate. Journalists become enemies. Elections become acceptable only if you win. Citizens become problems to solve.
Every Road Ends at the Same Door
History offers remarkably few examples of a movement that abandoned pluralism and concentrated power in one direction, ending up somewhere free. Mussolini’s Italy wrote the fascist playbook: crush the opposition press, jail the organizers, replace persuasion with fear. Stalin’s Soviet Union got to the same kind of country from the opposite direction, waving the opposite flag.
That’s not a law of history, and I’m sure someone can name an exception. But it rhymes often enough that the direction you walked stops mattering once a movement stops needing anyone’s consent. Call it a pattern, not a rule, and a pattern worth taking seriously.
Say “communism just hasn’t been implemented correctly yet” out loud, and a decent chunk of this readership nods along. Say the identical sentence about fascism, and everyone correctly hears an excuse for something monstrous. It’s the same sentence. If the excuse doesn’t work for one, it doesn’t get to work for the other.
What Power Is Already Doing With It
Apply the Cascade Test to whoever holds the most power right now. In March 2025 the administration flew alleged gang members to a Salvadoran prison under an 18th century wartime statute, after a federal judge ordered the planes turned around. They landed anyway. National Guard troops went into American cities over governors’ objections through 2025, until the Supreme Court blocked one deployment in December, 6-3, the one place the check actually held. On his first day back, Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6th defendants, including a Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, while the DOJ scrubbed the case files and the FBI compiled a list of agents who’d worked them.
The other direction earns the same test. Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoralty in November 2025 as an open democratic socialist, with the highest mayoral turnout in half a century, a real appetite, not a fringe one.
But DSA’s 2025 convention passed a resolution titled “Fight Fascist State Repression,” committing the organization to shrinking police budgets and running abolition candidates, and its platform calls for eliminating the Senate, the Electoral College, and judicial review. Some of that has real democratic arguments behind it. The question was never whether you can propose changing an institution. It’s what happens to a minority’s ability to say no once the institutions built to hear that no are gone.
You want immigration enforced harder than courts allow? Fine, what happens when a judge orders the plane turned around? You think capitalism itself is the problem? Fine, what happens to the person who still wants to own a small business? You think certain speech does real harm? Fine, what happens to the person saying the thing you find most repulsive?
Nobody has to apologize for what they believe.
The tell was never the belief.
It’s the answer to what happens to the person still standing there saying no after you’ve won.
Right Diagnosis, Captured Cure
MAGA got the diagnosis right. People who felt unheard and deindustrialized for thirty years weren’t imagining it. Obama diagnosed that frustration first, arguing the bridge between red and blue still existed if anyone bothered building it. Trump diagnosed the same frustration differently, and that’s a big part of why so many Obama voters became Trump voters.
Same hunger. Different vendor.
Obama named the bridge. Trump named the enemy standing on it, a faster sell than building anything, and the execution never touched the structure, it just handed the most extreme flank more leverage and called it a fix.
The left runs the identical trade, correct diagnosis, wrong prescription, which is why neither party has passed legislation that actually fixes anything in a generation. Fixing it was never the incentive. The incentive is the loophole that hands your side the power the other side just had.
Not the Middle
This isn’t an argument for splitting every question down the middle. If one person says the kitchen’s on fire and the other says it isn’t, averaging the answers doesn’t make you wise, it makes you the reason the fire spreads.
Not centrism. Pluralism. I can believe I’m completely right and still believe you keep your rights on the day I’m governing. Radical belief was never the problem. Unlimited permission is.
One objection first: don’t the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court already thwart democracy? Whether any one of those is good on its own terms is a separate argument. The real question is what protects a political minority once multiple veto points disappear at once, and right now the electoral college is one of the few reasons a Republican can still win nationally in a country this divided. Gut it alongside the Senate and judicial review and you haven’t rebalanced power, you’ve removed the seat at the table for everyone right of center-left. Democracy was never just majority rule. The majority governs. It doesn’t own the country.
Power
Here’s the part that’s actually about you.
You read the MAGA section and knew immediately when the justification stopped working for you. You read the DSA section and probably granted more context, or it happened the other way around. That’s the test. Not whether you have convictions, I hope you do. It’s whether the rules that should restrain your enemy still restrain you once you’re convinced your cause is righteous enough.
Your side doesn’t become authoritarian the day it builds the prison. It starts on step one of the cascade, the moment denying someone else’s rights starts feeling morally satisfying instead of morally dangerous.
Democracy was never designed to discover the one ideology everyone would agree on. It was built around the realization that we never will. That’s why the president can hear no. That’s why the majority can hear no. That’s why someone can stand in the middle of your revolution, your movement, or your national emergency, and tell you no, and remain your equal citizen afterward.
So I’m not asking anyone to move toward the center. Move toward evidence when it makes your side uncomfortable. Move toward restraint precisely when power makes restraint inconvenient.
And before you tell me everything you’re going to fix once people like you control the country, answer the only question that’s mattered this entire piece.
Freedom rarely disappears all at once.
It disappears one justified exception at a time.
What happens to the people who say no?
Authoritarianism doesn’t meet in the middle. It meets at power.
Special thanks to Mechanic of Statecraft
