Last week, after the Trump administration pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel from its late-night television lineup, a Daily Show guest summed up how Americans are reacting as the country slides into authoritarianism: We’re like deer in the headlights.
We’ve watched masked men surround a PhD student on a Boston street and force her into an unmarked van and prison in response to an article she’d written in a student newspaper. We’ve watched the government use the military to police citizens in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. We’ve watched President Trump grab power from Congress as he enacted tariffs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. He’s threatened his opponents with retribution, accepted a $400 million gift jet from Qatar, and said that the Federal Communications Commission should pull the license of any TV station that criticized him. The list goes on.
The response to all of this has been slow from politicians and citizens alike. It’s similar to the attitudes toward climate change: We’re witnessing the worsening of the climate, but we’re still not stopping it.
“This is a well understood and disturbing phenomenon—that people do adjust to the circumstances around them, including to greater political repression, and the loss of important freedoms, and the erosion of support for free and fair elections,” says Michael Ross, a political science professor at UCLA. “People have a hard time living in a state of constant emergency. And for better or worse, humans have learned over the millennia to adjust to their social circumstances. That’s clearly happening now, and very quickly.”
