memes

As someone who has travelled to developing countries:

1. Journalists who dared to report negative stories on those in power would disappear or be publicly killed
2. Much more censorship all around, the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist. The fediverse wouldn't exist, all media would be centralized so it was easier to monitor and censor.
3. The courts would all be in control of the powerful. Trials would be just for show, because the outcome was already determined. There would be no judicial independence or precedent. In smaller matters where the powerful didn't really care what the outcome was, bribery of the courts would be rampant.
4. The police would be even more brutal, even more unanswerable, and the text of the laws would be even more meaningless. It wouldn't be unusual at all for cops to just grab anybody off the street for any reason, and nobody would dare object. Sure, ICE is doing that now in the US but people are objecting, and haven't been gunned down as a result.
5. Any attempt to push back against the power of the government would be met by brutal force. You wouldn't have demonstrations, and if you did the cops / military would shut them down with gunfire, not tear gas.

The US is well on the path to this kind of place, but it definitely isn't there yet. The mainstream press is a bit cowardly, but there are still independent journalists who are digging into stories and they're not being disappeared or murdered. There's a fair amount of self-censorship, especially at big tech companies, but that's more about keeping advertisers happy than keeping the government happy. There's virtually no true Internet censorship or legal speech. The US supreme court is highly biased, but many lower courts are doing fine, and plenty of judges are ruling against the president. The ICE crackdowns are awful, and they are grabbing people off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans while wearing masks. But... at least they're still more or less focusing on illegal immigrants. There have been military and police in the streets, but the haven't been killing protesters, and when a guy recently threw a sandwich at a cop they tried to put him away for assault, but the grand jury laughed at them and they weren't able to move ahead with that case.

Things are getting worse and worse in the US, and I wouldn't want to have to live there, but it's still a long way from an authoritarian state.