This fucking sucks. This absolutely fucking sucks.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5.epdf

"If authoritarianism depends on spectacle and stagecraft, democracy is, by contrast, often a boring affair. Unlike the siege of the Capitol or a typical Trump rally, with few exceptions, most anarchism actually in existence is much like this: peaceful, constructive, and downright dull.

This lack of spectacle, in fact, marks a key difference between far-left forms of political organizing, like antifa, and the far-right forms on display in Washington, D.C., in early January or at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As I saw firsthand at the counter-protest in Charlottesville, the former is pro-democracy and the latter is authoritarian. If in practice both of these movements tend to mistrust centralized government, anarchists are suspicious of its forms—even representative democracy—because they find it insufficiently democratic. In contrast, many on the far right overtly glorify actual historical fascists, Nazis especially.

In the end, it is perhaps no surprise that, along with Black Lives Matter activists, one of the leftist boogeymen for Trump and his followers has been a scattered pro-democracy movement. In a bit of strategic hypocrisy, the far-right’s vilification of antifa maps precisely onto the actual characteristics of Trumpian politics over the last four years: centralized, violent, nihilistic, spectacular."

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/anarchism-democracy/

"Increasingly, it has felt as though parts of the British press are not up to the curbing democratic practice of holding our government to account. As the Conservatives metastasised into a nativist populist project and won a parliamentary majority, there were too few alarm bells or flashing lights. Instead, a normalising media patter set up Boris Johnson as a scones-and-jam-eating, freedom-loving, socially liberal prime minister. Well, now his government has passed a shockingly authoritarian policing bill, a severe crackdown on protest that also criminalises Gypsy and traveller communities. One MP described the bill’s rules as “so loose and lazy they would make a dictator blush”. The contrast between political reality and media portrayal could hardly be starker."

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnson-liberal-conservatives-authoritarianism-b1819954.html