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Notes -
Well there were two points in my tongue-in-cheek OP. The first is, again, the specific, concrete predictions that They would not "allow" Trump to take office in 2025 regardless of what the vote totals in November 2024 were, and he would not be allowed to do anything if he did. This seems to have been pretty clearly falsified.
The second is the broader idea that "democracy is fake." Admittedly this is not that well defined, because even many people who agree that democracy is fake disagree on exactly what about it is fake. But in any case, I think under most conceptions of "democracy is fake," (RW ones at least) the Trump victory in 2024 is less expected than under the democracy not-fake model.
Is there an advertised maximum level of oppression? This is, again, somewhat blurry. If the government was literally rounding up hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters and shooting them into large pits I would say "this is not very liberal." The most egregious actions of the Biden and Obama administrations were pretty far from that. Of course, the governments of liberal democracies interfering with the speech of private citizens is nothing new, and there have been more egregious cases in the past, from all of the various scandals of the Hoover FBI to the internment of anti-war critics in 1917. One response is to say, "and therefore, liberal democracy has never been real." Another, which is the response I would make is, such repression, while bad, is significantly less bad than that practiced by not-liberal democracies, even if it's impossible to point to an extremely specific line where you could say "the repression has gotten so bad that the promises of liberal democracy have been exposed as empty lies."
It seems likely that, various people who participated in anti-RW repression during the Biden administration, for whatever value of "repression" we're using will indeed be punished to some extent under Trump.
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