Opinion | The Killing of Renee Good Was a Turning Point

Totalitarian leaders need to wage wars, and sometimes they wage wars externally. More often they wage wars internally or both. And they always designate an enemy within. Trump did it as soon as he assumed office. His main “enemy within” were immigrants. And protesters. But the circle or the number of the “enemy within” has to expand constantly, because that’s the only way that you can wage war continuously. And the war needs to escalate. And that’s what we’re seeing. It was unthinkable — until it happened — that a white, presumably middle-class protester would be executed on camera in broad daylight in an American city. And now that it’s happened, it’s the sort of thing that can happen here. How does all this look similar or different, to you, from what you saw in Russia? It’s so much faster. And it’s so much faster — not just than Russia but than Hungary, than Israel, than any country that I have covered that I think we can say has become autocratic. It’s comparable to the speed at which countries that experienced an actual violent revolution have transformed that I have studied but not lived through. But I think that this really is — we can use some of the tools from, particularly from the electoral autocracies in Eastern Europe to understand some of what’s happened here. But I don’t have any tools for understanding the rate at which this country is being transformed.