When authoritarian impulses are described, the focus is often on the loud moments: rallies, speeches, or decrees. But in May 2023, the quieter mechanisms were on display. State legislatures passed bills curbing protest rights, redefining “disorderly conduct” to criminalize dissent. These measures did not arrive with fanfare. They slipped into law through procedural monotony, presented as routine business.
This is the banality of power: the normalization of repression through paperwork and scheduling. No tanks in the streets, no martial law announced—just a steady narrowing of space for opposition. It is precisely because these moves lack spectacle that they are so dangerous. They don’t galvanize outrage in the same way; they erode rights incrementally, often unnoticed until the cumulative effect becomes undeniable.
Authoritarian drift thrives in this quiet. The fewer headlines it generates, the more efficient it becomes. Citizens expect repression to look dramatic. Instead, it often resembles bureaucracy. And that miscalculation is why people miss the signs until the walls are already built.
If freedom is to mean anything, it cannot only be defended in the moments of spectacle. It must be defended in the dull corridors where power prefers to operate unseen. The lesson of May 2023 is that vigilance cannot be seasonal, episodic, or confined to the obvious. Power consolidates in the everyday. And resisting it requires the same.