One thing I've found helpful is to coax them to imagine dems in charge. You can't outright mention dems in charge, because they will (mostly correctly) point out that dems _have_ been in charge of our institutions for a long time.
You have to understand their position: They don't feel in danger. They feel in power - the opposite of danger. Asking them to perceive danger is asking them to give up their feeling of power - tantamount to admitting everything they voted for is void.
But the path I found was to tease out that expansion of powers are permanent, making any changes from expansion of powers temporary. And we don't want temporary positive changes, do we? With all this legislative power, couldn't we just, you know, pass laws?
I've also come to accept that we should (for the sake of progress past issues) just:
* build the border wall, but suddenly nobody seems interested - what gives?
* slash costs to balance the budget, but suddenly nobody seems interested, what gives?
etc
The problem with true discussion of these issues is that you find yourself mostly in agreement with each other's viewpoint (at least subject to their "axioms"), and have to mellow out a bit. You can't really stand still and say "Come over here" all the time.
Yeah, like they often don't have issues with their local cops, but you ask them about ATF or BLM and all of a sudden these outside it's these ridiculous outsider authoritarians, who don't know anything about what it's like where they live, trying to ruin things.
What works one on one doesn’t actually work at scale. You cannot make MAGA feel better by “building the wall” or “balancing the budget” — they don’t actually care about those things, in aggregate. In the political sphere, they care — because they’ve been conditioned to care by 40 years of increasingly strident right wing propaganda — about hurting brown people and liberals.
I don’t have an answer, but reason and logic are not going to solve the problem.
There is no ideological coherence of fascism. It's about coercing a nation into elevating a chosen group/ identity of people above everyone else (a sort of anti-pluralism).
-- I liken it to how arguing about the shortcomings of your bully's stance doesn't make them stop punching you.
EDIT: I'm going to add, that I think the solution at least begins with encouraging more shared experiences and spaces (like a movie theater). Most people want to be seen as well functioning in public limiting how much they might explore the nastiness of their own right wing echo chambers.
“Mostly correctly” is 100% false. Count the number of years under GOP presidents since 1980 vs the number under Democrats. SCOTUS has been dominated by Republican judges — and the chief justice has been a Republican — since the 1970’s.
The old-guard republicans were neo-cons. They championed things like free trade and projecting soft power through international institutions that are antithetical to the modern right.
The fact that the US only has “two parties” obscures the fact that there are wings in those parties that don’t really govern in a meaningful way.
The nationalist/populist conservative wing (MAGA née Tea Party) hasn’t really been in power pre Trump.
You'd be hard pressed to find a conservative college dean, non-profit CEO, or even a librarian. There's a belief (which I think is mostly true), that most government agencies are left-leaning in practice if not in appointed leadership. Add to that the growing (perceived!) left-leaning policies in the military and major industrial players, and you might see what they mean.
I'd be hard pressed to find a lefty college board of directors, or CEO.
I'd believe govt agency staffers, since conservatives by and large want to destroy those agencies and not work there.
The military is a weird place and contains multitudes
Well, I guess I'd roll it back to say there have been high profile, widly circulated perceived-to-be-far-left policies pushed or adopted by traditionally not-that-liberal organizations. Like "DEI" in military. It's all over conservative zeitgeist and looks like a massive power creep to them.
Why is the expansion of powers permanent? Do you think they’ve never been reversed in history? That there weren’t times when {insert government branch here} didn’t have more than it does now?