A nation can be authoritarian while being less authoritarian in degree than other nations. The US runs a global cultural and economic empire based on the threat of overwhelming military force and nuclear war - a threat every other power (including China and Russia) acts in response to, because the only credible threat of WW3 comes from the US either starting it, or escalating it. The US isn't "worried" about conflict with China and Russia, the US is planning for those conflicts because the American military industrial complex requires endless war to satiate itself.
From my point of view, the US (which just happens to be funding a genocide through a nuclear armed puppet state at the moment) looks no better than Russia and far better than China which at least tends to keep its authoritarianism to itself (harassment of Japanese fishing boats notwithstanding.) China today looks like what American domestic policy is becoming, and Russia today looks like American foreign policy in general.
And the political and cultural climate in the US has been creeping in an authoritarian direction for at least a decade. The US has a deeper and more invasive surveillance network than the Gestapo could ever have dreamed of. The US runs torture sites and a concentration camp where it detains enemies of the state under arbitrary duress without rights. American rights are nullified, arbitrarily, by an unelected and unaccountable panel of judges, and laws are arbitrarily enforced by a brutal militarized police force and government wholly insulated from consequence and the "will of the people."
Americans clutch their pearls over TikTok and Chinese influence while literally every form of media they consume is propaganda, much of it being openly fascist, designed to confuse, distract and scare them with fears of enemies within and without, or indoctrinate them into a pro-militarist ideology based on a corrupted and twisted view of the world and their own place in it.
The US is objectively authoritarian. You don't get to run the racket of Pax Americana without being an authoritarian regime, willing and able to commit violence abroad and able to quell any possible threat to the agenda at home.
From my point of view, the US (which just happens to be funding a genocide through a nuclear armed puppet state at the moment) looks no better than Russia and far better than China which at least tends to keep its authoritarianism to itself (harassment of Japanese fishing boats notwithstanding.) China today looks like what American domestic policy is becoming, and Russia today looks like American foreign policy in general.
And the political and cultural climate in the US has been creeping in an authoritarian direction for at least a decade. The US has a deeper and more invasive surveillance network than the Gestapo could ever have dreamed of. The US runs torture sites and a concentration camp where it detains enemies of the state under arbitrary duress without rights. American rights are nullified, arbitrarily, by an unelected and unaccountable panel of judges, and laws are arbitrarily enforced by a brutal militarized police force and government wholly insulated from consequence and the "will of the people."
Americans clutch their pearls over TikTok and Chinese influence while literally every form of media they consume is propaganda, much of it being openly fascist, designed to confuse, distract and scare them with fears of enemies within and without, or indoctrinate them into a pro-militarist ideology based on a corrupted and twisted view of the world and their own place in it.
The US is objectively authoritarian. You don't get to run the racket of Pax Americana without being an authoritarian regime, willing and able to commit violence abroad and able to quell any possible threat to the agenda at home.