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outside of the context of a domestic insurgency like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there is no example of state security forces being deployed under circumstances like this inside any democratic state.

There are, however, eerie similarities to what governments do during civil wars. During Sri Lanka’s fight with the Tamil Tiger insurgency between 1983 and 2009, state security officials would use unmarked white vans to scoop up citizens who had run afoul of the Sri Lankan government. This sort of abduction typically ended in the detainee’s torture or disappearance; they were so common at one point that Sri Lankan citizens started using the term “white-vanning” as a shorthand. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening to protesters detained in Portland, but experts find the echoes chilling.

The federal deployments to Portland and the tactics they use given the context are not normal. They are the tools of authoritarian states and military occupations.

a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland and Chicago are the enemy.

Are there limits to what political actors will do in the name of pursuing their partisan interests and hurting the other team? The Portland situation represents an edge case in these discussions. Trump is engaging in behavior that should clearly be unacceptable in a democracy; the historical and international comparisons make that excruciatingly clear.

One key element of what we’ve seen in the United States in the past several decades is the rise of what’s called “negative partisanship”: the growth of a political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one. A negative partisan feels like they “win” by inflicting defeats on the other team rather than passing their own positive legislative agenda (though sometimes they’re the same thing).

For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.

“I don’t even think calling it polarization is sufficient,” Mason, the Maryland scholar, says. “We are witnessing a crisis of democracy that is perfectly acceptable to a significant portion of the population — as long as it hurts their enemies.”

in an extremely polarized environment, members of Congress are pushed to align more with a president of their own party than with the institution. Republican senators act like Republican partisans first and members of Congress second; if they don’t, they suffer the wrath of primary voters all too willing to punish deviation from the president’s line. This has, throughout the Trump presidency, made him largely immune to congressional oversight, the Ukraine impeachment being the most vivid example. Now it allows him to get away with the imposition of a kind of occupation on American citizens with no real risk of congressional blowback.

one reason Portland has become such a dangerous situation is that it’s fused some of the deepest drivers of polarization, America’s culture wars and conflicts over identity, with Trump’s personal authoritarian instincts.

“It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule,”

How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion? How could he get one of the country’s two major parties to acquiesce to this, especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states’ rights? How could any of this be happening? What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.

Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.