I posted this on the wrong thread (with a similar title).
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Here's one perspective on people's sense of job security. There have been so many modifications to the Welfare State's safety-net that I don't know anyone who thinks that it would provide for them if they lost a job and couldn't readily pick up another one.
We have a class known as the precariat - living from one tranche of income to the next and worrying endlessly when that income will disappear.
A reviewer criticised Snyder's On Tyranny as less of a scrutiny of tyranny itself and more of an essay about how we might stop it from happening. The reviewer argues that Snyder's concerns about needing to comply with authoritarian demands to retain a job and sense of social security are misplaced and any equivalences are false.
“Do not obey in advance,” (Snyder) says. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected. It was no easy thing to risk your job when over a third of the workforce was unemployed, as it was in 1933. Hundreds of thousands of Nazi stormtroopers were roaming the streets beating up and killing the Social Democrats and Communists who were the regime’s main opponents. Up to 200,000 people, overwhelmingly those on the political left, were thrown into concentration camps and brutally mistreated. The great mass of Germans did not obey in advance: they obeyed when tyranny had already set up its tent.
I don't think it's overblown.
Do you think any of the lower ranks of female staff in Credit Suisse would feel supported and able to criticise Pip Bunce and the way PB flouts a dress code that would probably bring them a severe reprimand for transgressing? Do you think all of the women there are happy about what has happened to their facilities?
Following the TUC vote - do you think that women in many places would be confident their unions would have their backs and support their GC views?
Look at Kennedy and the TRAs who are trying to get GC staff ousted from university posts.
You don't need a visible army in the streets if you know your colleagues and various people are ready to police your language/thoughts and go after your livelihood. Look at Adrian Harrop's activities in re: Labour appointments.
We are being asked to be obedient if we have to accept things that we know to contravene science, law, and reason itself. We have our compliance compelled if we are instructed to deny our experience and pretend that we do not see any safeguarding implications for women and children.