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.

“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.

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?