To greater or lesser degrees, and in different ways. Which is important because otherwise you can end up "agreeing" to the reality of the phenomenon even if you have an entirely different thing in mind. I might be thinking of, say, Hungary or Poland weaponizing the press and using it to destroy their own democratic institutions. Someone else might think it means saying global warming is real.

In Hungary and Poland, they are specific, time-bound events with important institutional implications and unique factual circumstances. "It's always been that way" is risky because it can be used to airbrush away specific moral urgency with vagueness and false equivalences, and even functions to apologize for active advancements of authoritarianism as they are happening in real time.