What Authoritarianism Means

Even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault, they overestimated democratic resilience. What is America now, and what comes next?

iStock / credit: Jorm Sangsorn

It has been almost two months since Donald Trump’s inauguration. It feels much longer. The speed and the scope of the assault on the constitutional order, on the foundations of democratic self-government have been unprecedented. In mere weeks, the Trumpists have managed to turn America from a democratic system – albeit one with significant flaws – into one that no longer deserves to be counted among the world’s democracies. America is something else now.

Here are a few snapshots from just one day – Friday, March 14 – to illustrate what is currently happening in America:

The Department of Homeland Security bragged about arresting more students – or pushing them to “self-deport” – while alleging, without any evidence, they supported terrorism. Turns out one of them, a Columbia PhD student, fled to Canada when ICE came looking for her and her student visa was revoked. She had been arrested last spring even though she wasn’t even part of the Gaza protests, just in the vicinity on her way home, all charges had been dismissed. ICE doesn’t care. The Department of Justice doesn’t care either and announced it was investigating whether Columbia University and everyone involved in or just “tolerating” student protests was guilty of “terrorism crimes.” This, of course, came just days after armed agents of the state arrested and disappeared Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian former Columbia student who is a legal permanent resident. Khalil, even the regime has explicitly admitted, is not charged with any crimes. This is purely about his role in organizing the Columbia protests, it is about his public speech. Donald Trump, in what has to be one of the most chilling, enraging statements ever made by a president of the United States, called it “the first arrest of many to come.” And the Department of Justice is now making the utterly unprecedented claim that Trump, because of his “Article II authority to protect the nation,” can indeed order the deportation of anyone, at any moment.

Also on Friday, Donald Trump gave a speech at the Department of Justice in which he not only threatened media institutions, but also singled out individual private citizens, prominent critics of the Trumpist regime, declaring their actions “illegal,” calling them “bad people” and “scum.” He also signed yet another presidential executive order targeting a specific law firm – just days after a federal judge had declared a previous such executive order blatantly unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, ten Democrats decided to help Republicans pass a spending bill, thereby depriving the nominal opposition party of the one key tool in its arsenal to push back. This was a chance for Congress to assert some measure of influence over the budget, for Democrats to make it clear they would not cooperate with the Trumpists while the regime was dismantling the system. They chose collaboration instead.

That was all Friday.

It feels overwhelming sometimes. There is never time to dwell on anything – the next outrageous announcement, the next dangerous escalation is always lurking. It is easy to get lost in the outrageousness of it all. So much is happening, on so many levels, each day. And yet a key challenge is to take a step back and grapple with what it all adds up to. Faced with a comprehensive authoritarian assault, we must retain the ability to develop a holistic view and understand the big picture: Where do we stand now? What should we expect going forward?

The path to authoritarianism

On February 11, Foreign Affairs published a long essay, almost 5,000 words, by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, titled: “The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown.” It was an attempt to provide exactly the kind of big-picture assessment we desperately need if we are to navigate this storm. The piece, as Levitsky clarified in an interview in New York Magazine, was mostly written before January 20, and then updated in the very first days of the Trump administration. It therefore captures the expectations of two leading scholars of authoritarianism right at that moment before the Trumpists returned to the White House, and their impressions of the regime’s earliest initiatives. If we revisit it now, it can help us reckon with what has happened over the past two months, and how far down that dark road we have already traveled. “America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism,” Levitsky and Way wrote. They were right, at the end of January. Only they underestimated how rapid the transformation would be, and how fast the Trumpists would be able to move the country into territory they did not think was realistic – even just a few weeks ago, even as they expected democracy to crumble.

Because of who the authors are and because of what they wrote, the Foreign Affairs piece got a lot of attention when it came out. Most academic observers of American politics pointed to it and told their respective audiences: Please read this. I want to be absolutely clear what my goal is in revisiting the piece: I am not trying to dunk on two scholars who I admire and whose work I find crucially important. I agree with much of what they outline. On our Is This Democracy podcast, Lily Mason and I also talked about the piece at length in a recent episode. The article is worth the time and attention because it can help us crystallize some big-picture thoughts and observations about this current moment in American history. But I do believe Levitsky and Way, for as powerful a warning as their piece certainly is, still underestimated the Trumpist threat and overestimated how resilient both the political system as well as American civil society would be. And that is something we all need to grapple with in earnest. Here are two observers who are under no suspicion of reflexive anti-alarmism, who understand authoritarianism like few others, who are far more immune to ideas of American exceptionalism than almost anyone commenting on U.S. politics. And yet, not even two months in, I think it is undeniable that the Trumpist assault has already outpaced what they thought possible.

Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky have a long history of working together. Way is a Professor of Democracy at the University of Toronto, where he focuses on autocracies around the world in a comparative perspective, examining the sources of either their stability or their fragility and downfall. Levitsky, a Professor of Latin American Studies and Government at Harvard, is also a comparativist. Over two decades ago, in the early 2000s, the authors coined and popularized the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” to describe regimes that exist somewhere between democracy and autocracy – an idea they now apply to the United States.

Steven Levitsky has also played a very prominent role in the broader political discourse over the past few years. In 2018, he and co-author Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, a proper bestseller and likely the most cited book with academic credentials of the entire Trump era. Levitsky and Ziblatt looked at examples from across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of how and why democratic systems fell. The key message of the book was that many of the ingredients that had allowed autocrats to rise elsewhere were very much present in the United States. In particular, the authors warned that the democratic system relied on specific norms – mutual toleration and forbearance – to function, norms that polarized parties (well, especially one of the parties) in the United States seemed to increasingly ignore.

Five years later, Levitsky and Ziblatt followed that up with Tyranny of the Minority, yet another much discussed book, this time more explicitly focused on the authoritarian movement that has taken over the Republican Party. This movement, the authors warned, was being enabled by anti-majoritarian elements in the constitution and represented an acute threat to erect authoritarian minority rule in the United States.

The throughline in the perspective of these scholars on the situation in America is that they use the international comparison to highlight the threat of authoritarianism and why it could, contrary to what too many Americans have been wanting to believe for too long, actually happen here. Which gets us to the beginning of the second Trump presidency.

Imminent breakdown

Let’s outline the argument Levitsky and Way make in their Foreign Affairs piece. American democracy, they are certain, is in a much more precarious situation now than in the first Trump presidency. Trump now has a level of control over the Republican Party he did not possess in 2017, and the Trumpists are significantly better prepared than when they first rose to power. In fact, the authors do not shy away from making a clear prediction: “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.”

However, Levitsky and Way do not see a dictatorship as a likely or even possible outcome. Instead, they believe America on the path to what they call “competitive authoritarianism,” which they define as “a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.” This would put America in the same category as many autocratic systems that have emerged since the end of the Cold War – Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdogan, India under Modi, Venezuela under Chavez. In all these cases, the piece explains, “the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power.” And yet, these systems are distinctly not democratic anymore, as “competition is real but unfair,” as the game is rigged by those in power “deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.”

Levitsky and Way outline with great clarity and detail what the path towards this kind of system has looked like elsewhere, what the authoritarian playbook was, how foreign autocrats went about transforming the system – and how that would likely translate to the American case.

What the authors call the “politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy” is almost always the number one priority for autocrats. If they get a chance, they start by purging the civil service in order to turn government into a tool they can wield. They use the justice system to go after their enemies via targeted prosecution; they utilize other parts of the state – the tax authorities, for instance – to go after critics; they cut federal funding for universities; they use defamation lawsuits to silence the media. The weaponized state can also serve to reward friends via economic policy, government contracts, and regulatory decisions; these regimes use both “carrots and sticks” to bring the business community in line; they protect supporters from investigation or prosecution (or just issue a blanket pardon, as Trump did for those who stormed the capitol in his name on January 6).

Throughout the piece, I must imagine, the authors basically added a silent “Sound familiar?” after every sentence. All of this, the entire playbook, was already happening when Levitsky and Way published their piece, and they saw it clearly. However, they expected it would be hard for the Trumpists to consolidate authoritarian rule. They saw strong potential for resistance: A political system with a set of complex rules designed to check executive power; an independent judiciary; civil society actors with significant material resources enabling them to organize. Compared to other autocrats, Levitksy and Way argued, Trump was also relatively weak politically, with only narrow majorities in Congress and a low approval rating in the population.

And yet, there was no question: “America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism.” It would, the authors were certain, ultimately be possible to rein the Trumpists in. But it would take a much more active resistance. And until America would find its way back to the democratic path, enormous damage would be done to the country and the world.

Is the establishment listening?

“Democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history,” Levitksy and Way state very early on. There is so much crucial substantive analysis in there, but this might the most important part about the piece: The forceful warning it sent. Don’t simply expect more of the same, just a rerun of the first Trump administration, the authors pleaded. This will be much more dangerous.

That was absolutely a message the audience of Foreign Affairs needed to hear. Desperately. The magazine, founded in 1922, is published by the Council on Foreign Relations. This is not some lefty institution or medium. The audience of Foreign Affairs comprises what can reasonably be called the foreign policy establishment of policymakers and academics. With all due respect, but that means Levitsky and Way were addressing a crowd that had been extremely reluctant to grapple with who and what American democracy was now up against. I have no idea how much of an impact Levitksy and Way have been able to make. But they certainly tried admirably, presenting their case in an exceedingly calm and collected tone, providing lots of evidence and concrete examples for every claim they make. If the readers of Foreign Affairs weren’t buying this, they weren’t buying anything that was tethered to the reality of Trumpist rule.

Competitive authoritarianism

The concept of “competitive authoritarianism” Levitsky and Way have been developing since the early 2000s is really helpful in this current moment in U.S. history. It explores the space in between functioning (liberal) democracy and what the authors, in an early piece from 2002 that outlined the general idea, called “full-scale authoritarianism.” Competitive authoritarianism describes a nondemocratic system that is neither a democracy nor a “hegemonic or closed autocracy,” another term Levitsky and Way have used to distinguish different regimes.

I find this concept really clarifying. And it is important as a reminder: America doesn’t need to cross the line into full-blown fascism before it gets bad; a lot of damage will be done long before Trump ever gets to be a dictator – or even without ever getting there at all.

Initially, the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” was designed to capture the essence of hybrid regimes that emerged in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War – specifically in post-communist Eastern Europe and much of sub-Saharan Africa. It allows us to see these regimes as a distinct form, rather than just a transitional stage in the process of democratization or on the path towards full-scale authoritarianism. In many of the historical cases in the 1990s, the conditions weren’t exactly conducive to a thriving democracy, with an uncertain economic situation (or even a total breakdown of the national economy in many post-communist states), young institutions, and weak democratic traditions. But right after the end of the Cold War, there was a lot of pressure from international as well as domestic audiences to establish democracy, as it seemed liberal democracy had triumphed over its rivals and would henceforth be the only game in town. Under such conditions of (perceived) liberal hegemony, many an aspiring autocrat decided the cost of erecting a full-blown autocracy was too high, settling for something else instead.

Crucially, over the past fifteen years or so, competitive authoritarianism has arisen in places that had much stronger democratic systems in place, with seemingly stable democratic traditions and institutions. That is a new phenomenon, the paradigmatic case being Hungary since Orbán rose to power in 2010. Because of existing democratic cultures and guardrails, it was generally harder for autocrats to install competitive authoritarian rule. Relatively high levels of established democratic resistance necessitated “more subtle and sophisticated authoritarian strategies,” as Levitsky and Way observed in 2020. On paper, at least, what is happening in the United States now belongs in that same basket. Then again, we seem to be finding out just about now that this assumes an altogether unrealistic level of democratic resilience in America?

Beyond Orbánism

The experience that frames Levitsky and Way’s perspective more than anything else is the rise of Orbánism in Hungary. At the core of the Trumpist assault on democratic self-government, they see the attempt to centralize all power with the executive and use it as a tool to install a new regime. This, they believe, “Republicans learned from Orbán” who “taught a generation of conservatives that the state should not be dismantled but rather wielded in pursuit of right-wing causes and against opponents.”

This observation offers important insight – while also failing to fully capture what has actually been playing out since January 20. Levitsky and Way’s assessment, it seems safe to assume, was heavily influenced by what was outlined in Project 2025. The vision that emerged from these planning operations was indeed one of dismantling only certain parts of the state (the ones that served as restrictions on moneyed interests or were intended to advance a civil rights agenda) while mobilizing others in order to impose a reactionary order on American society. However, conspicuously missing from the Foreign Affairs piece is the Musk factor. The utter devastation of government brought about by Musk’s DOGE hordes is entirely absent. This is where we need to remember that the piece was mostly written before Trump’s inauguration and likely updated in the very first days of Trump’s rule. It wasn’t until about ten days in that Musk started going berserk and the public attention shifted towards the way he seemed to be realizing the fever dream of the rightwing tech broligarchy of wiping away the state and establishing some form of anarcho-feudal capitalism.

In his March interview with New York Magazine, Levitsky explicitly acknowledged that he failed to anticipate the enormous role Elon Musk would play, that he doesn’t really “have a model to understand” it. This strikes me as significant. The model Levitsky and Way were using was, more than anything else, Orbán. A lot of people have latched onto the idea that the Trumpists are following Orbán’s playbook. And in some areas the strategies certainly are very similar. I do not want to dismiss the comparison, or the usefulness of Orbán as a reference point. At the same time, we need to resist the temptation to boil the situation down to that one thing, identify the one master plan, or the one analogy (“just like Orbán”). We want certainty – if we know the *one* playbook, we think we know what’s coming. But it turns out that’s not quite what is happening. Orbán, for instance, mostly stuck to what experts call “autocratic legalism” – while much of what the Trump regime is doing is blatantly illegal; Orbán also never gave free rein to a wannabe CEO-King who wants to wipe away the system. And without wanting to minimize Orbán’s authoritarianism in the slightest, I think it is dangerously misleading to regard Orbán’s Hungary as the endpoint of what Trumpist rule in America might ultimately look like. If things go bad, we could be in for much worse.

Where does it end?

Donald Trump is “unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule,” Levitsky and Way argue. Every time I read the piece, every time I think about their assessment, I stumble over this sentence. I am more pessimistic.

Levitsky and Way identify potential sources of resilience in the United States and focus on certain institutions (in the broadest sense) they argue are comparatively stronger than what Orbán had to overcome in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey: “An independent judiciary, federalism, bicameralism, and midterm elections – all absent in Hungary, for instance – will likely limit the scope of Trump’s authoritarianism.”

I struggle with this assessment – and with every week that passes, I am more inclined to disagree. Which is not at all the same as saying I think we should dismiss it. Take their point about the midterm elections, for instance. It is indeed important to note that Trump has, compared to the more common four- or five-year cycles elsewhere, less time before his party is scheduled to face the will of the voting public again. Elections are also organized on the state level in the United States, which, in theory, presents an added layer of insulation from federal interference. Then again, leaving the elections up to the states is very much a double-edged sword, especially since the Roberts Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, opening the door for all sorts of discriminatory initiatives in Republican-led states to strip certain groups of their right to vote. It is certainly an open question, at best, whether or not the United States will have elections in 2026 that still resemble anything reasonably called free and fair. And even if we stipulate that the midterms will indeed be free and fair: To what extent will they still matter? What role will Congress even have left to play, considering that the regime is already assaulting the very foundations of the separation of powers, including Congress’ power of the purse? And even if Democrats were to take back Congress, what will even be left of the state after almost two more years of Trumpist sabotage?

What about America’s “independent judiciary”? I am not sure why Levitsky and Way say this was a factor “absent in Hungary,” as that seems to be the outcome of Orbán’s takeover, rather than the situation he found when he took power. In any case, it is certainly true that as of right now, the courts are offering the only real resistance to the Trumpist assault. But how confident can we possibly be this will last? Every federal judge who rules against Trump knows what will inevitably follow: An avalanche of threats, upending their lives and those of their families. Several federal courts are also in the hands of Trumpist judges, and by the end of his term, Trump might have picked as much as half of the federal judges across the country. A judiciary remade in his image. Most importantly, we have never even seen the hard-right 6-3 majority on the Roberts Court operate with Trump in the White House, with a Republican trifecta. At the very least, the Court’s almost unprecedentedly extreme ruling to declare Trump functionally immune from criminal prosecution should have erased any confidence that the Roberts Court “would not go THAT far.”

Finally, there is the assumption that Trump is weaker than the most successful autocrats were when they started their takeovers. Trump only has slim margins to work with in Congress, Levitsky and Way remind us, and is relatively unpopular if we compare him to people like Orbán who came in with extremely high levels of public support. Once again, I do not want to dismiss this specific point. But in general, I struggle with the suggestion that Trump is “weak.” He has been the undisputed leader of the American Right for a decade, dominated one of the major parties because the base is personally loyal to him, was re-elected even after a failed auto-coup attempt. Maybe weak/strong are just not the right categories to apply here?

I think it’s important to consider that, as Levitsky and Way point out, unpopular autocrats have generally faced a higher level of resistance – from within, meaning from their own party, as well as from an emboldened political opposition and civil society. As concrete examples, the authors refer to Brazil and South Korea. But must we not already assume that America is, unfortunately, on a very different track? In South Korea, the autocratic coup was defeated by fierce resistance from the legislature – which is basically unimaginable in America right now; in Brazil, the justice system is actually holding Bolsonaro accountable, and we know that ship has already sailed over here.

Will the United States remain competitive authoritarian? Can we really dismiss the threat of full-on authoritarianism? I don’t want to get hung up on labels. The concept of competitive authoritarianism, as I understand it, covers quite a spectrum from close-to-democracy-still to almost-full-blown-autocracy. It will remain tremendously helpful as we are trying to navigate what is happening around us. But Levitsky and Way strongly suggested, at the start of the Trumpist regime, that there is a line we will not cross – a line that delineates the plausible spectrum of outcomes from what is not plausible, and that the former ends within the competitive authoritarian realm. Two months after Trump took power, I just don’t know why we should confidently assert that’s the case. Clearly, there should be no more doubt about the intentions of the Trumpists. Not just Trump himself, but also those around him. During the first Trump administration, there were still people in Trump’s orbit who counseled against acting on the most extreme urges and authoritarian impulses, who occasionally just ignored his raging. Now, Trump is surrounded by extremists who constantly justify and demand maximal escalation. They are fully in charge on the Right. Who is going to stop them?

If no one defends it, the constitution doesn’t matter

“The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed,” Levitsky and Way predicted in their Foreign Affairs piece. “Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order.”

The piece, I want to state this one more time, basically reflects an assessment from two months ago, and it is predicated on the idea that the existing hurdles will be too high, that both the political system as well as U.S. society offer too much resilience for a “weak” autocrat like Trump to fully overcome.

“Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order.” But what if Trump doesn’t actually have to rewrite the constitution in order to fully suspend the constitutional order? More than anything else, this might be my number one takeaway from the past two months: The constitution doesn’t mean anything if no one enforces and defends it.

In his interview with New York Magazine in early March, Levitsky fully acknowledges that Republicans “have been even weaker than I thought,” that the “Republican abdication has been worse than I expected, and I thought it would be bad.” The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is in shambles and – thanks to a faction of accommodationists, people entirely incapable of imagining anything but politics-as usual, and outright collaborators sabotaging those who wish to fight back – has just given up the only real leverage it possessed. There has been no real pushback from businesses, not much in terms of opposition from the media – to the contrary, there has been a whole lot of acquiescence, appeasement, and complicity.

I think that’s where the comparative perspective, which has long helped scholars and observers to see more clearly than many of their Americanist colleagues how real and acute the danger was, might have led Levitsky and Way to *underestimate* the threat. They emphasized Trump’s relative weakness because, compared to many other countries where autocrats have been able to establish authoritarian rule in the recent past, America has – on paper! – relatively strong institutions and democratic traditions. They assumed a relatively high level of democratic resilience not because of some innate democratic disposition, not because of some quasi-metaphysical exceptionalism, but simply because democratic rules and institutions had more time to develop, civil society actors have a lot more resources at their disposal than, for instance, in post-communist Eastern Europe. They assumed it would take strength and cunning to overcome those hurdles, at least as much and probably more sophistication than what Orbán deployed in Hungary. But if those tasked with upholding the constitutional order and defending democratic self-government aren’t actually able or willing to even put up a proper fight, then how much does it really take to bring the system down?

Competitive authoritarianism is no longer just a possibility. Not even two months into the Trumpist regime, we are already there.

I truly appreciate and admire that Steven Levitsky, in his interview with New York Magazine, doesn’t feel the need to play savvy observer who is never surprised by anything. He admits that until very recently, he and co-author Lucan Way didn’t think competitive authoritarianism was even a realistic option in the United States: “We’d talked about it, but we always came to the conclusion that no, it would never really happen.” And now, mere weeks after they published a piece they didn’t think they would have to write, even that warning seems too tame. That is something we must all grapple with: For many years, the radicalization of the Right has consistently outpaced what even critical observers expected. Now the speed and scope of the authoritarian transformation and destruction of the system over the past two months have gone beyond what some of the most insightful observers thought likely. That means we must recalibrate what we expect going forward. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proven wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. The political conflict isn’t over, nor is the outcome determined, or democracy destined to be extinguished for good. But let’s finally discard whatever notion of “It cannot happen here” is still floating around. It is all happening right now.