Is America on the Path to Authoritarianism?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A month into Donald Trump’s second term office, many are alarmed by what they see as emerging signs of democratic erosion. In a new essay called “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” the scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way make the case that such alarm is justified—that the administration’s early moves could herald an irreversible transformation of the U.S. political system, with major implications for global democracy.

Drawing on their research on democratic decline worldwide, Levitsky and Way argue that the United States faces a particular kind of risk that many observers miss: a form of competitive authoritarianism, in which elections continue, but the state apparatus is weaponized against opposition. They spoke with senior editor Eve Fairbanks about the global playbook for authoritarian regimes and the stakes for U.S. democracy.

EVE FAIRBANKS

Hi Lucan, hi Steve, it’s a real pleasure to have you, and I’m really excited to talk about the piece you wrote for our recent issue, “The Path to American Authoritarianism.” And you made the case in that piece that, and I’m quoting you here, “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.” And you argue in the piece that no matter how much distaste some American voters may feel for Trump, they may not have understood what was coming this term because, and you wrote, “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…. Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution…. But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order.” So, can you walk us through this new form of what you call “competitive authoritarianism,” or elected autocracy, that’s really emerged since the Cold War? Maybe Steve, you can tell us about that and why that’s emerged.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Competitive authoritarian regimes are regimes that are actually competitive in the sense that there are multi-party elections, the opposition is legal, the opposition is above board and competes seriously for power, and once in a while even wins. I would say Poland in 2023 is an example of the opposition winning in a competitive authoritarian election. So from a bit of a distance, competitive authoritarian regimes may look democratic, but they’re not democratic. Because systematic weaponization and abuse of the state, of the machinery of government and its deployment against critics and rivals, tilts the playing field against the opposition. So competition is real, but it’s not fair.

There are abuses of power in every democracy; there are civil liberties violations in every democracy. But in competitive authoritarian regimes, it’s systematic enough that it begins to tilt the playing field against the opposition. As you mentioned, this is mostly a post–Cold War phenomenon. There have been competitive authoritarian regimes at other times in history, but they became much, much more widespread after the collapse of communism because beginning in the late 1980s, and I would say even still today, electoral regimes, competitive elections are really the most globally legitimate political arrangement.

It’s really hard, it’s really costly, to just shove aside elections entirely and rule with a single party, as in the communist era, or with the military, as did Pinochet or Franco. There are some such regimes, but they’re still much, much less common. It’s still much more legitimate to hold elections. And so the majority of new autocracies that have been born in the twenty-first century have been competitive authoritarian regimes—elected governments that abuse power and tilt the playing field against rivals.

LUCAN WAY

In the 1970s, almost all authoritarian regimes were formal in the sense that there were no elections to the top executive—there was a formal single party rule. Now, close to 80 percent of autocracies, of authoritarian regimes, have some multi-candidate elections for the executive. So it’s really become in some ways the modal form of authoritarianism since the end of the Cold War, even today.

EVE FAIRBANKS

I think we have the sense in the United States, maybe we’re a little bit behind in our way of thinking or a little stuck in the Cold War, and we think of these dictatorships where opposition parties are locked up and that really have repressive features. And people that I’ve spoken to, they say, “Well, Trump has all these kinds of limitations, and look at his first term. He promised a lot. He had certain big, big goals, and in the end he wasn’t able to break the system. We had Biden, it seemed like a sort of normal presidency.” You argue in your piece that this second term is really different from the first, and why is that?

LUCAN WAY

In the first term, when Trump was first elected in 2016, really no one expected him to win. He was himself quite surprised. He had just undertaken a kind of hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He had virtually no allies in the party. And so he was basically forced to rely on many establishment figures who shared basic commitment to the Democratic system. And he also had no plan coming in. He was very ad hoc and, as a result, many of his worst instincts were held in check. Various efforts to prosecute people such as John Kerry and Hillary Clinton never really saw the light of day, in large part because career government officials basically nixed them before they could take shape.

Now it’s a really different situation. He’s had eight years to establish a stunning degree of control over the Republican Party. I mean, the Republican Party now is willing to do basically anything he tells them to. And as a result, the transformation, I think, has been stunning. And I just want to add here that this piece was written a few weeks ago. It feels, to me, very optimistic, in some ways, if I had to rewrite it. I think both Steve and I are kind of much less confident in the core features of the democratic system than we were.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Just to reiterate, Trump came in with no team and no plan the first time around, in 2017, and he did not control the Republican Party. And so he governed with conservative technocrats and more or less mainstream conservative Republican politicians, and they constrained him. None of that is true anymore. He completely owns the Republican Party. There is no dissent; there is no check from the Republican Party. The entire House of Representatives led by Republicans has abdicated and stepped aside. And Trump is governing with loyalists, not with either skilled technocrats or Republican politicians. He’s governing with loyalists. There are no adults in the room, there are no checks on his behavior—which is not to say he’ll get away with everything he wants to get away with, but he has much, much greater room to maneuver than he had the first term.

EVE FAIRBANKS

Yeah. On the one hand, there’s this amazing sense that even observers, foreign observers—I’m sitting down here in South Africa, South Africans who’ve been quite targeted by Trump, Americans, are very shocked by what’s actually transpired in his first few weeks. And yet, on the other hand, the really fascinating thing about your piece is that it shows there’s a real blueprint that he’s following. In other words, there could have been an expectation of some of what he’s done if you really understood this regime form that you guys lay out. So let’s just sketch that out. You begin by really describing the very granular ways that authoritarians who enter in a competitive system who still have elections begin by purging the civil service. Why is that so important?

LUCAN WAY

Yeah, so basically, even in a country like the United States, which is relatively laissez-faire, the government just has enormous power over people’s lives. It can arrest you, it can investigate you, it audits you, it can tax you. For businesses, it’s enormously important in terms of providing contracts, in terms of regulating vast sectors of the economy. So leaders have enormous power to attack opposition and undermine their ability to compete in a democratic system, which is why all modern democracies—the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—developed a series of measures that basically restricted the ability of politicians to politicize the state. They created an arm’s length relationship between many of the bureaucrats who make core decisions that are important for everyday lives, such as tax auditing and partisanship. And this was basically what kept democracy intact for the last century.

And so this has begun to change. And this is the most important impediment to creating an authoritarian regime. And this is why in countries including Hungary and Turkey and India, populists have come to power. And they first had to attack this sort of independent bureaucracy—the most important impediment to creating an authoritarian regime. So in many ways, as we say in the piece, these bureaucrats, these unsexy bureaucrats, are really on the front lines of preserving democracy today.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Lucan’s absolutely right, and you’re right, that there is a blueprint for this—that if, in a competitive authoritarian regime, if you can’t ban your opponents, if you can’t lock up your opponents, the logical weapon available is the state itself. You wield the state against your opponents. That can be done in a constitutional way—that doesn’t, in most cases, violate the constitution. That’s all true. There is an established pattern. You could look at what [Hungarian President Viktor] Orban, what [former Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, what [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan did, and predict it. But there’s another reason why the establishment ought not to have been shocked in 2024, 2025.

Trump said he was going to do all of this, and the Republican Party has been clear, has been crystal clear since 2020, 2021, that it is willing to acquiesce to, if not support, an authoritarian project. I’m not exaggerating. Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and block a peaceful transfer of power, and the Republican Party decided to nominate him for President again. Donald Trump, with a partial exception of the DOGE stuff, promised to do every single one of the things that he’s doing: lawsuits against the press, wielding the [Internal Revenue Service] and the Justice Department against the opponents—he told us he was going to do this. So how the establishment was shocked that this is going on quite frankly is beyond me.

EVE FAIRBANKS

You said it’s beyond you; I mean, I was going to ask you, Steve, why do you think that Americans, and even some observers of the United States, had such a hard time envisioning this? One thing you say in your piece is that some elements of this have happened in U.S. history before. For instance, Nixon politicized the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] to go after his political enemies. You give the example of the Jim Crow south where, to put it generously, law enforcement actors turned a blind eye to really serious efforts to prevent black citizens from voting and therefore tilted the electoral playing field in their favor. And yet you present this period as really different, and I wonder what you think, maybe, the closest example is, if people are really struggling to fire up their imaginations or if that’s even what’s needed. Why is it so hard?

LUCAN WAY

It is true that some of this we’ve seen before. I mean, the most obvious example is Richard Nixon in the 1970s, but I also think it’s really important to understand that we are in a completely different era than we were in the 1970s. Nixon resigned in 1974 because he knew that Republican senators would convict him after his impeachment by the House. None of this is the case now. Trump faces literally no restrictions on his activity. There’s really no checks on his power, which is quite different from what it’s been in the past.

And I think basically part of what’s going on is, one, I think that in the United States we just have not experienced this in the modern era. And there was a false sense of complacency that was created by the failure of Trump in his first term, which . . . I think he failed because the context was quite different than as we’ve just talked about.

And I also think it’s similar to with vaccines right now. A lot of the opposition to vaccines is a function that people have never experienced measles, they’ve never experienced a lot of these—polio and horrible diseases. So they’re complacent, and they’re unwilling to take vaccines. And I think it’s because no one’s experienced this authoritarianism before that they sort of figure it can’t happen to them. And so I think as a result of this complacency, but also sort of active support on the part of the Republican Party, we’re in a particularly dangerous moment right now.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

That’s an excellent point, but it’s worse than that. Not only have people not experienced polio or measles, but we act as if it never happened in the United States before. So one reason why we’re in the mess that we’re in, in terms of public expectations and the public’s inability to come to grips with what’s happening, is that Americans have a really strong tendency to whitewash our past.

Most Americans don’t know or think about Reconstruction. Most Americans have never thought about the fact that the U.S. South was under single-party authoritarian rule for 80 years. We don’t think about the fact that the Red Scare and McCarthyism were serious violations of civil liberties. And that we were by contemporary measures, by mainstream contemporary measures, not a full democratic regime until 1965 in this country. So if we took seriously some of the democratic deficits that we had in the past, it might be easier to come to terms.

One other point though: this is unusual territory. No democracy even remotely as rich or as old as U.S. democracy has ever broken down. No democracy over the age of 50 has ever died—ever. And even if you take the birth date of U.S. democracy as 1965, we’re above 50. And so, all old, rich democracies never die. And that’s another reason for complacency.

LUCAN WAY

So if you look at . . . a lot of the social scientists who rely on historical data basically say there’s a zero percent chance of democratic breakdown in the United States, which is just patently ridiculous. I think Steve and I have talked about this a lot. This is really in many ways a stunning failure of political science to really not predict this at all, and I think we’re still grappling with that.

EVE FAIRBANKS

So you talk about, and to be a bit reductive—people must read your essay—three ways sequentially, that authoritarian figures that rise to the top of a democratic regime transform this regime into something. And it’s really important to stress, I think, that you’re talking about the United States becoming effectively a different regime form. And you’re really trying to say this is happening—it’s already happening. We’re in the middle of it, and we really need to grapple with that.

And those three ways are first, the weaponization of the bureaucracy by prosecuting, using the law—defamation suits, lawsuits, investigations of opposition groups—and to tilt the playing field such that it still looks like there is a game, but you can’t play it fairly. And then of course, doing this purge of the civil service and putting in loyalists. But the third component that I think there’s some attention on, but maybe not enough, is co-optation. So not only negative pressure that an authoritarian will put on their opponents and critics but using the state, using the bureaucracy to create inducements to comply—for business, for anybody who might be opposed to the regime. Can you walk us through a little bit how that works and give us an example or two of another country in which that’s been an effective way to consolidate a party’s advantage?

LUCAN WAY

Yeah, so I think one useful place to start is by looking at the media sector in the United States. The first initial competitive authoritarianism has really been felt most clearly in the media. And the problem really comes down to the fact that in the modern economy in the United States, media companies are part of larger conglomerates that have interest in a wide variety of areas—aerospace, Amazon, and others that are deeply affected by federal decision-making.

As a result, these companies are incredibly vulnerable to pressure by Trump. But more broadly, the ways in which business can benefit from good relations with Trump have convinced a massive number of businesses to go in and openly ally with the Trump administration. Michelle Goldberg called this, and we quote this in the piece, “the great capitulation.” And this is hugely disturbing, and I think what you’ve seen is what Timothy Snyder calls “obedience in advance.”

So even before Trump came to power, they were already sort of lining up behind Trump. And I think the most immediate impact we’ll see is, you see these numbers of settlements made between ABC and very likely CBS, and also Meta, that are almost certainly going to result in a self-censorship by the media and mitigation of criticism of the Trump administration during this term. So I actually find that is something that is already occurring right now.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

These are settlements of defamation suits that the companies almost certainly would have won, but because their parent companies had other economic interests at play that could be threatened by the Trump administration, they decided to settle, which is a major concession by the media in terms of shrinking the space for free press.

EVE FAIRBANKS

So a remarkable thing about your piece is that between when we finalized the text and when Trump came into office in his first couple of weeks, a whole lot of the things that you described—an effort to fire mass numbers of civil servants, various types of threats against the media, capitulation, new capitulations by media organizations—have occurred. Is there anything in this template of competitive authoritarianism that you’ve considered in other countries or contexts that we haven’t seen yet, but that you expect will be coming?

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Yeah, well, one thing I worry a lot about, and what you see not in all competitive authoritarian regimes but in some competitive authoritarian regimes, is the use of political thuggery: threats of violence, gangs, militias, armed groups, sometimes heavily armed, sometimes not, but the use of political intimidation on the ground to silence civil society actors and to threaten politicians. And they do it shielded by the judiciary.

So they’re engaging in illegal behavior—nowhere is it legal to go beat up opposition at rallies—but if the attorney general or the prosecutors or the Justice Department give you a wink and are willing to turn a blind eye, which often happens in competitive authoritarian regimes, then these guys get a certain free reign. They get a blank check to engage in intimidation politics. That seems far-fetched, but it is precisely what happened in the U.S. south during and after Reconstruction.

And given that the United States already has a large and armed extremist fringe, given that the level of threats against politicians and judges and prosecutors has already skyrocketed in recent years, and particularly given the huge wink that Donald Trump gave by pardoning almost all of the January 6 insurrectionists, that’s something that we see in other competitive authoritarian regimes that I think could easily happen here and is quite terrifying.

LUCAN WAY

Yeah, competitive authoritarian regimes rely not just on the formal agents of the police and the like, but on football clubs and other vigilantes to beat up protesters and provide a veneer of plausible deniability to the regime. And this is stuff that, as Steve mentioned, already infects the system. It, as we mentioned in the piece, probably explains why some Republicans opposed impeachment in 2021 when the grounds for impeachment were just utterly obvious.

I would add that we’re sort of now almost in this period, we can talk about this, the Democratic party is in some ways kind of shell shocked. There really hasn’t been an opposition, at least on the streets, and as a result, I think partly that’s kept violence down. Because there hasn’t been vociferous opposition. But when it does emerge, I think we’re going to see much more of this vigilante violence.

EVE FAIRBANKS

I want to talk about Democrats because a big focus of the end of your piece—or opposition, let’s say. But first Republicans; a lot of people that I talk to seem to be putting a lot of hope in the possibility of an emerging, over time, Republican opposition, so intra-group. Let’s take the resignation of Danielle Sassoon, the former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, former clerk for Antonin Scalia; she stepped down rather than follow this very abnormal request to dismiss charges against the New York mayor as a quid pro quo. And people can lift these up and say, “Well, at some point Trump’s own party, they’re just going to have had enough. They’re going to think this won’t work for us in the long term electorally, and they’ll break with him.” Based on your experience looking at other contemporary competitive authoritarian regimes, is this something to hold out for?

LUCAN WAY

I think this is certainly—if you look at the breakdown of competitive authoritarian regimes, it very often happens from within the ruling coalition. And I mean, I certainly hope that’s right. I think both Steve and I are, I can see Steve is shaking his head, quite skeptical that this is going to happen. I mean, the career costs to people doing this is just so enormous. You look at Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and what they’ve had to go through. These are two Republicans who courageously came out in opposition to Trump. It’s just hard to imagine that many would follow that path.

And I think it’s basically—if you look at other competitive authoritarian regimes, they’ve really had large scale defections or mass defections from the ruling coalition when the government is incredibly unpopular, when there’s the sense that there’s a danger to one’s career and livelihood by remaining loyal. And right now, we’re very far from that in the United States. I just find it really hard to imagine.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

There have been a lot of Danielle Sassoons since 2016. There has been a drippage of principled conservatives who’ve stood up for the rule of law and stood up for the Constitution and stood up for democracy. And as Lucan pointed out, every single one of them has seen at least their immediate career prospects completely destroyed. As long as that’s the case, as long as it is highly likely that internal opposition to Trump will be a career killer, you cannot expect large numbers of Republicans to do it.

In fact, the Overton window continues to shift in an authoritarian direction. It was unthinkable in early 2021, it was unthinkable, to allow Kash Patel to take a major position in the administration. Now it looks like he’s going to be FBI director. This is a party that has completely Trumpized. And if Trump were to become highly unpopular, then he will suffer defections. But as long as Trump is the most popular Republican, as long as he is more popular within Republican ranks than anyone who opposes him, you’re not going to see defections. And I think we’re far from it.

EVE FAIRBANKS

In your piece, one of the things that distinguishes the United States maybe a little bit from some other competitive authoritarian regimes is the degree of political polarization and the stasis of party identification. And in one sense, that’s a bit protective. You talk about how much damage and how much change a person with an 80 percent approval rate riding in can do. And you note that one of the potential sources of resilience in the United States is that Trump is, I think, hovering just below 50 [percent[ and can’t barely crack that number. He doesn’t have that level of support. But on the other hand, it seems very, very difficult for him to drop to 20 or 15 percent, as you see in some other places, because of this just incredible rigidity of this two party system.

Give us a quick picture. So let’s say, come 2028, presuming that Trump does not find a way to give himself a third term, he can’t redo the Constitution so he can’t run again, it’s a competitive election between Democrats and Republicans for both branches of Congress and the executive. Given what could be entrenched from Trump’s authoritarian aims over the next four years, how might that feel different, that election, that type of democratic experience, than it did even for us in 2024?

STEVEN LEVITSKY

It will depend on the number of things. First of all, will there be a level of grassroots intimidation of voters and election workers? We could be in an environment where that remains relatively rare, like in recent elections, or that could be stepped up. The Trump administration could make it clear that voter intimidation tactics—maybe not quite as violent as the 1870s in the U.S. south—but voter intimidation tactics are encouraged or allowed that could change the vote.

And the other thing we don’t know is just how much the government’s use of carrots and sticks in terms of economic and regulatory policy, just how much of the private sector’s arm the government’s going to be able to twist. So my expectation, and I hope I’m right, my expectation is despite the cooptation and the bullying of a large number of CEOs and wealthy Americans, there will still be a fair number of wealthy Americans willing to finance Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro or whomever the Democratic Party candidate is.

But it’s at this point not impossible, not even that difficult, to imagine a world where anybody, any individual, any upper middle class American thinking about writing a check to a Democratic candidate, has to think twice because maybe it’s going to increase the likelihood of an IRS audit. We’re pretty sure the playing field is going to tilt a little bit; we’re not sure how much. My guess, I’m still fairly optimistic that we have a big and wealthy enough private sector, a big and wealthy enough upper middle class, that it’s not going to make the election noncompetitive, but it’s impossible, at least for me, to anticipate just how far that level of intimidation and co-optation is going to go.

LUCAN WAY

I mean, I think another way of putting it is, I think both of us are quite confident that there’ll be a lot of abuse and efforts to intimidate the opposition. I’d be very surprised if that did not happen—if we did not live in a world in which people did think twice about going into opposition to the Trump administration. But I think where we’re a little bit more optimistic is whether that intimidation will be successful, in actually weakening in any dramatic way the Democratic Party.

I think that one of the core differences between the United States and places such as Hungary and Turkey is that we’re just a much more developed capitalist economy. Wealth is far more distributed across society, the legal system is much stronger, the institutions are much stronger. So really it’s much harder for even someone like Trump, who's a dyed-in-the-wool autocrat and basically willing to do almost anything to be successful. So I think we have to distinguish between his abuse of power versus the impact of that abuse of power.

EVE FAIRBANKS

You do write very insightfully and in a complex way about how the many facets on which opposition can become enervated and exhausted and overwhelmed and unfocused. Particularly, I was struck by this line in your piece: “The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.”

I want you to talk about sources of optimism, sources of hope, and how a good opposition might organize itself to preserve the United States’ democratic culture. But do you notice any of this weariness in yourself or in people you know?

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Right. There’s a mix of fear and exhaustion and resignation, and in some cases just sheer pragmatism. Different mixes for different people. But there are a number of forces, a number of emotional forces pushing us toward the sideline. In my case, I feel like there are many times each day I think to myself, I spent eight years doing this, and for what? And it is exhausting.

And then to get back to your point, Eve, when you see other people around you, people who are more powerful, wealthier, better positioned, better able to defend themselves than you are—Jeff Bezos is in a much better position than I am. When I see Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg getting on their knees, and when you see newspapers folding and CEOs who you know know better—politicians who you know know better—surrendering, it can be paralyzing. It can be debilitating. It’s hard to get up out of bed in the morning and continue to fight for democracy when you know Jeff Bezos and his billions have given up.

And this collective action problem that we have is that each individual civil society leader, every university president, every CEO, every editor, every parent company of a major media outlet has to take care of their shareholders, their university, make sure that they don’t face frivolous lawsuits that can be costly, that they don’t face investigations, tax charges. They’ve got to take care of themselves and their organizations. And there’s a strong tendency when you’re worried about the bottom line, when there are maybe billions of dollars at stake or an endowment tax coming or a costly defamation suit coming or an investigation coming, there are strong incentives to just say, “Okay, I’m going to take care of myself. I’m just going to step to the sideline for a year or two.” But when everybody does that, the democracy movement overall, civil society overall is badly weakened.

EVE FAIRBANKS

How does a person resist some of these very powerful forces? Because there is a depiction in your piece—the state is like a Titanic, it’s a gigantic mechanism that carries a tremendous weight against it, and the sense is that every individual would have a hard time swimming against that current. Have you seen anything thus far that is giving you specific optimism?

LUCAN WAY

Well, I mean I think it’s important to emphasize that there’s more opposition now going on than many of us appreciate. I think a lot of it’s being done through the legal system, with the 19 attorney generals who’ve filed suit against the various actions by DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] and Elon Musk. It’s still very early days. I just want to emphasize that it’s still very early days.

And it’s early days in two ways. One, that the legal process is working itself out. But it’s also early days in terms of we haven’t yet seen the full impact of Trump’s behavior. And I think that’s where I think some of my biggest optimism comes—in the fact that people like Trump are just very bad at governing and at dealing with core problems that people care about, like the economy and national security or airplanes not running into each other and things like that. So I think that his firehose of firing officials and stuff is almost certainly going to lead to a variety of catastrophic outcomes and decrease his popularity but also, I think, wake a lot of the population up in terms of reviving their outrage at this activity. And so I do hope that this sense of malaise that we’re seeing in this passivity is potentially short-lived.

EVE FAIRBANKS

There is a pervasive allegation by Trump himself and by Musk and by JD Vance and by prominent American Republicans who are now in power that what they are doing in fact is undoing the Democrats’ weaponization of the state. That it was the left, that it was the Democrats, Barack Obama weaponized the IRS, many allegations on this front. How do you think about that, if you do? How does one grapple with that counterclaim?

STEVEN LEVITSKY

What I do is I look to Freedom House reports or other international organizations whose job it is to measure democracy and authoritarianism. If they’re not reporting that the Democrats weaponized the state and that both parties are assaulting democratic institutions—don’t take JD Vance’s word for it. Find a reputable organization or a reputable scholar of political regimes who claims that there was a weaponization of the state, a systematic weaponization, a comparable weaponization of the state under previous Democratic administrations, and then we can talk seriously.

Until then, this is consistent with what virtually all authoritarians do when they purge the state. You have to justify purging and packing the state. I mean, Trump may be willing to just say he wants to do it, but it’s a pretty illegitimate thing to come in and fire people left and right and replace them with hacks. You need to justify it. And authoritarians, when they weaponize the state, invariably, almost without exception, claim that the state has been somehow subverted or infiltrated by dangerous elements of some sort.

LUCAN WAY

Right. To give you an example—I mean, Viktor Orban, in Hungary, he came to power again, a second time, in 2010, and immediately made the argument that the state was controlled by communists from the 1980s, which is just patently false, but that was his excuse for undertaking a major attack on the independent bureaucracy. This is again from the same playbook, really, that autocrats you see, as Steve says, in other cases. And I think you just have to look like where are those claims made? If they’re only made on Fox News or by leaders of the Republican Party then you can pretty much dismiss them.

EVE FAIRBANKS

My last question for you: There’s an effort to create an authoritarian system out of the United States government. What will be the evidence that the United States, that its opposition, that its culture, is dealing with this relatively well comparatively, and that it’s not? What would the former look like?

LUCAN WAY

So one thing, I think in a sense a constitutional crisis is a relatively better outcome—in the sense that if you see actual courts not accepting Trump’s actions as legal, I mean, that is already kind of a healthy outcome. I mean, the thing that I worry more than when we first wrote this article was that Trump could just decide to ignore the law at all and just engage in this activity. But I still think that some kind of resistance or some kind of constitutional crisis is actually, to me, an optimistic outcome in some ways.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

We’re at a phase right now where the only people willing to stand up to Trump are Danielle Sassoon and the minister who spoke to Trump in Washington, D.C., about mercy. But when it becomes first, acceptable, and second, eventually cool, to stand up to Trump, we’ll be in a better place. And I think that there’s a good chance that that will happen.

U.S. democracy, for all of its incredible weaknesses, dysfunction and vulnerabilities is going to be hard to kill outright. There’s a lot of opposition out there. It will probably take a self-goal by Trump, a mistake or two by Trump, and that will happen. For there to be a little blood in the water, and once there’s a little blood in the water, I think you’ll see greater opposition. I think this is quite likely to happen.

LUCAN WAY

I mean, I would just add to that—I mean, you saw this incredibly depressing great capitulation of much of the business sector almost immediately after Trump was elected. These are not loyal people to Trump. The minute they put their finger in the wind and things are blowing away from Trump, I could easily imagine these people abandoning them just as quickly as they went to him.

EVE FAIRBANKS

Steven, is there any temptation for the opposition in competitive authoritarian regimes to lose itself a little bit or lose its commitments by feeling that now the game theory has changed, the playing field has changed, and it has to imitate the originator of an authoritarian culture?

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Yeah, look, it’s really hard. You see this over and over again, whether it’s Venezuela or Hungary or Poland for a while, or Turkey—oppositions are widely criticized from the outside, by themselves, they question themselves. Because of a couple of things. First of all, it’s hard. I mean, the thing about an uneven playing field is if you’re in the opposition, you’re going uphill. It’s hard to compete—that’s why it’s competitive authoritarianism and not democracy. It’s hard to compete against an incumbent government that’s wielding the machinery of government against opponents.

And secondly, in many of these cases, certainly in the United States, the incumbent has rapidly and unexpectedly changed the rules of the game. Politicians in both parties, but particularly the Democratic Party, have been doing politics the same way their whole life. I mean, maybe they learned how to tweet in the last decade, but Chuck Schumer’s been doing politics a long time, Nancy Pelosi has been doing politics a long time. The entire Democratic Party’s leadership knows one way of doing politics. And politics are changing on a number of dimensions. Some are authoritarian, others just have to do with the changes in media technology, the attention economy.

So there’s a lot of change going on. And when that change is going on, and you’re fighting an uphill battle, that leads to a lot of self-doubt. There will be a lot of criticism, a lot of self-criticism, a lot of debate, a lot of debate that may seem like needless debate. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a terrible thing. Democrats do need to learn how to adapt to politics in the 2020s. They may have to engage in a little more attention economy politics. They may have to get on Joe Rogan a bit more or whatever.

But there will be a more serious debate, and there is a more serious debate, about how dirty should the Democrats play. Should they be willing to play hardball against, or even engage in authoritarian behavior against Trump? That’s a very, very difficult set of questions, but it is a set of questions that oppositions everywhere had to figure out: Do we cross these lines too? Do we take off the gloves? Do we cheat? Do we bend the rules? Do we play hardball? Those are a difficult set of choices that the Democratic Party has to make. And there’s no clear answer.

EVE FAIRBANKS

Steven and Lucan, your piece had a granular prescience that I think was born of really deep comparative thinking and offered a really different and deeper take on a very extensively covered moment and future. So thank you so much for joining us. It was great to speak with you.

STEVEN LEVITSKY

Thanks for having us on.