I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. As long as Trump is the most popular Republican, as long as he is more popular within Republican ranks. then anyone who opposes him, you're not going to see defection. It's because, you know, no one's experienced this kind of authoritarianism before that they sort of figure it can't happen to them.
A month into Donald Trump's second term in 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 Stephen Levitsky and Luke and Wei
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 Wei 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. Hi, Lucan. Hi, Steve. It's a real pleasure to have you. And I'm really excited to talk about your 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. 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 opposition forces are locked up. Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution, but contemporary 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. 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.
Competition is real, but it's not fair. There are abuse 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. 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 like 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 21st century have been this, have been competitive authoritarian regimes, elected governments that abuse power and tilt the playing field against their rivals. You know, in the 1970s, almost all authoritarian regimes were kind of formal in the sense that there was 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 sort of 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. I think we have the sense in the United States, maybe we're a little bit... behind in our way of thinking, are 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...
You know, Trump has all these kinds of limitations and look at his first term. He promised a lot. He had certain, you know, 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? Maybe Luke can...
In the first term, when Trump was first elected in 2016, you know, really no one expected him to win. He was himself quite surprised. He had, you know, 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 commitments to the democratic system.
And he also had no plan coming in. He was very ad hoc. And as a result, many of his kind of worst instincts were held in check. Various efforts to prosecute people like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton sort of never really saw the light of day, in large part because career government officials basically nicked them before they could sort of 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 just willing to basically do anything he tells them to. And as a result, the kind of 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 sort of core features of the democratic system than we were. 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 a more or less mainstream conservative Republican politicians. And they constrained him. None of that is true anymore. He completely owns the Republican Party. There's 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. 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
So authoritarians who enter in a competitive system, who still have elections, begin by purging the civil service. Why is that so important? Yeah, I mean, so basically.
even in a country like the united states which is relatively laissez-faire uh the government just has enormous power over people's lives it can sort of arrest you it can investigate you it audits you it can tax you um for businesses it's you know enormously important in terms of providing contracts, in terms of regulating vast sectors of the economy.
leaders just have enormous power to attack opposition and undermine their ability to compete in democratic system, which is why all modern democracies, you know, the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed a series. of measures that basically restricted the ability of politicians to politicize the state. They kind of created an arm's length relationship between many of the bureaucrats who make core decisions that are important for everyday lives.
tax audit and partisanship. And this was sort of basically what kept democracy intact for the last century. And so this has begun to change. And this is the most important impediment to kind of... creating an authoritarian regime. And this is why in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India, populists have come to power. And this has been, they first had to attack this sort of independent bureaucracy because it's the most.
important impediment to creating an authoritarian regime. So in many ways, as we say in the piece, these bureaucrats, they're sort of unsexy bureaucrats, are really on the front lines of preserving democracy today. Lukin's absolutely right, and you're right. That there is a blueprint for this, that if in a competitive authoritarian regime, the way 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 Orban, what Hugo Chavez, what 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 promised to do...
with the 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 IRS and the Justice Department against the pronouns. 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. 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?
So 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 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 to vote and therefore tilted the electoral playing field in their favor.
And yet you present this period is really different. And also, 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? You know, 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 sort of no no checks on his power which is quite different from from what it's been in the past and i think basically part of what's going on is one that's just you know i think that In the United States, we just have not experienced this in the modern era, and there was a kind of 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.
I also think it's similar to with vaccines right now. There's sort of 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 kind of complacent and they're unwilling to take vaccines. And I think. It's because, you know, no one's experienced this kind of authoritarianism before that they sort of figure it can't happen to them. And so I think...
you know, as a result of this complacency, but also sort of active support on the part of the Republican Party, we're in a kind of particularly dangerous moment right now. That's an excellent point, but it's worse than that. It's as if not only 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, right? Most Americans don't know or think about Reconstruction. Most Americans have never thought about the fact that the US South was under single party authoritarian rule for 80 years.
We don't think about the fact that the Red Scares 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. democracies, 1965, we're above 50. And so old rich democracies never die. And that's another reason for complacency.
Yeah, so if you look at a lot of the social scientists who rely on historical data basically say there's a 0% chance of democratic breakdown in the United States, which is just patently ridiculous. I mean, it is a really, I think Steve and I have talked about this a lot. This is really a kind of, in many ways, a stunning failure of political science to really not predict this at all. And I think we're sort of still kind of grappling with that.
So you talk about, and to be a bit reductive, people must read your essay, but kind of 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 cooptation.
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? Yeah, so I think, you know, one useful place to start is by looking at the media sector in the United States. You know, the first kind of... Initial competitive authoritarianism has really been felt most clearly in the media. And the problem really comes down to the fact that in the sort of 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. right but more broadly the sort of you know the ways in which business can benefit from good relations with trump have convinced a massive number of businesses to go in and sort of openly alive
with the Trump administration. Michelle Goldberg called this, and we quote this in the piece, the great capitulation. And this is, you know, hugely disturbing. And I think sort of 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, you know, these number of settlements made between ABC and very likely CBS also, and also a meta.
that are almost certainly going to result in kind of a kind of self-censorship by the media and sort of mitigation of criticism of the Trump administration during this term. So I actually find that that is something that is already occurring right now. 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. We'll be back after a short break.