Electoral Autocracy or Needed Correction?
The critics are divided.
NPR (“Concerns over autocracy in the U.S. continue to grow“):
As the United States heads toward the midterm elections, there are growing concerns among some political scientists that the country has moved even further along the path to some form of autocracy.
Staffan I. Lindberg, the director of Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which monitors democracy across the globe, says the U.S. has already crossed the threshold and become an “electoral autocracy.”
Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, agrees.
“I would argue that the United States in 2025-26 has slid into a mild form of competitive authoritarianism,” Levitsky said. “I think it’s reversible, but this is authoritarianism.”
Under competitive authoritarianism, countries still hold elections, but the ruling party uses various tactics — attacking the press, disenfranchising voters, weaponizing the justice system and threatening critics — to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.
The examples they cite are comparatively tame:
Levitsky cited what he considers two strikingly autocratic moments that occurred in September. First, the Trump administration threatened ABC’s parent company, Disney, following Jimmy Kimmel’s comments on the killing of Charlie Kirk.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, warned.
A week later, President Trump proposed that U.S. generals use American cities as training grounds for their troops.
“We’re under invasion from within,” Trump said to a gathering of military brass in Quantico, Virginia. “No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
The blatant attempt to steal the 2020 election through mob violence, the pardoning of even the most violent participants in that attempt, and the prospect of masked state agents with firearms at the polls to intimidate nonwhite voters could also have been cited. Regardless,
Levitsky said this is the kind of language dictators in South America used in the 1970s — leaders like Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
Those who disagree have to bend over backwards to defend the state of American democracy:
Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, says Trump is pressuring news organizations and universities to address problems with liberal bias.
“There are legitimate objections that have been raised by the Trump administration,” said Turley, the author of Rage and the Republic. “That does not justify some of the means, but there is a long-standing need for a debate within these institutions.”
Some might say that freedom of speech and the press are fundamental features of democracy, certainly the American model.
Others are somewhat more tenuous:
Other political scientists say the U.S. system of government is battered but still democratic. Kurt Weyland, who researches democracy and authoritarianism at the University of Texas at Austin, says he’s increasingly confident that the U.S. can withstand Trump’s sweeping attempt to expand executive power.
Weyland said that for the first months of his second term, Trump was like a “steamroller” and faced little containment or opposition. But Weyland, who wrote Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat: Countering Global Alarmism, says that has changed.
For instance, Kimmel was yanked off the air but soon returned and continues to routinely mock Trump. Weyland also said the president’s attempt to tilt the electoral playing field through mass redistricting hasn’t worked out as he might have hoped.
“If the guy had succeeded in seriously skewing [future] elections in the House, that would’ve gone to the core of democracy,” said Weyland, “but he didn’t. He got barely anything.”
There is some small comfort that attempts from the highest levels of our government to squelch free speech and rig elections have only been modestly successful, I suppose.
Weyland also said federal agents shooting two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis last month was disastrous for the president. Border czar Tom Homan said last week that the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota is ending. Weyland thinks the public blowback to the killings limits Trump’s ability to deploy such aggressive tactics going forward.
What’s two dead innocents, after all? And one imagines non-whites in Minneapolis and other American cities are reassured that they fully enjoy their rights as citizens and legal residents.
The next big test for American democracy could come in November’s midterms. The Trump administration is suing states to hand over voter data, which worries Kim Scheppele, a Princeton University sociologist who has studied the authoritarian tactics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
In 2014, Orbán’s government messaged Hungarian voters living in the United Kingdom to go to one polling place and then switched to a different location on Election Day.
“They disenfranchised almost all the Hungarians in the U.K., most of whom were oppositional to Orbán,” says Scheppele.
This month, Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, proposed that the administration deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to polling places to root out undocumented migrants trying to vote — which is statistically rare.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she’d never heard the president discuss such a plan — and federal law prohibits it.
But Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, worries that such a move would drive down participation by people of color and naturalized citizens who fear harassment by ICE. If ICE were deployed, Nyhan hopes it would spark even more people to vote.
“But even contemplating that kind of interference is, I think, a really substantial threat,” said Nyhan. “The way Election Day works in this country, there are no do-overs.”
We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.
Side note: the notion that Jonathan Turley deserves to be in the same set of experts as Lindberg, Levitsky, Weyland, Scheppele, and Nyhan is an utter joke.
This would be true, setting aside Turley’s work as a right-wing pundit.
He is neither an expert on democracy nor authoritarianism. He is a law prof who GWU bio describes him as having “written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law” and “He is the founder and executive director of the Project for Older Prisoners (POPS). He has written more than three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals including those of Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern Universities, among others. He most recently completed a three-part study of the historical and constitutional evolution of the military system.”
Cool and all, but not someone who has an expert opinion on the state of American democracy.
BTW: I struggle with the appropriate classification of where we are as the target is moving.
Having said that, I think it is clear that Trump himself is governing as an authoritarian, and I fear that the next president, even if it is a Democrat, will do the same. This puts me in the camp with Levitsky et al. Much will depend on whether the post-Trump Congress seeks to institute democratic reforms or tries to fix some of the obvious flaws in the system. I am not holding my breath, BTW.
Here’s a happy thought to add to all of this: I was talking with a political science friend who is a serious scholar of democracy, and the question we were discussing was whether the better descriptor of the current situation in the US is whether “competitive authoritarianism” was the right term or if “illiberal democracy” was the better fit.
That tells you where we are.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I would put it a little more strongly. Trump is making a serious, concerted effort to dismantle the democracy and establish himself as the dictator-for-life. He’d cancel elections if he could, but he’ll be satisfied with Russia-style fake elections rigged up the wazoo.
This is not remotely hyperbole or hysteria, it is absolutely what’s happening, and anyone who doubts it isn’t paying attention.
The main cause for optimism is (a) the ineptitude of most of his efforts thus far (b) the fact that the public seems to have turned strongly against him.
That said, even in a best-case scenario that Dems succeed in returning to power in 2029, the country they preside over will be less democratic than the one they left behind in 2025.
@Steven L. Taylor: Concur. His reputation as a legal scholar has certainly taken a big hit in recent years, but he’s not by any means an expert on comparative politics, political theory, or even authoritarianism.
@Steven L. Taylor: While Trump is sui generis in his sheer contempt for norms, he follows a long line of presidents who have pushed the boundaries of executive power. And once boundaries have been expanded, they seldom revert to the status quo ante.
@Steven L. Taylor: What little attention I’ve paid to Turley puts him in the even-the-liberal class of talking heads. And I take exception to,
There was debate. Conservatives lost.
Most arguments I see against Trump being regarded as an authoritarian are along the lines of “wait and see, the midterm elections will be fair” or “we don’t have extermination camps” or “people aren’t jailed for criticizing Trump”. That these are not the Nazi’s of 1944 doesn’t mean they aren’t the Nazi’s of 1935.
Weyland seems to be saying that Trump is trying to be an authoritarian, but it isn’t quite working. So that means everything is fine, don’t get excited.
@James Joyner:
It’s realistic and reasonable to expect normal presidents to seek enhanced power, you expect all segments of government to advocate for themselves. That’s the premise of how our system was set up.
The current problem is a Congress eager to cede power to the President instead of asserting and protecting its own powers. That, coupled with a SCOTUS supporting Presidential power, for example the “unitary executive” notion and the recent presidential immunity decision.
Also, the current situation of Executive Branch egregiously engaging in blatantly illegal behaviour and not being held accountable.