← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy
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- [00:06]
A
Hey, Andrew.
- [00:07]
B
Hey, Tyler. What's going on?
- [00:08]
A
Thanks so much for being here and welcome, everyone, to the political scene from the New Yorker and our series, How Bad Is It? Where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy. So how is that democracy going?
- [00:20]
B
Peachy keen. I don't know if I'm hitting, like, disaster fatigue or the holidays or something, but I'm just. I'm a little more distant from it right now. I mean, that doesn't speak well of me, but I'm just kind of.
- [00:33]
A
If even you feel distant from it, then I think we're. We might be toast.
- [00:36]
B
Yeah. I don't know. I'm just like, oh, another day, another potential alleged war crime. That seems bad. And then I kind of, you know, what. What else do I got going on this weekend? I mean, I think it's just. I know it's not flattering for me to reveal that about myself, but I think it's honest to be like, we have to be honest about how we can't be equally shocked and appalled and outraged by each thing every day. And that's kind of how the authoritarians get you. You know, they kind of just grind you down with the relentlessness of it all. So that's. I'm in the ebb of that recently.
- [01:05]
A
I guess at the same time you are doing some extra work here. We have a special episode of the podcast today in which, you know, Andrew, you spoke with three of the top American scholars on democratic backsliding.
- [01:18]
B
So, yeah, I did kind of pull the alarm and say we need to do an emergency episode of the pod, because it's not every day that these three heavy hitters come out with something. So we've talked about all of their work on the show before. It's Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who are both at Harvard, and Luke En Wei, who's at the University of Toronto. And they actually. I didn't realize until talking to them that they all went to grad school together at UC Berkeley in the early 90s, which they were saying was kind.
- [01:45]
A
Of, that's the time to be at UC Berkeley.
- [01:47]
B
Yes. And also a time to be studying the birth of democracies and the post Cold War flowering of democracy. And they were saying what a long arc it's been from that to being the death of democracy, guys. So Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die together. Levitsky and Wei wrote a book called Competitive Authoritarianism Together where they, like, coined that phrase 20 something years ago. And so in this little series that we've been doing, we've been talking basically about these central concepts, the concept of competitive authoritarianism, that you can be in an authoritarian system but still have competitive elections, the question of how democracies die and can they come back from the dead and all that stuff. So these guys, two of them, Levitsky and Wei, put out a piece about a year ago in Foreign affairs where they said, okay, Donald Trump has been elected for a second term. We predict that this will be the term under which American democracy does not survive. So they kind of made the prediction, and now here we are a year later, and all three of them have a piece in Foreign affairs where they are calling it and saying, okay, our prediction came true. American democracy has ended, at least temporarily. And in this piece, they're arguing we now live in a competitive, authoritarian country.
- [03:01]
A
Well, on that note, I'm very much looking forward to hearing this light and fun and easygoing conversation. This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker.
- [03:12]
B
And I'm Andrew Morantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Thank you so much for being here. Steven Levitsky.
- [03:23]
C
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [03:24]
D
Luke and Wei, thank you for having us.
- [03:26]
B
Daniel, thank you for being on the podcast.
- [03:28]
E
It's great to be with you.
- [03:30]
B
We're here to talk about your new piece just out in Foreign affairs, which is titled the Price of American Authoritarianism. And actually, we're going to get into the substance of the piece, obviously, but I kind of wanted to start with a process question. You three have known each other for decades, and you've been tracking these questions about the decline of democracy for long enough that the US Was not even part of that conversation. And now you are kind of, you know, calling it that the US Is no longer a democracy. So my process question is like, do you just wake up one day, you know, in the death of democracy group chat, and just say, like, okay, let's write the piece that says US Democracy has died? Or, like, how does that moment come about?
- [04:14]
E
Well, you know, we're in constant touch with each other, texting and at all times, and, you know, multiple times a day every day. And we all play slightly different roles. I mean, we kind of, we. We try to serve as skeptics to each other. And so if one person is kind of particularly anxious about something, others of us push back, and we kind of have a kind of back and forth. So actually, having the three of us in conversation about this rather than doing this on our own, I think, is actually very productive because since we all have different areas of regional expertise and different areas of historical expertise, we're always drawing on these other cases in our minds to understand how serious is this, how unprecedented is this, how does this match up to other places and times, and to try to take a longer view on things. And so in that sense, I mean, that's the luxury of being academics in a way, and not journalists, that we can take a measured view. And so it took nine months, essentially, to write this piece because we weren't firmly convinced of what was happening. But at some point, we kind of reached the conclusion that this was necessary.
- [05:16]
B
Now, to say this, you are academics, not journalists, but you are kind of doing a pretty sort of rapid response thing, I think, for academics. And so, Luke, and maybe this question can be for you, there's this kind of disconnect, at least that I feel in conversations that I have about this stuff, where in some intellectual sense, not that surprising to hear someone say the US has crossed the line into authoritarianism, or it shouldn't be, because Democrats spent the 2024 cycle saying, if Trump wins, that's the end of American democracy. And we had people like you warning about this. So on paper, in some logical sense, the fact that Trump won and is now doing the things he promised to do shouldn't be that startling. And yet there is this kind of jolt or shock that I noticed when you sort of really draw the very stark conclusion, the US Is currently not a democracy. So is that coming from American exceptionalism, in your view, that it can't happen here, kind of framing? Or is that disconnect or shock just something that you see everywhere?
- [06:21]
D
I think it's very much coming from the American experience of exceptionalism. When Steve and I originally wrote the piece on foreign affairs, it really came out of a frustration when about talking to other very smart people, very knowledgeable people who are quite complacent about the fate of democracy, mainly because democracy really did survive in Trump's first term. But what was clear to me and Steve was that this was very different, that when Trump came to power in 2016, he did not have control over the Republican Party, and the establishment very much blocked his efforts to weaponize the state with efforts to investigate Hillary Clinton and others. But that was clearly very different. We saw the Republican reaction to January 6th. And so this felt very obvious to us that now this is a very different context, that Trump was coming to power and that he was almost certainly going to be able to impose a competitive authoritarian regime. However, I will say, and I think Daniel and Steve both share this, that I expected a much more kind of slower, more legalistic path. I mean, if you look at places like Hungary and Turkey, you know, Hungary especially is equivalent. Roughly. It's a very wealthy country. It was considered a consolidated democracy. You know it quite well, Andrew. And the way they, they transitioned to competitive authoritarianism was through constitutional change and sort of. And efforts to sort of gain control over the courts. What happened in the United States was something which was really, you know, not legalistic in a number of ways. One, it did not involve a change in the law. He just did it. And I think that was the part that was shocking, is the sheer rapidity, the rapid descent in literally a matter of weeks, which was basically in late February, early March, with the attack on the law firms, that suddenly you had these law firms who were blocked from their ability to make a living simply because they had represented rivals of Trump or the Democratic Party, which was like full scale weaponization of the state.
- [08:32]
B
Interesting.
- [08:33]
D
Still in a kind of, comparatively speaking, a soft, competitive authoritarian regime, but really kind of firmly within the realm of competitive authoritarianism. No ambiguity.
- [08:43]
B
Interesting that that was a line for you or the line for you. Steve, what do you think about that?
- [08:49]
C
I mean, to me, Lucan and I wrote our piece in December during the process of nomination of the Trump cabinet. We've debated these questions for many years now. The possibility, the likelihood, the chances that the United States could ever tip into competitive authoritarianism. We were, for the first time ever, very confident when we wrote the piece in December that the US Was going to slide in this direction. The plan to purge, pack, and weaponize key government agencies made it abundantly clear from the beginning.
- [09:24]
B
I mean, for one thing, this is like a very micro process question, but just we were talking about how long, how long you've known each other since grad school and when. You know, how you've often been in touch about this. What makes you call out all three of the big guns to write this piece? I mean, why did you feel that all three of you needed to be on it? Maybe, Daniel, you can take that.
- [09:43]
E
Yeah, well, you know, I wasn't on that piece back in December. I mean, and it's not that in December didn't think that this was very likely. I think my thought was more, well, you know, I want to wait and see what actually happens before I make a judgment. I mean, so I was kind of less interested in making a prediction and making an assessment about what the judgment Was. So in some sense, I think I was maybe the least on board with saying that at that point. We also had a piece in the New York Times. When is our piece in the New York Times?
- [10:11]
B
May 8th.
- [10:12]
E
Yeah, May. And by that point, I came to come around and to kind of see, you know, looking at the evidence, saying, you know, this is. This is basically right. But I think it's really important here and maybe we can dig into this a. A little bit. The notion of competitive authoritarianism and even our very understanding of authoritarianism is often based on a kind of misunderstanding of how these systems operate. To make the judgment that this system is a competitive authoritarian system or an authoritarian system of any kind is not to say that this is like the end of history and now we sort of all go home and, you know, wait for the next 30 years for something to change. I mean, the very nature of this concept is we have to understand that there can be a federal government because we have lots of state governments that are not authoritarian. A federal government that has an authoritarian project that's trying to implement that project, and more than that is successfully implementing that project. And so to that degree, we are facing an authoritarian offensive. And, you know, the question of whether that endures, whether it institutionalizes how much pushback there's going to be. I mean, that's sort of baked into the concept that. That by making this judge. And it doesn't mean that Democrats won't win the next election.
- [11:17]
B
Yeah. Or that there won't be a next election. Right.
- [11:19]
E
There won't be a next election. Yeah.
- [11:20]
B
This. This is a key point that. I'm glad you hit on that. It happens to me as well. I talk about this and people sort of jump to 10 steps down the line and say, oh, so you're saying there's going to be yellow armbands and cattle cars and all these things. And it's, you know, that's not the argument. You go out of your way in the piece. Actually, the way you put it is America has entered an authoritarian moment. There are still ways out of that moment. And you say the outcome of the United States authoritarian turn depends less on the regime's strength than on the opposition's willingness to continue playing a difficult game. So how much does it matter? Speaking comparatively and historically, how long we spend in this moment, if it's six months, two years, four years, how much does that matter for the future health of the project? Lucan, do you want to weigh in on that, if I may?
- [12:07]
D
I mean, I think, you know, first of all, Competitive authoritarian regimes normally last at least three or four or five years. So this is. We're still very early in the process. And it's interesting. I mean, I do think that Daniel has been more cautious in having an authoritarian moment, but I think that's actually quite appropriate and in the sense that it is very easy to imagine, and this is the case in many competitive authoritarian regimes, that opposition can win. But especially in a country like the United States, where, in contrast to a case like Hungary or other places, the opposition is relatively unified, well resourced, and quite popular. So I think that this is still very much in flux. But it doesn't mean that the authoritarianism isn't real. Right? It doesn't mean. And this is what we highlight in the New York Times piece. So how do we know that we're in an authoritarian moment? It's when the cost of opposition become high, Right? In a democracy, you can criticize the government and still not have to worry that your government contract will be revoked or that you'll be audited by the IRS or lose your grant funding. But in the authoritarian regime, this is precisely what people have to worry about. They really have to think twice before engaging in normal criticism, you know, peaceful opposition to the government.
- [13:25]
B
You see kind of this very strident rhetoric, and I've engaged in it at times too, of, this is not normal. This is an emergency moment, you know, and then you might see the same person who was just saying that at brunch, sipping a mimosa or whatever, and there's this kind of whiplash of like, what is going on? Is it normal or not?
- [13:41]
C
They have mimosas in authoritarian regimes, too.
- [13:43]
B
So talk about that whiplash. And I mean, are people in your own life feeling this when you talk to them about it? How do you navigate that sort of affective distance?
- [13:51]
C
That's very common. This. This again, gets to Americans inexperienced with authoritarianism. I think if you talk to Brazilians or Koreans or Chileans or even folks in Spain and Portugal, they will tell you that life goes on in many, many, many respects, as normal in authoritarianism. And they. They don't wait for everything in their world to change before they conclude, oh, there's a problem here. So Brazilians were much, much quicker to recognize that something was wrong with Bolsonaro than Americans were, because I think Americans, very few of us knew what we were looking for. And it's especially hard in a competitive authoritarian regime because elections are still held, there are no mass executions or mass jailings of opposition. So things look pretty normal. But Even under pretty dictatorial regimes, Franco, Spain, Pinochet, Chile, life goes on normally for most people, most of the time without, without dramatic change. And so if we were expecting 99% of our, of our life to change, that only happens in the most totalitarian of dictatorship.
- [15:02]
B
Right. Which is not what we're talking about or anticipating here.
- [15:06]
E
Just, I mean, want to say that life under authoritarianism is always asymmet metric in the sense that some people feel the brunt of it more than others. And in some sense, the lighter the authoritarianism, the more that's the case. And so for those who aren't going to work because they feel like they may get, you know, rounded up if, even if they are US Citizens right now, I mean, this is something that's feeling very immediate. And so there is a way in which, and this gets to Lucan's point about that even if we come out of this moment, it'll be very tempting because of that asymmetric nature of authoritarianism to say, well, you know, it was, I was, that was a blip, but that was not so bad. Or, you know, see it act the system actually work. But, you know, for those who are, who are in fact enduring this, the system is not working.
- [15:46]
B
Definitely. I think this is a good place for us to take a break for a moment. We'll have more from the political scene in a moment. We'll be right back.
- [16:07]
E
It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at White House Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.
- [16:21]
B
I know there's going to be a.
- [16:22]
E
Twist one day, a massive twist. At every level of the criminal justice system, there's been a cover up in this case. I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker. Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.
- [16:44]
B
So I want to get into, you know, you've mentioned specific comparisons and I think often the impulse in American media is to push away from international comparisons as quickly as possible. But I do think it's worth lingering on some of them here maybe. Daniel, we can stick with you on this. The examples that you bring up in the piece, you say competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early 21st century in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey, Viktor Orban's Hungary, and Narendra Modi's India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther reaching than those that occurred in the first year of those other regimes. So, I mean, just if you could say a word on why those examples, as opposed to Brazil in that example, or Israel or the Philippines or Thailand or, you know, why are those the most direct comparisons, and why was the descent faster here?
- [17:40]
E
Yeah. So I think the comparison to Hungary is, you know, not only do the advocates of this agenda actually look to Hungary as a model, it is, in fact, you know, similar in the sense that it's, by all theories of political science, was a democracy that ought to have endured as a relatively wealthy democracy within the European Union. And it had a kind of communist legacy that among all the communist countries in the world, this is the place where things ought to have worked out. And, you know, and the kind of the autocratic legalism, the process by which this happened was very legalistic. And so, in that sense, you know, the rule of law up here is to kind of be intact in some way. So it's a country that, in that sense, has this kind of resonance with what's happened in the US in terms of why it's happened more quickly in the US this first year has been much quicker than the first year of any other regime in terms of the amount of damage done to the civil service, to the. To the packing of state institutions, the going after opposition. But there's another way to look at this, which is that, you know, this is Trump's second term, and we're really 10 years into this project. You know, so if we. If we kind of date the beginning of this project as 2016, you know, like Viktor Orban, who was in power earlier on and then was ejected from power and then came back in a much more ruthless way, dismantled democracy.
- [18:53]
D
Can I just say a bit about Hungary, because I actually, I think Hungary. Hungary represents a really interesting case of authoritarianism insofar as, to an important extent, Orban imposed authoritarianism without serious civil liberties violations. Orban did it both through constitutional change, but also through doing things that we see right now in the United States, which is not just packing the civil service, but. But using the state levers of state action to get loyalists in charge of major media outlets.
- [19:25]
B
In the case of media, the only clear example in the American case is Brendan Carr, who's the head of the fcc, going out in public and saying, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. And usually competitive authoritarians are more subtle than that. But in every other case, it's very hard for someone to point to, okay, well, you may have liked CBS News when it was a little more liberal, but now CBS is gonna be a little more conservative. And you know, sorry, but that's not authoritari. Right. One hears this argument. So how do you sort of show where the government authoritarian piece of that is without a coming across as the kind of paranoid conspiracist talking about things behind the scenes? And also, is it the case? Because in the Hungarian case, one of the things you write about is how wall to wall pro government the media has become. That's not the case here and maybe will never be the case here. So is it the proportion where we end up that matters or is it the strong arming itself that matters?
- [20:22]
D
I think what matters is the evidence of self censorship. And I think that is in a sense, where the rubber hits the road. If journalists are not stating facts and avoiding certain topics because they're afraid of government retribution, that is authoritarianism.
- [20:40]
B
On the point of self censorship. The case of universities, which is something you're very close to and maybe especially Steve and Daniel, since you're at an American university and an American university that has been in the news, is there any aspect of self censorship going on at universities as far as you're aware?
- [20:57]
C
There's a lot of it. In fact, there are times when I wish the university leadership would listen to the authors of How Democracies Die a little more. In the case of universities, the attack was so thoroughgoing and so punitive that there has been a large scale kind of preemptive appeasement or acquiescence. The degree of self censorship, the degree to which university presidents are not speaking out. The degree to which campuses, colleges and universities across the country have heavily restricted student protest. Students have a very difficult time. For the first time since before 1968, students are reluctant to protest because they know they will be punished for just peaceful protests. Dramatic change. The dismantling, the thoroughgoing dismantling of DEI programs which are entirely legal and anything that even smells of dei, the dramatic change in admissions, not in line with what the Supreme Court ruled a few years ago, but in line with what the Justice Department is demanding, which is a much, much higher bar and is going to result in a dramatic change in who gets admitted to universities. All these things are happening because university leaders fear getting in the crosshairs of this government.
- [22:26]
E
Let me say a word, maybe about life on campus. So it's sometimes useful to have the view of an outsider. And so we recently hosted a journalist from Europe who spent a month on campus and she came Away shocked. And the most striking impression she had was the degree to which, at seminars, public events, classroom settings, that the kind of whole atmosphere has changed to such a degree that now when people say things completely like unsubstantiated, truthless claims, such as, yeah, who knows what really happened on January 6th, you know, if somebody now articulates that kind of view, rather than there being pushback under the COVID of civility, in the name of civility, there's science. And what that does is have the effect on other students sitting in the room to say, well, maybe there's something to that. Nobody's pushing back. Certainly we need diverse views on campus. That's something that most people recognize. We need conservative views on campus. We need liberal views on campus. Whatever. That's all true. But I think we've reached a point where the basic facts, truth attacks on that, are responded to with silence because there's a concern that we need to allow all views to flourish. And so the effect of this assault is to damage life on campus.
- [23:46]
B
You've all been saying you can't save democracy from the sidelines. People have to step up and have some collective solidarity. Right. If you're the law firm who's being called in for extortion or the university who's being asked to come to heal, you know, maybe think of everyone else in your field before you take a deal. And I want to hear that perspective, but I also want to sort of flesh out the best, I think, Steel man, counterargument to that, which is, if you are in a particular moment of heightened scrutiny, it could be totally rational to try to lay low. Right? And you point to this in the piece, if you're the Ford foundation or the Soros Open Society foundation, and you're getting signals from your government saying, we would like to target you and potentially arrest you and bring you up on criminal charges. Right. Apparently there were prosecutors drawing up sort of hypothetical charging documents for Soros and people who worked for him with even, like, suggested criminal charges for what they could be charged with in that moment. It may be not only cowardly, but sort of rational to lay low. Wait till, as Steve says, this administration gets distracted and moves on to something else. So how do you counterbalance that forbearance or prudence with wanting everyone to act collectively?
- [25:01]
C
Acquiescence, I would say.
- [25:03]
B
Acquiescence, yeah. But when acquiescence is rational to sort of protect your own work or the future possibility of your work, like how. How do you argue against it?
- [25:14]
C
It's a tough one. It is arguably in many of these cases. I mean, that's why we are where we are. That's why US Society has responded slowly and effectively so far because it has been individually rational for individual media companies, university presidents, law firms, CEOs, to take care of their organizations. That's what they're hired for, that's what they're paid for. And they have to protect their people, their profits, their investors, et cetera. So how do you argue against it? You argue that in the, that what is short, rational in the short term may be very destructive in the medium term and maybe costly in the, in the medium term. And that is a matter of, you know, many CEOs and university presidents and law firms don't know very much about what happens in year five of an authoritarian regime. They really are operating with a lot of uncertainty. And we think that there's an added element of American exceptionalism here, which is American civil society, American civic leaders, again, leaders of law firm CEOs, university presidents. Because we haven't experienced authoritarianism before, we're overconfident in the strength and the durability of our institutions. We don't think it can really happen here. If we don't think it can really happen here, then maybe how bad is it to make your deal with the Trump administration? If you're fully cognizant of. Of what could happen, if there is a collective acquiescence to the government, then maybe you're more likely to push back. The one other thing is that US Associations, business associations, associations of universities, associations of law firms are pretty weak. Unions are also pretty weak. So the kinds of associations that maybe could facilitate CEOs or law firms or universities coming together and acting in a more collectively rational way, that's harder to do in the United States because the associations are weaker.
- [27:17]
D
I agree. I think it absolutely is rational. And that is, you talk to administrators of universities, and they're just trying to save their own institution. But I think recognizing that the actions particularly of big universities, the whales or the big fish like Harvard or the big law firms, have an outsized impact not just on their own fate, but on the reactions of others. And furthermore, it's important to recognize that the United States is in a very good place to resist authoritarianism, that it's not like Russia in the early 2000s, where efforts at resistance are almost certainly going to fail anyways. So, you know, in a sense there, like you think of the other oligarchs, you know, when Michal Khodorkovsky, when he was targeted, he was the head of the largest oil company in Russia. It was, you know, rational for other companies to fall in line, both because they were likely to be targeted, but, but also because Putin was almost certainly going to succeed. But that is actually not the case in the United States, that civil society is very robust. And so there is a very high likelihood that Trump will fail, which I think is another reason to resist.
- [28:28]
E
Can I just say, I mean, one other way of making an appeal to people's self interest. It's not asking people to not act in their self interest. I mean, it's, you know, Tocqueville, after all, and Democracy in America wrote about self interest, rightly understood. And by that he meant the notion that individual wellbeing is really tied to community success, to the public good. And so to have a broader sense of what's in your self interest and to not sort of only worry about what's going to happen to you individually in the next six months, but to think about the institution with which you're associated or the organization with which you're defending as part of an ecosystem that requires that ecosystem in order to survive. And so I think that's, you know, there in fact, is an American tradition, if we believe Tocqueville, of this, of understanding self interest in a broader sense. And that's really, really what the appeal is. To think about what is in the interest of society and of the organization you're part of is not just about a kind of narrow self interest.
- [29:17]
A
More with Stephen Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt after the break. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [29:35]
F
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [30:02]
E
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [30:04]
F
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [30:08]
B
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [30:17]
F
Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:53]
B
You say in the piece, you know, the no Kings protests aren't going to do it on their own, but they're a helpful ingredient. Elections aren't going to do it on their own, but they're a helpful ingredient. I mean, I want to put some of this conclusion stuff on the table here because I think there's a lot to break down. You know, you say the most likely medium term outcome in the United States is neither entrenched authoritarianism nor a return to a stable democracy. Rather, it is regime instability, a protracted struggle between authoritarian impulses and democratic solidarity. In the absence of a radical transformation of the Republican Party, which you could call it a de radicalization of the Republican Party, the most optimistic scenario for the coming decade is probably a slide back and forth between dysfunctional democracy and unstable competitive authoritarianism, depending on which party holds national power. Just to stick with you, Steve, on that, I mean, one thing I worry about there, to kind of take the more pessimistic side of this, is if you do have this instability between a party that has been sort of radicalized against democracy and a party that sort of respects the democratic process as one of its chief identity markers, where my mind goes is, well, then what you might have is a party that gets things done by any means necessary and a party that doesn't get as much done but really respects the process and really is democratic with both a small and a big D, but doesn't really do that much because going through democratic channels is slower and more difficult. And in that scenario, I would worry that if you're a voter, you pick, as voters did in the 2024 election, the party that seems to get more shit done. Right. So what do you do with that? I mean, you talk about, you know, the Democrats in the peace. I would say you kind of give them faint praise. You know, you say at least their Democrats are still here and they're still well funded and they're still a party. But if we're entering a scenario where we have a Republican Party that is really moving fast and breaking things and a Democratic Party that is giving a lot of speeches about how bad that is. Right. How do we get out of that cycle?
- [33:03]
C
Well, we may not for a while. But I mean, a couple of things. This is not El Salvador. This is not Bukele. This is a government that's moving fast and breaking things and breaking things that many Americans don't want broken. This is a very ideological political party, the Republican Party, that's pretty inept and pretty nihilistic. And so there are many authoritarians out there in history, from Pinochet to Duterte to Franco to Bukele, who generated their political capital on the ability to get things done. Pragmatically, they weren't ideological. The politicians couldn't get stuff done. They were gonna get stuff done. That's how they sold themselves. That is not the contemporary Republican Party. So there are many things to worry about in the next few years in the United States. But the Republicans, this Republican Party, the MAGA Republican Party, being a party that efficiently gets things done for Americans, I think is actually not one of them. That's not the kind of authoritarian force this is.
- [34:08]
D
Can I just say, in a sense, we're very lucky. I mean, in terms of democracy is very lucky that the MAGA Republican Party is engaging in a lot of very unpopular measures. I mean, when you talk about getting things done, people don't like the tariffs, people don't like ICE rounding up citizens on the street, people don't like military in major cities. So much of what the Republican Party is doing is profoundly unpopular. And really, actually what worries me more is when I see how quickly democracy collapsed. One can very easily imagine a much more rational, competent way of doing this that would have succeeded to a much greater extent. So imagine, for example, that Trump had simply gone after what they call in quotation marks, the elite universities, or. Or gone after select number of migrants. But not done the tariff stuff, not done the ICE stuff, not done the stuff that really kind of gets people worried and unpopular and also been more competent, then I think we would be in a much worse position. I mean, it's quite striking how just focusing on the incompetence part, when you look at sort of Lindsey Halligan's effort to indict Comey, right. It was just like pure incompetence and we're in a sense lucky. But that may not be true the next time around.
- [35:32]
C
Well, I want to pick up your point. I think you underappreciated our point about the strength of the Democratic Party. You say we give it faint praise, saying that at least it's out there, unified and well organized and well financed. If you compare the United States to every other competitive authoritarian case on earth in the 21st century, possible exception of Poland, you will find a much a badly discredited, badly fragmented, weak, electorally Borderline viable political opposition in El Salvador, in Venezuela, in Peru, going back to the 1990s, Russia for sure, in Turkey, in Hungary, oppositions were a disaster. They went a decade before they could credibly compete against the government. So for all the complaints that we may have about the Democratic Party and all the warts and limitations and problems, this is a viable political party that's going to be able to win the first election, the first national election that it faces after this authoritarian turn. You know, right now the opposition party is in a position to win. That's comparatively speaking, really quite positive.
- [36:55]
B
Yeah, I think that's totally fair. And it depends what the baseline is. I think that's a totally fair point. So, and we should get into these comparative cases of Poland and Brazil and all the rest. I think that's a good place to go. I mean, one key point that you make in the piece is how much approval ratings matter. You mentioned that, you know, when Bukele or Modi has something like an 80% approval rating, it's very, very hard for a competitive authoritarian in that position to be dislodged, whereas someone like Trump with a below 40%, it's much easier. Could you break down and this is a place where we can have a little bit of hope to round us out why that's the case. I mean, I think again, to your point, when people think about competitive authoritarianism or authoritarianism in general, they sort of think, well, that that's kind of the end of the road, that's the end of the game. And, and why would an approval rating even matter at that point? So why does it matter to have a low approval rating? Maybe Lucan, you can take that one.
- [37:49]
D
So I think it matters for two reasons. Above all, it matters because of elections, that, you know, we're still in a position where elections, as in other competitive authoritarian regimes, are meaningful and, and, and incumbents can lose them. But it's also matters in a way that's kind of more subtle but also equally important. So, so much of what you know of, of authoritarianism is, you know, why it's successful and why it was successful, I think, under Trump in early 2025, is this sense of inevitability, is this sense that resistance is futile. And what that does is it both encourages people to sort of, you know, sit out the process, but more importantly within the, you know, the state apparatus, among the sort of line level bureaucrats who are being told to do illegal things, if you're being told by a leader who is going to be in power for, for a very long time, you may more likely to sort of engage and go along with illegal activity. But if you think that this guy is going to be in power for another eight, 10 months or, you know, or another two years at best, and then the opposition is going to come to power and furthermore, you might face legal problems because of your participation in this regime's activities, you're going to resist. And I actually saw this in Ukraine in 2004 because this is when there was a real effort to steal an election. And I talked to a lot of local officials who basically I had beers with them and they told me that they actually didn't want to stuff ballots, not so much because both because they thought it was immoral and the wrong thing to do, but also because they didn't think that Yanukovych the autocrat would succeed. So if they did go along with this stuff, they would be, you know, in court, you know, you know, facing legal problems.
- [39:34]
B
Yeah.
- [39:35]
D
So I think, and I think that's kind of where we're at right now. I mean, you look at sort of the stuff around Venezuela, you know, where they're basically Hagseth is sort of hanging out to dry. I think his name is Bradley, the person who ordered the second strike on the boat. That to me is actually quite in a sense, good news because that's a message to all the other line bureaucrats that say, like, if the Trump administration tells you to do something that's illegal, they're not going to stand behind you. That tells me that when. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario in which there are protests and the military is told to fire on peaceful protesters, they know that they are going to, are very likely to suffer consequences, so they won't do it.
- [40:25]
B
But I guess in your scenario, I mean, that is heartening and I understand, I think it's well taken. But how much of this authoritarian breakthrough might result in some of this quasi legal hardball politics becoming politics as usual, and then the response to it has to be equalized in some sense by the opposition. Daniel, talk a bit about the Poland example and what that shows us, but my reading of it is, you know, in Poland they talk about the iron broom, they talk about militant democracy. Isn't the takeaway from that that to the extent that this hard nose politics becomes normalized, the other side has to do it too?
- [41:04]
E
I think so. I mean, just to clean, you know, with the, with the justification we need to clean house. All these people have illegitimately been placed in bureaucracy or in courts and so now we, you know, are we just going to stand by and let this, you know, let this stand? We have to clean house. We have to restore some kind of democracy. But to do that, you have to use means that previously you would have not found acceptable. And so, but this is why instability is path dependent. I mean, this is why, this is why we think this third path is the most likely path. Because once you go down this path, it's kind of contagious in a certain sense. And why, at the end of the day, really, what you need is you need to have at least more than one political party that accepts the democratic rules of the game. And that as long as you don't have that, you're going to fall into this kind of cycle of instability. Now, you know, how you get out of that situation, how you build a kind of a viable constitutional Republican Party, is a question that I don't think we address at all in this article and that I don't know if we have answers to. But it's certainly the case that until you have more than one political party who's willing to compete for office and abide by democratic norms and rules, then this is exactly the dynamic we're going to fall into. Ingle, to be honest.
- [42:13]
D
Well, I think you see right now, Trump holds all branches of government, and it's a unique moment with a Republican Party that has been almost entirely, completely compliant to him. He was very smart in coming with the Project 2020, coming into the plan and moving very quickly. But this actually may be the sort of limit what he can do. So I think that is a huge source of optimism again in the medium, long term. I think for reasons Dan and Steve mentioned, it is a very kind of dark scenario where it's not like Hungary or Russia or political prisoners are regularly locked up. But it is a kind of unstable situation in which at least there's a perception by both sides that the government is being politicized and the like. So I don't really see a sort of obvious way out of that.
- [43:05]
E
So I would add two other things. One, the, the way the issues are playing out, that the perception of, that this regime is corrupt, the kind of personalist authoritarian regime where family members are getting rich, I mean, the issues present themselves to Democrats to make this regime very vulnerable, this government very vulnerable. And I think, you know, and not all authoritarian regimes, you know, think of Hungary, you know, you know, although, although this issue is actually, you know, historically that hasn't been a problem for Orban. But increasingly, in the case of Orban as, you know, the kind of idea that the people in the government are getting rich while the rest of us are not. And that's not an accident that an authoritarian government acts that way because they are unaccountable. This is about the concentration of political power and economic power. And so this is a vulnerability of these kinds of governments. And so the issues present themselves to the opposition. So I think they need to run with that. But, you know, maybe people don't really immediately think about the kind of niceties of democratic politics, but the effect of. Of the concentration of political power that comes with authoritarianism is corruption. And that's something that people get. And so I think emphasizing that is really, you know, I'm not a campaign advisor, but my sense is that that is a powerful issue. So that's one advantage in the upcoming elections. The second is, compared to other countries, is the degree to which we have a decentralized voting system. You know, which, you know, a lot of people maybe in earlier points in our lives might have decried that, you know, there should be national voter IDs and so on, but the degree to which this is a decentralized system makes it, as always, much harder to rake. And so despite the efforts to do this, and there seem to be efforts underway to do this, it just. It's a steeper hill to climb. You know, controlling of elections is really under the purview of state governments and governors, who in many cases are Democrats and so. Or Republicans, who maybe are increasingly feeling like the declining popularity of Trump means they want to distance themselves from it. So I think this also represents an opportunity the US System has that others don't.
- [45:00]
B
Just while I have you, I know you guys have to go, but this is more on the personal side of things. But when I talk about this stuff often, one of the top three questions I get is, okay, so do you have a plan to leave the United States? Lucan, you're already in Canada. You're already living the dream. But, I mean, do you get it gets to your point about how people may be sort of having the wrong paradigm in their head and thinking only about Germany in 1939 and not these other cases we've been discussing. But, like, when people personalize it in that way, what do you say to them?
- [45:32]
E
I say, no, I'm a patriot. I want to stay. I mean, that's tongue in cheek a little bit, but I recently read a piece in a political science journal describing how authoritarianism in China works. And this is written back in 2013, and one of the things that this article emphasized, the role of what the authors call control parables and what a control parable is the degree to which people sit around over dinner, at professional gatherings, over coffee, say, did you hear what happened to this person? Did you hear what happened to that person? And oh, my God, I can't believe, what did he say? What did she say in order to end up in that situation? And these kind of control parables, engaging in control parallels, in effect, sort of talking, sort of gossiping about the threats that people face can have a very pernicious effect. And so I think even engaging in the kind of talk, oh, I might have to leave because my life is at risk, and stuff like this is just reinforcing this sort of perception of inevitability that Lucan talked about, which is one of the assets that authoritarian regimes kind of rely on. So, you know, I think it's really important to not exaggerate the threats. And people, every. People have all sorts of reasons to leave the United States, personal reasons, family reasons, and that's all perfectly legitimate or even feeling like you're under squeeze a little bit. But I think being really guarded about that and careful about it and to not kind of reinforce the story, to kind of, kind of make yourself sort of feel like a hero, I think is really important. And so, you know, at this point, that's, you know, I spend a lot of time in Europe and could very easily, you know, move to Europe and live in Europe. But I, you know, I have my own personal reasons to not want to do that. And to date anyway, I feel like I haven't needed to do that.
- [47:04]
B
Okay, well, thank you guys. Thank you for making the time and thank you for giving us the opportunity to do our emergency episode.
- [47:12]
D
Thanks very much.
- [47:13]
B
Of course, Steven Levitsky, Luke and Wei and Daniel Ziblatt have a new essay called the book Price of American Authoritarianism, which is featured in the January February issue of Foreign Affairs. That issue publishes in full on December 16, and their piece is out right now. So this has been our super fun chill emergency pod Thursday episode.
- [47:39]
F
Yeah.
- [47:39]
A
Thank you. Thank you for, you know, coming in and doing this emergency episode.
- [47:44]
B
You know, when the end of democracy, bat signal goes up, I come straight to the studio. I don't even wait. I just come to the studio and hope someone's here.
- [47:50]
A
Well, thank you again and happy holidays.
- [47:53]
B
Yes, you too.
- [47:56]
A
Andrew Morans is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can find all of his work@newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. This episode is produced with assistance from Nora Richie, with engineering and mixing by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer, Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. The Washington Roundtable are on this Friday and I'll see you next Wednesday. Thanks so much for listening.
- [48:36]
D
From prx.