How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy

0:06Hey, Andrew. Hey, Tyler. What's going on? 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? 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 like. If even you feel distant from it, then I think we might be toast. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just like, oh, another day, another potential alleged war crime.

0:40That seems bad. And then I kind of, you know, 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. Yeah. 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, 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.

1:17So, 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 Enway, 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 of. That's the time to be at UC Berkeley. Yes. And also a time to be studying the birth of democracies and the post-Cold War flowering of democracy.

1:51And 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.

2:25So these guys, two of them, Levitsky and Wei, put out a piece about a year ago in Foreign Affairs where they said, OK, 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, OK, 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. Well, on that note, I'm very much looking forward to hearing this light and fun and easygoing conversation.

3:08This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. And I'm Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

3:19Thank you so much for being here, Stephen Levitsky. Hi, thanks for having me. Luke and Wei. Thank you for having us. Daniel, thank you for being on the podcast. It's great to be with you. 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 U.S. was not even part of that conversation.

3:54And now you are kind of, you know, calling it that the U.S. 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, OK, let's write the piece that says U.S. democracy has died or like, how does that moment come about? Well, you know, we're in constant touch with each other, texting and at all times and multiple times a day, every day. And we all play slightly different roles. I mean, we try to serve as skeptics to each other. And so if one person is kind of particularly anxious about something, the others of us push back and we kind of have a kind of back and forth.

4:34So 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 in 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, you know, 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, you know, it took, you know, nine months essentially to write this piece because we weren't firmly convinced of what was happening.

5:12But at some point, we kind of reached the conclusion that this was necessary 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, it's not that surprising to hear someone say, the U.S. 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.

5:48And 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 notice when you sort of really draw the very stark conclusion the U.S. 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? 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.

6:42But 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.

7:30I 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. I mean, you know it quite well, Andrew. And the way they transitioned to competitive authoritarianism was through constitutional change and efforts to gain control over the courts. What happened in the United States was something which was really 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 dissent in literally a matter of weeks, which was basically in late February, early March, with the attack on the law firms.

8:18And 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. Interesting. So, you know, kind of comparatively speaking, a soft competitive authoritarian regime, but really kind of firmly within the realm of competitive authoritarism, no ambiguity. Interesting that that was a line for you or the line for you. Steve, what do you think about that? I mean, to me, Luke and I wrote our piece in December during the process of nomination of the Trump cabinet.

8:57We'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 U.S. was going to slide in this direction. The plan to purge, pack, and weaponize key government agencies made it abundantly clear from the beginning. 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.

9:34What 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. 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.

10:08We also had a piece in the New York Times. When was our piece in the New York Times? May 8th. Yeah, May 8th. By that point, I came to come around and to kind of see, you know, looking at the evidence saying, you know, this is basically right. But I think it's really important here, and maybe we can dig into this 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.

10:43I 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 is going to be. And that's sort of baked into the concept that by making this judgment, it doesn't mean that Democrats won't win the next election.

11:17Yeah. Or that there won't be a next election. Right. There won't be a next. Yeah. This is a key point that I'm glad you hit on, that it happens to me as well. Whenever 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.

11:52So 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? Luke, do you want to weigh in on that?

12:34where, 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. 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.

13:12But in an authoritarian regime, this is precisely what people have to worry about. They really have to think twice before engaging in normal criticism, peaceful opposition to the government. 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? They have mimosas in authoritarian regimes too. So talk about that whiplash. I mean, are people in your own life feeling this when you talk to them about it?

13:47How do you navigate that sort of affective distance? That's very common. This again gets to Americans' inexperience with authoritarians, 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 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.

14:29And 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, Triangl, Spain, Pinochet, Chile, life goes on normally for most people most of the time without dramatic change. So if we were expecting 99 % of our life to change, that only happens in the most totalitarian of dictatorship. Right, which is not what we're talking about or anticipating here. Just, I mean, I want to say that life under authoritarianism is always asymmetric in the sense that some people feel the brunt of it more than others.

15:12And then 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, even if they are U.S. 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, I was a blitz, but that was not so bad. Or, you know, see the system actually work. But, you know, for those who are in fact enduring this, the system is not working.

15:46Definitely. 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.

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17:02So 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.

17:42So, 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 dissent faster here? 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, 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.

18:25And the kind of autocratic legalism, the process by which this happened was very legalistic. And so in that sense, the rule of law appears 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 U.S. In terms of why it's happened more quickly in the U.S., 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 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.

18:56And we're really 10 years into this project. You know, so 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. Can I just say a bit about Hungary? Because actually, I think Hungary represents a really interesting case of authoritarianism insofar as to an important extent, Orban imposed authoritarianism without serious civil liberties violations. And 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 using the state levers of state action to get loyalists in charge of major media outlets.

19:44In 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, OK, well, you may have liked CBS News when it was a little more liberal, but now CBS is going to be a little more conservative. And, you know, sorry, but that's not authoritarianism, 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?

20:24And also, is it the case because in the 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? I think what matters is the evidence of self-censorship. And I think that is, you know, 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, you know, authoritarianism.

20:58On 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? There's a lot of it. In fact, there are times when I wish the university leadership would listen to the authors of How Democracy's 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.

21:40The degree of self-centrism, 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 protests. 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.

22:36All these things are happening because university leaders fear getting in the crosshairs of this government. 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?

23:18You know, if somebody now articulates that kind of view, rather than there being pushed back, under the cover of civility, in the name of civility, there's silence. 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. I mean, 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 kind of basic facts, truth, attacks on that are responded to with silence because there's a concern that, you know, we need to allow all these to flourish.

23:57And so the effect of this assault is to damage life on campus. 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 is being called in for extortion or the university who's being asked to come to heel, 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 counter argument to that, which is if you are in a particular moment of heightened scrutiny, it could be totally rational to try to lay low.

24:37Right. 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. But 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.