Is America becoming an autocracy?

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. We are more than three months into Donald Trump's second term as president, and there's a question that's coming up a lot. What is the state of American democracy? Last year at a Fox News town hall campaign event, Trump insisted he would be a dictator, but only for one day. There is energy. We're going to drill, baby, drill. After that, I'm not going to be a dictator. After that, I'm not going to be a dictator. Now, many scholars say the U.S. is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy and towards some form of authoritarianism.

0:42It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy. We are very certain that the United States is moving in the direction of autocratization. I think we're on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism. That was Stephen Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, Shebnam Gamushu, a political scientist at Middlebury College, and Kim Lane Shepley, a Princeton sociologist. Of course, there are scholars who disagree with them, but in recent surveys, hundreds of political scientists from all over the country were asked to rate the health of American democracy, and they downgraded America's democracy score more than ever before.

1:27NPR's Frank Langfitt has been covering democracy for some time and was intrigued by these landmark results. He decided to speak to some scholars and others who've come here from authoritarian countries and find out what they make of President Trump's first months in office. Welcome to the show, Frank. Hey, Aisha. Great to be here. What struck you in your conversations with these scholars? Yeah, there's one particular thing, Aisha. I had arranged to interview this guy, a scholar. He's originally from an autocratic country in Asia. And at first, he agreed to speak on the record. And then, like a day or two before the interview, he writes me this.

2:10I want to read it to you. It says, I've been following with concern the news this week, and I've decided for now, I don't want to be quoted in a news piece. So what was the news? And why did he have this change of heart? He'd seen this video. I'm sure you've probably seen it, too. It was widely covered in the news. There are these plainclothes homeland security agents. They detain a doctoral student at Tufts University. This all happens in broad daylight on a street outside of Boston. So this student, she's from Turkey. Her name is Ramesa Ozturk. And she's here in the U.S. on a student visa. And in the video, you can see these men, and it's a woman or two, come up to her.

2:50They grab her wrists. She begins to resist. She starts to yell. And then they take her phone, they hand cover it, and then they lead her off to a car.

3:07Yeah, I remember there was a huge reaction to that video. And so what happened to this student? So after she was picked up, they sent her to Louisiana. She's never charged with a crime. And a little more than a week ago, a federal judge released her, said the only evidence the government provided for holding her was that she co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Of course, this is not how Secretary of State Marco Rubio had described the whole thing. He said that the U.S. had revoked her visa, suggesting she's some kind of troublemaker.

3:42This is what he said. I think it's crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it. We're just not going to have it. So we'll revoke your visa. And once your visa is revoked, you're illegally in the country and you have to leave. Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn't. So that's what scared your source. Yeah, I mean, he told me that when he saw that video, he recognized this exact tactic. And essentially what he was seeing was an abduction. and it reminded him a lot from what happens in his homeland.

4:14He's worried that he could be detained as well. Oh, definitely. He's on a green card here, and he's worried that officials could get more aggressive and they could target him. He's also concerned, frankly, about the potential for being deported. His home government went after him some years ago because he criticized the government in a private online post, and he's worried he could be detained if he ever ends up getting sent back to his homeland. Now, eventually, Aisha, he did agree to talk to me, but only if we didn't use his voice or his name. So we got an NPR producer to voice his answers. And so I asked the professor what he was thinking when he watched that video.

4:56This was the problem that I felt like I left back home, and it's here. Coming from a country where occasionally they sort of disappear activists from the streets. This felt like a very familiar pattern. The lack of faces, the lack of uniforms, the arbitrariness of the whole process. Some authority figure says, come with me, and then this person vanishes. It felt a lot like this was the problem that I thought I'd left an ocean away. And suddenly there it was.

5:27So, Frank, I'd like to talk to you about something that we heard from some of the political science professors at the top of our conversation. They refer to something known as competitive authoritarianism. What is that? Yeah, first, I guess I want to point out what it isn't because I don't want to overstate this. We're not talking about hardcore authoritarianism like what you would see in China. Of course, that's a one-party state. There are no meaningful elections. Instead, we're talking about a case where a leader is democratically elected and then from office reshapes the state to maximize executive progress.

6:06power. And it kind of works like this. The executive fills the civil service with key appointments. And I mean, we're talking the prosecutor's office, the judiciary, fills them with loyalists. And then he or she, they'll attack the media, the universities to kind of blunt public criticism. And also we'll either intimidate or co-op business leaders. And the idea is to tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor. And that would mean, you know, elections would happen, but they wouldn't be fair. So political scientists were recently asked to rate the health of American democracy. Can you tell me more about how the survey works?

6:44Yeah, so it's a national survey. It's called Bright Line Watch. John Kerry, not that John Kerry, he's a Dartmouth professor, this guy, and he's co-director of this survey. And this is how he explained what they do. We always ask our respondents to rate the performance of American democracy on a 0 to 100 scale. So zero would be complete dictatorship and 100 would be a perfect democracy. The professors consider 30 different indicators. So, for instance, whether the government interferes with the press or punishes political opponents, whether the legislature and judiciary check executive authority.

7:19Right after Trump's election, political scientists rated democracy in the U.S. at a 67. Late last month, scholars downgraded democracy here to 53. The survey started back in 2017. Kerry says that's the biggest plunge ever. If you had asked me five years ago, I never would have expected the United States to be, to have fallen this far. And the U.S. score actually landed midway between our neighbor Canada and Russia, which, as we all know, is a hardcore authoritarian state. After the break, we consider two political leaders who people say concentrated power and transformed their countries. Stay with us.

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9:25We're back with the Sunday story. I'm here with NPR correspondent Frank Langfett. Frank, when people talk about President Trump's second term, they sometimes say he's following a playbook from other leaders, like in countries like Turkey and Hungary. Yeah. One leader that they'll talk about is Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He's the president of Turkey. A little bit of background. Erdogan was formerly, he was the mayor of Istanbul. Then in 2002, his party won a parliamentary majority and Erdogan became prime minister. Now, under Erdogan, there was a really nice period economically, what they refer to as the golden years.

10:02There's a lot of strong economic growth. And he leveraged his popularity to basically take control of the levers of power. We didn't just wake up one morning in an authoritarian system. Of course, it happened very gradually. This is Fulya Pinarş. She's an anthropologist who studies Turkey and the Middle East at Middlebury College in Vermont. And she says she watched Erdogan slowly tighten his grip on power in her homeland. Newspapers were taken over or shut down. Journalists were imprisoned or exiled. Even one of my older sisters, who is a journalist, she lost her job. Pinar's a sister. She worked for a major newspaper there.

10:43And it was taken over by a pro-government corporation after it revealed an arms deal that Turkey made. And soon after, many critical journalists were basically pushed out of other newspapers too. So this wasn't just about one newspaper. It was a part of basically a broader pattern of media consolidation and silencing people. And Pinar says the government also targeted a lot of academics. So many of my professors, mentors, colleagues were criminalized while I was still there just for advocating for peace or labor rights or unionization rights. So this wasn't really abstract for me. These were the people who shaped me, who taught me how to think and express myself.

11:30And it became clear that I couldn't build a future in Turkey without fearing for my safety or freedom. And so Pinar, this is 2016. She moves to the U.S. She's basically seeking academic freedom. And she's also studying for a Ph.D. at Rutgers. But the U.S. has not over time proven to be the haven that she'd hope. And since taking office, you know, Trump has withheld, as we've reported, billions of dollars from universities that he says haven't done enough to fight anti-Semitism. And Pinar, she's she's untenured. She's kind of worried and has changed actually the way that she's teaching right now.

12:06So I'm trying to be more careful. You know, at the end of the semester, students usually provide feedback about professors, and then your promotion depends on that. Before, in her lectures, she used to cite death tolls for conflicts like the war in Gaza. Now what she'll do is just direct students to readings where they can find the answers on their own. And otherwise, she's kind of worried that students who disagree with her might report her to the school administration. And Pinar says she wants to protect herself against any possible charges of bias. Did you think before and even during your time in the United States, you'd ever have to do this?

12:47No, I didn't see that coming, honestly. And this was actually the reason why I came to the United States. So how do you feel about being in America now? I feel quite fragile because I feel like I can't work freely here. It just feels like I'm stuck. Frank, so let's shift to the country that some scholars say is even more of a model for the Trump administration, and that's Hungary. Hungary's government has close ties to the Trump administration, and Trump has called Prime Minister Viktor Orban a strong man and a tough person. And strongman, like that's a compliment from Trump. It is. Yeah. So how did Orban turn Hungary into what the European Union says is no longer a full democracy?

13:42Yeah. So this is an interesting story, too. Orban becomes Hungary's youngest prime minister. This is back in 1998. He's 35 years old. He was defeated four years later, but then he sweeps back to power in 2010. And his party won so many seats in the parliament, it had enough to change the constitution. And then over time, basically, he took control of the country's media, universities and courts. Kim Lane Shepley of Princeton, she's studied Hungary for many years. And she offered a couple of examples of Orban's tactics that, you know, might sound a little familiar to Americans right now. For instance, Orban targeted the business models of news companies.

14:20Orban comes into power and realizes that whole media culture is sustained by state advertising. Overnight, he cuts all the advertising to the independent and opposition media. They all have a hole blown in their budget. Nobody expected that would happen. Shepley says Orban also took aim at higher education. The universities, a bastion of criticism of the government. In the first two years, Orban cut the university budgets by 40 percent. So how did Hungarians respond? I think in the early years, first couple of years, there were a lot of mass protests. But I was talking to Stefania Kopernsai. She used to run the Hungarian equivalent of the ACLU.

14:59And she says those big protests, they didn't really have much impact. A key lesson that we learned is that resisting is not enough. I really believe that people who are pro-democracy, who are pro-human rights, really have to think hard about how to attract and how to reach new audiences. And I think that starts with understanding their grievances, listening to what they care about, and really responding carefully to those. So did her organization do that? They did. They basically got out of Budapest and headed to the provinces. They opened local offices. They went to food fairs. After four or eight years, we realized that what we need to understand is why people don't care so much or don't care enough about these anti-democratic measures.

15:53And what did you learn? So what we learned is that people are disillusioned by democracy. And so what they said they realized they needed to do was connect the concept of people's rights to practical issues they were struggling with. And, you know, everything from like access to social services to the things that they sort of needed in their day to day lives. And she says, you know, it took a few years, but they're finally working much more effectively with grassroots groups. We were saying, oh, so this is the local issue that you are interested in because this is something pressing for you. let us help you, let us work with you, with our expertise, acknowledging that you have expertise on a topic that is important for you.

16:39So we have seen much more engagement like this that is actually interesting and relevant for people. How are these two strongman populist leaders in Turkey and in Hungary, how are they doing right now? What's the current situation? It's a really interesting time. Orban has some big challenges. He's facing a much more energized opposition, and it's led by a former protege who's actually ahead of Orban in the polls. And in Turkey, after more than two decades, Erdogan's competitive authoritarian model, it's under a lot of strain. In March, police arrested the Istanbul mayor. This is Erdogan's main rival in any future election.

17:24And this set off the largest protests in Turkey in a decade. Another Turkish scholar that I spoke to, she teaches at Middlebury College. Her name is Shebnam Gamushu. And she's actually in Turkey right now doing research. And she's been watching this all play out. Frankly, I wasn't expecting this kind of a mobilization, extensive mobilization in Istanbul and across the country. So that's quite surprising to me because I thought, and probably Erdogan did too, that he already established some sense of understanding that his was a repressive regime. And he thought he intimidated people into submission and he thought he succeeded.

18:06Clearly he did not. The mayor, this guy who was arrested, he's still in prison. And Gamushu says the country is at an inflection point because Erdogan, he can no longer keep up the pretense that this is a free and fair democratic system. So there are two options ahead of us. So it's going to be either like Russia or it's going to become a full functioning democratic country. So a system that some say the Trump administration is trying to take a page from could be running out of steam. Yeah, I mean, a competitive authoritarian system, it doesn't really work for a ruling party if it ends up losing major elections.

18:50okay so we've heard a number of parallels between some of what the trump administration is doing and what autocratic leaders have done elsewhere but america is still a democracy at least in some forms the the midterms are coming in 18 months we're still talking to each other freely yep um So I have to ask, did you talk to scholars or experts who think maybe there are some who are being overly dramatic here or that the concern about autocracy in America is overblown? Yeah, it's a great question, Aisha. I talked to 14 scholars, and the vast majority are – I think are very worried about an authoritarian slide.

19:34But there are some who see things differently, and I think it's worth listening to them. There's a guy, Todd Kent. He's a political scientist at Texas A &M. And he says, you know, the United States is so polarized today that the party out of power is always going to be kind of accusing the one in power of being anti-democratic. And so we tend to see things in the world through our own ideology and political persuasion. So Republicans now are looking at the world and saying this is what we voted for. Democrats are saying, no, this is anti-democratic. I also talked to a guy named Darren Shaw. He's a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

20:11And he says the pendulum is swinging towards what he calls the imperial presidency. But he also says that Trump is raising a lot of valid questions that resonate with a lot of voters. However much you dislike where it's coming from, can we sit down and have a serious conversation about, you know, what is Harvard doing with his admissions policies? And do students feel safe on campus? Do scholars really think that Trump will ultimately succeed in reshaping American government? Many are really worried, I think, but a few are skeptical. There's a guy that I know, a professor, his name's Kurt Whalen.

20:48He's also a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. It's very too early to say the United States is sliding into competitive authoritarianism. Trump's actions would end up having this effect, but only if they remained uncontested. And Waylon points out that so far, you know, the lower courts are checking Trump. And the United States is still, of course, a democracy in popular opinion really matters. And this is a point that Waylon makes. He said, you know, if you look at these autocratic leaders like Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader, and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, they needed overwhelming popular support.

21:24Like we're talking approval ratings from 65 to more than 90 percent to change their country's political systems. These populist leaders managed to engineer new constitutions that seriously concentrated power. That was the breakpoint that put those countries on the path towards competitive authoritarian rule. But in the United States, that's out of the question. Because, you know, Whelan says Trump doesn't nearly have the support he'd need to change the Constitution, which, of course, if you remember, he recently said he wasn't sure he had to uphold anyway. And there's another way of looking at this moment, too.

21:58I spoke to Jeremy Pope. He's a political scientist at Brigham Young University. And he says even if the U.S. does not slide into some form of authoritarianism, the long-term effects of this kind of governance will be profound. I think he's doing immense amounts of damage. I think he's perhaps, and it does not give me pleasure to say this, unalterably changing our norms in a way that is going to free up. Future presidents from both parties will feel more free to do the kinds of things that Trump has done. And that will frankly threaten the rule of law. And even if we don't move towards competitive authoritarianism all the way, you don't really have to believe that that will happen to be very nervous about the future of American democracy.

22:47What does the White House have to say about all of this? Well, I sent them some emails laying out the various things that people are saying that I've interviewed, and the White House didn't have any comment. The only thing that they asked, interestingly, was the identity of one of my academic sources, and they wondered if this professor might have donated money to Democrats. I checked, and the professor had not.

23:11When we come back, a pep talk for some Americans from an unlikely source.

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24:46Frank, you've reported overseas for many years. You've lived and reported from autocratic countries, including China and Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Cuba. What does autocracy look and feel like to you? You know, I'd like to go back to that scholar at the beginning, the one who didn't want to talk with his voice or name. I think he put it really, really well. Let's give a listen. I think many Americans have a cartoon vision of what authoritarianism looks like. They think it's sort of jackboots in the streets and prison camps in rural parts of the country. They don't recognize that for many people, indeed most of the population most of the time, authoritarianism is sort of banal.