In 2018, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky co-authored How Democracies Die, a hit book that explored the way strongmen leaders, including Donald Trump, can erode once-stable political systems. How Democracies Die resonated in the middle of Trump’s first term and made Levitsky a famous name among anxious liberals. Unfortunately, his work is even more relevant to American politics seven years later. Earlier this year, Levitsky and Lucan A. Way published an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “The Path to American Authoritarianism.” (They wrote almost all of the article before January 20.) Levitsky and Way focus on “competitive authoritarianism,” a concept they have explored for more than two decades. Under competitive authoritarianism, aspiring autocrats acquire power through legitimate elections, then stack the deck in their favor by rewarding corrupt allies, seeking revenge on their enemies through lawsuits and harassment, and cowing mass media. (Sound familiar?) I spoke with Levitsky, who is also a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations, about how the first few weeks of Trump 2.0 have gone, how Elon Musk has scrambled his thinking, and whether he ever thought competitive authoritarianism could actually come to the U.S.
Many of the warnings in your essay have already turned into reality: deep politicization of the FBI and spurious investigations into Trump’s political rivals, to name a couple. Have things accelerated more quickly than you were anticipating when you wrote it? In other words, how screwed are we right now?
We’re pretty screwed. A couple of things are a little worse than I anticipated. One is that while we knew the Republicans would not put up many obstacles, they have been even weaker than I thought. That the Congress is basically shutting itself down in the wake of the executive branch usurping its power is also really stunning. The Republican abdication has been worse than I expected, and I thought it would be bad.
The second thing I didn’t anticipate was the role of Musk. I don’t think anybody quite could have anticipated it. That article drew on 20 years of research on competitive authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The kinds of stuff we predicted, a lot of which has come to pass, are strategies that have been carried out in literally dozens of other cases. But Musk is pretty new. This is something that I don’t really have a model to understand. There’s a sort of technological frontier element to this that’s a little frightening. We don’t know what he’s going to do with data. And frankly, at least in democracies, I’ve never seen a concentration of political, economic, and media power as vast as this.
And in an unelected official.
In an unelected official, right. With the exception of really old-fashioned dictatorships like Somoza and Trujillo, or Mobutu in Zaire — the concentration of political, economic, and media power here is just stunning. That’s just never been seen in a democracy to my knowledge. So that’s really new territory.
You wrote at the beginning of your article — again, before the events of the last few weeks — that it had become somewhat passé to worry about the fate of democracy, since America survived Trump’s first term. What do you make of the strength of the opposition so far?
If I could go back, I wouldn’t need to write that paragraph. There has been a response to this authoritarian offensive, and it’s not that surprising. I think Trump is probably hurting himself by making so many enemies so quickly. Every fired employee and their family is going to move into the opposition, and every group that is directly or indirectly affected by the cessation of payments. He’s creating a certain amount of opposition at a pretty rapid clip.
It’s almost like he’s daring himself to do it, just running roughshod over people.
I never know what is driving him, what is motivating him. He’s not a typical rational autocrat in a sense, and I don’t think he’s necessarily going about this in the best way. I think he’s probably not building a sustainable coalition the way Chávez and Orbán and Erdoğan did. That said, a lot of autocrats move very quickly early on. I’m a sports fan, so I always find sports metaphors. This is the first round of a 15-round boxing match in which one fighter, maybe the underdog, comes out and decides to throw a thousand punches. And his rival is surprised, stunned, groggy, has maybe hit the mat. We don’t know how long he can sustain it. We don’t know what’s going to transpire if we go 7, 8, 10, 15 rounds. But the first round has been kind of stunning, because Trump took everybody by surprise. In part because the Establishment was asleep.
That has to do with the nature of his victory, I think — Trump made inroads with unexpected populations, and Democrats don’t know how to counter that exactly.
I don’t know. It’s true that I certainly did not expect him to win the popular vote, but we’re talking about a 1.5 percentage-point victory, and we’re talking about a 2, 2.5 percent difference from what was expected or what he’s done in the past. The idea that this was some overwhelming shift or overwhelming victory is ludicrous.
But when Trump wins by one, it feels like he wins by 30 — because he’s Trump.
Well, that’s how everybody treated it. The New York Times talked about, literally, a sweeping election victory. It was not a sweeping victory. So this gave him a legitimacy that he didn’t have before, that he probably didn’t deserve, but I think it quieted a number of dissident voices for quite a while. And, certainly, it left the Democrats on the sidelines for a few weeks.
To go back to your boxing metaphor, perhaps Trump is George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle and he’ll punch himself out?
James Carville wrote that out a few days ago, right? He said explicitly, “The Democrats just need to roll over and play dead.”
That they should take the rope-a-dope strategy, so to speak.
Absolutely. I don’t think he referred to Ali in ’75, but that’s exactly what he said. Which might, might be the right electoral strategy for the Democratic Party. But it is a horrible, horrible fact if you’re thinking about defending democracy.
There’s always this debate within the party about the extent to which politicians should be calling out every one of these anti-democracy infractions that Trump commits, and to what extent that they should just focus on the bread-and-butter issues, egg prices, and inflation, and all of that stuff that voters care most about. Is that a false binary to you?
Yeah, I think it’s false. It’s mistaken on a couple of fronts. First of all, it confuses the division of labor between party strategists and everybody else in society. I know we’re polarized — we divided the world into red and blue, and everybody’s on team blue or team red. But when people are telling me not to talk about democracy so much because it’s not the best strategy for the Democratic Party, I mean, give me a break. I’m a political-science professor. I’m supposed to talk. It’s my job to talk about it.
Well, not you. I meant more Chuck Schumer.
I know. But it’s not my job to figure out the best way for the Democratic Party to win votes. The Democratic Party does have to think about winning votes. And in the campaign, it was a legitimate question as to whether they should have campaigned around democracy or not. But there aren’t any elections for quite a while, and society — people who are not campaign gurus for the Democratic Party — has a responsibility to defend our democracy. And our politicians have a responsibility to defend our democracy. When democracy is under threat, you don’t just say, “Well, the polls say … My focus groups say bread-and-butter issues are better.” You’ve got to defend the Constitution, man.
I was super critical of Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy for putting their own short-term political ambitions above the defense of democracy. That’s in effect what they did. They knew better. They said as much in private, but in public, they decided that the best way to advance their careers was to enable Trump, to acquiesce to Trump, and the bulk of the party acted that way with huge consequences. But in a way, Schumer et al. are doing the same thing, right? If they decide that defending democracy is not in their best electoral interest, they’re also abdicating the role of defending democracy. They’re just not quite as culpable as the Republicans.
You’ve written that approval ratings matter for would-be competitive authoritarians. Some of the people you’ve covered have had 80 percent approval ratings; Chávez was very popular for a long time, for instance. Trump has never been that popular. He hit 50 percent recently, and it was a big deal because he’s rarely been there before. Many of his policies are also underwater in polls. But as you said, it’s a long time before any big elections, and he’s not one to step away from doing unpopular things. So let’s say he gets down to 35 percent or that area. What do you see as the effect of that on his power?
Certainly, that won’t necessarily constrain his behavior. And unfortunately, I think he’s unlikely to get down to the 35 percent.
I think there would have to be a serious economic shock to get to that level.
Yeah. More likely, around 40. But I think there’s a good chance he gets down there relatively quickly. If he does decline from 50 to 40, it won’t change his behavior. To be clear, he could still do a lot of damage, but it will send signals. It’ll make Chuck Schumer a little more likely to speak out. It’ll embolden Jeffries a little bit. You might see some more non-Trumpist Republicans taking a more independent position. The civil-society actors and CEOs may brownnose a little bit less. It’s hard to say when this would happen, but once there’s a little blood in the water, once that honeymoon’s over, you often see kind of a pack effect in people jumping into opposition.
That doesn’t necessarily block Trump from doing anything again. If the Republicans give him carte blanche, and certainly if the courts allow it, he can do a hell of a lot of damage. But there will be many, many more opposing voices in society, and that will slow him down a bit.
I’ve been struck by just how in lockstep big businesses have been in support of him over the last few months. That’s one thing I could see changing, slowly, if he becomes truly unpopular.
Like you said, his 1.5 percent victory felt like a 30-point victory. And when he was up over 50 percent for the first time ever, that’s a little bit like what it felt for years under Hugo Chávez when he was at 80 percent. When the president’s at 80 percent, everybody knows he’s untouchable. Nobody’s going to criticize him. The media’s quiet, the opposition shuts up because whatever it says is going to be unpopular. It has a really powerful, demobilizing effect on society and the opposition. That’s going to dissipate as Trump declines, if he declines.
As you mentioned, the Republican Party has been almost totally docile. Is there an equivalent you can think of where somebody has been in charge of their party for this long, the way Trump is dominating them for this long, and then the party eventually does turn on them?
Oh, that’s a good question. This is a little less authoritarian and more on the side of corruption, but the ANC eventually turned on Jacob Zuma. For those who care, I think UMNO eventually turned on Mahathir Mohamad back in the early 2000s in Malaysia.
There are other cases. When a leader gets this level of personalized control of the party, very often, the party goes down with the leader. In this case, Trump has an astounding level of personal control of the party, more than any other leader in modern history in the United States. It’s really possibly unprecedented.
Maybe FDR.
I don’t know. I think given the heterogeneity, FDR could not dominate the southern Democratic Party. FDR tried to intervene in primaries and failed miserably to get the southern conservatives onboard with the New Deal. FDR couldn’t even think about promoting civil rights because of the southern Democrats. So, no, FDR didn’t have anywhere near this.
That said, this is still a real party with many, many talented politicians emerging within it. If Trump does become quite unpopular, which is entirely possible, if he does fall into the 30s, the combination of his unpopularity and lame-duck status means that he’s not going to be able to impose his son as a candidate or the guy he wants as a candidate. I think you will see Republicans begin to emerge and challenge him as DeSantis tried to do a couple of years ago.
Which I thought would work for a month or so. I was naïve.
Yeah. He turned out to be not a terribly talented politician. But I think there’s a good chance that the party will find itself if Trump becomes sufficiently unpopular and it becomes politically useful to abandon him. Right now, it’s just not politically useful.
Or perhaps if he declines physically. Which I’m sure has happened in comparable situations before.
Oh, yeah. To give you one example, Juan Perón returned to the presidency as an old man in 1973. He had been in exile for 18 years, so not just four years, but he came back and he died the next year, in 1974. And the party just went to war with itself. It ripped itself apart after he died.
You’ve been writing about this for a long time, as we’ve said. Did you ever think your theories would be so applicable in America?
No. Lucan Way, who I co-authored the Foreign Affairs piece with — he and I published our first piece on competitive authoritarianism in 2002. We wrote it in 2000 and 2001, so we were finishing it up right around the time of 9/11. For a while after 9/11, a lot of liberals were concerned with the Patriot Act, that the Bush administration was going to be somewhat authoritarian. I was never as concerned as some of my friends. But people would ask us when we were first writing this up, “Is competitive authoritarianism impossible in the United States?” They had Bush and the Patriot Act and Cheney in mind.
And we dismissed it. Lucan and I always had these dark fantasies: Would we ever have to write a piece saying that the United States is becoming competitive authoritarian? We’d talked about it, but we always came to the conclusion that no, it would never really happen.
My political education was under Bush being pretty alarmed at the time. There was political corruption going on, but nothing compared to now.
There was pushback. There are always going to be efforts to abuse power, and there are always going to be scandals. But the key is there has to be a reaction from society, from the media, ideally from the president’s own party. There has to be a cost to it. The really scary thing right now is the lack of reaction, lack of pushback, especially among Republicans.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
