Posts Tagged ‘civil society’
“What wonder that gigantic corporations employ their enormous wealth and the highest legal talent to strain the laws to their upmost! What wonder that ill-gotten fortunes menace the liberties of the people!”
Tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America. Francesca Bria and a team of researchers supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES, the oldest political foundation in Germany) warn that Europe is next…
In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty.
A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies—one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history—was framed as a move toward “efficiency.”
It consolidated seventy-five procurement agreements into a single contract: a strategic handover of core military functions to a private company whose founder, Peter Thiel, has declared that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”…
… J.D. Vance, propelled to the vice-presidency by $15 million from Peter Thiel, became the face of tech-right governance. Behind him, Thiel’s network moved into the machinery of the state.
Under the banner of “patriotic tech“, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.
Our investigation shows how these firms now operate as state-like powers—writing the rules, winning the tenders, and exporting their model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to democratic governance…
[Bria an the team use elegant interactive infographics to map and explain the what’s happened so far in the U.S, then turns to Europe…]
… By mid-2025, its reverberations were already felt across Europe. In Rome, Italian defense officials moved to integrate Elon Musk’s Starlink into military communications. In Berlin, Rheinmetall and Anduril expanded their joint venture to deploy autonomous drone swarms for NATO. The German variants of its drones still run on Californian code. Musk livestreams with the AfD’s Alice Weidel, endorsing the German far-right while supplying NATO infrastructure.
In London, the NHS scaled Palantir’s £330 million Federated Data Platform across tens of millions of patient records, By May 2025, the government had to pay KPMG £8 million just to encourage hospital adoption. Meanwhile, a £1.5 billion defense partnership binds Britain to Palantir’s AI systems.
None of these decisions provoked real debate. Few reached front pages. Together, they reveal the systematic outsourcing of European sovereignty to American oligarchs whose ideology openly undermines democracy.
It is a paradox with devastating implications: pursuing digital sovereignty while ceding control through every signed contract.
Each new contract deepens the trap. Once Palantir becomes indispensable, once Anduril’s drones are NATO standard, once nuclear facilities power AI that runs everything else— the transformation is irreversible. Europe faces an existential choice: build genuine technological sovereignty now, or accept governance by platforms whose architects view democracy as an obsolete operating system.Silicon Valley’s Authoritarian Tech Right is not theorizing this world. They are already building it. The pipelines are operational. The feedback loops are functioning. The sovereignty transfers are completing.
Democracy persists as a legacy interface— maintained for stability, while being systematically hollowed out and replaced.
The question now is whether democratic societies can recognize this formation for what it is—and build alternatives before the infrastructure of control becomes too deeply embedded to dislodge…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Authoritarian Stack,” @francescabria.bsky.social, @fesonline.bsky.social.
* President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1907 “Provincetown Speech“
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As we reclaim the rudiments of our republic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that The Magic Christian premiered in the U.S. (having premiered in London two months earlier). Starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr (with appearances by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski), it was a scathing farce/satire of capitalism, greed, and human vanities, based on Terry Southern‘s 1959 novel of the same name.
“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist… It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell unpacks Ernest Gellner‘s understanding of the conditions of liberty– and the centraliity of civil society– and how they are threatened today…
There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed it. Some still do, but now, the dominant figures in political conservatism want to use government to weaponize and suborn civil society.
Like all simplified fables, this gets a fair amount wrong, both in its understanding of what happened and in what it leaves out. Still, it isn’t a bad way to start understanding some of what is taking place. Yet it begs an important question. What is civil society?
When I wrote about how civil society could beat Trumpism a couple of weeks ago, I felt a mild sensation of intellectual guilt – I knew I was invoking a complicated set of ideas without properly explaining them. So here’s my attempt to make up for that, and to explain why we ought want to protect civil society too, leaning on the account in Ernest Gellner’s book, Conditions of Liberty.
I suspect that few people younger than 50 have read this book – it’s been out of print for thirty years or so. [Though it is avaiable at the Internet Archive, in other lbraries, and used.] Gellner wrote it back in the 1990s, when civil society seemed to promise a path forward for the newly freed democracies of Eastern Europe. Now people are rediscovering the idea, not because of future hopes, but because they want to explain what is going wrong as the state escapes its restraints and threatens to crush the people’s liberties.
Gellner’s understanding of civil society is both relevant and a possible bridge between certain parts of the left and right. While he identified loosely with the left, Gellner was profoundly influenced by the kinds of classical liberalism articulated by Adam Ferguson and David Hume. They, in turn, wrote in the aftermath of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the previous century, when Scottish and English society had been torn apart by vicious religious controversies.
Gellner’s account of civil society, like those of his intellectual forebears, begins from the fact of profound disagreement and asks how best to manage it. From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is a marvelous accident, an unanticipated by-product of the seventeenth century stalemate between Calvinist enthusiasts (here and below, the term ‘enthusiast’ refers to Protestants who believe that God lives inside them, and are accordingly uncomfortable with certain kinds of hierarchy) and the English state. Yet this accident has shaped the world that we live in, creating a realm of autonomy in which people are free to live their lives in many different ways, within broad structures that support a reasonable degree of peace and shared order.
The dominant strain in American political conservatism has abandoned any commitments that it once had to this vision of pluralism. Some conservatives favor a shared notion of the common good, which ought be imposed as necessary on society. Others are more straightforwardly interested in domination and plunder. Neither faction has any interest in preserving the autonomy of civil society. Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, they see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, strained through the turd-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought…
[Farrell unpack’s Gellner’s thinking and puts it into context. He concludes…]
… There is plenty that is missing from the classical liberal account of civil society that Gellner lays out. It doesn’t capture many of the power dynamics that actually existing civil society entails. Civil society’s actual degree of pluralism varies, and is the subject both of legitimate debate and actual political struggle (something that both intelligent left- and right-Gramscian approaches capture better than classical liberal accounts).
Still, it does an excellent job in explaining why it is a problem when the government tries to capture civil society. If we lived in a world where the winning faction of conservatives recognized the value of civil society, we would be a lot better off than we are. There is also excellent reason to think that the left should be more appreciative of civil society too, and less prone to fantasies that everyone would change their politics if only this or that intellectual institution was controlled by the right people with the right way of thinking.
Liberal accounts of civil society push us to recognize the benefits of genuine pluralism, however painful and messy it may be, and however difficult to maintain in practice. Gellner’s particular version also has the particular benefit of emphasizing how contingent the development of civil society was, and how chancy its survival may be without relentless hard work.
Other societies may develop the economic benefits that helped civil society take off. [Quoting Gellner…]
Whether we like it or not, the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency is not always at the service of liberty. He had once rendered liberty some service, but does not seem permanently at her command. This may sadden those of us who are liberals and were pleased at being given such a potent ally – but facts had better be faced.
There will always be tensions in the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, which endanger the pluralism of civil society. Strong forms of national identity and strongman government based on fostering us-them divisions go hand-in-hand with each other. If economic growth stutters or fails, then social mobility is likely to become more problematic, and abusive hierarchy – the default condition of human society – may return.
That, then, is what civil society is (under one useful definition) and why we ought care about it…
Eminently worth reading in full: “What is civil society, and why should we care?” from @himself.bsky.social. For more from Farrell on the importance of civil society an what drives it: “Liberalism transforms plurality from weakness to strength.”
Lest we need a more “commercial” form of convincing (that, among its other defects, inequality doesn’t pay): Noah Smith on “Our Age of Kings” and why “the ‘cure’ is worse than the disease.” One example:
See also: “Equality and Development: A Comparative & Historical Perspective 1800-2025,” and “The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century.”
As Kant said, “The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.” Further to which, as Abbie Hoffman observed, “Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”
* Ernest Gellner (a la George Orwell’s distinction between the defensive patriot and the offensive nationalist: the former naturally prefers his particular customs, whereas the latter cannot be satisfied without demonstrating their superiority over others — by conflict if necessary).
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As we push for plurality, we might spare a thought for “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”– it’s Guy Fawkes Day.
On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building, and ordered the premises thoroughly searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. The authorities determine that the suspect was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy, largely organized by Robert Catesby, to annihilate England’s entire Protestant government including King James I. Over the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators in the “Gunpowder Plot,” and also arrested, tortured, or killed dozens of innocent English Catholics. Fawkes himself was executed on January 31, 1606.
The day after Fawkes arrest, November 5, 1605 Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the King’s escape from assassination by lighting bonfires, “always provided that ‘this testemonye of joy be carefull done without any danger or disorder'”; an Act of Parliament later that year designated November 5th as an official day of thanksgiving for “the joyful day of deliverance”, and remained in force until 1859.
But as historian Lewis Call has observed, Fawkes is now “a major icon in modern political culture.” The image of Fawkes’s face has become “a potentially powerful instrument for the articulation of postmodern anarchism” during the late 20th century, exemplified by the mask worn by V in the comic book series V for Vendetta, who fights against a fictional fascist English state, and by activists who were part of the Occupy Movement.
“We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth”*…
Research universities have been central to the accomplishments of “The American Century.” Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific leaders and innovators.
Research universities originated in Prussia in the early 19th century (animated by Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s vision of Einheit von Lehre und Forschung [the unity of teaching and research]). And indeed, into the early 1930s the world’s leading research universities were in Germany.
As historian Roger L. Geiger has explained, “the model for the American research university was established by five of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution (Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Columbia); five state universities (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and California); and five private institutions conceived from their inception as research universities (MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago).” The American research university first emerged in the late 19th century, when these fifteen institutions began to graft graduate programs derived from the German model onto undergraduate programs derived from the British model.
By 1960, U.S. research universities had become the global model; they still dominate the top of global university rankings (see, e.g., here, here, and here).
But as Nils Gilman explains, their pivotal role is in jeaopardy…
I wrote about MAGA’s coming assault on US higher education in the first week of the new administration. Here’s a brief update.
Within two weeks of the new regime taking office, the National Institutes of Health lost its director and deputy director and the new leadership announced that NIH was axing overhead costs on research grants — the operational lifeblood of large research universities. (Like everything else Team Trump has been trying to do, this effort caught up in litigation, through who knows whether the Trumpniks will pay attention to adverse rulings.) Should it move forward, these moves will kill the golden goose of US biomedical research.
The regime has also been threatening to withhold federal funding from colleges that do not kill programs at odds with the MAGA agenda, including abolishing DEI efforts and banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Two new fronts were opened last week with a direct targeting of Columbia University, ostensibly because of its coddling of Gaza protestors last year — including the demand that it place one of its academic departments in receivership. And on Friday, the regime announced investigations into 52 universities as part of its DEI crackdown. All of this entails a viewpoint-based assault on academic freedom that is unprecedented in American history, way beyond even McCarthyism — though, as my friend John Aubrey Douglas wrote a couple of years ago, it is a standard part of the modern authoritarian playbook.
Five brief observations:
- The MAGA axe is falling on all fields whose Wissenschaft is at odds with the ideological agenda of some faction of MAGA. This includes not just definitionally “woke” departments like ethnic and gender studies, but will envelop the whole of the humanities, as well as biomedical research and climate science.
- True to its nativism, the new regime seems especially keen on reining in transnational scientific collaboration. Furthermore, as MAGA closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become physically impossible (not to mention intellectually indefensible, as John Quiggan says).
- As of yet, there appears to be little if any coordinated pushback against any of this, either politically or even as an industry. If you look at the websites of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, the International Association of University Presidents, the American Association of Colleges & Universities, or other similar organizations, you’d have no idea that anything untoward is happening. Incredibly, despite the unabashed way MAGA telegraphed its intention to do all of this, university leaderships appear to be totally unprepared. What I take this to mean is that it’s going to happen, more or less unopposed.
- I expect that the evisceration of US research universities will spell the end of the long US dominance of research publications. It will also hasten the collapse of peer review — already in trouble for several reasons, including the replicability crisis and a business model predicated on free labor from US academics — as the standard quality control mechanism for scholarship.
- It is a sign of the times that several French research organizations and universities are now beginning to offer landing spots for US academics who find they “can no longer pursue their activities in their country of origin due to wars, political persecution, or censorship.” This may save a few individual careers, but obviously it’s not going to work for more than a tiny fraction of the half million+ ladder rank faculty in the country.
These are just ongoing field notes from the front, so I don’t have any big conclusions around this, so I’ll just repeat what I’ve been saying on this topic for years:
In 1933, German research universities were by every measure the greatest in the world. This intellectual power was in turn a cornerstone of German industrial and ultimately military might. In a few short years, however, using tactics not dissimilar to the ones listed above, the Nazis destroyed them — not least because the universities themselves went along with what was being done to them (Selbst-Gleichschaltung, as it was known). And nearly a century on, German universities have still not recovered, despite many proposed efforts — and neither has Germany’s prestige or power.
Self-inflicted wounds: “The MAGA assault on US universities has begun in earnest,” and, @nilsgilman.bsky.social suggests, it appears that the universities are going passively to surrender.
A case-in-point attack, with a suggested response: “What should be Columbia University’s legal answer to the extortionate & unconstitutional demands of the Trump administration.”
See also: “First they came for Columbia” (and this different piece with the same title), “The Crumbling Foundations of American Strength,” and “The Economic Danger of Disinvesting in Education.”
(Image above: source)
* Iris Murdoch
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As we re-educate, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that President George W. Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, the start of the Iraq War (AKA, the Second Gulf War). 22 days later, American (and Allied) forces took Baghdad, and on May 1, President Bush announced “Mission Accomplished.” In the event, U.S. military forces remained in Iraq until their withdrawal in 2011.
“The future’s another country, man… And I still ain’t got a passport”*…
Hamilton Nolan on seeing things for what they are, not what they used to be…
Born into a chaotic world, all of us develop a frame of reference to make everything intelligible. Consciously or not, we all have a narrative about reality that we overlay on events, placing them into a context in our own minds, allowing us to understand why things happened and what is likely to happen next. In the same way that our brains automatically filter out much incoming stimulus in order to provide us with a breadth of sensation that we can handle, our belief systems allow us to turn life’s waterfall of events into a story that we can read, and participate in.
Once we have developed this frame, this mental machine that inhales life and exhales explanations, it is tempting to allow it to run unimpeded. We can anchor ourselves to it and stop wondering why things happen. Religion is the classic example of this, but it applies to all realms of thinking. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the fact that these frames we generate are only approximate—they are the best we can do at any given time given the facts at hand. If we are actually concerned with keeping them as close to truth as possible, we must constantly dust them off and rework them in light of the unfolding of reality. This is what learning is. It takes work. It is tempting to check out from it, after we have enough to get by. Once we have an explainer machine that seems to work, it is easy to stick with it. The passing of time, the ceaseless interaction of people and things and ideas that produce events in the world, will render our frames anachronistic. Still, it is human nature to kind of relax into them, at a certain point, like an elderly person who sticks with their 20 year-old computer because they know how it works, turning off the software updates, satisfied with what they have.
This is a luxury that people in certain fields cannot afford. Science? Can’t stop updating. Medicine? Of course you must stay current. Literature? Technology? Academia? You must always do the painful work of tearing apart and rebuilding your knowledge and beliefs because failing to do so means that will not be good at your job. Politics is the same. Effective political policies and strategies are direct responses to the true condition of the world. Delusion does not pay. If the world changes and our political leaders don’t, it is the political leaders and not the world that will be left behind. The people who suffer for this failure are not usually the leaders, but the citizens who find that the leaders seem to have gone blind.
Things have changed in America. There are deep undercurrents that have been exerting pressure from below—the relentless evolution of global capitalism, the growth of inequality, new forms of technology jumbling the world of information—and then there are things that have changed rapidly, closer to the surface. It was possible to use a certain frame of reference that worked pretty well in the American political system for the past 40 years or so. But now that frame is out of date. It is worse than useless. It is misleading. It is detrimental, because the answers it spits out, the explanations it gives, the strategies it recommends for specific situations, are all based upon old data and old wisdom that no longer works. The frame of reference that guides many of the people who, unfortunately, dominate the Democratic Party in Washington is like a flood map that was drawn up before climate change. They keep using these same old formulas that worked back then, ignoring the rising water as it creeps up to their necks.
Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama all to varying extents did awful things and all to varying extents are responsible for the progression of the state of our politics to this point, but they also all believed themselves to be constrained by a set of guidelines, norms, and political realities that no longer exist. Even their most immoral policies were shaped to maneuver through public opinion and economic demands and historic traditions and laws that have now, effectively, disappeared. The playbook that political veterans used to operate in that old world is a set of directions to a house party that is already over. If you show up there you will only find an empty house. The action is elsewhere now. Chuck Schumer continues to pull up in front of that empty house each morning, blinking vacantly, knocking on the door with a bottle of wine in his hand, wondering what is taking so long.
Here are a few notable ways in which many (not all) of our political and media and business and intellectual leaders have failed to update their priors for current times: The federal government is now controlled by a political party that is nakedly, not bashfully, racist, and hopes to eradicate the past century’s worth of racial progress; economic policy is being dictated, stupidly, by a small group of zealots who do not understand economics; the primary concern of the president now is vengeance, and he is going to use the tools at his disposal to enact vengeance upon his endless list of enemies in a way that could surpass McCarthyism; “civil liberties” mean nothing to those who control the federal government now, and will likely provide little protection from that vengeance in the real world; the law, and the power of the courts to enforce laws that constrict the behavior of the federal government, is very much in question, and it is distinctly possible that within the next year or two the law is exposed as toothless in the face of the president’s will, and therefore the law should not be relied on as the primary guard rail of our democracy now; voter suppression is about to reach extremes not seen in generations, and outright election theft based on shoddy racist claims of voter fraud is extremely likely in upcoming elections at all levels; the US government is going to lose its status as a reliable source of information—economic statistics, scientific data, and more—as official information is manipulated for partisan gain in unprecedented ways, a development that will be devastating for almost all fields of knowledge, and for the economy; the federal government is being run by people who want to eradicate the government’s functions, except to the extent that those functions can be used to crack down on foreign and domestic enemies; many people are going to be jailed and deported and potentially killed unjustly in the very near future, by the president and his loyalists; institutions that imagine themselves to be proud, ethical, important parts of the fabric of America are going to cower in fear and abdicate their responsibilities in ways that their own leaders would scoff at right now. We are not living in “The West Wing.” We are living in “Goodfellas.” It does not have a happy ending…
… Extreme things—things that sit completely outside of the mental framework that too many of our political leaders are still using to govern their decisions—are happening now. And they are going to happen more. And they are going to get more extreme. This does not mean that we are in a hopeless situation. It does, however, mean that we must adjust our interpretation of the world, or be left behind. We must see things not for what we wish they were, or for what they used to be, but for what they are. There is no way to see beyond the curve when you’re looking towards the past…
Facing the future: “Seeing Things For What They Are,” from @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social.
Cases in point: “Trump and the Rise of the Multiracial Right” and “Tariffs on goods may be a prelude to tariffs on money.”
* Zadie Smith, On Beauty
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As we reframe, we might recall that, while today s of course St. Patrick’s Day, in Suffolk County, Massachusetts (which includes the cities of Boston, Chelsea Revere, and the town of Winthrop), and also by the public schools in Somerville, Massachusetts, residents are celebrating Evacuation Day, commemorating the evacuation of British forces from the city of Boston following the siege of Boston, early in the American Revolutionary War. Schools and government offices are closed.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”*
Just over a decade ago, Nils Gilman wrote an essay, The Twin Insurgency,” in which he warned of an emerging confluence of strategies between the rising global plutocratic class, on the one hand, and transnational criminal organizations, on the other. For all our sins, as you’ll see in his piece, he nailed the fundamental disposition of the tech-libertarian broligarch class. And…
One other thing I think I correctly intuited a decade ago was that a key politico-spatial implication of the Twin Insurgency was that the space of the national was fragmenting into “kaleidoscopic microsovereignties,” an argument that my friend Quinn Slobodian has recently developed at monographic length in his marvelous book Crack-Up Capitalism.
Quinn’s thesis is that the ultimate goal of what I called the plutocratic insurgents (and their intellectual and high-end service-economy henchmen) is to end the constraints that democratic nation-states impose on the privileges of the rich. These are rich men (and it is almost entirely men) who believe that their wealth should be untouchable, and that the privileges that this wealth buys should be unlimited. With Elon Musk’s DOGE, the mask is off: they are hell-bent on destroying any institutions of social care or risk-sharing that might touch their money or their privileges.
I cannot recommend Crack-Up Capitalism enough. Methodologically, is an intellectual history of the most notorious radical libertarians — from well-known assholes** like Milton Friedman and Peter Thiel to a congeries of even more colorful crackpots and kakistocrats — and their quest to craft for the perfect space for unfettered capitalism by shattering the map of allegedly sovereign territories into a variety of “exceptional” legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones, etc. It is also an historical travelogue, taking the reader (as its cover blurb says) “from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.” Best of all, Crack-Up Capitalism is wonderfully written: erudite and droll in equal measure (as the punning title itself suggests).
** I use the term “assholes” in the technical sense elaborated by Aaron James, chair of the UC Irvine philosophy department, in his 2012 book Assholes: A Theory, namely someone who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.” I was reading the book when I wrote “The Twin Insurgency” and, even though I didn’t cite it (the anxiety of influence?), I realize now looking back how much it informed my understanding of phenomenon of the plutocratic insurgency. Conversely, I suspect the empirical fact of the rising plutocratic insurgency may well have been part of what inspired James to write his own book.
– Nils’ thoughts in full: “Revisiting the Plutocratic Insurgency.”
So, what can we expect? Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way paint a pretty grim picture…
… Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. He did not control the Republican Party when he took office in 2017, and most Republican leaders were still committed to democratic rules of the game. Trump governed with establishment Republicans and technocrats, and they largely constrained him. None of those things are true anymore. This time, Trump has made it clear that he intends to govern with loyalists. He now dominates the Republican Party, which, purged of its anti-Trump forces, now acquiesces to his authoritarian behavior.
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.
But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.
The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens.
But much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. Modern states are powerful entities. The U.S. federal government employs over two million people and has an annual budget of nearly $7 trillion. Government officials serve as important arbiters of political, economic, and social life. They help determine who gets prosecuted for crimes, whose taxes are audited, when and how rules and regulations are enforced, which organizations receive tax-exempt status, which private agencies get contracts to accredit universities, and which companies obtain critical licenses, concessions, contracts, subsidies, tariff waivers, and bailouts. Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival…
[The authors explore the ways in which the government bureaucracy could be politicized: the threat of targeted prosecution, the weaponization of the IRS, and the mobilization of other executive departments to further the adminsistration’s agenda– which can, among them, punish identified opponents, reward loyalists, and operate like a “protection racket” on everyone else. For alll of that, they see a limit to the damage…]
… The Trump administration may derail democracy, but it is unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule. The United States possesses several potential sources of resilience. For one, American institutions are stronger than those in Hungary, Turkey, and other countries with competitive authoritarian regimes. An independent judiciary, federalism, bicameralism, and midterm elections—all absent in Hungary, for instance—will likely limit the scope of Trump’s authoritarianism.
Trump is also weaker politically than many successful elected autocrats. Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support: Bukele, Chávez, Fujimori, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin all boasted approval ratings above 80 percent when they launched authoritarian power grabs. Such overwhelming public support helps leaders secure the legislative supermajorities or landslide plebiscite victories needed to impose reforms that entrench autocratic rule. It also helps deter challenges from intraparty rivals, judges, and even much of the opposition.
Less popular leaders, by contrast, face greater resistance from legislatures, courts, civil society, and even their own allies. Their power grabs are thus more likely to fail. Peruvian President Pedro Castillo and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol each had approval ratings below 30 percent when they attempted to seize extraconstitutional power, and both failed. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s approval rating was well below 50 percent when he tried to orchestrate a coup to overturn his country’s 2022 presidential election. He, too, was defeated and forced out of office.
Trump’s approval rating never surpassed 50 percent during his first term, and a combination of incompetence, overreach, unpopular policies, and partisan polarization will likely limit his support during his second. An elected autocrat with a 45 percent approval rating is dangerous, but less dangerous than one with 80 percent support.
Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey.
Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey.
Weaponized states create a difficult collective action problem for establishment elites who, in theory, would prefer democracy to competitive authoritarianism. The politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents who modify their behavior in the face of authoritarian threats are acting rationally, doing what they deem best for their organizations by protecting shareholders or avoiding debilitating lawsuits, tariffs, or taxes. But such acts of self-preservation have a collective cost. As individual actors retreat to the sidelines or censor themselves, societal opposition weakens. The media environment grows less critical. And pressure on the authoritarian government diminishes.
The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.
America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.
Trump will be vulnerable. The administration’s limited public support and inevitable mistakes will create opportunities for democratic forces—in Congress, in courtrooms, and at the ballot box.
But the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Opposition under competitive authoritarianism can be grueling. Worn down by harassment and threats, many of Trump’s critics will be tempted to retreat to the sidelines. Such a retreat would be perilous. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation crowds out citizens’ commitment to democracy, emergent authoritarianism begins to take root…
See also: “There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing- How regime change happens in America,” from Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (gift article), “Trump As Sovereign Decisionist,” from Nathan Gardels and Noema, and this elaboration on Applebaum’s piece by Gilman, “What Comes after the Cleansing Fire of MAGA?“
Happily, there are some signs of the opposition for which Levitsky and Way call, among them: state’s Attorneys General, some major priviate law firms, even some red-state universities. Let us fervently hope that this is just the beginning. (Indeed, here, from the estimable Henry Farrell, a suggestion as of a step each of us can take: “Trump is weaponizing financial payments: here’s what you can do.”)
* Benjamin Franklin, in response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?“
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As we deliberate on democracy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that the first anti-discrimination law in the United States, the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945, was signed and went into effect. The product of the Alaska Native fight against segregation and other forms of discrimination, it abolished Jim Crow laws in Alaska, then a territory (not yet a state). One wonders if such an Act will be legal in our future…
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