October 2 Friday roundup

The latest podcast episode is about how authoritarians eventually stand revealed, even to their followers, and the moment of choice that follows. We are in that moment of choice now, and Trump is becoming more despised by the day. These are all good signs. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

A lot of people are looking toward the elections for salvation or something close to it. And I’ve been trying to address the real possibilities for change that November could bring. But I also often mention the hard reality we’re up against—that even if the Democrats retake both the House and the Senate (which seems more and more possible each week) there’s only so much they can do without a veto-proof majority.

There’s another danger ahead that we should keep in mind after November. I’ve talked about it before as—in the words of Mark Fallon—electoral change that is sometimes a pause instead of a hard stop on a political nightmare.

More than a decade ago, Fallon described President Obama’s actions on Gitmo and torture as more of a pause on the worst War on Terror tactics than any permanent shift. Which is not to say that Obama didn’t reject torture and set a goal of closing Guantanamo. It just means that without accountability and restructuring of agencies and government, no fundamental change happened. Which meant the human rights abuses that had been committed before could take place again.

Donald Trump’s return to office has underlined the ways that this kind “pause” is dangerous. And after he’s gone, we’re going to have to make a lot of changes to move the United States out of rogue-state status internationally and to more fully entrench democracy domestically.

This week, I read a paper in the latest Journal of Democracy from Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American Studies and of government at Harvard. He co-wrote it with Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto. It had some great research-based observations about these very topics.

Both men have written about these issues for several years now, including Competitive Authoritarianism, their book on Cold War governance. They took the tools and methods they developed for that project and analyzed whether the United States in 2026 qualifies as a competitive authoritarian government.

They used eleven criteria for their analysis (see the paper for the full list of criteria), noting that the presence of even one of the eleven qualifies a nation as competitive authoritarian nation. What did they conclude? It’s unlikely to surprise you that, based on the two preceding years under Trump 2.0 , the U.S. met five of the eleven criteria. Those include gerrymandering, harassment of the media, attacks on the civil liberties of critics, packing the media, and “skewing of campaign finance.”

Placing the U.S. in the context of other authoritarian regimes, the authors join a long list of people who have noticed the parallels with Hungary in the last decade, though they note that the U.S. has had “greater civil violations and a less tilted playing field.” And they observe that America has yet to see the threats to open elections of the kind experienced under Yelsin in Russia or Milošević in Serbia.

They also acknowledge the ways that democracy in the United States long had an asterisk next to its status as a democracy, due to its failure to fully enfranchise or guarantee civil liberties to all Americans for most of the years of its existence. As a result, the researchers compared the abuses during the second Trump administration basically to my lifetime, the only period in which any true American democracy could be claimed.

I want to include a few other points they made, because those dovetail very much with arguments I’ve been making about the impossibility of any automatic “return to normal” after Trump leaves office. You’ll see that they’re not at all hopeless.

“If, as we expect, America’s slide into competitive authoritarianism proves short-lived, observers will be tempted to retrospectively classify the United States as a democracy during the second Trump administration. Indeed, following Adam Przeworski’s widely cited characterization of democracy as ‘a system in which parties lose elections,’ scholars frequently equate electoral turnover with democracy. Following this logic, observers may interpret a Democratic Party victory in 2028 as evidence that the United States was continuously democratic between 2025 and 2028.

“That would be a mistake. One of the principal findings of our research on competitive authoritarianism is that opposition parties can (and do) win unfair elections, and that electoral turnover can (and does) occur in nondemocratic regimes. In Hungary, for example, the ruling Fidesz massively abused state resources and engaged in large-scale gerrymandering, and the opposition Tisza party had limited access to mainstream media. Yet Tisza won. The fact that opposition forces prevail despite unfair elections and authoritarian abuse does not mean the unfairness and abuse did not exist in the first place. When Olympic athletes cheat but lose, they are still punished for cheating. If the U.S. Democrats win in 2028, their victory will not wipe away the administration’s persecution of critics, attacks on the media, repression of protesters, or gerrymandering.”

Levitsy and Way note that “if the United States redemocratizes in 2029, it will likely remain an unconsolidated democracy . . . If democracy is restored, Americans should resist the temptation to downplay or forget this authoritarian interlude. Wedded to a myth of exceptionalism, Americans tend to suppress past democratic failures. But the experience of countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Poland, and South Korea suggests a different lesson: Remembering past authoritarianism is essential to preventing its recurrence. If we are to reclaim American democracy and safeguard its future, we must first acknowledge the extent to which it has broken down.”

The good news is that competitive authoritarianism hasn’t yet solidified its stranglehold on the U.S., and we have many tools to fight it. But looking past November, we should keep in mind that the second half of the battle will be the kind of guardrails and accountability that other countries have used to save themselves.

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