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Authoritarianism Here?

The question of authoritarianism in America has become a hot-button issue in our era of political discontent. A great deal of ink has been spilled by Left and Right on the rise of authoritarian threats in recent years—from Trumpian populism to Covid bio-surveillance—and many prominent social scientists have made strident arguments about democratic “backsliding,” “erosion,” “autocratization,” and similar dan­gers to the health of the American republic. Much of this has been couched in rather hyperbolic language, yet good, sane research on the subject also exists and competes for attention among the policy-minded set.

For the purposes of this essay, we can bracket questions of whether or not these arguments have been convincing. Instead, it may be more illuminating to focus on the common analytic problem shared by most of these discussions of backsliding and regime threats—an insufficiently fleshed-out account of what authoritarianism in modern America would look like in real terms. Backsliding arguments have usefully pointed to “democratic norms” as an important element in the breakdown of political legitimacy. But translating legitimacy crises into fully authoritarian regimes does not happen automatically, as assumed or implied by much of the “decline of democracy” literature. This is especially true for work written to reach audiences beyond the confines of academia. Many of the bad rehashes of “It Can’t Happen Here” have been just that—pale imitations mixed with a curious wish-casting for a wave of anachronistic fascism to sweep the country.1

In this article, I seek to partially rectify this failing by providing genuinely plausible, if speculative, accounts of what an American authoritarianism would involve, detailing two primary departure points on a hypothetical regime change trajectory: the endpoint of a process of gradual decay and the downstream outcome of a sudden regime break, respectively. It is less interesting for our purposes here to assess how that decay metastasizes or in exactly what way the regime break happens, but more to describe what settles in the aftermath, say, six to eight years later—illustrating what a stable or consolidated authoritarian America would look like. If we are serious about assessing the nature of an actual American authoritarian regime, the academic literature on comparative authoritarianism, although sometimes misapplied when translated into a popular context (and more often simply ignored), provides a good baseline sense of where political matters would most likely end up.2

Embarking on this dour thought experiment, what we will find is that rather than any concern over bare “minority rule” or incipient, interwar-era style fascism, scenarios of a truly authoritarian turn for the American polity involve either the popular establishment of an electoral authoritarian regime or the sudden crash into a far more unstable tutelary military regime by way of a genuine coup d’état. As Americans, when we think and worry about the collapse of our long-standing democratic polity, we should keep such potential realities in mind, and eschew distraction by more illusory fantasies.

The Limits of the “Democratic Backsliding” Framework

There has been an explosive growth in literature, both in the popular press and in academic journals, on related concepts of democratic back­sliding, “de-democratization,” and autocratization processes in the modern era. This is an understandable reaction to the ongoing legitimacy crises besetting many Western democracies,3 further justified by the concomitant rise of antiestablishment, populist parties and charismatic figures that have gained unexpected political prominence—with the ever‑present menace of Donald Trump’s presi­dency looming over the discussion and setting the backdrop for a sizeable portion of concerned scholarly research.4

Among the various doomful depictions of the collapse of democracy in the United States, two important scholarly projects stand out as particularly useful and informative. The first is the argument about crumbling “democratic norms”—best expressed in the popular academic work How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.5 The duo are senior political scientists whose other academic work on “competitive authoritarianism” and Latin American politics, and on nineteenth-century democratization trends in Europe, respectively, is excellent and highly regarded.6 Levitsky and Ziblatt’s careful foray into discussions of contemporary backsliding relies on a comparative ap­proach to cases of European and Latin American democratic collapse, highlighting the role that norms of procedural fairness, forbearance, and the tolerance of political opposition play in sustaining democratic regimes. In their view, where long-standing democracies have collapsed in the last half-century, they have done so because politics in these states has been undermined by hyperpolarization and monomaniacal, power-aggrandizing politicians breaking key norms for temporary political gain at the expense of the political system as a whole.

A second approach comes from the team at the V-Dem Institute, a decade-old research project based in Sweden that has developed a state-of-the-art data set operationalizing various definitions of “democracy” through expert surveys that cover all countries (by year) from 1900 to the present day, with follow-up expansions into nineteenth-century cases as well as other relevant metrics useful for quantitative comparative political science.7 Spearheaded by a collegial body of scholars, including the political scientists Staffan Lindberg, Anna Lührmann, and many other collaborating researchers, the team has since applied this excellent resource to exploring what they term “autocratization,” producing a wealth of academic articles and reports on the subject in just the last few years.8 In the framing of this large research agenda, democratic backsliding is largely the result of the weakening of institutional constraints on politics that liberal, counter-majoritarian institutions such as independent judiciaries, civil society protections, and media freedoms provide.

Both of these projects share a general emphasis on the importance of “liberal” institutions, norms, and proceduralism to sustaining democratic political regimes, although the V-Dem project has increasingly been defining thicker forms of liberalism as necessary for democratic health as well.9 Critically, while both projects have tremendous merit in illustrating the paths by which democracies may find themselves in legitimacy crises, political disorder, and perhaps concomitant civil strife and violence, they both falter when drawing out implications for how a polity moves from legitimacy crisis to consolidated authoritarian rule.

This would not be a problem—indeed, it is not meant as a criticism of these research agendas at all—but for the fact that many other scholars outside of the subfield have taken on the warnings of this “backsliding” line of research to extrapolate modern forms of authoritarianism as necessary follow-ups. That is, empirically patterned insights into preconditions for democratic collapse are then over-enthusiastically attached to existing, stable authoritarian regimes and the connection treated as a given.10 The through line from angry filibustering to Vladimir Putin’s decades-long reign somehow has been made into something self-evident by far too many commentators.

Indeed, these theoretical frameworks are genuinely quite helpful in explaining civic instability, the loss of political legitimacy, and perhaps even the breakdown of political order (although many such crises historically have been solved within the constraints of a given regime). But they cannot tell us what a stable authoritarian regime in the United States would actually look like—though this is regularly assumed. For example, American politics scholars and electoral reform activists like Lee Drutman confidently assert that the United States is in danger of “collaps[ing] into competitive authoritarianism,”11 or policy writer Zach Beauchamp claims that “[t]he GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda,” with the relevant references to competitive authoritarianism and the usual case set of Hungary, Vene­zuela, and Turkey.12 It is not just that such commentators are predicting political chaos—that is a perfectly reasonable takeaway from both lines of scholarly research and should be treated very seriously—but that they are then inserting examples of stable authoritarian regimes worldwide as necessary and obvious corollaries.

The major problem for such theories of American authoritarianism is that they ignore the paths actually taken by the commonly cited exem­plar countries and the conditions that were required for creating stable “competi­tive authoritarian” regimes, let alone more thoroughly auto­cratic varie­ties of nondemocracy. Most of the cases highlighted by authors concerned with democratic backsliding—contemporary Euro­pean and Eurasian cases such as Russia, Turkey, Hungary, or Serbia, or twentieth-century Latin American cases such as Chile, Brazil, or Argentina—involve far more complicated paths to authoritarian con­solidation than just disorder and the end of political comity.

All the key cases to which scholars and policy writers refer when speaking about the specter of authoritarianism in America are given as examples of consolidated authoritarian rule, not just collapse and vio­lence per se. And as scholarship on comparative authoritarianism makes clear, a regime collapse is conceptually distinct from the subsequent move toward either a new democratic regime or a new authoritarian one.13 Thus we need to understand how consolidated authoritarian rule is actually established, not merely the ways in which electoral democracies in recent years have succumbed to regime disorder and collapse.

Defining Authoritarianism

Given the problems of combining useful findings on the determinants of heightened political disorder through democratic backsliding with pre­dicting the onset of a new, stable American authoritarianism, it is useful to start from minimalist concepts, upon which we can set up more ambitious hypothetical projections. We start with electoral democracy, which is a political regime in which the decision-making offices are chosen through a competitive struggle for the people’s vote waged by political parties competing in free elections under broad suffrage.14 This minimalist definition can also be summarized even more pithily as “a [political] system in which parties lose elections,” in the words of Adam Przeworski.15 This conceptualization of electoral democracy, sometimes referred to as “Schumpeterian” from its intellectual origins in the 1940s, allows us to narrow in on exactly what makes democracy structurally distinct as a political regime, and pare away any ideological, normative, or moral values that are associated with democracy in the public mind.16

Authoritarianism, per the dominant academic literature today, is a residual category encompassing all political regimes that do not fit this definition of democracy—that is, any political regime which fails to satisfy these criteria.17 Perhaps the decision-making office is unelected (absolute monarchy, theocracy, personalist dictatorship, military junta, ideological party-state) or perhaps the elections are systematically unfree and unfair (electoral authoritarianism, hybrid regimes).18 Perhaps elec­tions are free, but with a severely restricted electorate (competitive oligarchy, ethnocracy).19 All of these are variants of authoritarianism found the world over in the present day as well as in the recent and more distant past.

Importantly, when we are talking about authoritarianism, we are referring to a political regime. There is an ongoing terminological tragedy in academia and the policy-oriented press in which “authori­tarianism” means very different things, and consequently gets badly muddled as a concept. Psychologists use the term authoritarianism to refer, varyingly, to a personality type, a set of behaviors, or a political outlook. Business researchers use it to refer to a leadership style or a means of organizing a workplace. Sociologists and political scientists sometimes use it to refer to a set of policy preferences. If you read these literatures, you will note the obvious generic relationship—something “authoritative” imbued with a sense of hierarchy, order, and some element of coercion. Yet this generic relationship is a conceptual “false friend” and should be cast out of one’s mind when thinking of political regimes.

There is very little evidence that the “authoritarian personality,” popularized by Theodor Adorno and given new life by sociologist Karen Stenner in recent years, has any significant relationship to the type of leaders who run the average authoritarian regime, the type of voter that may support either an existing authoritarian regime or the establishment of one, or the specific set of policies that authoritarian regimes pursue.20 There is something in the social world that is a bundle of the survey-measurement items that psychologists associate with this concept (although such measures are rather controversial), but matching that personality construct to stable political support in a national population, let alone to the structure of a given political regime itself, is either uncertain, unproven, or otherwise unconfirmed.21

Political regimes led by leaders of all ideological flavors and stripes have been authoritarian, and similarly so for democracies. Right- and left-wing examples are easy to come by, but even “liberal” authoritarian regimes were common in nineteenth-century Europe and can be found in places like Singapore today, or in many cosmopolitan empires of earlier centuries. One can go on, but for our purposes we just need to keep in mind that political regime is separate and distinct from personality types, your favorite political enemy, or an out-of-fashion child-raising strategy.

We will also make a few final assumptions to ground our discussion (and thus avoid complications for our speculative scenarios): (1) that there is no global or regional war or other catastrophic exogenous shock that threatens to undermine the territorial integrity of the United States; (2) that there is no active civil war within the United States, nor a major regional insurgency or separatist conflict; and (3) that there are no for­eign interventions into American politics in any significant sense (some­thing far beyond any of the substantiated claims about Russia’s activities during the 2016 election, for example). With that out of the way, let us wander into a bit of gloomy, though hopefully modest, speculation.

A Scenario of Gradual Decay

If the United States were well along the way toward democratic breakdown by a gradual path, we would expect elections becoming less free, media freedoms becoming more restricted, assembly and protest increasingly curtailed, and speech guarantees lapsing. Perhaps we may even notice that bureaucratic officials or the employees of major corporations are personally threatened unless they vote a certain way.22 At some point, on the spectrum ranging from electoral democracy to electoral authoritarianism, we find ourselves on the other side.

An “electoral authoritarian” America would not get rid of elections, nor would it change the formal constitutional order such that it could no longer structurally be a democracy in principle. An electoral authoritarian America would be defined, in almost all likelihood, by two notable characteristics: a popular, charismatic figure sitting in the presidency who has no desire to leave it; and a political party, increasingly lopsided in its electoral support and representation in Congress, who is loyal to and dependent upon that charismatic figure. As a recent article in the Journal of Democracy put it, crafting an electoral authoritarian regime is not a question of backsliding into political disorder, but a process characterized as “building . . . a massive, strategic, ‘uphill’ effort of political entrepreneurship.”23

A popular leader is essential for any gradual transition toward con­solidated electoral authoritarianism. The first obvious hurdle is getting elected to the apex political office—in our case, the presidency—and commanding sufficient popular legitimacy which the new leader can leverage to both tie a political party to him and to achieve significant electoral victories across the country’s political geography. Pursuing a “personalist” style of governance is both helpful under conditions of a legitimacy crisis and bypasses checking institutions that would seek to hamstring a political strategy of growing hegemonic authority.24

On the flipside, it is very difficult to imagine any sort of electoral authoritarian regime existing in the United States without a dominant party to help such a personalist leader take charge of existing political institutions. All model regimes elsewhere (such as modern Russia, Hungary in many accounts, Turkey, Venezuela, or Tanzania, as well as recent past cases such as Mexico under the PRI, Malaysia under UMNO, Egypt under the NPD, etc.) have or had dominant political parties.25 Not all of those states had powerful, institutionalized parties—some are or were quite weak.26 But dominant parties are always present nonetheless, at the very least as political vehicles designed to win unfair elections and ensure that representative bodies are appropriately stacked with loyalist members.

The United States has already experienced two periods in its history in which this was a plausible path—the brief Republican-dominated period under Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and the Democratic Party–dominated era under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. In neither case can we actually call these authoritarian regimes, nor could we say they would have been successful in institutionalizing and stabilizing rule along such lines. Both cases arose under conditions of extreme exigency and even so contained considerable pluralism within the dominant party.

Yet the examples are instructive. Dominant parties are critical for the establishment and maintenance of a plausible electoral authoritarian regime in the United States. A twenty-first-century electoral authoritarian regime would have to convert the Congress into a legislative body dominated—with at least a 60 percent majority to avoid procedural trouble—by one party over multiple elections. It would further have to capture the state houses and governor’s mansions of most of the fifty states or prepare for either open rebellion or tacit separatism in the American equivalent of “the regions.” As Lucan Way has noted in cases like Ukraine, some countries are naturally divided along cultural and institutional lines that make political consolidation inherently difficult—what he terms “pluralism by default”—and the social and political reality in the modern United States bears a resemblance to this concept in important ways.27 The widespread capture of American political institutions alone is a heavy lift under current circumstances, and without such a dominant party, it is difficult to imagine an aspiring electoral authoritarian regime surviving for even just a few years under any gradual backsliding model.

A lucky election and a popular leader and party could get us part of the way there. Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey all saw popular party leaders win decisive national elections, found themselves with lopsided majorities in the national legislature, and then managed to retain their popularity, won subsequent elections, and modified their constitutions and electoral statutes to make winning further elections much easier for themselves.28 What all these cases share, however, is decisive electoral victory first, and only afterward a movement to substantive transition toward a new political regime proper.

Another key trick to establishing an electoral authoritarian regime is that the national leader has to be and remain popular. At least for a good long while. Especially while elections are still strongly contested, or while constitutional regulations are still permissive of political opposition, it is very hard to maintain an electoral authoritarian regime. Those that fail tend to be called hybrid regimes, which do not have much staying power and often see leadership turnover anyway, despite their best efforts (see, for example, the color revolutions in Eastern Europe).29 In this hypothetical, we shall presume the leader of an electoral authoritarian America has no such difficulty and is able to move more smoothly down the path of Putin’s Russia or Erdoğan’s Turkey.

So, if we look five years on, what would we find? We would see a popular president—perhaps he was successful in a widely supported military intervention abroad, or had shut down some threatening extremist group with decisive impunity, or presided over an unprecedented economic wave, or just “undertook good policies and avoided bad policies” surprisingly well over the course of his first term. This president would have won his first election, and his party would then somehow buck trends and win unusually large congressional margins in the midterms despite current levels of polarization. Then, riding the president’s continued wave of support, the party would have to repeat the feat, managing to do even better in the next presidential reelection. Perhaps some governors would also switch parties, while others would manage to lose in surprising ways due to infighting among their own co-partisans. Meanwhile, those politicians that pledged especial loyalty to the rising tide of our popular president would achieve success en masse. Not exactly a simple lift—it is hard to get to dominant party status indeed.

Certainly, there would be group loyalties at play—this president would need to make sure he had the backing of a large core of voters and machine politicians to get over the edge across the country.30 Pick your ethnic and socioeconomic groups that might fit that bill; there are several. But this president and his party would need to be quite disciplined in arguing that they represent nothing less than all the American people, and care for America and our national promise. Perhaps he would also show important care for the world, for global harmony, to fight against widely held evils such as climate change or extractive globalization. Again, pick your issue area at will. Actual authoritarian regimes are not limited to a single ideological subset.

A real authoritarian aspirant would have no truck with esoteric ideologies of either the extreme Right or Left, and would prioritize common sense, obvious everyday values shared by large swathes of the American populace (whatever those might be), and be opposed to violence, to unpopular taxes, and to perceived unfairness. Fairness and unity would be among the watchwords of campaigns, like any good politician.31 In many ways, a president preparing an authoritarian regime by this route would likely be “moderate” or even “centrist” (at least by the standards of the average voter, if not necessarily the existing elite zeitgeist), given the large and pluralist country in which he will have to win his initial overwhelming electoral victories.

Only after these major victories and sustained popularity could we plausibly get our actual institutional backsliding. Picture the following scenario: someone in Congress suggests removing term limits and all of a sudden thirty-eight loyal governors say they would sign such a constitutional amendment. The president demurs, loving American constitutionalism and hating such divisive tactics. Electoral authoritarian regimes often do not change their constitutions drastically even after being consolidated, preferring to just cleverly tinker with electoral systems and abuse decree powers (e.g., executive orders) when they need to, especially in relatively early days.32 No need for Enabling Acts or other such extreme extra-constitutional outliers on the road of autocratization-by-election. The modesty and studied humility of the national leader is often a key rhetorical frame for rulers in electoral authoritarian regimes today.33

In any case, our authoritarian American president will probably prefer to just slowly have his allies buy up television stations and media companies, while taking full advantage of his electoral victories and the embarrassing disarray of his party’s political opponents. As we move toward consolidating the regime, subsequent elections would need to be less uncertain and open to chance. Instrumental opportunism can be of great use at this point, as well as deftly capitalizing on the buoyance of continued genuine popularity.34 Perhaps there could be a crisis, say an economic collapse across the world or a very real foreign policy danger or an oligarchic business figure who supports the political opposition, but just happens to be a devious pedophile. The relevant backdrop is thus set to justify a need to further rein in dissenting opinions—protesters damaging property, media figures insulting our frontline heroes, billionaires not willing to pay their fair share and who are too involved in divisive politics.

And there we could find ourselves. Ten years on, our president has been sworn in for his third term, his party holds constitutional majorities in the House and Senate, as well as most statehouses, perhaps with other co-opted parties running the show in a few states, although not causing trouble. And with those lopsided majorities, soft coercion can run amok—electoral system revisions that benefit the ruling party, extreme gerrymandering, media restrictions, protest limitations, and the gradual replacement of institutional heads (in media, the academy, cultural organizations, grant-making foundations, and the like). Very likely there would be a cowing of wealthy elites on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, and among oligarchs in the natural resource sector. Disloyal or unsupportive wealthy elites are a primary target for any burgeoning electoral authoritarian regime.35 Indeed, the regime would likely be quite popular for many years—that, of course, is the secret. And that is a believable scenario of electoral authoritarian America. It certainly could happen here. But it would be quite hard to get there.

A Scenario of a Sudden Break

There is a second scenario of American authoritarianism, one both far darker and perhaps more plausible than a super-popular president-party combination that manages to secure sustained power. To that let us turn, and sketch a scenario of what America might plausibly look like after a military coup. We will thoroughly ignore how the coup came about, what it was responding to, and which party, sociocultural group, or ideology was in particular favor by the sitting administration that was ultimately the target of said coup d’état.

Let us imagine then the immediate aftermath of the coup—the Joint Chiefs announcing the emergency suspension of constitutional order for a time, given the seriousness of the situation and the traitorous actions of key politicians in power (presumably the sitting president). And then imagine, if you can, the deployment of the military throughout the country, to reassure the nation and safeguard against internal enemies. We would find immediate media and internet blackouts likely, the suspension of constitutional rights to assembly, speech, and the press—perhaps accompanied by the forceful removal of weaponry from seg­ments of the citizenry, although that is far less certain. We are now in the realm of a military junta.

Military juntas are short-lived things, most of the time, as generals desperately want to avoid running the political show over the long term, and even more desperately want to avoid getting blamed when things go south.36 Most juntas punt formal rule to civilians as soon as possible, even if only nominally (there are exceptions, as emergency rule is an inherently varied and uncertain thing). Or should a leading military figure, one who does want to achieve the heights of power, direct the coup, he would likely formally take the reins of state and either doff the uniform or combine both together. Thus the junta quickly turns into some sort of civilian, often personalist, dictatorship, although with a surely oversized role for the military. Of course, the tragedy of military rule is always that it is hard to close “Pandora’s box” once the military becomes involved in politics.37

Suffice it to say that it is likely, given the educational and ideological formation of our military elites, that any such junta would very quickly want a return to formal constitutional order. Indeed, they may deny that said order was ever violated. The coup may even have been undertaken as a favor to a political party in opposition to the presidency, although it would have to be such a serious emergency situation that the political order would have already broken down as well.

Regardless, we have our coup, we have our junta of Joint Chiefs (or, in a particularly unlikely situation, a very well-connected and capable group of generals below them—the “colonels” scenario more common in developing states), and we have presidential authority given over to some civilian. Yet the military is still in the streets, and political insta­bility rocks the nation. Thus, the “tutelary”—that is, an informal veto role outside the constitutional order—position of the military continues, and our brief coup “to protect democracy” becomes a longer-lasting bout of de facto military rule.

How would this situation be justified? There would have to be a constituency for a coup and subsequent tutelary military regime to survive. Many such cases in twentieth- and twenty-first-century history have been based on either upper-middle- and capitalist-class fears of radicalized lower-class rebellion (Latin America) or one ethnic group seeking to gain power over another (sub-Saharan Africa) or radical, violent ideological partisanship (Southeast Asia). The twenty-first-century United States is far too heterogeneous for the middle, and too atomized for the latter—but the first is sufficiently plausible. The signifiers and views of the American upper class may indeed form the contours of what an American junta would seek to safeguard.

Five or so years on, what would such an America look like? It would likely be a personalist dictatorship with a strong, tutelary role for the U.S. armed forces exercised by whatever cadre of coup-plotting generals took the extra-constitutional plunge. The constitution would be abro­gated in practice, if not formally. The Congress would either not meet, or perhaps one of the two major parties would be banned from elections for subversive activities, thus rendering it a submissive, one-party legislature by default (again, note the partial Lincolnian similarities here).

Yet who would this person be, occupying the executive office and leading our new political regime? Here the branching tree of possibilities extends considerably: A general who has claimed the role of national protector in a time of crisis? A charismatic politician who encouraged the coup in the first place, now taking his rightful position to safeguard the return to political order? A cypher figure, just a placeholder for a military cabal to call the shots? Many such variations are possible. Egypt’s regime changes have always brought back military officers to the presidency and held a tutelary role for the armed forces, but eventu­ally reintroduced party politics.38 Coups in Brazil and Argentina left amorphous collectives of generals running the show for a time before gradually reintroducing civilian politics, while in Chile a general took decisive personal control for a decade.39

And how would our tutelary military regime evolve? By one way or another, any group of coup-plotter generals would either release power or one would ascend to civilian authority as much more than just a military figure. We could find ourselves in a form of Caesarism or Bonapartism, with a charismatic leader keeping the constitutional order suspended under emergency rule for a sustained period.40 Or if we consider instead a particularly strong class element to our military regime and its support, perhaps we would see the creation of a form of authoritarian constitutional order, taking on an oligarchic cast, in which the bounds of legal political contestation are sharply curtailed and opposition parties straying outside the limits are banned and their members hunted down.41

Again, military regimes are not long-lasting things, and it is unlikely that the above would be any kind of stable equilibrium for an authoritarian America. As noted, once a coup happens, it is easier to make another, and then another.42 Fragmentation, regional separatism, politi­cal radicalism, and deep social mistrust all are likely outcomes of this kind of authoritarian rule. In many ways, the Caesarist outcome would likely be the most stable among the above options—moving toward a full, personalist dictatorship at least has the benefit of lasting (usually) as long as the leader is alive43—although the road to consolidated authoritarian rule remains steep.

What This Exercise Tells Us

A little dose of speculative authoritarianism is a great treatment for a case of political hyperbole and conceptual hyperventilation. An unfortu­nately large share of the non-scholarly writing on democratic backsliding in the United States has both too little and too much imagination, believing both in an imminent fascist takeover and anachronistic suppression of dissent, yet only by bare “minority rule” through the procedural quirks of the Electoral College and Senate. In a country split essentially evenly across two poorly institutionalized political parties with absolutely no unifying political figure in sight, this seems difficult to maintain.

One also notices how many types of authoritarian regimes are not even considered in the above two speculations. There is not going to be any techno-utopian absolute monarchy suddenly emerging, contra cer­tain esoteric dreamers in the world of neoreaction.44 Nor is it produc­tive to speculate about the establishment of a real theocracy, despite a recent renewal of interest among certain thinkers in the medieval authoritarian historical experience.45 And the likelihood of some sort of ideocratic (i.e., fascist or communist) party-state emerging is similarly very close to zero—just imagining the cat-herding required to keep the current American parties together makes visions of Chinese Communist Party–style cadres planting themselves in suburbs from California to Wisconsin to South Carolina particularly laughable. Thus, a wide swathe of potential forms of authoritarian rule are functionally off the table, and so can be ignored outside the delusionary realms of fantasists.

Taking the threat of authoritarianism seriously means taking the practical—and actual, real-world—nature of authoritarian rule seriously. The United States, insofar as it resembles European and Eurasian states, is vulnerable primarily to its electoral institutions being subverted over time through popular politics. Insofar as it resembles Latin American nations, it is similarly vulnerable to military intervention in politics and the varied outcomes of post-coup regime restabilization. We can dream many dreams, but these are the realities we face as the autocratic twenty-first century moves forward.

Indeed, this exercise should make clear that neither cries of incipient fascism nor dark mutterings about an all-pervasive surveillance regime hit the mark insofar as they describe actually existing authoritarian regimes. All of the commonly cited cases of the gradual establishment of an electoral authoritarian regime (Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary, Serbia, and so on) require a nationally popular leader with a nationally popular ruling party that can win majorities in the federal legislature and across provincial bodies over multiple elections. And all the Egyptian, Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Ugandan, Indonesian, and other cases of a coup and the establishment of a military regime require a politically activist military and obvious alignment with key socioeconomic groups that are in favor of military intervention.

The greatest problem with wish-casting authoritarianism in the modern United States is the complete failure to understand what successfully consolidating an authoritarian regime really entails under either scenario. One must be able to control a large set of political and economic organizations: the national-level political institutions, the state‑level political institutions, the judiciary, the military apparatus, the media, the wealthy elite, the socially and politically relevant corporations, and significant segments of the population. Indeed, even recent scholarly accounts of democratic “resilience” recognize the many diffi­culties of ending democracy in established political regimes.46 For electoral variants of authoritarianism, it is basically impossible to do so unless one can conceivably win considerable majority power in elections—at least once, usually twice! For military regimes, that popu­lar support can be much lower, but alliances with economic and social groups are even more important after the dust from the coup settles.

The United States is a country of 330 million people, spread across an entire continent, containing a smorgasbord of overlapping racial, ethnic, and class segments, divided into a multitude of powerful state governments whose legitimacy and political authority are centuries old and practically meaningful to the lives of their respective citizens, in one of the oldest democracies in the world.47 America, especially in eras of high polarization, is in many relevant respects “pluralist by default.” There is no “seize the radio tower, seize the country” moment for the United States, no more than there is a scenario in which a leadership whose popularity barely crests 50 percent (of 330 million!) can so heavily bear down on institutions and society. To say it would be hard to institutionalize and consolidate genuine authoritarianism in America is an under­statement.

But that is not to say it is impossible. Nor is it to say that—even if we never arrive at consolidated authoritarian rule in the United States—the American democracy will remain in good health as far as political regimes go (or our normative concerns may prefer). Electoral democracies are not immune to the lure of technocracy or the cartelization of political parties—two issues that are major causes of the very political legitimacy crises in Europe and North America that we have today, in which vibrant, contested mass electoral politics and growing elite preferences for rule by experts are increasingly opposed.48

Meanwhile, the particular structure of our political institutions means that both executive aggrandizement and de facto juristocratic decision-making can live side-by-side with a minimalist conception of electoral democracy and still-substantive representative government. We may not enjoy this degradation of the republic and may increasingly need to resort to the concept of a plural oligarchy to explain its politics, but America would still remain an electoral democracy. And if we are desperate to find authoritarianism, it is more plausible to search for questionable political orders sustaining themselves at the subnational level, although that brings a whole different set of classification challeng­es. Of course, the dire possibility of political violence and even civil conflict could certainly tear our shared national polity asunder in tragic ways well beyond the scope of this essay and its assumptions. Yet stable authoritarian rule is none of these things, and we should be quick to delineate conceptual differences when we discuss the myriad problems and discontents of twenty-first-century American political life.

Indeed, the vignette speculations provided here perhaps, in synthesis, suggest a more likely trajectory in the longue durée of American history should our democratic regime end. In many ways, the plausibility of a Caesarist outcome is worth spending the most time on, as thinkers in previous eras—from the founding to the Civil War to the immediate post–World War II era—often did. A combination of the abrupt suspen­sion of constitutional order due to a military coup in the wake of a terrible national tragedy, followed by the quick handing of political power to a decisive, charismatic politician (and likely a former celebrity, if we take the need for national-level popularity seriously) has been conceivable before. This certainly could lead to a form of consolidated American Caesarism in due course.

But if we do wish to indulge our authoritarian fantasies, we are better off dropping the interwar anachronisms and autocratic reveries to admit a potentially far stranger reality. In our actually existing America, and with only a modestly facetious stretch, we are far more likely to get something like a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson regime than anything else, for better or for worse.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 1 (Spring 2022): 158–178.

Notes
1 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020); Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018); Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Crown, 2017); Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York: Doubleday, 1935).

2 Rachel Beatty Riedl et al., “Authoritarian-Led Democratization,” Annual Review of Political Science 23, no. 1 (2020): 315–32; Scott Gehlbach, Konstantin Sonin, and Milan W. Svolik, “Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 19, no. 1 (2016): 565–84; Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz, and Joseph G. Wright, “Military Rule,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014): 147–62; Beatriz Magaloni and Ruth Kricheli, “Political Order and One-Party Rule,” Annual Review of Political Science 13, no. 1 (May 2010): 123–43; Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism,” Annual Review of Political Science 12, no. 1 (June 2009): 403–22.

3 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso Books, 2013).

4 Sheri Berman, “The Causes of Populism in the West,” Annual Review of Political Science 24, no. 1 (2021): 71–88; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash and the Rise of Populism: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Robert C. Lieberman et al., “The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis,” Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 2 (June 2019): 470–79.

5 Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018).

6 Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 51–65; Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Daniel Ziblatt, “How Did Europe Democratize?,” World Politics 58, no. 2 (January 2006): 311–38.

7 Michael Coppedge et al., “V-Dem Dataset V11.1,” (Rochester, N.Y.: Social Science Research Network, April 22, 2021); Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes,” Politics and Governance 6, no. 1 (March 19, 2018): 60–77.

8 Melis G. Laebens and Anna Lührmann, “What Halts Democratic Erosion?: The Changing Role of Accountability,” Democratization 28, no. 5 (July 2021): 908–28; Nazifa Alizada et al., “Democracy Report 2021. Autocratization Turns Viral,” (V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, 2021); Seraphine F. Maerz et al., “A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset,” (Rochester, N.Y.: Social Science Research Network, February 1, 2021); Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?,” Democratization 26, no. 7 (October 3, 2019): 1095–1113.

9 Alizada et al., “Democracy Report 2021. Autocratization Turns Viral.”

10 See, for example, a recent article on the electoral authoritarian regime tentatively being built by Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, which fruitfully uses the Levitsky and Ziblatt framework to describe both the “populist” aspects of Bukele’s activities as well as the breakdown of political legitimacy over the last three decades, but also describes without analysis how the transition to authoritarianism took place through capturing formal political institutions. See: Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, “Latin America Erupts: Millennial Authoritarianism in El Salvador,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 3 (2021): 19–32.

11 Lee Drutman, “Why the Two-Party System Is Effing Up U.S. Democracy,” Five Thirty Eight, July 16, 2021. Drutman is quite vocal on social media about his belief in the very near threat of specifically competitive authoritarianism in the United States, see for example, his tweet: “If democracy collapses into competitive authoritarianism, what good is a legislative filibuster?” His book takes more cues from the “norm-breaking” argument, however, and focuses on potentials for political violence. Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

12 Zach Beauchamp, “Call It Authoritarianism,” Vox, June 15, 2021.

13 Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 313–31; Milan W. Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Vilde Lunnan Djuve, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Tore Wig, “Patterns of Regime Breakdown Since the French Revolution,” Comparative Political Studies 53, no. 6 (May 1, 2020): 923–58; Luca Tomini and Claudius Wagemann, “Varieties of Contemporary Democratic Breakdown and Regression: A Comparative Analysis,” European Journal of Political Research 57, no. 3 (2018): 687–716.

14 Adam Przeworski, “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” in Democracy’s Value, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55; David Owen, “Democracy,” in Political Concepts, ed. Richard Bellamy and Andrew Mason (Manchester University Press, 2003), 105–17.

15 Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10.

16 If one prefers a thicker conception of democracy, see the academic literature that starts from Dahl onward, see: Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (Yale University Press, 1971).

17 Gehlbach, Sonin, and Svolik, “Formal Models of Nondemocratic Politics”; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.”

18 Carsten Anckar and Cecilia Fredriksson, “Classifying Political Regimes 1800–2016: A Typology and a New Dataset,” European Political Science 18, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 84–96.

19 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

20 Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt, “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness, but an Eternal Dynamic within Liberal Democracies,” Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America, ed. Cass R. Sunstein (New York: Harper Collins, 2018), 175–219; Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1993).

21 Carol Galais and Guillem Rico, “An Unjustified Bad Reputation? The Dark Triad and Support for Populism,” Electoral Studies 72 (August 1, 2021): 102357; Joseph H. Manson, “Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Left-Wing Authoritarianism, and Pandemic-Mitigation Authoritarianism,” Personality and Individual Differences 167 (December 1, 2020): 110251; P. D. Harms et al., “Autocratic Leaders and Authoritarian Followers Revisited: A Review and Agenda for the Future,” Leadership Quarterly 29, no. 1 (February 1, 2018): 105–22; John Duckitt et al., “A Tripartite Approach to Right-Wing Authoritarianism: The Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism Model,” Political Psychology 31, no. 5 (2010): 685–715.

22 Timothy Frye, Ora John Reuter, and David Szakonyi, “Vote Brokers, Clientelist Appeals, and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Russia and Venezuela,” World Politics 71, no. 4 (October 2019): 710–46; Timothy Frye, Ora John Reuter, and David Szakonyi, “Political Machines at Work Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace,” World Politics 66, no. 2 (April 2014): 195–228.

23 V. Ximena Velasco Guachalla et al., “Latin America Erupts: When Does Competitive Authoritarianism Take Root?,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 3 (2021): 65.

24 Erica Frantz et al., “How Personalist Politics Is Changing Democracies,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 3 (2021): 94–108; Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave,” Perspectives on Politics (2021): 1–13.

25 Ora John Reuter, The Origins of Dominant Parties: Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Rico Isaacs and Sarah Whitmore, “The Limited Agency and Life-Cycles of Personalized Dominant Parties in the Post-Soviet Space: The Cases of United Russia and Nur Otan,” Democratization 21, no. 4 (June 7, 2014): 699–721; Ora John Reuter and Thomas F. Remington, “Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem: The Case of United Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 4 (April 1, 2009): 501–26.

26 Anne Meng, “Ruling Parties in Authoritarian Regimes: Rethinking Institutional Strength,” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2 (April 2021): 526–40; Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

27 Lucan Way, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

28 Andrea L. P. Pirro and Ben Stanley, “Forging, Bending, and Breaking: Enacting the ‘Illiberal Playbook’ in Hungary and Poland,” Perspectives on Politics (July 2021): 1–16; Selim Koru, “The Institutional Structure of ‘New Turkey,’” Foreign Policy Research Institute Strategy Paper, Black Sea Initiative (February 2021): 1–47; Lise Esther Herman, “Re-Evaluating the Post-Communist Success Story: Party Elite Loyalty, Citizen Mobilization and the Erosion of Hungarian Democracy,” European Political Science Review 8, no. 2 (May 2016): 251–84; Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold-Becerra, “Venezuela: Crowding Out the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 2 (2007): 99–113.

29 Way, Pluralism by Default; Jason Brownlee, “Portents of Pluralism: How Hybrid Regimes Affect Democratic Transitions,” American Journal of Political Science 53, no. 3 (June 23, 2009): 515–32.

30 Tatiana Tkacheva and Grigorii V. Golosov, “United Russia’s Primaries and the Strength of Political Machines in the Regions of Russia: Evidence from the 2016 Duma Elections,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 5 (May 30, 2019): 1–16; Grigorii V. Golosov, “The Territorial Genealogies of Russia’s Political Parties and the Transferability of Political Machines,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 6 (November 2, 2014): 464–80; Ora John Reuter, “The Politics of Dominant Party Formation: United Russia and Russia’s Governors,” Europe-Asia Studies 62, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 293–327.

31 Oksana Drozdova and Paul Robinson, “A Study of Vladimir Putin’s Rhetoric,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 5 (May 28, 2019): 805–23; Greg Simons, “Stability and Change in Putin’s Political Image During the 2000 and 2012 Presidential Elections: Putin 1.0 and Putin 2.0?,” Journal of Political Marketing 15, no. 2–3 (July 2, 2016): 149–70.

32 Tom Ginsburg, “Beyond Window Dressing: Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes,” Modern Constitutions, ed. Rogers M. Smith and Richard R. Beeman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 133–53; Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser, eds., Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

33 Richard Sakwa, “Putin’s Leadership: Character and Consequences,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 6 (August 1, 2008): 879–97.

34 Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, “The Popularity of Authoritarian Leaders: A Cross-National Investigation,” World Politics 72, no. 4 (October 2020): 601–38; Derek S. Hutcheson and Bo Petersson, “Shortcut to Legitimacy: Popularity in Putin’s Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 7 (August 8, 2016): 1107–26; Richard Sakwa, “Putin and the Oligarchs,” New Political Economy 13, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 185–91.

35 Lily L. Tsai, When People Want Punishment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Margarete Klein and Hans-Henning Schröder, Presidents, Oligarchs and Bureaucrats: Forms of Rule in the Post-Soviet Space (London: Routledge, 2016).

36 Geddes, Frantz, and Wright, “Military Rule”; S. E. Finer, “The Retreat to the Barracks: Notes on the Practice and the Theory of Military Withdrawal from the Seats of Power,” Third World Quarterly 7, no. 1 (January 1, 1985): 16–30.

37 Geddes, Frantz, and Wright, “Military Rule”; Gordon Richards, “The Rise and Decline of Military Authoritarianism in Latin America: The Role of Stabilization Policy,” SAIS Review 5, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 1985): 155–71; Amos Perlmutter, “The Comparative Analysis of Military Regimes: Formations, Aspirations, and Achievements,” World Politics 33, no. 1 (October 1980): 96–120.

38 Irene Weipert-Fenner, The Autocratic Parliament: Power and Legitimacy in Egypt, 1866–2011 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2020).

39 Anthony W. Pereira, “Samuel P. Huntington, Brazilian ‘Decompression’ and Democracy,” Journal of Latin American Studies 53, no. 1 (May 2021): 349–71; Carlos Huneeus, The Pinochet Regime (Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006); Guillermo A. O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

40 Anton Jäger, “Caesarism and Republicanism in the Political Thought of Thomas E. Watson,” American Political Thought 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2021): 419–49; Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, eds., Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

41 Alfred C. Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

42 Nam Kyu Kim, “Previous Military Rule and Democratic Survival,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 65, no. 2–3 (February 1, 2021): 534–62; Curtis Bell, “Coup d’État and Democracy,” Comparative Political Studies 49, no. 9 (August 1, 2016): 1,167–1,200.

43 Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.”

44 Joshua Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 187–203.

45 Julian G. Waller, “Quirks in the Neo-Integralist Vision,” Church Life Journal, February 4, 2021.

46 Wolfgang Merkel and Anna Lührmann, “Resilience of Democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges,” Democratization 28, no. 5 (July 2021): 869–84; Vanessa A. Boese et al., “How Democracies Prevail: Democratic Resilience as a Two-Stage Process,” Democratization 28, no. 5 (July 2021): 885–907.

47 Daron Acemoglu et al., “(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support,” Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2021; Milan Svolik, “Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation,” American Political Science Review 102, no. 2 (May 2008): 153–68.

48 Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (New York: Harvard University Press, 2018); Sheri Berman, “The Pipe Dream of Undemocratic Liberalism,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 3 (July 2017): 29–38; Mair, Ruling the Void.


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