Authoritarianism, Reform, or Capture?: Democracy in Trump’s America

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way are among the most prominent scholars of comparative politics in the world. Their collective and individual works are highly cited contributions to academic research on democratization and authoritarianism and have given us considerable insights into the study of modern political regimes. Their analysis of the rise of “competitive authoritarianism” revolutionized the study of nondemocratic regimes in the post–Cold War era.¹ This research provid­ed a toolkit for understanding authoritarian regimes that structurally resembled democratic ones, a curious political phenomenon increasingly found worldwide over the last thirty years.

In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, they build on this earlier work to assess the state of contemporary American politics.² In doing so, they make the bold and provocative claim that the United States is experiencing a transformation from democracy into this very same competitive authoritarianism. We believe that their analysis is unconvincing and their attempt to apply their own conceptual apparatus flawed. It is, therefore, necessary to provide a counterargument using the very same theoretical paradigm that has been misapplied to the American case. We do so in the interests both of scholarly debate and to ensure that informed American readers are not given the unchallenged impression that social science tells them they live, or soon will, in an authoritarian regime.

The Competitive Authoritarian Framework

Levitsky and Way are writing to shake readers out of perceived indifference to looming authoritarianism. As they note, “many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown. After all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.” This optimism, however, is misplaced, in their telling. As they see it, “democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history.”

In making this case, they forecast that the breakdown of American democracy will not result in a “classic” dictatorship or a totalitarian regime—but rather in a competitive authoritarian system. In such regimes, the structures of liberal democratic constitutions are in place (directly elected executives and legislatures, multiparty elections, inde­pendent courts, and so on), and these formal democratic institutions are viewed as the principal means of gaining power, but incumbents violate democratic rules so often and to such an extent that the regime fails to meet minimum standards for functional democracy.

In short, a competitive authoritarian regime is an autocracy masquerading as a democracy. The “competitive” element describes the public politics of such a regime, which is partially contested by a genuine political opposition but on a highly uneven political playing field (the slightly broader term “electoral authoritarianism” is sometimes used interchangeably, often by those wanting to make no claims about the state of the political opposition).³

Competitive authoritarian regimes differ from other authoritarian regimes, such as absolute monarchies, party-states, or military juntas, by relying on formal elections to choose decision-making officeholders, by maintaining broadly liberal democratic constitutions, and by not entirely stage-managing party politics. Authoritarian regimes are highly diverse, and competitive authoritarian variants are merely one of many contemporary options. Competitive authoritarianism is unique and striking insofar as it is the most “democratic” of all authoritarian regime types, at least in a purely institutional sense.

To that end, it is helpful to understand what we mean by democracy, and, therefore, what exactly has to fall short to usher in a transition to authoritarianism. Widely agreed minimum standards for a modern democracy are as follows: (1) leaders are chosen through free and fair elections; (2) most adults possess the right to vote; (3) political rights and civil liberties are broadly protected; and (4) elected authorities possess real authority to govern, without tutelary control from unelected officials.⁴

Competitive authoritarian regimes differ from democracies because major violations of the above criteria create a systematically distorted zone of political contest between government and opposition, even while they otherwise share the same formal constitutional schema. The political playing field is comprehensively lopsided, and pervasive bias exists across a range of political, state, economic, and social institutions. This unfair dynamic prevents the opposition from conceivably winning power, outside of a major error on the part of the government or a disastrous political crisis. Competitive authoritarian regimes are not immortal, of course, and do share a tendency for surprise transitions due to their reliance on regular elections that structurally build in a chance of going off the rails. One set of notable examples of this phenomenon includes the competitive authoritarian regimes that fell during the wave of Color Revolutions in postcommunist Eastern Europe in the 2000s.⁵

Critically, a competitive authoritarian regime, while maintaining the formal institutional trappings of democracy, does not hold to the level political landscape necessary for the uncertainty over election outcomes that define modern democratic systems and produce regular rotations of power. To be clear, this is not an abstract claim about generic or temporary political unevenness among competing parties: democracies often find one party maintaining office for long stretches of time. In competitive authoritarianism, the state systematically abuses monetary and bureaucratic resources to produce lopsided election outcomes; the political opposition is regularly harassed, attacked, jailed, or even killed; media are persecuted and largely coopted or controlled by the regime; and political expression is regularly and significantly curtailed.⁶

This is not merely a theoretical exercise for terminologically inclined social scientists. The concept takes important real-world cues from postcommunist and Latin American cases, such as Serbia under Slobodan Milošević, Ukraine under Leonid Kuchma, Peru under Alberto Fujimori, and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez.⁷ In all of these cases, authoritarian control is not minor or contestable, and it is not merely a form of constitutional hardball or polarized and combative politics. Rather, it involves egregiously tilted media environments; weak opposition parties, controlled local and regional officials; thoroughly compliant parliaments and judiciaries; massive state interference in election campaigns through money, targeted regulations, and administrative resources; and even regime pressure on state employees (such as teachers or bureaucrats, or state-owned factory workers) to vote a certain way.

This picture is simply not in the same ballpark as modern American democracy. And that remains true even if it is certainly undergoing a major stress test within the bureaucracy and is likely set for considerable constitutional contestation with elements of the federal judiciary over the extent of bureaucratic autonomy and executive control. The United States has a long and uninterrupted history of democratic rule, a strong and diverse economy not reliant on direct state control, a robust set of democratic institutions populated by large minorities of active opposition party members, multilevel federalism with the political opposition in control of many states, and a flourishing civil society ecosystem. Levitsky and Way erroneously present the United States as a case of transition to competitive authoritarianism when there is no such evidence, certainly not aligned with any of the cases used to derive the concept in the first place.

America today squarely fits within the core dimensions of democracy as we understand it in the modern world. Admittedly, the electoral system in the United States is idiosyncratic, being just one of a handful of democracies without nationwide voter ID laws, centralized elections management, or state funding for political parties. Perhaps most notably, it retains the unusual institution of the Electoral College to select the president. U.S. elections remain free and fair, however. The 2024 election showed very little evidence of electoral malfeasance. Suffrage is practically universal. The judiciary remains notably independent, evidenced not least by the ongoing interbranch contests over nationwide injunctions and the bevy of lawsuits against the administration put forward by well-funded legal teams over the last several months.⁸ Elected authorities are not constrained by tutelary military leaders, religious authorities, or unelected bureaucrats.

In Levitsky and Way’s own words, “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.” There is no variety of authoritarianism, competitive or otherwise, in which the executive is seriously constrained, power is diffused across institutions, and persistent uncertainty over election outcomes remains. This is, in fact, democracy.

Autocratization Is Harder than It Looks

Despite free and fair elections, institutional resilience, and a vibrant opposition with strong representation in Congress and the states, there are certainly reasons why scholars may be concerned with the health and stability of the American political order. Levitsky and Way understandably highlight “the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy” as a key change since January 20th of this year, which has certainly concentrated minds in recent months. Yet the ongoing, hostile reformatting of the federal bureaucracy by the current administration is not a question of regime, but one of state reform or state capture (depending on one’s normative viewpoint).

This matters because shaking up a state bureaucracy does not in itself make a competitive authoritarian regime, nor does the executive branch of government asserting the right to delimit and influence executive agencies to a greater degree render democracy inoperable. In many ways, the parvenue state reformism campaign by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a novelty of considerable ambiguity, but authoritarian regimes very rarely destroy their own bureaucracies: rather, they preserve their powers to use it in their interests.

Furthermore, there are many reasons to doubt that a transition to competitive authoritarianism is so easy as to be predictable less than half a year into a new administration.⁹ Most critical is the role of sustained electoral competition. Elections are the crucial arena of factional competition in democracies and must be closely managed in competitive authoritarian regimes. In competitive authoritarianism, incumbents routinely abuse their administrative leverage to maintain systematically unfair electoral advantage.¹⁰

Indeed, the so-called authoritarian playbook to manage elections and control politics is actually quite specific: hard control over electoral commissions and the mechanical counting of ballots; fundamental changes to the electoral system through either widespread single-member district gerrymandering or high-threshold proportional repre­sentation to foreclose opposition parties from translating their votes to seats (thereby enabling disproportionate majorities for the government); and the cooptation of legislators, governors, and mayors by the ruling party to ensure a comfortable pro-regime majority across all major policymaking institutions, either at the national or subnational levels. There is as yet no evidence of systematic use of state resources for electoral purposes in the United States.

We can take the 2024 election as a helpful touchstone example. In that election, the incumbent governing party outspent the succeeding administration’s campaign by a significant amount and received greater numbers of donations from high-wealth individuals and corporations while doing so.¹¹ If there is any analytic weight to the idea of a pervasive, controlling oligarchy in American democracy, it is not reducible to the minority set of billionaires, foundations, and corporate apparati supporting the current administration relative to their even more flush political opponents. As Levitsky and Way themselves state, “opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable.” This is not a party system dynamic resembling modern authoritarian rule. The political opposition is not cowing in the corner as a failed David overmatched by a triumphant Goliath. They simply lost. They are hardly gone and are in no sense systematically incapable of effectively challenging the government in high politics.

Second, in competitive authoritarianism, media coverage is systematically unbalanced against the opposition. In all cases, competitive authoritarian regimes have lopsided, pro-government media ecosystems. The government directly controls media outlets (as in Russia), uses state purchases of advertising to fund or deny funding to publications (as in Hungary), or puts direct legal pressure on journalists and editors among the small number of opposition-oriented outlets existing (as in Turkey).¹²

In the United States, while there is evidence of media bias, it is across a very diverse and pluralistic network of television stations, newspapers, and online platforms protected by strong constitutional speech guaran­tees. Indeed, the majority of newspaper and television outlets are currently engaging in aggressive oversight reporting on administration activities. This is not close to the pro-government media ecosystem of a competitive authoritarian regime. It is rather the media environment of a competitive, if pugilistic, democracy.

Third, American opposition politicians freely operate and campaign, are not systematically jailed or exiled, nor are they banned from running for office, and enjoy legal protections and due process. While electoral violence is a real concern, not least the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump during his campaign, there is no evidence to suggest that the government is systematically targeting the opposition in a comparable way to other competitive authoritarian regimes. President Biden’s retrospective pardons during his final days of office further enforce the protections offered to politically vulnerable elites. This is simply not the political environment of a state under authoritarian rule.

There are several additional barriers in front of the potential autocratization of the United States. Most of them were not present in modern competitive authoritarian regimes when looking at the historical and contemporary record. First, America’s strong tradition of local governance provides a crucial layer of resistance to centralized authoritarian control and creates separate, electorally accountable incentives for tens of thousands of political officials to make their own determination over how they will interact with the federal government, rather than being forced to bend the knee. Second, the vast expanse of independent professional organizations serves as additional checks on government overreach, with resources to find judicial remedies, organize protest, and fund political activities. Lastly, the decentralized nature of the U.S. educational system helps maintain considerable intellectual independence. Indeed, the current fight over educational funding should further an environment of freethinking on campus, a new, if belated, appreciation for the dangers of reliance on government funding, and the true mission of educational nonprofit organizations.

Given that last fact, it is perhaps surprising that recent plans to abolish the Department of Education have not been met with overwhelming support from those opposing potential autocratization of the United States. Any authoritarian ruler worth his or her salt would be savoring the opportunity to bend the Department of Education firmly to the will of the government, while expanding its ability to indoctrinate the population. Instead, the administration’s approach in its first hundred days, while unsophisticated and disruptive, looks nothing like the comprehensive, pro-regime ideological policies often pushed for­ward by authoritarian education ministries.¹³ Given all of this, it is surprising how easy many senior academics with an excellent grasp of deep nuance on autocratization have suddenly leapt to the conclusion that “America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism.”

Misapplication and Moderation

Perhaps the most questionable statement in Levitsky and Way’s article is their prognosis that “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.” This prognosis simply is not based on reality, or at least any observed reality so far. Establishing authoritarianism, even of the competitive authoritarian variety, is a long and arduous task. Constitutional hardball, the collapse of norms, the restructuring of the state, harsh and polarized political rhetoric, and interbranch contestation may all be signs of a lack of health and stability in the body politic, but these are not expressions of immanent authoritarianism.

While vigilance against democratic erosion is certainly warranted, the path to competitive authoritarianism in the American context would face significantly more obstacles than suggested by Levitsky and Way. Indeed, we can very helpfully take another concept developed by Way himself to underline this point. The United States is a vast, continent-sized polity containing a rich diversity of complicated cultural, ethnic, class, and regional components across a population of more than 330 million citizens, cut into substantial state governments with major authorities delegated by the constitutional order. In Way’s terms, the United States is likely “pluralist by default,” with far too many distinct interests and decentralized governance mechanisms to capture easily.¹⁴ It would be very hard to do this—and harder to predict successfully.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Levitsky and Way are engaged in unreasonable conceptual stretching. Defined by the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori, this academic phenomenon occurs when scholars try to make concepts “travel” to new contexts by broadening their meaning and range of application without reducing their defining attributes.¹⁵ This results in vague and amorphous conceptualizations that lose their analytical precision and utility. Think of the interminable and largely useless “fascism” debate as just one example.¹⁶ Whatever the relevance of the term for historical analysis, it is likely unhelpful today and has been made so by overuse, misapplication, and specious stretching. Levitsky and Way’s procrustean application of the competitive authoritarianism framework to American politics only works with unacceptable degrees of stretching.

None of this is necessary. Scholars can and should express alarm at political developments in the United States without claiming that it is “on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism.” There is enough grist for the analytic mill as it stands without fetishizing autocratization. The unique role of Elon Musk and the use of DOGE as a digital bludgeon against the sprawling American federal state is arguably a twenty-first-century novelty, sui generis to the United States for the time being. We would point to this as a critical topic of interest for future research. Indeed, thinking seriously about state capture is significantly more fruitful than asserting that the United States is not a democracy today.¹⁷ In the other column of news-dominating political developments, the huge salvos of injunctions by district courts may prove to be a path toward constitutional crisis as the government begins simply to ignore perceived court overreach—a clearly unhealthy dynamic.¹⁸ And while certainly bound to produce tumultuous politics, neither of these spell the end of democracy.

State Reform or State Capture?

It is useful to take a final excursus into the most unusual and genuinely new aspect of the second Trump administration: DOGE and the role of Elon Musk. As of the time of this writing in June 2025, Musk has effectively severed ties with the White House and is in the midst of a heated public feud with the president. But his outsized role for roughly the first five months of this administration nonetheless merits close attention and analysis. For that experience calls forth a different conceptual vocabulary than that of competitive authoritarianism, one that could, in fact, be more useful in the days and years ahead as the American state further enmeshes its activities and objectives with a powerful and overrepresented tech sector. This is, of course, a trend that long preceded the Trump era and that will almost certainly continue for its remainder and beyond, even without Musk at the helm; needless to say, there is no shortage of equally ambitious tech moguls who aspire to take his place and are well positioned to do so.

The narrative about Musk’s place in government through DOGE presents a cautionary tale for hasty analysis and judgment rendering. As early as February 2025, commentators were making dramatic (almost apocalyptic) proclamations comparing Musk to Stalin and suggesting he was “setting himself up as dictator of the United States.”¹⁹ These voices claimed he had masterminded Trump’s election campaign (an assertion later repeated by Musk himself) and was pulling puppet strings across the government. Some warned that Musk had been positioning himself to potentially take over if or when Trump becomes incapacitated and was in the meantime establishing “political commissars” throughout federal agencies to enforce authoritarian compliance with his future dictatorship. The reality appears significantly more mundane.

Since DOGE amounts to something quite novel, it is theoretically difficult to relate to most empirical autocratization episodes in recent history. There is no Russian, Turkish, Serbian, Hungarian, Venezuelan, or other case study of note in which an autocratizing executive empowers an outside intervention into internal bureaucratic workings (and note, at a very technical level) designed as a hostile attempt to reorient that bureaucracy away from its operational status quo, which was perceived to benefit the political opposition.

If DOGE were to succeed in its efforts, the proper comparison might be to a kind of twenty-first century modernizing Meiji Restoration, or the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms of Prussia, or America’s own Progressive Era, or perhaps even the New Deal itself. In fact, the closest recent attempt at a DOGE-like bureaucratic assault occurred in countries usually lauded by NGOs and democracy promotion activists: Estonia and Georgia.²⁰

In both states, poorly performing, deadweight postcommunist bureaucracies were taken on by idealistic reformers. In Estonia, advo­cates of change pursued an ideal of e-government in which bureaucratic friction would be minimized and government functions made highly accessible. In Georgia, the push for efficiency led to masses of bureaucrats being summarily fired, and in the name of transparency, the government built performative, glass box-like “Public Service Halls” as one-stop shops where all forms and procedures were filed in full public view as a means of forcing oversight and shaming bribery attempts.²¹ These efforts were viewed as forms of liberal reform supporting democratization by NGOs, activists, and academics at the time, but it is not a tale that would be told today, of course.

As of June 2025, what is most interesting about the story of DOGE is that it has been widely regarded as a failure. At the time of Musk’s exit, DOGE claimed to have saved $180 billion, very far from the $2 trillion deficit-reduction goal with which it began.²² And as the conservative activist Chris Rufo noted, while it failed to “cut the federal budget by roughly a third; deliver technocratic improvements to make government efficient; and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse,” its real promise was in its ability to go about “an ideological purge.” In this, it also only succeeded in part.²³ If DOGE was meant to be a leather-coated commissariat, it did not succeed during the initial 2025 Staatsblitzkrieg of the new administration.

But the case of DOGE simply does not need to be thought of in terms of political regime. Rather, it should be approached through the lens of the state, either as a reactionary reform against an entrenched and sclerotic bureaucracy, or as a means of contouring the state to produce outcomes benefiting the private good of Tech Right–aligned billionaires such as Musk.

To that end, the concept of “state capture” may also prove analytically useful for understanding ongoing political developments, especially when juxtaposed with the powerful idea of the benefits of disruptive reformism, which are widely shared especially among younger cohorts in the new administration. State capture describes the systematic subversion of state institutions by powerful elites who reshape laws, regulations, and policies to serve their private interests rather than the public good.²⁴ Unlike competitive authoritarianism, which requires the comprehensive tilting of electoral competition and systematic harassment of political opposition, state capture can occur within functioning democratic systems through the influence of individuals or groups who shape the formation of basic rules of the game through various means, including but not limited to illicit payments.²⁵

Yet state capture is a variable phenomenon. Indeed, some forms of state capture have proven to be economically beneficial up to a point, when coupled with a strong and assertive developmentalist agenda, while other cases have often led to stagnation and decline.²⁶ From South Korea’s sprawling chaebols to South Africa’s nexus of dynastic oligarchy and dominant party politics to the more prosaic forms of crony corruption found in nineteenth century America and industrialist cliques across pre–World War I Europe, instances of state capture are both widely diverse and distinct from pure questions of regime.

The early months of the Trump administration witnessed an unprecedented experiment in unusual techno-corporate influence over federal functions. The role of the world’s richest man in DOGE represented something qualitatively different from traditional lobbying or the swampy revolving door between government and industry that has long characterized elite-level American politics. Rather than seeking to influence policy from the outside or transitioning from private sector leadership to government service, Musk maintained his position as the world’s wealthiest individual while simultaneously wielding extraordinary influence over federal bureaucratic restructuring. This arrangement quickly created potential conflicts of interest on a scale rarely seen in American political history, likely not since before the New Deal.

The mechanisms through which this influence operated bear some resemblance to state capture dynamics observed in other contexts. For example, in South Africa, the relationship between President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family illustrated how private actors can gain disproportionate influence over state decision-making processes, includ­ing ministerial appointments and public procurement, for private gain.²⁷ A useful contrast can be made with Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party systematically placed loyal allies in key state institutions while using state resources to benefit connected business networks, a process also described as state capture.²⁸ The latter is not how DOGE has functioned (appointee policy remains pluralistic and divided across the larger Trump coalition), which further points to the limitations of comparing dynamics here with those elsewhere.

DOGE’s Muddled Impact and Legacy

The uniqueness of DOGE stems in part from its oddly wide remit. DOGE’s mandate extended far beyond typical advisory roles, encompassing everything from technical updates of government IT systems to dramatic alterations in staffing and budgetary decisions across federal agencies. Musk’s companies, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, maintained extensive government contracts even as he wielded influence over the very agencies that regulate and contract with his businesses. This created a feedback loop where private corporate interests could potentially shape the public environment from which those same interests benefit. The key question for analysts, however, is whether this has actually proved to be the case.

In fact, several factors distinguish the American case from clear examples of state capture. First, the public nature of Musk’s role, while unprecedented, contrasts sharply with the secretive, behind-the-scenes influence typically associated with captured states.²⁹ Second, the vigor­ous opposition from Congress, civil society organizations, and the press—culminating in extensive litigation and ultimately Musk’s depar­ture—demonstrates the continued functionality of institutional checks and balances. Third, the temporary and ultimately unsuccessful nature of DOGE’s most ambitious goals suggests that American institutional resistance proved more robust than the reformist assault.

Indeed, prior to his public break with Trump, Musk himself announced that he was “scaling back” his involvement with DOGE.³⁰ Rather than consolidating dictatorial power, he is returning his focus to Tesla and his other business interests, which have seen both gains (in the form of lucrative government contracts) and losses (in the form of vandalism, boycotts, and stock sell-offs) due to his recent political prominence. The White House has indicated that DOGE will continue without Musk’s daily involvement, which also works against the interpretations that viewed DOGE as a vehicle for personal power accumulation. While DOGE has likely opened the reform window for future hardline interventions into the federal bureaucracy (a DOGE 2.0 or its continuance in other forms is likely), it is very far from clear evidence of autocratization or the establishment of a competitive authoritarian regime.

The early trajectory of Trump II and its experimentation in hostile state reform reveals how unwise it is to extrapolate dramatic scenarios out of early political developments, especially given the chaotic and fickle nature of Trump’s governance. The administration inherits an obviously powerful executive apparatus, and its officers have not been reluctant to use its legal and administrative mechanisms forcefully in pursuit of its policy goals. None of this should be mistaken for dictatorship. It could be seen as a case study in the Hamiltonian application of executive vigor and administrative flexibility (or perhaps eccentricity), not all of which will work out even in the short term, as the initial DOGE experience suggests.

While Musk certainly wielded great influence in the early months of Trump’s second term, the American system’s checks and balances, its institutional inertia, and Musk’s own business priorities have ultimately prevented any fundamental perversion of democratic governance. The United States remains a rules-based polity, with Congress, the courts, and federal agencies continuing to function within their constitutional frameworks. The reform of the state is of critical interest to many analysts, and whether DOGE could ever have done so effectively or not is up in the air.

The DOGE experiment reveals both the potential vulnerabilities and the resilience of American democratic institutions when confronted with novel forms of private sector influence. On one hand, the sheer scale of Musk’s wealth and technological capabilities, combined with his direct access to executive decision-making, created opportunities for private interests to shape public policy in ways that traditional regulatory frameworks were ill-equipped to address.³¹ On the other hand, the ultimate failure of DOGE to achieve its stated goals and Musk’s eventual exit from formal government influence suggest that the American system retained sufficient institutional capacity to resist capture. We have no doubt that the reactionary-reformist drive embodied in DOGE remains an active element of the new administration, and it is highly likely that it will inspire future efforts.³² Yet we must be clear on exactly how difficult this is, even in unprecedented conditions following the tailwinds of a major election victory.

Perhaps most importantly, the DOGE case illustrates how the boundaries between state reform and state capture can become blurred in practice. What began as an ostensibly public-spirited effort to improve government efficiency evolved into something that appeared increasingly driven by private interests and personal conflicts. This ambiguity reflects a broader challenge facing contemporary democracies: distinguishing between legitimate private sector expertise in government reform and illegitimate capture of public institutions for private gain.

While there is no conclusive evidence that the United States has experienced systematic state capture, this concept is surely more applicable for understanding current political dynamics than competitive authoritarianism. State capture can occur gradually and partially, affecting specific sectors or agencies rather than transforming entire political systems or regimes. It can coexist with electoral competition and media freedom while nonetheless distorting policy outcomes.

Real Democracy Is Not Polite Pleasantries

What the state of American government will look like at the end of the current administration is surely unpredictable, but we must be careful in misapplying scholarly concepts. The object of political science is to explain patterns in the social and political world. Imagining patterns where they simply do not match reality does not help and obscures far more than it clarifies. And our ideal-typical vision of democracy, with everyone content and cooperative in endless coalitions of right-minded, inclusive, and respectful policymaking, has rarely actually accorded with reality. It is at best a picture of a minor European state under the bureaucratic tutelage of Brussels, not an example one should assume applies to the continent-wide politics of America’s polyphonous, fissiparous, and always vaguely disgruntled polity.

Democracy is messy, complicated, divisive, compromised, emotional, and prone to disappointment. Most democracies suffer periods of overbearing executive domination alternating with periods of diffuse oligarchy. This does not make an authoritarian regime, unless one is convinced that democracy actually means that one’s partisan side (who are naturally smart, well bred, and morally just elites) can or should never lose.

It is vital that critics of the current administration maintain both a sense of comparative balance, as well as accept that the American tradition of democracy has encompassed periods of significant governance contestation and forthright, statist activity. In at least two periods in U.S. history, for example, we have seen major episodes of fraught regime politics: that of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime government during the American Civil War and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive-dominant New Deal administration in the 1930s and 1940s.

While these eras are rightly remembered and celebrated as high points in the life and evolution of American democracy, the fact is that persistent rights violations, court-packing schemes, executive aggrandizement, bureaucratic manipulation, one-party hegemony, and per­sonalist politics were all prominent. Someone looking for “democratic backsliding” or burgeoning autocratization could certainly find piece­meal evidence in these periods. And yet American democracy survived.

Authoritarianism can always emerge in any country at any time. It is the modal form of political regime today. It is the dominant regime of human history. It is the majority regime even across the brief centuries that have seen the rise and impressive efflorescence of modern democracy. And no regime is eternal. We do not want to say that concerns over the resilience of democracy are unwarranted, or that everyone must put their fingers in their ears (or to use the Soviet parlance, “hanging noodles on their ears”). We do want to say that the characterizations of current political reality expressed by very senior scholars, whom we respect greatly, fall far from the mark.

Significant contestation between the executive and judiciary, the jarring decision to break with the status quo, and the hostile assault on the federal bureaucracy are all reasons to study contemporary American politics (and we cannot emphasize enough the uniqueness of DOGE in the brief period of Musk’s ascendancy and its likely influence on future administrations). But we reject misusing an important conceptual toolkit and providing an account of politics that underplays the vast difference between real competitive authoritarian regimes and the actually existing American republic.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 112–28.

Notes