Steven Levitsky: America’s descent into authoritarianism

This is the speech, edited for length, given by Professor Steven Levitsky at FFRF’s national convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Oct.18. He was introduced by FFRF Executive Board member David Tamayo, who is co-founder of Hispanic American Freethinkers. To watch the speech, go to ffrf.us/con25.

David Tamayo:  Professor Steven Levitsky’s background is of special interest to me as a Latino. He is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He is co-author of “How Democracies Die,” which was a New York Times bestseller and published in 30 languages. It was followed by the book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point.” He is currently working with a colleague on a book about democratic resilience across the world.

Please welcome Professor Steven Levitsky.

By Steven Levitsky

Thanks for invitation. It’s a great honor to be here. I don’t think I’ve been surrounded by this many atheists since my bar mitzvah.

Social scientists have discovered two seemingly rock-solid facts about democracies.

First, rich democracies never die. The wealthiest democracies ever to break down (Argentina and Hungary) had a per capita GDP of about $20,000 in today’s dollars. The United States is four times richer than that.

The second seemingly rock-solid fact is that old democracies never die. No democracy over the age of 50 has ever broken down. Even if we date the birth of U.S. democracy at 1965 (when we achieved full suffrage), U.S. democracy is over 50. So, no democracy even remotely as rich or as old as the United States has ever broken down — not once, in the history of the world.
So, we ought to be safe. And, yet, we’re not safe: U.S. democracy is breaking down right before our eyes. To be clear, I don’t think the U.S. is descending into fascism or single-party dictatorship. It closer to what Lucan Way and I call competitive authoritarianism.

Competitive authoritarianism is a political system in which parties compete in elections, but in which systematic incumbent abuse tilts the playing field against the opposition. In other words, governments don’t eliminate elections or ban opposition — they weaponize state institutions and deploy them to punish critics, weaken rivals and bully the media and civil society.

This is what autocrats did in Russia, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary and El Salvador — and it’s what Trump is doing today. At the heart of competitive authoritarianism is the weaponization of the state, or the machinery of government.

The first step is to capture the referees. You purge key government agencies of professional civil servants, and pack them with loyalists. Trump has purged and packed the Justice Department, FBI, the Defense Department, intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, the IRS. He has packed regulatory agencies like the FCC and the FTC. He’s even packing the Army.

Once key government agencies are in the lands of loyalists, they can be weaponized and deployed in three ways that subvert democracy.

One is to punish critics through targeted prosecution. All elected autocrats deploy their justice departments, prosecutors, intelligence agencies and tax authorities to investigate and prosecute rivals — often for petty infractions (like minor tax code violations and mortgage fraud).

The Trump administration rolled out politically motivated investigations with stunning speed. Dozens of Trump’s critics and opponents are now under investigation — James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New Jersey Congresswoman Lamonica McIyver have been indicted — and others (like Sen. Adam Schiff) appear to be on the way.

The Department of Justice is investigating Act Blue, one of the Democratic Party’s main fundraising platforms, and the Open Society Foundation, one of the leading funders of civil society. It’s going after major Democratic Party donors, like Reid Hoffman, and pro-democracy organizations like Indivisible — increasingly, in the name of combatting what it calls “domestic terrorism.” It is now openly linking all opposition to domestic terrorism.

Victims of selective investigation and prosecution don’t have to end up in prison for it to be problematic. The investigation itself is a powerful form of harassment. Targeted individuals have to spend down their savings on lawyers. They are distracted them from their jobs for weeks and months at a time. Sometimes they have to leave their jobs. And their reputations are often seriously damaged.

The administration is also going after the media. The FCC has launched investigations into PBS and NPR. Trump has filed defamation suits against ABC, CBS, the Des Moines Register, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The administration has blacklisted law firms with ties to the Democratic Party. It has launched investigations into dozens of universities and illegally stripped top universities of congressionally approving research funding. And, it is threatening to withdraw the tax-exempt status from NGOs that defend immigrants, the environment and other progressive causes.

So, individuals and organizations across the country are getting punished for being on the wrong side of the government.

A weaponized state can also serve as a shield to protect government allies who engage in illegal or undemocratic acts. For example, the Justice Department could turn a blind eye to acts of political violence — things like threats against politicians, judges and election officials or attacks on peaceful protesters. It could decline to investigate incidents of voter intimidation or local election fraud.

Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists wasn’t just a massive injustice, it signaled that acts of violence committed by his supporters will be tolerated and even protected. This is crucial.

The U.S. experienced a marked rise in political violence during the first Trump presidency. Threats against members of Congress increased dramatically. According to Mitt Romney, several Republican senators voted to acquit Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack because they feared for their physical safety if they voted to convict him. Republican senators also received death threats during Trump’s cabinet confirmation hearings in early 2025. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said that the FBI warned him of “credible death threats” while he was considering opposing Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary. Tillis voted for confirmation, and Hegseth was confirmed by one vote.

What we have seen over the last nine months is prototypical competitive authoritarianism — the systematic weaponization of government institutions and the deployment of those institutions to punish critics and bully or co-opt business, the media and civil society.

Crossing the line

So, how will we know when we have crossed the line into authoritarianism? Let me suggest a simple metric: How costly is it to oppose the government? In a democracy, legal opposition should be virtually costless. In democratic societies, we don’t think twice about writing op-eds against the government, giving money to opposition campaigns, or joining peaceful protests — because there is no risk of government retribution.

Under authoritarianism, opposition comes with a price — and that’s what’s happening across the U.S.:

• Government critics know they may become targets of investigation.
• Media owners know they may face lawsuits or investigations.
• Wealthy donors who finance the Democrats now fear tax investigations.
• Law firms that work for Democrats know they may get blacklisted.
• Universities know they could face crippling funding cuts.
• NGOs know they can lose their tax-exempt status.
• Republican politicians face threats of physical violence if they cross Trump.

There is now a clear cost to opposing the Trump administration.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans who might have engaged in some kind of opposition behavior are now thinking twice about it — because they know there’s a risk associated with opposition.

As Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski put it, “We are all afraid.” That’s quite a statement. “But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious about using my voice, because retaliation is real.”

The threat of government retribution is now visibly changing people’s behavior.

• Major law firms have stopped doing pro bono work for progressive causes.
• Universities have virtually eliminated students’ right to protest out of fear of government attacks.
• Columbia and the University of Virginia fired their presidents under government pressure.
• Jeff Bezos changed the Washington Post’s editorial policy.
• CBS news has changed its editorial line and its programming.

And thousands of politicians, CEOs, NGO foundation heads and university leaders have begun to silence themselves because they fear possible government retribution.

That suggests to me that the United States has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. And, it could get worse.

Competitive authoritarian regimes like those in Hungary, Turkey and India weaponize the law. Outright dictatorships openly subvert the law. There are signs that the Trump administration is contemplating this. ICE’s transformation into what is essentially a paramilitary force goes beyond anything we see in Hungary or Turkey or Poland.

• We now have masked agents in unmarked cars abducting people off the street.
• Due process is routinely being violated.
• And, of course, the military is being deployed in U.S. cities.

In September, Trump called 800 military commanders to Washington and told them to refocus their attention on “internal enemies” — in U.S. cities. The most powerful armed forces on Earth is being told to wage what Trump called a “war from within.” That’s Pinochet stuff. It’s literally the language that was used by military dictatorships in South America in the 1970s.

So why is this happening?

I want to answer this question in two parts. One focuses on the role of the Republican Party and the other focuses on elite abdication.

Let’s start with the Republican Party.

Individual leaders can’t kill a democracy on their own. They always need accomplices among mainstream politicians. Trump has the complicity of the entire Republican Party. Trump has only been able to do what he has done because he enjoys the full, active support of the Republican Party. Republicans could have convicted Trump in the Senate after Jan. 6 and barred him from running for office. He tried to steal the 2020 election. But they acquitted him.

Republicans could have abandoned Trump after 2020. But, they didn’t abandon him — they renominated him in 2024. They backed him for president despite his authoritarianism. They confirmed nominees like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel even though they openly planned to weaponize the government and go after Trump’s opponents. And, they have stood by silently as Trump repeatedly violated the Constitution, prosecuted his rivals and sent troops into cities. So, it’s not just Trump. The entire Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to democracy.

Embracing authoritarianism

This is crucial: One of America’s two major parties has embraced authoritarianism. How could that happen? How could a mainstream conservative party that had been competing peacefully in elections for 160 years suddenly turn authoritarian?

In our book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” Daniel Ziblatt and I argue that it’s fear of losing. For democracy to work, parties have to be able to tolerate losing. For parties to tolerate losing, two conditions must hold.

First, parties must believe they stand a chance of winning again in the future, and, second, parties must believe that losing will not bring ruinous consequences.

When politicians fear they won’t be able to win future elections, or when they or their constituents believe that defeat will bring catastrophe, the stakes rise dramatically. In other words, when parties or their supporters perceive losing to pose an existential threat, they radicalize — and often turn against democracy.

We’ve seen this before in the United States. Think about the Southern Democrats after the Civil War. Reconstruction was this country’s first experiment with multiracial democracy. It brought widespread Black enfranchisement. African Americans in the 1860s were a majority or near majority in most Southern states, so their enfranchisement terrified Southern Democrats and their supporters. Not only did Black suffrage threaten the Southern Democrats’ electoral dominance, but it threatened the entire racial order. For many Southern whites, that felt like an existential threat.

As South Carolina’s white supremacist Gov. Ben Tillman, put it, “We felt the very foundations of our civilization crumbling beneath our feet, that we were sure to be engulfed by the Black flood of barbarians who were surrounding us and had been put over us by the Army under the Reconstruction Acts.”

Southern Democrats responded to the prospect of multiracial democracy by turning against democracy. As one Southern Democrat put it, “We cannot outnumber the Negroes. So, we must either outcheat, outcount or outshoot them.”

And, that’s what the Democrats did. They used a combination of violence and election fraud to seize power across the South — and then stripped the right to vote from African Americans, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in South.

Ziblatt and I wrote that something similar happened to the Republican Party in the early 21st century. The U.S. experienced two major changes after 1965.

First, a massive wave of immigration has made the country much more diverse. Second, the U.S. began a transition to multiracial democracy — or a democracy in which the rights of individuals of all ethnic groups are protected equally. That transition generated a fierce backlash — one that has been far more consequential than many of us anticipated.

To understand how this reaction played out, we have to go back to 1964. The civil rights revolution generated a lot of resentment among white voters — particularly in the South, which was overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Republicans were the minority party in the 1960s, but white resentment over civil rights created an opportunity for them to expand their base. So, beginning with Barry Goldwater and continuing with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Republicans targeted racially conservative, white Christian voters. And it worked.

In a little more than a generation, Southern whites flipped from being overwhelmingly Democrats to being overwhelmingly Republican. The Republicans became the party of white Christians — winning the white vote in every presidential election since 1968.

And, because the U.S. electorate was still overwhelmingly white and Christian in the 1970s and ’80s, even ’90s, the Republicans became the majority party. The Republicans won every presidential election between 1968 and 1988, except for the Watergate election of 1976.

But, the strategy eventually ran into trouble, because, at the same time that the Republicans were becoming America’s white Christian party, America was becoming less white and less Christian. The percentage of Americans who identified as white and Christian fell from 80 percent in 1976 to 43 percent in 2016.

This posed two threats to Republicans.

The first was electoral. It became increasingly difficult for an overwhelmingly white Christian party to win national majorities in the 21^st century, which is why the Republicans only won the popular vote for president once between 1988 and 2024.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 55 percent of the White vote and translated that into a landslide 44 state victory. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the White vote but still lost the election. When Republican leaders realized they were winning the white vote but losing the American vote, they started to panic.

In 2016, Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachmann declared: “This is the last election. It’s a math problem of demographics and a changing United States. If you look at the numbers of people who vote and who lives in the country and who Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want to bring into the country, this is the last election when we even have a chance to vote for somebody who will stand up for godly moral principles. This is it.”

But, the problem went beyond losing elections. For much of the Republican base, America’s transition to multiracial democracy felt like an existential threat. White Christians weren’t just any group. For two centuries, they occupied the top rung of this country’s social, economic, political and cultural hierarchies. They were the politicians, the judges, the CEOs, the university presidents, the football coaches, the newspaper editors, the TV talking heads.

All the way through my bar mitzvah, every single president and vice president, every single House speaker and Senate majority leader, every single chief justice and Federal Reserve chair, every single governor, every single Fortune 500 CEO, and every Miss America was white.

Demographic changes

All of that is now ending — rapidly, relentlessly — right before our eyes. The number of Black and Latino members of Congress has more than quadrupled since my bar mitzvah — from 28 in 1980 to 114 today. For the first time in history, the percentage of African Americans in Congress equals the percentage of African Americans in the overall population. In 1965, all nine Supreme Court justices were white men. Today, only four of nine justices are white men — and only six of nine are white.

And the change extended beyond politics. We see it in the growing presence of non-white and multiracial families on our TV and movie screens. We see it in mounting societal pushback against acts of racism. Think of the Black Lives Matter protests. We see it in challenges in newsrooms and classrooms to historical narratives that downplay or ignore America’s racist past.

The early 21st century saw an unprecedented assault on this country’s racial and gender hierarchies. But, when your group has been at the top of a social hierarchy for 250 years, challenges to that hierarchy can feel threatening. Losing one’s dominant social status can feel like an existential threat.

Many MAGA voters feel like the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. That sense of loss has pushed many rank and file Republicans toward extremism. In a recent poll, 56 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

So, it’s not just Trump. But Republican authoritarianism is only part of the story. The U.S. has powerful institutional and societal bulwarks against authoritarianism. We have the world’s oldest and most successful Constitution — a constitution that, for all its flaws, has a pretty good track record in limiting executive abuse. We have a strong bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, an established rule of law and a robust system of federalism. Those institutions should protect us.

The U.S. also has a wealthy, well-organized civil society. We have a big, wealthy private sector. There are 900 billionaires in this country — and 22 million millionaires in this country.

There are dozens of private law firms that earn at least a billion dollars a year in revenue. There are hundreds of independent media outlets. There are more than 1,700 private universities, and a vast infrastructure of churches, labor unions, private foundations and nonprofits.

Finally, for all its problems, the Democratic Party is far better organized, better financed and more unified than oppositions in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela or El Salvador.

Abdicating responsibility

So, American society has more than enough muscle to blunt this authoritarian offensive. But, even the best-designed institutions don’t operate automatically. Institutions are just pieces of paper. They have to be deployed. They to be defended — by people. And, so far, America’s leading public officials and societal elites have been AWOL. Rather than defend our democratic institutions, they have capitulated, acquiesced or retreated to the sidelines. In other words, the people with the constitutional authority or societal influence to stop this authoritarian offensive have stood down.

There is a word for this: abdication. Democratic abdication occurs when those with the authority and responsibility to defend democratic institutions fail to do so.

• The U.S. Senate abdicated when it acquitted Trump after Jan. 6.
• The Supreme Court abdicated in 2024 when it derailed the federal cases against Trump and instead granted him vast immunity.
• Congress abdicated its oversight role in 2024 when it confirmed authoritarian cabinet picks — and in 2025 when it remained silent as Trump repeatedly violated the Constitution.
• Media companies like Paramount and Disney abdicated when they settled flimsy lawsuits rather than defending press freedom.
• Jeff Bezos abdicated when he altered the content of the Washington Post in order to stay on good terms with Trump.
• Leading law firms and universities abdicated when they acquiesced to Trump’s authoritarian demands rather than defend the rule of law and academic freedom.
• Business, labor, religious and other civic leaders abdicated when they opted to remain silent in the face of blatant authoritarian abuse.

This is not how you defend democracy.

Trump hasn’t seized power. We are ceding it to him. Civil society has more than enough finance and organizational muscle to blunt this authoritarian offensive Trump. But we are abdicating our responsibility to defend democracy — and that is enabling autocracy.

Abdication facilitates authoritarianism in two ways.

First, it has an enabling effect. When we acquiesce to authoritarian measures like prosecuting critics, extorting law firms and universities, bullying the media, or sending troops into cities, we expand the authoritarian toolkit by making previously unacceptable measures acceptable. The more tools you give autocrats, the more damage they can do.

Second, abdication has a powerful signaling effect. Public officials’ acquiescence to authoritarian acts tells citizens that those acts are acceptable. When governments cross red lines without serious resistance, it normalizes behavior that was considered unthinkable.

And, when our most prominent billionaires, media companies, law firms and universities acquiesce to authoritarianism, it sends a message to the rest of society that resistance is futile. If billionaires, senators and Ivy League universities can’t stand up to Trump, what chance do the rest of us have?

The great danger is that we will start to silence ourselves, that fear of retribution will lead a growing number of Americans to retreat to the sidelines.

• To not give that speech or sermon denouncing Trump.
• To NOT run that that controversial story or that critical editorial.
• To NOT join that protest.
• To NOT give money to an opposition group or candidate.
• To NOT run for public office.

When we all decide — out of fear, resignation or sheer exhaustion — to retreat to the sidelines, the authoritarians win. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Stopping authoritarians

In South Korea, when President Yoon declared martial law last year, South Koreans immediately mobilized in protest. Congresspeople rushed to Congress and literally scaled the walls to get inside and call a special session to annul the martial law decree. When troops tried to force their way into the Assembly chamber to prevent a vote, lawmakers barricaded the chamber doors with sofas and benches. Protesters outside the building helped them.

One young woman was captured on video tugging at the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. When the soldier pulled away, she shouted at him, “Aren’t you ashamed?” The woman later said she thought to herself, “We have to stop this. If we don’t stop this, there’s nothing else.”

Barely two hours after Yoon declared martial law, 190 legislators, including members of Yoon’s own party, voted unanimously to rescind it. President Yoon was impeached and is now standing trial for his attack on democracy. That’s how you defend democracy!

In Brazil, when Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro tried to organize a coup to overturn the 2022 election, the courts moved quickly and aggressively to hold him accountable. Bolsonaro was barred from running in the next presidential election and then prosecuted and convicted of the crime of organizing a coup. As one Brazilian Supreme Court justice told me: “We realized that we could be Churchill or we could be Chamberlain. I didn’t want to be Chamberlain.”

So, why are America’s elite behaving like Chamberlain? I’m still trying to figure that out. I think part of the story is that Americans lack a history or shared memory of authoritarianism the way that Koreans, Germany, Brazilians and Argentines do.

Koreans and Brazilians reacted more quickly and effectively to authoritarian threats because they know what it’s like to lose a democracy. They have a collective memory of authoritarianism. South Koreans remember when martial law was declared in 1980. They remember the repression of that era. It is burned into collective memory, and it’s reinforced in popular films and novels.

Brazilians remember their 21-year military dictatorship. The Supreme Court justices came of age under military rule. They call themselves the Generation of ’88, in reference to the 1988 Constitution that ushered Brazil’s democratic era. They took the threat of a coup seriously.

As Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes put it, “When you’re much more attacked by a disease, you form tougher antibodies, and you seek out a preventive vaccine.”

That collective memory of authoritarianism doesn’t exist in the U.S. Rather than remember historical abuses so as not to repeat them, Americans tend to whitewash our past. We don’t teach ourselves about Jim Crow, lynchings, McCarthyism or the internment of Japanese Americans. Instead, we remain wedded to a myth of American exceptionalism — the belief that there is something in our culture or DNA that makes us immune from authoritarianism. We are living the consequences of that illusion.

To this day, most American elites still don’t believe authoritarianism can happen here. But it can. And it has.

OK, so where are we headed? I do not think the U.S. is headed toward a Putin-style dictatorship. The slide into competitive authoritarianism has been modest. It’s reversible.

Reasons for hope

The Trump administration is pretty incompetent. It makes a lot of mistakes and it’s overreaching in ways that are costing it support. This will give the opposition opportunities.

Second, and related, Trump isn’t very popular. Autocrats do a lot more damage when they have 80 percent support than when they have 40 percent support. Chavez, Putin and Bukele all had 80 percent support. Trump will never have that kind of public support. His approval rating is already in the low 40s.

Unpopular autocrats have a harder time consolidating power. Trump and Bolsonaro were both in the low 40s when they tried and failed to overturn elections. South Korean president Yoon had a 20 percent approval rating when he tried and failed to declare martial law last year.

Finally, we have a strong civil society and a strong opposition party. This is not Russia or El Salvador. Our society has more than enough financial and organizational muscle to stop Trump. But, the opposition can only win if it stays in the game.

Democracies don’t automatically defend themselves. People have to defend them. Authoritarians have to be beaten. That means politicians, judges, CEOs, media owners, university presidents and law firms have to have step up and show some courage. No one has ever defeated an autocracy from the sidelines.

Thank you.