Are We There Yet? Keeping ScOR #12
The Washington Post headline caught my eye. Something about Georgia sentencing a journalist. I read the lead: “A prominent independent journalist in Georgia was sentenced Wednesday to two years in prison for slapping a police officer during a heated exchange at an anti-government protest this winter. The sentence drew immediate international condemnation as judicial overreach and as a sign of deepening authoritarianism and repression of dissent and press freedoms in the country.”
By this point it had dawned on me that we were talking about the eastern European nation of Georgia – an authoritarian kleptocracy partly under the thumb of Russia – not the Peach State in the southern U.S.
Welcome to America in 2025, where you can get several sentences into an article about “deepening authoritarianism” and reasonably think you’re reading a domestic report.
Many of us have been asking for months now: At what point have we crossed the line into autocracy? How will we know? Are we there yet?
The answers to these questions aren’t simple. But amidst the torrent of news – about Trump’s chaotic tariff policy, the stalling economy, the Epstein brouhaha, Israel-Gaza, Russia-Ukraine, the Alaska “summit” – this administration’s race toward dictatorship can slip down the list of concerns. We frogs can fail to take note of just how hot the water’s getting around us.
So, let’s take note.
We know that Donald Trump took office in January uncorking a barrage of executive orders of dubious constitutionality, threatening to punish his political enemies, staffing his administration with unqualified lackeys, and purging government officials and bureaucrats deemed insufficiently loyal to him personally (including in agencies expressly designed to be independent and apolitical). Seven months in, Trump and his allies show no sign of slowing their drive toward autocracy.
Trump’s attempt to take federal control of the Washington, D.C. police force while sending National Guard troops into the capital is a fresh outrage. The president used exaggerated claims of “out of control” crime to justify the move, even as police statistics show violent crime in the district at a 30-year low.
In a bizarre escalation, the Republican governors of six states, at Trump’s request, sent hundreds more National Guard troops to the capital — creating what began to look like a red state occupation of a major blue city. Pondering the symbolism, some couldn’t help evoking the onset of civil war. No less a far-left conspiracy theorist than Bill Kristol, the longtime GOP strategist and conservative journalist, posted on social media: “There’s no longer any pretense this has anything to do with crime (there are cities or parts of cities in SC and Ohio that have higher crime rates than DC — send the troops there!). This is about seizing control of the nation’s capital when he wants to.”
Following on his deployment of troops to Los Angeles, Trump seems bent on normalizing the militarization of American cities. The U.S. military answers to the Commander in Chief but by law and tradition serves the Constitution, not the president. By naming a former Fox News weekend host to head the Pentagon and replacing top generals with loyalists, Trump may have already succeeded in turning the military into an instrument of his personal whims. Former national security officials Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson wrote in The New York Times that the military should respond “kicking and screaming” to presidential orders to deploy to American cities. There’s no sign that’s happening. “(W)e no longer expect resistance from that institution,” the authors wrote.
Consider some other developments from just the past few weeks:
· Trump fired the Director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after the agency released figures showing a dramatic slowdown in hiring from May through July. Those skeptical of Trump’s loopy economic policies have wondered if his approval ratings would take a hit when those policies inevitably led to inflation, an economic slowdown, or both. Some foresaw that Trump, like the dictators he admires, might resort to hiding or cooking the numbers when they turned ugly. Right on schedule, the president has now declared open season on accurate data and those who report it. Economist Justin Wolfers, for one, called Trump’s firing of the BLS director “an authoritarian four alarm fire.” Trump’s proposed replacement has signaled that he’d like to simply stop putting out monthly jobs numbers.
· Through all the justified gnashing of teeth over the effects of Trump’s tariff policy, there’s been less focus on the likely illegality of the whole thing. The Constitution grants to Congress, not the president, the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” Trump is asserting the legal right to hike tariffs to Gilded Age levels under a 1977 law that permits the president to take certain actions toward other countries in case of an economic emergency. The emergency we’re in, according to Trump? The trade deficit – which the U.S. has been running consistently for fifty years. Some experts think that even this Supreme Court could strike down Trump’s tariff regime. If that comes to pass, does anyone think Trump will just take the L, turn off his tariffs, and move on?
· As it happens, a Washington Post analysis found the administration is failing to comply or dragging its feet on federal court orders in one-third of the cases in which judges have ruled against it. We now have a federal government, and in particular a “Justice” Department, whose lawyers routinely stonewall and lie to judges and trash them when they don’t like their rulings.
· The “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Trump signed into law in July, has many odious features that will harm vulnerable people while further enriching the rich. It also authorizes a massive expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. – “with a bigger budget than most of the world's militaries,” noted Sarah Mehta of the ACLU. The Department of Homeland Security says the money will help ICE hire 10,000 new deportation agents and build the capacity to hold up to 100,000 people in detention. Before the 2024 election, anyone doing the math could see that if Trump were going to follow through on his mass deportation promise, that would require a vast network of concentration camps to hold the human beings that ICE would be rounding up. The plan is proceeding apace.
· After a splashy visit from Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention center in the swampy Everglades. The facility’s name manages to be both offensive and euphemistic. The men locked up at the original Alcatraz had been tried and convicted of crimes. Many of those sent to this Florida camp are being scooped up in ICE raids having committed no crime besides entering the country without documents. And, given the Trump regime’s contempt for due process, we can’t be sure that legal residents, asylum seekers, green card holders, and even U.S. citizens who happen to be brown won’t be nabbed off the street and sent to the camp.
· As if testing the waters on that last front, Trump mused aloud about deporting U.S. citizens. It seems clear that this is where Trump and his nativism czar, Stephen Miller, are headed: creating conditions where they can ship anyone out of the country or to a foreign prison for any reason they deem sufficient. “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here a long time,” Trump told the press at the Florida detention center. “Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job we’ll work on together.”
· Turning to the regime’s campaign of retribution: The U.S. Office of Special Counsel confirmed that it’s opened an investigation of Jack Smith, the former special counsel who prosecuted Trump in the January 6 and classified documents cases — both of which were dismissed after Trump’s lawyers successfully ran out the clock last year. The Justice Department led by Trump loyalist Pam Bondi announced investigations against Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who led the prosecution of Trump in his first impeachment trial, and Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, who won a $454 million judgment against Trump after suing him for fraud in the valuation of his properties. The administration also made a criminal referral asking the FBI to open investigations into James Comey and John Brennan, former top officials who investigated potential wrongdoing by Trump during his first term in office.
· The New York Times reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote letters to corporations in February assuring them they should feel free to violate the law – because, well, the president said so. This pertained to Trump’s order reversing Congress’s banning of TikTok – itself an unconstitutional abuse of power, though the Republican-controlled Congress let it slide. The law in question barred other companies from supporting TikTok, but Bondi’s letter gave the green light to break that law because Trump. Think of it: the nation’s top law enforcement official, who traditionally maintains a level of independence from the president, encouraging lawbreaking on behalf of the chief executive. The move constitutes a “breathtaking” power grab by the president, a University of Minnesota law professor told the Times.
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Are we there yet? As Rachel Maddow argued recently on MSNBC, we now live in a country with an authoritarian leadership. Trump’s goals and impulses are plain as day. The question is, what will he and his henchpeople get away with? Will anyone stop them?
One of the other “coequal” branches has signed on to the autocratic project. The Republican-controlled Congress bows down, ceding its power to Dear Leader. The courts are offering more resistance, in some cases with real checks and reversals, in other cases with speed bumps, but the judicial response is hit-and-miss and painfully slow. The Supreme Court, with its three Trump appointees, has shown extraordinary deference, permitting many of the administration’s apparently illegal orders to take effect while the challenges to them slog through the courts.
The powerful are not our best hope. We are.
Scholars use the term “competitive authoritarianism” to refer to societies that maintain elections and other trappings of democracy even as an incumbent leader abuses his power to tilt the field to his advantage. Countries like Hungary, Turkey, India — and, now, the United States.
Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Danial Ziblatt propose a metric for deciding when a country has tipped into competitive authoritarianism: when there’s often a price to pay simply for opposing the government. “Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.” they write.
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.
“By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
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The only way out is through, the saying goes. And the only way out of this mess is to shove back. To overcome that increasingly tilted playing field.
David Pressman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, wrote that what he finds most disturbing about the U.S. in the second Trump term is not the president’s behavior, which was promised and predicted. It’s the response to Trump’s autocratic drive by too many others in positions of power and influence. It was hard enough to watch in Hungary, Pressman says — Hungarian judges and businesspeople caving in the face of Victor Orban’s corruption and abuses of power. Then he returned home. “Here, too, powerful people are responding to authoritarian advances just as their Hungarian counterparts have — not with defiance, but with capitulation.”
Many are, but not all. In any case, the powerful are not our best hope. We are. Masses of everyday people must find ways to say no, to throw sand in the gears. There are enough examples to inspire hope: People disrupting ICE raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere. People showing up to speak their minds at protests and congressional town halls. Government workers refusing unlawful or unethical orders and resigning if necessary to avoid complying. City officials filing a successful lawsuit to head off the federal takeover of a local police department. People working to elect representatives who will fight the regime instead of enabling it. People insisting on telling and amplifying the truth.
For all that, the most direct and powerful way to save democracy may be something else: for more of the people who’ve backed this president to turn against him. Trump is an historically unpopular president but he still maintains enough support to press ahead — with help from an entire political party and a right-wing media complex running interference. He can do all that he’s doing because four in ten Americans approve.
If and when it becomes clear that Trump’s party will lose badly in the next election (emergency gerrymanders notwithstanding) — and that any attempt to call off elections would result in an overwhelming popular uprising — the tide could turn. Trump’s enablers may finally stop enabling. More people in positions of power and influence might locate their spines. Trump’s drive toward dictatorship would stall out.
Which is to say, the popular will still matters. The best hope for democracy, it turns out, is democracy. Ours has always been hobbled and flawed and is now under systematic assault — but let’s not exaggerate its death. We are not there yet if we choose not to be.
Comments are open. Love to hear from you. What actions have you taken, or witnessed others taking, that you believe will have an impact?
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