Transcript: America’s Authoritarian Era Won’t End Next Week

This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon, and this is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Lucan Way. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He’s written a lot about competitive authoritarianism. We’re going to talk about that today. It’s a concept we’ve talked about that’s happening abroad. We’re going to talk about that in the US context more than other places. So Professor, thanks for joining me.Lucan Way: Thanks.Bacon: So define—I think people have heard this term before, but tell people what competitive authoritarianism is, and how that’s different from democracy, for lack of a better way to say that.Way: Yeah. So competitive authoritarian regimes describe cases in which opposition parties compete for power in elections that are genuine. They’re not like facade elections as you see in Putin’s Russia or Uzbekistan and things like that. Elections are genuine, but in which there’s widespread abuse of power, and in which incumbents basically weaponize the state in order to create an uneven playing field against the opposition.Bacon: And so what’s the quintessential example of a competitive authoritarian regime from the past?Way: So observers will know probably Hungary most, under Orbán. This was a case in which you didn’t have massive fraud in elections. You had opposition was allowed to compete openly. They weren’t arrested. There was actually very few civil liberties violations. It wasn’t like Russia where journalists were shot, or things like that. But access to media and other things were severely restricted for those who opposed Viktor Orbán.Bacon: And so, you have a new piece out with another scholar named Steven Levitsky. He’s one of the authors of How Democracies Die, and your piece is about competitive authoritarianism in America. So you all are making the argument that particularly the second Trump term, more than even the first, the US has now slipped from democracy to competitive authoritarianism. So talk about why that might be the case.Way: Yeah, definitely. So this has really occurred quite rapidly in 2025, with Trump’s second inauguration. And basically what we saw in 2025 was Trump’s ability to weaponize institutions like the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, institutions that have, in the last few decades, at least since the 1970s, been completely independent of whoever is in power, and autonomous. And he was able, basically by appointing loyalists to head the Department of Justice, FBI, and other places, to use the power of those institutions to target opposition leaders, essentially, opposition figures, or people that Trump saw as critics or rivals.Bacon: And you all mention in the piece, the way that he dealt with law firms is a good example of this, right?Way: Another example is that he took law firms, many of whom obviously are very important in democracy, and basically punished them for their only sin of representing members of the Democratic Party or representing people suing Trump. So he really threatened their basic livelihood and used the power of the executive to basically punish those who tried to oppose his administration.Bacon: So you all say there are a few different criteria of competitive authoritarianism that the US under Trump qualified for, for lack of a better word. Tilting the electoral playing field via national gerrymandering, frequent harassment of the media, attacks on individual civil liberties, a modest packing of the media, and skewing of campaign finance. I think people can understand what those things mean in our context, but you have a certain criteria, and the US right now hitting a lot of them.Way: Yeah, so I think in contrast to past decades, it’s now become harder and more costly to oppose the government. Certainly not impossible. In comparative terms the United States is still a very soft or mild form of competitive authoritarianism. So the authoritarianism is modest and certainly reversible, but quite real, right?So just to give you the example of the gerrymandering, obviously gerrymandering at some level, at the state level, is as old as the Republic. What’s different about what’s going on under Trump is this sort of national effort to engineer gerrymandering to support the current party in power. And certainly the midterms will be very competitive, and it’s likely the Democrats will win. But because of Trump’s national effort at gerrymandering, the Democrats face a kind of ten-seat disadvantage than they would have had otherwise. So that’s quite real.And of course, everybody has seen the sort of massive civil liberties violations by ICE and others, the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. And then you’ve also seen this effort, which is particularly striking, by the Federal Communications Commission, to basically utilize the regulatory power of the FCC to encourage or discourage criticism of Trump on major networks.Bacon: So the reason I wanted to talk to you today was, we’re in this election, and it appears, and I think it’s pretty clear, Democrats will make some gains in the House, probably win the House, maybe win the Senate, governorships. So I think I know the answer to the question, but let me ask you anyway. Will America still be in a competitive authoritarianism even if Democrats win on Tuesday?Way: Yes, absolutely. So I think it’s obviously incredibly important and I think normatively good that elections remain competitive in the United States. But actually what I worry about is that if the Democrats win overwhelmingly, as is certainly possible, that we’ll decide that the United States was never authoritarian to begin with.The Democrats winning in November will not magically erase all the abuse that Trump undertook, his attacks on civil liberties. That still has taken place. His weaponization of the Department of Justice, where he’s clearly using the investigatory power of the Department of Justice to intimidate those who oppose him. Those abuses will still occur, even with a Democratic victory.Bacon: And let’s say we have a Democratic president. Does that end competitive authoritarianism? I think you’re saying, “I’m not sure about the answer to this question.”Way: Yeah. So I think certainly if the midterms are one thing, control over the executive is obviously the most important thing. And if Democrats win in 2028, they can easily end competitive authoritarianism by halting the weaponization of those criminal law institutions. It would be very easy and very quick for a new president to simply stop that weaponization, to stop using the Department of Justice to target enemies.But nonetheless, Trump has really done long-term damage to our civil service. Now, it’s interesting because we typically think of the civil service and bureaucracy as boring and all. But having an autonomous civil service, an autonomous state essentially, is essential to democracy, because actors who have tremendous power over our lives, can audit us on our taxes, can choose to arrest us—if that is under the direct control of a particular party in power, then democracy is over, right? Because then whoever is president can decide to arrest whoever is opposing him.And the point is that the first thing that Trump did when he came to power, as people remember, in January and February, was he had DOGE, right? The Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk, in which they fired about 12 percent of the civil service. That’s a massive number of people, right?And what that did was, it took a group of people who had before assumed that they had autonomy from the administration in power, who assumed that their jobs were safe. And it basically showed them that in fact they needed to toe the line, that they couldn’t act independently, or risk facing retribution. And so in a sense, he’s already broken that spell.And even if, in the best case scenario, the Democrats win and they rehire all the lawyers from the Department of Justice, there will still be that fear that in four years, you’ll go through this whole process again. So this is a kind of long-term damage to our democracy that even if we’ll end competitive authoritarianism, go back to democracy, the damage will remain.Bacon: So let me probe a little bit to ask, are we at a point where—you’ve used the term competitive authoritarian regime. But is it more precise to say we have a competitive authoritarian party right now, and then more of a democracy party, or a light democracy or whatever, and therefore we’re toggling between, if Biden is a small-D Democrat, Trump is a bit of an authoritarian, Pete Buttigieg is a Democrat, maybe President Rubio. Is that where we are now?Way: Yeah. So basically, I think you have one of the two major parties in the United States is openly anti-democratic, and that’s the Republican Party. And I think what’s most likely in the medium term scenario is that you basically have a kind of unstable authoritarianism, where you have periods of apparently relatively soft competitive authoritarianism under Republicans, and more or less dysfunctional democracy under Democrats, right? And so I think this sort of oscillation is probably what we’ll see in the coming decades.Bacon: That is not good. That’s not on the course of democracy.Way: Yeah, no. So I guess it’s funny, because when I say this, people are always like, “Oh, you’re so optimistic.” I’m like, we’re not Putin’s Russia. I guess that’s a form of optimism. Compared to where we were a decade ago, or 20 years ago, this is far from optimistic.Bacon: So there’s a political scientist, University of California, Berkeley, Eric Schickler. I assume you’re familiar with him. So he wrote a paper last year arguing that basically we thought that the way America’s constructed, with various power centers, we have independent media, we have independent universities, and so on, that’ll probably stop an authoritarian-style person from consolidating power. And he wrote a paper last year I thought was good, saying actually the executive is able to influence law firms and universities and the press, and maybe we underappreciate, maybe the sort of diversity of powers in America is not as strong as we thought.Your paper, I thought, was a little bit more, I’m going to use the word optimistic on this ground. I guess you all argued, “As we have argued in these pages, economic development gives rise to bigger cities and wealthier private sectors, more robust civil societies, and more prosperous and autonomous citizenries. These in turn generate countervailing power.” And then you all argued that America still has a fair amount of countervailing power. You think that’s still true?Way: Yeah. So first of all, Schickler, his work is great. I think he’s absolutely correct. I think all of us remember in 2025, there was a sort of almost Wizard of Oz quality to what happened. You remember in Wizard of Oz, you have Oz, this great figure, and then the dog puts the curtain back and it turns out it’s quite weak. So our constitutional system, I think, was demonstrated to be much weaker than I think most of us thought. It just collapsed quite quickly, and I think that’s still very much the case.And institutions that we thought were the bulwark, separation of powers, were the bulwark of democracy, didn’t function, because institutions are run by humans, and humans have to decide to resist. So all that is definitely true, and I think our democracy is much more vulnerable than I think any of us thought, and I think it’s important to remind ourselves, even if in the best case scenario, the Trump era ends relatively quickly.But I do think it’s also important that the United States is by far the richest competitive authoritarian regime ever. So we’re three times as wealthy per capita as Hungary, which is the next richest case. And what this means is that it’s very hard for any leader to monopolize control over the country.So to give you a counter example to make this clearer. In Russia in the early 2000s, Putin arrested one rich guy, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the third richest, or owned 3 percent of Russia’s GDP at the time. So when he did this, one guy, right? He was able to starve all opposition of any finance, because there just weren’t that many autonomous rich guys.That’s not the case in the United States. Trump could arrest 10 Soroses, 10 Reid Hoffmans, these are Democratic donors, and you’d still have a massive middle class that can give money to Talarico, can give money to whomever. So that is just very different from most other authoritarian regimes, which is why I think clearly the United States, we’re in this period of competitive authoritarianism, but it doesn’t mean it’s consolidated. And I think that’s why I am fairly optimistic that we’re going to go back fairly quickly.Bacon: Talk about what happened in Brazil a little bit. Do you see Brazil as toggling between, or maybe potentially averting that? Are they in the same place we are, which is that one party is an anti-democratic party and one party is pro-democracy, and they’re toggling between, and maybe avoided the bad outcome again? Or is Brazil in most of the same place as us, or is it mysterious?Way: No, there’s certain similarities. I think there’s a sort of polarization, in the fact that the political spectrum is divided essentially between a party or group of parties that supports democracy and others that don’t. That polarized dynamic is very similar.What’s different though is that in 2022, when Bolsonaro senior attempted a coup, the courts responded much more aggressively, ultimately jailed him. So he wasn’t able to run again, right? And he was forced to have his son run, who was less popular, and his son lost by, in relative terms, a fairly substantial margin, I think 4 percent. And so things weren’t great in Brazil, and they’re still unstable and you’re still very nervous, but we’re in a better position than the United States, where after January 6, basically Trump wasn’t held accountable. He’s been allowed to run again, and so in that sense it’s worse in the United States than in Brazil.Bacon: I’ll close with, if you’re the opposition to a competitive authoritarian, what does taking America out of competitive authoritarianism look like? What does that look like comprehensively?Way: Yeah. So I think in competitive authoritarian regimes, elections are still the name of the game, so that really is in some ways the most important thing. There’s legal mechanisms. You can’t abandon those. But at the same time you need to use the full panoply of techniques. You need to use protests. You need to use all of the above, because you can’t simply take institutions for granted as we have done during periods of consolidated democracy.Protests, what we saw in Minnesota, it’s just hugely important that this sort of active community activism and protests were really essential in pushing back ICE.And so basically, I guess in a competitive authoritarian regime, we need to do all of the above. You need to do street activism, we need to compete in elections. There’s a hugely important legal mechanism in the courts. So it needs to be a full court press.Bacon: Lucan Way, thanks for joining me. I encourage people to read—there’s an essay he wrote with Steven Levitsky in the Journal of Democracy. It’s called “Competitive Authoritarianism in America.” So Lucan, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.Way: Oh, just one thing.Bacon: Please, yes.Way: It’s actually free online until October 31, so you have three days to read it for free. After that, it goes behind the paywall. So do it fast.Bacon: All right, Lucan. Good to see you. Thank you.Way: Hey, thanks. Bye.Bacon: Bye-bye.