Trump's Playbook: "Competitive Authoritarianism"

An influential scholar of autocratic movements explains how retreat by civic leaders, activists and discouraged citizens paves the way for tyranny

By Ben Raderstorf Protect Democracy

When we started thinking about this series, to explain Trumpism’s ambition to stay in power indefinitely, our first call, as it often is, was to Cambridge, Massachusetts. We called one of our advisors, Steven Levitsky.

Levitsky is a professor of Latin American studies and government at Harvard. He’s the co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of the monumentally influential How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority.

But we wanted to talk to Levitsky about another of his books, one that’s not quite as widely read outside academia: Competitive Authoritarianism (written with Lucan Way).

This concept, “competitive authoritarianism,” which Levitsky and Way first diagnosed 23 years ago in 2002, is more or less exactly what is happening right now in the United States.

The entrenchment agenda is competitive authoritarianism. The concept diagnoses the new wave of authoritarians — the Hugo Chávezes and Viktor Orbáns and Recep Tayyip Erdoğans of the world — and their hybrid regimes that sit somewhere between totalitarianism and democracy.

How democracy becomes tyranny. What competitive authoritarianism helps us understand is that there’s no hard line between democracy and tyranny.

That, in the 21st Century, autocrats don’t need to jail every opposition leader and shutter all newspapers and cancel elections and shoot every protestor to successfully entrench themselves in power. They just need to tilt the playing field far enough that all of those things don’t really matter much anymore.

Competition still exists, it’s just unfair. A political system can retain competitive elements and still be authoritarian.

That is what’s happening in the United States. We’re becoming a competitive authoritarian regime.

What became clear, talking with Levitsky, is that so many key actors in our democracy — members of Congress, civil society and business leaders, the news media — are clinging to the first half of this dynamic, the “competitive” part, without noticing (or perhaps, willfully ignoring) the second half. Many are reassuring themselves that we still have a playing field, ignoring how fast it is tilting.

It became pretty clear to us that this disconnect, this lack of understanding, is a five-alarm fire.

The end result of those conversations is The New Authoritarianism, an essay, published earlier this week in The Atlantic.

Levitsky’s piece is a call to action. It captures how and why the United States is well on its way to becoming a competitive autocracy. And here’s the central conclusion:

“[T]he opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

It’s not too late to stop the U.S. from becoming a competitive autocracy like Turkey or Hungary or El Salvador. But democracy only survives if we manage to work together — collectively, forcefully, aggressively — to defend it. Otherwise our democracy may already be lost.

Read (or listen to) the full essay. It takes less than 10 minutes, and you’ll have a much deeper sense of what’s happening now.

Ben Raderstorf is a policy advocate at Protect Democracy.