Steven Levitsky, a leading expert on authoritarian regimes, joins host Alex Lovit to talk about the US’s current slide into authoritarianism and what we can do about it. Democracies tolerate dissent. In a democracy, citizens and institutions can criticize, protest, or file legal claims against the government, without fear of reprisal. That is no longer true of the US today, which means that the US is no longer a full democracy. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Along with many acclaimed academic works, he is the coauthor (with Daniel Ziblatt) of two bestselling books about threats to democracy: 2018’s How Democracies Die and 2023’s Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He is also a senior fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
Steven Levitsky:
We should not be under the illusion that 250 million citizens are going to feel the effects of authoritarianism, are going to feel repressed every day. In many, many, many authoritarian regimes across history, many people have been largely unaffected. It's still bad.
Alex Lovit:
Think of an authoritarian regime. Maybe you're imagining an example out of history like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or a modern example like Russia under Putin or North Korea. My guest today says that if you are in the US right now, all you have to do is look around. You are listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. Today I am speaking with Steven Levitsky. He's a professor of government at Harvard. In the academic world of political science, he's a rock star and he's also written a couple of bestsellers about threats to democracy. He's currently working on co-authoring a new book about the Trump era, and he's a senior fellow here at the Kettering Foundation.
As you'll hear, Steven believes that the slide into authoritarianism can be surprisingly subtle. So if you have been waiting to find out when the current administration's attacks on rights and institutions would cross the line, let this episode be a wake-up call. It's already happened. The good news is that Steven also believes it's possible for the US to course-correct back to democracy, but it's going to take all of us.
Steven Levitsky, welcome to The Context.
Steven Levitsky:
Thanks for having me, Alex.
Alex Lovit:
So you wrote an editorial for the New York Times back in May with a couple of your frequent co-authors and proposed a metric for whether the United States is still a full democracy. Tell me about it, what is that metric?
Steven Levitsky:
These days it is difficult sometimes to tell when a country has slid into authoritarianism because in most cases, in the 21st century, democratic backsliding takes a much more subtle form than it used to. In the old days in the 20th century, particularly during the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns were quick, decisive, unambiguous. The military would seize power, a junta would govern the country. The Constitution would be suspended or dissolved. And that happens occasionally, but most of the time it does not. Most contemporary authoritarian regimes, most new ones anyway, are installed by elected leaders themselves. They're much more subtle. And so we asked ourselves where can we draw the line between democracy which may be in a degree of crisis and a that has become authoritarian? And what we came up with and what we presented in the New York Times piece is that in a democracy, it should be pretty close to costless to speak out against the government, to organize protests, at least legal protests against the government, to join protests, to run candidacies against the incumbents, to give money to candidates.
All of these are constitutional forms of opposition that citizens shouldn't have to think twice about doing. In authoritarian regimes, there is a price, there's a cost to opposition behavior. In really harsh dictatorships like say Russia, that cost can be prison or exile or even death. That's not the case thankfully here, I don't think it's likely to be the case here, but in what we call competitive authoritarian regimes, these regimes that still continue to hold elections and permit opposition, but nevertheless tilt the playing field against the opposition, there are costs to opposition. You may have the tax authorities investigating or auditing those who give money to the opposition. There may be defamation suits against journalists or media outlets that displease the government. There may be investigations into civil society organizations that are in opposition. There may be death threats or harassment of critics of the government. All of these raise the cost of opposition.
And what we argue in the Times piece is that remarkably, during the first four or five months of the Trump administration, hundreds of thousands of Americans found that suddenly there was a cost to their public opposition, that publicly opposing the government now ran a credible risk of government retribution. So many, many Americans from different walks of life are now having to think twice, even three times about publicly opposing the government, about engaging in constitutional behavior. And that is the sign that I think we have crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. Now, this is a very mild competitive authoritarianism. It's an entirely reversible competitive authoritarianism. We have not plunged into brutal dictatorship and we have not crossed some threshold that we can't pull back from, but I think it would be inaccurate to say that we are the kind of fully democratic regime that we were between I would say at least 1965 and 2024.
Alex Lovit:
As you're saying, the White House is putting pressure on a number of individuals and institutions, law firms, media companies, universities. Probably the most prominent example is your own employer, Harvard University. So let's talk a little bit about that example. In Harvard's case, what has Trump done to punish the university and why are those actions illegitimate and anti-democratic?
Steven Levitsky:
Universities are culturally influential centers of dissent and autocrats don't like centers of dissent, and so they almost invariably go after them. I cannot think of a healthy democracy in which the government went after major universities in this way. So what has the Trump administration done? It has accused us vaguely of not protecting Jewish students and of engaging in, again, very ambiguously put, DEI practices that they claim violate certain civil rights laws. They did not go through proper procedure of investigating, showing the university exactly where we went wrong, giving the university an opportunity to address those things. That would be the proper procedure.
Rather, the Trump administration took virtually all of our federal research funding, much of which is at the medical school and is funding Alzheimer's research and Parkinson's research and a bunch of other really critical research, all of which was funding approved by Congress, and it just arbitrarily stripped it away. Nearly $3 billion in federal funding for cancer research is going to be cut. The other thing the Trump administration has attempted to do thus far is deny us the right to admit and enroll foreign students. That so far has been blocked in the courts. It's an incredibly arbitrary move. Even really authoritarian regimes like Cuba allow international students. The only country I know that outright bars international students is North Korea. So again, this is not something that ever occurs in a democracy that the federal government would prohibit its universities from enrolling foreign students.
Alex Lovit:
So I think most people have a vision of Harvard as a very old, prestigious, wealthy institution. You have a pretty up close look at what operations look like day to day. How have these actions affected Harvard?
Steven Levitsky:
Oh, they've affected us terribly. We have for decades attracted the best talent in the world to do really critical research. Research that it's not an exaggeration to say has made the United States the great power, the great economic and military power that it is over the last 75 or so years. A lot of these star faculty and students are finding their research shut down. Many staff have had to be laid off and it's been devastating. All of us have been affected by the threat to our international students.
Harvard has thousands of international students. 90% of my graduate students, I'm a Latin Americanist, almost all of my PhD students are from Latin America. They have worked their lives, their whole young lives to be here. They have in many cases made huge sacrifices. Their families have made huge sacrifices to come here. And having to talk to dozens, hundreds of students and tell them I have no idea what's going to happen to them and what will happen if the administration actually gets away with barring our foreign students. That's affected everybody at Harvard in every corner of this university, from the most senior faculty to undergraduates.
Alex Lovit:
So there's supposed to be checks in the American system to prevent executive overreach. So the most obvious checks are the other two branches of government, the legislative and judicial branch. There's also the federalist system of government where the states retain a lot of power. In some ways political parties can be a check on individual politicians' overreach. The bureaucracy even within the executive branch can be a check. So when you look at this system, what checks are working and what's not working?
Steven Levitsky:
It's a great and important question. The thing about checks, even in vaunted constitutional systems like the United States, checks never work automatically. Checks that are written down on paper don't just spring automatically into action. They have to be exercised by human beings, by people. And if the people in charge of our institutions do not use those institutions in the way that they're designed, checks will fail. And so you elaborated I think a pretty good list. And the problem is that the Republican Party is willing to do Trump's authoritarian bidding. It is a party that is clearly no longer committed to democratic rules of the game, and that party controls many state governments and controls importantly the Congress.
And so the first constitutional check that blatantly failed I think was the Senate in the aftermath of January 6th. Donald Trump attempted, and really there's no contesting this, attempted to overturn the results of an election and block a peaceful transfer of power. That is about as open an assault on democracy as has ever occurred in the United States, at least from an individual president. And that is precisely precisely the behavior that Hamilton and Madison and other Framers of the Constitution in mind when they designed the institution of Impeachment and Conviction. The Constitution allows the Congress to impeach and convict a president and to bar them from running again. And the Republican control Senate failed to exercise that not only right but constitutional responsibility, they abdicated that authority.
And since Trump came to office again in 2025, the Congress has completely shut down. It has basically folded up its tent and shut down its oversight responsibilities. The DOGE process cut government programs in a eliminated spending that had been approved by Congress, and Congress said nothing. The courts have been more mixed. Lower level courts, whether it's judges appointed by Obama or Biden or Trump, have all been pretty consistent in striking down illegal and in some cases authoritarian behavior by the administration. But there are caveats there. The courts alone cannot save us.
The Trump administration has a very mixed record in terms of its compliance with judicial orders. It has in some cases pretty openly defied orders. And of course the Supreme Court has, I would say, a mixed record in checking Trump's abuse. It did an admirable job of ensuring that the 2020 election results held, but its rulings in 2024, which derailed some very serious prosecutions of Trump, and then of course granted presidents an extraordinary amount of immunity, were cases again of abdicating in the face of potentially authoritarian president.
So far, the first six months of this administration, our vaunted constitutional checks and balances have been falling down. I think US elites, our politicians, our judges, many of our bureaucrats were just not prepared for this. They were not trained for this, they were not expecting this. Perhaps they should have been, but they so far have not fully been up to the task of dealing with an authoritarian president.
Alex Lovit:
So when you tell this story and when you tell the story of what's happening at Harvard, it sounds pretty dramatic, and I think you and I are pretty alarmed by a lot of the Trump administration's actions, but as we're recording this, his approval rating is not terrible. It's higher than Biden was for most of his presidency. If authoritarianism happened and nobody noticed, why is it such a bad thing?
Steven Levitsky:
It's true that a good solid third of the American public is embracing varying degrees of authoritarianism, but it's a third, it's not a majority of Americans. There are cases where 85, 90% of the public approves of an authoritarian president. It's still bad because when society gives away its rights, gives away its institutions of checks and balances, it's not just giving them away this week when the president's really popular, it's giving away forever. And one thing we know in politics is nobody ever remains popular forever. There will come a day. And in every single case I know of, that day has arrived when citizens no longer love the president that they handed a blank check to wish to constrain that president, regret having given away their rights, and can't do a damn thing about it.
Democracy is a long game, and yes, there are moments in time when publics don't care or are willing to tolerate presidential abuses of power or violations of rights because they are scared or because they approve of something else that the president is doing. It is always a mistake. It is always a mistake. I cannot think of a single case where 10, 15 year down the road people were happy that they ceded their rights. It never happens. If you're just an everyday citizen who doesn't care about politics and who doesn't speak out against the government and it doesn't wish to speak out against the government, in many, many, many authoritarian regimes across history many people have been largely unaffected.
Historically, it's only in what political scientists call totalitarian regimes, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, communist Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea, Cuba, those kinds of regimes affect everybody every day. But many authoritarian regimes throughout history, including Franco's Spain, including even Pinochet's Chile after the first few years. In many periods of authoritarianism, dictatorships affect certain people. They affect anybody who publicly dissents, they affect journalists, obviously people who are committed to human rights, they affect students, universities, they affect all forms of opposition.
If you pay attention, there are ways that you will be affected. If ICE develops the way it's looking like it might develop with a massive, massive expansion of its budget and staff and mandate, people will be affected. Not everybody, not every day, but people will soon know somebody who was affected or will see something happen. But we should not be under the illusion that 250 million citizens are going to feel the effects of authoritarianism, are going to feel repressed every, that's not how most authoritarian regimes work.
Alex Lovit:
You mentioned ICE there, Congress recently tripled ICE's budget. How worried should we be about that?
Steven Levitsky:
It's a really good question. Most of the Trump administration's behavior, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the use of defamation suits, what Trump just did with the Wall Street Journal. That stuff is classic competitive authoritarianism, right out of the playbook. ICE is a little different. This is organized violence. This is a potentially paramilitary organization that's already engaged in some fairly lawless behavior. This is people wearing masks and doing things that they know is certainly immoral and might be illegal. The regime in Hungary doesn't have this kind of organized almost secret police. Even in Turkey, there's a little more violence, but nothing like this. And so I don't know where it's going to go, but I think it's something we need to keep an eye on because this could be much more repressive and violent and lawless and could provide a lawless basis for this regime. It could take us quite quickly to a pretty dark place. I don't want to push the comparison too far, but it does have a bit of a 1930s feel to it.
Alex Lovit:
Let's talk about elections. That's a pretty important way to hold power accountable in this country. Are you worried that elections in 2026, 2028, and going forward will be less free and fair than previous elections?
Steven Levitsky:
Again, it's hard to say. This is an authoritarian government. This is a government that is arresting and attempting to arrest opposition. This is a government that attempted to overturn an election in 2020 that it already has a track record of violating the cardinal rule of democracy, which is free and fair elections and accepting defeat. So of course, we should be worried. It's not going to be easy to, say, cancel or postpone the elections. There are ways that that could be done, doesn't seem super likely to me. Our electoral system, for better and worse, is highly decentralized. Despite Trump's claims about 2020 and 2016, it's not easy to orchestrate a national level fraud, but there will be I think efforts to purge voter rolls. There may be efforts to make it harder for people to get to the polls. There may be efforts to intimidate voters.
This would not be new in US history. This stuff occurred in the Jim Crow South for decades and decades. And one of my greatest concerns about a highly politicized Justice Department and FBI is not only that it'll be used to go after rivals, but it will be used to protect those who break the law on Trump's behalf. The pardon of January 6th insurrectionists was a terrible injustice in and of itself, but one of the most frightening things about it was the message that it sent to those who will engage in violent and illegal behavior on Trump's behalf in the future. It says you will be tolerated, you may be protected. And so I worry a lot about local level efforts to commit fraud or to intimidate voters in the belief that the Justice Department will turn a blind eye. So we should probably expect efforts at the state and certainly the local level to carry out shenanigans that given how close our elections are could be decisive.
Now, gerrymandering is not new in the United States, and both parties have carried out historically, but normally it's done after a census each decade. The possible effort occurs by Trump to gerrymander Texas in an effort to squeeze out four or five additional Republican seats. That's consistent with this effort to potentially play dirty to win the election. There will be an election, there'll be a competitive election, but there is a risk that it will be not an entirely fair election.
Alex Lovit:
You've said that a lot of the actions that Trump has taken are similar to what other authoritarian leaders have done, but also that you've been surprised at the pace at the speed of which he's dismantling checks on his power within the government trying to take control of opposing institutions outside of government. So is that a risk for him? Does that open up possibilities to prevent our slide into authoritarianism?
Steven Levitsky:
For sure. Despite similarities in other cases, the United States is so unique in so many ways that it's very, very difficult to predict what will happen. But first of all, just to reiterate the point that you let off with, if you compare the first six months of the Trump administration to the first six months of the Orbán government in 2010, '11, the first six months of the Hugo Chavez administration in 1999, the first six months of the AKP, wasn't Erdogan yet, the AKP government in 2002, or the first six months of the Modi government in India, there's no comparison. None of them were even remotely as aggressive or authoritarian as Trump. Trump moved much more quickly on many more fronts than any of these other authoritarians.
Trump has grabbed a lot of power, and unfortunately our institutions as we discussed, but also our society, has allowed him to do it overall. US society has been asleep at the wheel. Power begets power, and this very aggressive, very bold, very unexpected power grab could allow Trump to do even more. But I think there's also a world, and this is where your question is heading, in which Trump has picked a lot of fights very quickly on a number of different fronts, and he's overreached. This kind of authoritarianism, some of which is somewhat performative, really isn't playing well with most Americans outside of the roughly 35% of the electorate that is hardcore MAGA. Arresting Adam Schiff will be popular with a good chunk of Trump's base, but it will not be popular with most Americans.
And these ICE raids and deployments of the military in public parks in Los Angeles is not popular with most Americans. And attacking universities has not proven popular with most Americans. And so Trump's assault across the board on civil society is picking a lot of fights. It is costing him. It is narrowing his coalition. And I think there is a good chance that it's going to eventually weaken him and bite him in the back.
Alex Lovit:
You mentioned a number of [inaudible 00:25:13] countries as a comparison for the US, Venezuela, Turkey. Can you think of any examples of countries that have started this slide into authoritarianism and then have pulled themselves back to democracy? And then if so, what did it take to make that happen?
Steven Levitsky:
There are many such cases. Most of them don't look a lot like the United States. They're not remotely as rich as the United States. I think the closest comparison is Poland under the Law and Justice Party. Now, the Law and Justice Party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, was frankly not as authoritarian as Trump, but they did pack the judiciary and attempt to intimidate and pack the media as well and tilt the playing field in a way that is comparable to Trump. They were in power eight years, but lost narrowly, but lost the 2023 election. And Poland today has gone from being mildly authoritarian three years ago to being a still somewhat troubled, but fully democratic regime. So that's one case.
And very, very different case, which played out differently, but important to remember is Israel in 2023 before October 7th. Massive, massive societal mobilization effectively blocked the so-called judicial coup pushed by the Netanyahu administration. Now, subsequent events pushed Israel down a very different path, but it's important to remember that that was a successful societal mobilization and defense of democratic institutions.
There are many, many, many other cases of much lower income countries where autocrats just proved unable to consolidate power because governing is hard. Their state bureaucracies were weak and governments grew unpopular. So whether it's Ukraine or Sri Lanka or Zambia or Malawi or Belarus, these are all cases where authoritarians are in power for a while, but they're unpopular and either they lose elections or they are pushed out by mass protests.
So democracies always seem vulnerable and autocrats always seem strong. And in the United States, when we think about autocrats, I think most of us immediately think about either China or Putin in Russia, which are too quite consolidated, robust authoritarian regimes. Most authoritarian regimes don't look like either Russia or China, most of them are pretty weak and pretty vulnerable. It's hard to be an autocrat. It's hard to consolidate power. People eventually get tired of the government and want to change it.
Alex Lovit:
I want to give listeners some advice for what they can do. You're Steven Levitsky. You're an expert on this stuff. You're a public intellectual and you are, I think working pretty hard to try to draw public attention to something you think is a pretty big problem. You're writing editorials for the New York Times. You're appearing on podcasts, but if you woke up tomorrow and you were Steven Levitsky, professor of English or an accountant or a plumber, what would you do? What can people do that don't have your platform or position?
Steven Levitsky:
That is a great question. My answer may not be very satisfying, but I think it's true. There is no single blueprint for toppling autocracy, and you cannot predict in advance which strategies, which citizen strategies will ultimately succeed. What we know is citizens have to be engaged, meaning citizens have to pay attention, they have to inform themselves, and they have to be engaged in politics. It's very important that we not accept encroachments on our rights. It's very important that we not go about our daily business. All of us have things to do, all of us have ambitions and responsibilities and joys and pleasures in life that we can and should pursue, but we all need to take some time to engage in civic life when democracy is on the line.
I honestly think there are a thousand different ways to do it. There's no single organization to join. There's no single protest to attend. It doesn't to be street protests. Some people like street protests, other people are uncomfortable in street protests. There are a thousand different ways to be involved. If your issue is abortion, then it should be abortion. If your issue is mass deportations, then it can be mass deportations. If your issue is corruption, it can be corruption. The important thing is that we all be involved, that tens of millions of Americans be engaged every day, and we're starting to.
There is pretty good evidence that the level of civic engagement is growing and in fact is higher than it was in a first Trump administration. Some of it takes the form of protests at Tesla dealerships. Some of it has taken the form of people showing up at town hall meetings. Many, many, many people are continuing to write their congressperson and let their congressperson know their views, telling in some cases, Republicans that they don't like that they're not standing up on behalf of constituents. Some telling Democrats that they want them to be more aggressive in confronting Trump.
There are literally hundreds of different ways to be engaged in politics. What's important is, one, that we all be engaged, that tens of millions of us be engaged and that we experiment with different forms of opposition. In a way, every time you confront an authoritarian regime, society has to do a certain amount of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing which strategies work. In Poland, it turned out public anger about a total ban on abortion is what really mobilized people and turned them decisively against the Law and Justice government. And it was the street mobilization against a court decision banning abortion [inaudible 00:31:26] that really got people engaged.
I don't think you could have predicted that in advance, and that's not necessarily what's going to work in the United States, but we have to be involved, we have to be engaged. And it's important to engage on the issue that you care most about. So if Steve Levitsky were a plumber, he probably wouldn't be a very good plumber, and I'm not sure what would be the interest that really got him out of bed on Saturday morning, but I would encourage him to find that thing.
Alex Lovit:
So if we get out of this, if we return to a party and president in power that is pro-democratic, whether that's a Republican or democratic president, you earlier spoke about the failures of our checks and balances in our system. Your last book pointed out that it's very difficult to amend the US Constitution. Are there structural fixes that are realistic that could prevent us from getting into this kind of situation in future?
Steven Levitsky:
I'm not sure that there's ever a complete structural fix. Democracies are always going to be vulnerable because democracies a lot of freedom and they allow virtually everybody to compete for office. There are some measures that you can take to prevent, say, convicted felons from running for office, but a democracy cannot fully vaccinate itself from demagogues or from authoritarian forces without ceasing to be democracy. There's always a certain amount of uncertainty. Our democracy will be on safer ground only when all the major political forces are committed to playing by democratic rules of the game. And that's a political process more than it is one of finding the right institutions. There are all sorts of institutional reforms that I think the US should try to undertake. Not only the ones that we talked about in Tyranny of the Minority which were involved making the United States a little more majoritarian and allowing electoral majorities to express themselves and to govern more easily, which would bring us in line with other democracies in the world, but we have to go beyond that.
We still have frighteningly high levels of public discontent in the United States. Public frustration, public distrust in our institutions, especially among young people. So convincing the next generations of Americans that this is a democracy worth having, worth sustaining, worth fighting for, we have a lot of work to do. Many political scientists who work on democracy, and I'm at the top of the list of the guilty here, have been very conservative. We've been worried about losing the democracy that we had for legitimate reasons, but we've mostly been thinking about preserving 20th and sometimes 19th century institutions. And that's important, we want to preserve elections, we want to preserve basic constitutional rights and civil liberties, but we also need to spend some time and some brain power thinking about innovations, institutional innovations that will carry us into the 21st century. And I think we've had real deficit in that area.
So it's true, we have a short-term problem of removing an authoritarian from office, and that is what's going to have to be at the front of our brain in the months to come. But if and when we achieve that, and I think we will achieve that, we're going to have to sit down hopefully in a cross-partisan way because that's the only way we can reform the Constitution and the only way that we can make anything really stick politically. We're going to have to sit down and think about innovating and designing institutions that work for more people more of the time.
Alex Lovit:
Steven Levitsky, thank you for joining me on The Context.
Steven Levitsky:
Thank you for having me, Alex.
Alex Lovit:
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Levitt. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views expressed during this program are critical to us having a productive dialogue, but they do not reflect the views or opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation's broadcast and related promotional activity should not be construed as an endorsement of its content. The foundation hereby disclaims liability to any party for direct, indirect, implied, punitive, special, incidental, or other consequential damages that may arise in connection with this broadcast, which is provided as is and without warranties.
Speaker 3:
This podcast is part of The Democracy Group.