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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats' warnings that American democracy was in jeopardy if Donald Trump was elected failed to persuade a majority of voters. Our guest, Stephen Levitsky, says there's plenty of reason to worry about our democracy now.
Levitsky isn't a politician or a political pundit. He's a Harvard professor of government who spent much of his career studying democracy and dictatorship and how healthy democracies can slide into authoritarianism. He was last on Fresh Air to talk about the book he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt titled How Democracies Die.
In a new article for the journal Foreign Affairs, Levitsky and co-author Lucan A. Way write, quote, U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy, full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties, unquote.
We've invited Levitsky here to explain the threats he sees to democracy and to talk about dramatic developments in the Trump administration's confrontation with Harvard University. Stephen Levitsky is director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He's also senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Besides the book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt co-authored the 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority. We recorded our interview yesterday. Well, Stephen Levitsky, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. You note in this article that Freedom House, which is a nonprofit that's been around for a long time, which produces an annual global freedom index.
has reduced the United States rating. It has slipped from 2014 to 2021. How much? Where are we now and where did we used to be?
Freedom Hustlers scores range from zero, which is the most authoritarian, to 100, which is the most democratic. I think a couple of Scandinavian countries get scores of 99 or 100. The U.S. for many years was in the low 90s, which put it broadly on par with other Western democracies like the U.K. and Italy and Canada and Japan.
But it slipped in the last decade from Trump's first victory to Trump's second victory from the low 90s to 83, which placed us below Argentina.
And it had a tie with Romania and Panama. So we're still above what scholars would consider a democracy, but now in the very low-quality democracy range, comparable, again, to Panama, Romania, and Argentina. And does Freedom House explain its demotion? Why? Why did this happen?
Oh, yeah. Freedom House has annual reports for every country. The rise in political violence, political threats, threats against politicians, refusal to accept the results of a democratic election in 2020, an effort to use violence to block a peaceful transfer of power are all listed among the reasons for why the United States has fallen. I should say that even in the first four months of the Trump administration,
It's quite certain that what's happening on the ground in the United States is likely to bring the US score down quite a bit. Trevor Burrus You say that the danger here is not that the United States will become a classic dictatorship with sham elections, opposition leaders arrested, exiled or killed. What kind of autocracy might we become?
I think the most likely outcome is a slide into what Luke and Wei and I call competitive authoritarianism. These are regimes that constitutionally continue to be democracies. There is a constitution, there are regular elections, a legislature, and importantly, the opposition is legal, above ground, and competes for power. So from a distance, if you squint,
It looks like a democracy, but the problem is that systematic incumbent abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. This is the kind of regime that we saw in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez subsequently become a full-on dictatorship. It's what we see in Turkey under Erdogan. It's what we see in El Salvador. It's what we see in Hungary today. Most new autocracies that emerged in the 21st century have been led by elected leaders and
and fall into this category of competitive authoritarianism. It's kind of a hybrid regime. So free and fair elections lead us to a leader which takes us in a different direction. Right. And because the leader is usually freely and fairly elected, he has a certain legitimacy that allows him to say, hey, how can you say I'm an authoritarian if I was freely and fairly elected? So citizens are often slow to realize that their country is descending into authoritarianism.
It's interesting that you say that no democracy is entirely free of politicization of these tools and that that was the case in the United States in recent decades, true? Yeah, it was much more so prior to Watergate. Again, throughout history, you can always find cases of certainly politicization, people using government agencies either to help their friends or to help their party. No democracy has ever been completely free of that. In the United States, there were lots of it.
particularly at the local and state level, but even at the federal level, the use occasionally of the IRS to go after presidents, political enemies, the use of the FBI to spy on sometimes political rivals, more often political activists, usually in the left or in the civil rights movement, notoriously in the mid-20th century. So some of this stuff is not new. But after Watergate, which was one of the most sort of notorious case of a president actually getting caught in
engaging in this sort of weaponization. There were a series of reforms that pretty dramatically limited the politicization of key government agencies and
ushered in what I consider far and away the United States' most democratic era. Between 1974 and 2016, there was very little weaponization of the state. You know, it's interesting. I read in some of the recent reporting that in the U.S. criminal code, it is expressly prohibited, it is unlawful for the president or the vice president or any member of their executive staff to directly or indirectly suggest that the IRS audit or investigate a particular taxpayer. Right.
Right. I mean, in theory, this can't be done. It's also a violation of the rules for the president to order the Justice Department to investigate critics or people he doesn't like. And Trump just issued an executive order saying,
instructing the DOJ to investigate former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Christopher Krebs. Taylor was the author of the so-called anonymous op-ed in 2018, which stated that there were, in effect, adults in the room who were aware of the danger posed by Trump within the Trump administration and who were working to constrain him. And after leaving the
The government – Taylor became a vocal critic of the Trump administration and Christopher Krebs was in charge of cybersecurity in the 2020 election, did by really all accounts an extraordinarily effective job of ensuring that the 2020 election went off relatively smoothly. His crime, in air quotes –
was contradicting President Trump and declaring that there was no significant fraud in the 2020 election. And for that, he is now the target or will be the target of a DOJ investigation. You know, it struck me that it's one thing to say you're going to prosecute someone you don't like.
But I wonder if it will actually happen. I mean you do have to find a provision of the federal criminal code that has been violated and make a case to convince a jury, right? This isn't really so easy, is it? Well, conviction is not easy. We still have a very powerful and a quite independent judiciary.
And so it's pretty unlikely that any of these cases will end up with the target landing in prison, at least as things stand now. But that doesn't prevent the FBI from investigating folks and the DOJ charging people with what may be dubious, difficult to prove crimes or what may be very petty, meaningless infraction of the rule.
Almost certainly these charges won't end up with the target in jail. But you can force targeted individuals to spend a lot of money lawyering up. You can force them to take a lot of time away from their job or to be distracted from their job, in some cases to have to leave their job. And you can cost them and their families months, sometimes years of anguish and lost sleep. So you can do a lot of damage. You can do a lot to harass and to punish your critics for
even if you fall short of putting them in prison. You also write about how elected governments can slide towards autocracy. And one of the things that they do is find ways to get private actors, particularly corporations, on their side. To what extent are we seeing this in the Trump term? We're seeing it a lot. It turns out that government agencies, nominally independent and fair government agencies, regulatory agencies in particular, have a lot of power in
over businesses and other organizations' ability to make money or to do their jobs, to operate, whether it is tax-exempt status, whether it is anti-monopoly rulings, whether it is access to government contracts, government concessions, critical waivers from regulations. High-level bureaucrats have a lot of say over major CEOs or major companies' ability to
to continue to make money over their profit margins. And that's why it's so important that these agencies be independent of the executive branch, that they not be political loyalists who are doing political work for the executive. But if the executive weaponizes these agencies, whether it's the SEC or the FCC or
They can turn into not only weapons to punish, say, businesses or media companies they don't like, but to induce them to cooperate. So if there are millions, billions of dollars at stake and businesses know that key regulatory decisions are going to be made with politics in mind—
Then businesses and CEOs are going to behave accordingly. They're going to cooperate with the government. They're going to try to get on better terms with the government. That is exactly what we saw with Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is not known to be a Trump supporter necessarily.
Mark Zuckerberg, other major CEOs who very, very publicly gave money to Trump's inauguration, showed up very publicly at Trump's inauguration, praised Trump because they know that politics is now suddenly behind key regulatory and business decisions that affect their bottom line. There are countervailing forces in this trend that you note towards authoritarianism.
You say in this article that Trump is unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule in his term. Why do you say that?
Well, studying democratic backsliding, studying authoritarian turns in other countries, we've learned that there are certain things that make it more or less likely that autocrats will succeed in the long run in establishing an autocracy like, say, Putin did in Russia or Chavez and Maduro did in Venezuela. Those are consolidated autocracies.
Two factors that matter a lot. One is the popularity of the president. A president with an 80% approval rating, 75 or 80% approval rating, like say Bukele in El Salvador, like Hugo Chavez had, like Modi had for a while in India, can do much, much more damage than a president with 40, 45% approval rating. That's not fully prohibitive, but it helps to slow down the degree to which
to which an autocrat can consolidate power. But more importantly than that, the degree of what I would call organizational and financial muscle in society matters a lot. It's much easier to consolidate an autocracy in countries with a pretty small private sector, with a weakly organized, maybe fragmented opposition, and with a relatively underdeveloped civil society.
The United States has none of those things. The United States has a very large, very wealthy, very diverse private sector. You know, even with people like Zuckerberg and Bezos kind of moving to the political sidelines, there are still hundreds of other billionaires in the United States. And there are literally millions of millionaires in the United States. There's a lot of money out there in society. There are a lot of organizations with high-powered lawyers out there in society. There are many, many well-organized organizations.
and civic organizations and the opposition, for all of its flaws, the Democratic Party represents a unified, well-organized, well-financed, electorally viable opposition. So compared to societies elsewhere, our civil society and our opposition is pretty well equipped to resist Trump. I wanted to talk about what's happened at Harvard University, your employer, where
which became a leader in the opposition to Trump recently.
When the university refused to comply with the list of demands from the administration, and the administration responded by freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants. Let's just talk about this for a moment. The letter that the administration sent to Harvard a week ago Friday, that's April 11th, is a pretty remarkable letter. I just read this over the weekend. I wanted to cite a passage here. This is a part of the letter that deals with Harvard's
apparent imbalance in viewpoint diversity, according to the administration, obviously underrepresenting conservatives. But here's what the text of the letter says. By August 25, the university shall commission an external party which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse."
This review shall begin no later than this summer and shall be submitted to the university and the federal government by the end of the year. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices that function as ideological litmus tests.
Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity. That's a pretty remarkable thing for a government to demand of a university, isn't it? What that passage is saying is that the government is demanding the right to dictate to a private university that
who it can hire and not hire, and effectively what it can teach and cannot teach. That's the end of academic freedom. That is completely incompatible with a democratic society. And I know of no democracy that's ever permitted that sort of intervention. I know of many authoritarian regimes that didn't permit that level of federal intervention into the internal life of a university.
I'm wondering what role, if any, you might have played in urging the administration of Harvard to take the position it did. I think you wrote an open letter with Ryan Enos. Is that right? Yes. Ryan Enos and I wrote a series of columns in the Crimson that were pretty widely diffused. And we organized a letter signed by 800 faculty members saying,
calling on the administration, one, to publicly denounce attacks on other universities. We found it unconscionable that other university leaders were silent when Columbia first came under attack. We called on the university to refuse to acquiesce to the kinds of demands that you just read.
And we called on the university in the letter to work with other universities to try to build an opposition to these attacks. What the current administration is doing is a deliberate effort, an authoritarian effort and an illegal effort, I should add, to weaken universities, which is something that autocrats do regularly.
really almost invariably autocrats of the left, like Hugo Chavez, autocrats of the right, like Erdogan and Orban, invariably go after universities. And that is precisely what the Trump administration is doing. So there are a number of reasons why the university ultimately said no to the Trump administration's demands. But faculty are really concerned, particularly those of us who not only teach here, but who study authoritarianism and have seen these kinds of assaults elsewhere.
You know, there was some reporting over the weekend – this is pretty wild – that suggested that the government's letter, which made these extensive demands of Harvard to eliminate DEI and change the balance of its faculty in terms of their ideological point of views, that that letter may have been sent by mistake. What do you make of this? I mean the administration has not backed down. It's not said that the letter is inoperable.
I think that the administration blinked. I think it realized that this was not going well. Harvard's resistance gave a real burst of energy and encouragement, not just to other universities, but to civil society across the country that's been waiting for the more powerful actors, the more prominent actors in our society to get off the sidelines and begin to fight back.
I know that Harvard's leadership was concerned that Harvard's public image is not great right now. It's viewed as very elitist and that there was a concern that the public would rally behind Trump against Harvard if there was such a conflict. That did not happen to the extent that anybody rallied. The public rallied. It was beginning to rally behind Trump.
And I think the administration realized that this fight was not going well and wanted to reset the negotiations. And I think they realized that they asked too much. And the danger now is that they'll come back and offer or demand 60 percent of what they demanded before. And I don't know what the university's response will be.
Stephen Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and co-author with Luke and Wei of a new article in the journal Foreign Affairs titled The Path to American Authoritarianism. After we recorded our interview yesterday, news broke that Harvard had sued the Trump administration over its announced funding cuts, accusing the government of violating the First Amendment by seeking to control what Harvard teaches its students. We contacted Levitsky to get his reaction. He said,
He said, quote, I'm very pleased to see Harvard leading by example. The most powerful among us must lead the way, unquote. A White House spokesman said in a statement that taxpayer funds are a privilege and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions to access that privilege. We'll hear more of our interview with Stephen Levitsky after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from NPR sponsor Disney+.
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On this week's Wildcard podcast, Brett Goldstein says even though his shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking get emotional, he doesn't. I haven't cried in years. I guess I thought you might be like a closet crier. No. I mean, I write all this stuff because then I don't have to live it. Whoa. She's like, I got him. I'm Rachel Martin. Brett Goldstein is on Wildcard, the show where cards control the conversation. We've been talking about some of the troubling things
Signs that you see since the second Trump administration was inaugurated. One thing we haven't talked a lot about is other Republicans. In your book, The Tyranny of the Minority, you write about politicians who are semi-loyal to democracy. That is to say they believe in it or apparently believe in it but tend to be quiet when it is attacked. What's the state of the Republican Party? What's its role in all of this?
I think the Republican Party has a crucial and really underappreciated role in all of this. It would be pretty easy to put the brakes on what the Trump administration is doing. It would only take a handful of Republicans. It would not take a majority of Republicans. It wouldn't even take a large faction of Republicans. Could change the dynamic and put Republicans
on what is a pretty radical authoritarian turn in the last four months. But the party now, now sort of purged of its last Adam Kinzinger's and Liz Cheney's, is almost uniform in backing an openly authoritarian figure, or at least acquiescing to an openly authoritarian figure. Unlike 2016, 17, there's no serious debate about
Donald Trump's authoritarianism. He openly attempted to overturn the results of an election, and he tried to block a peaceful transfer of presidential power. The fact that the Republican Party, knowing that, knowing that their leader attempted a coup, would nominate him and would give him the blank check that they have given him in the sense of allowing him
to place somebody like Kash Patel in charge of the FBI and allow to basically abdicate authority while the president engages in illegal behavior and appropriating congressionally approved funds is shocking to me, even though I wrote those words a couple of years ago in Tyranny of the Minority. It's astounding to me how...
mainstream Republicans are willing to go to avoid a conflict with Trump and how far they're willing to sacrifice democracy in order to preserve their jobs or their social standing. You know, in an interview with The New Republic, I read that you said that if Trump were to refuse to obey, to openly violate the law and potentially not comply with judicial orders, judicial rulings,
saying that you're in violation of the law, that that's really outside of this competitive authoritarianism. You said that's the realm of outright dictatorship. And I wonder how close are we to that right now? I mean the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was
According to the administration, mistakenly arrested and transported to that prison in El Salvador. The administration is claiming now that he's in the custody of El Salvador and they can't bring him back. Isn't the administration in effect defying an order of the Supreme Court here? In effect it is. However, I think there's always a lot of ambiguity, a lot of gray area when it comes to whether or not the administration is openly defending
challenging or disobeying the court. Both sides have an interest in avoiding the appearance of outright violation of court orders. And the Trump administration will say it's complying. It will say it will try to appeal in various ways. It will claim sort of a different interpretation of the ruling. There are lots of ways to fudge. And it will be up to the Supreme Court to kind of
If it needs to, if the court is truly concerned that the administration is not complying with Supreme Court rulings, Justice Roberts is going to have to be much, much clearer and much more public in his language. And the thing is, the Supreme Court also doesn't want that kind of confrontation. Few things could weaken the court more.
than being openly undermined by the executive branch. That would be a crushing blow to the legitimacy and the authority of the court. So the court has an interest in fudging things as well, which allows the president, if he wants to, to kind of play chicken with the court and threaten and threaten and threaten. And you will find in some instances and to some degree, courts will back down. So a lot of...
A lot of violation of the rule of law can occur before we're all convinced that there's been an open rejection of a Supreme Court ruling. I hope it won't come to that. But if Justice Roberts were to draw a red line and Trump were to cross it, yeah, then I think we're in at least temporarily a situation of dictatorship.
There were reports last week by Politico and NPR that the administration is cutting back on annual reports, the State Department's reports on countries' human rights records, removing critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corrections, and restrictions on political participation. What's the impact here, do you think? I think it's part of a process in which this kind of nativist-leaning government is
is abandoning our longstanding, certainly since World War II, commitment to the world, commitment to international development, commitment to democracy, which has been very strong in this country since the 1980s, and commitment to sort of build and sustain soft power in the world, which many of us think is pretty consequential. So
This administration not only doesn't really care about reporting on or perhaps addressing human rights in country X or country Y, but actively dislikes it and is withdrawing from it. Those human rights reports were very good and were widely used, including by scholars. Those were pretty systematic reports that came out each year and which were quite credible. This is since the 1970s.
And, you know, it's not the end of the world that they disappeared, but I think the world is worse off as a result. We talked about one of the key elements of an authoritarian state is weaponizing the state against opponents. And, of course—
People will remember that Trump and his supporters have said that it's the Democrats who weaponized the state and weaponized the Justice Department under the Biden administration. And I wonder if there was some credibility to that in the prosecution of Donald Trump in the hush money case where it was a state prosecution for him, the money that he paid to keep the affair with Stormy Daniels quiet as the election was approaching. And what he was actually convicted of was 34 counts of fraud.
falsely entering business records, misstating the purpose of an expenditure, which I have to believe is technically the kind of thing that happens in businesses all the time. And in this case, you can argue that it was, yes, it was to shield information from voters on the eve of the presidential election, but it was information about a consensual sexual encounter. And again, that's not been uncommon among powerful politicians in the past. What do you make of that? Is there an argument that
that the Democrats went too far in that example. Yes and no. So it is not the case, at least according to the evidence that I've seen, that the Biden administration or the Democrats as a national political force weaponized the DOJ. That's a really important point. So Donald Trump has openly weaponized the DOJ, falsely accusing the Biden administration of having weaponized the DOJ.
I do think that the Manhattan-Hashimani case, first of all, it was a case of weaponization. And I think it ended up being very problematic because the other cases against Trump were by virtually all sane accounts, real and serious. These are the January 6th case and the documents cases. Those were not weaponization cases. Those are cases where
Donald Trump by all means ought to be investigated and prosecuted and tried. But the Manhattan case was those similar charges would not have been brought upon most politicians. So that is a case of weaponization. It's a local case. I think what they were trying to do and the reason why many opponents of Trump accepted it, even supported it, is it was basically an Al Capone play. So this was an effort to nail him down.
For something small because maybe they wouldn't get them for the other stuff. But I think it was a mistake. And it did. It did give legitimate grievance to Trump and Republicans and allows them to say, hey, this is a case of weaponization because it was a case of weaponization.
We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Stephen Levitsky. He is a professor of government at Harvard and co-author with Lucan a way of a new article in the journal Foreign Affairs. It's titled The Path to American Authoritarianism. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
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One thing that distinguishes this administration from others is the outsized influence of Elon Musk, you know, the billionaire head of a social media company and other companies. He's had this enormous influence on the administration through his efforts to cut staff and budgets and all of that. Is there anything comparable to this in other democracies that have slid towards authoritarianism?
Not that I can find. When Luca and I wrote our foreign affairs piece, it was published in February, but we wrote it in December before Trump took office. And so it's a speculative piece. And I think we really nailed it in a bunch of areas in terms of the weaponization of government and its deployment against critics. But one thing we did not anticipate, didn't even mention, is
This is an entirely new dimension that all of our studies of authoritarianism elsewhere had really provided us no comparable example. I still don't fully understand exactly what Musk is after, but I consider it probably the most dangerous element of the whole process the last few months. I've never seen, never remotely seen,
a concentration of economic, media, and political power as we see today in Elon Musk. That is just way too much power for anyone to have. It's almost unthinkable that our regulations and our politics failed to prevent that from happening. Even in sort of the best case scenario in which this is mostly just corruption, the amount of self-dealing, unchecked self-dealing that's going on is beyond the pale.
But the information collection, the illegal and frightening information collection and centralization that's going on, we still don't know to what ends that's being put. And in a country that prides itself on institutional checks and balances that we could permit to
This sort of, first of all, concentration of political, economic and media power and then unchecked and illegal behavior that could, in the worst case scenario, you know, serve as a basis for a very authoritarian project. Musk is going to hurt a lot of people. And Musk's breaking of the state is going to hurt a lot of Trump voters and dramatically downsizing the government if that's if that is the end.
is not necessarily compatible with building a working class populist base for MAGA. So again, I have to confess, I don't yet fully understand what Musk is after and what Trump is after by letting Musk loose. You know, I wonder if there's anything comparable in Putin's rise in Russia where you had oligarchs who –
made fortunes and increased Putin's power by allowing themselves to his administration. The parallel that I see to Putin, and I don't want to draw it too far because the regime in Russia is very authoritarian, much, much more so than anything the United States I think even could become. But the parallel I would draw to oligarchs in the Putin case are more the Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos's.
Putin is the guy in charge. The oligarchs are able to make a lot of money, but Putin made it very, very clear soon after he became president that the deal was these guys could make money through legal and illegal means, but the one rule was that they had to stay out of politics. If you finance the opposition, you were done. And that's what happened, for example, to Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
So Bezos and Zuckerberg kind of acquiescence, getting on their knees to Trump, I see that parallel. Musk, though, is much more Trump's partner. He is thus far not behaving as if he is a subordinate to Trump. And there's no equivalent independent oligarch in Russia. Nobody who can stand up to Putin and sort of independently partner with Putin the way that Musk has.
Final question. How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the future of American democracy? I think the way the debate goes these days, I'm still somewhere in the middle. I'm very pessimistic in the short term. In fact, I would go as far as to say that today we are no longer living in a democratic regime. I think we have already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. Very quickly, we
In a democracy, there should not be a risk or a cost to publicly opposing the government. And I think now it's pretty clear just in four months with the weaponization, the attacks against law firms and the threats against CEOs and media and universities and NGOs and individual critics of the Trump administration that today there is a cost to publicly opposing the government. One runs a credible risk today.
of government retribution if one opposes the government. So people, individuals, organizations all over this country today have to think twice about engaging in public opposition because they know there's a credible threat that something will happen to them. They're not going to be jailed or killed or exiled, but they may face some pretty difficult circumstances if they oppose the government. That to me, the fact that there's a price on
that there's a cost to opposing the government means that we are already in an authoritarian situation. It is, it's mild compared to others. It is eminently reversible, but we're not living in a fully democratic regime today. And so I'm very pessimistic about our ability to,
to revert that in the short term. Our society, our very muscular civil society, has not stepped up for the most part. There are signs that this is changing, but we've been very, very slow to respond. And the wealthiest, most prominent, most powerful, most privileged members of our civil society have for the most part remained on the sideline. And that's allowing Trump to do much more damage than I expected him to be able to do.
Again, in the long run, I think we continue to have a number of institutional channels to contest Trump, and we continue to have the muscle, the organizational, financial muscle in society to sustain opposition. Well, Stephen Levitsky, thank you so much for speaking with us again. Thanks for having me.
Stephen Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard. His new article with Lucan Way in the journal Foreign Affairs is titled The Path to American Authoritarianism. Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the second season of HBO's The Rehearsal, in which Nathan Fielder stages elaborate recreations or anticipations of events using a mix of actors and real people. This is Fresh Air.
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HBO's The Rehearsal, in which Nathan Fielder stages elaborate recreations or anticipations of events using a mix of actors and real people, just started its second season and is available to stream on Max. Our TV critic David Bianculli says it's even more surprising, disturbing, and fascinating than season one. Here's his review.
Viewers of the first season of the rehearsal already know what a weird, unpredictable, often unsettling show Nathan Fielder's HBO series is. His concept is to prepare people for some upcoming life event—a marriage proposal, a financial confrontation with a relative, even the prospect of parenthood—by allowing them to rehearse it in advance and play out the various possibilities.
He trains actors to observe and approximate the other people involved, then throws his subjects into an improvised conversation. And because he digs deeply into HBO's budget, like John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, Nathan stages and photographs these rehearsals on elaborately detailed replicas of actual locations, from bars to bedrooms. Last season, some of these social experiments were extremely funny and astoundingly original.
At the same time, though, sometimes they came with an occasional, unavoidable cringe factor, as when Nathan would insert himself into the narratives and his subjects' lives and get way too close for comfort. Part of the delight of watching the rehearsal when it premiered in 2022 was having no idea what to expect from Week to Week, from the format or from Nathan. So I approached Season 2 with a bit of wariness.
How in the world could Nathan Fielder, with a new batch of episodes about rehearsals and recreations, recreate the show's original mystery and unpredictability? Well, he does. And he does so right from the start. I'll discuss only the opening installment of this new season of the rehearsal, because the show's twists and turns are a crucial part of the plot, and also most of the fun.
But because it's established right in the opening scene, it's fair to reveal what differentiates the new season of this quirky comedy series. This time, the rehearsal is no laughing matter, at least not at the outset. The first subject of this new season is deadly serious. It's about airline crashes and some of their possible contributing factors.
Using transcripts from cockpit recorders and elaborately constructed flight simulators, Nathan and his team restaged the last moments of several commercial airline disasters. His thesis is that a lack of chemistry and personal communication in the cockpit between the pilot and the first officer may have played a significant role.
And when his research uncovers the findings of a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, who suggested that advanced role play between pilots may help that interaction and prevent crashes, Nathan goes to him and tries to be taken seriously, even though, by profession, he's a comedian.
So I've been going through thousands of pages of these documents, and I noticed that one of your recommendations in the aftermath of this crash was to teach first officers to assertively voice their concerns. You recommended role-playing exercises should be done and that they should be required by the FAA. Right. But the FAA said no. Why? I don't know. For whatever reason, they're just not going there.
And we couldn't push them to go there. And we tried formally, we tried informally. And this was 15 years ago, and since this point, nothing's been done. And it might take another 15. Who knows? Getting Congress to do anything? Difficult. I do have some experience with creating elaborate role-playing scenarios. Okay.
Before long, Nathan is on the case. He enlists as his initial test subject a young first officer who lives with his mother and has a somewhat shaky relationship with his girlfriend. Nathan tries to shadow the junior pilot going through his everyday routine, but when Nathan and his camera crew track him through the Houston airport, they're denied access to the exclusive pilot's lounge. That's when Nathan places a phone call.
and halfway through the call, walks into an adjacent office to deliver a message in person. You said this is for HBO? HBO, yeah. And the focus of the project is aviation safety. So, you know, we're really trying to make a somewhat sincere effort to explore and develop new ways to improve pilot communication in the cockpit. So that's the main thrust of the project.
Okay, okay. Could you tell me more about the project? You said somewhat sincere? Well, I only say somewhat because it's a television show, so we're also trying to make it entertaining. So there's dual goals, I guess. Okay. And you said it's a documentary? Yeah. I mean, I would use that term loosely, but yeah. Yeah.
Like, when you say that it is hybrid, you mean, I'm just trying to get a sense of the tone and what the end product is going to look like. We are happy to work with media projects. We just want to make sure. I think that's good. Yeah, I think I'm going to call them for real now. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, great. Think of how meta that is.
Before Nathan places a call to United Airlines, he stages his own rehearsal, with a hired actor to ad-lib her responses to his request. And then, when he calls the real United Airlines representative and she doesn't play ball, Nathan uses HBO's money to build on a vast soundstage a replica of a long stretch of the Houston airport terminal, including the pilot's lounge, as described by the first officer.
An actor is hired to play the senior pilot, and we, along with Nathan, get to observe how they interact before a flight. Or, more precisely, how they don't. I encourage you to take a ride with Season 2 of the rehearsal. It's like a magical mystery tour because you aren't given any clues about its final destination. But I can promise you this. The rehearsal doesn't crash at the end. It sticks the landing.
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the second season of HBO's The Rehearsal, now streaming on Max.
On tomorrow's show, we hear from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Coogler. His films include both Black Panther movies and Creed. His latest, Sinners, was number one at the box office this weekend and received raved reviews. It's a vampire thriller about twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, opening a juke joint in Jim Crow, Mississippi. I hope you can join us.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krensel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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