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From Kiki Weedy in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Day after day, the Trump administration has attacked the constitutional order and the rule of law in this country. Many of these actions were laid out before the election in Project 2025, while others seem less premeditated.
Today we talk with political scientist Steven Levitsky and historian Anne Applebaum about the models of governance that the Trump administration has deployed. What do we need to know about what's happened in Hungary, El Salvador, Turkey and other countries that might help us recognize the form our government is taking? It's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
There was something about watching Elon Musk parade around the CPAC stage with a chainsaw gifted to him by the right-wing president of Argentina, Javier Millay, that made me realize we needed to do this show. As much as Donald Trump himself is a unique American creation, the way that the Trump administration is smashing up against the institutions of democracy and the American constitutional order has some precedence both here at home but also around the world.
This morning, we've got two experts on governance, each of whom has drawn parallels between the Trump administration and what's happening in other countries in Europe and Latin America. We're joined by Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Her book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It's great. She's also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Thank you so much for joining us, Anne. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
We're also joined by Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard, co-author of "Why Democracies Die" and "Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point." Thanks for joining us, Steven. Thanks for having me. And let's just start with some term definition here. You know, we've got autocracy, authoritarianism, oligarchy, fascism. Let's just like start with autocracy. Like how do you, how would you define that in our context?
So autocracy is a useful word because it doesn't have a specific ideology attached to it. You can be a left wing autocrat or a right wing autocrat or a religious autocrat or many different kinds of autocrat. But it means that you are you or a clique of people or a.
or a political party are people who aim to rule your country without any checks and balances, without anything that constrains you. So ideally, without any free media, without a real opposition, without courts, without independent courts, you seek to use to rule by law rather than use rule of law, meaning that the law is what you decide it is and not
something that comes from a constitution or from some separate legal institution. So it's not all autocrats achieve this, but the ideal is that they run their countries without any constraints. How would you contrast that with authoritarianism?
I mean, authoritarianism is similar. You know, I suppose it's a broader and more general term. You know, you can be a kind of authoritarian person or have an authoritarian personality, you know, even if you live in a democracy. So it doesn't imply a system quite as much, but they overlap. They overlap with the idea of dictator. You know, autocracy just describes, as I said, you can be a one-man autocracy or you can be a political party
That runs an autocracy or you can have a clique of oligarchs who run an autocracy and, you know, dictator implies one person. Yeah. You know, Stephen, you wrote a piece in February titled The New Authoritarianism. How were you? What kind of contrast are you trying to draw between the old authoritarianism and the new one?
Well, in the 20th century, most authoritarian regimes were of a foreign that many of us find recognizable either military dictatorship or single party rule like we saw in the Soviet Union and the communist world. There was really no mistaking these regimes for democracy. In the 21st century, many more autocracies outside of say China and the Middle East,
have at least the formal architecture of democracy. They have elections, they have multi-party elections. They operate at least nominally within the bounds of some democratic-looking constitution.
So they're harder to identify, sometimes harder to even know that you're living under authoritarianism. But at the end of the day, few people would contest the fact that obviously Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, or even India today are autocracies. They're what Luke and Wei and I call competitive authoritarian regimes.
I can't help but think of Mexico under the PRI, too, right, where there would be elections and stuff, but they didn't really matter until the 1990s, yeah? Yeah. I mean, Mexico evolved over time. For many, many years, the PRI was far and away the only game in town, and there was no...
Yeah, I love the line you have. Competition is real but unfair. Right.
You know, one of the things when I was first reading your article that you wrote in the Journal of Democracy, kind of the even longer form kind of version of this argument, you were looking, for example, at like the Department of Education and talking about it being possibly weaponized in this sort of competitive authoritarian kind of regime.
But now when we look at what's happened with the Department of Education, we see that it's not only being weaponized, but it's also being gutted and hollowed out. How do you see the specifics of this administration in its sort of application of the principles of this new form of governance?
That's a great question. I think it's confused. I think there are very different currents within this administration that still have to play themselves out. Going back to your introduction, there's a real difference between Millet in Argentina and Viktor Orban in Hungary. Millet, who thus far has been, I should say, less authoritarian than Orban, is basically breaking the state.
He took a state that was not working and it was very unpopular and is just gutting it with a chainsaw, as you said. Victor Orban didn't break the state at all.
Viktor Orban learned and has taught a generation of conservatives that the state can be deployed against one's enemies. So he has strengthened and used the state and turned it pretty systematically against his political rivals and enemies. Now, there are some within the Trump administration who want to weaponize the state a la Orban and turn it against rivals. And the education department, in fact,
has been used, is being used systematically to attack and weaken universities. We've seen this at Columbia. The guns are being turned on Harvard as we speak. But at the same time, as you said, they're talking about eliminating the Department of Education. You can't smash the state entirely and weaponize it and use it against your rivals. And I think these guys are going to have to kind of figure out what their priority is.
And how do you read this sort of the different factions, the sort of the Doge versus the Bannon in some sense? So, first of all, I think it's important that Americans understand, since we're comparing this to other countries, that some of what's happening here in the United States is much more radical than anything we saw happen in Hungary or, you know, or in India. You know, the speed of change is much faster.
the randomness of it is much greater. I mean, I think Steve is right that there are, you know, it's unclear yet what the end game is. But I would identify, you know, at least three different groups who are acting in the Trump administration. I would say one, let's call them techno-authoritarians. I mean, this is Elon Musk, who's simply going in
taking control of the treasury payment system and cutting stuff he doesn't like. And this is the thing that's very radical. I don't I don't I can't think of an exact precedent for this. Maybe Steve can. But I mean, even some of the programs that he's cut aren't ones that Trump himself has ever mentioned or Trump necessarily even knows about. They aren't. He doesn't have any agreement from Congress to eliminate programs that are congressionally funded and congressionally approved.
He's simply cutting stuff he doesn't like and he finds to be wasteful. And so he talks a lot about fraud and waste, but he doesn't prove it except to identify programs that seem to him unnecessary. I'd say that's one group. I'd say there's a second group and we haven't heard from them as much, but we might later down the line and they would be the ones who
are more in line with Victor Orban's idea that you use the state and you take over the state. And this would be Christian nationalists who want our, our, the, the American government to be Christian. And they want it to promote Christian values and to encourage Christianity, whatever, you know, that can look and look like lots of different things. But this is Russell Vaught. Who's the, who's the head of the office. Oh,
OMB, you know, this has been his idea. This is a lot of what that is in Project 2025, which was one of his projects.
which he was closely attached to. We haven't heard from them yet quite so much. I mean, I suppose maybe in the using the weapon of the federal government against universities as you've using threats of federal funding to eliminate so-called DEI or to eliminate eventually eliminate other programs that they don't like. This would be this would be more like an Orban idea, more like, as Steve said, using the state. I mean, then there's a third group who are, I don't know,
traditional MAGA. I don't know what to call them. I think it'd be TradMAGA if you were just going to do it. TradMAGA. And this is a part of, this is actually a group that we've had in American history before. I mean, I think techno authoritarians are new, but there is a set of political ideas that come mostly from the South.
that are simply a prejudice against federal government and a dislike of being told what to do and a belief that there's too much control coming from Washington. And this is, of course, this is the piece of the spectrum that's most attached to
white supremacy and to a lot of older ideas that, you know, that, and those are people who we've seen before. I mean, they've had role in state politics before and they've been in American history before. I mean, I think the other two groups are new at least to government power. And Steve is right. They all have slightly different agendas. So far, the group that has
moved the fastest are the techno-authoritarians who do seem bent on just a kind of destruction. There's a theory behind that, which is that they'll destroy everything and then
if there's something that needs to be saved, they'll put it back in later. I think that was the idea behind destroying Twitter. I mean, the problem is that, you know, in the case of the federal government, if you've destroyed the social security system, it's not that easy to put it back together again once it's gone. And a lot of what they're destroying isn't going to be easy to put back together. Yeah. Fascinating map you've just laid out for us. The techno-authoritarians, the sort of urbanists use the state kind of Christian nationalists and that sort of trad system.
Maga. We're talking about the state of our country's democracy, the lessons we can learn from other countries that have fallen into authoritarianism. We're joined by Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Also joined by Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard.
And of course, we want to hear from you, too. Have you lived in an authoritarian country? What do you want us to know about how it happened? What you noticed as your country, you know, entered into democracy or descended into something else? And give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786.
The email is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on all the social media things. We are, no surprise, KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.
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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the state of our country's democracy, kind of doing some comparative study across other countries here. Joined by Stephen Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard and Applebaum staff writer for The Atlantic.
You know, Stephen, one of the things that I see people struggling with, I mean, one of the things that I even have a hard time kind of thinking about is that really as all of these kind of assaults on the rule of law and constitutional order continue, life is pretty normal in the streets, right? You know, people's DoorDash arrives, they go see their friends. And I was thinking a lot about the Brazilian movie, "I'm Still Here," set in Brazil in the 1970s.
In which, like, yeah, the opening scenes are these great parties. People are going to the beach and then, you know, the father and the family get sort of taken to prison and disappeared. How can people kind of make sense of the dissonance of life right now? And is there, do you have any tools to help people think about this?
No, it's a really tough problem. And, you know, only some of the world's most totalitarian dictatorships, most of which, thankfully, have passed from the scene, really only communist regimes and fascist regimes disrupted people's lives on a kind of day-to-day basis. Most dictatorships, including the Brazilian one that you pointed to, and many, many other dictatorships, Franco's, Spain's,
They only hit you if you were a political dissident. If you criticize the government, if you oppose the government, then the government was going to make life very difficult for you. But if you were a not very political person, in most authoritarian regimes across history, you could get through life without really running up against the regime.
And I think the kind of competitive authoritarianism that the United States is sliding into is even worse than Brazil. For most people, they'll go to the beach and they won't even run into the police checkpoint that you saw and I'm still here. Politics goes on as normal for many people, at least for a while. The problem is that
Once you begin to tilt the playing field, once you begin to weaken democratic norms and then violate and change the rules, eventually you end up with something that is very corrupt and potentially very abusive.
There's a poll in Venezuela in 2011. This is 12 years into Hugo Chavez's presidency. The regime is clearly a competitive authoritarian regime.
And a poll found that most Venezuelans still believed that they were living in a democracy. Now, things hadn't gotten really bad and really violent yet, but a few years later, it was very clear to Venezuelans that they'd lost their democracy. So it happens slowly. It happens in a way that targets universities, targets law firms, it targets elements of civil society. It targets people who give money to the Democratic Party. But the vast majority of Americans don't.
won't be touched, at least initially. You know, Ann Applebaum, I feel like you have shown this in your work so brilliantly, what this has kind of felt like in Hungary, yeah? Yeah.
I recently wrote about Hungary. I was in Hungary about a month ago. And Hungary is an interesting example of a place that, as you say, felt very normal to most people for a long time. But what happened was, is as Viktor Orban, the sort of autocratic prime minister, began to remove checks and balances, as he took over the courts, as he took over the media, as he took all elements of transparency out of the political system, he
then the economy became incredibly corrupt. It's a long, complicated story, but eventually he set up, there was a group of oligarchs that he created, including some members of his own family, who dominated about a
a quarter or a fifth of the economy and who ran businesses that essentially exist because of their relationship with the government. And eventually this piece of the economy and the corruption of the economy and the lack of rule of law began to bring down everything else. Investors didn't want to come there. People didn't want to stay there. A lot of Hungarians emigrated. Famously, doctors emigrate from Hungary because the hospital system is falling apart.
Working conditions are unpleasant, so you have hospital departments. So there was a kind of gradual economic and political deterioration, which had wound up with Hungary being, depending on which marker you use, is either the poorest or the second or third poorest country in the European Union.
And from a pretty good start, actually, was considered the leader of Central Europe for a long time. It was probably in that area of the world. It was the richest country at the end of the communist regime 30 years ago. But gradually they impoverished the country. They weighed it down. But it wasn't something that people felt immediately. They didn't feel it from one day to the next. I mean, we may actually in the United States
feel something more immediately just because of the tariffs which are coming, I don't know, tomorrow or the next day or next week and which are really not so much the product of some systematic form of authoritarianism but of a kind of whimsical madness of the president. I mean, this is an aspect of the Trump presidency that's also different. There's an element of it that's just...
what he wants at any given moment is American policy. And you have a kind of personalization of politics that's much, you know, that you don't even find in a lot of more systematic, more strategic autocratic takeovers. You know, so maybe we'll have economic effects earlier. But in Hungary, it took a long time to kind of bring down the system and really impoverish people.
I mean, Stephen, could you read the tariffs, though, as a way of essentially creating more opportunities for Trump to exert personal leverage or to enrich only particular industries? I've certainly seen some of that kind of analysis online.
For sure. I mean, both things can be true, and I think they are true. Trump doesn't have too many deep-seated beliefs, but he has always been a believer in tariffs. Going back to the 1980s, he's on the public record supporting a more protectionist foreign policy. So this is clearly something he believes in.
But tariffs are really useful for him because they're something that he doesn't need to go through Congress. It's an instrument he can just, as in the executive, just grab off the shelf and use and use in a way that is really effective.
very compatible with his political style, which is sort of extortion and bullying. Trump's... We have to... We shouldn't... For all the factions that I think Anne very nicely mapped out, we should also...
Keep in mind that this is a very personalistic government, and Trump really is a pretty unique figure. And he's a uniquely authoritarian figure for American politics. There just aren't very many people outside of Elon Musk with as many authoritarian instincts as Trump. So one of his authoritarian instincts is he thinks as ruler he should be able to bully and extort people.
both within U.S. society and other countries. And tariffs are just a really useful way for him politically to do that. They've got terrible consequences, but they're useful for him. Yeah.
You know, one of the fascinating things about your framework, Stephen, is it kind of it doesn't assume that there's sort of one democratic model, which is sort of the American one, and then all the other versions of it are kind of corruptions. It's like each country's government, sort of its own evolved organism with these sort of different features and possibilities. As we watch the U.S. set off on this path, knowing what you do about the way that other countries have gone down the same road,
Are there other things that are sort of particular or particularities of the American system you feel like make us, you know, uniquely resilient or maybe like have an unexpected downside risk to?
Well, one thing I've learned over the years is, to summarize what you just said, there are many ways to make democracy work. There's no single model of democracy. Britain has a certain model. Scandinavia has a certain model. Latin America, Uruguay, Argentina has a certain model. The United States has a certain model. And each one of those models, parliamentary or presidential, very strong checks and balances, more majoritarian models,
can be made to work but also can be made to fail each one has certain strengths and certain vulnerabilities uh... one of the strength i think that the u_s_ has is a is a is its federalism and it's very strong judiciaries is even though uh...
The judiciary is clearly going to be one of the last bulwarks that we have in constraining Trump. It's not going to save us, but there's no question that it's going to help to slow Trump down. But we're learning that even our vaunted checks and balances, we went around – all of us went around until very recently –
talking about how the U.S. has an effective system of checks and balances. They didn't work very well for us. We had a president who openly attempted to overturn the results of an election, violated the cardinal rule of democracy.
And we had an institution for that, which is impeachment and conviction. That institution failed to hold him accountable. We had a judicial system that failed to hold him accountable. We had a political party system, the Republican Party, that failed to hold him accountable, that re-nominated him. And, of course, elections that failed to hold him accountable. So institutions that are very well designed and that work very well in certain eras are
can fail miserably in other contexts. Just to make one more point, the one vulnerability that I think the US system has more than Europe is that because of our electoral system and when you combine that with a two-party system in primaries, it's possible for about a third of the electorate to win national power. The far right
In Europe and the United States, just about everywhere, nowhere does it exceed about 30% of the vote. And in European parliamentary system with proportional representation, electoral rules, it's really hard for that 30% to govern alone. It can get into power, but as a partner, usually in coalition governments. In the United States, because of our electoral system and primary system,
If that 30 percent can capture a political party, that political party can govern alone. And that is that has allowed MAGA in effect, which is really no more than 30 percent of the United States to to govern us unilaterally, which has been really costly. Let's bring in a caller. Let's bring in David in Oakland. Welcome, David.
Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm curious whether your guests know of countries where this slide towards authoritarianism was happening, but it was stopped by popular revolt. And if so, what happened in those countries so that we can learn about what we need to do? Thanks for that, David. And you want to take a first crack at this?
Sure. I can talk about Poland, actually. Poland is a country that I live in part of the time and stipulate for full, you know, years.
Full revelation, I'm married to a Polish politician, so inside knowledge. Poland was a country where we had an autocratic populist government that ran the country for eight years, was democratically elected, and in the manner of Orban and other leaders, was chipping away at some guardrails, was trying to politicize the court system, take over media. And so going down this pathway that we're familiar with,
It was held back in several different ways, some that aren't applicable to us, like the Poland's membership of the European Union, but also it was held back by very strong local government and local leaders, something like 99 out of 100 mayors of largest 100 Polish cities represented.
were members of the opposition, leaders from the opposition, even at a time when the ruling parliamentary party controlled both the parliament and the presidency. That was a really important bulwark.
Eventually, an election was won, and it was won by thanks to very, very unusually high turnout. So there was a popular get out the vote campaign that persuaded in particular younger people to vote. A lot of it in the end.
A lot of the success in the end came from finally, after a long period of failure, finding a way to explain to people the relationship between these assaults on democracy and people's ordinary lives. Looking for the links to, you know, between between democratic decline and economic problems, between democratic decline and corruption issues.
in the special case of Poland between democratic decline and changes to the abortion law that resulted in several women dying. You know, there was a, you know, I think it's important maybe even for Americans to understand that initially, as we've just been saying, people don't feel it. They don't see it. Democracy is something that you talk about theoretically rather than pragmatically. But if you, once the opposition is able to articulate that,
What are the how is this impacting you? Once they begin to be able to point that out, then they're able to be more successful in any way that the upshot is that a coalition. I mean, this is another important point, a coalition of center right, center left and
and liberal parties won an election at the end of 2023 and did eventually take over from this autocratic populist party that had, I think, intended to run to stay in power indefinitely. I mean, that's what they were hoping to do. So it is possible it can be done. They did it through campaigning and through elections. And as I say, and this is what returning to your point about what is one of the advantages of the United States, clearly one of our advantages is our federal system.
That we have, you know, there are governors, there are mayors, there are members of Congress, senators from all over the country who are able to galvanize public opinion where they are and put up some kind of campaign.
I mean, not just resistance. I mean, states have a lot of power. And so they're able to create their own laws and create their own institutions up to a point. And that, I think, has a... There are some parallels there that I think are useful. Yeah. Yeah.
um you seem to well let's uh let's have this it's interesting you know one listener uh writes in to say here's democracy for you trump won 197 pivot counties across 32 states in 2024 with a larger average margin of victory than any previous pivot county winner since 2008 including its first two candidacies harris won nine pivot counties across eight states sort of
you know, Pivot County is sort of a new unit of measurement here. But it is true that across most of the country, these move Trumpward. Most of these counties move Trumpward. What do you make of the popularity of Donald Trump, Steven Levitsky?
Well, first of all, it's really important to point out Donald Trump won the popular vote. And that's important. It's uncontestable. And it was a Democratic vote. And he won that. But winning the Democratic, winning the popular vote, even if Trump won 80 percent of the popular vote, that does not allow him to violate the Constitution, to violate the law, and in particular to...
Use the powers of the government to go after political rivals and critics. That is authoritarian behavior. Just because you're popularly elected does not make you immune to authoritarianism. Hugo Chavez was popularly elected. Juan Peron was popularly elected. Victor Orban was popularly elected. Popularly elected leaders who then go on to engage in authoritarian behavior are...
Now, what do I make of Donald Trump's popularity? It's a combination of factors. I'm not an expert in public opinion or in elections. But one thing that's very important to point out, I think, is that since COVID hit,
And incumbents have been defeated in about 80% of democracies around the world. I did a count of all the democracies in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and found that nearly 80%, something 42 out of 55 democratic elections, the opposition won. People are really grumpy. We're still, I think, feeling the effects of COVID and lockdowns.
Clearly, we're feeling the effects of inflation. We're still beginning to understand the impact that social media is having on public opinion. But there's growing evidence that it is increasing public discontent and leading people to vote against incumbents. So Trump has some strong supporters. Again, they're about a third of the electorate. But what brought him victory was just discontent with the status quo.
We're talking about the state of our country's democracy. Stephen Levitsky from Harvard and Ann Epbaum, staff writer for The Atlantic. We'll be back with more right after the break.
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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the state of our country's democracy, lessons we can learn from other countries that have fallen into authoritarianism. We're joined by Anne Applebaum, staff writer for The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, author of the book Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. We're also joined by Stephen Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard, co-author of the books Why Democracies Die and
Tyranny of the Minority, Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. We're, of course, getting to calls and comments and questions here. Let's take one from Michael in Petaluma. Welcome.
Hey, good morning. I ask this question, even though it may sound as analytical as the rest of the show, speaking as a father of three kids, one, a rather active vocal community activist in the making. You know, on the one hand, we're talking here about, well, you know, you go to the beach until you're taken away. Life happens as normal in most systems. On the other hand, you see the, the,
Sorry about that. That didn't work very well. On the other hand, you see, you know, if you voice too much dissent, if you write the wrong opinion paper and so on, then you're on the opposite side of the government. So how does that work when we have a system of a few hundred years where we're used to the ultimate solution is, well, you go in the streets and you protest. And that's how you move the political system.
Where do you cross the line between that and all of a sudden you're on the wrong side of being too vocal? Yeah, yeah Michael appreciate that question and Applebaum. I mean you want to talk about this?
So actually in our political system, you get change through elections. That doesn't mean that popular protest is unimportant. On the contrary, it's very important and it's particularly important. It's been important in our history at moments when the electoral system wasn't expressing people's views. I mean, the most obvious example is the civil rights movement when you had, which was really a protest in part from coming from people who couldn't vote. I mean, in the South,
Black people were unable to vote and the civil rights movement was expressing views that weren't expressible through formal politics. Mobilization of people is also really important
You know, in order to, as I described a moment ago in Poland, in order to persuade people that politics are urgent, that they matter, in order to get out votes, in order to create new political leaders, you know, who will eventually lead elections and win them.
And so so right now, being engaged in politics and being involved in protest movements is useful and important and central. And it's also really important that they are eventually focused on winning election campaigns and making sure that elections aren't stolen over the next two and two and four years. I mean, what you say about people who are.
you know, whether whether at what point people know or feel when they cross the line. I mean, I don't think we know the answers to that yet. You know, right now it's you know, there's there's no reason why any American shouldn't join a protest and and wave a sign, say whatever they want. And I would encourage everybody to do so. We haven't yet got to a point when the government tries to stop that or some paramilitary force tries to stop it. I wouldn't
I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we didn't get there, depending on what happens over the next couple of years. But for the moment, I hope that young people who are engaged stay engaged and that they focus on mobilization, expressing anger, and eventually getting people to vote.
You know, Steve Levitsky, question from a listener. Obviously, Harvard is one of the targets of this, Art writes, I'd like to hear your guests talk about how the Trump administration is weaponizing their false definition of anti-Semitism, that is to say, demonizing criticism of Israel to suppress freedom of speech, which can increase actual anti-Semitism.
Well, there are many different views on this. I'll give you mine. I think we had a very unfortunate confluence of events between the aftermath of October 7th in 2023 and the rise of Trump.
There was a fair amount of conflict on college campuses around the aftermath of October 7th, and there was a serious and very successful effort to basically conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, which I think is a terrible way to go. And so...
Pro-Palestinian protest was effectively – was very difficult. It was practically outlawed on college campuses. And the conventional wisdom became that college campuses, because there were pro-Palestinian protesters, college campuses were riven with anti-Semitism, which I can tell you at Harvard is not true.
The Trump administration has, in fact, weaponized that. It's used the excuse of anti-Semitism to go after universities. And it's in the process of evaluating somewhere between $250 million and $9 billion in federal funding cuts and grant cuts to Harvard.
on the grounds that Harvard has not dealt with anti-Semitism. That is not because Harvard has a problem with anti-Semitism. It's because Trump has a problem with Harvard. Yeah.
change in tack a little bit here. One listener writes, you know, even before Trump, military bases all around the world and the highest incarceration rate in the world, which part of that wasn't authoritarian? And Applebaum, can you talk a little bit about this? This is a sentiment that I do see expressed at times of sort of
Well, you know, actually the U.S. has always been authoritarian or that like this is this country has these dark episodes in the past where this kind of authoritarianism has risen in the past. Do you agree with the sort of fundamental premise of that, that there are authoritarian strains, but they've been largely held in check? Or do you have an entirely different view?
So I actually made a podcast last summer that was called Autocracy in America. And the premise of the podcast, it was a sort of narrative series of episodes, was that we are already seeing evidence of autocratic decline in the United States.
that some of those, some of these episodes do have an echo in previous eras of American history that you can find. I mean, we did an episode that was partly about Huey Long, who was a governor, kind of autocratic governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, who uses some language and tactics that seem really pretty familiar right now. So,
So I'm not, you know, it's clear that the trajectory of American history is not one of sunshine and light all the way through. And there are plenty of negative episodes. I mean, having said that, I do think that the
the existence of our constitution and the fact that in times of strife, we have always returned to it, including during the civil rights movement, for example, or including during the civil war. And we've gone back to the language of it and our greatest leaders have always quoted from it. And, you know, and that has continued to guide
an effort to expand democracy and expand rights in this country, which at times has been very successful, you know, is, you know, that's the primary theme of our history. I mean, that's a, it's certainly, you know, the center of our history is the attempt to create and maintain and hold a democracy. And of course, we've always argued about what that is and whether, you
you know, what the limits of it are and what the excesses might be. But, you know, but I think if you if you if you deny that or move away from it, then you're in a kind of nihilism about America that is really not useful right now. And it's important to remember what we've done that has been good, what we have achieved, what we've managed to have in the past.
And while we're facing what is, I think, the greatest contemporary challenge to our Constitution and to our constitutional republic, it's important to remember the better side and hope to expand it and return to it again in the future.
Yeah, it seems at least somewhat self-evident to me that you know We can think of these things as not just like yes or no like it's the US authoritarian or not like we can See strains of it This is there are spectrums and the different parts of the American government and in our behavior at home and abroad and like so I Take that point and thank you so much
Stephen, here's one for you. Katrina writes, "What do you think is the point at which the U.S. is beyond the point of returning to a functioning democracy as we've known it? What's the trigger event or circumstance that renders a permanent change?" My own concern here is that there won't be that signal event to people. But what do you think?
I agree. There won't be a trigger event. If I could just very quickly say something to the last point, which is that I'm a mainstream comparative politics guy. I study political regimes. We have spent years and years trying to figure out ways of measuring democracy. And by most mainstream definitions of democracy, it's fair to say the United States was not a fully democratic regime.
until the end of Jim Crow in the mid-1960s, late 1960s, that we became a fully democratic system in the late 60s or maybe after the Nixon era reforms. But it's also fair to say that over a 50-year period between the early 70s –
And 2016, we were a full democracy. So what's happening now is a dramatic shift from what we've seen and experienced in all of our lifetimes. Now, I agree with you. It is very unlikely that we're going to face a single declaration of martial law or state of siege or a cancellation of elections or a coup. It's more likely.
much, much more likely to be what we've seen in countries like Venezuela and Turkey and Hungary, where it's a gradual slide. And that's much more dangerous. To the earlier question of how do we know we've crossed the line, let me suggest the following metric.
In a democracy, there should not be a cost to publicly opposing the government, legally publicly opposing the government. One shouldn't have to think twice about writing a critical article or protesting or working for an opposition party. But in authoritarian regimes, there is a cost. In really brutal authoritarian regimes like Russia today, that cost could be your life or it could be exile or prison.
In the kind of competitive authoritarian regime that we're seeing, we're increasingly seeing, not necessarily for everyday citizens, but as we've seen for law firms, for universities, for some legislators, for Democratic Party donors, for civil society organizations that are in the crosshairs of the government, there is now a price to be paid for being on the other side of Trump. Again, it's nowhere near the price that Russians...
risk or pay in opposing Putin. But there is now a non-zero risk that if you publicly oppose the Trump administration or work for the opposition, you will face some form of government retribution. And that suggests to me that we've already crossed the line into a soft form and very reversible form of authoritarianism.
Stephen, really appreciate that. I think there's probably some people taking notes there. In a democracy, there should not be a cost to opposing the government. Let's bring in Alon in San Francisco. Welcome, Alon.
Hi. One of your guests mentioned the tariffs as a way of personalizing politics. I was wondering if they could talk about, I guess, if they see a similar thing with Doge and cutting government programs but at the same time privatizing them. I've seen this framed as something similar to what happened in Russia where a lot of the
I guess government functions were moved over to, I guess, to be privatized. And then suddenly, rather than like going to Congress to make things happen, they can just turn to, you know, their CEO or CEO friend who is in power and get things to happen that way. Yeah, I'll take that. Alon, great question. And Applebaum?
Yeah, no. So we've always had in our country, we've had very influential rich people and sometimes extremely influential. And the rich people have played roles in the government before and so on and so on. I do think, though, that the caller is pointing to something that is changing. And this is
of money and political power that's a little bit different from what we've had before. Just look at Elon Musk himself. Elon Musk is not only an enormous receiver of American government subsidies, not only does he run companies that
that are subject to government regulation, he's now in charge of the departments that are regulating his companies and subsidizing his companies. In other words, he's now playing a role in making decisions that affect his own personal wealth.
And that combination of political and personal, you know, political and financial power in exactly that form is pretty new, I think, in the United States. I mean, maybe Steve will correct me if there's a longer ago precedent. And it is much more like the way people hold combined political economic power, for example, in Russia. Yeah.
where they have access to government funds and government, you know, and influence over government decisions that affect them personally and they directly benefit. So, yeah, I think we're in a new era in that sense. And, of course, Musk has set an example that clearly,
others are following. I mean, you can see CEOs lining up to pay huge amounts of money to go to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. You can see people understanding now, aha, I need access to the president or maybe to the vice president. I need personal access in order to get stuff done in the American government. And I'm going to need to pay for that access. And so the idea that
And this isn't just general lobbying or general political influence. It's the idea that I need to do X. I need to the government needs to make this X decision that affects my company. It looks like I'm going to have to pay for that directly. Which that lobbying regime was already kind of gross enough. It was gross enough. But this is a kind of new iteration of it. And I think the caller is right to draw attention to it.
Steve Levitsky, this is a big topic to try and tackle here in our last couple of minutes, but I want to try anyway. Listener writes, please discuss the position of the military in the U.S. It seems to me this is the last bulwark. Is the Trump administration working to bring the military more fully under its control? You know, I'll remember in the last there have been times where military leaders have stood up and said, you know, like in 2020, you know, we are not under political control in quite the way that the leader might like. So talk to me a little bit about that.
Yeah, that's a big question. I don't think the military is the last bulwark we've got. Again, I think the judiciary is going to continue to do a lot of work and elections and quite possibly after 2026, the Congress will continue to be important constraints on Trump. The game is not up yet. But it's certainly true.
that if you want to sort of really circumvent the Constitution in the United States, if you want to, say, stay for a third term, or if you want to overturn the results of an election, you really need the security forces on your side. That is, in Latin America, is a long tradition of presidential coups or autogolpes. And the key to the success of presidential coups is having the military on your side. And the United States has one of the most
professionalized institutionalized militaries in the world. It has a long, long tradition of adhering to the Constitution and very, very professional behavior. But any time that a president orders the military to engage in unconstitutional behavior,
or in authoritarian behavior, it is putting military leaders in a terrible, terrible dilemma because they are constitutionally bound to follow the Constitution and they're constitutionally bound to obey orders from a civilian president. So either way, whether they obey the president...
and violate the Constitution, or whether they stick to defend the Constitution and refuse orders from the president, they are in trouble. So this is really, really hard. There's some evidence, and I was...
somewhat surprised by this, maybe I shouldn't have been, that Trump is in fact trying to purge and pack the military command the same way that he is purging and packing other institutions in the state. That'll be harder, it'll be slower, but if he's able to do it, if he's able to pack the leadership with loyalists, which I think is an open question, if he is
then he's going to be able to do much, much more damage than he's done so far. We've been talking about the state of our country's democracy with Stephen Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard and Ann Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to all of our listeners for their comments and calls. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour ahead with Mina Kim.
Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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