Is America an Autocracy Now?
The stakes of naming, and the reality of process
Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Friday, April 25, 1-2pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 10amET to register for the Zoom gathering. If you can’t attend, you will be able to access the video of the event as soon as it has ended on the Lucid home page, videos tab.
Our guest on Friday will be Anthea Butler. She is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. She is the winner of the 2022 Martin Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion and an op-ed contributor for MSNBC. Her articles have also been featured in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
We’ll talk with Professor Butler about Christian nationalism, the role of faith institutions in resistance to authoritarianism, and how we can reverse the moral collapse that facilitates autocracy, as discussed here:
If you’d like to join this and other weekly discussions, you can sign up as a paying subscriber or upgrade to paid here:
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**This essay is an expanded version of comments I gave to Joyce Vance for her Civil Discourse newsletter on the idea of “constitutional crisis.” Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, law professor Leah Litman, Supreme Court expert Dahlia Lithwick, law professor Paul Butler, and law professor Ryan Goodman also weighed in.
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"When do we know we've become an authoritarian state? What is the tipping point when we must say: we are no longer a democracy?" These are among the most common questions I receive from the public and members of the Lucid community. It is part of human nature to want to make sense of what we are living through by giving it a name. And when what we are living through is the destruction of our democracy, the naming is also empowering, because we can take inspiration from others who have been in our situation, and apply their hard-earned wisdom to our own place and time.
“Democratic backsliding” and “authoritarian capture” (two terms now in circulation) refer not to states but to processes. In truth, short of a coup or a declaration of dictatorship that is followed up with prompt and wide-ranging action, it can be harder to point to one precise point or policy as proof that democracy has been vanquished.
It can also be harder to recognize autocracy if we hear the word and think of one-party dictatorships on the Fascist model. These are less common now (although Communism has kept its tradition going in countries such as China and North Korea).
Electoral Autocracy: What Authoritarianism Often Looks Like Today
Today, we have a proliferation of electoral autocracies, or countries with strongman leaders who keep a semblance of democracy going —emphasis on semblance— by allowing opposition parties and media to exist, and holding elections. "Here we have a ballot box...the democracy gets its power from the people. It's what we call national will," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed to CNN in 2018, denying he was a dictator.
Elections are often the last democratic institution standing in a country where the judiciary, bureaucracy, and security forces have been captured and made tools of the executive. But those elections have a different function when strongmen "game" the system so elections tend to produce the results necessary to maintain the strongman and his allies in office. For example, they shut down opposition media and domesticate what is left, so the opposition’s message does not reach voters during election seasons. GOP muse Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, has done that.
Turkey is an example of how strongmen can propel their countries into full autocracy if they are haunted by a charismatic rival who would likely win the vote if free and fair elections were held. The stuff of Erdogan’s nightmares is former Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu. In 2019 Erdogan tried some electoral tricks to keep Imamoglu out of that office, but ultimately relented.
Yet as Turkey’s economy has worsened and the president has become less popular, Imamoglu has emerged as an obvious choice for Turkish head of state. And so Erdogan has made sure that electoral contest will not happen, at least while he is in power. In advance of the 2023 presidential race, Erdogan sentenced Imamoglu to several years in jail. Then, in March 2025, when Imamoglu was about to be nominated by his CHP party as the 2028 candidate, Erdogan actually arrested him, along with 100 other opposition party notables, including other mayors and local authorities, and stripped him of his mayoral office.
This has led to a huge and still-ongoing crisis, with record numbers of Turks protesting in the streets. No one would believe Erdogan today if he called Turkey a democracy. His actions were a tipping point that moved Turkey from an electoral autocracy to a de facto authoritarian regime.
The Fascist Road to Autocracy: Two Years vs. Two Months
I cite this Turkish story because it unfolded over years. And that is how things usually go when autocrats come to power legally (via elections or appointment). Benito Mussolini’s Jan. 1925 declaration of dictatorship led to immediate roundups of some anti-Fascists and closure of some opposition media and party offices, but it was only later in 1925 and throughout 1926 that “Laws for the Defense of the State” created a secret police (OVRA) and formally banned strikes, political parties, and more. Antonio Gramsci, the Communist politician and theoretician, was not arrested until November 1926.
Adolf Hitler’s speedy moves to transform Germany into a dictatorship stand out as unusual, and in fact they went against advice Mussolini gave to Hitler in Jan. 1933 through his Berlin liaison, Italian military official Giuseppe Renzetti: “make your moves carefully, and don’t rush.”
The February Reichstag fire allowed Hitler to take a different path. The building still smoked when an emergency decree ended freedoms of press, assembly, and more. Thousands of leftists were detained in prisons and warehouses while Dachau, the Reich’s first concentration camp, was being converted from an arms factory. In March, 52 days after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, came the Enabling Act, which allowed him to rule without consulting the Reichstag or the President. Germany was now an autocracy.
So Where and What Is America in April 2025?
I hope these foreign examples from past and present give some context for the American situation. I want to emphasize that there is no 21st century parallel, where the head of state came into a highly developed democracy via an election, for the pace of what is now happening in America: the speed-of-light purges, dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, abandonment of allies and partnering with autocracies, and wrecking of government entities concerned with humanitarian assistance, compliance, checks on power, oversight, and accountability.
Even where there was no such tradition of democracy, as in Russia, Vladimir Putin, in his first months, did not fundamentally recast government and foreign alliances at the pace the Trump-Musk administration has moved.
There is also almost no parallel in a highly developed democracy for a leader to try and overthrow the government in a “self-coup” and, rather than end up banned from politics, or stand trial, is elected to a second term, with a major political party as his personal tool, and legal, business, media, and other elites capitulating to him as though that coup attempt and insurrection had never happened.
Now we are 100 days into the second Trump administration. Whether it is public health policy, economic policy, national security, foreign policy, media-government relations on the democratic model, or the everyday business of governance, America is becoming unrecognizable to allies abroad and to many Americans.
When U.S. legal residents are rounded up and deported to a foreign gulag without the semblance of due process; when U.S. citizens with no criminal record receive letters from the government telling them "It's time for you to leave the United States"; when the executive power makes clear it no longer believes that court decisions should constrain its actions; when the leader has a personality cult that resembles those of autocracies: these are all signs that a shift away from democracy has taken place in government that is affecting everyday Americans.
This accelerated transformation from democracy into autocracy has been possible due to an innovation of the authoritarian playbook which I described as a “new kind of coup” less than two weeks after the inauguration. Instead of one strongman at the helm of government, we have two.
One of the parties in this power-sharing agreement has taken a more traditional approach to the dismantling of authoritarian governance: purges of the bureaucracy, the appointment of fanatics to Cabinet positions, attacks on the independent judiciary and security forces and military, and so on.
The other, a private citizen, has been given license to unleash digital shock troops to re-engineer government to benefit himself and his private companies, and wreck America understood as a democratic power. This new kind of coup can also be described as a hostile takeover of government via DOGE, which was created as an instrument for Musk to infiltrate and control a sovereign power.
History serves as a guide to discern what is new and what is an application of classic tactics of autocratic consolidation. So, where is America in April 2025? When “democratic backsliding” is producing demonstrably autocratic outcomes, we are in authoritarian territory.
One of my worst fears has always been that some combination of Trump and his political allies and Musk and his fellow broligarch allies will collude (or already are colluding) to wreck our voting system via some combination of electronic/digital systems tampering and plain old voter suppression, such as we've already seen, both at present and in the past. IMO a lot more attention needs to be paid to this, and it's very useful for us to look at what other autocrats have similarly done. Ignorance is NOT bliss.
Thank you Ruth for your insightful analysis, however, I believe it's important to address the role of social media, especially Facebook, in deepening and fixating the ideological divide and giving Trump the popular support he used (along with the probably suppression of around 7 million mostly minority votes, according to Greg Palast) to take power. Social media do not check for accuracy and their presumed rejection of hate speech is mostly empty policy. According to an MIT study in 2018, cited in ex-Facebook operative Roger McNamee's brilliant book, "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," "disinformation and fake news are shared 70% more often than factual stories and spread roughly six times faster" (p. 177). This contemporary phenomenon is utterly new in human history and has effectively undermined the benefits of a free and well-informed press. It's well-known that Fox News watchers harbor different beliefs than CNN and MSNBC fans. But the enraged certainties of the MAGA crowd that are nourished on Fox are seeded and hyper-fertilized via social media, thanks to their supremely profitable business model, in which targeted user attention is the commodity that they sell to advertisers. It's a deeply vicious cycle. The left has no such rigidly closed circle of ideological unity, but resistance is growing and hopefully will become better coordinated. Also, we can rely on Trump's stupidity and outrageous lack of self-control as well as the faltering economy his ridiculous policies have caused, to administer some doses of reality to the true believers. And once cowardly Republican office holders sense that his support is slipping among the faithful, I expect we'll see a rush to the door.