General Discussion

Celerity

(48,982 posts) Mon Mar 31, 2025, 10:54 AM Monday

What America could look like a decade from now

Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/31/united-states-authoritarianism-trump/

https://archive.ph/ZEBul

The bust of U.S. President Zachary Taylor is seen after blood was smeared on it when a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol building on January 7, 2021. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post)

snip

To answer that question, I reached out to a number of people who study systems of government and, specifically, the erosion of democracy. My question was simple: Given the country’s trajectory and what’s unfolded in other countries, what can we expect the United States to look like in five or 1o years’ time?

This is admittedly somewhat unfair (as several respondents noted), since I essentially asked them to look into a crystal ball and potentially suffer the ignominy of being wrong. Given how bleak many of the predictions were, though, I suspect many of them would be happy to see things resolve more positively than they might otherwise expect. The responses (offered over email or by phone) have been edited lightly for clarity.

Steven Levitsky

Levitsky is the David Rockefeller professor of Latin American studies and a professor of government at Harvard and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It’s important to point out that this is uncharted territory. Nothing like this has happened in the United States, and, in fact, no democracy even remotely as rich or as old as the United States has ever broken down. So we have really very little to draw from here. I think there are obviously three scenarios. Probably the least likely scenario — although possible — is a return to pre-2016 politics, relatively polarized but almost fully bounded within certain formal and informal institutional guardrails. In which politicians routinely refrain from manipulating or abusing institutions to harm the other party. We were broadly there between Nixon and 2016, and that’s entirely possible, but doesn’t seem very likely. It seems like the least likely.

I think the second least likely scenario is a real entrenchment of authoritarian rule along the lines that we see in other electoral autocracies elsewhere — Venezuela and Russia in the worst case scenarios; Turkey and Hungary, maybe more realistic. I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.

snip