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IS AMERICA SLIDING INTO AUTHORITARIANISM - OR ARE LIBERALS SUCCUMBING TO "TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME" AGAIN?

INTRODUCTION:

We're 9 months into Donald Trump's second presidential term, and although we've focused quite a bit on his administration's foreign policy, tariffs and tech/energy policies, we haven't discussed his domestic policy since our meetup on January 26th - just a few days after he took office and began issuing a flurry of executive orders. Since then, many left-leaning journalists, academics & pundits have argued that Trump 2.0 is even more dangerous, because he's not checked by the traditional Republican politicians (e.g. Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, John Bolton) and military experts (e.g. John Kelly, James Mattis, Mark Milley, Mark Esper) he had in his first administration who reportedly dissuaded Trump from rash actions in some cases and occasionally refused to enact orders they saw as unconstitutional. Instead, they argue, Trump has stocked his administration with loyalists, he has a Republican majority in both houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and he's been gutting much of the federal bureaucracy, so he's virtually unchecked. As the months have worn on, Trump's critics have pointed to various signs of authoritarian sentiments and policies they regard as authoritarian & unconstitutional or at the very least highly corrupt, for example:

So what should we make of all this? If this United States actually sliding away from liberal democratic norms and towards illiberal authoritarian form of government? And if so, is this primarily or exclusively due to Donald Trump and his followers, or were there signs of this "democratic decay" in earlier administrations of both parties (and in other democratic countries abroad) that might signal broader structural forces that can't merely be solved by getting Trump out of office?

And to what extent is a left-leaning political bias among journalists, academics & civil servants distorting our view of what's happening? To what extent are we seeing a media circus like "Russiagate" in Trump's first term, where we'll eventually realize that much of the media fell prey to hype about unverified claims? And for those on the left complaining about Trump's actions now, why didn't they criticize Obama's deportations of 3.1 million people, expansion of domestic spying, and prosecutions of whistleblowers? Why did they downplay the Biden administration's "jawboning" social media platforms into censoring content and their attempts to inject partisan narratives about race & gender into our public schools, universities & HR departments? Are those who are tempted to dismiss the media's recent warnings about Trump succumbing to the "cry wolf effect" and "whataboutism" where the media's false alarms & hypocrisy in the past has caused people to ignore genuine warnings now?

In this discussion, we'll explore 4 various sets of arguments about Trump's aggressive actions that have aroused cries of authoritarianism & calls for resistance on the political left, some hand-wringing & calls for civility by centrists, and lots of cheers among the populist right...

In the 1st section, we'll look at some arguments for why Trump has overridden the federal government's checks & balances to the extent that he is causing a rapid slide towards a system of "competitive authoritarianism" (a.k.a. "illiberal democracy", "anocracy" or "hybrid regime") similar to Hungary under Orbán & Turkey under Erdoğan if not a full-blown autocracy like Nazi Germany or Russia under Putin. Under this theory, elections will continue but Democrats will be seriously hampered by factors like gerrymandering, voter suppression, malicious prosecutions of their candidates, and government attacks on their fundraising apparatus & activist organizations. Proponents of this scenario often see Trump sending ICE & the National Guard into blue cities as the initial steps to a "police state" and warn that it's intended to provoke left-wing activists into rioting, which will be used to justify even more draconian measures. This in turn could lead to a spiral of escalation that could thrust the U.S. into a period of extended civil conflict comparable to "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland or Italy's "Years of Lead" if not a full-blown civil war like we saw in the U.S. in the 1860s or in the collapse of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In the 2nd section, we'll look at some arguments for why Trump's cronyism & corruption, as well as his use of "lawfare" against his political opponents, has eroded democratic norms leading to what analysts have called "constitutional rot" and a Jacksonian-style "spoils system". This places the U.S. in the realm of a borderline "flawed democracy", but this is unlikely to lead to "competitive authoritarianism" since Trump's administration is too incompetent to fully consolidate power and he faces too little public support and too much opposition from powerful elites both within and outside the government. A reduction of civil liberties & rights violations are also expected, although this falls short of dystopian scenarios like a "police state". In terms of political violence, they predict something analogous to the protests & riots we saw in the summer of 2020, which still fell short of the riots of the 1960s-70s and didn't lead to anything analogous to "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Rather than a protracted civil conflict, proponents of this scenario tend to predict various types of "soft secession" from red & blue states ignoring the federal government when it falls into the hands of the opposition. This in turn could lead to a loss of national unity, economic decline as bureaucratic incompetence reduces "state capacity", and the loss of America's status as a world leader.

In the 3rd section, we'll look at arguments for why right-wing populism is best thought of as a structural force almost incidental to Trump, and why it is part of a "Great Realignment" (a.k.a. "Seventh Party System") where the Republican Party slowly but almost inevitably transitions into a multiracial working class coalition rather than a white nationalist party as some had feared. Proponents of this theory point out the Republican Party gained more support from black & Hispanic voters under Trump despite much of his rhetoric. Under this theory, the transition will be incomplete & chaotic until the GOP finds capable leaders who will make a clear break with the Reaganite legacy of tax cuts & deregulation to enact social & economic policies that are clearly pro-worker - what some refer to as "producerism". Proponents of this "Great Realignment" often imagine the Democratic Party slowly absorbing the neocons & libertarians pushed out of the GOP and reverting to a business-friendly version of "Third Way" liberalism roughly analogous to the Democrats under Bill Clinton.

In the 4th section, we'll look at arguments for why Trump is merely enforcing existing immigrations laws, cracking down on crime, and trying to reverse the left's "long march through the institutions" (e.g. news media, entertainment, schools & universities, nonprofits, the federal bureaucracy). They argue that elite dominance of most major institutions makes any major conservative reforms impossible without drastic actions that breach ostensibly "neutral" democratic norms that implicitly favor the left - e.g. invoking the Insurrection Act to use the National Guard in sanctuary states or violating the 1st Amendment by cracking down on left-wing activists & academics at universities. However, they'll often argue these actions are still constitutional based on various historical precedents when liberal administrations used similar strong-arm methods to enact their agenda, often connecting this with the "unitary executive theory" of jurisprudence. Another major component of this involves not so much ignoring or overturning civil rights laws but reinterpreting them to root out what conservatives perceive as anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian & anti-Jewish discrimination. Under this interpretation, journalists, academics, civil servants & other managerial elites are merely using claims of "authoritarianism" and "fascism" against Trump to whip up a moral panic and obscure their agenda which is tantamount to "soft totalitarianism" under the guise of diversity, equity & inclusion administered by the "managerial state".

As you can see, the first 2 sections present scenarios which differ in their severity but put the blame mostly or entirely on the forces of right-wing authoritarianism, Christian nationalism & white supremacy, as well as its grifters & useful idiots. For most proponents of these scenarios, the radical left plays a merely incidental role in terms of giving the radical right a scapegoat.

The latter 2 sections present scenarios which are different in their outlooks but both put some or most of the blame on aspects of "liberalism" - economic liberalism (a.k.a. "neoliberalism" or "free-market fundamentalism") for Scenario 3 and social liberalism (a.k.a. "identity politics" or "cultural Marxism") for Scenario 4. In these latter 2 scenarios, the radical left is often seen as having a symbiotic relationship with the establishment left, and both share much of the blame for provoking the right into taking such drastic actions.

Please keep in mind that several or all of the scenarios presented in each section may have some true claims without being entirely true, and that they're not necessarily all mutually exclusive. It's not uncommon for people on the left to go back & forth between Scenarios 1 & 2, centrists to draw upon aspects of both Scenarios 2 & 3, and conservatives to use arguments from Scenarios 3 & 4. However, these scenarios are not necessarily exhaustive of the entire range of possibilities. Rather, these scenarios are just some of the more common narratives I've heard from journalists, pundits & academics over the last year or so, and I'm hoping they can serve as the launching point for a more nuanced discussion.

DO WE KNOW WHICH SCENARIO IS CLOSEST TO THE EXPERT CONSENSUS? AND HOW RELIABLE OR BIASED ARE THE EXPERTS?

As far as I can tell, the closest proxy we have to an "expert consensus" would be the Bright Line Watch which is an organization created back in 2017 that regularly polls U.S. political scientists & the general public on issues related to the health of democracy and government actions that potentially breach democratic norms. I encourage you to read the key findings of their recent survey from Sept. 2025 of both 703 political scientists and a representative sample of 2,750 Americans - it's entitled: "Violence, redistricting, and democratic norms in Trump’s America". In general, it appears to best align with the 2nd scenario we'll look at, since it says "current expert ratings of U.S. democracy are closer to those of a mixed or illiberal democracy than a full democracy or countries often considered as relevant comparisons such as Great Britain and Canada." It also notes that "human forecasts from the Metaculus prediction platform and those from experts are broadly consistent after adjusting for experts’ prior tendency toward pessimism. AI forecasts from the startup Mantic, which has created the best-performing AI forecasting bot to date, rate the likelihood of most events lower than either human source."

If you'd like to understand the research being done at Bright Line Watch and how much we should trust the experts, I'd recommend listening to the Niskanen Center's interview with political scientist Brendan Nyhan back in January. The interviewer, Matt Grossman, prods Nyhan by pointing out that "you found that experts tend to overestimate or be too pessimistic about democratic threats.... [In Trump's first term,] there’s events that [scholars] thought were 65% likely to occur that 20% of them occurred or so. So we got pretty high, and I know at the highest levels, they did occur, but we got pretty far into a consensus that didn’t materialize. So what are the reasons for that? Is there liberal bias in academia? Is there just a negativity bias when you’re asking people about a bunch of threats? Is there something that went wrong in the reasoning that we can tell?"

Nyhan responds by saying: "We don’t have a lot of direct evidence on why this is taking place. It’s certainly possible that it’s political bias. I don’t think the totality of the evaluations offered by our experts across all their survey responses is consistent with that. I’ll say for instance, if you look at the overall evaluations of democracy during Trump’s term, the experts barely moved. They expressed concern. We asked people are these things threats to democracy? But they didn’t engage in the doomerism that we often saw online, and they consistently rated the US democracy as pretty stable, and while imperfect, significantly better than countries like Brazil and Russia and so forth. So I’m not convinced that the political bias story is the right one. I think negativity bias is an important idea to evaluate. And in our new future surveys, we hope to include negative events that aren’t related to democracy as well as events related to democracy that are neutral or positive to be able to better isolate how much that’s contributing. The final factor is, I think it may simply be these events are ones that seem especially intuitive. They coincide with narratives about Trump and potential vulnerabilities... And in selecting them in that way, we may be drawing out their beliefs on the kinds of events that they’re most likely to override their prevalence of."

RELEVANT MATERIALS FROM PAST MEETUPS:

Way back in Dec. 2017, we had a meetup entitled "Trump & Post-Truth Politics." We discussed: (1) the "Goldwater rule" and rhetorical analysis of Trump's speeches, (2) applying Occam's razor & Hanlon's Razor to the Trump administration, (3) the debate over "Trump Derangement Syndrome", (4) political fact-checking websites & their reliability in the age of "alternative facts", and (5) Trump as a "bullsh*tter" and "master persuader".

Back in Feb. 2018 we had a meetup entitled "Are We In A Global 'Democratic Recession'?" We discussed: (1) the components of democracy (free & fair elections, civil liberties, civil society, rule of law); (2) correlations between rankings on "democracy indices" and economic growth, personal freedoms, social progress & happiness; (3) whether we're in a global "democratic recession" - and if so, why; (4) has the U.S. declined into a "flawed democracy" - and if so, why.

In Sept. 2018, we had a meetup entitled "Can We Predict Geopolitical Conflict?" where we discussed the principles for geopolitical forecasting that Philip Tetlock discovered in his research with the Good Judgment Project. In the 3rd section, we looked at what factors can predict civil unrest, military coups & popular revolts. In the 4th section, we looked at looked at what factors can predict civil wars & mass atrocities.

In Oct. 2020, we had a meetup entitled "Is Constitutional Conservatism Dying?" We looked at the social trajectory of the American conservatism movement from the resistance to FDR's New Deal, to the Reagan & Gingrich Revolutions in the 1980s-90s, to the way the "libertarian moment" fizzled amid the Tea Party populism of the 2010s, which in turn paved the way for rise of Donald Trump. We also discussed the East Coast vs West Coast Straussian split over Trump, and the debate among Christian conservatives about whether fidelity to classical liberal ideals should be retained or jettisoned.

Back in Jan. 2021, just after the storming of the Capitol on 1/6, the Skeptics had a meetup entitled "Bad History & Our Political Crisis". We looked at political turmoil & violence in Weimar Germany and the U.S. in the lead-up to the Civil War and compared & contrasted this with modern-day America.

In Nov. 2022, we had a meetup entitled "Understanding the Great Realignment" and the 4th section dealt with the possibility that Trumpism" and the "Great Awokening" are realigning the two major parties, leading to a GOP that's more driven by a working-class/middle class coalition in the rural, suburban & exurban areas and a Democratic Party that's based around an multiracial urban coalition composed of a college-educated elite and lower-wage service workers. We explored how the current party coalitions might fracture in a meetup in Jun. 2024 entitled "Which Party's Coalition Will Crack First?", focusing on Democrats' struggles with young people and black & Hispanic voters (particularly men), and Republicans' struggles with major corporations and suburban middle-class whites (particularly women).

Back in September of this year, shortly after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, we had a meetup entitled "Is Political Violence Increasing in America?" We discussed: (1) what we can learn from studies on who commits political violence & which portion of the public supports it, (2) what we can learn from studies on hate crimes & the public's underlying racial/ethnic animosities, (3) the political effects of peaceful protests vs riots and the "radical flank effect," and (4) conflict cycle theories and whether they indicate the U.S. is at risk of a civil war.

DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major debates over democratic decline in the U.S. over the past decade. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 61 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I've listed some questions under each section to stimulate discussion. We'll do our best to address most of them, as well as whatever other questions our members raise. I figure we'll spend about 40 minutes on each section.

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I. ARGUMENTS FOR WHY TRUMP IS CAUSING A RAPID SLIDE TOWARDS A SYSTEM OF "COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM" & A "POLICE STATE" WHICH COULD PRECIPITATE AN EXTENDED CIVIL CONFLICT:

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1a) NYT w/ Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder & Jason Stanley, "We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S." (video - 6:53 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXR9PByA9SY

1b) History Documentary Channel, "Expert [Barbara F. Walter] Reveals the Signs & Risks of Civil War 2.0" (video - 4:15 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of3Up6qDoVU

II. ARGUMENTS FOR WHY TRUMP'S CRONYISM & USE OF "LAWFARE" HAS ERODED DEMOCRATIC NORMS & LED TO A DYSFUNCTIONAL "FLAWED DEMOCRACY" WHERE RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, LOWER "STATE CAPACITY" & "SOFT SECESSION" ARE MORE LIKELY THAN AUTHORITARIANISM OR CIVIL CONFLICT:

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2a) MSNBC w/ Joanne Freeman, "‘Blatant cronyism’: Trump’s gutting of the civil service has historic parallels to ‘spoils system’" (video - 9:24 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yM24CvEQAs

2b) CBS w/ Jeffrey Rosen, Gillian Metzger, Don McGahn, "Are we heading toward a constitutional crisis?"(video - 7:59 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UscjaQXPZo

III. ARGUMENTS FOR WHY TRUMPIAN POPULISM IS PART OF THE "GREAT REALIGNMENT" WHERE THE G.O.P. SLOWLY TRANSITIONS INTO A MULTIRACIAL WORKING CLASS PARTY BASED ON "PRODUCERISM" RATHER THAN A WHITE NATIONALIST PARTY BASED ON FASCISM:

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3a) Daily Signal w/ Patrick Ruffini, "The Multiracial Populist Voters Reshaping the Republican Party" (video - 22:32 min, listen from 0:39 to 9:05)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAak9cZLJ6o&t=39s

3b) Eric Metaxas Show w/ Michael Lind, "Can Democracy Be Saved from the 'Managerial Elite'?'" (video - 6:53 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq3kYVc3UyM

IV. ARGUMENTS FOR WHY TRUMP'S DRASTIC ACTIONS ARE MERELY PART OF RESTORING LAW & ORDER, FLEXING "UNITARY EXECUTIVE" AUTHORITY, AND REVERSING THE LEFT'S "LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS":

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4a) The Hill w/ Dritan Nesho, "Trump Policies Hugely Popular, New Poll Finds: 81 Percent Support Deporting Illegal Migrants" (video - 8:49 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0KVQwTw-Nk

4b) CBS News w/ Jessica Levinson, "What is the unitary executive theory and how might Trump be using it to transform government?" (video - 4:41 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yad8iVoZBg

4c) Chronicle of Higher Education w/ Chris Rufo, "Chris Rufo Floats Calling in ‘Troops’ [to end DEI in Universities]" (video - 56:14 min, listen from 49:08 to 53:19)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFCj_3zd6GM&t=49m8s

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Donald Trump
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