How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?

According to a group of political scientists who study how democracies come to an end, the US is facing creeping authoritarianism. They explain how Americans will know know when we have lost our democracy:

"Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.
The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.
How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy."

Full NYT article (paywalled):
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/trump-authoritarianism-democracy.html

Also we recommend this commentary from Perry Bacon:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/08/trump-resistance-democrats/
Bacon's take: "The second resistance gets low marks. Civil society must step up."

In this event, we will consider how we can organize civil society so as to resist authoritarianism and defend democracy. Note that this event isn't really supposed to be about political parties or specific officeholders, such as the president, nor about people who might have run for president in the past, nor about people who might run for political office in the future. Those considerations are related, but for this event, we want to focus on the signs of authoritarianism in our midst and how to resist them and how to defend our free and fair system of government through civil society.

Here is one view of a recent sign of authoritarian behavior:
https://open.substack.com/pub/quadzillahikes/p/forget-trump-palantir-ai-is-the-ultimate