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Notes -
It's Different When We Do It, Chapter 27
or
Did I Just Get Trolled?
tw: old news, unapologetic whataboutism
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have a free essay at the (reportedly centrist!) Foreign Affairs: "The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown." (Archive link.) You may notice the URL has "trump" in it, despite that word not appearing in the title. Curious.
But wait--who are Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way? After all, one can scarcely throw a cursor across a website these days without hitting, say, six or seven hyperlinks to "think pieces" about Trump, fascism, fascist Trumpism, or even Trumpist fascism. But never fear--this is no Average Andy/Joe Sixpack collaboration. This is professional work by a team of scholars whose most famous contribution to the canon of political scholarship is the term "competitive authoritarianism." What, you may ask, is competitive authoritarianism? Read on!
Steve Levitsky, according to his employer (Harvard University, naturally), is a
His focus is not exclusive--he also writes on Israel policy while calling himself a "lifelong Zionist" (admittedly, in an article endorsing something like BDS)--but his interest in Latin America is apparently more than skin-deep:
Lucan Way is no less distinguished. Well, maybe a litte less--the University of Toronto is not even the Harvard of Canada, much less the Harvard of, well, Harvard. But his title--his title! He is literally a Distinguished Professor of Democracy. Where Levitsky's focus is Latin America, however, Way's might best be described as "Cold War and Cold War adjacent." He credits at least some of that interest to family ties to historical events:
This is an academic power couple, right here. Get one expert on authoritarianism in the New World, one on authoritarianism in the Old World, and baby, you've got a stew going! A book stew. An article stew. A bottomless cornucopia of cosmopolitan political commentary and analysis. Their 2010 text, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War," focuses on democratization (or its lack) under authoritarian regimes. David Waldner gave a blurb:
So: you've literally written the book on how democracies are (or are not) born. What are you going to do next? No, no, you're not going to Disneyland--you're going to witness the election of Donald Trump and stop telling people that you study the birth of democracies, but instead the death of democracies. From the Amazon page for Levitsky's (but not Way's) How Democracies Die:
That's the preliminaries. This week, Levitsky and Way published an article, and I have to say, I found it... kinda convincing? Except, I couldn't help but Notice some things that gave me pause. The thesis of the piece, as I mentioned, was that the United States is headed toward "competitive authoritarianism." The article provides a small explainer:
(As an aside, Way seems to think India is doing alright, actually? Not sure where that fits in with the above but, co-authored pieces do sometimes result in these little puzzles.)
What actually struck me first about this description was my memory of posters here in the Motte discussing "Brazilification," the process by which the U.S. is, as a result of economics, immigration, and identity politics, gradually adopting the political norms of South and Central American nations. But my experience has been that it is usually more conservative, even arguably nationalist people expressing this concern. While Levitsky and Way do not use the term "Brazilification," they definitely seem to be placing the United States on that trajectory.
They elaborate on the problem at length:
This is where I started to wonder, just a little, whether I was being trolled. While Trump's second term has indeed set a record pace for executive orders, Joe Biden's early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders was a greater departure from the norm. Most readers here will be well-acquainted with the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Many will also be aware of the time regulators inappropriately targeted the NRA. Conservative media outlets faced expensive defamation lawsuits (losing some, winning others). The fit with the Biden administration just seems too close in this paragraph, to be pure coincidence... but what am I supposed to conclude from that? Am I supposed to be doing a Straussian reading?
The piece continues:
Republicans have long complained against the weaponization of government against conservatives, and Democrats have long ignored those complaints. Whether it's a county clerk jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses or the throw-the-book-at-them attitude toward January 6th protesters, conservatives regularly find the scales of justice thumbed against their interests. Similarly-situated Democrats need fear no prosecution at all.
Levitsky and Way have more to say about this sort of thing:
Tax evasion, you say? As for minor violations of arcane rules and rarely enforced regulations, well, the whole "Trump committed a felony" charade in New York was recognized well in advance as "novel" and "built on an untested legal theory."
The argument continues!
Why would the Republican Party embrace the idea that America's institutions have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies? After all, just 63% of senior executives in government posts are Democrats; only 58% of public school teachers identify as Democrat; fully 3.4% of journalists identify as Republicans, and the ratio of liberal to conservative college professors is a measly 17 to 1!
I guess "believing facts about the ideological makeup of our country's institutions" qualifies as authoritarian, now?
There's more to the article--I invite you to read it. But maybe some of you want to ask, in total exasperation, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Maybe none! I am not here to do apologetics for Trump. I was just really struck by the idea that this article could have been written, almost word for word, about Biden, or even Obama. Maybe Bush! Maybe others--FDR for sure, right? But I can find no evidency of Levitsky or Way ever actually noticing, or worrying, about American competitive authoritarianism, until Trump. They think he's special. I don't think he's special! I think that, so far, he has actually committed far fewer of the sins on their list, than Biden did. That doesn't mean I endorse Trump's actions, so much as I am confused that a couple of highly-credentialed experts on the matter only seem to recognize American authoritarianism when it is coming from their right (or, more accurately, even when it might eventually be coming from their right).
Aside from that, I don't see any obvious problems with the picture that they paint. Having pundits on both sides of the aisle say similar things about our nation's political trajectory serves to increase my worry that "Brazilification" might be a real thing, and makes me wonder how quickly it might happen, and how seriously I should take the possibility.
(Insert butterfly meme: is this authoritarianism? Insert spaceman meme: always has been.)
The problem for the thesis that Trump is going to usher in an era of “unfair elections” is that the system has worked this way from the literal inception of the American government. The electoral college has long overpowered urban areas in elections, to the point where California with 50+ electoral votes, alongside other large urban centers like New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, etc. are so important to the presidency that they spend most of their energy trying to win those states. The last election hinged on three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia. If you live in Wyoming, your vote literally doesn’t matter. Your whole state gets three votes. If Pennsylvania and Michigan wanted to have Wyoming nuked as a major election issue, pack your bags, because you’re getting the bomb.
To be honest, this is the veneer rubbing off to the point that most people can now see what our Republic always was. We were always a nation ruled by the coastal elites, pushing those concerns and values. The question is what to do now with a brief window in which the peasant population in flyover states is given brief control over the levers of power. And this is where the “our democracy” rhetoric is coming from. Not because we are losing democracy, we never really had it. But now the left is on the side the right is usually on, and they don’t like it. They don’t like having alien values forced on them, or having their institutions disempowered. So this is the end of democracy.
Who is spending money on winning California or New York? Republicans haven't broken 40% in 20 years in California, and except for the last election, ny is the same.
In fact the classic criticism of the electoral college is that if you live in CA or NY then your vote doesn't matter. The ad spending bears this out. And this isn't a new trend - twenty years ago candidates were also focusing little on California and New York and way way more on Ohio.
It doesn’t matter if your a red tribe Californian as the state has three huge blue urban centers that outweigh the red vote, so the state is a lock for tge blues. The state isn’t competitive, but on a federal level, if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe. Further, there are states that are only blue because of a huge blue city in an otherwise red state. Illinois has been this way for decades. 99% of tge state are red tribe. The state is solid blue because of Chicago.
Yes, cities are blue, this is a fact.
Nevertheless, it's obviously false that presidential candidates are elected by the coastal elites or that candidates spend most of their energy on California and New York.
The majority of ad dollars and pandering do not go to convincing the coastal elites. The coastal elite vote is, as they say, priced in.
At best you can say that the coastal elite in California mean that the rest of the votes in the state don't matter. Of course, this is simply a popular vote, so it's a little strange to call them an elite when they apparently have the majority opinion in the state.
I agree, if you remove all the democrat voters the country would be red like you wouldn't believe.
As a point of fact, the state, like almost all states is winner take all, either by district or in the case of the president, the entire state. So the state goes democratic, and because of that, Democrats get an automatic 54 votes for president.
And the huge locked in states have basically kept democrats in the game much more than they would be if they weren’t guaranteed the entire state of California. Removing the large locked in states means Ds get something like 108 electoral votes in the presidential election rather than the close race we see. Now yes, some of this is organic but because those states are winner takes all, it’s a huge boost to blues to have 150 or more votes locked in before a vote even occurs.
Yes, by land area the US is more red, but deciding that land area is what matters is even more ridiculous than the people who think the popular vote is all that should matter. Chicago dominates Illinois because the population of Illinois is under 13 million people and the population of chicago and its suburbs is almost 10 million people.
You're justifying in terms of capital-centric paradigm that doesn't work at a continental scale.
One of the historical failing points of empires / large states is that the capital politics is going to prioritize the benefits of the capital region to the disadvantage of the peripheries. The periphery regions, in turn, begin to build up grievances and divisions against the capital regions, which- over time and exasperation- can lead to resistance / revolts / insurgencies that threaten the capital's ability to control the peripheries, particularly when the costs of trying to maintain control threaten the ability of the capital elites to maintain control. This elite capacity is further complicated by the willingness of elites to trade off elements of the periphery for personal advantage in control over the rest, or the ability of external states to support the periphery against the core.
Historically, there are three main outcomes of this: (a) the peripheries are lost until the capital reaches an equilibrium of being able to maintain control as a small-to-medium state, (b) an extensively resourced suppression state apparatus is built and maintained to suppress separation for as long as the means to do so are available, or (c), the core region's institutional powers are deliberately limited so as force greater consideration of the periphery territory's interests.
The US, as a federalist system, commits to (c), which in turn allows the periphery power centers to become miniature capital centers and dominate their peripheries... but only to the point within the system. The California elite can dominate California, but it can't dominate the power center of Nevada. The California elite can't in turn build their own suppression state, and so have to balance how they deal with people with the ability of people to migrate out. If California were to leave the protections of the federalist system, the capital-periphery dynamic of the state would change- not least because they could be supported by the now-external federalist state to break apart the California core zones against the periphery zones (see the prospect of California spin-off states).
The inverse of that federalist system, however, is the systemic protection of the voting power of the periphery states against capital-group interests. This means states who power is in a sense decided by land area (namely- they control an area of land sufficient to be a state, which has equal senate representation).
Rather than being a ridiculous way to allocate power in a system, this is the way to have a federal system in the first place once you hit a point where core centers of power can no longer maintain control of the peripheries. The alternatives are for a still-born system where periphery states wouldn't join in the first place, or a suppression-state system which the periphery states wouldn't willingly join in the first place and would have much higher tendencies to fight back against.
Systems where a populated core dominates the periphery aren't formed of willing members, they are conquered or converted from more restricted beginnings. There are reasons that even the EU has gotten less stable as it has tried to concentrate powers that functionally consolidate the influence of the core regions (Germany and France) at the expense of periphery regions.
If I were arguing for using the popular vote instead of the electoral college you might have a point but that's not my position. Neither is it my position that Chicago should be allowed to impose its culture and rules on wider Illinoisans. The capital of Illinois isn't even Chicago as a concession to this idea that the wider state ought not be totally dominated. What voting rule specifically do you even advocate here? That the ~20% of Illinoisans who don't live in Chicago but own a great deal of much cheaper land outside of the metropolitan area should dominate? It's going to be a hard sell to say that farmers are treated poorly by the federal government given how large farm subsidies are.
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