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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.)
This is interesting because I think the government should influence the peoples political opinions. Democratic competition naturally encourages division. If the losing side gets to stick around and try again indefinitely, you quickly end up with a whole lot of people who are really angry about how at least half the decisions went. You want a population that mostly agrees with each other as a backdrop against which the current battles are fought, and unless you believe in the right side of history to a truely insane extent, thats not gonna happen on its own.
What distinguishes this from authoritarianism? Perhaps here we can steelman Levitsky and Way: The left, for all the questionable things they may have done, really have influenced public opinion to a great degree. By contrast, the measures that they worry about with Trump would attack relatively "late in the pipeline" - prosecuting rival candidates for example doesnt do a lot for public opinion, but its good at winning elections. Obviously, this kind of influence has failed eventually, as shown by Trump 2x (and maybe some of the more extreme measures against him are because of that), but maybe as an optimistic lefty you see this as an abberation - bad macroeconomic luck, or the left overplaying their hand, or something like that. Certainly it seems easier for the left to regain this influence, than for the right to build its own version in 4 years. So a republican competitive autocracy would look like those third-world examples, and a democrat one wouldnt necessarily. Here I go doomering again I guess.
See this is where I disagree vehemently. To have the government effectively decide where the Overton Window sits and basically indoctrinate its people into a set of beliefs and values in order to swing the elections is tyrannical. And at least in a bad old tyranny there was a limit to the things that a tyrannical regime would care about. The old tyrant wanted my loyalty, he wanted my obedience. He did not, however care if I agreed with trans ideology, if I agree with blank slatism, if I think that Israel or Palestinians are in the right. That is honestly something I’d rather like about a monarchy or something like that. Instead of having to teach everyone to agree that we need to support some side in a conflict, you just tell me we’re sending weapons to Kazakhstan and be done with it. Instead of teaching my kids to see trans as an option, just decide you’re allowing it and leave my kid alone.
I feel like no democratic society actually is allowed to have an organic culture because it’s all being manipulated all the time. You’re being told what you must think and believe by professional opinion shapers rather than allowing opinions to develop naturally.
In particular there are always motives for a government in control of the Overton Window to push the window towards Big Government and away from checks & balances.
Not only that but weakening any competition. Churches and the family are competition for the loyalty and power of the state. A state full of strong families doesn’t need to provide nearly as many social services. Because the wife raises the kids, they grow up healthy and well adjusted, achieve more, and are less likely to engage in self-destructive or criminal behavior. But this leaves a lot less need for government intervention in social structures. A society of weak families needs government services: subsidized daycare, welfare, addiction counseling, abortion, etc. and to boot is less able to teach its children itself which means less competition for the tender minds of the youth. The same is true at larger scale of churches and communities. Yet, to listen to modern culture, none of that is true. The modern culture, through every organ teaches that parents are at best clueless, and at worst bigoted. Women must be protected from their husbands, schools must act bravely to protect kids who want to change their gender, etc. now abuse can and does happen, but it’s much much rarer than it’s held out to be by official organs. And again the same applies to churches and communities: the abuse and rabid fundamentalism the public is told to fear are rarer than advertised.
But all of those are competition. So the public must be taught to be selfish (to break community bonds), to fear religion (which provides help and might contradict the government on some issue), and to prioritize everything else over the family (and thus remove competition for values and services).
Congratulations: this is a point that makes considerable sense in retrospect that I hadn't seen before. Thank you!
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For an extremely literal example, see kulturkampf- although the German state lost that time, this has been an enduring tendency of German centralization of power.
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