(2023-03-28) The Uniquely American Future Of Us Authoritarianism

The Uniquely American Future of US Authoritarianism. The US Republican Party has become increasingly authoritarian and extreme in recent years, and it doesn’t seem likely to moderate that in the foreseeable future.

Nearly half of Republicans say they would prefer “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones,”

around 55 percent of Republicans say defending the “traditional” way of life by force may soon become necessary

About 61 percent of Republicans don’t believe the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“To call a party democratic—committed to democracy—they’ve got to do three basic things: They have to unambiguously accept election results, they have to unambiguously renounce violence, and they have to consistently and unambiguously break with extremists or antidemocratic forces,” says Steve Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “I think the Republican Party now fails these three basic tests.”

“There’s a minority of the population that’s pretty reactionary and, by a bunch of measures, fairly authoritarian in really all Western democracies,” Levitsky says. “The question is, how are they channeled into politics? What’s exceptional about the United States is that 25 percent or so was actually able to wield national power. Is MAGA comparable to far-right parties in Europe? Yeah. With the exception of maybe Golden Dawn in Greece, though, probably more openly authoritarian.”

The problem is our incentives—the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the fact that sparsely populated territories are dramatically overrepresented in our electoral system—allows the Republicans to wield a lot of power without winning national majorities,” Levitsky says.

A lot of Americans have been radicalized since Donald Trump first took office, and it’s not easy to roll that back.

the rhetoric and actions of the GOP have emboldened their supporters to sort of accept certain behaviors that we wouldn’t have thought were in line with democracy,” says Erica Frantz

Suddenly it’s OK to question if our elections are free and fair.

A. James McAdams, a professor of international affairs at the University of Notre Dame, says those who oppose authoritarianism need a strong message that will appeal to people who might be pulled in by authoritarian leaders.

“If you look back historically, one of the big problems in democracies has always been that the forces of reason can’t figure out what they stand for,”*

“If you do have stable democratic institutions—particularly viable courts—then there’s a lot of bullshit that you can overcome,” McAdams says. “Perhaps the greatest victory for American institutions in the Trump age was that the courts weren’t overpowered.”