The Pursuit of Progress in a Competitive Authoritarian American Regime
June 23, 2025•804 words
"Elections are held, but they are not fair. Rights exist, but they are violated. Institutions look democratic, but they are warped." ~ Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way
"Democracy is not an all-or-nothing affair. Many regimes fall somewhere in between full-fledged democracy and outright dictatorship." ~ Fareed Zakaria
"The erosion of democratic norms is more often a slow, quiet process than a sudden collapse." ~ Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
"Modern authoritarianism wears the mask of democracy, using its language, institutions, and rituals to veil the consolidation of power." ~ Timothy Snyder
"Authoritarians don’t destroy the democratic game; they change the rules, stack the referees, and rig the field while claiming to defend it." ~ Ruth Ben-Ghiat
"The forms of democracy—elections, a free press, courts—remain, but the substance fades. Authoritarians learn to simulate democracy without letting it constrain them." ~ Anne Applebaum
"We are witnessing a new kind of authoritarianism, one that cloaks itself in democratic legitimacy while dismantling its foundations." ~ Yascha Mounk
You live in a time where the image of external democracy is showing as a tattered flag with half of its material showing like a rag flies in the wind, ballots are filled in, judges wear their robes, and newspapers still print. But beneath this familiar democracy, you begin to feel the iron fist clench around organs of governance previously intended to bind power. You are no longer a republic of free discourse and limited leadership. You now live beneath a regime gradually, invisibly, towards a regime of competitive authoritarianism, a regime in which the architecture of democracy remains, yet its core of three branches of government are hollowed out.
Power itself was rebranded, not seized by armoured cars, coups, or proclamations, but encapsulated by narrative manipulation, institutional erosion, and the theatre of legality. As a canny "deal maker," the president in office manipulated the balance of power as a battlefield, on which the courts, press, and legislature/Congress are no longer co-belligerents of governance, but roadblocks to be domesticated. Courts are disregarded, judges are vilified as enemies of the American people, and legal restraints fall not by opposition, but by queasy ease. The courts and the judicial system have no teeth. They are not sure how to impose power upon an American authoritarian leader.
The president now asserts the right to bomb foreign nations without congressional approval, rewriting an act of war as a personal decision without democratic clearance. He initiates tariffs and docking tax against most nations unilaterally, breaking years of established trade agreements by his black sharpie autograph alone, which were previously signed and agreed to by legislators. These reckless acts cause inflation and surging consumer prices, taxing typical Americans for the sake of the pretence of power.
This authoritarian impulse leaks over into the post-secondary, where the colleges and universities that refuse to expel foreign exchange students have their higher education funding and certification funding held back, demonstrating executive power is no longer constrained by legal limitations, but by personal loyalty to the president's authoritarian ideology of no foreigners. You watch executive power dictate against any type of diversity or inclusion or equity in society twisting it as if such citizen diversity is anti-American, unloosed and mobilized, and voices of dissent, in court, in the press, in the military, in the classroom, being actively suppressed or stifled.
You live in a world where power roars through litigation, through propaganda, through fear. A free press, which was the fourth estate, is now besieged, its defenders framed and vilified as traitors to the state. Networks are sued against, critical journalists are criminally investigated, and even publicly funded broadcasters are federally investigated. What you see happening is the domestication of truth itself. Dissent is not merely discouraged, it is prosecuted.
Protesters are grabbed by masked immigration police, driven away in unmarked vans, immigrants deported without due process, legal immigrants denied protection for their thoughts. Habeas corpus, the centuries-old shield of liberty, is non-existent to immigrants and permanent residents.
Colleges, those seats of unfettered discourse, bullied by economic extortion, threatened budget cuts unless they toe the politically motivated line. Trade policy is yet another blunt hammer of executive power, tariffs being used without debate, destabilizing global alliances, shocking domestic markets.
Inflation that follows is not a coincidence, but the cost of power exercised without constraint. The president does not govern as a caretaker of democratic institutions, but rather a KING above them, beyond Congress, beyond the judicial, unbound by ultimate power and authority.
Speak out, and you risk your livelihood, your reputation, even your standing in society. This is not chaos, but rather strategic, intentional, carried out through surgical precision. You are reminded of such competitive authoritarian power, in its purest sense, does not desire obedience, it constructs it.
https://youtu.be/h4FgK1YkeNc?si=gKdlQ-j4hLerQYTZ
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump