In the wake of ruthless arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort in Minneapolis, one Harvard political scientist is arguing something many of us have suspected for a long time: the US is moving away from its traditional democratic framework toward a fundamentally different system of governance.
In an interview with the media industry publication Status, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky made the case that the Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms has now become extreme, even by the standards of right-wing dictators.
“This is a new dimension,” Levitsky told Status. “In democracies, journalists don’t get arrested. In authoritarian regimes, journalists get arrested.”
Levitsky went so far as to contrast Trump with notorious conservative nationalist Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary since 2010. Since coming to power, the Hungarian strongman has systematically dismantled the country’s judiciary, as well as its election system by rewriting the constitution. Yet as Levitsky notes, even Orbán has stopped short of the kind of paramilitary street enforcement emerging in the US.
“Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” the Harvard academic claimed. “In Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”
Notwithstanding that Orbán has been criticized for arresting journalists, it’s true that Trump’s attempts to silence the press and embolden armed federal agents speak to an alarming escalation of reactionary policies — especially in a country that fashions itself a global beacon of democracy and freedom.
Still, this moment in US politics doesn’t begin or end with Trump. As University of Tulsa economic historian Clara Mattei has argued, the groundwork for democratic erosion was laid decades ago through neoliberal austerity policies that hollowed out the economic foundations of American democracy.
In Mattei’s analysis, austerity functions as a tool to disempower people, worsening conditions for the majority “to help prevent political action against the system as a whole.” The dictatorial turn we’re seeing today — manifested in the suppression of free speech and rising police state — is the result of decades of policies that already reconfigured who holds power in American society.
“I see austerity fundamentally as one-sided class warfare, led by the state and its economic experts and aimed at refurbishing the capital order in moments when it is crumbling,” Mattei said in a 2023 interview about her book, “The Capital Order.” “As a political project, austerity is in fact the most rational way to safeguard capitalism: it structurally disempowers workers by increasing precariousness and market dependence.”
Indeed, as Levitsky observes, the damage this has done to American democracy may be irreversible.
“Even in the best case, we throw these guys out electorally, I don’t think we’re going to go back,” he told Status. “We’re not going to step back to a democracy with strong constitutional guardrails. The democratic norms have, at this point, been shattered and on the floor, and rules have been violated, twisted, manipulated.”
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