Steven Levitsky talks about his recent article, “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” assessing Donald Trump’s first 12 months back in the White House and the threat he now poses to the 2026 midterm election, U.S. democracy and our republic.
Levitsky is co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority.
SCOTT HARRIS: We begin our program tonight by welcoming to our show Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Professor Levitsky, thanks so much for joining us on our Counterpoint program this evening. And I wanted just to welcome you first and then get into the issues that I know that you’re anxious to talk about.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Well, thanks very much for having me on this evening, Scott.
SCOTT HARRIS: As you’ve written about in books and articles, the United States is now in the midst of the most serious attack on the nation’s Democratic institutions, rule of law and checks and balances on executive power in modern presidential history. Every day, it appears Donald Trump and his authoritarian regime are violating constitutional norms, civil and human rights as he embraces dictatorial powers and employs political violence and weaponizes the federal government to repress his perceived enemies. All of this as Trump and his co-conspirators in the White House are working to dismantle civil rights law as they clearly are pursuing a shameless white supremacist agenda.
I would like to get your take on the war in Iran, first of all. Unlike most of the world’s authoritarian leaders, Donald Trump has at his disposal the most lethal military and war fighting machine that our world has ever known. From your study of Trump and his brand of authoritarianism, how does this U.S. war against Iran fit into his quest for uncontested power around the world and here in the U.S.?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Well, it’s a little surprising because this was the one area where Trump had seemed like he was not inclined to exert a lot of power. His old exertion of power in the international stage runs counter to his project over the last decade, to seemingly what his campaign promises were and what his base seemingly wants. But what is an example of— I think first and foremost is—what happens when you yield autocratic control to a leader? When a highly personalistic autocratic government, as we have in the United States today, is capable of all sorts of decisions, including ill-informed decisions, reckless decisions and incredibly damaging decisions. I think by all counts, this was not publicly debated. We still don’t know why the administration got into this war. I don’t think, honestly, that this administration even knows why it got into this war—did not consider a range of implications and consequences and is engaging in a highly destructive war.
The fact that there was no consultation with the public, no debate in Congress, no consultation, even among the U.S. foreign policy establishment, made it highly likely that we would engage in very, very reckless behavior. So you’re right. Taking the world’s most powerful armed forces and putting a highly personalistic autocrat in charge of it—ood luck. It’s really, really damaging.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. It’s a scary moment. There are many people listening who are alive and active and opposed to the war in Iraq that George W. Bush initiated. But he attempted to rationalize it over a period of, I think, close to a year. There was evidence, phony evidence about weapons of mass destruction brought to the United Nations, a lot of congressional debates. Here, nothing. I mean, it was just out of the blue, really.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Right. There have been many U.S. military interventions abroad in your and my lifetime. I’ve opposed most of them. Some of them worked out okay. Others were pretty disastrous. But in all the other cases, even some of the most disastrous adventures abroad—Afghanistan, Iraq—there was considerable public debate about it. And we knew, even if we disagreed with the government, we knew more or less what the government was trying to do. And that’s not the case here.There was credible reporting in the Wall Street Journal a few days before Trump launched the war that Trump had decided to go ahead with the war, but hadn’t decided on the reason why yet. This is the Wall Street Journal.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Not some left-wing rag, as they say.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: That was implied, but not stated.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Professor Levitsky, as you’ve observed Trump’s conduct in his second term in the White House this past year, what in your mind do you see as the most serious long-term threat to extinguish our democracy? I know there’s much to choose from, but what are you most concerned about today?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: I mean, I study democracy. I spend my time talking and thinking about defending democracy and that’s what I focus on. But in some ways, I think that as much damage as being done to our democracy, even greater and more irreparable damage is being done to the U.S. state, to our federal bureaucracy—meaning the politicization of government agencies, the weakening of our government agencies, the massive brain drain and corruption of our government agencies, including the politicization of the armed forces. That states are really hard to build. They’re easy to corrupt and to break and to weaken. They’re very, very hard to build. In the best case, it will be decades before we repair the damage that’s been done just in the last 15 months to the U.S. state. And I think even more damaging than that is what Trump has done to what remained of the liberal international order, the rules-based international order, which was never perfect.
It was never entirely rules-based, but it was something. And the U.S.’s standing in the world, which was in decline already, but has plummeted under Trump. And I think our alliances and the liberal international order that the United States, for better and worse, had imperfectly upheld over the last 75 years—I think that’s enshattered and probably cannot be rebuilt. So our democracy, I think, can be rebuilt. I worry a lot about the politicization of the state, and in particular, I think the most thorough growing transformation of our institutions is that of the Republican party, which has been transformed into a thoroughly authoritarian political party and will continue to do damage to our democracy long after Trump is gone. But again, I think our democracy will be easier to repair than the state and certainly easier to repair than the international order because I think there’s possibly no repairing that at all.
SCOTT HARRIS: I definitely want to talk about the Republican party and its role in our democracy going forward in a little bit. But I wanted to ask you about white supremacy. It appears to myself and I think anybody who’s observed the behavior of Trump all his life, all his political life, certainly, and even as a real estate guy, that white supremacy and blatant racism is a major feature of Trump and his regime’s policies. How does the scapegoating and demonization of minority groups here in the U.S. fit into the authoritarian playbook as practiced by other of the world dictators from Nazi Germany, fascists in Italy, Pinochet’s Chile and Victor Orban’s Hungary, just to name a few. How does this work and practice as we see it playing out here in the United States and in these other countries through history?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Well, I’m not very expert in some of these other cases and I think the dynamics there are pretty different. It is true that most autocrats and certainly all the autocrats that you just named, were very good at finding scapegoats and often either outsiders in society, ethnic religious minorities in society and scapegoating them as a way of appealing to their base. The U.S. dynamic, that is happening, but I think it’s actually a … it’s a long running and deep-seated dynamic here in the United States, because the United States, unlike any of the other countries that you just listed, is undergoing this extraordinary transformation in the last half century. It is becoming, in many respects, the world’s first multiracial democracy. And we are undergoing a transition that no other democracy has yet successfully undergone, which is where a once dominant ethnic majority loses both its dominance and its majority.
And so, white Christians are a part of the white Christian population, which as you know, dominated every political, social, cultural, economic hierarchy in this country for 200 years—over the last 50 years, has seen those hierarchies seriously challenged, especially in the 21st century. And that to me is the core factor radicalizing the Republican party. It’s not common. It is in fact extraordinarily rare that a mainstream, center right political party has been competing in elections for 150 years, suddenly goes off the rails and radicalizes and turns against democracy. That does not happen very often. This is not born as an authoritarian party, like the Nazis were. This is a mainstream conservative party that went off the rails. And Ziblatt and I, in our book Tyranny of the Minority, argue that the principle, there are many reasons, but the principle reason is that the core activist base and voting base, the primary winning majority in the Republican party is white Christian constituency that feels like the country that it grew up in is being taken away from it.
Losing one’s dominant status is a big deal and it is radicalized a third of this country and that is the driving force behind MAGA. We’ve seen this percolating in the Republican party for a few decades, but Trump recognized it.
It fit Trump’s personality and his own racism, as you mentioned, perfectly. He was willing to cross certain lines that no other Republican politician was willing to cross, basically to openly signal to MAGA voters that he was willing to openly, basically defend white Christians. And that is the single most important source of his original appeal. And one of the reasons why his appeal is so intense. Yeah, the Republican party’s radicalization is rooted in, I would call it white nationalism, but it’s principally a reaction against this country’s gradual transition of multiracial democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that. We’re speaking this evening on Counterpoint with Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University and co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of the books, How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Professor Levitsky, you’ve written that Donald Trump has moved rapidly to demolish Democratic institutions and attack the media, corporate America, law firms and universities. This you say is being done much more quickly than other similar authoritarian regimes. Is Trump’s strategy here of moving quickly to consolidate his power, a strength or a weakness in the long term, in your view?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: That’s a great question. I think it’s both. I mean, I should give credit to my co-author here. My co-author, Daniel Ziblatt likes to point out that this is in many respects, this is not year two of the Trump regime. This is year 6 or even year 10. These guys have been planning this assault for a long time. They stumbled around during the first Trump presidency, but people like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller learned how the machinery of government works, spent four years planning this assault. Trump learned in his first presidency that if he wanted to do what he wanted to do, he had to fill the upper ranks of the government with loyalists, which he did. So they came in this time prepared, prepared to move quickly. I think that what worked for Trump was kind of a shock and awe effect.Amazingly, the U.S. establishment, much of this country, most of this country’s elite was not expecting this. The dominant views, you can remember back to November and December of 2024, the dominant view was, “Oh, we survived Trump 1.0, it’ll be the same. It won’t be that big. We’ll muddle through.” And it was not that at all.
And the rapidity with which these guys struck, went after the media, went after universities, went after law firms, went after CEOs, just took our entire elite by surprise. Took all the university presidents by surprise. Took CEOs by surprise. Took law firms by surprise. Took Republican and Democratic parties by surprise. And they were able, because of the basically deer in headlights effect in the early months, they were able to progress much further than even I anticipated and I was a pessimist. That said, Trump picked a lot of fights and made a lot of enemies very quickly and overreached in many areas and has bled support, expended an awful lot of political capital.
I think in some respects, he had it too easy in the early months and I think really overreached. And that has left the administration in a gradually, but importantly, weakening position. Autocrats do much, much more damage when they have broad public support. And Trump never had a lot of support, but what he had, he’s already kind of given up. So in the long run, my guess is notwithstanding all the tremendous damage that the administration has done with this all out offensive against institutions and against civil society—that ultimately is going to catch up to him.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Levitsky, there’s great concern about Donald Trump’s unconcealed plan to derail or manipulate in some way the outcome of the 2026 midterm election. There are attempts to rig the ’26 election through unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics, massive purges of the voter rolls, targeting communities of color and young people primarily and Trump’s unconstitutional executive voters and the proposed SAVE Act legislation that would have the president dictate how local and state elections will be organized, such as the attempt to eliminate all mail-in absentee ballots and require all voters to present proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate that millions don’t have that would immediately disenfranchise more than 20 million voters. Professor Levitsky, what can be done right now in your view by the opposition Democratic party, the courts and ordinary citizens to ensure our country holds a free and fair election this November?
And there’s the prospect of emergency declarations, the imposition of the Insurrection Act or martial law, that although they sounded fantastical and crazy a few years ago, I think we have to be prepared for the worst. I’m sure you agree.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Yeah, we do. I mean, what is crazy and what is deeply troubling is that all of the things that you just mentioned are possible. Some of them are not super likely. Some of them may be attempted and not achieved.
But one of the most sort of obvious indicators that we are no longer a stable democracy like Canada or Spain or Germany or Costa Rica is that we don’t know whether this will be a more or less normal election in which the opposition party would almost win. Or this will be a crisis-ridden election, which the Republicans refuse to accept the results or attempt to manipulate the vote. Or even, although it’s a little less probable, or even an outright stolen election through a declaration of emergency. Any of those outcomes are in fact possible and there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Now elections are hard to steal, and thankfully, the Democrats actually responded very effectively to the first serious effort to manipulate this election, which as you mentioned, is the national gerrymandering scheme where the initial plan was to net something like 18 seats for the Republican party, which would have allowed them to lose the popular vote pretty handily and still retain control of Congress.
And I think what the Democrats did in California, what Newsom did in California was both very bold and very effective. And that effort, which was maybe the most credible and serious effort to manipulate this election has largely been thwarted. You listed a number of efforts that Trump has talked about, that they’re attempting, that they’re thinking about. I would add, I don’t think you mentioned paramilitary forces, ICE forces, border patrol agents near the polls intimidating voters. I think that’s a real possibility.
You didn’t mention the possibility that in a few cases, the Republicans would cry fraud and that the House leadership wouldn’t seat the winners of the election. That’s a legal possibility. It’s hard to steal elections. Thankfully, the United States has a very decentralized … it’s kind of a mess of an electoral system, but it’s a very decentralized one. And the Constitution is pretty clear that the administration of elections should be left up to the states. It is not legal for Trump to issue an executive order that changes the way that we vote in the states. It could pass legislation, but all of this would be pretty difficult. I think it’s very likely that the administration will throw all sorts of spaghetti at the wall and so citizens have to be prepared.
The lawyers are going to be critical of this, the work of the Democratic party and allies in the legal profession. People like Mark Elias, I think are playing a really, really important role. It’s very, very important that citizens lobby their Congress people, particularly Republicans, moderates if they’re the few who remain mainstream Republicans to not go along with these shenanigans. Trump is, again, exerting pressure to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass the SAVE Act through the Senate because it doesn’t have the votes in the Senate right now.
And so it’s extraordinarily important that citizens be vigilant, that they be aware. We shouldn’t have to be. We should be able to take for granted that the process of registration and voting and counting the votes and then seating elected representatives. We used to be able to take these things for granted. We can take none of those things for granted. And that means the citizens have to be aware, they have to be in communication with their representatives.
And it may be that at some point we need to mobilize, we need to take to the streets. We still fortunately have three broad avenues to defend our democracy. One is the ballot box. Another is the courts. And the third is the streets, citizen activism. And it will take, without question, a combination of all three of those things to protect our democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. I’ve increasingly heard talk about general strikes as one possible lesson of history of how pro-democracy movements…
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Not easy to pull off, but yeah. I think consumer boycotts are another increasingly important tool and one that is just that citizens are just beginning to learn how to do … historically not that effective, but blue states have a lot of purchasing power.
SCOTT HARRIS: One last question I have for you, Professor Levitsky, and it’s about the accountability for crimes against democracy. President Obama, when he came into office says, “I’m going to look forward and not backward.” And the crimes of George W. Bush—the torture, the lies about weapons of mass destruction, the hundreds of thousands who died in Iraq and the thousands of U.S. soldiers died. And then Merrick Garland waited two and a half years to prosecute Donald Trump for Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, tried to overturn the 2020 election. In your view, how important is accountability for crimes against democracy when it comes to the Republican party that I think you agree has been complicit in Trump’s attempt to destroy and demolish our democracy and burn the U.S. Constitution. How important is that, do you think?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: I think it’s extremely important. I mean, if you look at the two other major democracies in the world that were seriously threatened at the same time as the United States. President Yoon attempted to declare martial law in South Korea. Jair Bolsonaro, who’s sort of a copycat of almost a mimic of Trump, attempted to overturn the ’22 elections in Brazil. Both democracies in South Korea and Brazil are much younger than American democracy. But in both of those cases, citizens, legislatures and courts got to work immediately holding accountable the leaders who engaged in these crimes against democracy. Yoon was impeached almost immediately. He was then charged with crimes against democracy and was convicted and imprisoned. Bolsonaro, the first thing, he was banned from running in the 2026 election. He was then charged and prosecuted and is now in prison. That’s how you defend democracy.The U.S., I’m a little more hesitant to call the Bush administration’s war in Iraq a crime against democracy. I don’t think it was. But Trump’s behavior in 2020 and 2021 was absolutely a crime against democracy. It was an attempted coup. It was an attempt to overturn the results of an election and then violently block a peaceful transfer of power. By any account that should have been prosecuted. That the U.S. Senate should have convicted him and should have barred him from running in the next election and the U.S. Justice Department should have gone after Trump from Day One and should have convicted him of the crime of trying to overturn an election and didn’t.
I think our elite just wasn’t sufficiently aware of the threats to our democracy, still trying to understand exactly why our elite was so slow to respond, but it was a tragic failure. Donald Trump, after openly attempting to overturn the election, should never have gotten near the political arena again.
It was a huge failure of our political system and our justice system that we left him untouched. And we’re now paying the price for that.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Professor Levisky, thanks so much for spending time with us. I hope we can stay in touch. There’s so much more I wanted to talk with you about and certainly we’re going to have a lot of revelations in the coming months, especially before this election in November. So love to have you back if you have time and I’ll be back in touch about that.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Sure. Happy to talk. Best of luck.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you very much. Goodnight.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Goodnight.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University and co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris.
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