Daniel W. Drezner (2025), Drezner’s World (Substack newsletter) — https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/is-the-united-states-still-a-liberal
Key takeaways
- Drawing mainly on Levitsky and Way’s Foreign Affairs essay “The Path to American Authoritarianism”, Drezner argues that the US risks ceasing to be a liberal constitutional democracy by January 2029 and sliding into “competitive authoritarianism”. The weakening of opposition from civil society is, in his view, the most worrying sign.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-001. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Writing about three weeks into the second Trump administration, Drezner asks whether the US will still be a liberal constitutional democracy in January 2029. He reviews earlier warnings from political scientists: Barbara Walter on the US Polity score falling to “anocracy” levels for 2020, Vanessa Williamson (Brookings) on election manipulation and executive overreach, and Polity’s current statement that the US “lies at the cusp of autocracy”. He weighs counterpoints, including continued compliance with court orders and a law professor’s view that there is no constitutional crisis yet. He then endorses Levitsky and Way’s forecast of competitive authoritarianism, in which elections continue but the incumbent tilts the playing field.
Standing in the record
Filed by the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25: 795 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-001 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — a short, fair synthesis of the 2025 democracy-index downgrades, roughly half of it quotation; its central forecast is Levitsky & Way’s (“The Path to American Authoritarianism”, Foreign Affairs, Feb 2025), which is the primary source to read and is not held here.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-001, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — a short opinion synthesis whose substance is in the sources it quotes. The primary sources deserve the deeper reading instead (t=795 s).
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-001 is that reading):
- It is a commentary and synthesis piece. The load-bearing sources are Levitsky and Way (Foreign Affairs, February 2025) and the Polity/CSP coding, which should be read directly.
- The measurement question is worth checking: how the Polity, Freedom House and V-Dem indices coded the US in 2025-2026, and how sensitive they are to coding rules.
- It is an opinion piece by a political scientist, and its forecasts should be checked against later events.
Access when seeded: I retrieved the full public post (dated 2025-02-13 in its metadata; subtitle “I’m afraid the question must be asked.”) and read it in full, including a published correction and a footnote.