Contribution
This is a short opinion column by the political scientist Daniel W. Drezner, written three weeks into the second Trump administration. It puts the question of US democratic status bluntly and assembles prior warnings. It then relays, largely by long quotation, Levitsky & Way’s newly published forecast of “competitive authoritarianism”. Its own contribution is the framing (the January 2029 question and the retired Churchill quote), a brief weighing of counterpoints, and two judgements. The first is that elite and civil-society accommodation “seems … more about fear than interest”. The second is that the administration is creating a reusable illiberal “blueprint”.
Key insight
Drezner’s point, following Levitsky & Way, is that democratic breakdown in the US, if it comes, need not look like dictatorship. Elections, courts and a legal opposition can persist while the incumbent “tilts the playing field”. The decisive losses are the opposition that withdraws, and the opposition that never forms because the cost of opposing has risen.
Assumptions
Premises and authorities:
- Measurement indices as evidence. Polity (Center for Systemic Peace) and Freedom House scores are taken as meaningful, while Drezner concedes Polity may be “one slightly wonky coding schema”, given that the US recovered to “full democracy” by 2024.
- Authorities quoted. Barbara Walter (Washington Post, January 2022), Vanessa Williamson (Brookings, 2023), Kristin Hickman (via NPR, February 12, 2025) and Levitsky & Way (Foreign Affairs, February 2025).
- Definition of liberal democracy, as quoted from Levitsky & Way: “full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties”.
- Early-term events as signal. “The events of the last three weeks”, if repeated, are taken as indicative (firing inspectors general; partial noncompliance with freeze orders, footnote 1).
- Author’s stance. The post is openly partisan in tone (“Making America Democratic Again”), a self-described series of pessimistic posts.
Key results
What the post argues and records:
- Walter (2022, quoted): the CSP Polity score fell from +10 (2015) to +5 for 2020, placing the US in the anocracy band (−5 to +5).
- Williamson (2023, quoted): two forms of erosion, “election manipulation and executive overreach”, not limited to Trump.
- Polity’s front page (as of the post) is quoted: “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”
- Counterpoints: the executive branch was then “complying with federal court orders that freeze such actions”, conceded in footnote 1 to be imperfect. Hickman is quoted: “We’re not there yet.”
- Levitsky & Way (quoted at length): the Freedom House score fell from 92 to 83 over 2014–2021. Breakdown is “likely” during the second term. There will be no “classic dictatorship”, and “There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them”. What lies ahead is competitive authoritarianism, with examples in Fujimori’s Peru, Chávez’s Venezuela, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia and Turkey. The mechanisms they list are IRS targeting of donors, regulatory and legal pressure on businesses and media, and the depletion of societal opposition, including opposition that “never did” materialize.
- Drezner’s own judgements: accommodation by actors who opposed Trump in 2017 looks driven by fear; the administration is building a “blueprint” for future populists; there is no “public rebuke” (linked to a February 2025 CBS poll); and “the political constant for the rest of my days will not be the resilience of American democracy, but its precarity”.
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The US Polity score fell to +5 for 2020 and was back to “full democracy” by 2024 | moderate | quoted secondary source (Walter) and the author’s statement; the CSP data themselves not shown |
| C2 | Polity currently (February 2025) says the US “lies at the cusp of autocracy” | moderate | direct quotation of the CSP front page, linked |
| C3 | Freedom House downgraded the US from 92 to 83 between 2014 and 2021 | moderate | quoted from Levitsky & Way; not independently shown |
| C4 | US democracy will likely break down into competitive authoritarianism during the second Trump term | weak (in this post) | forecast by Levitsky & Way, relayed by quotation; Drezner endorses it (“hard to disagree”) without independent argument |
| C5 | Elite and civil-society accommodation is driven more by fear than by changed views | assertion | author’s impression (“it sure seems as though”) |
| C6 | The administration is creating a blueprint for future illiberal use of executive power | assertion | author’s judgement, unelaborated |
| C7 | No public rebuke of the administration exists (February 2025) | weak | one linked poll |
Concepts
- Anocracy — as quoted from Walter: a regime “neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic”, Polity −5 to +5.
- Competitive authoritarianism — as quoted from Levitsky & Way: a system in which parties compete in real elections but “the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition”. Competition is “real but unfair”.
- Liberal democracy (criteria) — full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, broad protection of civil liberties (Levitsky & Way, quoted).
Connections
The post is a relay of Levitsky & Way, “The Path to American Authoritarianism” (Foreign Affairs, February 2025), and draws on the lineage of Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018). It also cites Walter’s anocracy argument (How Civil Wars Start, 2022, via her Washington Post op-ed). Within this record it has no direct sibling. Its footnoted theme, executive compliance with court orders, is documented at first hand a year later in the Minnesota show-cause transcript (LIT-012), which Drezner obviously does not cite.
Bearing on the record
No THEORY document is affected, and there is no ML-practice content. The only general point it touches is measurement: an index’s category boundary (Polity’s democracy/anocracy thresholds) can move a headline verdict while the author himself suspects “wonky” coding. That is a caution about categorical readings of composite indices, not an ML result.
Limitations
- It is an opinion post, and its evidence is mostly quotation of other commentators.
- It gives no independent data analysis, and the index figures are second-hand.
- The central forecast is Levitsky & Way’s and is endorsed rather than argued.
- The counterpoints are raised briefly and set aside (“this is how I organized this particular newsletter”).
- It was written three weeks into a term. This reading does not assess its forecasts against later events.
Open questions
- How did Polity, Freedom House and V-Dem code the US for 2025 and 2026, and how sensitive are those codings to rule choices? Reading the indices’ published codebooks and scores would settle it.
- Did the “invisible” depletion of opposition (candidates, journalists and whistleblowers who never emerge) become measurable, and by what indicator?
Corrections to the seeded skim
- The skim’s summary says the weakening of civil-society opposition is “in his view, the most worrying sign”. The text does not rank it that way. Drezner writes “I cannot shake those last two paragraphs” (Levitsky & Way on the depletion of opposition), then: “More disturbing is that the current administration is laying down a blueprint for how future populists can wield executive power in an illiberal manner.” By his own wording, the blueprint point is the more disturbing one.
- The skim has Levitsky & Way warning about the “invisible” loss of opposition. “Invisible” is not in the text. The quoted phrasing is that it is “harder to see the opposition that might have materialized … but never did”.
- The skim’s summary has Drezner arguing that the US “risks ceasing to be a liberal constitutional democracy by January 2029”. January 2029 is the date in Drezner’s question. The forecast he endorses is Levitsky & Way’s: “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration”. His own verb is “hard to disagree”, and his own conclusion concerns “precarity”.
- The skim omits the Freedom House figures inside the Levitsky & Way quotation (92 to 83, 2014–2021). It also omits the correction’s detail that the error was in naming Way rather than Ziblatt as co-author of How Democracies Die.
- The header date “published: 2025-02-01” is a month placeholder. The post is dated 2025-02-13.