Twilight of American Democracy

Mapping A Democratic Breakdown in the United States

I just got back from an intense two-day gathering focused on the current crisis of American democracy under President Donald Trump. It was a collective brainstorming to try to understand what is going on in this country. There were a lot of technical terms flying about—“democratic backsliding,” “competitive authoritarianism,” “autocratic legalism,” “patrimonialism,” “descent into fascism.” As we were debating the different theories, I created a mental map—a framework to help organize all the different positions and to locate my own argument that we are experiencing “a modern counterrevolution.” I thought it might be helpful to others, so I am sharing the framework and identifying the terms that are being used to describe American democracy in crisis.

The Framework

The different diagnoses being offered today all include, implicitly or explicitly, a before-and-after account of American democracy. Some only describe where we are headed (e.g., authoritarianism, fascism), some focus on the mechanism of the transformation (e.g., political polarization, populism, democratic backsliding), some focus on the causes (e.g., technological innovation, labor markets, inequality). But they all—and here, oftentimes implicitly—describe a transformation of American society from a before to an after and offer an account of the dynamics of that change. In this sense, they amount to a “social theory,” in the classic style of social theories that offer an interpretation of a structural transformation of society from some earlier period, for instance from the ancien regime in France, to some later period like post-Revolutionary France, as exemplified by Tocqueville’s famous work, L’Ancien régime et la Révolution (1856).

Thus, to understand a possible breakdown of American democracy, an analysis needs to begin (1) with an account of what American democracy was like in the early twenty-first century, say in 2010 or 2015, before the first election of Donald Trump. Then it needs a diachronic, dynamic theory of transformation that can address both (2) the mechanisms of how any transformation is taking place and (3) the underlying social, economic, and political forces that are bringing about the change. Finally, (4) the analysis needs a description or diagnosis of where American democracy stands in 2025 or where it is headed. Let’s go over some of these, and I will try to locate my argument within this framework.

1. The “Before”: Turn-of-Century America

The place to start, then, is with an analysis of where American democracy stood at the turn of century, in the early 2010s. It is essential to begin there because, whether there is a descent to fascism or instead a “just-so” story—what Jed Britton-Purdy and David Pozen call “more of the same” in a forthcoming Boston Review piece—will turn on often unstated assumptions about what American democracy looked like “before.”

The Democracy Index, proposed by a working group of The Economist (the Economist Intelligence Unit), ranks countries into four political categories: “full democracies,” “flawed democracies,” “hybrid regimes,” and “authoritarian regimes.” The EIU uses 60 variables associated with measures of political participation, culture, pluralism, process, and respect for civil liberties. Until 2016, at the time of the first election of Donald Trump, The Economist ranked the United States among the most democratic in the world, a “full democracy.” That year, though, the EIU dropped the United States to the category of a “flawed democracy.” A flawed democracy, by contrast to a full democracy, may have fair elections and respect some civil rights, but suffers from weak governance or low levels of participation in elections, or low trust in the political institutions, or it may experience troubling infringements on civil liberties or erosions of the ordinary political checks and balances.

Democratic regimes can also be characterized as “consolidated democracies,” a term coined by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan to analyze transitions to democracy and thus having more of an evolutionary dimension. Here the contrast is between a “consolidated democracy” and a “weak democracy.” These categories are generally reserved for emerging democracies, but many heterodox thinkers consider the United States to be a recent or emerging democracy: it could not be considered a true democracy when it condoned slavery or Jim Crow or excluded women from the suffrage, and so, for some thinkers, the country consolidated into a democracy only in the 1960s or 70s with the Civil Rights Acts.

In any event, consolidated democracies are those in which democratic processes are considered “the only game in town,” in Linz and Stepan’s words. They define them along three dimensions—a constitutional, attitudinal, and behavioral dimension. Consolidated democracies are regimes in which all of the players are bound by the laws and institutions; where public opinion overwhelmingly believes in the democratic method to resolve disagreements; and where none of the major actors in society are putting their energy in trying to create a non-democratic regime or trying to secede from the democracy.

I think of these different metrics—full, flawed, consolidated, weak democracies—as quantitative measures within the category of democracies. But there are also other qualitative descriptors that can be used to describe turn-of-century American democracy.

One of the most frequently used is the notion of a pluralist democracy. The idea of pluralism is that there are different competing interests and groups in society, and that they resolve disagreements and competition by means of compromise and adjustments leading to a relatively harmonious coexistence. Pluralism is one of the elements of the EIU’s Democracy Index, but it also serves here to describe a style of democratic politics.

Liberal democracy characterizes a system that has anti-majoritarian checks and balances that serve to protect the individual liberties of citizens. Many people referred to the United States and Western European countries, at the turn of century, as “liberal democracies” or as systems of “embedded liberalism,” especially when they would highlight civil rights protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights or in La Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme and the associated values of political liberalism.

The term liberal, of course, brings up the question of political economy, which then opens up a number of other characterizations more critical of the role of capitalism in Western democracy. Some commentators build an economic critique into their desccription by referring to American democracy as “neoliberal democracy.” Others, like Carles Boix, invert the emphasis and refer instead to “democratic capitalism,” as in the title of his 2019 book, Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics. Other critics elaborate on the character of capitalism and infuse that diagnosis into their conception of American democracy—incorporating terms such as “cannibal capitalism” (Nancy Fraser), “racial capitalism” (Cedric Robinson), “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein), or “late-stage capitalism” (originally Werner Sombart, but also Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas), etc.

Now, where one starts the social theory will have significant effects on the diagnosis. There were many on the Left who, prior to the 2016 or 2024 elections, felt there was no difference between the traditional political parties, Democratic and Republican. Many people argued that Hilary Clinton was a compromised candidate—a neoliberal hawk with Wall Street ties—hardly different than Donald Trump; some argued there was little difference between the Biden administration and the first Trump administration (e.g. Biden deported more immigrants than the first Trump administration; Biden unconditionally funded the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of the war in Gaza; etc.) For some on the Left, especially following the marginalization of Bernie Sanders in 2016, there was no real democratic choice and the elections resulted in just a rotation of elites. On that view, American democracy was a failed democracy, or some kind of hybrid, and what we are experiencing now may be just “more of the same.” Others hold the view that the United State has gone from a full and robust democracy, through a period of transition, that is leading us possibly to authoritarianism. Where we start the narrative is going to have a direct bearing on our assessment of the democratic crisis.

My argument that we are witnessing a modern counterrevolution threads a needle through these different positions. I spotlight the recurring periods in modern American history when counterrevolutionary forces took the upper hand and diminished American democracy—for instance, with the assault on human rights during the War on Terror (e.g., torture, indefinite detention at Guantanamo, drone assassinations) under the Bush and Obama administrations after 9/11; or with the attack on the federal bureaucracy and constitutional protections during the Reagan Revolution; or during the Nixon years, with J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program and the crackdown on Black leaders; or with the purges during the McCarthy era. I argue that these counterrevolutionary moments are linked. There is direct evidence for that. As I noted in a previous essay on “The Ideology of the Heritage Foundation,” the authors of Project 2025 understand their initiative as part of a conservative movement that brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. It was at that time that the movement published its inaugural “mandate for leadership,” which, in the words of Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, “literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page.”^[1] Dans underscores the “revolutionary” nature of that moment: “the revolution that followed might never have happened, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists.”^[2] In addition, the actual strategies and practices of the Trump administration—regarding for instance the attack on research universities and liberal professors—are in direct continuity with the Nixon era.

By emphasizing the historical continuities in the American counterrevolution, I contend that the flaws and weaknesses of American democracy already existed and are not solely the product of Donald Trump’s presidency. However, I argue that we are now in an accentuated phase, in a new offensive of the counterrevolution—I describe it as being the demolition phase of that new offensive—that is pushing the United States out of its democratic bounds. So I view turn-of-century American democracy as having been a fragile, evolving project that attempted to consolidate democratic power against recurring waves of counterrevolutionary assaults, but that is now on the ropes.

2. Modes, Mechanisms, and Causes of Transition

There are also different accounts of the mode and mechanisms of transition from turn-of-century to present America.

One mode is the sudden political shift and is typically called a “discrete breakdown of democracy.” This form of transition, studied by scholars like Adam Przeworski and others, often on the basis of the Boix-Miller-Rosato Dichotomous Coding of Democracy (1800-2020), identifies a specific act or moment—a coup, an election, the passage of legislation—when a democratic regime falls. In Nazi Germany, the moment of rupture can be identified as March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the “Law for the Rectification of the Distress of the Nation and the Reich,” which granted Hitler the power to enact laws by decree. In Chile, it occurred on September 11, 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against President Salvador Allende. Had the January 6^th uprising succeeded, that would have been the date people associate with a discrete breakdown of American democracy. Now, in his second presidential mandate, Trump signing a record number of executive orders during the first 100 days could qualify as a discrete breakdown.

A second mode of transition is what is called “democratic backsliding.” This involves a longer, gradual process that can take shape in different ways and need not always necessarily be unidirectional. There may be back and forth, and possible returns to democracy. The erosions can take place through delegitimization of opposition parties or the encouragement of violence. Social scientists have tried to identify the factors that are likely to predict backsliding. As Adam Przeworski has shown, in legions of statistical analyses, democracies with high per capita income and a history of democratic transitions have never become authoritarian—which suggests that American democracy should not fall, at least if prior experience is any guide, or unless something has changed.

Several forces may contribute to a discrete breakdown or backsliding of democracy. An increase in populist politics is often identified as a mechanism that leads to backsliding. Jan-Werner Müller has written extensively about populism, arguing that it represents, at its core, a rejection of pluralism and thus a real threat to democracies; others, though, such as Chantal Mouffe, in her book For A Left Populism, argue that populism can be wedded to a left democratic vision. I have tried to disambiguate the thorny issues surrounding populism in this essay here.

The rise of populist or anti-establishment parties in several Western democracies (France, UK, Germany) or of populist tendencies within established parties (US) has produced what are called “electoral realignments” over the past decade, meaning that traditional parties (e.g. Socialist and Republican parties in France) have collapsed and their traditional alternation has ended.

Other mechanisms include increased political polarization that can fuel increased conflict in society and orient people toward a friend-enemy model, typically associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A lot has been written about increased polarization in the United States and Western democracies. Rather than polarization, Rick Pildes talks about “political fragmentation,” or what he describes as a fracturing of political power into so many different parties and groups that it makes it impossible for democracies to deliver what their citizens demand. Pildes attributes a lot of the fragmentation to the new era of social media communication.

Kim Lane Scheppele has written about “autocratic legalism” to describe the way that democracies devolve when their leaders use legal means and the veil of legal legitimacy to weaken checks and balances in a liberal democracy and push it toward authoritarianism. Scheppele has used the term to describe Hungary, and the term was picked up during the protests in Isreal surrounding the judicial reforms.

Other focus more on ideology and culture in explaining the erosion of democratic values and processes. In her book The Code of Capital and subsequent work, Katharina Pistor traces how capitalist logics have taken over political institutions. The culture wars are also often presented as a cause or symptom of democratic breakdown.

Undergirding these different mechanisms of transformation, some scholars focus on the deeper forces at play—economic, political, social, and cultural. In terms of economic forces, many highlight technological changes, deindustrialization, and global trends. Carles Boix, for instance, emphasizes the introduction of digital technologies, the acceleration of automation, globalization of trade, as having reshaped labor markets and brought about political polarization and electoral realignment.

The focus on deeper economic forces is the classic move that Karl Marx made in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: to shift the attention from the person of Louis Napoleon to the deeper economic forces and crises that were giving rise to class struggle in France. Marx’s point was to demonstrate, in his words, “how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.”^[3]

I take this approach in my analyses of the ongoing counterrevolution, focusing most of my attention on the broader social conflicts and economic forces that are causing the democratic crises, rather than focusing on the rise of any one individual, such as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen.

In terms of modes and mechanisms, the idea of “a modern counterrevolution” should be understood by analogy to a sinusoidal pattern resembling wavelengths. The counterrevolutionary historical moments (McCarthy era, Nixon-Hoover, Reagan Revolution, post 9/11) represent the peaks, as opposed to the troughs, of the wave cycles. They are the points at which the counterrevolutions are at their apex; but there are often setbacks, at which point the cycle recedes into the trough.

Right now, we are experiencing a peak of counterrevolutionary fervor. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist, proudly acknowledges as much in the New York Times, claiming that “What we’re doing is really a counter revolution. It’s a revolution against revolution.”^[4] Rufo has also just published an article titled “Counterrevolution Blueprint” in City Journal. (I will elaborate on this recent article in another post).

Another way to think about this sinusoidal pattern is through Marx’s famous reference to proletarian revolution as being an “old mole,” with a wink to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Marx is writing about revolution, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, and suggests that, when it has accomplished its task, people will celebrate it:

… the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. […] And when it has accomplished [its mission], Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!

Like the famous mole who surfaces every once in a while, but is digging and burrowing at all times, the anti-democratic counterrevolutionary forces represent a constant ongoing effort since the post-war period, and it is now reaching an apex.

3. The “After”: Where We Are Headed

Then, finally, there is the question of where American democracy is headed.

On the way to authoritarianism, there is a hybrid form called “competitive authoritarianism” in which democratic elections are held, but the incumbent entrenches their power and effectively creates unfair elections. By contrast to the authoritarian who does not even hold elections, in competitive authoritarianism there is the appearance of democracy, but not the substance. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have recently suggested that the United States may be headed there.

In the analysis of hybrid and authoritarian regimes, Max Weber plays a big role because of the way that he mapped different types—or what he called ideal-types—of political authority. Weber famously developed three categories: traditional (based on customs, e.g. patriarchy, hereditary monarchies, clan chieftains), charismatic (based on a leader’s personality), and bureaucratic (based on legal-rational logics, e.g. the American administrative state). Weber also proposed subtypes to traditional authority, including patriarchalism (modeled more closely on the patriarch or father of the household, so applying to smaller communities) and “patrimonialism” (where a leader treats the entire country as his personal household).

Jeffrey Kopstein and Stephen Hanson returned to Weber’s category of patrimonialism in their book The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, and they, as well as others, such as Jonathan Rauch, have begun to use the term to describe President Trump’s style of governing: “running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business,” as Rauch writes.

Juan Linz, mentioned earlier, developed dozens of other alternative classifications for non-democratic governments in his book, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. One of them in particular, called “sultanism,” has been picked up in discussions of Trump. In an article titled “The Sultanization of US Politics,” Wolfgang Merkel argues that the Trump administration fits the bill:

According to Chehabi and Linz, sultanistic regimes are organized around leaders rather than legal-rational structures. Institutions do not play a role in guiding action. Important government positions are not filled according to meritocratic principles, but are hand-picked based on loyalty criteria. The chosen few often include family members, friends, and business partners. Loyalty to the ruler is not established through a coherent ideology, religion, or charisma, but through the dual principle of ‘fear and reward’. It is the ruler personally who decides on the appropriate mix. He rules at his discretion, unbound by ideology and values. Administrative and legal norms are hollowed out; the ruler decides. The boundaries between the state and the private sphere become blurred. The ruler’s companies conclude business contracts with the state. Patronage, nepotism, and corruption become informal norms. They replace formal institutions, first in the ruling apparatus and then in society (Chehabi and Linz 1998, 7 ff.). Max Weber explicitly assigned this type of patrimonial rule to traditional societies; Linz specifically mentions the Duvalier regime in Haiti, the Shah regime in Persia, Marcos in the Philippines, and Somoza in Nicaragua (ibid., 5). Does this fit Trump?

Merkel’s answer is yes, not jot-for-jot, but no ideal-type ever does fit perfectly.

Another characterization of the Trump administration uses the analogy to the mafia, the mobster, and the gangster. The philosopher and 2024 presidential candidate Cornel West has often referred to Donald Trump as a “gangster.” In her foreword to Bálint Magyar’s book, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, which describes Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, Kim Lane Scheppele implicitly draws parallels that speaks to the present moment in the United States.

The term “fascism” is akin to the nuclear option. Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, believes that we are witnessing fascism in the United States today under President Trump. Jason Stanley warns us as well of a gradual ongoing descent into fascism. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write about the rise of “End Time Fascism,” describing the main ideology of far-Right oligarchs, such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as a kind of “supremacist survivalism” in the face of global climate warming.

On my diagnosis, the modern counterrevolution, if it were successful, would lead to an authoritarian state with concentrated power in the hands of a small group formed principally around President Trump, including his cabinet (especially his Attorney General, War Secretary, and Secretary of State) and his inner circle at the White House (e.g. Stephen Miller, Vice President J.D. Vance).

Recall the core of counterinsurgency theory: as the French commander David Galula emphasized, in his book Counterinsurgency Warfare, the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory, or modern warfare, “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”:

In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause.

The technique of power consists in relying on the favorable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralize or eliminate the hostile minority.

This basic tenet of political power is exactly what US general David Petraeus, the leading American thinker and practitioner of counterinsurgency theory, rehearsed in a concise table in the first chapter of his edition of the US Army and Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24 on counterinsurgency, published and widely disseminated in 2006. Under the header “Aspects of Counterinsurgency,” Petraeus’s field manual includes the following table:

That, I argue, is the central logic of the modern counterrevolution. It operates on the continual construction—and elimination—of an internal enemy (the “active minority for the cause”). Right now, that active minority consists of immigrants, transgender persons, federal employees, and Leftist professors. And on this reading, American governmental power must concentrate in the hands of the small active minority that eliminates the internal enemy and wins the hearts and minds of the general population. This represents a military model in which President Trump and his closest advisors wage counterinsurgency warfare against the enemies of America.

To be sure, there are elements of patrimonialism and sultanism in the way in which President Trump runs the government as if it were his household, gives out favors to his family and friends, grants pardons to his donors, and operates as a private entrepreneur. There are mobster elements as well, with President Trump directing his Department of Justice to prosecute and punish the people who have gone after him, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James. There are also Bonapartist elements, especially the “coup d’état en miniature every day,” as Marx described Louis Napoleon. With the construction of the ballroom in the White House, the Mar-a-Lago palace in Palm Beach, the courtesans and the Botox, and the way in which he surrounds himself with trophy aides, there is even an element of a Louis XIV complex.

But to best understand where we are headed, I believe that the model of the modern counterrevolution offers the clearest view—and a path forward. Because, as I note elsewhere, history shows that when people retain their values, counterrevolutions rarely succeed.

Notes

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^[1] Paul Dans, “A Note on ‘Project 2025,’” xiii-xiv, in Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 2023), at xiii (hereinafter referred to as “Project 2025.”

^[2] Dans, Project 2025, at xiii.

^[3] Marx, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire (International Publishers, 1964/2024), at p. 6. Friedrich Engels made a similar point in his articles on Germany: to show that the revolutions, as well as counterrevolutions, “were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country.” Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.

^[4] Christopher Rufo speaking on Michael Barbaro, host, “The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges,” The Daily (podcast), April 11, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/podcasts/the-daily/christopher-rufo-dei-critical-race-theory.html.