I guess we have “Authoritarianism Lite”

It’s not hyperbole when I say we have entered into authoritarianism and fascism in the United States, but the truth is somewhat more nuanced. You see, we aren’t in a full dictatorship or full authoritarian state of any other kind; that much is clear from the fact that 47 and his crew of right-wing supporters, enablers, and puppeteers are still being slowed and blocked by various actions in state legislatures, the courts, and so on.

But we are not a fully functional democracy (our particular flavor being a democratic republic/representative democracy), and we have slipped very far toward authoritarian rule. So, what are we? Where are we? Where are we going?

Turns out there’s a word for the condition we are suffering right now (or a label/phrase, more accurately): According to an NPR story the other day, “Some experts say the United States is no longer a liberal democracy, but operating under a system called competitive authoritarianism.”

Further, as the NPR “Word of the Week” story tells us, “Competitive authoritarian countries have democratic rules and hold competitive elections, but the party in charge uses various tactics to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor to maintain power.”

As NPR quotes Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, “Elected authoritarians, when they come to power, try to convert the state, which is supposed to be a neutral arbiter, into both a weapon and a shield … It’s a weapon to be deployed against political rivals, and it is a shield to protect themselves and to protect their allies who engage in authoritarian or illegal behavior.”

All this sounds pretty legit and accurate, frankly, and describes our situation fairly well. The only complaint I have is ever having considered the United States to have been a “liberal democracy” before now. We are way too tied to capitalism for me to ever frame the country that way, even when Democrats were largely in charge and laws and policies were getting more progressive.

Considering how deeply rooted the country and its institutions (private, corporate and governmental) are in racism and other forms of bigotry and how much those systems that harm the marginalized have been preserved over the years even by Democrats (thanks, complacency, American exceptionalism, white privilege, and all the rest), we have never been overall very liberal. Smack dab in between conservatism and liberalism at best, and never for very long.

If you’re familiar with the “Overton window” and you largely agree with the things I write, you’re probably aware that political and social discourse, while it has widened to be more inclusive of things like LGBTQ+ people and racial equity other so-called “liberal” things (though I consider them simply moral and basic humanity things), has tended toward conservatism over recent decades. That’s why the Democratic Party is not nearly as liberal as it might have been once (or might have been headed toward). They keep chasing after “moderate” or “swing” voters and so they have to keep moving slightly to the right to try to court them. I would argue that while the average “moderate” may be fairly progressive in some views, overall they probably lean slightly right of center or even farther right. There are actually only a small percentage of truly liberal or left-wing Democrats in office or in any kind of power, really (much less actual leftists).

No, I’m not getting off into a tangent. I do have a point here.

Because of the shift in the Overton window toward a lot of conservative views in terms of how the economy and justice system and government should operate, for example, we have been sliding toward this “competitive authoritarianism” for a long while.

I’ve said before and many others have as well that the reason we are in this situation now and the reason 47 and his regime and Project 2025 have been so successful is because the conservatives (mostly particularly the far right wing) have since at least the Ronald Reagan era been diligently making sure they put people in positions of governmental and other authority at all levels, from the local school boards all the way up to the federal government. They have positioned themselves to have an outsized amount of power compared to their numbers.

It’s just that a lot of us didn’t notice the gradual effect was getting more and more pronounced. Polls will tell you consistently that the average person in the United States—and the majority of people—often don’t like the policies of their Republican local governments, state governments or the people in Washington, D.C. But a lot of times those policies get entrenched anyway, leading to most of the country now being forced to live under a lot of stuff that really only appeals to evangelicals, right-wingers, fascists, etc. Control over women’s bodies, making life more difficult for LGBTQ+ people, dishonoring and marginalizing Indigenous People and other BIPOC folks, bringing back Jim Crow-style policies for Black people, etc.

They have been able to do this with things like gerrymandering to make sure that votes are skewed toward Republicans and that Republicans are heavily over-represented in the U.S. Congress even when a state’s population is pretty evenly split politically and ideologically.

They have been able to do this by being draconian and uncompromising when they hold power. How often have we watched Democrats “play fair” and compromise to get things done, while Republicans have more typically refused to budge? How often have we watched Democrats punish members of their ranks for misdeeds, ending their political careers, while the GOP typically does the exact opposite?

We see it in Tennessee in particular right now where not only did the GOP-controlled state legislature immediately start gerrymandering at a time when it normally wouldn’t be doing redistricting of any sort as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the last of the Voting Rights Act this month—probably ensuring that Democrats (and Black people in particular) will lose the one singular seat they had in Congress—but the legislature also just removed Democrats from all current House standing committee and subcommittee assignments (except for a few that House rules require to have some kind of representation from the minority party in the legislature, but I bet they’ll try to erase that rule soon, too). The people of your state are not being fully and fairly represented if the Democrats are left out in the cold, not knowing half the time what’s even being discussed, much less having a voice in things at the committee level.

A functioning government requires compromise and it should faithfully represent the ideals and views of the people it serves. But what we have now is a government ruled by a minority ideology (far-right Christian nationalist types who tend to also be white supremacists and homophobes).

Think of how the Republicans have destroyed the Postal Service (again, this isn’t a tangent). Once upon a time, the USPS was very successful. It actually made money and didn’t simply rely on tax dollars to operate. It was one of the most beloved, successful, and reliable government agencies from the point of view of the citizenry. The GOP hated that. Why? Well, for one thing, they want mail privatized. They want it to be something on the stock market; they want rich mofos to have control of it. So, over the years they have undermined the USPS, most notably by requiring them to “pre-fund” retirement benefits/pensions in a way that no other federal agency was required to do. By forcing them to pay more for benefits than any other agency, the right wing essentially destroyed the ability of the USPS to be successful. The USPS might have still lost ground to corporate folks like UPS and FedEx, but they wouldn’t be at the extreme disadvantage they are now and teetering on the edge of destruction.

Another factor was the right wing wanting to make the USPS look dysfunctional when it never was until the GOP broke it on purpose. Because the GOP is always going on about the dangers of “big government.” Never mind that they themselves are into big government and government control over individuals (usually in far more destructive, cruel and mean ways that even questionable folks on the left). They have to make government look like a mess so that they can have a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And what is that prophecy? That too much debate or too much discussion or too much voting or too many rights are bad. They want to convince not only their most conservative base but also the “moderates” that what is needed is less democracy and less freedom. They want people to believe that a strong government telling them more often what to do and asking them less is better.

In other words, authoritarianism. Or, apparently in our case, competitive authoritarianism.

What does this mean for us? Well, we saw Viktor Orban do the competitive authoritarianism thing in Hungary for what—16 years I think? He stayed in power and ran an authoritarian right-wing state despite having elections and all that. Same as 47 and his regime are trying to do—stay in power and gain more power and never let go.

Well, eventually the elections finally got Orban. There is no guarantee that the new folks in charge might not also become evil assholes, but he was dislodged. Voting and other rules of government that had been left in place finally worked to some degree. He ruled his country essentially like a dictator, but unlike more extreme authoritarian states, he didn’t wipe out all the old rules and old systems.

Just like us. We still nominally have all the processes in place and rules and the checks and balances—they just aren’t working properly or are being suppressed actively. We can still vote, though it’s increasingly less that our votes matter if they lean to the middle or left of the ideological spectrum because of cheating on the right. We can still protest, but increasingly we risk being labeled as terrorists for doing so and finding our First Amendment rights squashed. Women still have the right to vote, but not to choose what to do with their own reproductive systems. And so on and so forth.

So, assuming there isn’t a right-wing takeover—revolution style—that remakes the whole country like we saw with the Communist revolutions in places like Eastern Europe and China in the 20^th century, we will still have our votes and our Constitution and all that. This means that voting still matters, but it’s going to have a lot less power under “competitive authoritarianism.” We are not without hope or an eventual escape route, but getting there is going to be hard, messy and might take a lotta lotta years.

And there remains the chance that we could go full authoritarianism. That’s not outside the realm of possibility.

So, once again, I am going to tell you how important it is to vote, and to vote for people who are contrary to what the regime wants (and who have a chance to win). Even if that means voting for the so-called “lesser of two evils.” Because if we cede the vote or vote for people who have basically zero chance of winning, we willingly hand power to the right wing to do more and worse than they already have.

But I am also going to remind you that voting isn’t nearly enough, and we need to protest and disrupt and stymie the GOP in general and the right wing in particular a lot more and a lot more intensely than we have done so far. Because if we don’t, that “competitive” part may drop, and then we’re just authoritarian, and we saw how bad that was in the USSR/Soviet Union, and now Russia with a different authoritarian direction than when it ran the Soviet Union. We’ve seen how bad it was for Hungary and Turkey. We’ve seen it not go well for citizens and freedoms in China or Cuba. So many other places, too, where authoritarian regimes have done incredible harm.

Let’s not go there. More importantly, though, let’s work hard (even at risk to ourselves) to get out of “competitive authoritarianism” and back to something more like a functioning representative democracy.

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Image by Mike Newbry, obtained via Unsplash