Why the United States Has Slipped into Authoritarianism and May Soon Be a Dictatorship, and What Americans and the International Community Can Do About It
A View from the Outside
I’m an Australian. I wrote this essay from the other side of the Pacific, watching events in the United States with the same mixture of disbelief and recognition that millions of people around the world now share. I mention this because it matters.
Americans are living inside the crisis. They are subject to its pressures, propaganda, exhaustion, and normalization. Every day brings a new outrage, and every new outrage pushes the last one further from memory. The sheer volume of institutional destruction makes it difficult to see the pattern from within, because the pattern is everywhere, and when something is everywhere, it becomes invisible. Americans are also subject to the powerful mythology of their own exceptionalism, the deep conviction that what happens in other countries cannot happen here, that the Constitution is a kind of talisman against tyranny, that the system will hold because it has always held. That conviction is itself one of the most effective tools the current regime possesses.
Distance clarifies. From Australia, the pattern is unmistakable. We’ve watched democratic backsliding in Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, and Brazil. We’ve studied it. And what’s happening in the United States follows the same trajectory, at greater speed and with far higher stakes. The advantage of writing from outside is that I carry none of the psychological burden of American exceptionalism. I have no sentimental attachment to the idea that the United States is immune from the forces that have toppled democracies throughout history. I can see what’s happening for what it is, compare it honestly to what has happened elsewhere, and say plainly what many Americans are still struggling to bring themselves to say: this is an authoritarian regime, it is consolidating power, and it may soon become a dictatorship.
The evidence speaks for itself. What follows is an attempt to lay it out clearly, so that Americans and the world can see the full picture and act accordingly.
The Present Crisis
The United States of America, the nation operating under the oldest written constitution in the world, is in the process of becoming an authoritarian state. This isn’t a prediction about some distant future. It’s a description of the present. In the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, the executive branch has seized control of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. It has deployed paramilitary immigration forces into American cities over the objections of elected local officials. It has defied federal court orders. It has raided state election offices and confiscated ballots. It has targeted journalists, universities, law firms, and political donors with threats of investigation and retaliation. It has called protesters domestic terrorists. And the president himself has mused openly, repeatedly, about canceling the next elections.
When Bright Line Watch surveyed more than five hundred political scientists in early 2025, the vast majority concluded that the country was moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward authoritarianism. Their numerical rating of American democracy plummeted in a matter of weeks, the steepest decline since the survey began in 2017. The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter recorded a twenty-eight percent decline in a single year. The Economist Intelligence Unit had already classified the United States as a “flawed democracy” before any of this began. These are the professional assessments of people who have spent their careers studying how democracies live and how they die. They are converging, across methodologies and political orientations, on the same conclusion.
The gravity of this moment is difficult to overstate. The United States is the wealthiest nation in world history, the possessor of the largest military, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and the anchor of the postwar international order. If it ceases to function as a democracy, the consequences will reshape global politics for a generation or more. The question that Americans and the world must now confront is whether this slide can be arrested before it becomes irreversible.
How It Happened
The standard comparative framework for understanding developments in the United States derives from the work of scholars such as Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, whose books How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority have become essential texts. They describe a pattern called “competitive authoritarianism,” in which a leader comes to power through democratic elections and then systematically erodes the system from within: filling the civil service and judiciary with loyalists, attacking the independence of media and universities, weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents, and tilting the electoral playing field so decisively that meaningful competition becomes impossible. Elections still occur, but they cease to function as genuine mechanisms of accountability. This is the model visible today in Hungary under Viktor Orbán and in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The Trump administration has moved through this playbook with remarkable speed. The Justice Department has been converted into an instrument of presidential will. The FBI, under a director chosen for loyalty, has conducted raids on election infrastructure in Georgia that legal experts have called unprecedented. The intelligence community has been brought to heel. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency responsible for protecting elections from interference, has been significantly reduced, with roughly 1,000 employees removed. ICE has been expanded into what Harvard’s Levitsky has described as a paramilitary force operating with minimal oversight, deployed into cities to create confrontations that serve the administration’s political narrative.
At the same time, the administration has pursued a strategy of intimidation that reaches deep into civil society. Law firms that take cases against the government have been threatened with loss of security clearances and federal contracts. Universities that produce critical scholarship have faced funding cuts and investigations. Political donors who support the opposition have pulled back, fearing retaliation from a government that has explicitly stated its intention to use the IRS and the Justice Department against its perceived enemies. Major corporations and media companies have engaged in what scholars of authoritarianism call “anticipatory obedience,” capitulating to demands before they are even formally made. Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth has observed that “even if they weren’t okay with it in private, not standing up collectively probably made the situation much worse.” The pattern is familiar from every case study in the literature: institutions are picked off one by one, and each capitulation makes the next easier to extract. The collective failure of elite institutions to resist in the early months of the administration created a permissive environment for escalation.
Robert Kagan’s Rebellion, published in 2024 and now read with the grim clarity of fulfilled prophecy, argued that these forces are nothing new in American life. The antiliberal tradition, he showed, stretches back to the founding of the republic. What Trump represents is the resurgence of an impulse that has long coexisted with American democracy, held in check during certain eras and unleashed in others. The current moment, Kagan warned, bears a striking resemblance to the years before the Civil War, when half the country decided it would rather destroy the constitutional order than accept its outcomes.
The Roots Run Deep
This is where the American case diverges from the standard comparative models. Hungary and Turkey descended into competitive authoritarianism from relatively young democratic traditions. The United States has a much longer democratic history, but it also has a much longer authoritarian history, and the two have always been intertwined.
For nearly a century after the Civil War, the American South operated as what political scientist Robert Mickey called a set of “subnational authoritarian enclaves.” These were fully functioning authoritarian regimes embedded within a nominally democratic nation. White supremacist governments controlled elections through poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence. They enacted comprehensive systems of racial control over every dimension of Black life: economic, social, political, and cultural. They were sustained by a coordinated apparatus of state power, paramilitary terror, and elite economic interest. And they were justified, at every step, by the language of Christianity, constitutional fidelity, and states’ rights.
The Jim Crow system was dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s, but the worldview that sustained it was never fully defeated. It adapted. The sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry have traced the ideology they call “white Christian nationalism” across three centuries of American history. It’s a worldview that fuses racial hierarchy, Protestant religious identity, patriarchal authority, and a proprietary claim on American nationhood into a single, self-reinforcing structure. It holds that the United States was founded by and for white Christians, that its greatness is divinely ordained, and that any expansion of rights and recognition to those outside this charmed circle represents an existential threat. Experimental research has confirmed what historians have long observed: support for Christian nationalist beliefs increases when white Christians are told about their own demographic decline.
The journalist and scholar Katherine Stewart, in The Power Worshippers, documented the organized political infrastructure that has channeled this worldview into institutional power over the past four decades. The historian Anthea Butler, in White Evangelical Racism, showed that racism has been woven into the political identity of white evangelicalism since the era of slavery. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne, traced how white evangelical culture became fused with a militant, patriarchal vision of masculinity that primed its adherents for authoritarian leadership. Robert P. Jones, in White Too Long, documented the persistent statistical correlation between white Christian identity and support for racial hierarchy.
What these scholars collectively demonstrate is that the authoritarian movement now in power in Washington did not arrive from outside the American tradition. It emerged from within it. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s described itself in language that’s almost indistinguishable from the rhetoric of today’s Christian nationalist politicians: native-born, white, Protestant Americans restoring the fundamental principles of the Constitution under a code of conduct defined as Christianity. The robes and hoods are gone. The underlying ideology persists.
This history matters because it shapes what kind of authoritarianism the United States is building. It’s an authoritarianism organized around demographic anxiety, around the fear of a white Christian majority losing its dominance in a diversifying nation. The sociologist Philip Gorski has observed that white Christian nationalism in America surges during periods when white Christians feel threatened by outside forces, amplified by war, heightened immigration, or economic instability. All three catalysts are present in the current moment. Levitsky and Ziblatt put it plainly in Tyranny of the Minority: America is attempting to become a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever achieved, and the backlash against that attempt is the engine driving the current crisis. The counter-majoritarian features of the American constitutional system, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the structure of the judiciary have allowed a radicalized minority to wield power far beyond its numbers and to entrench itself against the preferences of the majority. The result is a political system in which a shrinking demographic base can maintain its grip on power through institutional manipulation, voter suppression, and gerrymandering, and in which the arrival of a charismatic authoritarian leader transforms that institutional advantage into a vehicle for regime change from within.
The Elections of 2026 and 2028
The most immediate test of whether American democracy can survive will come in the 2026 midterm elections. As of early 2026, the administration has taken a series of actions that election officials, legal scholars, and members of both parties have described as laying the groundwork for interference. The FBI has raided election offices in Georgia and seized ballots from the 2020 election. The Director of National Intelligence personally attended the raid. The president has called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections and “take over the voting” in cities he has described, in unmistakably racial terms, as corrupt. His allies have called for ICE agents to surround polling places. The federal election security infrastructure has been dismantled from within.
Legal experts are clear that the president has no constitutional authority to cancel, postpone, or take over federal elections. The United States held elections during the Civil War, during both world wars, and during every crisis in its history. Election administration is controlled by the states, and the timing of federal elections is set by Congress. These are formidable legal barriers.
But the concern among scholars and officials is that the administration may attempt to disrupt elections through means that fall short of outright cancellation: deploying federal agents near polling places in heavily Democratic and minority communities to suppress turnout; seizing ballots or voting machines under the pretext of fraud investigations; creating a narrative of illegitimacy around the results that provides cover for refusing to seat a new Congress; or using the machinery of federal law enforcement to intimidate election workers, candidates, and voters. State officials from both parties are already gaming out these scenarios and preparing responses.
The 2028 presidential election raises additional questions. The Twenty-Second Amendment bars Trump from a third term, and amending the Constitution to change that would require supermajorities that don’t exist. But the concern is that two more years of institutional erosion could leave the playing field so tilted that the 2028 election, while technically held, would function as a managed exercise producing a predetermined result. Trump could seek to install a handpicked successor and use the full apparatus of the federal government to ensure that person’s victory. The machinery of voter intimidation, ballot seizure, litigation, and narrative manipulation being built now could be deployed with far greater precision by 2028. This is how competitive authoritarianism works: the forms of democracy persist while the substance drains away. Elections become rituals of legitimation for a regime that has already determined their outcome.
From Competitive Authoritarianism to Personal Rule
Most of the scholarly discussion of the past year has centered on whether the United States has entered a phase of “competitive authoritarianism.” That debate is now settled. The question that has overtaken it is whether the country is moving through competitive authoritarianism toward something worse: consolidated personal rule, in which a single leader commands the state apparatus so completely that elections, courts, and legislatures cease to function as meaningful checks on his power. The evidence that this transition is underway is accumulating rapidly.
The first and most alarming indicator is the administration’s relationship to the law itself. In a competitive authoritarian system, the leader manipulates legal and institutional frameworks to his advantage while maintaining their outward forms. What has distinguished the Trump administration’s second year is its willingness to abandon even that pretense. Federal court orders have been openly and repeatedly defied. The Justice Department has been transformed into an instrument of presidential will, its professional staff purged and replaced with loyalists whose primary qualification is personal fidelity. The FBI, under a director selected for that loyalty, has conducted operations that legal scholars have described as without precedent in American history, including the January 2026 raid on the Fulton County Board of Elections in Georgia, in which agents seized ballots and voting equipment from the 2020 election while the Director of National Intelligence personally oversaw the operation. Columbia law professor David Pozen told the New York Times in early 2025 that the administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers, and legal constraints of all kinds marked it as an authoritarian regime. The pattern has only deepened since.
The second indicator is the creation of a personal security force operating outside the normal structures of military and civilian law enforcement. ICE and Customs and Border Protection have been expanded, funded at historic levels, and deployed into American cities in ways that bear no relationship to immigration enforcement. They have been used to confront protesters, intimidate local officials, and create an atmosphere of fear in communities that the administration has identified as political opponents. In Minneapolis in January 2026, federal agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and bystander, during an immigration enforcement action that local officials had neither requested nor authorized. The administration described protesters as domestic terrorists. In a June 2025 speech at Fort Bragg, the president goaded uniformed soldiers to jeer at elected Democratic officials. In September 2025, he told top military officials to prepare to deploy in American cities to fight what he called a “war from within” against an “enemy from within.” Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt noted in Foreign Affairs that this language is reminiscent of the military dictatorships that ruled Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in the 1970s.
The third indicator is the systematic campaign to make future elections either unfair or impossible. The president has called for the Republican Party to “nationalize” elections and “take over the voting” in cities he has described, in explicitly racial terms, as corrupt. His former adviser Steve Bannon called for ICE agents to surround polling places. The administration has pushed Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional maps outside the normal redistricting cycle. It has proposed the SAVE Act, which would impose identification requirements that experts estimate could disenfranchise millions. It has dismantled the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, removing the federal government’s capacity to detect or respond to election interference. The president himself has repeatedly floated the idea of canceling the 2026 elections, has told interviewers that he regrets not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines after 2020, and, when invited by Fox News to deny that he wanted to cancel future elections, repeatedly declined. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker compared the playbook to Hitler’s consolidation of power in 53 days.
The fourth indicator is the collapse of Congressional oversight. Levitsky has described this as stunning: the Department of Justice was openly breaking the law and almost certainly violating the Constitution, and Congress stood by and did nothing. Hours after the president declared his intention to take control of elections, the Democratic leadership in the House supplied enough votes to pass $1.2 trillion in government funding, including a short-term extension for the Department of Homeland Security. The dynamic that political scientists describe as “anticipatory obedience,” in which institutions surrender their independence before they are even formally threatened, has spread from corporations and universities into the legislative branch itself.
The fifth indicator is the speed and trajectory of the decline. The six-step model of incremental autocratization developed by political scientist Daniel Stockemer, drawing on Marianne Kneuer’s studies of Venezuela’s collapse, posits that the United States breached the first three stages within a single year. The Bright Line Watch survey, which rates American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy), recorded the steepest single decline in the survey’s history between November 2024 and February 2025, from 67 to 55. The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter found a 28 percent drop in one year, from 79 to 57 out of 100. In every case, the trajectory was described as accelerating.
Robert Kagan, who spent years describing Trump first as antiliberal and then as authoritarian, stated in a February 2026 interview on NPR that Trump was, at that point, a dictator, and that the question was no longer whether he had dictatorial ambitions but whether anyone would prevent him from fully consolidating that power. He described Trump’s actions in 2025 as a remarkable destruction of government: turning the Justice Department into a personal legal weapon, the CIA into a personal organization, and the FBI into a tool for pursuing enemies. He called these textbook actions of a dictator.
In comparative politics, the distinction between competitive authoritarianism and dictatorship is partly a matter of degree: whether elections remain genuinely contested, whether courts can still enforce limits on executive power, and whether the opposition retains the organizational capacity to challenge the incumbent. On each of these dimensions, the direction of travel in the United States is clear and accelerating. The 2026 midterm elections will test whether any of these mechanisms still function. If they do, the country remains in the realm of competitive authoritarianism, damaged but recoverable. If they don’t, the transition to consolidated personal rule will have been completed in less than two years, faster than the equivalent process took in Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela.
What Can Be Done
The research on democratic backsliding and recovery, drawn from countries as diverse as Poland, South Korea, Brazil, and Senegal, converges on several clear lessons.
The first is that elections remain the most powerful tool for reversing authoritarian drift, and protecting the integrity of elections is the single most urgent task. State and local officials, who control the actual mechanics of voting in America, are the front line of this defense. They need resources, legal support, and public solidarity. Every citizen who can volunteer as a poll worker, election observer, or legal monitor should do so. The 2026 midterms must produce turnout so overwhelming that manipulation becomes impractical and claims of illegitimacy become implausible.
The second lesson is that opposition forces must unite across traditional political divisions. The comparative evidence is unambiguous: authoritarianism is defeated when people committed to democracy from the left, center, and right set aside their policy disagreements to defend the democratic process itself. Poland’s democratic recovery in 2023 was achieved by a coalition that spanned the political spectrum. In the American context, this means that Democrats, independents, and the growing number of Republicans who are breaking with Trump must find common cause. The signs of Republican resistance, the Indiana Senate’s refusal to gerrymander on Trump’s orders, the calls for the Epstein files, and the quiet defections of donors and officials are fragile but significant. Authoritarian regimes die when they fragment internally, and every crack matters.
The third lesson is that civil society institutions must resist collectively. The pattern of the past year has been one of serial capitulation: institutions targeted one by one, each calculating that compliance will spare them from further attack. This is precisely the strategy that authoritarian regimes use, and it works only when institutions fail to act in solidarity. Law firms, universities, media organizations, professional associations, labor unions, and religious communities must coordinate their responses and defend one another. When one institution is targeted, the rest must treat it as an attack on all of them.
The fourth lesson is that citizens must sustain engagement and resist the pull of despair. The most consistent finding in the scholarly literature on democratic backsliding is that the principal accelerant of authoritarian consolidation is the withdrawal of the opposition from the political arena. When people conclude that the game is already lost, that elections will be rigged, that resistance is futile, they create the very conditions that make those fears come true. Levitsky has argued that the current situation is “an authoritarianism that can be reversed, and I think likely will be reversed.” That assessment is grounded in evidence, but it depends entirely on whether citizens continue to show up, organize, litigate, protest, vote, and demand accountability.
The fifth lesson concerns the international community. European democracies, in particular, must recognize that the United States under its current government is no longer a reliable partner in the defense of democratic values. Kagan has urged Europeans to stop waiting for the America they knew to come back. The implications are profound: Europe must accelerate its own defense capabilities, diversify its economic partnerships, and build institutional resilience against the pressures that an authoritarian-leaning American government will bring to bear. NATO allies must plan for a world in which the alliance’s most powerful member is governed by someone who admires autocrats and disdains the democratic solidarity on which collective security depends.
At the same time, international institutions, election-monitoring bodies, press freedom organizations, human rights mechanisms, and transnational civil society networks play a role in maintaining global norms and supporting American democratic forces, just as they do in any country experiencing a democratic crisis. International election observation, which the United States has historically promoted abroad, may now be needed at home. The notion that the United States is exempt from such support is itself a casualty of the current moment. Countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and the democracies of Europe must also be prepared to serve as sanctuaries for American journalists, scholars, and civil society leaders who face retaliation, and to maintain economic and diplomatic relationships with American states and cities that continue to uphold democratic values even as the federal government abandons them.
Is This Merely a Leftist Concern?
One of the most common responses to an essay like this is the charge that it represents a leftist perspective and that the alarm it expresses is a product of partisan bias. This charge deserves a direct answer, because if the evidence assembled here amounts to nothing more than an echo chamber, it should be dismissed. And if it does not, then the charge itself becomes a way of avoiding the evidence, which is precisely how democratic erosion advances.
The research cited throughout this essay is drawn from peer-reviewed political science, from surveys of more than 500 scholars across the political spectrum, and from frameworks developed by academics at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth who have spent decades studying democratic backsliding in countries on every continent. The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter, Bright Line Watch, and the Varieties of Democracy Institute are all nonpartisan institutions with long track records of measuring democratic health regardless of which party holds power. Robert Kagan, one of the most prominent voices cited here, is a lifelong conservative, a Republican, and a former adviser to Republican presidential campaigns. His concerns about the current trajectory of the United States are rooted in precisely the values that conservatives have historically championed: limited government, the rule of law, and the preservation of individual liberty against the concentration of state power.
Democracy is the mechanism that protects everyone’s rights, regardless of who holds power. Conservatives who value individual liberty, religious freedom, and the right to bear arms should be the first to defend independent courts, free elections, and checks on executive power, because those are the only things that guarantee their freedoms will survive the next change of government. When a leader can ignore court orders, deploy federal agents against domestic opponents, and threaten to cancel elections, no one’s rights are safe. The question of whether democratic institutions are functioning determines whether the left and the right can continue to exist at all. If the evidence presented here is wrong, it should be challenged on its merits. That challenge is welcome, and it is the kind of exchange that democracy requires.
What About the Democrats?
A thoughtful critique of this essay’s argument would note that many Republicans believe the Democratic Party has engaged in its own form of competitive authoritarianism, and that the essay would be stronger if it addressed this claim directly. That critique has merit, and this section attempts to answer it honestly.
The specific grievances are familiar and held sincerely by millions of Americans: that the Obama and Biden administrations politicised the FBI and DOJ, that the prosecution of Trump himself was politically motivated, that liberal dominance of universities and major media constitutes a form of institutional capture, that the administrative state has been weaponised against conservative priorities, and that social media censorship during COVID amounted to state suppression of dissent.
Some of these concerns have substance, and acknowledging that is important. The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page FISA warrant was genuinely troubling and was acknowledged as such by the Inspector General. The pressure placed on social media companies during the pandemic raised legitimate First Amendment questions that courts are still working through. The ideological homogeneity of certain institutions is real and worth scrutinising. These are not trivial complaints, and dismissing them wholesale would be dishonest.
But there is a qualitative difference between institutional bias and institutional capture by a single leader, and the scholarly frameworks cited throughout this essay are designed precisely to identify that difference. The indicators of competitive authoritarianism are specific and measurable: the seizure of law enforcement and intelligence agencies by the executive, the defiance of court orders, the deployment of paramilitary forces against domestic opponents, the direct interference with electoral machinery, and the systematic intimidation of donors, journalists, universities, and law firms who oppose the regime.
No previous Democratic administration sent federal agents to seize ballots from a county election office. No previous Democratic president called for the nationalisation of elections in cities controlled by the opposing party. No previous Democratic administration defied federal court orders as a matter of routine. No previous Democratic president used uniformed soldiers as a backdrop for partisan rallies against named political opponents, or told military commanders to prepare for war against domestic enemies. The ordinary hardball of democratic politics, which both parties have played throughout American history, is qualitatively different from the systematic dismantling of the mechanisms that make democratic competition possible. Both sides engage in hardball. Only one side is currently dismantling the playing field itself.
That distinction is what the research measures, and it is why the alarm is sounding now rather than in previous administrations. If a future Democratic president were to take the same actions, the same frameworks would apply, the same scholars would raise the same alarms, and this author would write the same essay with the party labels reversed.
How Would I Know If I’m Wrong?
Any serious thesis should be falsifiable. If the argument presented in this essay cannot be tested against observable outcomes, it risks becoming an article of faith, and faith is not what this moment requires. A reader posed this challenge directly, and it deserves an equally direct answer.
Here is where I plant my flag. If the 2026 midterm elections are conducted freely, without federal interference at polling places, without ballot seizures, without mass disenfranchisement through the SAVE Act or similar measures, and if the results are accepted and the winners are seated, that would constitute significant evidence against the dictatorship thesis. It would not resolve the question of authoritarianism on its own, because competitive authoritarian regimes hold elections, but it would demonstrate that the electoral mechanism still functions as a genuine check on power, and that this matters enormously.
I would go further. If by the end of 2027, federal courts are still able to enforce rulings against the executive branch and have those rulings obeyed, if journalists and academics are able to criticise the administration without facing federal investigation or prosecution, if ICE and other federal agencies have been pulled back from their domestic deployment against protesters and political opponents, and if Congress is exercising genuine oversight of the executive, I would happily say the system held, and that the most alarming projections in this essay were wrong. I would be delighted to be wrong. I would write a follow-up essay saying so with genuine relief.
The scholars I draw on most heavily would agree with this framing. Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt have explicitly warned against treating dictatorship as a fait accompli, arguing that the greatest danger is demobilisation caused by premature despair. Their entire framework assumes that the outcome remains contested and that the actions of citizens, institutions, and opposition forces in the coming months will determine the country’s trajectory. To treat the battle as already lost is to guarantee that it will be.
So the colours are nailed to the mast. The 2026 elections are the test (and thereafter, the 2028 US elections). If they are free, fair, and their results are honoured, I will say so publicly. And in the meantime, the urgency of this essay rests on the conviction that whether those elections are free and fair depends, in large part, on whether enough people understand what is at stake and act accordingly before November.
The Fire Is Burning
There is a natural human tendency to assume that what has always been will continue to be. Americans have lived within a democratic system for so long that many find it genuinely impossible to believe it could end. This is the most dangerous form of complacency. Every democracy that has fallen into authoritarianism was populated by people who believed it could never happen to them. The scholars who study these transitions for a living are telling us, with unusual unanimity and urgency, that it’s happening here, now, in real time.
The comparative evidence also provides important insights into timing. Research across fifteen countries over three decades has found that after two full electoral cycles under authoritarian governance, reversal becomes dramatically more difficult. The window for democratic recovery narrows with each passing month as loyalists are increasingly embedded in the judiciary, bureaucracy, and security services. Poland managed to vote out its authoritarian government in 2023 after two electoral cycles, but the incoming democratic coalition found PiS loyalists entrenched throughout the constitutional tribunal, the prosecutor’s office, and the national broadcasting council, thereby blocking reform at every turn. The longer an authoritarian government remains in power, the more thoroughly it rewires the state, and the harder it becomes to undo the damage even after a change in leadership.
The fire alarm is ringing. The question is whether enough people will hear it, and whether they will act with the speed, courage, and solidarity that the moment demands. The historical record offers grounds for both fear and hope. Authoritarianism has been reversed in living memory in countries with fewer resources and weaker traditions of self-governance than the United States. South Korea defeated an attempted declaration of martial law within six hours in 2024 through the immediate mobilization of legislators, citizens, and a free press acting in concert. Brazil’s democratic institutions held against Bolsonaro. Senegal’s young population voted out an entrenched ruling party. These victories were not gifts. They were earned through preparation, solidarity, and refusal to accept the unacceptable.
The United States is now at that threshold. What happens next depends on what Americans and the world decide to do about it.
Graham Joseph Hill is the Mission Catalyst – Church Planting and Missional Renewal for Uniting Mission and Education. You can read his Blog here and his Substack here.
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Comparative Perspectives and Democratic Resilience
Klaas, Brian. The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy. New York: Hot Books, 2017.
Bermeo, Nancy. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (January 2016): 5–19.
Stockemer, Daniel. “America’s Slide Toward Autocracy.” Politics & Policy, May 2025.
McCoy, Jennifer, Rachel Beatty Riedl, Kenneth Roberts, and Murat Somer. “U.S. Democracy Is Under Attack. Here Are Some Lessons for Democracy’s Defenders.” Good Authority, March 31, 2025.
Center for American Progress. How Democracies Defend Themselves Against Authoritarianism. Washington, DC, April 2025.
Protect Democracy. The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025. Washington, DC, 2024.
Brookings Institution. Democracy Playbook 2025. Washington, DC, January 2025.
Indivisible. Indivisible Guide. Updated December 2025.
Key Articles and Reports
Bright Line Watch. Expert Survey on American Democracy. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, February 2025.
The Century Foundation. Century’s New Democracy Meter Shows America Took an Authoritarian Turn in 2025. New York, January 2026.
Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and Brookings Institution. A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture. Washington, DC, 2023. Updated with Religion and Authoritarianism Survey, 2024.
Brennan Center for Justice. Reports on federal threats to election integrity, executive orders on election administration, and the SAVE Act, 2025–2026. Available at brennancenter.org.
Kaufman, Robert R. “Democratic Resilience: Prevention, Resistance, and Recovery.” IGCC Working Paper No. 8. La Jolla, CA: UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, November 2025.
Dixon, Donovan, and Madison Jennings. “Lessons on American Authoritarianism: What the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras Warn About America’s Future.” Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, 2025.
This bibliography is organized thematically and emphasizes works that are both scholarly and accessible to general readers. It reflects the state of the literature as of early 2026. Many of the listed authors have also published extensively in periodicals, including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and academic journals in comparative politics.
