“Regimes characterized by such abuses cannot be called democratic.” “Incumbents routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, and in some cases manipulate electoral results,” Levitsky and Way write. “Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. They identified competitive authoritarian systems as ones that hold elections but ensure that they’re fundamentally unfair - stacked in the incumbent party’s favor so heavily that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them. The concept was first developed in a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way, two leading scholars of democracy. Some of these governments, like modern China, are violently and nakedly repressive others control their population through subtler means.Ĭompetitive authoritarian governments fall into the latter category - so closely resembling a democracy on paper that many of their own citizens believe they’re still living in one.
GAY NIFTY AUTHORITARIAN FREE
But “authoritarianism” is actually a broad term, encompassing very different governments united mostly by the fact that they do not transfer power through free and fair elections. When people think of authoritarian governments, they typically think of police states and 20th-century totalitarianism.
The escalation in authoritarian behavior since January 6, from both national and state Republicans, shows that things are worse than even some pessimistic observers have feared. Democrats can and still do win power, as they did in 2020.īut the playing field is indisputably tilted against them - and only growing more so.
GAY NIFTY AUTHORITARIAN SERIES
It happens in a series of steps,” former President Barack Obama said in a CNN interview last Monday. “All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. We are suffering from the same rot that has brought down democracy in other countries: a party that has decided it no longer wants to play by the rules and that would instead prefer to rule as authoritarians rather than share power with its opponents. Understanding what’s happening in the US as something fundamentally similar to what’s happened elsewhere - using the a-word, unflinchingly - helps us not only diagnose the most dangerous policy steps the GOP is taking, but also truly appreciate the gravity of the situation in which America has found itself. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique - we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them.
It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda. The term “ minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.
It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.īlocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.