USA: The New Authoritarianism

Under Trump the USA is no longer the so-called ‘beacon of the democratic world’. Instead, it is becoming the symbol of a new type of authoritarianism. This blog looks at the way the USA is changing

 Two types of authoritarianism
 
There are two types of authoritarianism in today’s world. There is the old, exemplified by Putin in Russia and Xi in China. And there is a new, towards which a number of democratic countries are being drawn including Mohdi’s India and Trump’s United States. 
 
The old
 
The old style of authoritarianism is associated with the rule of an autocrat or autocratic party that controls all significant aspects of life, directly or indirectly. It controls the police and armed forces, the media, the courts and strategic sectors of the economy, both public and private. Elections are for show. Opposition is snuffed out.
 
Features of new
 
The new style of authoritarianism is widely labelled as ‘populist’ reflecting power achieved through majorities at the ballot box. News and the information available through the digital world are manipulated. Inconvenient facts are denied. The framing of news in the digital media is based on a ‘them against us’ style of politics. The ‘them’ is defined through negative messaging. The style of messaging divides the world into friends and enemies. The independence of the different branches of government represents obstacles to be overcome. Electoral districts are there to be redrawn and redistricted. Courts are packed with allies, independent epistemic agencies from health care to financial services are brought to heel through the appointments system or through direct interference. Trump’s America reflects all these features. 
 
The division of the political world into friends and enemies and scorn for the delays inherent in democratic processes echoes the political thought of the German political theorist and Nazi supporter Carl Schmitt (Professor in Berlin until 1945).
 
Old labels: new parties
 
The new authoritarianism may adopt new party labels such as Reform in the UK. But very often old labels persist, such as Republicans and Democrats in the US. Despite the persistence of old labels, the politics has changed underneath. The old party labels reflected mainly a broad divide about how much societal welfare should be left to market forces and how much social provision required government intervention to support public provision of infrastructure, other public goods and to regulate the excesses of the market and its negative ‘externalities’ such as polluting emissions. 
 
What has changed is that in the new information economy old distinctions between what belongs to the market and what belongs to the world of collective choice and politics are no longer relevant. Both private firms and public bodies face a common organizational challenge in how to reduce uncertainty in a world of an over-abundant supply of information. At the same time, easy distinctions between price signals of the market channelling demand for private goods and the political signalling channelling demand for social provision have eroded. Private platforms that monetise information produce public and common goods as well as private. The new models are Starlink, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, and producers of open-source software. Moreover, common goods are not supply constrained. The old ‘tragedy of the commons’ does not apply when platforms supplying common goods experience an increase in their usage. More users increase value and utility.

The new model information economy crosses the old boundaries between the private and the public and promises direct delivery of what people want rather than the endless chains of intermediaries involved in old style collective provision. In this world, old parties have to reformulate their messages and deliver them in new ways mainly through digital media. 

Like-mindedness
 
In contemporary politics the world of information dominated by supply has to be brought together with and translated into the world of political choice dominated by demand. This is achieved through the creation of new meta-narratives. The meta-narratives may be presented in broad brush terms of outsiders v insiders or in narrower terms for example targeting immigrants. The meta-narratives bring together those who share the same view of the world and are ‘like-minded’. 
 
The world of the like-minded is not a world of debate with those with whom we might disagree, where there is a willingness to change our minds in the light of debate and where we show respect for those with different views. Models of rational deliberation, communicative action and Town Hall forums offered by models of deliberative democracy are increasingly divorced from the contemporary world. Like-mindedness serves two purposes. It signals preferences. It sorts out those who are with us and those who are not.
 
This world is frequently referred to through the metaphor of an ‘echo chamber’. The metaphor captures the sense in which we listen to views similar to our own and the absence of debate and deliberation. It does not catch the way in which like-mindedness also acts as a sorting mechanism for making demands in the world of political choice. 
 
The inclusive/exclusive
 
In order to make their demands on politics effective, like-minded electors and interests have to group together. Two very different strategies can be seen. Some groups are ‘inclusive’ and bring together dissimilar interests united only under a broad meta-narrative often framed in the negative such as anti-elitism or anti-insiders. Trump supporters range from billionaires to the low income. Other groups are ‘Exclusive’ and want under their umbrella only those who are 100% committed to the same cause. Some environmental or green parties in Europe might fall into this category. What divides the two groups and their attitude to the formation of political alliances is ‘risk aversion’ or the fear of damaging their own cause. Inclusive groups are prepared to take risks with an alliance of dissimilars, united only by their self-perception as outsiders. Exclusive groups feel they have too much to lose by diluting commitments to their cause. 
 
Each type of group will pursue power in their own way using separate strategies. Inclusive groups will favour majoritarian politics. They will promise direct delivery of what people want. They will use their broad base of support not only to dominate politics but also the other branches of government. Exclusive groups will favour coalition governments where they have a greater chance of getting their views accepted as a necessary component to provide a coalition with a majority (the so-called ‘hold out’ power.). They too will want to use the other branches of government to help achieve their own ends and political objectives. They will try to find ‘linked ecologies of interest’ in the law, judiciary and epistemic bodies who share their own views and will use their different forms of authority to promote them. Either strategy is damaging to the different kinds of reasoning that go into making public choices – electoral, judicial and epistemic.
 
Resisting the new authoritarianism
 
The new authoritarianism puts democracies on the backfoot. Public consent that underpins the legitimacy of democratic forms of government is used to justify undemocratic aims and behaviours. Old political parties have to find new narratives and new governance models that offer more direct forms of delivery.
 
Defences against the drift towards the new authoritarianism can be divided into two – formal protections and the informal. 
 
Formal protections
 
Formal protections are those familiar from America’s separation of powers and centre on clearly defined institutional roles where each branch defers to others in their respective fields of responsibility. In today’s world, these roles distinguish and protect the different sources of information that protect society and the way societal choices are made. The key distinctions are between electoral sources of information, judicial expertise, and the knowledge base of independent government agencies.
 
Informal attitudes
 
Democracies depend on informal attitudes and practices as well as formal institutional protections. One of the best known is ‘Loser’s consent’ when the losing party or candidate accepts their defeat and agree to await their next chance at the polls. It is way of symbolising the legitimacy of an elected government and the electoral process itself. When Trump disputed the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election, he was attempting to undermine the system itself. 
 
There are other informal features that enable democracies to work. These enabling values include attitudes that encourage tolerance, accommodation, providing space for difference, and moderation in expressing views and making demands. These are not heroic values of the sort proclaimed by would-be charismatic leaders or by Trump and his MAGA supporters. Neither are they the kinds of values that get more than a passing reference in constitutional declarations of fundamental rights. But they are essential if democracies are to serve their purpose in keeping a society together despite containing a multiplicity of interests, values and identities.
 
Neither formal protections, nor the informal, offer direct delivery - the promise of populism. On the contrary they guard against it. Institutions in the judicial or epistemic branches may check the legislative. Enabling values may require us to moderate our own  demands and accept those that others make even if we do not go along with them.  

Vitality
 
In the final analysis, democracies depend on the willingness of the people to standup for democratic institutions and practices and to support both formal institutional values and the informal attitudes that enable democracies to work. The nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill referred to it as ‘vitality’. In practice this means relying on each person’s sense of personal integrity in doing their job and their civic sense when they go the polls. Trump is already anticipating adverse polls in the 2026 congressional election. We can expect his support for gerrymandering and news manipulation to crescendo. It is up to the American people to call him out for what he is – an utterly discreditable aberration from a great American tradition.