“Competitive Authoritarianism” as a Nice Way for Academics to Not Say Fascism
Image by Markus Spiske.
The phrase “competitive authoritarianism” has become a common go-to way for liberal and leftish academics, pundits, journalists, and “activists” to foolishly avoid using the scary “F-word” – fascism – to describe the exterminist Trump regime, movement, and party.
Here is a summary of the phrase’s meaning and inception from National “Public” Radio’s All Things Considered last month:
“Some experts say the United States is no longer a liberal democracy[1], but operating under a system called ‘competitive authoritarianism’… 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. Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard …and Lucan Way – now a professor at the University of Toronto – came up with it in 2002 to describe systems in countries such as Serbia, Kenya and Peru. ‘We never – when we coined this term 25 years ago – never imagined that we would apply it to the United States…When we began to see the Justice Department go after people who were public critics of Trump, when we began to see lawsuits against (the) media or attacks on universities that are viewed as critical of the government,’ said Levitsky, ‘all these things are raising the cost of opposition.’ …To describe these kinds of political systems, Way and Levitsky initially came up with the phrase, ‘Contested Autocracy.’ Way admits it was a ‘horrible’ term. Then, in conversation, Way’s faculty adviser, Harvard professor Timothy Colton, unwittingly provided a eureka moment. He misremembered the concept as ‘competitive authoritarianism’…‘So, we thought, “Oh my God, that was it!,” Way recalled…The term is catching on. Since President Trump took office last year, searches on Google Trends for competitive authoritarianism have spiked. It has also shown up in scores of publications, from the Ventura County Star in California to The Scotsman in Edinburgh and The Indian Express in Mumbai.”
In a 2020 Journal of Democracy essay, Levitsky and Way defined competitive authoritarianism as “the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse, yielding electoral competition that is real but unfair.”
“Oh my God,” indeed…as in “oh my God what a pile of vapid, bloodless and academic softening and avoidance!” Levitsky and Way’s term drains Trump, Trumpism, the Trump regime, and MAGA of their drivingly venomous, ferocious, and interwoven counterrevolutionary sociopolitical and ideological life bloods: genocidal racism, militant patriarchy, xenophobic and palingenetic ultra-nationalism, cruelty, irrationality, violence, cultism, hyper-militarism, power madness, anti-intellectualism, anti-socialism, and political eliminationism, all bound up with a relentless campaign to impose a new form of governance beyond the previously normative rule of law, parliamentary deliberation, electoral “democracy” and constitutional checks and balances.
Compare Levitsky and Way’s tepid language with the brilliant left academic Henry Giroux’s recent and far more serious, properly chilling reflections on the dystopian Trump nightmare:
“[Trumpism’s] fascist politics [involve]…the transformation of the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism… this culture of corruption and authoritarian spectacle converges with a politics that glorifies militarism, violence, and hypermasculine domination. One of the driving forces behind…the Trump regime is the fusion of toxic militarism, white Christian nationalism, and a hypermasculine politics that glorifies violence, domination, and war. This deadly convergence is visible in Trump’s appeals to divine authority, biblical rhetoric, and crusader imagery used to justify military aggression and war-crime-level violence in Iran. It also appears in the militarized language of [the open Christian Fascist – PS] Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled ‘Secretary of War,’ for whom war becomes a theater of masculine redemption in which cruelty is defined as a badge of strength. Hegseth’s swaggering militarism might appear absurd were it not tied to the power of the state and its capacity to unleash violence at home and abroad… his rhetoric is steeped in ‘Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity,’ a poisonous language that turns militarism into a spectacle of aggression while elevating authoritarian brutality into a model of national identity and civic virtue.”
The Trump regime’s goals go far beyond “tilting the electoral playing field in its favor to maintain power.” It seeks nothing less than the takeover and makeover of American government and society on fascist – racist, sexist, nativist, fundamentalist, violent, and brutally hierarchical (“traditional”) — lines. It is a bold, fearsome, fast-moving, and unremitting counterrevolutionary project ready, willing, and able to kill, poison, torture, deport, and maim on a mass scale as part of a crusading war against decency, dissent, deliberation, science, rationality, livable ecology, and humanity at home and abroad. Its vile racist and nativist concentration, torture, and death camps are expanding along with the fascist machinery for rounding up brown-skinned people from coast and coast. In one such ICE camp, Delaney Hall in New Jersey, conditions are so miserable that the inmates have started a hunger strike that Trump’s henchman of a “Border Czar” Tom Homan has threatened to end with the international human rights crime of forced feeding.
Yes, death camps. According to the Associated Press last week:
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer report deaths of detainees who have recently been released from its custody… Dr. Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of the New York City jail system [says that] ‘eliminating reporting of these deaths represents a willful act of ignoring the most serious health outcome that can reflect inadequacies in care or help track outbreaks.’ ICE detainees routinely die at hospitals where they are taken for treatment after their conditions deteriorate inside detention facilities…The decision to limit death reporting comes as a greater number of ICE detainees have been dying. At least 18 detainees have died since Jan. 1, which is on pace to surpass last year’s death toll, which was the highest in two decades. Detainees are dying by suicide at an unprecedented pace, and experts say many other deaths from natural causes likely would have been preventable with timely medical care…Dr. Sanjay Basu, a University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist who recently published an analysis of more than 270 ICE custody deaths, said the policy change will ‘make the mortality statistics appear lower without any actual improvement in care. The period immediately following release is when deaths attributable to inadequate care during confinement become apparent,’ he said. ‘Missed diagnoses, interrupted medications, untreated infections, and decompensating chronic conditions don’t always kill someone while they’re still in the building.’”
Meanwhile, the Trump regime and party are not simply trying to tilt the playing field of elections, they are trying to blow the field up. They are bidding to exterminate any hint of effective opposition not just on the “radical Left” (fascism’s classic ideological bête noire) but first of all in their own party and in the other leading capitalist-imperialist party — the dismal Weimar Dems, who Trump absurdly calls (in one of many signs of his fascist essence) “radical Left.”
Look at how wildly indifferent the Trump regime is to its deranged and demented cult leader’s incredible sinking popularity, now below his previous nadir after January 6. Herr Trump recently said that the financial situation of the American people does not concern him right now and that the federal government can’t afford Medicare, Social Security, and “day care” anymore because it has to pay for wars. Trump ordered his Internal Revenue Service and his Department of Justice (the latter under the control of his personal attorney Todd Blanche) to create a wildly menacing and corrupt “deal” whereby US taxpayers grant vast sums to the January 6 putschists who Trump pardoned while he and his family are immunized from civil penalty for past, present, and future tax crimes.
Look at how Trump launched his insane, reckless, incompetent, and wildly unpopular, mass-murderous war on Iran. Unlike the George W. Bush administration before its criminal imperialist invasion of Iraq, Trump hasn’t bothered to even pretend to make a serious case to the American people or Congress for this criminal fascist war.
These is exceedingly unpopular and impolitic conduct, not what would be expected from an administration that takes electoral competition seriously, consistent with a dictatorial determination to do far more to future elections than merely tilt the field. Does anyone really believe that the tyrant who attempted a coup and pardoned the J6 insurrectionists will respect any election his regime loses?
Never forget that Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump wanted the Capitol Riot to include Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and other neo-Confederate Amerikaner fascists armed with military assault weapons.
And never forget what Trump said to 800-plus US military “flag officers,” mainly generals and admirals, he ordered to Quantico, Virginia from across the US Empire last September 30th: that the nation’s top adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning his domestic political critics and opponents. Trump told the brass in Quantico that US cities should be used as training grounds for foreign wars. (Then his Christian fascist Pentagon chief told the generals and admirals that the military should ignore international human rights and wartime law and privileges “maximum lethality” over “tepid legality”).
In other news, the Trump fascist[2] regime has constructed the faux-legal basis for the jailing and murder of any Americans who dissent from capitalism, imperialism, traditional gender relations, white supremacy, nativism, and fascism. In a cover letter atop the regime’s new Counterterrorism Strategy issued last May 6th, Trump tells those who question “American values” that “we will find you and kill you.”
The Trump regime held a nauseating orgy of Christian white nationalist fascism on the National Mall last Sunday. This White House-backed, evangelical-dominated event promoted the revanchist notion of the United States as “one Christian nation under God” and heralded the monumentally corrupt, multiply accused rapist and pedophile Trump as the nation’s divinely ordained leader. By one on-the-ground account, “This was a nine-hour, full-throated declaration of intention to put this country under Christian fascism and (despite the fact that there were numerous Black and brown people performers and speakers) open white supremacist rule based on the notion that God delivered this country to its founders… they are rewriting history in the service of the fascist remaking of society.”
The liberal-beloved imperialist historian Timothy Snyder is not wrong to warn that Trump may want his war on Iran to spark terrorist attacks the regime can use as a pretext to declare a state of emergency and cancel the mid-term elections.
“Competitive authoritarianism” doesn’t remotely capture the horror of what we and the world are facing with the fascist Trump-Vance-Miller-Vought-Roberts-Rubio-Ellison-Hegseth-Musk-Homan-Blanche-Mullen-Bezos-Cook-Zuckerberg-Abbott-DeSantis-Kavanaugh-FOX News regime.
ENDNOTES
+1. Someone should tell N“P”R that United States wasn’t a “liberal democratic” or any other kind of democratic system prior to the rise of Trump’s “competitive authoritarianism.” It was, as numerous credible political and social scientists have shown, a corporate-dominated imperial plutocracy/oligarchy synergistically linked to an archaic constitutional order that Levitsky and his colleague Daniel Ziblatt have shown to be a “minority rule” structure designed for propertied elites to “consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities.” It was, in Marxist/scientific terms, a specifically bourgeois form of democracy, one matched to and constrained, contained, and conditioned by the underlying rule of capital.
+2. Fascism is a violent counter-revolutionary movement advancing a lethal, illegitimate, and dictatorial form of government rooted in and advancing virulent racism, toxic patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism, and traditional hierarchical values. I endorse the following concise definition of fascism on the Website of the US-based organization Refuse Fascism:
“Fascism is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power.
Fascism has direction and momentum. Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this has taken dramatic leaps under the Trump MAGA regimes.
What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. No matter how it comes to power, fascism is never legitimate. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”
For my two best efforts to synopsize the soul-chilling fascism at the heart of this horrific regime, situation, and moment, see Paul Street, “A Declaration of Independence From Trump’s Fascist America,” Common Dreams, July 4, 2025; Paul Street, “What Would it Take?,” CounterPunch, May 15, 2026. My 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America showed how the Trump45 regime matched the best definitions of fascism. Trump 2.0 makes Trump 1.0 look mild by comparison.
