America’s Authoritarian Turn: A Man, a Failed Political Economy, and a Flawed Democracy

On January 6, 2021, the United States came close to scuttling a democratic election and installing an illegitimate president. How did the United States arrive at this point? An answer must start with Donald Trump’s authoritarian nature, which had long made him indifferent to or contemptuous of constitutional limits on his power—and unable to tolerate political outcomes that went against him. But it must also dig deeper to examine an international neoliberal political order that, since the 1990s, had widened economic inequality, stirred ethnoracial resentments, and raised doubts about the capacity of liberal democratic regimes to fix what had gone wrong. It must also examine the fateful decision by the Republican Party in the decade after George W. Bush’s presidency to deepen rather than ameliorate the oligarchic tendencies present in America’s eighteenth-century political system, further casting doubt on whether what the nation had long celebrated as “American democracy” was worth preserving. A failed political economy in combination with an ailing democratic system set the preconditions for America’s authoritarian turn. With a door to authoritarian politics thus opened, Trump lost no time in attempting to walk through it. America, and the world, are still dealing with the consequences.