Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Today, we're going to get smarter about some big terms that have been popping up in headlines lately,

kind of like a vocabulary lesson to help you unpack the news.

Starting with a big one you've probably been hearing a lot.

Authoritarianism.

And it is a big term.

There's been a lot of talk about whether the Trump administration's actions fit into this category.

It even came up earlier this week when I was talking with Patrick Eddington,

a senior fellow in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato Institute, about President Trump's use of the National Guard and the broader attempts to grow the powers of the executive branch.

Now, authoritarianism is generally defined as a form of government characterized by the concentration of power in a single leader or small group, often bypassing democratic processes and citizen input.

But we wanted to ask Eddington about how he thinks about the term, and here's what he said.

I'm sure there's a textbook definition, but to me, authoritarianism is when you do not have a functioning democratic polity,

whether you want to talk about that in the context of a republic-style government that we used to have

or in a parliamentary system.

But invariably, when we talk about authoritarianism, we are

talking about one man or one party rule, where civil rights and civil liberties are at least

severely curbed, if not essentially, non-existent. We also asked political communications

professor Karin Vosby Anderson at Colorado State University

about how to define authoritarianism. And she said the term has a bit of a branding problem,

because when people hear the word, they think of military dictatorships of the past, rather than it

being a modern issue. But according to Anderson,

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