How Bad Is It?: Three Political Scientists Say America Is No Longer a Democracy

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz is joined by the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who teach at Harvard, and Lucan A. Way, who teaches at the University of Toronto, for an installment of “How Bad Is It?,” a monthly series on the health of American democracy. In a new essay for the journal Foreign Affairs, “The Price of American Authoritarianism,” the scholars of government assert that President Trump’s rapid consolidation of power in the first year of his second term has tipped the United States into authoritarianism—specifically, into competitive authoritarianism, in which elections persist but the ruling party rigs the system in its favor. The panel discusses how they arrived at their conclusions and suggests that not all is lost: America’s authoritarian moment could be temporary. “The United States is in a very good place to resist,” Levitsky says. “Civil society is very robust and so there is a very high likelihood that Trump will fail.”

The Political Scene draws on the reporting and analysis found in The New Yorker for lively conversations about the big questions in American politics. Join the magazine’s writers and editors as they put into context the latest news—about elections, the economy, the White House, the Supreme Court, and much more. New episodes are available three times a week.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Andrew.
0:07.0	Hey, Tyler, what's going on?
0:08.4	Thanks so much for being here.
0:09.8	And welcome, everyone, to the political scene from the New Yorker and our series, How Bad Is It, where Andrew and I sit down for a monthly checkup on the health of our democracy.
0:17.9	So how is that democracy going?
0:20.4	Peachy keen. I don't know if I'm hitting like
0:23.6	disaster fatigue or the holidays or something, but I'm just, I'm a little more distant from it right now.
0:29.3	I mean, that doesn't speak well of me, but I'm just kind of like. If even you feel distant from it,
0:33.9	then I think we might be toast. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just like, oh, another day,
0:37.9	another potential alleged war crime. That seems bad. And then I kind of, you know, what else do I got going on this weekend? I mean, I think it's just, I know it's not flattering for me to reveal that about myself, but I think it's honest to be, like, we have to be honest about how we can't be equally shocked and appalled and outraged by each thing every day.
0:56.1	Yeah. And that's kind of how the authoritarian's get you. You know, like we have to be honest about how we can't be equally shocked and appalled and outraged by each thing every day.
0:56.2	Yeah. And that's kind of how the authoritarian's get you. You know, they kind of just grind you down with the
1:01.0	relentlessness of it all. So that's, I'm in the ebb of that recently, I guess. At the same time, you are doing some
1:07.9	extra work here. We have a special episode of the podcast today in which,
1:12.9	you know, Andrew, you spoke with three of the top American scholars on Democratic backsliding.
1:17.8	So yeah, I did kind of pull the alarm and say we need to do an emergency episode of the pod
1:22.0	because it's not every day that these three heavy hitters come out with something.
1:26.6	So we've talked about all of their
1:28.9	work on the show before. It's Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatte, who are both at Harvard and Luke
1:33.3	and Way, who's at the University of Toronto. And they actually, I didn't realize until talking to
1:38.9	them that they all went to grad school together at UC Berkeley in the early 90s, which they were saying was kind of...
1:45.1	That's the time to be at UC Berkeley. Yes. And also a time to be studying the birth of democracies
	...

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