How Countries Fall Into Autocracy

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Since taking office, President Trump has taken aim at the constitutional order. By conducting mass firings of civil servants, investigating and prosecuting rivals and critics and pardoning insurrectionists, Trump has plunged the country into what political scientist Steven Levitsky argues is an authoritarianism that, unlike a full dictatorship, allows for opposition but deploys “the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power.” And this playbook has been used in countries like Hungary, El Salvador, India, Turkey and others. We talk to Levitsky and historian Anne Applebaum about the lessons other countries can teach us about recognizing authoritarianism at home. Guests: Anne Applebaum, author, "Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World"; staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. Steven Levitsky, professor of government, Harvard; co-author of "Why Democracies Die" and "Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:44.6	From Kikiwede in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:01.0	Day after day, the Trump administration has attacked the constitutional order and the rule of law in this country.
1:08.0	Many of these actions were laid out before the election in Project
1:11.3	2025, while others seem less premeditated. Today we talk with political scientists
1:16.7	Steven Levitsky and historian Ann Applebaum about the models of governance that the
1:22.2	Trump administration has deployed. What do we need to know about what's happened in Hungary,
1:26.7	El Salvador, Turkey,
1:27.6	and other countries that might help us recognize the form our government is taking?
1:33.1	It's all coming up next needed to do this show.
2:03.6	As much as Donald Trump himself is a unique American creation, the way that the Trump administration is smashing up against the institutions of democracy and the American constitutional order had some precedents, both here at home, but also around the world.
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