Hello and welcome to the excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, April 27, 2025.

There's a scary word that's showing up with increasing frequency lately.

Authoritarianism.

Quick Google search reveals many articles,

commentaries, social media posts,

and scholarly debates on whether or not America is sliding into an authoritarian state.

But is that really what's going on here?

Or is calling the current political climate authoritarian

simply a case of liberals being melodramatic? Perhaps the question we need to ask ourselves is really

what is authoritarianism? And if it were happening here, what would that look like? Here to help us

understand this moment and define what we're actually seeing play out in U.S. politics is Ruth Bengiot, a professor of history and expert on fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection at New York University.

Thanks for joining me, Ruth.

It's a pleasure.

Let's start with the basics. Take us back to Political Science 101.

How is an authoritarian state defined?

So there are two ways you can define it.

One is a political definition, and that is when the executive branch kind of overwhelms,

overreaches so that the other branches of government become politicized and

become the kind of tools of the personal will of the leader. So the judiciary is purged,

the bureaucracy, the civil service is purged, and so only loyalists could be there. And at the extreme cases, you get a parliament or

legislature that becomes a rubber stamp of the leader. And the media, of course, in old school,

one party states there's no opposition, there's no elections. Today, things work a bit differently.

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