Intro

Tyrants are getting sneakier, and I wanna show you their secrets.

Around the world, there’s a growing group of leaders using new strategies to subvert democracy in covert ways.

There’s a super interesting chart that shows this.

It’s a graph of the number of countries in the world over time with multiparty elections (L).

Those are elections where voters have a choice about who to vote for.

Because this is so fundamental to democracy, if democracies are dying, or there’s some rising tide of tyranny in the world, we should see it here. And at first, we do.

There’s a big decline here in the 30s to 40s a big decline in the number of democracies, thanks largely to the rise of fascists like Hitler and Mussolini. Then again, a big drop in the 60s to 70s due to the spread of dictatorship and communism during the cold war.

The trick is in what this graph doesn’t show you. Consider the United States. It’s counted on this graph starting in 1825: when slavery was still legal and voting limited to some white men. Is that really democracy? I don’t think so. The truth is that tyranny like this can hide behind elections.

Often, however, it isn’t so obvious. Let's jump to 1950. According to the Constitution, everyone had the right to vote. But in practice, this was restricted by Jim Crow measures that subtly disenfranchised black voters, rendering elections in the South effectively meaningless, and national elections compromised.

This is what’s called Stealth Authoritarianism, because it’s hiding in the details. Today it’s not just sneakier than ever, it’s spreading all over the world.

Take Hungary today, for one last example. It’s included on this graph, because like any democracy it has elections with multiple competing parties. Here, suffrage isn’t restricted like Jim Crow America. Instead, one party's just rigged the map. In 2014 and 2018, this party, Fidesz, won only 45% of the vote yet received supermajorities in parliament. And even if they did somehow lose, they’ve embedded loyalists so deep in the courts and bureaucracy that any other party would find governing impossible.

But like I said, they’re not alone. Fidesz is increasingly admired and imitated by right-wing movements all over the world, including in America.

That’s why I wanna dive deeper into stealth authoritarianism: because it’s spreading and because its subtlety makes it really hard to detect and to fight.

So, we’re gonna look at how stealth authoritarianism works, how dangerous it is compared to more overt forms of tyranny like fascism, whether it’s happening now in America, and how to fight it. Because this new, quiet tyranny may be growing in your country, too, even if you don’t know it yet.

Theoretical Cases

To understand this new, sneakier type of tyranny, we have to look at what it evolved from and why. The easiest way to do that is with a hypothetical country that captures this process super clearly, and then we can look at some real-world examples that help us connect these ideas to what we're seeing today.

So let's look at Leviathonia. (AH, AI)

By the way, this video has no sponsor. We had one lined up but canceled it, because it just didn't feel right with this topic. If you want to support what we do, though, stay tuned for a message at the end of this video. Okay, back to Leviathonia.

For millennia, it was a monarchy premised on the divine right of kings, until the people realized that not only was this all a ruse, but that any ruler's power ultimately depended on their consent. So they revolted, declaring the Republic of Leviathonia. Now, elections, not bloodlines, would decide who was in charge. In turn, Leviathonia saw big economic growth and improvements in quality of life across the board.

However, after some time, the republic suffered an economic downturn and defeat in a big war with their neighbor, The Principate of Virtue. Now people weren't just suddenly poorer; they felt dishonored. No longer forced to simply accept such adversity as they did under the king, the people instead got angry with their leaders who were failing to address these big challenges.

In turn, an aspiring tyrant saw his opportunity. His name was Rudolf Morsolini.

I know, very subtle.

Anyways, Rudolf's plan was simple. He'd have to win the people over. Luckily, they were angry, hopeless, and disillusioned, so he offered them hate, hope, and a new path. For the defeat in war and economic downturn, he falsely blamed a long-marginalized minority that had managed to achieve some prominence in cultural and economic life. They were easy to hate, and he was able to sic armed militias on them and other designated enemies. To inspire hope, he promised a return to national glory and prosperity. The catch, however, was his insistence that he alone could achieve this and that to do it, he'd need absolute power. Anything less, and he wouldn't be able to overcome that shadowy and powerful minority.

When the next election rolled around, he and his Morsi party won a majority in some part thanks to genuine support but mostly because people were just fed up with the failed system and leaders and wanted change.

Empowered by the people, he pursued a simple, three-step plan to do as promised and consolidate his power. First, he attacked the ability of his opposition to organize against him: restricting press freedom and other forms of association. Next, he called on his majority in the legislature to surrender their powers to him as executive with an enabling act, allowing Rudolf to rule by decree. Finally, he purged the courts and bureaucracy, filling them instead with loyalists.

Within the span of months, Rudolf's coup was complete, because he eliminated all checks on his power. There was no opposition; no actors independent from his whim. It was the antithesis of democracy and accountability, yet he achieved this largely by democratic means and so justified his rule as freely mandated by the people. They voted for this, he made sure to remind everyone.

Over the next few years, Rudolf exercised this power ruthlessly against his hated minority and eventually in war against his hated neighbors, in a bid to restore national honor and expand his own power. This war did not go his way. In the end, Rudolf devastated Leviathonia so badly that when democracy was finally restored, everyone decided they'd learned their lesson about megalomaniacs who seek absolute power.

Fortunately, postwar economic growth meant that the conditions which favored tyranny were absent anyways. Unfortunately, that didn't last forever, and when hard times came around once more, a new aspiring tyrant saw a similar opportunity. His name was Ronald Putkin.

Ronald is about to invent stealth authoritarianism—the phenomenon we're interested in, so this is the final phase of this hypothetical before we can look at some real world examples of it. His idea was simple and similar to Rudolf's, with one key distinction. The people were once more angry and hopeless, but they weren't totally disillusioned. They knew the history of what happened last time democracy was abandoned, and they weren't keen to repeat it. So Ronald offered them someone to hate and blame, something to hope for and believe in, and he pitched himself as the fixer, but he didn't insist that democracy was the problem. He was far more clever. Like Rudolf, he claimed a shadowy minority was in control, but he further claimed that he had to oust this hated group from the halls of power to restore democracy.

So when he won an election, he claimed a mandate for sweeping reform. Because he couldn't quite end freedom of speech, his rich allies bought up media outlets, and he criminalized libel. Because an enabling act would look too much like dictatorship, his majority in the legislature instead just let Ronald call the shots and didn’t object when he started infringing on their authority. And because democracy had been subverted for so long by shadowy elements, he purged the bureaucracy and courts of "activists," replacing them with loyalists.

Unlike Rudolf, Ronald justified his actions not as the destruction of a defunct system but as a restoration of democracy, accountability, and transparency. However, the upshot of their actions was the same, and in the end Ronald had undercut his opposition's ability to organize, reduced competition from the legislature, and eliminated checks on his behavior from the legal or administrative establishment.

Admittedly, his hold on power was a bit more fragile than Rudolf's, but Ronald was paradoxically harder to attack, because he took such great pains to preserve the image of democracy: his tyranny hidden in plain sight. So, he was able to further solidify his grasp on power until Ronald ended democracy without anyone noticing. By the time it was obvious, it was too late.

Case Studies

Ok, so we’ve looked at this theoretical democracy fall apart: first, to authoritarianism and then to a stealthy variant. But what about real life examples?

The most dramatic cases of overt authoritarian takeovers are Germany, Italy, and Japan of the 20s to 30s. There were global events driving this rise in tyranny: war, socialist revolution, and the Great Depression. They created the conditions of economic deprivation and national despair, and left average people disillusioned with democracy and receptive to rhetoric of love, hate, and personalism.

This was nowhere more true than in Germany, which democratized suddenly after losing World War I (AJ, 85-87). For the country's humiliation in the war and financial troubles, Adolf Hitler blamed the new democracy and the socialist party which led it but also Jews, long a popular scapegoat in German culture, who seemed disproportionately influential in politics and finance (AJ, 89). Beyond this hate, he promised hope in the form a “thousand year Reich,” which only he could achieve (AJ, 96, 123). Once Hitler won a legislative majority in 1933, he essentially abolished Germany’s legislature through an enabling act, and prohibited opposition parties. After that, one of his first moves was to capture state institutions, with the Orwellian-titled “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which in reality merely expelled Jews and political opponents from the bureaucracy (AJ, 152-158).

Democracy was over in Germany, undermined first by widespread suffering which political leaders proved incompetent to solve, and then destroyed by a man who swept in with an alternative vision that combined hope, hate, and personal appeal. Once in power, he used the strategy from our theoretical case: eliminate the opposition, seize executive power, and capture state institutions.

For another example that inspired Hitler, let’s rewind to Italy in 1922. In response to growing socialist power, Benito Mussolini and his Fascist militia-men undertook a March on Rome, threatening and intimidating the Italian King and Italy's weak democratic leaders into submission (AJ, 62-65). In turn, Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister, won a massive legislative majority in 1924, and set about consolidating power. First came censorship laws and restrictions on the activity of labor unions, then the outlawing of opposition parties (AJ, 67-73). By 1926, Mussolini was ready for the coup de grace — an enabling act that empowered him to rule by decree (AJ, 73-79).

What we see here is the naked exercise of physical force and political power to transform the system with a formula very similar to Hitler's. It happened under the cover of law, but along the way Mussolini was up-front that democracy was the enemy.

And finally, we have Japan: a bit of a different case. Here, democratic gains made in the 1920s unraveled in the 1930s as a spate of assassinations aiming to restore the Emperor terrified the political class into submission, helped along by a court system that basically permitted the assassinations to continue (A). By the end of the 30s, the military had put an end to civilian politics, forced the dissolution of political parties, and passed a bill that seized control over the national economy. Like Germany and Italy, the upshot of this tyranny was eventually war on their neighbors and then, eventually, the world.

Japan's case differs from the Europeans, though, since it was a direct military seizure of power rather than an electoral coup, but their shared anti-democratic DNA is important, and the employment of terror, basically legalized by the country’s judiciary, is instructive.

So those are our historical cases. They show us how authoritarianism develops in its most obvious, brutal form. However, because all of these fascist regimes failed so spectacularly by 1945, the rules authoritarians had to play by changed. They had to get smarter.

In three modern Eastern European examples — Russia, Hungary, and Poland — they have. In all of these cases, the transition from Soviet rule was uneven, and made some right-wing parties deeply suspicious not just of Communism but the liberalism that attempted to replace it. Determined to win power and entrench it, they developed cunning strategies of stealth authoritarianism.

Campaigning on hopeful promises for Hungarian families and hatred for globalists like George Soros, Viktor Orban's Fidesz party capitalized on discontent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and achieved a legislative supermajority. In turn, they rewrote the constitution and redrew Hungary's electoral map to entrench Fidesz (G). Remember how they’ve won supermajorities in two elections since 2010 with only 45% of the vote. As if that weren't enough to disadvantage opposition, rich allies to the party have also bought out media outlets, turning them into supporters of Fidesz’s party line even as they remain nominally independent (F). Lastly, to dispatch any administrative roadblocks Orban politicized the bureaucracy, replacing professionals with loyalists at all levels in the name of "efficiency" (E, G).

It's classic stealth authoritarianism: exactly the kind of thing that you don’t see if you’re just looking at a graph of countries with multi-party elections. Democratic competition and accountability for powers have been totally destroyed, using shockingly similar methods as the classic authoritarians, by a man who claims to be restoring democracy.

Similarly, though Putin has completely hollowed out Russian democracy since his first election in 2000—imprisoning opposition leaders and racking up laughably fraudulent vote shares—he’s managed to do so while studiously retaining an appearance of lawfulness (B). For example, instead of ignoring presidential term limits in 2008, he moved to the office of Prime Minister, before reforming term limits and returning to the Presidency in 2012, where he remains today (C).

Perhaps the masterstroke in Putin's stealth maneuvers though has been his criminalization of libel. Unlike in Mussolini’s Italy, Russia’s constitution guarantees the freedom of the press. So, rather than revoke this essential feature of any free society, Putin has instead relied on an expansive definition and unusually harsh penalties for libel (N). This frees him from the need to overturn a core constitutional right while providing the same security from critical coverage that Mussolini enjoyed.

Finally, we have Poland. In 2015, the right-populist Law and Justice Party won the country’s parliamentary elections, using recent pro-migrant European Union policy as wedge issue to force out the EU-friendly incumbents. Immediately, Law and Justice engaged in a showdown with Poland’s powerful Constitutional Tribunal, successfully forcing a number of justices, recently nominated by the prior parliament, off the bench (H). They were replaced with loyalists, and the forced retirements of 100 lower judges effectively secured a judiciary subservient to Law and Justice (O). Their victories against the courts paved the road for a reorganization of the bureaucracy and a protest law that highly restricted opposition demonstrations (H).

Compared to Hitler or Mussolini or even Putin, both Fidesz and Law and Justice had to be especially sneaky, because EU membership—on which their economies depend—requires democratic systems and rule of law be observed. But the fact that, despite these restrictions, they were so able to consolidate power tells us how effective stealth authoritarianism can be. The new authoritarians are good at their game. They neuter opposition parties without banning them outright. They silence the press without censorship. And they capture state institutions while claiming that this is all in the name of efficiency, transparency, sovereignty, and democracy itself.

Final Answer

Now, you might be thinking, “this is bad, but really it’s nothing like Hitler or Mussolini.” And that’s true, at least so far. Because this is the whole point of stealth authoritarianism: to convince people that the surface differences between these movements matter more than the similarities in their approaches to power—the intolerance of opposition and consolidation of executive authority.

But these maneuvers only end one way, with the erosion of democratic accountability and the enabling of megalomaniacal behavior. That means it can achieve similar results while being harder to combat, and worse still, the more this stealthy method spreads, the more its overt counterpart becomes accepted. And that brings us to whether this is happening America today.

To explore this, I want first to take a quick look at America’s recent political history, to map the conditions, rhetoric, and authoritarian strategies like we did with our theoretical, historical, and contemporary cases. As for conditions, there’s been no shortage of those that authoritarians take advantage of: a messy and unpopular War on Terror, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the loss of jobs to globalization, you name it.

In creating or failing to respond to these problems, the political establishment squandered their credibility and created an opening for Trump to come in, take over the Republican Party, and win the 2016 election on a promise of big change. Within just a few years of that, we experienced a global pandemic that killed over a million Americans and wrought havoc on our social fabric, an explosion of protests against police brutality that splintered into riots which rendered them extraordinarily divisive, and then, to top it all off, record inflation and a surge of asylum-seekers at the country’s southern border. At the same time, the rapid pace of technological development has left many, especially young Americans, alienated and isolated by social media.

Moreover, despite beating Trump once and promising to restore faith in the American system, Joe Biden proved simply too old to inspire anyone’s confidence, leaving people similarly vulnerable to deceptive rhetoric based on simple solutions and hatable villains. Dislodge those shadowy elites, get rid of the migrants they're supposedly importing, keep the country safe by keeping it closed (M). And Donald Trump, through his undeniable showmanship, has mastered this rhetoric while insisting that [I ALONE CAN FIX IT], something which excuses his own extraordinary hypocrisies while fostering a cult of personality (K).

The conditions are there, the tell-tale rhetoric too. So, in power, has Trump, and behind him the now-loyal Republican Party, acted more like the stealthy or overt authoritarians? And does it matter which?

For starters, Trump has made some moves that look a lot like our examples of stealth authoritarianism. He's lately issued executive orders threatening federal funding for universities that don't sufficiently crack down on campus protests against his policies: a simple way to limit opposition speech without overt bans (U). Moreover, like Hungary's Orban he's had the benefit of a close ally buying an influential media outlet with Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, and like Russia's Putin he's publicly mulled the criminalization of libel.

Lastly, he continues to benefit from key actions taken in his first term that bear a strong resemblance to the court-packing tactics employed in Poland. In 2016 he was able to fill a Supreme Court seat which opened under Obama, because Republicans kept it vacant for a record-breaking duration, claiming it shouldn't be filled during an election year (P). This defied all existing precedent in the Senate, and sure enough, when another seat opened mere weeks before the 2020 election, the same Republicans quickly filled it with a Trump appointee (P). Maybe that just seems like political hardball, but the upshot has been the erosion of accountability, as the conservative-majority court recently ruled that the President has total legal immunity for any "official actions" (Q). More revealing still of his anti-legal intentions, as other courts have lately ruled against his administration's blatant civil rights violations, Trump has openly called for the ousting of those judges (S).

It's here in Trump's clashes with the legal establishment that the line between stealth and overt authoritarianism begin to blur, especially around his attempts to "reform" the bureaucracy. Trump and DOGE have aggressively purged the civil service, firing more than 20,000 federal workers, bringing independent agencies like USAID directly under Presidential control, and slashing other departments' budgets by executive fiat (T). In classic stealth authoritarian fashion, they've insisted this is necessary to restore professionalism and efficiency, while the upshot has been a massive expansion of executive power over legislative prerogatives without an overt enabling act. Not only is some restructuring like this a near-constant in stealthy and overt authoritarian strategies, Trump has taken it more into the overt camp by directly violating Constitutional separations of powers and defying federal court orders.

And there are more moves that are closer to what happened in Germany, Italy, and Japan than in Poland, Hungary, or even Russia. Take January 6th, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to interrupt the proceedings confirming Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, after Trump spent months peddling a lie that that election had been stolen from him (BB). It's got all the markings of Mussolini's March on Rome and the Hitlerian penchant for shadowy conspiracy theories based in pure imagination to stir up violent fury. Even worse, Trump went further by pressuring his Vice President to unilaterally annul the results and, upon returning to the White House, by pardoning the rioters, echoing the permissive treatment granted by Japan's courts to the 1930s terrorists (AA).

Finally, though Trump has recently made some "stealthy" moves to muzzle opposition, he hasn't stopped there. On his direction, Immigration Enforcement authorities have lately detained multiple pro-Palestine student protestors without charges and deported migrants accused of gang membership without presenting evidence (V). Even if those targeted lack full citizenship, legal residents and undocumented migrants still possess due process rights which have been flagrantly violated—in some cases again in open defiance of court orders (AC). Not to mention, one of Trump's first executive orders since taking office attempted to proclaim an end to birthright citizenship in direct contradiction to some of the clearest language in the Constitution (X). It's not hard to see how these deportations—Mussolini's favorite way of dealing with opponents—could expand against citizens next.

This is perhaps the key idea. Not only is there a new, stealthy form of authoritarianism growing right under our noses, all over the world. The more it grows, it paves the way for more brazen, overt, and brutal forms of authoritarianism. On the one hand this is pretty intuitive—less opposition and more power concentrated in the hands of one man lead to greater abuses. But it goes further than that. Both Trump and Orban have publicly voiced support for Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine (AF), while the three of them just the other day voiced their shared opposition to the International Criminal Court, a show of support for Benjamin Netanyahu—who has carried out his own project of stealthy yet increasingly overt authoritarianism in Israel among so many other horrors (AD). Moreover, Poland's Law and Justice Party and Hungary's Fidesz have a long history of defending each other from EU attempts to thwart their tyranny-building (AE). In turn, stealth authoritarianism doesn't just risk evolving into overt repression at home; it can also spread exponentially, as aspiring tyrants see each other as useful allies in smashing the democratic world order opposed to their aggrandizement.

This is scary because it really could destabilize both domestic and global politics in ways that we haven’t seen since the 1930s and 1940s. Trump has his sights set on territorial expansion, making comments about taking over Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Gaza (AG). His centralization of power combined with capricious tariff policy could very well drive the American and world economies into the ground, creating the social conditions for authoritarianism here and elsewhere. We could easily see a new cycle of violence and intimidation spiral out of control, both at home and abroad. Not to mention—we didn't even get into this in the intro, but look at this drop at the end of our chart. 2017 to 2024 was the largest overt seven-year decline in worldwide democracies since 1970: the same drop as 1932 to 1936.

Now, this is all a very grim picture, but there is hope. First of all, stealth authoritarianism is being rolled back in Poland right now, thanks to a sensible, broad coalition of parties from the left to center-right—setting an example for the rest of us. Second, if we're looking at America, the obstacles to tyranny are serious. Federalism makes meddling in elections very hard, and Americans take their rights very seriously. And lastly, to broaden our perspective, let's look one last time at that chart. Those two big dips in democracy worldwide? Democracy did win. And it's not a coincidence, because there is a genuine abiding truth to what the Leviathonians discovered before they threw out their king. The surest power does rest in the consent of the governed. These movements can be beaten. Often they display stunning incompetence and win legislative majorities without corresponding popular ones, meaning that they lack popular consent. They depend most of all on the persistence of social ills exacerbated by poor leadership. And that means if we're going to find a way forward, we need change. The kind of leadership necessary to weed out authoritarianism, or worse, fascism, is not going to emerge from the the Beltway or the Ivy League. That combination has proved too insular, too old, too immersed in its own world to consider alternative perspectives. They don't have what it takes. We need fresh ideas, fresh faces, and genuine commitment to problem-solving. That will come when liberals are willing and able to defend themselves in a robust public debate about where the country goes next, abandoning efforts to enforce rhetorical purity and emphasizing instead clarity, sincerity, and seriousness. We need new leaders with new visions, and in a democracy, those only come from one place: all of us. And if we want them to behave like that, it starts with us.

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