Steelman Analysis
Our Thesis (Restated)
The United States is following a documented playbook of competitive authoritarianism that has played out in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela; the scholars who created the diagnostic framework have now formally applied it to America; but the same body of research shows that most such episodes are reversed -- and the data prescribes specific conditions for recovery.
Primary Counterargument: Conceptual Stretching and the Misapplication of the Framework
The single strongest argument against our thesis comes from the analytical tradition represented by the American Affairs Journal and echoed by a minority of dissenting scholars: the competitive authoritarianism framework is being stretched beyond its explanatory capacity when applied to the United States, and the result is not sharper analysis but political rhetoric dressed in academic clothing.
The original Levitsky/Way framework was designed to describe a specific category of regime: post-Soviet states, Sub-Saharan African countries, and Latin American governments where democratic institutions were never deeply rooted, where civil society was thin, where media landscapes were fragile, and where opposition parties had limited organizational capacity. The 35 regimes identified in the 2002 study -- Cambodia, Cameroon, Gabon, Kenya, Malaysia, Mozambique, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and others -- share a set of structural conditions that are qualitatively different from the United States. To classify the US alongside these states is not pattern recognition; it is, in the language of comparative politics, concept "traveling" without warrant.
The core of this argument is not that nothing is wrong. It is that the competitive authoritarianism label obscures more than it reveals about what is actually happening. The American Affairs analysis proposes that "state capture" -- a narrow coalition using government machinery for private benefit, exemplified by Musk's DOGE targeting the CFPB while planning competing financial products -- is a more analytically precise frame. State capture explains the corruption and self-dealing. It explains the specific agencies targeted and the specific interests served. What it does not do is imply that the United States is on a trajectory toward the elimination of meaningful political competition, which is what the competitive authoritarianism label functionally asserts. The distinction matters because the policy prescriptions differ: state capture calls for anti-corruption enforcement and transparency; competitive authoritarianism calls for resistance to an existential threat to the constitutional order. If the diagnosis is wrong, the treatment may be counterproductive -- inflaming polarization, delegitimizing normal political competition, and crying wolf in ways that exhaust the public's capacity for alarm.
There is a further methodological concern that lends this argument real weight. The democracy indices the essay relies on -- Century Foundation, Freedom House, EIU, Bright Line Watch, and Polity -- all depend substantially on expert coding by political scientists, many of whom are based in the United States and are themselves participants in the political culture they are measuring. The Polity data series' scoring of the US -- which dropped the country to a 5 (anocracy, alongside Somalia and Haiti) by 2020, a score lower than the US received during Jim Crow or before women's suffrage -- has been flagged by methodologists as failing basic face-validity checks. If the measurement instruments are biased by the political anxieties of their coders, then the "convergence" of multiple indices may reflect a convergence of shared assumptions rather than independent confirmation. This does not mean the indices are wrong. But it means the essay's strongest evidentiary move -- "every major democratic index confirms the diagnosis" -- is weaker than it appears if those indices are not truly independent measurements.
Who Makes This Argument
This is the argument of conservative and right-of-center intellectuals who take democratic norms seriously but reject what they see as analytical overreach by liberal academia. American Affairs Journal is the primary venue. But it also resonates with portions of the Bright Line Watch minority who dissented from the majority assessment, with political scientists in the measurement-and-methodology tradition who worry about concept validity, and with traditional conservatives like those at the American Enterprise Institute who have themselves written about competitive authoritarianism's threat to civil society but resist applying the framework's full implications to the US case. William Galston at Brookings occupies a related but distinct position: he accepts the direction of travel but disputes the proximity to the destination.
Why It Has Merit
This counterargument has genuine intellectual force for three reasons.
First, the structural differences between the US and the original competitive authoritarian cases are not marginal -- they are enormous. The US has 50 state governments with independent constitutional authority, state-administered elections, 15 Democratic trifectas, an independent judiciary with life-tenured judges, the largest and most diverse media ecosystem in human history, and a civil society infrastructure that dwarfs any country that has ever experienced competitive authoritarianism. When the essay says "the playbook is the same," it necessarily elides the fact that the playbook is being run against an opponent of qualitatively different strength. Hungary is a unitary state of 10 million people with a single national media market. The United States is a continental federal republic with 330 million people, 50 separate state court systems, and media institutions that retain significant independence. These are not incidental differences.
Second, the essay's own evidence contains a tension it does not fully resolve. If US courts are defied in one-third of cases, that means they are obeyed in two-thirds. If the SCOTUS shadow docket sides with the administration 84% of the time, that means it rules against the administration 16% of the time -- and in high-profile cases (Abrego Garcia), the Court ruled unanimously against the executive. If journalists are arrested, they are also released, and the arrests generate massive public backlash and legal challenges. If federal workers are fired, states are hiring them and passing their own protective legislation. The competitive authoritarian frame emphasizes the degradation of these arenas. A fair reading of the same evidence could emphasize their resilience.
Third, the "conceptual stretching" concern is not a fringe methodological quibble. Giovanni Sartori's foundational 1970 work on concept formation in comparative politics -- the very tradition Levitsky and Way work within -- warns that when concepts are stretched to travel across too many cases, they lose analytical precision. If "competitive authoritarianism" can encompass both Cambodia under Hun Sen and the United States under Trump, either the concept has become so broad as to be meaningless or one of the applications is wrong. Levitsky and Way are aware of this critique, which is presumably why they felt the need to make the case formally in Foreign Affairs rather than simply asserting the classification. But the very fact that the framework's creators felt a formal argument was necessary suggests the application is not self-evident.
Where It Falls Short
The conceptual stretching argument ultimately fails because it confuses the severity of competitive authoritarianism with its existence. Levitsky and Way's framework explicitly describes a spectrum -- competitive authoritarian regimes vary enormously in how tilted the playing field is. The framework was never meant to imply that all cases look identical; it was meant to identify the type of regime based on the mechanisms of power maintenance. And the mechanisms are disturbingly present: systematic media intimidation (journalist arrests, AP exclusion, 170 journalist assaults in 2025), judicial defiance (57 of 165 court orders), civil service politicization (50,000 Schedule F reclassifications, 242,000 workforce reduction), and the use of state power against political opponents. The American Affairs argument that DOGE is "reform" rather than authoritarianism collapses when you note that reform movements in Estonia and Georgia -- their own comparisons -- did not arrest journalists, defy court orders, or characterize post-Watergate civil service protections as "unconstitutional overcorrections."
The measurement bias critique, while methodologically interesting, also has a ceiling. Even if individual indices carry some degree of coder subjectivity, the convergence of Freedom House, EIU, Century Foundation, Bright Line Watch, V-Dem, RSF, and Human Rights Watch -- organizations with different methodologies, different institutional cultures, different political orientations, and different national bases -- is difficult to explain as mere groupthink. And the qualitative evidence (court order defiance rates, journalist arrests, workforce purges) exists independently of any scoring system.
The state capture frame, while useful for explaining specific instances of corruption, cannot account for the systematic pattern across all four arenas of democratic contestation. State capture does not explain why the administration characterizes civil service protections as unconstitutional. It does not explain why journalists are arrested for reporting. It does not explain why the executive defies court orders as a pattern rather than as an exception. These are not corruption -- they are the systematic degradation of the institutions that hold power accountable, which is precisely what competitive authoritarianism describes.
Secondary Counterarguments
The Federalism Firewall
The strongest structural counterargument holds that America's federal system creates barriers to authoritarian consolidation that have no parallel in the cases the essay cites. This is not a dismissal of the threat -- it is an argument about the ceiling on how far the playbook can advance.
William Galston's version of this argument is precise: federalism makes authoritarian consolidation "slower and more difficult, though not impossible." The US has 50 state governments with independent constitutional authority, state-administered elections that the federal government cannot directly control, 15 Democratic trifectas that are actively passing counter-legislation (Illinois's state Bivens Act, California's 120+ lawsuits against the first Trump administration), and a judiciary that, despite strain, continues to issue orders against the executive. Hungary and Turkey are unitary states where capturing the national government captures the entire system. The US is structurally different, and that structural difference is real.
The November 2025 elections are the sharpest proof point: Spanberger won Virginia, Sherrill won New Jersey by 14+ points, and Democratic legislative majorities expanded. These are not the results of a system where the playing field has been tilted beyond recovery. The electoral arena -- the arena that matters most for the essay's hope narrative -- is demonstrably still functional.
Assessment: This is genuinely strong and must be given full weight in the essay. The thesis already acknowledges federalism as a structural advantage, but the counterargument's force comes from its specificity: state-administered elections are the single most important structural barrier to the full playbook, and they remain intact. The essay should grant this completely and then make the case that federalism slows but does not prevent the playbook. James Gardner's research in Publius (Winter 2026) is the essential counter-counterargument: "the most likely outcome of central democratic backsliding appears to be some kind of competitive authoritarianism regardless of whether the state is federal or unitary." Federalism creates friction; it does not create immunity. And the essay should note the troubling counter-evidence: DOGE's disruption of federal services affects all 50 states regardless of their political orientation, the DOJ Voting Section's gutting (from 30 to 6 lawyers) undermines federal election protection everywhere, and CISA's pause on election security activities creates national vulnerability. The firewall is real, but the fire is spreading through channels the firewall was not designed to block.
The Democratic Mandate Argument
A version of the counterargument that the essay barely touches but that has real populist force: Trump won the 2024 election. He campaigned openly on dismantling the administrative state, deporting undocumented immigrants aggressively, and challenging the "deep state." Voters chose this. The essay treats Schedule F, DOGE, and aggressive immigration enforcement as evidence of authoritarian erosion -- but a populist counterargument holds that these represent the execution of a democratic mandate. The bureaucracy is not a neutral institution; it is a power center with its own interests, and voters chose a president who promised to break its grip. Calling that "authoritarianism" is, in this view, an attempt by institutional elites to delegitimize the expressed will of the electorate.
This argument has a sophisticated version articulated by thinkers like Adrian Vermeule and the post-liberal right: the administrative state is itself a form of undemocratic governance -- unelected bureaucrats making policy decisions that properly belong to elected officials. Dismantling it is not anti-democratic; it is more democratic, returning power to elected representatives and the voters who chose them. The "unconstitutional overcorrections" language in the Schedule F rule is not Orwellian; it is a legitimate constitutional argument about the proper scope of executive power.
Assessment: This argument is genuinely uncomfortable because it identifies a real tension in the thesis. The essay treats institutional destruction as inherently anti-democratic, but the essay's own democratic values require grappling with the fact that voters chose the person doing the destroying. The answer, which the essay must articulate clearly, is that democratic mandates are real but bounded. A president has a mandate to change policy; a president does not have a mandate to destroy the mechanisms of accountability that allow the next president to change policy again. Defying court orders is not executing a mandate -- it is defying the rule of law. Arresting journalists is not executing a mandate -- it is attacking the information environment voters need to make future choices. The distinction between policy change and institutional destruction is the line between democratic governance and competitive authoritarianism. The essay should note that Orban also won legitimate elections -- twice -- and used his democratic mandate to construct a system where genuine competition became impossible. The mandate argument proves too much: it would justify any action by any elected leader, which is the negation of constitutional democracy.
The "Courts Still Work" Rebuttal
A more granular version of the conceptual stretching argument focuses specifically on the judiciary: US courts are still issuing orders against the executive, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the administration in Abrego Garcia, federal judges are still blocking executive actions, and the legal system continues to function as a meaningful check. In Turkey, Erdogan purged 4,000 judges -- 30% of the judiciary. In the US, judges have life tenure and cannot be removed by the executive. The essay's emphasis on court order defiance, this argument holds, conflates noncompliance (which is serious but addressable through contempt proceedings, enforcement mechanisms, and political pressure) with judicial capture (which would be a qualitatively different and far more dangerous condition). The courts are strained, not broken. The essay's comparison to Turkey's purged judiciary is misleading because the American judiciary retains its structural independence in ways that Turkey's never did.
Assessment: This is a legitimately strong point that the essay must handle with precision. The response should be threefold. First, acknowledge that judicial independence remains structurally intact -- judges have life tenure, and the administration has not attempted to remove judges. This is a genuine and important difference from Turkey. Second, introduce the concept of "legalistic noncompliance" as the specifically American mode of judicial erosion: you do not need to purge judges if you can simply ignore their orders with impunity. The enforcement mechanism for court orders depends on the executive branch (US Marshals, DOJ prosecutors), and when the executive is the defiant party, the enforcement loop breaks. Third, note the SCOTUS shadow docket's role: the Supreme Court is not being captured in the traditional sense, but it is providing a de facto shield for executive overreach through emergency docket decisions issued without explanation (84% administration win rate, 90% when the administration is the applicant, 7 of 25 decisions with no written reasoning). The judiciary is not broken, but the enforcement mechanism is. The analogy is not to Turkey's purge but to a subtler and perhaps more durable form of judicial marginalization: courts that speak but cannot act.
The Reconstruction Parallel Is Inapt
A counterargument the essay does not anticipate but should: the Reconstruction/Redemption/Jim Crow parallel, while emotionally powerful, risks analytical imprecision that undercuts the essay's credibility. Jim Crow was a system of explicit racial caste hierarchy maintained through state-sanctioned violence, legal racial classification, and the total exclusion of an entire race from political participation. Current democratic erosion, whatever its severity, is not organized around racial exclusion as its primary mechanism (even if its effects are disproportionately felt by communities of color). The essay's comparison risks implying a false equivalence between the systematic disenfranchisement and murder of Black Americans and the current administration's institutional overreach. Critics from both the right (who will reject the comparison as inflammatory) and the left (who will argue it trivializes the unique horror of Jim Crow) will find grounds for objection. The parallel also risks undermining the essay's analytical precision -- the Levitsky/Way framework does not require a domestic historical precedent to be valid, and reaching for one invites exactly the kind of conceptual stretching the essay accuses its critics of engaging in.
Assessment: This is a real vulnerability, though the essay's framing partially addresses it. The argument is not that the current moment is Jim Crow but that the mechanisms of competitive authoritarianism -- legal exclusion framed as neutral, institutional weaponization, the preservation of democratic forms while draining democratic substance -- have American precedent. The essay should be explicit about what the parallel claims and what it does not claim. It claims structural similarity in the type of regime (elections continued, courts operated, but the playing field was radically tilted). It does not claim moral equivalence between Jim Crow's racial terror and current institutional erosion. The essay should also preemptively acknowledge that the parallel is imperfect: Jim Crow was geographically concentrated in the South, was organized primarily around racial hierarchy, and operated with broad elite consensus -- none of which precisely describes the current situation. The parallel illuminates the mechanism; it does not equate the severity.
The Recovery Data Cuts Both Ways
The essay's hope narrative rests heavily on V-Dem's finding that 73% of recent autocratization episodes are reversed. But this statistic, honestly examined, is less reassuring than the essay suggests. The 73% figure covers the last 30 years, a period that includes many episodes of relatively mild backsliding that were reversed precisely because they never advanced very far. The question is not whether most backsliding episodes reverse but whether episodes that have advanced to the stage the essay describes -- court order defiance, journalist arrests, mass civil service purges -- reverse at the same rate. The answer is less clear, because many of the cases in the 73% figure involved early-stage backsliding caught before institutions were significantly degraded. Furthermore, the essay's own evidence from Poland shows that even "successful" recovery is agonizingly slow and incomplete: Tusk has "achieved little on institutional repair in its first year and a half," and "autocratic enclaves" continue to obstruct restoration. If Poland -- a country with EU institutional support, EU funding leverage, and a parliamentary system that allows faster governmental change -- is struggling this badly, what does recovery look like in the US, where the presidential system gives the executive independent constitutional authority, where there is no supranational body with leverage, and where the two-party system makes coalition governance impossible?
Additionally, the 3.5% threshold argument has significant limitations that the essay should acknowledge. Chenoweth's data was drawn from "maximalist" campaigns to overthrow dictators or achieve territorial independence -- not reformist movements within functioning (if flawed) democracies. Chenoweth herself has been cautious about directly applying the framework to the current US situation, declining to "quantify current US readiness." The 50501 movement's 7 million peak mobilization is impressive, but sustained participation between major events is unknown, and Chenoweth's own recent work documents a decline in nonviolent campaign success rates globally (from 65% in the 1990s to below 34% since 2010). The essay's most data-driven hope narrative may be standing on thinner empirical ground than it acknowledges.
Assessment: This is the counterargument that the essay is most vulnerable to, because it attacks the hope narrative that is central to the brand identity ("hope must be earned by the analysis, not tacked on as a feel-good coda"). The essay should handle this by being transparent about the limitations: the 73% figure is a broad average, not a specific prediction; Poland shows recovery is hard even under favorable conditions; and the 3.5% threshold is descriptive, not prescriptive. The essay should reframe the hope narrative around conditionality rather than probability: the data says recovery is possible if specific conditions are met (sustained mobilization, functional elections, institutional defense, state-level governance), not that recovery is likely regardless of what people do. This is actually a stronger narrative position because it connects hope to agency rather than to statistical inevitability.
Tertiary Counterarguments
The Speed Argument May Prove the Opposite of What We Claim
The essay argues that the US is moving faster through the playbook than Hungary or Turkey, and frames this as alarming. But speed has a double edge: Orban moved slowly because he faced less resistance. The US may be moving faster precisely because the Trump administration is overreaching against a stronger opposition -- taking bigger swings because smaller ones would be absorbed by the system's institutional density. Speed could indicate desperation or recklessness, not strength. Erdogan consolidated slowly over 20 years because he was strategically patient; the Trump administration's pace may reflect the opposite -- an awareness that the 2026 midterms represent a hard deadline and that the window for action is closing. If the speed reflects weakness rather than strength, the essay's alarm about acceleration may be misplaced.
The Scholarly Consensus Is Narrower Than Presented
The essay frames the Levitsky/Way/Ziblatt Foreign Affairs article as the "formal judgment of the field's leading authorities." But Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt are three scholars. The Bright Line Watch survey of 703 political scientists shows a majority concerned about democratic erosion, but a meaningful minority dissented, and the survey measures concern about authoritarianism rather than formal agreement with the competitive authoritarianism classification specifically. The Bright Line Watch rating of 54/100 indicates significant democratic strain, but 54 is still well above the threshold where countries are typically classified as non-democratic. The essay should be careful not to conflate "most political scientists are worried" with "the scholarly consensus is that the US is a competitive authoritarian regime." These are different claims, and the second is stronger than the evidence warrants.
The International Comparison Glosses Over Crucial Differences
The side-by-side comparison of Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and the US is the essay's visual and argumentative centerpiece, but the parallels are more superficial than the format implies. Orban had a constitutional supermajority -- Trump does not. Erdogan's purge was triggered by a failed military coup that created genuine public fear -- Trump has no comparable crisis pretext. Chavez rewrote the constitution -- Trump cannot unilaterally amend the US Constitution. The playbook moves may look similar in a comparison table, but the structural context in which those moves are executed differs so profoundly that the comparison risks misleading the audience about the likely trajectory. The essay may be showing pattern recognition where the actual pattern is: authoritarian-leaning leaders do authoritarian-leaning things, which is true but analytically trivial.
Our Weak Points
1. The Measurement Problem Is Real
The essay treats the convergence of multiple democratic indices as independent confirmation, but the indices share methodological DNA (expert coding, similar conceptual frameworks, overlapping coder pools). The Polity score dropping the US below its Jim Crow-era rating is a genuine credibility problem that critics will seize on. The essay needs a more honest reckoning with the limitations of its quantitative backbone.
2. The Hope Narrative May Be Overpromising
The 73% V-Dem figure, the 3.5% threshold, and Levitsky's own "likely will be reversed" prediction create expectations that the essay's own evidence from Poland and the Carnegie Endowment's cautionary findings do not fully support. If recovery is "long, difficult, and messy" even in favorable cases, framing the data as showing recovery is "likely" risks the very complacency the essay warns against.
3. The Reconstruction Parallel Is a Double-Edged Sword
It is the essay's most original argument and its most vulnerable one. The parallel will be attacked from the right as inflammatory and from the left as trivializing. It needs careful framing that explicitly states what it claims and what it does not.
4. The "Legalistic Noncompliance" Concept Is Underdeveloped
The essay introduces this as the specifically American mode of authoritarian erosion, but the concept is newer and less well-established in the comparative politics literature than competitive authoritarianism itself. Critics will note that court order defiance, while serious, is not unprecedented in American history (Andrew Jackson's apocryphal defiance of Marshall, Eisenhower needing to send troops to enforce Brown v. Board). The essay needs to distinguish between historical episodes of defiance and the systematic nature of current noncompliance.
5. We Rely Heavily on the 2026 Midterm Window Without Addressing What Happens If Democrats Win But Cannot Govern
The essay frames the 2026 midterms as the critical intervention point, but even if Democrats win the House, they will face a hostile Senate (depending on the map), presidential vetoes, and the same executive defiance that has characterized the administration's relationship with the courts. Winning the House gives Democrats subpoena power and budget authority, but it does not give them the power to reverse Schedule F, restore fired federal workers, or compel executive compliance with legislation. The essay risks implying that winning the midterms solves the problem, when it may only prevent further deterioration.
6. The Essay Does Not Adequately Address Why 74 Million Voters Chose This
The essay's framework treats the Trump administration as an authoritarian project, but 74 million Americans voted for it. Some voted despite the authoritarianism; some voted because of it; many voted for other reasons (economy, immigration, cultural grievances) and view the institutional destruction as an acceptable price or a necessary corrective. The essay's failure to seriously engage with the democratic legitimacy of the vote that produced these outcomes is a vulnerability that the populist mandate counterargument will exploit.
Recommended Handling
Deserves Substantial Engagement (5-8 minutes combined)
The conceptual stretching / state capture argument should be the essay's primary counterargument engagement, positioned in Thread 4. Present it at its strongest: the American Affairs version, not the Twitter version. Let the audience feel its force -- the structural differences between the US and the original cases are real, the measurement concerns are legitimate, and the state capture frame does explain some of what is happening. Then methodically show where it falls short: the systematic pattern across all four arenas, the mechanisms that state capture cannot explain (court order defiance, journalist arrests), and the reform-movement comparison that collapses under scrutiny. This is the moment where the essay earns its credibility by demonstrating it can engage with the best version of the opposing argument and still make its case.
The federalism firewall should receive the second-most-significant treatment, also in Thread 4. Grant it fully -- federalism is a genuine structural advantage. Then cite Gardner's research and the specific evidence of erosion that operates through channels federalism cannot block (DOJ Voting Section gutting, CISA pause, federal service disruption). The essay should explicitly say: "This is the strongest argument against our thesis, and it is partially right. Federalism buys time. The question is what we do with that time."
The recovery data limitations should be addressed honestly in Thread 5 rather than glossed over. Acknowledge that the 73% figure is a broad average, that Poland's recovery is harder than the headline suggests, and that the 3.5% threshold has limitations. Reframe the hope narrative around conditionality: the data says recovery is possible if specific conditions are met, not that it is inevitable.
Deserves Brief But Honest Acknowledgment (2-3 minutes combined)
The democratic mandate argument should be raised proactively in Thread 2 or Thread 4 -- ideally as a one-paragraph acknowledgment that the administration was democratically elected, followed by the clear articulation of why democratic mandates are bounded. The Orban comparison is the sharpest tool here: Orban was also democratically elected, and used his mandate to construct a system where genuine competition became impossible. Mandates authorize policy change; they do not authorize the destruction of the mechanisms that allow the next mandate to express itself.
The "courts still work" rebuttal should be acknowledged briefly in Thread 4's treatment of the judicial arena. Concede that judicial independence is structurally intact, then pivot to the enforcement gap and the shadow docket's role. Be precise: the problem is not judicial capture but judicial impotence in the face of executive defiance.
The Reconstruction parallel's limitations should be preemptively addressed in Thread 3. One sentence: "This parallel claims structural similarity in the type of regime -- not moral equivalence between Jim Crow's racial terror and current institutional erosion."
Should Shape Our Framing Throughout
The scholarly consensus question -- the essay should be precise about what scholars agree on (democratic erosion is real, the direction of travel is toward authoritarianism) and where they disagree (whether the competitive authoritarianism label formally applies, how severe the situation is). Do not overstate the consensus.
The 2026 midterm limitations -- the essay should frame the midterms as a necessary condition for recovery, not a sufficient one. Winning the House opens a window; it does not deliver recovery. This is consistent with the Poland evidence and the Carnegie Endowment's finding that "even when an election puts an end to autocratization, illiberal laws often remain on the books."
The speed argument's ambiguity -- rather than presenting speed as purely alarming, acknowledge that it may also reflect overreach that creates its own opposition. This makes the argument more honest and connects to the essay's hope narrative: the administration's aggressiveness is provoking the very mobilization that the recovery data says is necessary.