The Unbearable Normality of Creeping Authoritarianism

The U.S. government is under attack from within, the Constitution isn't really in effect, but if you don't follow politics and aren't directly targeted, you might not notice

America is in crisis. Our constitutional order is failing in front of us. Rule of law is crumbling as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a cadre of extremists raid the executive branch for political power and personal enrichment, while an obsequious Republican Congress watches. 

But does it feel that way to most people? 

When we turn the television on at night to watch one of the weekly shows or walk down through our local shopping centers, glancing into storefronts, there’s little sense that we are living through the moment we are. Outside of professional and amateur political junkies, many Americans aren’t paying attention, and circumstances aren’t forcing them to. At least not yet.

We can, if we like, live a perfectly normal twenty-four hours, not different in any obvious way from a decade ago. We can get a coffee at our favorite store, stroll a park or museum, buy a new sweater, and relax with loved ones by streaming the latest hit. 

But in the background, things are not as they were. Companies like Disney and Paramount are settling frivolous lawsuits from a sitting president designed to instill fear and a regime of self-censorship among the media. Our executive agencies are run by unqualified extremists with no interest in traditional public policy. The sitting vice president (JD Vance) and the shadow president (Elon Musk) have both argued that the courts have no power to check the executive at all.

This is the nature of modern democratic backsliding. Stasi agents and “papers please” are the fringe cases. Not only do the lights turn on, but so does Netflix.

Consider Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, one of the most common points of comparison among both critics and proponents of the Trump administration. Hungary has, over the last fifteen years, descended into a partially illiberal society rife with legal and social hostility toward LGBTQ individuals and immigrants, a media sector hollowed out of independent voices, a captured judiciary, and an heavily titled electoral environment.

But you could also go to Budapest today and have the sort of weekend you might also enjoy in the freer cities of Munich or Brussels. You can, for instance, stay down near the Danube at a Radisson or Hampton, walk to buy some clothes at an H&M, pop into a chain or local coffee shop, and then visit one of the city’s great museums. In the course of those activities, you usually won’t encounter too stark a reminder of what Hungary has lost.

It wasn’t so different when I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend for the Principles First conference. The exception came when newly pardoned members of the Proud Boys intervened to harass the former Capitol Police officers invited to speak, and later disrupted proceedings with a bomb threat. I was away from the conference at the time of the threat, but it was a sharp reminder of what is bubbling beneath the surface in American life.

But these kinds of shocks are not the norm. In most cases, the surface remains largely still, its shimmering gleam reflecting back our favorite entertainments. This is not meant to suggest the people are idiots (or “sheeple,” in the parlance of many a meme). Rather, my point is that the veneer of normality makes it difficult to articulate the ways liberal democratic life has deteriorated and can still worsen.

We don’t have giant authoritarian banners hanging off of America’s monuments or your local courthouse. There aren’t trenchcoated goons walking down your neighborhood block.

So for many people, there is not much reason to think about how the new FBI director plans to pursue the people on his enemies list, whether LGBTQ Americans will be able to obtain the appropriate identifying documents, or whether university research funding is being unlawfully withheld for ideological reasons.

These are the hallmarks of a backsliding democracy. This is how the vibrancy, ingenuity, and vitality of a liberal democratic society are dulled and destroyed.

We are becoming less free and our government more corrupt and abusive. But these changes are rarely perceptible from the vantage point of daily life. At least at the start, before some become too entrenched, too consolidated, too invasive to ignore.

Just Like Us

Presentationally, you’d never guess from Instagram that someone like Karoline Leavitt is the mouthpiece for an authoritarian assault on our democracy. 

Look at her posts, and you’ll see a young mother balancing her professional life with her new family. In one post from the campaign trail, Leavitt mixes photos from Trump events with her child and captions it “in my working mom era.” It’s cute and relatable enough you could almost forget the man and administration she was working to elect. It’s the sort of thing any of us might post to Instagram. 

On the one hand, this is classic image maintenance. Leavitt benefits from emphasizing the aspects of herself that have nothing to do with her role in aiding a hard right takeover of American life. 

On the other hand, it’s a reminder that all politics, even at extremes, is populated by people. And people are mostly the same—even, sometimes especially, when they are behaving badly.

There’s a touch of the banality of evil to this, but I am less interested here in the psychology than the presentation. Social media makes it easy to engage in this pageantry.

I can’t know Leavitt’s interior life, but I can see her posing her young son for various holiday photos or showing off a custom jersey from her visit to the Boston Bruins locker room, even as she stands behind the podium and declares that the White House will kick out media that doesn’t toe the party line. Like anyone else online, she loves her kid, enjoys seasonal decor, and can’t pass up a chance to rub shoulders with star athletes. In action, in government, she lies daily for an administration now exerting Orbánist controls on press access and espousing revisionist geopolitics.

There are echoes of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in my argument. But that isn’t the central point I am making here. It’s the unbearable normality of it all that I find both compelling and confounding. It’s not abnormally decadent or entitled, it’s startlingly normal.

The lie we tell ourselves is that it will be obvious when the danger comes, and we’ll do something about it then. We grew up on movies where villains are clearly evil, and the good guys act in time.

But the real world is less straightforward. Neither creeping authoritarianism nor the people enacting it have to look a certain way. Oftentimes they look just like us, reflected in a shop window, or the black screen of the television we’ve just turned off for the night.