The Road to Soft Authoritarianism

 Ever since the election, we've all been playing the dismal game of trying to figure out just how much of Trump's authoritarian rhetoric on the campaign trail we should take seriously. Any given day may find him saying something even more despotic and unhinged than we could have expected. And yet, the next day may find him appearing to waffle on some of his more disturbing campaign pledges. In short, he's so mercurial that his words alone don't give us much to go on. 

If we look past the shifting rhetoric of the moment, however—and focus on his actions and (crucially) the way other people are already responding to him—we start to see the outlines of how he really could severely curtail free expression in this country and transform the United States into a quasi–personalistic autocracy in a very short space of time. Indeed, we might already be partway there—and he's not even president yet. This is the road to soft authoritarianism. 

Before we talk about that though, we should at least consider another question: how serious is the risk of outright hard authoritarianism under Trump? Call me naïve, but I think—at this point—my read is that this is not quite what is coming. I may be eating my words in a few months, but from what I can see right now, I think that Trump will not actually manage to lock up his political opponents, for instance. I don't imminently expect to see Nancy Pelosi in a detention camp, let's just say. 

Partly, this is because we actually do have some decent safeguards in this country around criminal proceedings. The FBI under Kash Patel's reign could certainly undertake some bogus investigations. They could seriously complicate life for people who are targeted and harassed by them. But, in many ways, we've already run this experiment in the form of the John Durham investigation into the FBI's Russia probe. And ultimately, it came to nothing. Courts were not impressed. 

We have a lot fewer safeguards, however, around our country's utterly broken system of civil litigation. And I think it's quite significant that Trump and his allies are already using civil suits to try to silence their critics, and that they are openly plotting to file even more. And one of the various problems with this system is that the burden of proof is much lower. Most civil litigation is fought under the heading of "preponderance of the evidence," rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt." 

Of course, there are various legal standards that would serve as a check on frivolous litigation against Trump's critics. To win a libel suit in a case involving a public official like Trump, he and his allies would have to meet a very high burden of showing willful deceit or reckless indifference to the truth. But, another way in which our civil litigation system is broken is that—in practice—it doesn't really matter if the suit is bogus. The other party is defeated by the mere act of you filing it. 

How so? Well, no matter how groundless a lawsuit, people still have to hire lawyers to defend themselves against it (because, if they don't respond, they will get a default judgment entered against them). And basically, as soon as you have to start paying legal bills, you are already ruined. It doesn't matter if you ultimately prevail at trial. Under the "American rule," the default assumption (absent some statutory exception) is that you are still responsible for your own lawyer's fees. 

This is why ABC News settled its current libel lawsuit with Trump for 15 million dollars. They probably could have prevailed, under the current legal standard, if they had been willing to go to trial. But that would have meant discovery. Years' worth of time and effort and money. It probably would have cost them as much as they settled for even if they won. So, they decided it was easier to just pay Trump off. And many others may reach the same conclusion. 

What is even more troubling: a lot of media companies may simply decide it's not worth even raising the possibility of the fight in the first place. They may find themselves quietly self-censoring. The same goes for Trump's recent threats to revoke broadcast licenses for news outlets that reported on him critically. Even if he never quite follows through on this—it's not hard to imagine them shifting their tone slightly, just to appease him and avoid the argument in the first place. 

Indeed, many major institutions are already signaling that they will take this course. Corporate America, in recent weeks, has been sending the message very clearly that they will bend the knee to Trump. The ABC News settlement is being widely interpreted as a worrying sign that major players in journalism may simply not bother to defend their own legal rights when it counts, because—as noted above—there is no way to win, really, in any civil suit. 

And if Trump never really locks people up, but the independent media just slowly bleeds out̉ or goes silent—whether because they are bankrupted through civil litigation or because they choose to self-censor—then a lot of people will never really notice the loss. Countless Americans ignore the traditional news media already, and are content to get their information from MAGA-controlled social media outlets like Elon Musk's X, which are already Trump-aligned. 

We could very quickly reach at least Viktor Orbán levels of authoritarianism in this country, therefore—and the worst part of it is, a lot of people would not even notice or care if it happened. If the stock market does well in the meantime, people will happily forfeit their birthright of freedom. As Heinrich Mann notes in his novel about Wilhelmine Germany, Man of Straw: there have always been people who "preferred profit to honour" and were all too willing to succumb to "servile materialism."

We could be well advanced on this path toward soft authoritarianism already. As I note, Trump has not even taken office yet, and already people are silencing themselves. The contrast with how many people spoke out against his vile rhetoric in 2016 is stark. Even though Trump has only gotten more extreme since then—the criticism directed against him has only become more muted. How can this be? People are scared; or complacent; or making a virtue of necessity, I suppose.

This is why, the worse Trump's behavior becomes, the less people are willing to speak out against it. As Bertolt Brecht chillingly wrote, of Germany's later descent into another and even worse form of tyranny than the Wilhelmine regime: "The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread." (Willett trans.)

One other factor that explains this spreading silence: there is also, I fear, something about "soft authoritarianism" that makes it even harder to resist than the hard variety, at a psychological level. After all, hard repression often confers a kind of nobility and heroism on its victims. Soft authoritarianism waged through frivolous lawsuits and empty regulatory threats which lead to self-censorship, by contrast, mostly just makes its victims look ridiculous. 

In every age, there will be some brave souls who are willing to sign up to go to the scaffold. They will face the dungeon or the stake for their beliefs. But I'm not sure any age has furnished us with examples of people willing to bankrupt themselves through years of litigation for their beliefs. As Robert Michels once wrote: "The joy of self-sacrifice is comparable to a fine gold coin which can be spent grandly all at once, whereas if we change it into small coin it dribbles imperceptibly away." (Eden trans.) 

Plus, people will be able to relativize away whatever Trump and his allies—Hegseth, Kash Patel, etc.—do in this regard. They will say: "Democrats targeted Trump with bogus lawsuits first." 

And while there is a difference between public officials targeting private individuals versus the other way around, I have to say that I have always found the size of the civil judgments in those defamation cases against Trump, Rudy Giuliani, etc. to be indefensible. To all the liberals who thought this was a good way to vindicate democracy, and who gloated about Giuliani or Alex Jones, say, having to sell off all their possessions due to litigation—all I can say is: be careful what you wish for. 

Our broken civil litigation system has indeed been wielded wrongfully against people of all political stripes. But having the President and the god-damned entire U.S. federal Justice Department trying to wield it to silence critics is an infinitely more disturbing prospect than what we have already. And, since it is money at stake, rather than lives, I feel people will have fewer legal protections against it, and those who are not directly affected by it will take it all far less seriously. 

We could very quickly find ourselves on the road to serfdom, then, and not even notice it. We might end up with our vaunted free society being entirely controlled by one a small-minded petty tyrant, and most of our citizens won't even observe the fact, because they stopped reading actual news years ago and just get their facts about the world from Elon Musk. Perhaps "this is how democracy ends," as a friend of mine once put it, parodying Eliot: "Not with a bang, but with a.... huh?"