Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Steven Levitsky: Thanks for having me.
Levitsky: The open declaration that media should be jailed, that the journalists or editors or media owners should be jailed is obviously just outright authoritarian behavior. Unfortunately, rather than be shocked by each time Trump or one of his closest allies utter something openly authoritarian, we need to take a step back and realize that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian political party.
Now, I don’t think this is going to be the major mode of operation under Trump. I doubt they’re going to be jailing many journalists or media figures. What they are going to do—what they already have done—is begin to exert various forms of economic pressure on parent companies to either bully or induce media into changing its behavior. You see ABC News’s willingness to settle a defamation suit by Trump that it definitely would have won but the economic interests of its parent company have been manipulated in ways that it is in its own interest to toe the line. Using the levers of governmental power to pressure businesses and media into conformity—that is the authoritarian behavior that we can expect to see a lot of.
Levitsky: Sure. First of all, it is very, very naive to suggest that because somebody was popularly elected, they cannot, by definition, be authoritarian. Juan Perón in Argentina was freely elected. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela was freely elected. Bukele in El Salvador was freely elected. Erdoğan in Turkey was freely elected. That did not inhibit them from then going on to jail opponents, to exile opponents, to close down media, to engage in egregiously authoritarian behavior. In fact, most authoritarian regimes in the world today were originally elected.
Levitsky: Well, I think he’s been very clear. Trump has been very open, very honest since 2020 about his desire to politicize and weaponize the state. In our book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and I show that the first move by the vast majority of electoral authoritarian regimes—whether it’s Hugo Chávez, or Orbán in Hungary, or Modi, or Erdoğan in Turkey—is to capture the referees, to politicize the key state agencies that have either regulatory power or power of investigation and prosecution so that the state can be wielded as a political weapon to reward supporters, to buy off powerful actors, and, of course, to punish critics.
Sargent: That’s a really good point. He’s putting Trump’s desires and whims and diktats over the desires of his own electorate.
Sargent: So Trump had this tweet in which he said the following, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” That was all in the tweet. Your response to that?
So far, it’s mostly been huffing and puffing on the part of Trump and JD Vance and others. We don’t know that they’re going to take that step. But if this government decides to openly violate the law and to try to circumvent the judiciary—it’s already circumventing Congress—as well, that would be frankly worse than I anticipated. And I was pretty pessimistic.
Levitsky: It’s new, but at the same time this is the oldest authoritarian discourse around. Authoritarians everywhere do two things. First of all, they paint their political rivals as an existential threat, as enemies, as subversives, as criminals, which justifies authoritarian behavior. If the opposition party is somehow not legitimate, if they’re enemies, if they’re an existential threat to the nation, then that justifies extraordinary behavior against them.
Sargent: I want to add here in reference to what you said earlier: Many of Trump’s allies are out there including judges in this enemy class. Judges are getting in the way of “the people’s” effort to save the country. That seems highly ominous.
Sargent: Yes. So Steve, here Trump is openly declaring that he’s above the law, and Musk is openly demanding the jailing of media figures who displease him. Is there a risk here that American voters could get overly acclimated to this kind of talk and come to accept it as normal?
And I fear, as you do, that this kind of rhetoric, that repetition that we don’t have to obey the law, we don’t have to comply with the judiciary, we can jail journalists is going to be.... Not to say that he’s going to be able to pull it off, but he will be able to acclimate a good chunk of the electorate, certainly a majority of Republicans, to make it part of the legitimate acceptable discourse. Very, very dangerous.
Levitsky: We do. I should say that we really need the Republicans to do it as well because even today, most Republican politicians, most Republican senators know this. And they say some variant of it; they admit to as much in private. So the Republicans who have a lot of power over what goes on in the next two years are the front line, and they’re the ones who are abdicating the most.
They conflated defense of democracy with campaign platform. There was all this talk in the media about, Well, talking about democracy doesn’t win votes. Talking about democracy defends democracy. That’s more important than winning votes. And there are important exceptions like Jamie Raskin [who] has played a very important role, Elizabeth Warren, Brian Schatz recently, but we need to see Democrats realizing this is not the time for complacency, this is not the time for weakness. It’s a time for opposition.
Levitsky: Well, ultimately, ordinary voters have to turn out and vote. Not enough small-d or large-D Democrats turned out to vote in 2024, which is why we got Trump. People have to be engaged, and they have to be engaged in person, not just online. There’s no single strategy. There’s no single organization. There’s no single movement. There’s no single cause. But it’s incredibly important that people be involved, that they speak out, whatever the issue is that they care about—and there are 200 that one could think of. People need to join organizations, attend protests, write letters to their congresspeople. The fact that Democrats, and Republicans in some case, have begun to reach out to their congresspeople, write letters, call in, attend town meetings, has begun to pull Democrats out of their lethargy, which is important. So getting involved is important.
Sargent: A hundred percent endorse that. Steve Levitsky, thank you so much for coming on with us. Alarming stuff, but stiff medicine. We need that stiff medicine, man.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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