CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

“Competitive Authoritarianism” as a Nice Way for Academics to Not Say Fascism

Image by Markus Spiske.

The phrase “competitive authoritarianism” has become a common go-to way for liberal and leftish academics, pundits, journalists, and “activists” to foolishly avoid using the scary “F-word” – fascism – to describe the exterminist Trump regime, movement, and party.

Here is a summary of the phrase’s meaning and inception from National “Public” Radio’s All Things Considered last month:

“Some experts say the United States is no longer a liberal democracy[1], but operating under a system called ‘competitive authoritarianism’… Competitive authoritarian countries have democratic rules and hold competitive elections, but the party in charge uses various tactics to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor to maintain power. Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard …and Lucan Way – now a professor at the University of Toronto – came up with it in 2002 to describe systems in countries such as Serbia, Kenya and Peru. ‘We never – when we coined this term 25 years ago – never imagined that we would apply it to the United States…When we began to see the Justice Department go after people who were public critics of Trump, when we began to see lawsuits against (the) media or attacks on universities that are viewed as critical of the government,’ said Levitsky, ‘all these things are raising the cost of opposition.’ …To describe these kinds of political systems, Way and Levitsky initially came up with the phrase, ‘Contested Autocracy.’ Way admits it was a ‘horrible’ term. Then, in conversation, Way’s faculty adviser, Harvard professor Timothy Colton, unwittingly provided a eureka moment. He misremembered the concept as ‘competitive authoritarianism’…‘So, we thought, “Oh my God, that was it!,” Way recalled…The term is catching on. Since President Trump took office last year, searches on Google Trends for competitive authoritarianism have spiked. It has also shown up in scores of publications, from the Ventura County Star in California to The Scotsman in Edinburgh and The Indian Express in Mumbai.”

In a 2020 Journal of Democracy essay, Levitsky and Way defined competitive authoritarianism as “the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse, yielding electoral competition that is real but unfair.”

“Oh my God,” indeed…as in “oh my God what a pile of vapid, bloodless and academic softening and avoidance!” Levitsky and Way’s term drains Trump, Trumpism, the Trump regime, and MAGA of their drivingly venomous, ferocious, and interwoven counterrevolutionary sociopolitical and ideological life bloods: genocidal racism, militant patriarchy, xenophobic and palingenetic ultra-nationalism, cruelty, irrationality, violence, cultism, hyper-militarism, power madness, anti-intellectualism, anti-socialism, and political eliminationism, all bound up with a relentless campaign to impose a new form of governance beyond the previously normative rule of law, parliamentary deliberation, electoral “democracy” and constitutional checks and balances.

Compare Levitsky and Way’s tepid language with the brilliant left academic Henry Giroux’s recent and far more serious, properly chilling reflections on the dystopian Trump nightmare:

“[Trumpism’s] fascist politics [involve]…the transformation of the state into an instrument of domestic terrorism… this culture of corruption and authoritarian spectacle converges with a politics that glorifies militarism, violence, and hypermasculine domination. One of the driving forces behind…the Trump regime is the fusion of........

© CounterPunch