What Are We Living Through?

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing a cyclical swing, an existential transformation, or something in between? Nine months into the second Trump administration, Americans confront three very different answers to these questions.

Uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—“back to the future,” back to the GOP of 1989, or back to Germany in the mid-1930s—goes beyond what any fact checking could resolve.

One view, dominant at this point among mainstream liberals and centrists, is that the United States has entered a dangerous new era of authoritarian crisis. Following a playbook used in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and other illiberal regimes, the Trump administration is attacking independent institutions such as the media and universities, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into instruments of extortion and retaliation, manipulating official data, pardoning violent allies, dehumanizing marginalized communities, declaring endless emergencies, and preparing the military to suppress “the enemy from within.” The emerging authoritarian crisis is also a constitutional crisis, as an ever more emboldened and presidentialized executive branch sidelines Congress and the civil service, deploys troops domestically over the objections of state and local officials, and flirts with ignoring judicial rulings. Variously framing the threat as one of autocracy, kleptocracy, fascism, patrimonialism, gangsterism, or another cousin of authoritarianism, this view insists that things have ceased to be “normal.” American democracy is beginning to fall apart.

A second view, espoused by prominent voices on the left as well as some libertarians, asserts that Trump has not ushered in a new order so much as highlighted and exacerbated preexisting pathologies. It’s mainly more of the same. Following a standard Republican playbook, his administration has embraced sweeping tax cuts, a selective gutting of economic and environmental regulations, and hostility to abortion and affirmative action. With some coarsening of the discourse and hardening of anti-immigrant policies, we could be in Ronald Reagan’s America. This through line is no cause for comfort. Whether styled as homegrown fascism, racial fascism, or simply the unreconstructed core of American political ideology, more of the same means more harsh immigration enforcement (as in Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” or Obama’s record-setting deportation program), more vilification of dissidents (as in the Red Scares or Nixon’s “Enemies List”), more expansion of the national security state, and more runaway deficits that fail to address runaway inequality. The real constitutional scandal is not the sudden arrival of “executive lawlessness”—the War on Terror had that in spades—but a long-festering rot that has eaten away at our system’s ability to produce responsive governance and thereby created the conditions for Trump 2.0.

According to a third view, embraced by many of Trump’s advisors and supporters, U.S. politics are indeed undergoing transformation but in a familiar or at least not unprecedented way, as part of a process of constitutional regime change. Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular (if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Following a playbook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce, restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind” conception of racial equality. To be sure, some of these shifts may be alarming to those socialized in the prior regime. But that’s what happens in a constitutional democracy when voters choose the other side. And if there has been some overreach or misadventure, well, the same could be said of any regime change. This revolution in law and governance, moreover, is at heart a “counterrevolution”—not so much a turn toward any foreign model as a return to principles that prevailed before the assaults of wokeism and Warren Court liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and the proliferation of identitarian rights.

The stakes of this disagreement are high, the shape of it disorienting. From within each script, people in the others tend to look either dangerously complacent or risibly hysterical. Americans are deeply divided not just over partisan preferences or “alternative facts” but over the basic direction and meaning of our politics.

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The three scripts began to take shape almost a decade ago, during the first Trump administration. There was a “resistance” view that took Trump to be an authoritarian menace from the start, a skeptical riposte that saw his norm breaking as “more bark than bite,” and a hope on the right that his presidency would prove a constitutional watershed. That hope did not come to pass. Even after the ravages of COVID-19 and the riots of January 6, 2021, Joe Biden assumed office in a constitutional order that remained essentially intact.

Today, it seems clear that something bigger is afoot. But it is not yet clear how well the scripts from Trump’s first term can keep up with the dizzying pace of developments. The uncertainty about where we find ourselves in political time—about whether this presidency is bringing us “back to the future,” back to Republican politics circa 1989, or back to Germany in the mid-1930s—has numerous causes and operates on multiple levels.

To begin with, these are still early days. Things could break in many directions, especially considering that Trump’s approval rating with independents has hit a record low and that the president’s party tends to lose ground in midterm elections. The story is also complicated by the size and sprawl of the American system of government, including the important role of the states. Whereas the ruling party in smaller and more unified systems like Hungary’s can set a single direction of travel, the overall picture here is bound to be mixed.

More fundamentally, like other aspects of American polarization, the competing scripts reflect differences in worldview that go beyond what any fact checking could resolve. The disagreement between “authoritarian crisis” and “more of the same” comes down to continuity versus discontinuity: whether this presidency represents a decisive break with past practice or a cruder and more intense of version of it. That judgment, in turn, depends on how one sees the past.

Underlying most versions of the authoritarian-crisis view is the premise that the United States achieved a special degree of moral and political legitimacy—and a seemingly safe distance from authoritarianism—following Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Second Reconstruction. Elections were generally free and fair. The judiciary was widely respected and meaningfully nonpartisan. A thicket of procedural safeguards and legal doctrines ensured that press outlets, law firms, and other private institutions enjoyed substantial autonomy from government. Executive branch officials understood themselves to be pursuing a public interest that was different from their party’s interest, even if it was never entirely clear what the public interest involved. The country may not have reached the beloved community envisioned by Martin Luther King, but these arrangements and practices amounted to a commendable approximation of democracy and the rule of law, which are now teetering as the same arrangements and practices come under Trump’s thumb.

From the more-of-the-same perspective, this picture of an exemplary country recently fallen reveals less about the reality of U.S. history than about “America’s narcissistic image of itself.” Despite the gains of the civil rights movement, where has due process been in an immigration system long known to be byzantine, backlogged, and chronically short on lawyers; in a criminal system where policing falls most heavily on poor and racialized communities and the vast majority of prosecutions end in coercive plea bargains; or in a civil system that shunts most workers and consumers to mandatory arbitration? Just how representative is a political system in which “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans” have exerted “essentially no impact on which policies government does or doesn’t adopt”? Or a system that handed the presidency to the loser of the national popular vote twice between 2000 and 2016, once with an assist from the Supreme Court? Speaking of the Court, let’s not forget that the justices since Brown have been unable or unwilling to halt school resegregation and “racial authoritarianism” more broadly, or that a whole subfield of political science supplies evidence “that personal policy preferences are the strongest influence” on their decisions. If there is an authoritarian crisis on this view, it is a long one—maybe more than two centuries old, and certainly not a fraternal twin of Project 2025. Rather than demonstrate the United States’s virtue prior to Trump, “the study of illiberal, anti-democratic regimes” brings us back around, ironically, to “the authoritarian tendencies of liberal democratic regimes.” The constitutional-regime-change account agrees that the past fifty years have no special claim to democracy and the rule of law, but for a different reason: because they have been an era of liberal hegemony. All such eras end, this account stresses, and the constitutional system helps them to end peacefully. President Trump’s base did not find particularly democratic a regime in which federal courts enforced novel unwritten rights to sexual autonomy and same-sex marriage, federal agencies took on topics as broad as global warming without explicit legislative authorization while issuing controversial regulations on everything from vaccination to gender identity, and the professions fostered an elite culture that kept conservatives constantly on the back foot. The MAGA movement wishes to dismantle not just a policy here or a doctrine there but a whole edifice of laws, norms, and values that it sees liberals as having imposed through their dogma of “living constitutionalism” and their sway over regulatory bodies, universities, foundations, and legacy media organizations. Although a “radical” reform agenda of such scale may not sound very conservative, nothing less will suffice, on this view, to overthrow the prevailing forces of institutional and ideological control. Critics of the authoritarian-crisis view on the left and the right thus agree that recent U.S. history featured much more arbitrary power than centrists care to admit. They disagree about who was under the boot. From both perspectives, those who accuse Trump of betraying the American democratic tradition have confused the features of a particular constitutional regime with constitutionalism writ large. The rise of Trump represents the failure of the previous regime to sustain its legitimacy.

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The authoritarian-crisis account arose in the late 2010s as a guide to opposition strategy, and its imperatives have only become more dire under the second Trump administration. Its basic prescription has been a pragmatic politics aimed at preserving the core pillars of liberal democracy. In practice, many have taken this to entail seeking “cross-partisan” alliances whenever possible (think of Liz Cheney campaigning for Kamala Harris); rallying to the defense of nonpartisan institutions such as colleges and courts (“Preserve the independence of your courts at all cost,” advises the Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide); and fighting “fire with fire” on redistricting, at least until the risk of electoral manipulation can be contained in other ways. Others contend that Democrats must disavow unpopular stances on policing, transgender issues, and the border. Scholars of authoritarianism warn against “distraction.” The centralization and abuse of power are the key threats and must therefore be the focus of the struggle. Such sober-sounding tactics, however, soon run into trouble. Bipartisan “anti-authoritarian” campaigning was tried in 2024, and failed. Fighting fire with fire on issues such as gerrymandering, meanwhile, can present a catch-22: refusing to fight means losing, but joining in may intensify polarization and cynicism among those not already convinced that your side is engaged in a righteous struggle to save the republic. Besides, widespread disaffection with institutions tends to favor politicians who promise to break the mold, not parties and candidates who talk of saving the system. Under current conditions, some in the authoritarian-crisis camp now maintain, moderation and bipartisanship no longer carry significant electoral benefits for Democrats and may instead be liabilities. What then? The more-of-the-same script suggests a bolder set of remedies, based on a bleaker diagnosis. The system has been broken for a long time. Instead of seeking out the occasional Never Trump conservative to rally a “grand coalition” of the embattled establishment, the opposition should outflank the president on his populist side. Take the fight to economic oligarchy. Make strong statements of principle—say, on the free speech rights of student protesters or the due process and human dignity owed to noncitizens—so that everyone will know where you stand. Doesn’t Trump say many unpopular things that somehow persuade people he is authentic? Rather than romanticize judicial supremacy over the Constitution, push to deepen democracy through court reform, as activists and academics briefly did during the Biden administration. Don’t retreat to a liberalism of fear at a time when many voters have decided, with cause, that there is plenty to fear and detest in the present system. Turn toward a populism of hope. Here, too, political practice has not always conformed to theory. Harris’s loss was also a loss for the Biden administration’s break from neoliberal business as usual with pro-union initiatives and ambitious investments in infrastructure and reindustrialization—all of which earned it nothing electorally. Beyond Bidenism, those who recommend responding to Trump with a bold agenda inverse to his may be morally right but politically wrong in imagining that they can sustain a full suite of social justice commitments alongside a full-throated populism. Many Americans seem to believe that Democrats are “not on their side” in part because of these commitments, regardless of the party’s comparatively progressive economic platform. Structural responses such as court reform are no less vexed. It might be true in principle that unelected judges have too much power in U.S. governance and that a healthy, self-confident democracy ought to rein them in. It might also be true that ours is not a healthy, self-confident democracy, and that the best Americans can do is hope to rally around extant institutions and symbols—the Constitution, the courts—even though their capacity to unite is fading. Both positions remain more sharply at odds with the constitutional-regime-change account. From this perspective, the crucial intellectual task is not to diagnose the current crisis or trace its roots but to explain why talk of crisis is misplaced. In downplaying the discontent of liberals and progressives as just so much Trump Derangement Syndrome, the regime-change view counsels a very different mode of engagement: constitutional loyalty coupled with ordinary political opposition. No one has to agree with Trump to accept that he has the right to govern—and, like earlier “reconstructive” presidents, to govern in his own way. Shifts in immigration policy, agency management, and civil rights enforcement are typical hallmarks of a new administration, unsurprisingly magnified under a president whose campaign emphasized these issues. Consolidation of authority in the executive is a long-running trend. If anyone has been refusing to comply with Supreme Court orders lately, MAGA’s constitutional theorists contend, it is not tyrannical Trump officials but “showboating” lower-court judges. As with the Reagan revolution, the only sensible response might be to concede the legitimacy of Trump’s political program, at least the bulk of it, and keep trying to beat Trumpism at the ballot box. This approach is rapidly being overtaken by events as well. Proponents of the authoritarian-crisis view warn that the ballot box may be effectively going away. Pointing to a pattern of activity that is hard to defend on any democratic grounds, they worry not just about violations of particular legal and ethical constraints but about a hostility to constraints per se; not just about partisanship but about personal loyalty as a litmus test; not just about objectionable enforcement priorities but about the use of law enforcement to reward political obedience and intimidate perceived enemies. The constitutional-regime-change framing depicts the second Trump administration as an articulation of popular sovereignty and the rule of law, not the antithesis of these. But in any version, those principles stand for meaningful barriers to strongman rule. The style of governance that has been on display these past nine months is too brazenly self-enriching, power-concentrating, and enmity-mongering for many to accept that this is just how a constitutional democracy renews itself. Not only that, the legitimacy of basic political change—what some legal theorists call a “constitutional moment”—has generally been thought to require large and sustained majorities. Franklin Roosevelt had those to a degree unique in the twentieth century, and he used them to remake the judiciary and the executive. Following a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson worked with supermajorities in both chambers of Congress to enact landmark legislation. Trump has won a single popular vote, by the smallest margin of any president since Nixon, and he has never enjoyed majority support. A movement party like the present GOP, which controls the government but trails in most national polls, has every right to advance a new policy vision. For a president like Trump to claim a mandate for constitutional revolution (or counterrevolution) is itself a revolutionary idea with little basis in U.S. history or democratic theory.

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Although they appear fundamentally at odds, there is a sense in which all three accounts of the second Trump administration can be true. The fact that a new administration’s agenda outrages political opponents and disrupts settled norms does not mean it is illegitimate. At the same time, the fact that any given constitutional regime change starts out on a reasonably democratic footing does not mean it won’t end up shattering both constitutionalism and democracy. Not only is authoritarianism a real possibility in a rich and mature republic; we are seeing unmistakable signs of its spread. Defeating authoritarianism in any decisive fashion, however, requires reckoning with the underlying trends that fuel it, including legislative dysfunction and economic domination. It is no solution to defend a prior dispensation that led us straight here. The persistence of the competing storylines over nearly a decade is more than a matter of conceptual inertia, then. As much as the scripts disagree with and denigrate one another, each captures an enduring political truth that is missing or downplayed in the others. Moreover, no script has been able to sustain majority support, which makes efforts at mutual comprehension and coalition expansion all the more vital.

As much as the scripts disagree with and denigrate one another, each captures an enduring political truth that is missing or downplayed in the others.

While Trump’s critics in the first two camps increasingly agree that the United States has turned (or turned harder) toward authoritarianism, they continue to fragment over whether and to what extent this turn has been driven by identity politics, racial resentment, affective polarization, economic inequality, or capitalism itself. Key parts of the anti-authoritarian camp, for example, have identified global financial markets as a crucial check on Trump, whereas key parts of the more-of-the-same camp see these same institutions as part of the undemocratic distribution of power that brought him into office. Reflecting this divide, when hedge fund founder Ray Dalio threw his weight behind the authoritarian-crisis view, comparing Trump to the fascists of the 1930s, he offered the government’s taking a 10 percent share in Intel as his main piece of evidence. Bernie Sanders, by contrast, praised the Intel acquisition in a rare moment of overlap with the president. On the electoral front, although some Democratic officeholders have expressed enthusiasm about economic populists running to unseat Republicans, they have been far more ambivalent about the openly left-wing platform of democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani, whose bid for New York City mayor caused establishment figures to “freak out.” Clashes over the Mamdani campaign have brought to the fore another barrier between the camps: a deep divide over Israel and the Gaza war, which Trump has eagerly exploited. For all these points of continued conflict, the authoritarian-crisis account and the more-of-the-same account have begun to merge and hybridize in a way that did not happen during Trump’s first term. It is more common now to find theorists of authoritarianism highlighting long-term causes such as the democratic deficiencies of the U.S. Constitution, and less common to encounter a progressive economic populist who genuinely doubts that his presidency poses a distinctive threat to core political values. As Mamdani’s primary victory reflects, there has been growing convergence among Democrats on U.S. policy toward Israel, as well as more general movement toward a shared sense of purpose, if not yet a unified agenda. Much is at stake in this nascent synthesis. The question today is less whether the two camps are willing to cooperate than whether they can find terms on which to do so effectively. Bridge building between the first two camps and the third is more challenging, of course, but it is important. Notwithstanding Trump’s autocratic persona, the political viability of Trumpism still depends on some version of the constitutional-regime-change story. For the time being, at least, there is little public support for nakedly authoritarian tactics such as deportations without hearings or defiance of court orders. Right-wing populism is likely to be an important political force for the foreseeable future, both here and abroad. Any hope of containing its authoritarian threat in the United States depends in part on driving a wedge between Trump’s general policy agenda, which has plurality support in key respects, and his most extreme abuses of power.

If the three main scripts that Americans have been using to make sense of this presidency are any indication, some combination of anti-authoritarianism and anti-oligarchy may well be the only platform that can decisively overcome Trumpism. Difficult as that promises to be, it is even harder at present to envision a constitutional modus vivendi spanning all three camps, with recognition of legitimate disagreement bounded by accepted limits on the stratagems of power. In the absence of one or the other form of common ground, there will continue to be sharp and at times surreal disputes over the most basic civic questions, including whether the republic is flourishing or disintegrating. The United States will remain lost in political time, with no assurance of a lasting majority for democracy itself. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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