Introducing Autocracy in America

There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.

Renée DiResta: ’Cause I thought, Surely we’re not that far gone [laughs]. Um, and then, yeah, and then I realized maybe we are, actually.

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Anne Applebaum: There’s a common perception that democracy ends with a battle—soldiers in the streets, a coup d’état, the fall of a government.

Amanda Carpenter: Modern-day authoritarians do not come into power by brute force.

Peter Pomerantsev: No, democracy’s lost one little step at a time.

Carpenter: Modern-day authoritarians come to power by winning by democratic elections, but then once they get into power, tilting all the levers of power in their favor.

Pomerantsev: We know this because we have studied how autocracies take hold.

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Jefferson Cowie: My nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Applebaum: We have reported from places where freedoms are curtailed and corruption flourishes.

Mikhail Zygar: If you are accused of something, you’re going to be proven guilty. And there are no exceptions.

Applebaum: We have seen with our own eyes what happens when democracy gives way to authoritarianism.

Pomerantsev: When we look at America today—right now—we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun.

Applebaum: It’s not some distant future. It’s the present. The evidence can be found in the tightening grip of conspiracy theories.

Stephen Richer: Never in a million years would I have thought that somebody would have accused me of shredding ballots from the 2020 election, feeding them to chickens, and then burning the chickens to cover the evidence.

Pomerantsev: It can be seen in the misuse of investigations and the fragility of the courts.

DiResta: I just kept saying, like, When do we get to the part where the facts come out?

Applebaum: There are signs of autocracy in the growth of dark money and the lack of transparency in politics.

Sheldon Whitehouse: This is a beast that is stalking America’s political landscape.

Pomerantsev: To understand it, you’ve got to look around the world.

Leopoldo Lopez: The struggle for a transition to democracy in Venezuela—we are fighting a global fight.

Applebaum: And you have to look to history.

Richard D. White Jr.: You go to the records, and you’ll see that the voters of that election voted in alphabetical order. Can you figure that out?

Pomerantsev: That’s pretty sloppy, cheating.

White: No, it’s not sloppy. It’s blatant.

Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: And I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: Coming this September, a new podcast from The Atlantic: Autocracy in America.

Autocracy in America is produced by The Atlantic and made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.