Larry Diamond, sociologist: ‘Trump wants everyone to bend the knee to his imperial will’

The winds of democratic decline began blowing a long time ago. Most democratic governments were still celebrating post-Cold War globalization, and the United States pursued its mission to democratize the Middle East — starting with Iraq — even at the cost of an unjustified war.

Larry Diamond, 73, a Stanford University sociologist and expert on authoritarianism, was among the few who recognized the rise of a new generation of populist leaders. Figures like Hugo Chávez, Viktor Orbán, and, to some extent, Vladimir Putin were exploiting democratic processes to erode democracy itself, consolidating vast power within the executive branch. This so-called electoral autocracy was neither isolated nor coincidental. There was a pattern of illiberal strategies and common denominators — a playbook Diamond termed “the autocrat’s 12-step program.” A broader global democratic retreat was underway.

The issue was hotly debated among academics, who discussed concepts like hybrid regimes and competitive authoritarianism. But while the authoritarian virus had not yet infected the great democracies of the West, few took the threat seriously. Then, Donald Trump rose to power in the world’s most economically, technologically, and militarily dominant nation.

Diamond recognized the implications for American democratic institutions. In 2019, while Trump still had a chance of winning the 2020 election, he warned that a second term could be even more extreme and damaging to democracy. That warning came a year and a half before the MAGA mob stormed Congress on January 6, 2021.

Now, a month into Trump’s return to the White House, the frenetic pace at which the president and his team are dismantling the country’s governing apparatus is difficult to process — even for someone like Diamond, who has spent decades studying how autocracies arise and take root.

The sociologist opens the door to his home in a quiet, wooded neighborhood near Stanford University, where he has worked for decades. He settles onto a sofa in front of a large window and waits for questions. There is no time for formalities. Democracy around the world is in peril, and its enemies are more powerful than ever.

Question. Since Trump’s return, there has been intense concern about democracy in the United States. Paul Krugman speaks of a self-coup; others say that the United States is “Latin Americanizing,” which is a way of saying it is headed toward authoritarianism. In the book Ill Winds, you warned about the decline of democracy in the U.S. How could Trump impact the country? Are you concerned about what is happening?

Answer. I’m very worried. We’ve already entered in the early stages of a constitutional crisis that is certain to get much worse. Trump aspires to be an authoritarian ruler, to sweep away checks and balances, to weaken and psychologically intimidate opposition and criticism, and to dominate the political landscape in the same way that Orbán does in Hungary, that Erdogan does in Turkey, and that Modi is doing in India. Maybe there’s no immediate Latin American parallel that’s exactly right. It’s not going to be Bukele, who got an 80% approval rating. He’s already at the point where more people in the U.S. disapprove of his presidency than approve of it. But he will plunge forward and try to hollow out democratic institutions. It is a dangerous path.

Q. You say that U.S. democracy is being hollowed out.

A. I don’t think it is hollowed out yet, but it is remarkable the speed with which Trump is moving to try to establish an absolute presidential power, and to diminish and even eliminate congressionally authorized agencies, which he has no authority to do under the Constitution. So he is violating the law, democratic norms and procedures. The courts have issued injunctions, and in certain cases he’s ignoring them. They’ve ruled that he can’t suspend funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), but he’s doing it anyway.

Q. Has fascism arrived in the United States, or is it on its way?

A. You have to be very careful when using the word fascism. It’s a very specific historical and political phenomenon, with a number of distinctive components. If you are going to ask the question “is Donald Trump a fascist or is the U.S. entering a fascist era?” it’s very important to be rigorous and analytical. Right now, we’re in the early stages of a dedicated authoritarian project and a deeply alarming authoritarian drift. If you run up the flagpole of alarm with the word fascism, what word do you use when he starts arresting people and creating political prisoners?

I am going to use fascism as an adjective. Fascists like private, violent organizations, like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other networks whose names we may not even know, but who participated in the illegal and unconstitutional attack on our democratic process on January 6, 2021. If these groups become more overt, violent, and intimidating, emboldened by having been pardoned by Donald Trump for all their crimes on January 6, what word will we have left if we start using fascist? There are elements of fascism in the ideology, organization, mentality, and aspiration of the MAGA movement. But if we just use the fascist label, it can become reflexive, ahistorical, imprecise, and, unnecessarily polarizing. The political right perceives it as a term of attack, as a negative code word that the left might use. So we need to be careful.

Q. How did the authoritarian wave spread to the United States?

A. We have been in a democratic recession since 2006. That year reversed the trend that had existed since the end of the Cold War in 1990 until 2005, when many more countries gained in freedom each year than declined. Over these 19 years, we have seen a classic pattern of democratic backsliding.

A president gets elected legitimately in a free and fair election, and then, almost always, he decides that the power that the constitution of the country has conferred on him, with its checks and balances and constraints, is not enough. And he begins a process of reducing all the independent actors in society.

This authoritarian playbook unfolded over a number of years after Chávez came to power in Venezuela, and unfolded very quickly in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Bolsonaro tried to bring it off in Brazil, but he didn’t have a congressional majority or the support of the electorate. In my book Ill Winds, I call it “the autocrat’s 12-step program.” Trump is following that program. He tried in his first term, but the checks and balances were too strong. His electoral defeat in 2020 came very close to overturning the democratic process, but failed. Now he has been re-elected and is picking up where he left off.

Q. It’s the pace that’s striking; Trump is accelerating the authoritarian process.

A. He’s moving very quickly. They now have a much more ideological project than last time. It’s called the Theory of the Unitary Executive, which could also be labeled the theory of the imperial presidency. It states that the president can do whatever he wants, that he owns and controls the entire federal government, that there cannot and must not be any independent actors in the bureaucracy; that everybody, in the entire administrative state he loathes, owes absolute personal and political loyalty to the president. They have engaged in withering behind the scenes and public intimidation of congressional Republicans to get them to confirm all of Trump’s nominees and bend their knee to Trump’s imperial will.

They are entering the government and taking control through the irregular mechanism of Elon Musk and his technocratic brownshirts, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), even though it has not been authorized by Congress. They go into computers and do whatever they want, with no real statutory authority to do so. They know that they must act decisively, intimidatingly, without restraint, without hesitation, without respect for the courts, in contempt of Congress, and unconcerned about public opinion. Again, I’m going to use the word fascism analytically. The Trump administration has fascist elements in terms of the deification of the leader as an all-powerful and infallible being, in the mobilization of an irregular squad of fervent believers to do the leader’s will, in the intimidation of independent or semi-independent actors who might exert checks and balances. It’s very important to understand now how Trump is disabling Republicans in the Senate. I’m talking about the death threats that members of Congress are getting, which have been spiking for the last two years.

Q. What are you referring to?

A. Some Republicans in Congress and some election officials are concerned about their physical safety. You don’t understand fascism if you don’t understand the role of the threat of physical violence in intimidating people and disabling their resistance. Trump has withdrawn Secret Service protection for people who crossed him in the last administration. He’s sending out a warning, like a mafia boss.

Q. There is not much talk about the unitary executive theory.

A. Google the words “unitary executive theory” and then look up the writings of Russell Vought, who is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Among both MAGA militants and the intellectual world around Trump, which includes some religious conservatives and Christian nationalists, there is a theory that we need a strong leader to lead us out of the moral rot we’re in, restore our moral virtues, and purge the government of its woke elements. It sweeps away Article One of the Constitution and the role of Congress in elevating the president as the sole legitimate and directing actor of the executive branch.

Q. That happened in Venezuela under a different ideology.

A. Whether it’s the right or the left, if that vision exalts an elected president above any scrutiny or accountability, it can be called an illiberal version of democracy. As we saw in Venezuela, in Hungary, in Turkey, in Russia at the beginning of Putin’s rule, soon that government will not be an illiberal democracy, but an illiberal authoritarianism with a merely a competitive multi-party veneer.

Q. You say that the Republican Party has been driven to submission.

A. Trump owns the Republican Party: lock, stock and barrel. It was a hostile takeover, a coup from the outside, because he was an outsider, he had no association with Republicans until he decided to run. But that happened a long time ago. Control of Congress is more complicated. Mike Johnson, re-elected as House speaker, is a loyal servant of Trump, though he has shown some pragmatism. Controlling the Senate is trickier. Trump wanted to have an equally loyal servant as Senate majority leader, an extremely powerful position. But fortunately, that election happens by secret ballot. Rick Scott, Trump’s man, finished a very distant third with only 13 of 53 senators in favor. That should tell you something about the way the senators really feel privately. Senator John Thune of South Dakota was elected, the man who was most institutionalist and most wary of bending too much to Trump. Thune is now living in a world where he doesn’t feel he can really speak up.

Q. Silicon Valley billionaires and technologists are cooperating in dismantling the U.S. government apparatus. Why is this happening?

A. First of all, Silicon Valley is not a monolith. Some prominent leaders in Silicon Valley, such as Marc Andreessen, a very influential venture capitalist, endorsed Trump in the election and others jumped on the bandwagon once he was elected. What brought about the philosophical change of many Silicon Valley billionaires and other executives who abandoned the Democratic Party or moved to the right? In part, it has been a reaction against the woke agenda, which they perceived as extremism and intolerance of the left; an ideological agenda that seemed to go beyond the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” to a broader, philosophical, militant agenda, to which everyone had to submit. Even though most of these executives are extremely socially liberal in their views, they don’t like this. They are also reacting to what they see as cuts in their personal and corporate freedom. So they flipped. They said, “what the heck? The left has gone crazy with the woke agenda. We are tired of this overreach by the progressives. Trump is going to give us lower taxes, less regulation. He won’t do that much harm.” Now, some of them may be asking, “My God, what have we done?”

Q. Is Trump motivated primarily by his ego, or is there an ideological plan?

A. Trump wants power, status and wealth, three elements of social stratification. In what order does he prioritize them? It’s hard for me to know. For a long time in his career, political power was only something he dreamed of. What he sought was wealth and social status, including the celebrity that came from a remarkably successful television show, The Apprentice. Now he wants unmitigated power. He doesn’t want it to be checked or scrutinized. We must not forget that one of the first things he did when he took office was to fire all the inspectors general from a wide variety of agencies and cabinet departments. These are the anti-corruption watchdogs, the so-called monitors of waste, fraud, and abuse in every government agency. Trump wants free rein to convert power into more wealth for himself. Musk is doing that as well by capturing all this data that he’s collecting to have unfettered power. This should alarm not just Americans, but anyone whose data might be captured by Musk, or who has done business or shared secrets with the U.S. government.

Q. You have used the word “emperor” several times. Do you think the ultimate goal is to become a Caesar?

A. I don’t think Trump can become emperor. I worry about the future of American democracy, but I don’t worry that we’ll have a Mussolini as president for life or something like that — Il Duce in the literal sense. I think he’s going to make such a mess of the American economy and the world economy and our system of government that he and his whole project will be defeated in four years. But do you remember that interview where he said, “I just want to be a dictator for a day”? I don’t think he was being honest. He wants to be a dictator for four years, and he’d love to carry on after that. But I don’t think he’ll be able to do that. He can get away with it for the next three years and 11 months, but he can’t get away with eliminating the Constitution. There’s not the remotest chance that any changes he’d like to make to the Constitution will be adopted. His long-term project faces a lot of challenges. But in the short term, he could do a lot of damage.

Q. Will Musk endure, even as he overshadows Trump in a number of ways?

A. Everyone was anticipating a breakup in the bromance between Musk and Trump, but that hasn’t happened. We’re in unforeseen psychological territory, where Trump is almost playing the role of number two to Musk. Trump admires him: his technological prowess, his wealth, his personality. I make no prediction of how long this will go on or where it will lead. All I can say is it will become more and more dangerous as long as Musk is the agent of this democratic destruction.

Q. Are we witnessing the decline of the liberal democracy that characterized the post-war world order?

A. What worries me is that political ideologies, political styles, and political changes have a viral dimension. Samuel Huntington, in his book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, referred to it as diffusion and demonstration effects. You see someone acting as a strongman and wiping out the predatory criminal gangs in El Salvador, which makes him quite a popular figure. You see a strongman taking control and running roughshod over the opposition, expelling immigrants out of his country, and pushing back against woke tendencies, which many of those who cling to tradition see as a perversion of their traditions and beliefs. This has its appeal. If the strongman is successful financially, he will achieve tremendous capacity for diffusion, which I don’t think will happen here.

But look at what’s happening in Europe right now. After the elections in Germany, the Alternative for Germany party expanded its seats in Parliament. Marine Le Pen has a 50% chance of being elected president of France. Within four years, Nigel Farage could become prime minister of the U.K. with the real possibility of his Reform Party replacing the Conservatives as the principal party of the right. We are starting to see a spread of this right-wing authoritarian mentality: Austria, the Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni is already prime minister of Italy. And the most powerful, richest and successful democracy is also moving in this authoritarian, strongman, illiberal direction, again, with some growing elements that bear resemblances to European fascism.

Q. What will happen in Brazil in two years? President Lula has a low approval rating.

A. Lula is down. He’s old. He’s ineffective, frankly. What happens if Bolsonaro comes back? Or a Bolsonaro-like figure? You’ve got to start to worry. The party system has imploded in Peru and there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the current government. We are in an extremely fluid situation, both ideologically and in terms of commitment to democratic values and institutions. This is the main issue: democrats around the world are going to have to fight to defend their values, their constitutions and the boundaries of legitimate political behavior.

Q. What counterweight can the democracies that are still standing exert to counter this authoritarian trend?

A. First of all, they must preserve the quality of their own democracy. We cannot afford any more democratic backsliding. The second is what can be done collectively. There are two elements: one regional and one global. Europe has to be very vigilant through the mechanisms of the European Union about what is happening and about the signs of crony capitalism and the abuse of democratic norms. Hungary should have been penalized for its defections from democracy much sooner. There are other worrisome trends in old and new Europe. Recently, there was an attempt by the Russians to manipulate social media in Romania to elect a pro-Russian right-wing populist. The EU has to support Romanian democracy. The Organization of American States failed the people of Venezuela after it was shown that the opposition won the presidential election on July 28 with two-thirds of the vote.

Q. Can authoritarianism be reverse engineered?

A. We know what the authoritarian playbook is, and now we have a number of instances of pushing back. The most efficient way to end a competitive authoritarian regime is through an election. We know what is necessary for the opposition to prevail. First, you have to unite it behind a single presidential candidate. Second, you need a program that goes beyond defending democracy. Voters are going to ask: “What about my life, my income, my job, my prospects, the security on the streets?” You have to show why the corruption and autocracy of the ruler has damaged their material interests. Third, you have to have a vibrant candidate and campaign. You can’t be boring. You have to win. And fourth, you have to take back the flag and recapture what it means to be patriotic, not let autocrats monopolize patriotism, because what they are doing is deeply unpatriotic.

Q. If you had the ear of leaders like Macron, Lula, Boric, all besieged by the extreme right, what advice would you give them?

A. Number one, govern from the center out and build a broad coalition. Number two, listen to the people and their real concerns about immigration, jobs, and social policies. If democracies don’t find ways to control their borders, the populist right will win. They’ve got to be flexible, adaptive, and humble. They must win back the working class by re-elevating them as valued members of society. All of these societies are now experiencing a rift between college-educated and non-college-educated people, between those who work with their minds and those who work with their hands. This is extremely prominent now in American politics. The old divide between the working classes and the elite has been flipped: we need to win back the working classes for democracy and economic justice. The United States will not be the main defender of democracy for a few years, but we are not the only liberal democracy in the world. There is political and economic strength in other liberal democracies in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. And they need to step up and constitute an alternative leadership.

Q. Where do you find hope?

A. These authoritarian projects can be turned back, as in Brazil. Venezuela could have gotten rid of Maduro if the world had stood behind María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. The courage of the Venezuelan people gives me hope, as does Ukraine’s resilience, and activism in the United States. Trump is already below water in his presidential approval ratings one month into his presidency. This is not popular and it’s going to implode when its lack of success becomes known and the opposition unites. We are facing a sobering circumstance, but I have confidence that we’re going to defeat this authoritarian project.

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