How to Know When the Frog Has Boiled

Autocracy in America won’t unfold the way you expect.

(Photo by Taurat Hossain/Anadolu via Getty Images.)

A few days ago, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo shared a few paragraphs from Harvard political scientist and sociologist Theda Skocpol about what is probably the most important and ominous aspect of the mammoth budget bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law on July 4: a vast expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Skocpol explains that, until now, her study of democratic breakdown in interwar Germany and Hungary had convinced her that federalism in the United States would stand in the way of Trump’s desire to create a centralized national police force that he and aides like Stephen Miller could use to impose their will and punish their enemies. But not any longer:

Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of [it] to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.

This is the key story unfolding right now. Governors and civic groups and media outlets need to get clear on this imminent threat and work together across the board to reveal and push back against the emerging ICE police state.

When I shared this statement on Twitter/X over the weekend, the response from people I respect (and who I consider intelligent and honest political analysts on the center right) was an eyeroll. These are people who recognize that Trump is bad in various ways, but they’re convinced the political system will remain what it always has been, with regular free and fair elections, judicial review, separation of powers, and so forth. The chance of a descent into authoritarianism is miniscule—and that raises the question of whether people like Skocpol, who should know better, will take any kind of professional or reputational hit when their anxious premonitions fail to materialize. (The consensus seemed to be that there will be no negative consequences, which will be one more bit of evidence that the populists have a point in their anti-establishment furies.)

This raises an important question.

I was skeptical during the first Trump administration of those who warned about Trump overthrowing democracy and replacing it with a form of autocracy. (Back then I worried more about the prospect of civil war breaking out, even while considering that to be a fairly remote possibility.) But the opening months of the second Trump presidency have changed my mind. I now think the United States may well be evolving to become a competitive authoritarian system in which free elections are still held but fall far short of fairness.

But what to say to those who, in all sincerity, call this hyperventilating hysteria? What would convince them otherwise? Why don’t they see the mounting evidence? How can I be sure I’m not hallucinating—or projecting my fears onto the world rather than responding dispassionately and empirically to the facts and trendlines?

In a word: How will we know if we’ve undergone a transformation into another form of government?

Continuities and Discontinuities

A lot of people on both sides of this dispute proceed on the basis of an unstated and unexamined assumption: The United States currently resides unambiguously on one side the democratic line, and a move to autocracy, if it comes, will take place with a dramatic and equally unambiguous break from it, with Donald Trump openly defying the Supreme Court, canceling elections, and proclaiming himself dictator for life—or something like this.

Even the worst-case scenario I’ve been worried about since long before the 2024 election would unfold in pretty unambiguous terms: mass unrest provoked by ICE raids could prompt Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he uses to deploy military forces to numerous cities; if unrest continues, this could become widespread and draconian enough that the United States would have several regions (nearly all heavily Democratic cities) living under de facto martial law.

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These kinds of scenarios invariably involve the president acting unilaterally in explicit or implicit defiance of laws, norms, court rulings, and/or the Constitution. The key assumption is that at some point in time Trump will cross a bright line that makes it obvious to everyone that we no longer live in a free society. One day, America is a democracy; the next, we’re an authoritarian regime. The model here would seem to be the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which served as a pretext for newly-appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler to turn himself into a dictator, which he did in short order.

But this might not be the way it’s most likely to happen here. One reason to think so is that this isn’t even an entirely accurate account of what happened in 1933. For one thing, the Weimar constitution already included a provision (Article 48) that allowed the Reich president, in times of national emergency, to exercise special unilateral powers. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler insisted on formalizing this provision through various measures, including the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, the second of which gave the chancellor the ability to pass and enforce laws without the involvement of the legislature.

Hitler insisted that these innovations were consistent with Article 48 of the Weimar constitution—which is one important reason why the constitution was never formally abolished by the Nazi regime. It merely evolved into a dictatorial system, with totalitarianism emerging from the prior liberal-democratic order. The continuities obfuscated the discontinuities.

Various Paths to Autocratic Government

In the United States, too, the continuities are likely to obfuscate the discontinuities.

Note that my worst-case scenario that culminates in millions of Americans living under martial law would be made possible by the Insurrection Act—a law that’s been on the books since 1807 and has been invoked on several prior occasions without precipitating a collapse of self-government in the United States. That’s because previous presidents invoked it for limited times and in good faith, in order to quell violence or widespread lawbreaking. Would Trump do the same? We’ll have to see.

But if not—if he attempted to govern over an extended period using the Insurrection Act—could some observers claim he was doing so legally? Absolutely. Though some during the Biden administration made the case for reforming the Insurrection Act to involve Congress in the process of invoking and lifting it, such reforms never happened. Which means Trump could invoke the Act in the face of violence and continue to rely on it without the involvement of Congress while never violating the law or the Constitution.

But what about other paths to autocratic government?

Let’s say the Trump administration follows the suggestion of Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles in acting to arrest the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, strip him of his American citizenship, and deport him from the country. Might such acts be legal and constitutional? Yes, they may well be. But does that mean there would be no problem with an American president doing such a thing? Would doing it just once be compatible with the United States remaining a liberal democracy?

What if, having done it once, Trump began to do it with other people on the ideological left—politicians, writers, activists? Let’s say that every time it’s done, the administration can cite a law permitting it, even if nothing like it has ever been attempted in the past. In each case, a suit would be filed in federal court claiming the act is illegal, judges would attempt to block the moves, and the Supreme Court would overrule many of the lower courts, pointing to the extant, under-utilized laws or clauses of the Constitution that give the president such powers.

In this hypothetical series of events, the president would be acting in a legal way, his actions vindicated by the nation’s highest court.

Should the acts therefore be considered compatible with self-government? Could the United States really be considered a liberal democracy if the president of one party regularly strips members of the opposition party of citizenship and deports them?

Then again, what if armed agents of the state were deployed, masked and without badges, in communities across the country to round up suspected undocumented immigrants? And what if some of those immigrants were sent, sometimes without due process, to foreign prisons beyond the reach of American law where they would be beaten and tortured? And others were sent, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, to war-ravaged countries where they have no prior ties at all?

What if these kinds of things were not done once, or in rare cases, but regularly, as part of normal immigration policy? Then, I think, we would say that America is no longer a free country.

What Was Once Unthinkable

The point I want to make is a simple one: We tend to assume that a break from liberal democracy will take place in one blatantly illegal or unconstitutional act. When it happens, it will be obvious; if it never does, everything is fine.

But it’s also possible for a president to act in a way that is technically legal, for the Supreme Court to pronounce such acts constitutional, and for Congress to register no objection to them—while the acts themselves break substantively with principles that were once taken for granted and freely extended and applied to all. That is a circumstance in which the political system and public opinion would have evolved to the point where they are compatible with (and even mandate) blatantly illiberal governance.

To those inclined to defer to “the rule of law” and liberal proceduralism, this may look like business as usual. But it isn’t. It’s a country becoming at once something new and something worse—its outward forms remaining intact while its soul is hollowed out and degraded.

How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.

Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

A version of this piece originally appeared in Notes from the Middleground.

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