Is America Still a Free Country?

Six months in, it’s looking an awful lot like soft authoritarianism.

Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court on July 9, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.)

Remember when the Biden administration arrested a judge for actions in her own courthouse? Or when Obama threatened to arrest, and deport, a Republican mayoral candidate? How about that time when Bill Clinton had border agents scrutinize the writing of conservative journalists and subject them to humiliating airport interviews?

If you’re scratching your head, it’s because, oh right, these things simply didn’t happen. They didn’t happen either in the George W. Bush administration, notwithstanding the chilling effect of the Patriot Act, and for that matter they didn’t happen in the first Trump administration. The real story of the last six months has been the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, to a degree that would have been unimaginable in any previous (non-wartime) administration. And the real story there is that it is happening so quickly and quietly that the drastic unraveling of civil liberties is normalized.

Pick whatever incident you want to be outraged about. Is it that Trump greeted the news of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary by saying, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything” and then added that if Mamdani opposed ICE raids, “then we’ll have to arrest him”? Is it that an Australian journalist arriving in Los Angeles was met by a border agent saying, in the journalist’s recollection, “Look, we both know why you’re here. It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University”—and then was deported back to Australia as a consequence of material he’d posted on his Substack? (PEN America called this part of a “disturbing pattern of U.S. border agents screening visitors for their viewpoints”—with recent deportations including a Canadian professor, British punk rock band, French scientist, and Mexican drummer, most of them expelled for criticisms of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, some for posts about Trump.) Is it that Hannah Dugan, circuit court judge in Milwaukee, was arrested—mugshot, cuffing, perp walk, the works—for interfering with ICE agents trying to arrest the defendant in a case that she was about to hear? Or maybe it’s the “Catch and Revoke program,” with the State Department using AI to scrape social media posts of foreign students and then cancel their visas and deport them based on objectionable political content? Or could it be the State Department canceling over 200 Fulbright scholarships on political grounds—a move that prompted the entire Fulbright board to resign?

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How to Know When the Frog Has Boiled

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It’s perfectly possible to litigate any one of these incidents—you can argue that Dugan did interfere with the ICE investigation, that Trump is unlikely to actually arrest or deport Mamdani—but what matters here is the pattern. Americans, and foreign nationals in America, are suddenly subject to legal consequences for their speech and their writing in ways that are unprecedented outside of war. Say what you will about, for instance, the Dugan case but what is not in dispute was that the decision to “perp walk” her, with the photo then tweeted by the FBI’s director, was wholly unnecessary when, as the Wisconsin Examiner points out, she could have just turned herself in, and that public humiliation was clearly designed to send a message to the judiciary at large. The accumulation of incidents like that creates an atmosphere of fear throughout civil society and raises the real question of whether the United States, six months into the Trump administration, can still be thought of as “a free country.”

My answer would be that it is not. The climate of fear is strong enough—particularly the closer one gets to the seats of power—that the kind of “robust” protections for freedom of speech and expression that used to be resonantly called “our way of life” no longer really exist, and the United States already bears the hallmarks of a soft authoritarianism.

That was the very strong sense I had, for instance, in reading Jeff Flake’s op-ed in The New York Times earlier this month. Flake—a former Republican Senator—wrote of the atmosphere within the national Republican Party: “Contrast [the George W. Bush era] with the party under President Trump. Any deviation from his dictates is treated as apostasy. It’s no longer about ideas or governing philosophies. It’s about personal allegiance to a single man, whose positions can shift by the day.” That echoed the perspective of Mitt Romney—who, let’s not forget, was the Republican nominee for president a decade ago—and claimed that a significant number of Republican legislators voted against impeaching or convicting Trump in 2021 out of physical fears for their well-being. “Think of your personal safety, think of your children,” one senator said to another in Romney’s reminiscence. Exhibit A for this kind of soft authoritarianism materialized this week in the depiction of the Senate Republicans’ tortured deliberations over a bill that the White House wanted but that deeply undercut congressional authority. “We’re lawmakers, we should be legislating. What we’re getting now is direction from the White House,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski complained, while Senator Roger Wicker matter-of-factly stated that the bill amounted to a constitutional crisis—before voting for it anyway.

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What is important to recognize in a shift to soft authoritarianism is that it’s not necessarily about totalizing control throughout the society. That metamorphosis can often happen through a handful of dramatic gestures that set the tone and then with everyone else—everyone who is professionally ambitious, anyway—falling into line. Certainly, that was the pattern in Russia in the 2000s where civil society freedoms were broken in a series of lightning moves—with Vladimir Putin targeting Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in a trumped-up corruption charge, and, by going after and defeating a sufficiently big adversary, breaking any rival center of power. Within years of that, civil liberties and the division of powers in Russia were already a distant memory. By 2011, The Moscow Times would describe one parliamentary session as “a rubber-stamp ruling frenzy.” Khodorkovsky himself would, in 2010, delineate the somewhat subtle way by which civil liberties disappeared in Russia. “Theoretically you have a free press, but in practice there is self-censorship,” he said. “Theoretically you have courts, in practice the courts adopt decisions dictated from above. Theoretically there are civil rights enshrined in the constitution; in practice you are not able to exercise some of these rights.”

If it sounds a bit hysterical to compare what’s happening in Trump’s America to Putin’s Russia, well, the predominance of fear even among Republican senators—in the party that is ostensibly in power, among people who have constitutionally-mandated job security—gives the clear sense of the erosion of norms. And that is to say nothing of the atmosphere among partners at law firms or chancellors at universities who know that the administration may freeze their funding or target them politically. And that is to say nothing of the atmosphere among writers anxiously scanning their own Substacks or foreign students looking through their old social media posts or migrants showing up for court hearings—as they’re supposed to—knowing that ICE agents may be waiting for them outside courtrooms to summarily deport them.

It will be objected that Trump and the Republicans are not entirely to blame for this state of affairs, and that is a more than fair point. The slippery slope to where we are started a long time ago. Certainly, one can point the finger at the bipartisan support for the 2001 Patriot Act, eliminating a wide array of civil liberties in post-9/11 hysteria, or to the NSA’s wiretapping programs, which were solidified and expanded under the Obama administration. The accusatory finger rests heavy on actions taken under the Biden administration to curtail voices skeptical of accepted narratives on the pandemic—with Biden himself accusing Facebook of “killing people” by failing to enact desired content moderation regimes and with Biden officials regularly browbeating executives at tech companies to more stringently monitor their platforms.

A plague on all their houses.

But let’s not fall for the trick of false equivalency here. What Trump is doing in curtailing civil liberties and suppressing freedoms throughout the society is of a different order. The dramatic images of Judge Dugan perp-walked, of students arrested on the street, have their effect—as do the airy threats to arrest a Democratic mayoral candidate and the internalized fear that seemed to sway Republican senators just before one of the most consequential votes of their careers. And the comparison to Russia, and the steady erosion of liberties there, is not out of place. It has happened elsewhere, and it is happening in America too. Freedom is like the kind of muscle that atrophies from disuse. To keep America a free country—if it really still is—those threatened civil liberties need to be actively exercised and jealously guarded.

Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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