Offline with Jon Favreau - What Post-Democracy America Looks Like

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

U.S. democracy is likely to break down during this second Trump presidency, but what lies ahead isn’t a traditional dictatorship. Dr. Steven Levitsky joins Offline to explain competitive authoritarianism—what it looks like, how Trump and his cronies are enacting it already, and why it’s more popular than the fascism of yore. But first! Max and Jon discuss how the MAGA regime is silencing critics, including with two frivolous media lawsuits against ABC and CBS. Then they dive into rumors that Elon Musk is trying to use DOGE to replace federal workers with robots, and share updates on the ultra competitive, ultra scientific Offline Challenge. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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slash offline for $25 off your starter kit. The Democratic Party is in much better shape than oppositions in other competitive authoritarian regimes. You have a single unified opposition which doesn't exist in Hungary or Turkey in other places. It's clearly electorally viable. Yes, you know, it lost by 1.5 percentage points in 2024, but won a series of elections prior to that. It's pretty well organized. It remains pretty well financed. There's no well organized. It remains pretty well financed. There's no reason why the Democrats can't go out and win the 2026 election despite the Trump administration's abuses. So it's been demoralizing to watch just how stunned

and groggy the opposition was in the initial weeks, but we're already seeing the party begin to react and I think that the Democratic Party's ability to compete in elections is not in serious doubt. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest political scientist and professor at Harvard University Dr. Stephen Lew Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, political scientist and professor at Harvard University, Dr. Steven Levitsky. So you and I are going to get into all the ways that our new MAGA regime is trying to control our perception of what they're doing.

Media outlets are facing defamation lawsuits and FCC investigations. Social media platforms are now largely controlled by people friendly to the regime or in Elon's case, part of the regime. And as we were talking in our production meeting, we all thought it might be a good idea to have a discussion with someone who can help us compare what Trump and Elon are doing to other modern information age authoritarian regimes. And lucky for us, Steve Lewicki just published two great pieces in the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs this week about what a 21st century model of autocracy would look

like right here in the United States and what we can do about it. For those of you unfamiliar with Dr. Levitsky's work, he's a scholar of authoritarianism and democratic institutions around the world. You might have heard about his New York Times bestseller, How Democracies Die. He also co-wrote Tyranny of the Minority, which explores the way Trumpism has weakened America's democratic institutions. So we invited him on to talk about what authoritarians around the world can teach us about what we can expect from Trump 2.0 and what lessons those opposing him can teach us about fighting back.

It was a great conversation. We'll get to it in a minute. But first, as promised, we're going to talk specifically about what the MAGA regime is doing to intimidate and silence critics, especially in the media. Trump has targeted quite a few media entities with lawsuits. Disney and ABC have settled a $15 million defamation case meta has settled for 25 million dollars over suspending Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts after January 6th It may be the most troubling the reports that paramount which is the parent company of CBS Is in talks with Trump to settle his baseless and fucking bonkers lawsuit against 60 minutes for what he alleges was a

Deceptively edited interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That's not all. Trump's new Project 2025 FCC chair has already launched investigations into NPR and PBS over their advertisement policy, Comcast NBC over DEI initiatives, and a local San Francisco radio station over their coverage of an ICE immigration raid. None of which is illegal. None of which is illegal. None of which is. It's very explicit.

The goal of these regulatory maneuvers is don't do reporting on the government that we don't like. It's very explicit. That's about it. From a pure business perspective, you can see why giant companies like Disney and Paramount and Metta are settling and see that as the path of least resistance. But like what are smaller outlets

and journalists supposed to do? Like, what do you think about all this? I think that you are really right to highlight as a like big first matter what this means for smaller outlets, for independent journalists. There are only a handful of outlets in the country that have the resources to combat a frontal legal or regulatory assault, like what we're seeing.

And there has been, people outside of the industry won what we're seeing and there has been people outside of the industry won't know this but there has been a very long standing practice for decades that the big outlets will collectively act as a shield for the entire industry on legal matters, on legal protections, on big Supreme Court cases, whistleblower protections, four-year rules. This is sort of like an unwritten, non-formalized understanding. Yes. Yeah. And the idea is that everybody pulls resources on these because everybody benefits from the protections for your rules. This is sort of like an unwritten, non-formalized understanding. Yeah, and the idea is that everybody pulls resources

on these because everybody benefits from the protections and that that shields the smaller outlets too, who they can't field a team of 10 people to go argue these cases. And I think it really seems like that era of the big collective industry wide shield is ending. We see the big TV networks, which are a big part of that kind of shield coalition, are starting to capitulate, maybe because they feel like they have to, maybe because their

corporate overlords are weighing it against other things. Some friends at the Times were telling me the other day about a big briefing that everyone in the newsroom got from the New York Times legal team, which has always kind of unofficially acted as the sort of leaders of this big media wide coalition, they lead a lot of these cases. And what they said in this briefing is basically what I have said that the collective shield is gone. The idea of everyone working together against legal challenges is gone. It's everybody for themselves now. And if you're a reporter, like one of two or three places,

you are probably okay, but for the most of the industry, that's going to be really scary. They also said that billionaire conservatives are now funding tons of defamation lawsuits, nuisance lawsuits against media organizations with the expectation that some will go through, some will not, but it will just like raise the cost of doing business.

And another important thing is that you and I have talked about a little bit, but it seems to really be getting formalized, which is that defamation law is just kind of not real anymore in the way that it has long standing served as a protection for a free press to report on the government. Conservative judges are just like reinterpreting defamation to mean whatever they want it to mean and to mean now that they're gonna render huge judgments

because you hurt conservatives' feelings. That's not in most cases, but it's happening in enough that you can judge shop, you can kind of, you throw 30 defamation cases at the wall and one or two of them will go through now where it used to be none of them would go through. And this is really, I think, making systemic changes for how the media works. Because even if, you know, again, even if not all of those cases succeed, some of

them go to discovery, which leads to public humiliation, because it means all of that media organization's emails, internal communications have to go through the trial and inevitably they become public, they can name reporters personally, which means even if your outlet is protected, maybe you lose your house or you lose your kid's college fund. And this is gonna force now every reporter and every news outlet into an impossible calculus.

You wanna report something about the Trump administration that that administration won't like. You might end up facing a defamation suit, the risk, however small, of a $5 million, $25 million settlement or judgment or an FCC fine because the FCC is run by a crazy person. Now, and even if that just makes you or your editors 20% more cautious, more risk averse,

that is gonna have a big effect on what reaches people. Like I've worked at places that have a lot of lawyers and places that don't have a lot of lawyers. And the news that they feel comfortable reporting is different. And the way you report it and the way you talk about it. Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, look, their goal here is to change behavior. Yes. Right, their goal is not necessarily get a bunch of money. Right, no, of course not. I mean, they are punitive people and I'm sure they'd like to bankrupt some individuals and media outlets, but they want to change behavior and they want compliance. And so if you see that this is happening and you don't have the resources to hire the lawyers

that you need to to fight it, or you don't want all of your texts and slacks and everything else to be public or to be leaked during the course of a trial, you certainly don't want all of your texts and slacks and everything else to be public or to be leaked during the course of a trial. You certainly don't even want, even if you're confident about all that, if you have the resources and you're confident about all of your tech, you still just don't want to go through a multi-year legal process hanging over your head because of incredible stress, anxiety, right? Or you don't, maybe you know, you don't know how your managers are going to respond

if a suit gets brought. There's also this stuff with like JD Vance and Elon Musk sickening their followers on this Wall Street Journal reporter who had the temerity to report about this like guy in Doge and what he was doing and telling everybody like, she's evil, like, let's get her. Even if nobody acts on that, every reporter now has to ask themselves before I report a story on Musk or Doge that is going to be unflattering to them, you know, will one of their 10 million followers on Twitter

take the cues that these people are clearly trying to put out and come to my house or come to my kid's school? And everybody's gonna have to have hard conversation now about how much are you willing to personally put on the line to report on what the government is doing, which is scary. I do feel like that shield that you spoke of needs someone needs to try to reconstitute that and maybe in a different form, right? Because obviously the media industry has changed so dramatically over the last 10, 20 years. It's not just that the political environment has changed.

I've been wondering if some liberal billionaire or some of the more liberal donors or even center right, whoever, whoever's not MAGA that has the resources is going to help fund the defense for some of these defamation or some organization is going to pop up. Right. It is this sort of, of course, right. But if they have lawyers, they can at least defend and get it, it is one of the problems that is not solvable but is much more addressable like just with money.

It's a shortcoming in our institutions that you can kind of defense again. But I do think it's important to take a step back here and to look at, to me, this is not just like trying to steer coverage in a direction that they like or don't like, which of course every administration does to some extent. The totality of the tools that they are using is authoritarianism.

It is wielding the power of the state to make it costly and to coerce media organizations out of, specifically out of reporting on the government's extraordinarily illegal abuses of power. And that's when I say that, I know that like everybody calls everything authoritarianism now and fascism now. And I'm not saying that it's like, whoa, Trump's got big dictator vibes. I'm saying this is the model.

This is the like, I can't say the number of countries I've reported in where this is precisely, this is how it started in Russia. Like I'm not just talking about like places where it's like, oh, Poland, they like have some, you know, there are some erosion freedoms around the margin. Like people think the way that this works is you wake up one morning and the government has thrown all the reporters in the jail.

And it's illegal. And that's not how it works. It is many steps like this where you make it scarier, harder, riskier to report on what the government is doing around the margins. You restrict access, the AP just got thrown out of the White House briefing room, maybe. And you, alongside that, and we're gonna talk about this,

you promote regime media that does not have the same restrictions on it. And just over time, it becomes harder and harder and costlier and costlier to freely report on what the government is doing. So fewer people understandably do it. You mentioned sort of defamation law and judges reinterpreting it, especially mega judges,

Trump appointed judges. Trump mega donor, Steve Wynn has also filed a petition with the Supreme Court imploring them to overturn New York Times versus Sullivan, which is the landmark case that raised the standards for a plaintiff to win a suit against a media organization. It's like the foundational defamation ruling. Can you explain what New York Times versus Sullivan is and what the media environment would look like if it were overturned. So what this 1964 Supreme Court case did is it said that defamation suits filed against the media by a public official

have to meet a special separate bar. That you have to be able to prove not just that what the media published was wrong and harmful, but that it was had had what's called actual malice behind it, which means specific intention to harm that official by publishing something false. Like one of the few instances of this that we can point to of like a defamation lawsuit actually meeting this bar against a media organization, which is very rare because it's very hard to meet it was Fox News News in 2020. I was just going to say Dominion.

Right, Dominion, they were publishing or they were running all of these lies about Dominion voting systems. And the way that they proved it was they didn't just say the things you're airing are not true and they're harmful to this company. They through discovery, they proved that executives were emailing each other saying, hey, we know this isn't true. Should we still air it? Sure.

Right. That is actual malice. It was a very hard bar to clear. It's very rare to clear it. Congrats to Fox News for clearing it. I know. Which we talked about at the time. It's good that at some point you can be accountable for deliberately lying about people in ways

that are harmful to democracy. But it was part of a larger transition that has been happening where we are eroding the bounds of that. And before we go on, the Paramount 60 Minutes thing. It's not that. No, but I was gonna say that would be, what happened there was they aired an interview with Kamala Harris and one part of the interview

where she gives sort of a bad answer, it's not great, it was not terrible, whatever. We know about it because they released that clip on social as a preview to the interview. The actual interview didn't include that one. They showed a different clip. So this would be, they'd send, they take CBS to discovery. Right.

Now this was, this was election interference. It wasn't defamation because she wasn't defaming Trump. She wasn't talking about Trump in the fucking clip. So there's no harm to proof. Yeah, but they would have to be like, they would have to find texts in 60 minutes and be like, hey, we think this answer was pretty bad, let's not cut it all together, let's put it out on social,

but not to our viewers, and then maybe it'll hurt Mr. Trump. I know. Well the thing is- It is the most insane one yet, and if Paramount's settling, and CBS on that one, I do think like that. Well the thing, I mean, you kind of alluded to this, the often how these pressures work on media organizations and this case is an illustrative one, is that he is simultaneously

suing them for this bullshit election interference thing that everybody knows is false. And the content of it is like, how dare you air an interview with my political rival? I want that to be illegal now. But he's paired that with implied regulatory pressure because CBS is trying to do this merger right now. And the fear is, the fear that they are trying to create in corporate is if you don't cave on this and give us $20 million, you won't get your merger.

Now, from the perspective of this giant company, it's worth paying a $20 million speeding ticket or whatever in order to get a merger that is worth much more. The thing that is scary about it is it creates a further precedent that you throw out whatever bullshit defamation charge you want if you don't like coverage or if we dared to interview one of your rivals, and then we are gonna have to pay you some sort of fine or fee for doing so, which creates a big added burden for free functioning of the press.

So anyway, back to Sullivan then. Right. What do you think the appetite is for it being overturned? I know Clarence Thomas has sort of hinted that he doesn't like it all that much. Right. If, what do you think the appetite is for it being overturned? I know Clarence Thomas has sort of hinted that he doesn't like it all that much. Right. And then what would the environment look like should it be overturned? So Neil Gorsuch as well hinted, has suggested that he wants it to be overturned. So that's two justices.

We don't really know about the other ones. Brett Kavanaugh said something offhand where he like approvingly referenced Sullivan in a way that people are reading as maybe he wants to uphold it. So it's tough to say. A world without it, the standard for suing a media outlet for defamation is no longer actual malice, it's just negligence. And it would also mean that public officials would be treated the same as private individuals for the purpose of defamation lawsuits.

The bar is much, much higher. It should be. Right, right, because you should be able to talk critically about public officials because they are accountable to the public and a world without Sullivan, it would be like, no, Donald Trump is just like, has the same protections as any other private individual

and the same level of accountability as a random person on the street, which is to say he would be much less accountable. Bad. It's bad. Very bad. And I think that even if it stands, and I'd Supreme Court readers think it's safe, I hope they're right.

I think it's always easy to be too optimistic about it. Even if it stands, creating the threat is another thing that forces everyone to be more cautious and to walk on eggshells because nobody wants to write the story or the blog post or the tweet that Trump then uses to like box in Kavanaugh. Yes. So that he will strip free media protections from the United States for a generation. So it's just, it's a lot of things to make people proactively surrender. The other huge problem unique to this version of the MAGA regime is its incredibly close alliance with the social media moguls whose platforms originally weakened these legacy media organizations we're talking about and now dominate most of our attention, most of

our media diet. One thing I've noticed that feels different than the first Trump term is that it's not just hard. We've talked about how it's harder to find information, good information, keep up with what's going on. But when they do something dangerous or damaging, it also seems harder to get the word out and get people's attention beyond the people like us who are already alarmed and already know, and this goes to the conversation I had with Chris Hayes

on last week's episode. How are you thinking about that? Like, I just, it feels like I feel sort of, not constrained, because I'm afraid, but I'm just like, we're just like yelling into the wind here. Yes, it feels like every time I log onto social media, the bars and the walls of who I can reach

are closing in more tightly. The field of the discussion is getting much more narrow. And I don't think that's an accident. I think that these companies have been very clear that they want to retool their algorithms in a way that will promote Trump. We know that Metta did this very explicitly the first time around.

And the first time around in Trump won, they were at least overtly opposed to him. And they were still behind the scenes engineering their algorithms to favor him. Now he's up there at the fucking dais with him. You know, he's going on Joe Rogan and saying, we're going to de-wokeify the internet. Of course they want to steer things his way. They've got a sweet deal with them. Biden was trying to regulate the tech companies. And I think that this is a really,

I think it's extremely important to see this in context with Trump's pressures on free media and with his efforts to like effectively end a lot of media freedoms in America because this is the other half of the authoritarian playbook which is you promote regime media. And this again, like people, I understand why people have this image in their mind of like North Korea. It's like, which is you promote regime media. Right. And this again, like people, I understand why people have this image in their mind

of like North Korea. It's like, oh, you have state media. And it's like, have you ever watched the North Korean state media? I've seen some clips, yeah. It's pretty funny. It's great. So there's the lady who like talks

in this weird sing songy voice and just like praises the grand marshal of the army, Kim Jong-un, but that is not- It literally now sounds like the Trump administration. Yeah. And Fox and Newsmax, all of it. It's like all not- It literally now sounds like the Trump administration. Yeah. And Fox and Newsmax, all the same. That's true. Tucker has been there for a while, yeah.

But is to say that that is not actually the model for how regime media works. The way that regime media works is you promote friendly, loyal, but often privately owned media companies. You give them access while you're denying it to everybody else. You promote lots of rights and freedoms for them while nobody else has them. And it's also much more engaging. I think people are shocked. I find people are often shocked to learn that Russia Today,

which is the like now fully regime state media for Russia, that people watch it voluntarily, watched it voluntarily when there were other freely available outlets, even people who don't like... Like Larry King was on it for a while, remember? That's right, I forgot about that. Yeah, Larry's not bad in the thousands. It has had an evolution like... It has, it has, absolutely.

But it's to say that like, the way that regime-controlled media works now is that it's more engaging, it's more entertaining, people turn it on because it's easy, they turn it on because the free press is much more constrained, becomes more expensive. Well, yes and there's something else going on, which is I think if you look at Donald Trump's approval ratings or the level of alarm in the country or why there aren't people in the streets, or why there aren't people in the streets. Right. It's not all because the rest of the country is tuned into Fox or just on Twitter the whole time and only seeing Elon and his fanboys tweet.

Like it's just that people have turned away altogether or they are getting their information from fragments of clips and social media here and there, and they dip in and out, and it's just, it is the breaking apart of a media environment where we all sort of consume from the similar 10, 15, 20, whatever outlets. Shared reality.

The fact that that's gone, I think is a very, it's made this moment more dangerous because there is more apathy or more just ignorance of what's happening. You're not aware of what's happening or what you see is that like, oh, this seems reasonable. Look at all that fraud, USAID. Or just, yeah, Trump wins, Trump won, that kind of sucks, whatever. I'm going to work every day. I can't deal with this shit anymore. I did this for a whole bunch of many years and I'm fine.

Everything seems fine so far. Right. I'm not affected personally. Yes. I think there's a lot of that. I think it's important to remember that you and I, or probably most of us in the show, will log on to social media and what you'll see are people yelling about how Trump is bad. Like I'm logging on to Twitter, I'm saying that Trump is bad. Like the Steve Levitsky

piece, I tweeted it out and like I got a lot of numbers on it and that was great. And if you really want to feel like things are bad, then you go to blue sky. That's true. It's like one alarm on Twitter in between a bunch of Elon people being like, look what Doge found, let's arrest all these criminals. And then you go to Blue Sky and it's like, ah! Everybody is truly, but even that is like, that is a narrow and increasingly shrinking space.

And if you see what social media looks like for the much larger demographics of the kind of like low information, Joe Rogan listening swing voters, you start an it's actually worth trying this. You start an Instagram account or a Twitter account likely you want to set up a burner to like follow whatever you will see what the algorithm feeds you now and it's very different what it would have fed you a year ago. It's all pro Trump accounts. Elon Musk, it's pro AI. Yes.

Didn't they stop or now they're back to doing political politics. All pro-Trump accounts, it's Elon Musk, it's pro-AI stuff. You go on Instagram? Yes. Didn't they stop, or now they're back to doing political content? They're back to doing politics, sure. Politics are safe again now because the politics lead to Trump, which leads to deregulation. That's a good, I might do that. I might do the dummy account just to see.

I have talked to a couple people who have done it on both Twitter and Instagram and they were shocked. I wonder if TikTok, I wonder what TikTok would be like. I have to say, it is. I don't TikTok, I wonder what TikTok would be like. I've got a whole experiment in my head. I mean, you open up TikTok, the first thing you see is a fucking push alert saying thank you, president Donald Trump for saving TikTok. Yeah, that's, uh, it's not settled. Offline is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol.

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pretty big megaphones with which to control the narrative. Right. Um, but there was a Washington Post story this week by Jeff Stein and some other Trump and Elon have pretty big megaphones with which to control the narrative. But there was a Washington Post story this week by Jeff Stein and some other reporters that I'm surprised didn't get more attention, though maybe I shouldn't be in this environment. They report that in addition to shrinking the federal workforce and making life hell for the people who decide to remain, one of the end goals for Elon Musk and Doge is to replace most federal workers with quote, AI, machine learning and even robots. You don't think we can, this is job replacement retraining,

but for the robots that make Hondas. I just, what is happening? I look. Of course, of course it is. I know. Look, if we're talking about putting the Arnold T-1000 in charge of SEC regulations, FTC. Unfortunately, that's not what we're talking about. Okay, but I would, I'm just saying, I would support that.

I'm not categorically against robots and government. But no, but you bring up the point and the challenge, right? Which is, I don't think, I don't wanna be reflexively against, for government, making government like using technology to make government work better. And this, like look, technology automating people's jobs in the private sector out of existence is a problem and we can all debate whatever. In the public sector, when it's taxpayers funding the federal workforce and the federal

bureaucracy, if you can find some technological fixes to make government more official and better, and serve people better, serve the taxpayers better, give us better benefits and save money and everything, like I get that. But with AI, you are creating AI that can potentially has ideological bias,

bias towards in other ways. And if we are now counting on AI to serve taxpayers and to serve people their benefits, and Elon is like, let's build an AI that destroys woke. But he, you know, his definition of woke is anything that's not something that he doesn't like. His companies, yes. That's the real danger. His definition of woke is anything that's not right and I like his companies. Yes So I initially will be I did not take this like super seriously because it's like Elon Musk says a lot of things

But there was a really good piece about it in the Atlantic by these two security experts Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders They made I thought a pretty persuasive case for why it's worrying and And I should say, they're not categorically anti-AI in government, and they're like, it pains in the piece to talk about how several governments, including the Canadian government, Taiwanese government, have found really effective ways to use AI to enhance the function of governments, if like regulatory agencies can use it to try to track like fraud in the stock market. And it like can be a useful tool beyond just the like whatever productivity stuff.

The point that they made that I thought was a very good one, which really aligns with Steve Levitsky's piece is that one of the most important breaks we have on the politicization of institutions in this country is the civil service, is two million people who are career, they have discretion, they have ethics, they have workplace protections because they're unionized, and that that has proven to be in this country and in many others a really strong break on people like Trump who want to turn the DOJ into, you know, prosecute all of my rivals. So the more that you replace those workers with AI or robots or a sticky note or whatever Elon wants to like

bring in, the more that you are effectively empowering the political appointees who as a default are like wildly outnumbered by the career civil service. Yes, this is the danger. Yeah. Where are you at on Elon Musk's agenda and all this? I know you talk about it a lot on PSA, but do you feel like there's anything that's happened in the last few days that have kind of changed how you're thinking about it?

You know, I think that he is from the tech world and they- Is that the worst thing you can say? Well, now, yeah. They, I'll give you the most, you know what? I'll give you the most generous explanation. Okay. It may not sound generous.

We're nothing at this show of not generous Elon Musk. Right, but it may not come off as generous, but this to me is the most generous explanation, which is people have in Silicon Valley, in my experience, in the tech world, especially as not the rank and file, but the founder level, incredible disregard for government and politics.

And they don't understand why someone hasn't innovated America's way out of all of our political problems. Because every problem can be solved by some kind of technological innovation and it has nothing to do with human judgment and how people don't get along and need to agree because they've never had to agree with anyone because they're the boss. Right. Or institutions, God forbid. Institutions, right. God forbid. So he looks at that and of course, and he has not paid much attention beyond whatever government has done for him and his companies, which

is plenty. And so he comes to Washington, he opens up the hood, right? He looks under the hood and he was like, what is this shit? It's inefficient. And so he was like, I'm gonna treat it like one of my companies and I'm gonna break shit apart. And also he's not just a regular tech guy anymore. Now he is a radicalized right wing tech guy who sees people in the government who a lot of them are liberal. And if they're not, he assumes they're liberal.

And he hates everything woke, everything DEI. And so he is in there like a bull in a china shop, just destroying everything. And he feels like, I read in one of these pieces that they believe in zero-based budgeting, which they use in their companies, which is you just take every budget down to zero, and then you rebuild from there.

So I think he thinks like we will, some parts of the federal government are valuable, some benefits are good, some services are good, but let's just get rid of it all, and then rebuild from scratch. Well, in the getting rid of it, at a company that means you lose some workers, you fire some people, they lose jobs,

which is, you know, bad enough. But in the federal government, it's going to mean that, like, life-saving services, benefits, cancer treatment coming to a halt. Things that the whole, yeah, are gonna be destroyed. And it's gonna be hard to build them back, even if later on, through a court or through the goodwill of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they decide,

oh yeah, this service and this benefit was actually worth it. Yeah, there is a very- That to me is the most generous interpretation of what is happening. I mean, there's a very like late 1980s, early 1990s kind of cultural trope that we see in like, you ever see the movie Dave? Yes.

Where it's this like- Yeah, they all wanna be Dave. Right, if we just had like a normal guy who came in and just like, you ever see the movie Dave? Yes. Where it's this like- Yeah, they all wanna be Dave. Right, if we just had like a normal guy who came in and just like, this is a family budget and if we sat down at the kitchen table and are like, we don't need this wasteful pork barrel spending problem

or this wasteful pork barrel spending, then we can balance the budget and save so much money. And I do think that he is riding a little bit off of that. I think there's a lot of nihilism happening too though. I think that he sees the headlines about, you know, cancer research disappearing and about hundreds of thousands of people losing access to life saving care.

And I think that's fun for him. Tressie McMillan Cottom had a great piece about this in the New York Times. And I thought she made a good comparison. She said, Musk's fans love his narration of power as a vicarious game-like experience of dominance. These fans don't find the doge escapades cataclysm. Confusing, if anything, the bombastic flooding

of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. Musk clarifies a scary world, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy, good guy, evil, villain, kill, kill win right this is propaganda but it's also a skilled manipulation of content in a content saturated culture all of our emotions are fueled for the content machines that don't care what we feel only that we do right and I think that was really smart because he is gamifying it and he's fine like I remember being in government writing speeches for Obama when he would want

to talk about making government more efficient and reorganizing government and getting more bang for our buck and using technology and all that kind of stuff. And I remember you'd be like, famously, we had a line in the State of the Union about salmon and how the salmon were under the purview of the Department about salmon and how the salmon were under the purview of the Department of Commerce and also the Interior Department because one of them looked at salmon when they were in freshwater and one in saltwater and then we made a joke. I remember this. Like the war between the cabinet agencies, like I was getting calls from Gary Locke,

who was the Secretary of Commerce, right before the State of the Union, like you can't do this, this is wrong, this is gonna be attacked. And I was like, this is fucking bureaucracy, right? Like so I get that, but these examples, suddenly when they are just tweeted out to just hundreds of millions of people, many of them idiots, many of them purposeful idiots who want to use them as an example of why all government is bad,

are very dangerous. And I think it's- And that's not, like I said, that's not to say that there's a lot of inefficiency in ways to government, I've seen it, right? You're right, yeah. But this is something, you could go after waste inefficiency in government, even with a sledgehammer,

in a way that is not this. There's nothing about this that looks like the salmon to agencies, there are too many people looking at the salmon. This is in like Al Gore's reorganization of government project in the early, you know, whenever it was, 90s. I do think it is, I think it is the critical insight of understanding what's happening now,

and maybe one of the critical insights of politics in our era, that people like watching other people get hurt. And it makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel empowered at a time when, for lots of reasons, some good, some created out of thin air by social media, people feel disempowered. The idea of watching someone be hurt on their behalf. I think this honestly is a big part of the Luigi Mangione stuff. Yeah. And the like conversations that I've had with people since you and I first talked about it,

where I think most people, it's kind of like a laugh and a joke, but I talk to a lot of people who know better. The joy I would see in their eyes when they're talking about someone who they don't know and they don't really have a good case for why he should be murdered, but it feels good to cheer for someone getting killed. And I worry about that crossing partisan lines.

Yes, I do think there's a lot of that, especially with, I mean, you see it on Twitter all the time now. Absolutely. It's like one of the reasons I have turned replies off. It's where people go to have fun hurting other people. But I do think for the broader electorate who is not necessarily paying attention

or only hearing some of this, one thing I've been thinking over the last couple weeks is we have to lift up stories of people getting hurt because conversations about lawlessness, who's gonna win in court, the bureaucracy, the fight against bureaucracy, I think they can be confusing to people. I think they feel esoteric to people,

like it's hard to grasp. And I think when you esoteric to people, it's hard to grasp. And I think when you share a story about the, there's a 71 year old grandmother in Thailand, who's a refugee, who would go back to this USAID funded hospital every time she had oxygen problems and the hospital shut down and she just died.

You know? You're literally someone who just died. Right. You know? You're literally someone who just died. And it's like that wasn't, so like someone dying in a war where there's one side thinking this, it was just someone died because Elon Musk decided to pull the plug on USAID without any process whatsoever. Right. And now, and there's going to be so many more stories like that.

Right. I agree that that, and that's something we really learned about the like save democracy discourse from Trump's first term is that that is very animating to people like you and me but For a lot of people it's an abstract principle that does not have a lot of concrete meaning. Yeah Offline is brought to you by lumen Did you know that when your metabolism is working properly you will feel the benefits and literally every aspect of your life? Lumen is a valuable tool that gives you insights to create a healthy metabolism for your body. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach.

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Okay, before we jump to Dr. Levitsky, it's time to talk about what we've been doing to reclaim our ability to focus with our new offline challenge. Max, this week you and I were supposed to spend more time just walking outside, 20 minutes, uninterrupted with no phone. Did you get a chance to do that and how did it go? I did. I think what I will say is this, the daily walk evangelist, like Chris Hayes, the way that they talk about it is you go for a stroll

and your brain is just exploding with you're making these connections across different topics and it's the enlightenment that you feel great and you're floating up in the clouds. Didn't happen to you, huh? I would not say that was my experience. Now, it absolutely improved my life. There were some days when I would go for a walk

and I would like doom spiral about the news or I would ruminate about something that happened. But for the most part, I really did find that it really helped to calm me down, even on the bad days, even the days when I was like thinking about the news on my walk, it wasn't making me feel better about where the country was going.

I still had the same like assessment of what was happening in the world and why it was bad, but I just felt more equipped to face it. And the real benefit that I found was that on days where I took a walk at the end of the day and then after that like put my phone away, I was just like, I felt better all night if I was just like, I felt better all night if I was with friends, I was much more present and much more like enjoying the time with them, much more effectively.

And then I slept better and it's like the next morning, I would really realize how good it had been for me because I would pick up my phone and get all the push alerts and all of a sudden it would like hit me again. And that was a terrible feeling, but it also made me appreciate like, oh, I had, you know, 12 hours

of like relative peace inside of my own heart. I think largely because I took that walk at the end of the day and then made sure to stay in that state after I got back. Yes, that's exactly what happened with me. Really? I am now the walk evangelist. And I do not think that I necessarily had, you know,

the deepest thoughts, but here's why. The first time I did it, the first couple of times at the beginning of the walk, you still have the, you're perseverating about whatever's happening in your life or the news or whatever. And the thoughts are, yeah, smartphone brain. Yeah, the thoughts are ping pong. By the end of the walk, that's when you start thinking,

bigger thoughts, letting your mind wander. Yeah, the thoughts are ping pong. By the end of the walk, that's when you start thinking. Exactly. Bigger thoughts. Yes. Letting your mind wander. So it does take a transition. Right. But I found it so enjoyable that I, like yesterday's walk, I kept my phone in my back pocket just in case somebody needed me. But I, and for a timer,

cause I was like, it's a 20 minute walk. And the timer went off and I just kept walking. Cause I was like, I don't have another meeting until like another 15, 20 minutes. I'm just going to keep walking and still not look at my phone. That's great. I loved it. So you did like 40 minutes.

Yeah. And it's really, and it's same that you do, you were a calmer. I did it the other day cause I didn't want to walk around the office. It's not like the nicest walk around our office. But I wanted to go home, but I didn't want to go in the house cause then they were all going to see me and I wasn't going to go out. So I literally parked. I parked a block.

Oh, I told Emily this afterwards, after the fact. I parked a block from my home and then walked around my neighborhood, which I love my neighborhood. So you did like you were the FBI, like casing your own house. The funniest thing though is I'm like, I'm in the zone and I'm coming back to my car

after the 20 minute walk. I see this guy walking, he's got headphones in with his dog and he was like, I'm in the zone and I'm coming back to my car after the 20 minute walk. I see this guy walking, he's got headphones in with his dog and he was like, he just looks at me. And I'm like, I wonder if he's looking at me because I'm a weirdo walking with nothing. Not a phone, not nothing. And he's up and he goes, I'm listening to you right now. Really? And I was like, and I go, oh, I'm like, I'm doing this thing where I'm trying to walk without any distractions. He's like, I know, I, I'm like, I'm doing this thing where I'm trying to walk without any distractions. He's like, I know, I've heard you guys.

He was listening to Offline? I don't think right then, but he was like, I know I've heard you guys. No, he was listening to Offline. Yeah, that's a better story, better story. That's beautiful. Oh, I love that. It was very funny.

We'll cry on the sidewalk. Thank you for listening to the show and take out your fucking headphones. In all seriousness, I go on hikes all the time. I almost always bring my headphones. This forced me to do it with that headphones. In all seriousness, I take, I go on hikes all the time. I almost always bring my headphones. This forced me to do it without headphones and it's so much better for me. It is better. It's so much better. I love podcasts. I hope that people continue to listen to podcasts,

but do the walk without the headphones, really. Before we sat down, we took some time to look at an oil painting as a way to measure our ability to focus. Something inspired by Francesca Paris and Larry B. Cannon at the New York Times. Last week, I kicked Max's ass. You did. Did so again this week. Do you have anything to say for yourself? Look, I am impressed that given your, frankly, horrific screen time.

Horrific. Numbers, that you have this focus within you and I do not, but I think it's a nice reversal of the last offline challenge where I felt like we were, say starting in different places. Yeah. But I feel my focus drifting. I really want to look at the painting. I'm enjoying the painting.

We looked at it, it was a painting of people at a party, which was so nice. I was imagining myself there. I did misidentify the painter when the painting first came up, which is... You were pretty proud of yourself. I know, it was the worst of all worlds where I got caught bragging about knowing

a impressionist painter and then was also incorrect. We're also looking at the number of times we pick up our phones over the course of the day. Last week I averaged 276 times per day. Max, you averaged 88. How's it looking this week for you? I'm down to 81. Okay.

I'm doing pretty good, what about you? So my average is 201. Oh my God. So I got down from 27 to 201. So like a drop of like a quarter. But I will say that today, right before we recorded, and of course it is 3.30, so there's some time left, I was at 70.

Really? Yeah, right before we recorded. I find that days where I work more, my numbers are better if I have something to focus on. Sometimes work is helpful. I think that the focus, and we didn't even get to talk about our sleep, which is, by the way, the sleep track wrap is garbage. It said that I slept three hours and 45 minutes last night and that's not what happened. How much did you sleep? Three hours and 55 minutes? Emma and I were talking that I slept it's not that I slept three hours and 45 minutes last night That's not what happened How much did you say but it's also maybe hours and 55 minutes Emma and I were talking about this. It's making me

Sleep worse when it's on because I'm like, I know I'm not it's like the good student in me I'm like, I'm not gonna sleep well I had a listener reach out to me actually after we talked about that and was like don't worry That's perfectly normal to stress about your sleep number and therefore sleep worse. Sleep, but like it goes away. Yeah. But it's still, I think that your and I's brain is like not, it's not ideal for a challenge like this where we're keeping score.

It's not. I will say the walks combined with, so like yesterday I was tired. I didn't get good sleep the night before. Last night, despite what the sleep app says, I did get good sleep. Yesterday I had a lot of time in the middle of the day to prepare for this very show. I was just not focused all over the place.

I was tired. And this morning, I came in here feeling rested and I had my phone somewhere else and I was like prepping for the show and like no distractions, I was focused. And I was like, you know what, I'm like feeling better and I have the phone somewhere else and I was like prepping for the show and like no distra- I was focused. And I was like, you know what? I'm like feeling better and I have like have the phone over here and I'm like doing better because of the locks. I did notice an improvement. Something that I think we keep learning with this is you can't solve any one thing because all of these things feed into each other.

Either a vicious or a virtuous cycle. I felt- there was one night this week where I slept like four hours because I was stressed about the news all the next day I'm on my fucking phone, I'm doom scrolling, I feel terrible, I don't go for a walk, catching up all week. But another day this week I went for a walk, kept my phone completely away from me for the rest of the night, slept better, felt better the next day and had an easier time keeping off of my phone. Yeah, that's, there you go.

What do we have in store for the week ahead? Okay, so this week we are trying a set of techniques for creating blocks of time where we can deeply focus on work. This is a huge one on the wellness podcaster circuit. Also the most annoying type A person, most annoyingly successful type A person that you know definitely does

this as an evangelist for it. I hear about it from a lot of people. I'm skeptical about it to be honest, but I feel like we should try it because it's like the top of the list for a lot of people. So we're going to set a few blocks this week. I'm thinking maybe like three blocks of two hours each of just focused on work. Those numbers sound good? Yeah, sure. Okay, thank you.

How are we going to do this? You're going to say, do not disturb on your laptop, so it'll mute certain things. We're going to set times of the day to check email and social media. So it'll be there are blocks when you can't check it, blocks when you can't check it, kind of like batching it in or out. We'll figure out off mic whether we're going to use

any specific apps on our phone to limit our access to these things or not, or if we think just like using our word is enough. And I might check in midweek and if this is too easy, then maybe we raise the stakes by giving ourselves blocks of time during the day at work where we like stick our phone in a drawer. This will not be too easy for me. Oh, really?

This is the boy. Just thinking to myself, I mean, who knows, but thinking to myself that there's going to be a two-hour block where I just have to pay attention to the one thing that I'm doing and not check everything else is insane to me. Oh, I love deep focused work. It feels amazing. When you're like really jamming on something, I think it feels great. I mean, I did it this morning, but even this morning while I was doing it, I was still,

I was checking from time to time, but just for me, relatively speaking, it was better. I was going to say, I thought this one would be easier for you because you typically work from like 3.30 in the morning to 5.30 in the morning. I'm all over the place. Okay. No, I'm all over the place. I'm reading all kinds of tweets.

Just get them. So you are reading all kinds of tweets. That's true. If there's one thing I know about John Favreau. But the only way you get the news these days is just checking a million different places. There's some tweets, there's some websites, there's a piece, there's some texts.

I'm just getting on absorbing all the news. Where we just get the newspaper. Could you imagine getting the news the next day? What that would do to your brain? I mean, the company would shut down, but what an experiment it would be. That's not news, that's old. That's old, yeah.

All right, before we jump to Levitsky, some quick housekeeping slash some big news. We are changing our release date. I'm excited. This is great. This is huge. Going forward, you will find new episodes of Offline in your feed every Thursday.

We're also hoping this new schedule will help us stay on top of all the crazy offline news we find ourselves constantly bombarded by during the week. Our first Thursday episode launches this upcoming Thursday, February 20th. We will see you all back here then. After the break, my conversation with Dr. Steven Levitsky about what 21st century autocracy looks like in America. [♪ MUSIC PLAYING FADES IN, FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES IN, FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES OUT, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FADES out, MUSIC FAD importance of therapy here. You know, maybe some of you have been in therapy, maybe some of you haven't.

And here's the deal, everyone actually needs therapy. You think you don't need therapy, therapy is not like, oh, something's wrong with you, go to therapy. Therapy is just like someone to talk to, hour a week. You sit there, you talk about your feelings, talk about what's on your mind. And unlike, unlike friends, they're, they're obligated to listen. And they don't just pretend to listen. They're like, they're really listening. And it's really helpful.

It usually makes you feel better. It makes me feel better every time I go to therapy. So I would highly recommend it. And if you want to give therapy a try and you don't want to leave your house, you can use BetterHelp. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient,

serving over 5 million people worldwide, access a diverse network of more than 30,000 credentialed therapists with a wide range of specialties. You can easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash offline to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-p dot com slash offline. Steven Levitsky, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me, Jeff. So, uh, you know, things are bad when a how democracies die author is out there writing pieces a few weeks into, uh, Trump 2.0, uh, you write in foreign affairs, quote, U S democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration,

but that what lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship, but competitive authoritarianism. Can you explain for people what competitive authoritarianism is and what it looks like? Yeah, competitive authoritarianism is kind of a hybrid between democracy and authoritarianism. The constitutional

architecture of democracy remains intact. There continue to be elections. The opposition is legal, operates above ground. But, systematic incumbent abuse of the state, the use, weaponization of the machinery of government and deployment against rivals, against opposition, tilts the playing field against the opposition so that there is competition. It's not single-party rule, but competition is unfair and there are abuses of power that are not something that we associate with with democracy. So this is contemporary Hungary, contemporary Turkey, Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, Peru in the 1990s, a bunch of sort of middle-income countries, post-communist countries slid in and out of competitive authoritarianism in the 1990s, early 2000s.

It's just not something that we ever would have anticipated emerging or that I ever would. I wrote a book about this in 2010. Just never ever imagined that we'd be talking about competitive authoritarianism in the United States. Why do you think that competitive authoritarianism is the de facto model for authoritarianism in today's world? Like what about contemporary society makes traditional authoritarianism like, you know, the Axis powers or North, what North Korea is less plausible? Well, the main reason is that since the end of the Cold War, democracy, electoral democracy continues to have a lot of legitimacy.

No, with the exception of maybe parts of the Middle East and maybe China, there are very few places where an alternative to electoral democracy is really considered legitimate. People like to vote. People like the idea of being able to choose their leaders. So it's really hard in the 21st century to just eliminate elections and have, say, a single party rule or military dictatorship of the kind that we saw a lot of in the say the 1970s. So democracy continues to be pretty close to being the only game in town. So because it's so hard to just completely derail democracy and eliminate democratic institutions, elected leaders, autocrats like to cheat. They kind of create a Potemkin village facade of democracy, but try to abuse power within it.

And so that's become very, very common since the end of the Cold War. So I know the transition from democracy to autocracy is more of a sliding scale than an on-off switch, especially in the modern era. But what do you see as the primary differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 that makes this version seem more like competitive authoritarianism to you? Oh, there are differences.

I mean, one of the problems in recent months is that an awful lot of Americans responded to Trump's victory in 2024 with a shrug because he said, well, you know, the first time people like Levitsky started, you know, raising, talking about democracy dying and, and we, you know, we were fine, we survived. But, um, the context is really different. First in, in the first time around, Trump didn't think he was going to win. He had no plan. He had no team.

He did not control the Republican Party. And he didn't understand how the machinery of government even worked. He believed when he began his presidency that all the institutions of the state were there at his beck and call. That he would be able to get public servants across the US government to work towards his own personal and political ends. It was shocked and angered to find out that things don't work that way. So he governed for the most part to his first term

with either conservative technocrats or traditional, more or less traditional Republicans. And they constrained him. He didn't have a plan for overturning democracy and he relied on more or less establishment figures who at critical points constrained him. And second time around is very different. First of all, he has a better sense of what he wants to do. Very importantly, he does have a team and a set of ideologues around him who have been planning for four years for this weaponization of the state that we're seeing. And third, and crucially, crucially,

he now owns the Republican Party. There is no resistance from within the Republican Party whatsoever, and that party, of course, controls both houses of Congress. So Trump is in a much, much better position to oppose as well. He's much less constrained than he was first time around. It's really night and day. You say in the piece that competitive authoritarianism under Trump will transform political life in the United States. For people who might be following the news

and seeing the chaos but are not sure how it's actually going to transform political life here, could you talk about what that might look like for people, like what might be in store for us? Sure. A number of different individuals and organizations across the country are going to have to think hard about the consequences of their behavior. Those who wanted to write a check to a Democratic candidate, Democratic party candidate in the past and would do so, you know, maybe thinking about their bank account, but beyond that wouldn't have to think about the consequences, Now are going to have to worry about maybe you know maybe

they're increasing the likelihood of an IRS investigation or audit if they become a Democratic Party donor. Universities are having to think about what kinds of policies they carry out about who they hire, who they promote, what they teach. We're seeing a dramatic consequence of this with the city of New York, right? The mayor of New York is supposed to be elected by the people of New York and is supposed to govern on behalf of the people of New York, and is now basically co-opted by the federal government. It is going to have to carry out policies, not that the voters of New York want, but that Donald Trump wants, because if he doesn't, he's going to get suspended charges waged against it, right? This is the weaponization of the state

means that a whole series of carrots and sticks are deployed to change the way people behave. No longer are we going to be able to think just in terms of our, you know, what's best for our career, what's best for a job, what's best for our constituents. We're gonna have to worry about the consequences in terms of investigation, in terms of online harassment in terms of tax tax audits For our behavior and that is life under Authoritarian rule soft authoritarianism, but authoritarianism nevertheless. Yeah, we've obviously been thinking about this a lot since we do both politics and media here Yeah, I mean every media organization including ours, you know now faces the prospect of You know frivolous costly debilitating defamation suits from Trump,

someone else, not to mention potential investigations by the FCC, DOJ, another government agency, we're already seeing this with some media organizations. From where you sit, is there anything that can be done about this? What are the best strategies for opposition forces or media outlets to fight this? Well, I think there's a collective action problem because almost all of the actors involved, whether it's the CBS News, ABC News, Harvard University, Democratic Party politicians, mayors, governors,

there's a whole set of pretty powerful actors who if they got to, first of all, who believe in democracy at the end of the day, would rather have a democracy than authoritarian regime, and who if they acted together could exert a fair amount of power, but they face a collective action problem because every CEO, every university president, every media owner or editor has to worry about their organization, right? Every CEO is going to take care of his or her shareholders, every university president is going to take care of their endowment, make sure they don't get a federal funding cut. And so the behavior to take care of your own organization requires making compromises or

maybe shutting up, maybe not engaging in the kind of opposition behavior that would perhaps weaken the government. And so what is rational for the president of Harvard, what is rational for the CEO of major corporations, what is rational maybe for particular governors and mayors is to adapt a very pragmatic response, often to move to the sidelines to silence themselves. The collective cost of that is a weaker opposition, is a quieter opposition. What we need to do is the opposite of that. It's not easy. But I think one of the great myths of the last two months has been that resistance

failed the first time around. I mean, that is just a ridiculous claim. The resistance, the opposition to Trump in the first term blocked his most abusive initiatives, led to his defeat in the 2018 election and then his defeat in 2020 removal from power. So the resistance stopped Trump in his tracks and removed him from power as soon as was legally possible. I measure that as a success. There's no way to stop an authoritarian power grab by remaining silent. It requires resistance. Resistance takes place on all sorts of fronts.

Ultimately, we're not going to be able to really change the balance of power until the midterm elections. But we've got to begin to move public opinion, and that only happens when influential figures speak out, when university presidents speak out, when CEOs speak out, when religious leaders speak out. Remaining silent is not going to do it. How would you characterize the state of the opposition right now and why do you think it feels so different than it did in 2017? I've been trying to figure that out since the day after the election.

You know, obviously there is a mix of fear, of exhaustion, of resignation, in some cases of pragmatism and opportunism, but mostly fear, exhaustion, and resignation. People, including me, have been doing this for eight years. And to see Donald Trump not only come back to power, but win the popular vote was incredibly demoralizing. And the fact that he won the popular vote, even though he was one of the narrowest victories in modern history, really legitimized his whole project in many people's eyes and it was a gut punch. That said, I think the Democratic Party is in much, there are a number of long-term issues for I think the center-left across the Democratic

world, but the Democratic Party is in much better shape than oppositions in other competitive authoritarian regimes. You have a single unified opposition, which doesn't exist in Hungary or Turkey or other places. It's clearly electorally viable. Yes, it lost by 1.5 percentage points in 2024, but won a series of elections prior to that. It's pretty well organized. It remains pretty well financed.

There's no reason why the Democrats can't go out and win the 2026 election despite the Trump administration's abuses. So it's been demoralizing to watch just how stunned and groggy the opposition was in the initial weeks, but we're already seeing the party begin to react. And I think that the Democratic Party's ability to compete in elections is not in serious doubt. The other challenge that I think about a lot, that we talk about a lot on this show is, and this is a change from 2017,

it's just gotten worse since 2017, which is the information environment has become so polluted and degraded. I'm not just talking about misinformation and propaganda here, though there's plenty of that, but our ability and willingness to keep our attention on what's happening and to direct other people's attention on what's happening and to direct other people's attention toward what's happening. And the fact that there are so many different sources

of information and the media environment has become so atomized at this point and splintered, that it's become really hard to get people to pay attention. And we were talking about the collective action problem in terms of sort of the organized opposition, but it feels like there's almost a broader issue in the country where you might see all the chaos

and not be too thrilled with Trump, but you're like, if I don't speak out, or if I don't organize, or if I don't seem supportive of the opposition, then I can just live a pretty decent life with my family and that's probably more important than figuring this out and you know maybe maybe Trump will burn himself out and I can just ignore him for four years. How do you think about that challenge in this environment? Well a couple of things. First of all, there's always a danger in an authoritarian setting of too many people just saying, well, this isn't

directly affecting me. I kept my job. My kids are okay. I'm just going to keep my head down for four years. That's a danger in every authoritarian situation. In terms of the changing information environment, this is very recent. I'm still trying to get my head around how this new information environment works and how many people it affects. I buy the argument about the attention economy and I think it probably is the case that Democrats have been a little slower than Trump and some of his allies in sort of learning how to capture attention in the contemporary era. I don't think we know though, how many people that affects.

I mean, I don't think that's the reason, frankly, why the Democrats lost the 2024 election. The Democrats lost the 2024 election primarily because incumbents are losing elections since COVID all over the world. I did a count right after the election of all the democracies in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, Australia, New Zealand, 55 elections since COVID hit. Incumbents were thrown out of power 41 out of 55 times. 80% of the time, incumbents lost. People are really grumpy post-COVID. Whatever the information

environment, in all democracies, people were poised to throw out the incumbents. I'm not sure, and I think that's going to work in the Democrats' benefit in the in the years to come they should not wait around for Trump to lose support for sure but Trump will lose support I don't think the the information environment is so fragmented and that we're in such bubbles that Trump's 49% is gonna remain at 49% no it's probably going to decline. People are aware, particularly if the economy does not go well, particularly if prices don't come down, particularly if

they dismantle the key aspects of the federal government, and so the government becomes much worse at solving people's problems. I suspect that people are going to be well aware of that and that, you know, the Democratic politicians have to learn how to work this new information environment, but I don't think that's going to prevent Americans from becoming aware of what's going on in the Trump administration. He has to say, I mean, one thing your piece really hammers home is that public opinion matters. And when authoritarian leaders are more popular, there's less resistance. Trump is more popular than he's ever been. But as you mentioned, he's still around 50% and falling in the last couple of weeks since

he's taken office. How do you think about the ability for the opposition to move public opinion in a competitive authoritarian system? And are there examples in other places, except for, I guess, ours in 2020, but where public opinion can actually be shifted by the opposition and different strategies and tactics that they may have used? I mean, it's especially today. I mean, one of the good things about this new media environment is old-fashioned strategies of buying off the major television networks or the major newspapers don't work anymore because it's really easy for people to get access to information online.

And so it's harder today for autocrats to manipulate public opinion than it ever was before. That's one of the benefits of the internet and social media. Hungary is one case where Orban has been able to maintain an unusually high level of public support, and that does seem to have to do with his ability to manipulate the media environment. But Erdogan's lost a lot of support in Turkey. Maduro, God knows, has not been able to, despite his control of the mainstream media, has been not able to maintain public support. The few who maintain a lot of support like Bukele and Putin are actually legitimately very, very popular. So I don't think there's any reason why.

I mean, the thing about Trump is he's got a ceiling, as you said, he's not going to get over 50 percent, which I think is helps protect us, but he's also got a floor. And the guys, the autocrats who really flail are the ones who become really unpopular. The president of, one of the reasons why the president of South Korea completely failed in his effort to impose martial law is he had a 20% approval rating. He was really, really unpopular. So Trump's in the middle. He's not popular enough to be able to just immediately tramp on democratic institutions and get away with it, but he's never going to be unpopular enough that he becomes politically isolated, unfortunately. Yeah. Ezra Klein wrote a piece about the first few weeks of Trump called Don't Believe Him, where he argues, quote, Trump

is acting like a king because he's too weak to govern like a president. He's trying to substitute perception for reality. He's hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. The first two weeks of Trump's presidency have not shown his strength. He's trying to persuade you of something that isn't true. Don't believe him. What do you make of that argument? There's a lot to that in that an awful lot of what Trump is doing is show our executive decrees that don't either that don't do very much or that are likely

eventually to be stalled or blocked in a row of return in the courts. It's not entirely true though. I mean the you know that the co-optation of the the city government of New York, that's real. That's happening. That's a big deal. The pressure that was placed on the parent companies of ABC and CBS News to settle frivolous lawsuits that they easily would have won. That's a major blow to press freedom. That's real. That arm twisting is real. And the damage that Musk and Doge are going to do to the federal government, some of it will be repaired, some of it will be forced to abandon, but they're going to really weaken our civil service and our government.

That's going to affect many, many people's lives, whether we believe it or not. So I take Ezra's point in the sense that it's really important that we not be cowed into submission or into hiding under our desks by Trump's symbolic exertion of power, because most of it is symbolic. But he's doing damage day to day, and we've got to get out and fight it. I've thought a lot for the last several years about what draws people and entire societies to authoritarians. You mentioned that a leader like Putin is legitimately popular. And, you know, as we saw, Trump has gotten more popular over time. Hannah Arendt believed that one

reason people are attracted to dictators is what she called atomization, or, you know, disconnectedness with society that can breed loneliness. And this is, again, something we talk a lot about on this show. But how much do you think that sort of our sort of social alienation loneliness, especially post COVID, is contributing to some of the instability we're seeing here and across the world? And if so, like, does that give us a sign of how we might start to organize collectively to oppose authoritarian movements? Well, I'm no Hannah Arendt. I don't have a great answer to that question. I mean, I think I'm not sure. There's clearly a discontent in democracies across the rest since COVID. There's no question about it. And that discontent is leading to the election

of more populous figures who basically promised to take a wrecking ball to the status quo. To just break the status quo. I mean, we see this in Argentina, we've seen it to a degree in Mexico and El Salvador, and we're seeing it in the United States. I mean that people will be cheering on that just sort of reckless dismantling of the U.S. government is stunning. I think few of us would have expected it a decade ago. So there is a level of discontent that is behind this. But look, more than atomized, we're polarized.

Half this country wants nothing to do and will never want anything to do with what Trump is doing, and never has supported Trump and never will support Trump. It's a third of this country, a little more than a third of the country, that is energetically behind Trump and Trumpism, that is enthusiastically embracing the wrecking ball that is Trump. That's important. We need to understand that, but it's not a majority of Americans. Trump won the election not because we're in an Orentian state of atomization. Trump won because people were unhappy with the status quo

uh... particularly the economy in the voted for the opposition we have a two party system and with people are unhappy with the dip with the status quo the vote for the opposition for it's not true that forty nine point eight percent of the u.s. electorate voted for authoritarianism

they voted for the opposition some people were for the returns but a lot. They voted for the opposition. Some people voted for authoritarianism, but a lot of them just voted for the opposition party. So, you know, this is like one advantage we have, right? That Trump's popularity is still hovering around 50%. What are other advantages that you think the United States has either at this moment or just structurally that other countries that have slid into competitive authoritarianism didn't have. First of all, we're a really wealthy country with a big civil society and a big private sector

and as scandalous as it was to see people like Zuckerberg and Bezos on their knees, there are still a lot of billionaires and multimillionaires out there who are willing and able to finance the opposition, to finance pro-democracy groups, civil society organizations, universities and Democratic Party candidates. I don't, whoever the Democratic Party candidate is in 2028 is probably going to be able to finance themselves pretty easily. And that's critical in really effective authoritarian regimes, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, especially Russia.

Oppositions are starved out of existence because the private sector is too terrified to fund the opposition. So a wealthy private sector is really helpful. And then there are a couple of institutional advantages that are not guaranteed and eventually can get worn down, but a highly professionalized military that is not going to be easily mobilized for extra constitutional behavior. So you know the best way to shut down the democracy is to get the military behind you. Most presidential coups involve an alliance with the military. That is not going to happen immediately still that the upper ranks of the military are very, very professionalized. And we have a

pretty independent judiciary. That can change and there are already, we've seen some Trump appointees that are really kind of in the bag for Trump. And that could worsen over time eventually, but for now we can rely on a pretty independent judiciary and you know they I gotta say even a month ago when we wrote this foreign affairs piece we didn't anticipate a serious challenge to judicial rulings the kind of stuff that JD Vance has been talking about this week I have no idea whether the administration would would follow up on those sorts of threats but you know if they ignore the judiciary that puts us in a different in a different ballgame, a much more dangerous ballgame.

But for now, an independent and powerful judiciary, a highly professionalized military, and a pretty wealthy, well-endowed civil society, private sector, are three advantages the opposition in Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Venezuela didn't have. Do you have examples of where a democracy successfully restored its guardrails after a period of severe democratic erosion? There are lots of cases of democratic oppositions winning power back. There are fewer cases of a quick restoration of the old guardrails. So the case to watch, I think, is Poland, where there's a democratic opposition, one power, back a couple of years ago, and it's

hard. After the machinery of government's been weaponized and partisan allies are placed throughout the state. It's hard to go back and restore the state the way it was before. And it's been a very difficult chore for the current government of Poland. But that's probably the closest case to watch of a – I mean, there are other cases of sort of long-term periods of authoritarian rule, the collapse of a dictatorship like in Spain or Chile, but that's not what this is. This is a sort of a slide into an authoritarian government, a pretty good chance that the opposition wins the next election.

And I think that the problem is going to be precisely what you point to that the norms have been shot to hell and a lot of the rules have been twisted, manipulated, weakened and it's just a lot easier to break democratic institutions than it is to rebuild them and my guess is we're gonna take a couple of steps back and then we'll're going to take a couple of steps back, and then we'll be able to take a step forward. But it's going to be very hard to get back to where we were in, say, the Obama era. So, you're a professor. What are you saying to your students to try to stave off the fatigue and disillusionment

that so many young people might be feeling right now and sort of, you know, wave the flag for democracy as you are trying to send off a lot of young students, hopefully inspired to go change the world. I tell them it's their turn. I tell them that a lot of us have been out there for the last eight years fighting for democracy with a mixed record. We certainly did not prevent Trump from coming back to power. And by 18, 19, 20-year-old students, it's time for them to stand up.

And they were young when Trump was first elected. Most of them were too young to be part of the so-called resistance the first time around. It's their term. I mean, as we noted earlier in this conversation, a lot of us are feeling this awful mix of exhaustion and fear and resignation, which is pushing a lot of activists, a lot of citizens to the sidelines. What the small D democratic opposition needs is fresh blood. And I think college students, it's very likely that college students will lead the way in the opposition this time around. I hope so.

Dr. Szybliewicki, thank you so much for joining Offline and for everything you've been doing to really help put this in context for us and give us a bit of a path forward. So appreciate that. Thanks so much for having me on. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Segland. Dilan Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeleine Herringer, and Adrienne Hill for production support, our

production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.