Imperial presidency

Ever since the beginning of Donald Trump’s first presidency, many Americans have worried that he might try to become a tyrant. Those worries have of course been stoked by things Trump has actually said and done: He’s threatened to imprison his political opponents; he’s vowed to purge the federal government of “disloyal” bureaucrats; and he led a concerted, if ineffective, effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The idea of Trump as a would-be autocrat has been a more or less constant theme in U.S. media—and not just on the left but also in the established center and on the center-right. It dominated “Resistance” outlets like MSNBC, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic—which published an early cover story on the theme by David Frum, a former speechwriter to U.S. President George W. Bush—and was the subject of numerous best-selling books, such as On Tyranny, by the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder. As the prospect of a new Trump presidency became more real, these same outlets and writers warned that, even if Trump failed to overthrow the American political system in his first presidency, he might succeed in a second.

But with that presidency now upon us, the Resistance seems notably muted. True, the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, called Trump a “fascist” in the closing moments of her campaign. For the most part, though, reactions in D.C. have been much calmer. “Welcome,” Joe Biden said to Trump on his return to the White House. “Welcome back.”

In what might seem emblematic of this shifting mood, The New York Times recently published a big feature on the pro-autocratic thinker Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin is a computer engineer by training but known broadly for the political views he’s elaborated on his blog, which turn principally on the idea that democracy is a fundamentally dysfunctional form of government—and that now-democratic governments, particularly the U.S. government, should instead concentrate power in the lone figure of the “monarch” or “chief executive.” As the Times put it, “while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not”—noting that no less a public figure than U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has picked them up.

But does the idea of autocracy have any real traction in America?

Daniel Bessner is an associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington and the author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual. Bessner says no, there’s no authoritarian movement competing in any serious way with republican democracy for the hearts and minds of the American people. The New York Times interview with Yarvin is in that sense a spectacle—entertaining to read, perhaps, and compelling to a niche audience; but Yarvin’s ideas aren’t meaningfully influential. There is a related problem in plain sight, however—subtler and genuinely threatening to democratic life for the way it’s become normalized in the minds of so many Americans: the hyper-centralization of executive power …

Jönsson: What do you make of the popular interest in authoritarian ideas like Curtis Yarvin’s?