From the whirlwind start of the second Trump administration through the war in Iran, Americans have been put to a very difficult task: How are they to make sense of this cascade of events?
Last fall, two law professors, Jedediah Britton-Purdy of Duke and David Pozen of Columbia, wrote an article in Boston Review, “What Are We Living Through?” that tried to answer that question.
In a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion, they elaborated on their earlier answer and explored it further with recent developments.
John Guida: You offered three theories to answer the question in your title. They are: 1) an “authoritarian crisis” (the most alarming script); 2) a politics of “more of the same”; and 3) “constitutional regime change,” or a shift in the structure of how government works. How do you think about developments since then through those lenses?
David Pozen: Our article was published on Oct. 15. The very next day, the former national security adviser John Bolton was indicted on charges of mishandling classified information. Such indictments are extremely rare, especially against high-level officials, so this looked like yet another act of political retribution. And it was followed by a shocking string of events in Minnesota, Venezuela, the Caribbean and Iran.
All of these episodes have arguable precedents in modern U.S. history, especially the use of military force abroad without congressional authorization. But the degree of lawlessness and the scale of violence are meaningfully, alarmingly different today.
Which is to say, things have been trending in the worst direction — authoritarian — in some ways that are hard to miss. And the more unpopular Trump gets, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the narrative that this is the constitutional change Americans signed up for.
Jedediah Britton-Purdy: The worry about authoritarianism isn’t going anywhere, even if the midterms go forward more or less normally.
Guida: Perhaps you can explain the three theories. The first is authoritarian crisis.
Pozen: The authoritarian-crisis view has been the conventional wisdom among liberals and centrists for months now. The basic proposition is that President Trump is following the “authoritarian playbook” of autocrats abroad by attacking civil society institutions, persecuting political opponents, sidelining the legislature, declaring endless emergencies, demonizing immigrants, preparing to rig elections and consolidating power wherever he can. The closest parallel to Trump isn’t Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush; it’s someone like Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Guida: The second is a politics of “more of the same.” As you described it, this one identifies “a long-festering rot that has eaten away at our system’s ability to produce responsive governance and thereby created the conditions for Trump 2.0.”
Britton-Purdy: The “more of the same” view has come mainly from the political left, and it rejects the claim that the authoritarian aspects of Trump 2.0 represents a sharp break. This view says to the liberal or centrist worried about authoritarianism: If you’re concerned about due process, where has that been in a criminal justice system with a lot of racial disparities and effectively coercive plea bargaining? Where has due process been in an under-resourced and often arbitrary immigration system?
This argument insists that Trump 2.0 may be authoritarianism, but it isn’t new. From this standpoint, the Trump administration’s worst features are not really innovations or imports; instead, they intensify deep trends in American life. These include economic oligarchy, racial inequality and nativism.
There also a version of “more of the same” that focuses on the ways that both parties have concentrated power and initiative in the president. Think of Barack Obama’s executive action protecting Dreamers and his Libya intervention or Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness and eviction moratorium actions.
Guida: The third is what you call constitutional regime change, or a revival of how the government works, even if it means disrupting or reshaping institutions. As you note, this is what you might hear from a Trump adviser or official.
Britton-Purdy: The basic argument here is that although what this administration is doing has constitutional stakes, seeing it as authoritarian is exactly wrong. This is an ordinary form of extraordinary politics. Constitutional change in the United States doesn’t come through formal constitutional amendments, at least not in the past 100 years.
It comes from political initiatives to rearrange powers among the federal branches and relations between national and state governments and even change the role of civic institutions like universities.
And this is how it was done in the New Deal and in the civil rights era. These changes are always shocking to those socialized in the previous regime: Franklin Roosevelt was called a fascist, not casually, and not by just a few of his opponents.
Pozen: It’s striking that Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump both look to figures like Roosevelt as an inspiration.
Britton-Purdy: In this view, Trump won a decisive electoral victory as a candidate of fundamental change, and is governing accordingly, in line with the American tradition of basic constitutional change.
Guida: Am I correct in saying that your own views of the administration remain a combination of the first two?
Pozen: Yes, with the caveat that it’s important to recognize what the third one — the Trump-sympathetic view — gets right, not merely for the sake of being charitable but because it captures a core truth about our system. In a country with a functionally unamendable Constitution, major transformations in governance can and will occur even if the charter of government stays the same. And just because these transformations disrupt norms or dismay opponents doesn’t necessarily mean they’re illegitimate.
Guida: There is also a contrast between Trump 2.0 and Roosevelt, right?
Pozen: Yes, it’s essential to recognize the contrasts as well as the similarities. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt was pursuing an anti-oligarchic program with enormous electoral support, and he worked closely with Congress to inscribe that program in landmark legislation. Democratically, legally and morally, Trump’s own efforts at constitutional regime change cannot claim those sources of legitimation.
Britton-Purdy: Trump has hardly ever enjoyed majority support and has acted mainly through executive action. The depressing thought that follows is that given American polarization and political disaffection, we’ve basically had alternating minority parties for a couple of decades. That situation tends to block any genuinely majoritarian path to deep change.
Guida: Distrust of American institutions is a longstanding problem. Since around 2005, the Gallup poll that has tracked “satisfaction with the way things are going in the U.S.” has wallowed mostly in the 30s, with rare spikes above that.
Britton-Purdy: That appetite for change in our political and economic systems will tend to get pushed into presidential initiative if it doesn’t have other pathways, and presidents with a fragile hold on power will be motivated to do as much as they can when they have the chance.
Guida: The authoritarian-crisis mode seems distinct for what it suggests about abuses of power or more threateningly an entrenchment of power. Critics of Orban say that, yes, Hungary has had elections, but he has rigged them in such a way that they are not truly democratic. Heads he wins, tails the opposition loses.
Pozen: We are about to run that experiment with the midterms. And we have plenty of reasons to worry. Trump has already called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections, railed against a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud, pardoned people involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, pressured senators to force through a SAVE America Act that would effectively disenfranchise millions, and more.
Guida: I’m thinking of a line from “Democracy and Development,” by the political scientist Adam Przeworski and co-authors: “Democracy is a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave office when the rules so dictate.”
Pozen: Yes, as far as keeping democracy intact, the single most crucial question is whether free and fair elections continue to go forward, followed by peaceful transfers of power.
Guida: Trump is roughly in line with, say, Joe Biden’s approval rating for much of his term. But both are and were, by historic standards, unpopular. What does this level of unpopularity do to the incentive structure for someone sitting the White House?
Britton-Purdy: My worry is that the administration’s vulnerability and its dangerousness are essentially linked. The weakness isn’t just unpopularity, but what seems like a commitment to plowing forward without majority support — first in the unpopular and aggressive immigration crackdown, now in the unpopular war with Iran, which was sprung on Americans without a serious or consistent rationale The temptation to move to more authoritarian tactics emerges organically from the failure to take democratic politics seriously — which Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and, to name a conservative president who achieved some constitutional-regime change, Ronald Reagan, all did.
Guida: What impact has the current Supreme Court had on shaping how the federal government functions? On the one hand, the conservative justices have stressed and expanded executive power through its unitary executive theory.
Pozen: All three branches bear blame for the rise of the imperial presidency. But the Roberts court has also enabled presidential power generally, and Trumpism specifically, in very significant ways. The immunity decision in Trump v. United States is the obvious example. The unitary executive line of cases is another. On its emergency docket, the court has allowed Trump to do enormous damage to the civil service and to agencies like the Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission in defiance of congressional mandates.
Guida: On the other hand, through the major questions doctrine — as seen in the tariff ruling against the administration — the court has tried to set separation-of-powers limits of a kind.
Pozen: Yes, the Roberts court has held some lines, as with the tariffs ruling. But it’s important to note that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs that the court struck down were not only an unprecedented use of that statute but also unpopular with the business community and the public. The same goes for Trump’s attempts to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.
The court’s conservative bloc is not a monolith, and the justices recognize that their own institutional legitimacy, as well as their professional integrity, requires them to rein in Trump at least occasionally. But it is far from clear that we’re going to see similar pushback from the court if Trump engages in election machinations that don’t similarly spook markets or split the Republican coalition.
Britton-Purdy: What becomes of the emergency powers statutes is a watershed question. The Defense Production Act, for example, can be read to make astonishingly broad delegations to the president to run aspects of the economy. There’s plenty of evidence that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, and probably Justice Amy Coney Barrett, don’t like this sort of thing at all. But how much will they cut back on uses of statutes that seem to authorize broad emergency measures?
The best thing would be for Congress to set up meaningful and ongoing limits on any emergency powers. It created these delegations, after all. The difficulty of imagining that happening right now points us beyond the courts to broader questions about the separation of powers and where political control initiative is going to lie in future governments.
Guida: Beyond the courts, where do you see issues related to separation of powers and political control going? Are there one or two scenarios that you think are most likely — I assume Congress plays a role in one?
Britton-Purdy: I see two paths: One is indeed to try to strengthen Congress — at last! But that can feel quixotic. The other is to accept seesawing regimes of executive initiative — at the extreme, oscillating and warring emergencies. Energy emergency. Climate emergency. Energy emergency II.
Guida: The seesawing regimes future sounds like a deepening of where we are, in terms of the presidency. For example, what happens in 2029 to the Justice Department? One could imagine two versions of it: One presidential regime features the post-Watergate ideal of an independent agency; another features prosecutions of political opponents and the like. But having this stark seesaw doesn’t seem sustainable.
Britton-Purdy: The second — the Justice Department as a political weapon — is the worst prospect from a rule of law perspective. The Trump administration has enthusiastically used law enforcement against opponents. But Trump’s base would say we’re already in a seesaw because of targeted prosecutions between 2020 and 2024.
The post-Watergate experience at the Justice Department shows that norms can be rebuilt — or just created. Or maybe, more cynically, political elites realize it’s just too dangerous to try to put each other in jail every four years, so they find a way to lower the temperature, and legal norms can reassert themselves.
Pozen: More broadly, I think policymakers looking to rebuild in good faith after Trump face a choice about the nature of that rebuilding project. In a “Never again!” spirit, they could commit to a “liberalism of fear” that seeks, above all, to minimize the likelihood of further government abuses.
Guida: What is an example of something from the liberalism-of-fear playbook?
Pozen: Checks and balances and veto points are good; the more they slow things down, the better. Courts are bulwarks of liberty and law; the more empowered they are, the better. NGOs are sites of free speech and free thought; the more insulated they are from the state, the better.
On the other side of the ledger, this approach would counsel against, for example, thinking seriously about Supreme Court reform or filibuster reform. The downside risk is too high.
The problem is that there are risks in all directions. If you make it your No. 1 priority to avoid bad outcomes, you may be left with a system incapable of meeting the major challenges of the day, whether it’s economic inequality, climate change, dislocations caused by artificial intelligence, or whatever else.
To take an example from the university context, where I work, some of my colleagues have suggested that the lesson to take from Trump 2.0 is that universities ought to wean themselves off federal grants and become fully fiscally independent; otherwise, they’ll remain too vulnerable to political pressure. This would be a Pyrrhic victory, however, if you believe that robust government funding of research, and of higher education in general, is vital for scientific and social progress.
Guida: What else could reformers try, if not a liberalism of fear?
Pozen: Alternatively, they could try to demonstrate that “progressive anti-authoritarianism” is not an oxymoron — that ambitious and inclusive policy agendas are still possible and desirable in a liberal democracy. The idea would be to pursue bold government goals through means that are relatively resilient to authoritarian capture.
Guida: And what is an example or two of that?
Pozen: There is no off-the-shelf playbook for this, but as a first pass, I would say that rebuilding congressional capacity has to be a pillar of any such program, along with invigorated antimonopoly enforcement, campaign finance reform and other policies that target economic domination and concentrated power. My colleague Reilly Steel has a new paper that explains how such policies can be designed in ways that curb “systematic corruption.”
Articulating a compelling vision of progressive anti-authoritarianism (or whatever one calls it) might also have electoral payoffs. I claim no expertise on this. I just observe that anti-authoritarianism, in and of itself, doesn’t seem to have a lasting majority constituency in other countries that have struggled with similar issues. Even when opposition parties manage to retake power, as in Poland, systems that fail to deliver the sorts of policies people need to lead decent, dignified lives remain vulnerable to the next crop of authoritarians in waiting. The stability of constitutional democracy ultimately depends on responsive governance of the sort that a purely defensive agenda can’t deliver.
Britton-Purdy: The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Bernie Sanders “fighting oligarchy” tour framed Trump as authoritarian and also as a product of billionaire power, legitimate discontent about affordability and the failure of mainstream politicians to respond adequately. That implies protecting — and extending — due process, voting rights, etc., while also pushing for transformation on economic issues like wages, working conditions, housing affordability, and breaking up or otherwise constraining the tech monopolies. The idea is that Trump arises from the failures of the pre-2016 world, so if anti-authoritarian resistance means trying to restore that world, that can’t be right. We have to transform those conditions. This is a synthesis of the first two positions — I think it’s exactly the right direction.
Guida: Talk a little about what you see as troubling as well as hopeful developments since your article came out in October.
Pozen: Well, short of full-on fascism, it’s hard to get much more troubling than the federal actions in Minnesota. But there have been encouraging developments, such as the backlash to ICE and Trump’s recognition that he had to pivot on immigration. It is also notable that for all his raging against the court’s tariffs decision, Trump never once suggested that he would simply refuse to comply. Some institutions and norms continue to hold. While the moment is therefore confusing — and could still break in many directions — the authoritarian danger has only become more obvious, lurid and imperialist.
Guida: Let’s say, in January 2027, there is a Democratic House. Perhaps a Senate as well, perhaps not. But the midterms have come and gone more or less as usual. First, does that suggest there is still a way to go to a truly authoritarian regime?
Britton-Purdy: Free and fair elections are the ultimate touchstone. If you have those, you can argue over, and work for, everything else.
Guida: What one or two things should that Democratic chamber (or chambers) do?
Britton-Purdy: I don’t know exactly what Democrats should do, but I know what it should mean: We believe the system has been broken and has failed many people, we want both affordability and constitutional democracy, we are angry at Trump’s abuses of power and at the billionaires and giant corporations that have enabled him and profited from those abuses, and we want to make this system work.
Maybe that’s more like a five-point manifesto with a legislative agenda attached. That might include the kind of immigration reform that majorities seem to want, with pathways to citizenship and support for future enforcement, which would have the political benefit of taking that issue off the table to some extent. It might include a meaningful reassertion of power over war. It would include the kinds of economic populism that we touched on earlier. And even if these bills would all be vetoed, Democrats had better show that they mean it and are ready to govern for a discontented majority.
Democrats should also put meaningful limits on emergency powers. My colleague Tim Meyer has an essay coming out in which he argues that they should be ready to offer the next Democratic president a deal: You come to us with your agenda rather than following Trump in imposing it by executive order, and we’ll enact it while you sign legislation to constrain future presidents — and you — from trying to rule unilaterally. A lot of what looks like constitutional crisis is statutory accretion plus an inert Congress, and an active Congress could roll that back.
Pozen: I will just second what Jed said — and note that, in the language of our article, this would be a broad push to respond to the “authoritarian crisis” threat and the “more of the same” diagnosis at the same time, rather than just one or the other.
Jedediah Britton-Purdy is a law professor at Duke and the author, most recently, of “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope.” David Pozen is a law professor at Columbia and the author, most recently, of “The Constitution of the War on Drugs.” John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
Source photographs by Damon Winter/The New York Times, Nathan Howard/Reuters, Mark Peterson for The New York Times, U.S. Central Command Public Affairs, via Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Davidoff Studios/Getty Images, Atta Kenare/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Adam Gray/Reuters, U.S. Southern Command, Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times, Tyrone Siu/Reuters, Ioulex for The New York Times, and Hussein Malla/Associated Press.
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