National Public Radio’s “roving national correspondent” Frank Langfitt uncovered the least surprising story of the week: Liberal professors think Trump is a tyrant. The actual headline for the Tuesday morning text report read “Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism.”
It’s laughable to portray left-wing campus professors as agents of democracy when academe is incredibly one-sided, but NPR took the survey all too seriously.
A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump's election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump's second term, that figure plummeted to 55.
"That's a precipitous drop," says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."
And when did this survey began collating scholarly opinion on the state of American democracy? During Trump’s first year in office, of course!
Carey said the decline between November and February was the biggest since Bright Line Watch began surveying scholars on threats to American democracy in 2017. In the survey, respondents consider 30 indicators of democratic performance, including whether the government interferes with the press, punishes political opponents and whether the legislature and the judiciary can check executive authority.
Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump's attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.
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When these scholars use the term "authoritarianism," they aren't talking about a system like China's, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called "competitive authoritarianism," the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.
The group’s definition of “competitive authoritarianism” seemed suspiciously curated to fit a certain president, though the study also found "Democrats are more supportive of aggressive action – including violence – against corporate CEOs in the name of economic justice than are Republicans..." But don't wait up for a story on that inconvenient statistic, at least not on taxpayer-funded NPR.
In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments -- including the prosecutor's office and judiciary -- with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor.
Once again, feel free to smirk at the idea that only Trump used loyalist prosecutors to try and tilt the electoral playing field. NPR allowed one dissenting voice.
While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. James Campbell, a retired political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers to address long-standing problems. Campbell points to Trump's use of tariffs to try to push companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States....Campbell adds that he thinks many political scientists may see Trump as autocratic because they don't like him or his politics.
Then the litany of Trump’s alleged anti-democratic actions resumed.
In another example, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, citing concerns about antisemitism. Scheppele says Orbán also targeted universities that had been critical of his government.
And yet the Obama administration used the same levers of federal control to pressure universities to adhere to #MeToo standards of prosecuting alleged sexual misconduct by students, violating due process procedures to applause from the left and the approval of the press.
