'Fear of retribution spreading': Experts warn of creeping authoritarianism under Trump

Many political observers and activists have been arguing that the American democracy is heading in a wrong direction under President Donald Trump's administration. An article in NPR published Tuesday quoted a number of American university professors, who warned that fear of government retribution is now spreading through society.

The article featured a key survey called Bright Line Watch, in which professors in the United States evaluated the state of American democracy on a scale from zero (total dictatorship) to 100 (ideal democracy). Following Trump's election in November, academics rated American democracy at 67. However, just a few weeks into Trump's second term, that rating dropped significantly to 55.

Many professors interviewed by NPR expressed concerns over the president's attempts to expand executive power.

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John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch, said, "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who co-authored the book How Democracies Die, said the U.S. has already slid into some form of authoritarianism. "It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy," he said.

Levitsky suggested another method for assessing authoritarianism: examining if opposing the government publicly carries repercussions. He argues that, during Trump's presidency, it does. An example of this is Trump's executive orders that prevent lawyers from firms he disapproves of from accessing government buildings and representing contractors for the government.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who has studied Hungary for years, said the U.S. is "on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism."

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The NPR article further mentions that a researcher interviewed requested not to be named because he feared the Trump administration might retaliate by cutting funding for his research projects.

Meanwhile, in an article published in The New Republic on Tuesday, senior journalist and author Alexander Stille echoed this sentiment, saying that Trump resembles Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Like Mussolini’s dictatorship, the writer says, Trump's style of governances "involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort."

"Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses," Stille added.

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"Like Trump, Mussolini was an ardent protectionist, adopting a policy of 'autarky,' demanding that Italy should consume only products made in Italy. The policy was initially a peevish response to the boycott that other nations leveled at Italy following its unprovoked invasion of Ethiopia. But Mussolini elevated the practice to a central feature of Italian economic policy, even though it did little to improve the standard of living for Italians," he wrote.

AlterNet reached out to the White House for comment.

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