March 2026 · Intelligence Report
From Theory to Power
How two centuries of anti-democratic theory became the governing blueprint of the second Trump administration.
Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way define competitive authoritarianism as a regime that keeps the formal institutions of democracy — elections, courts, a legislature — but systematically tilts the playing field so the incumbent cannot lose on a level playing field. It is not a coup. It is not a dictatorship. It is democracy hollowed out from within.
The four mechanisms: (1) abuse of state resources — using government agencies, funding, and personnel as political weapons; (2) harassment of the opposition — legal, financial, and reputational attacks on critics, journalists, and civil society; (3) biased media access — rewarding friendly outlets and punishing hostile ones; (4) selective application of law — prosecuting opponents while shielding allies.
In 2025, Levitsky and Way explicitly stated that the United States has entered competitive authoritarianism. This report traces how that outcome was not accidental — it is the culmination of nearly two centuries of reactionary political theory, from 19th-century counter-Enlightenment thought through European fascism, post-war intellectual networks, Christian Dominionism, and Silicon Valley neoreaction, all converging in the policy blueprints of Project 2025 and the second Trump administration.
— Levitsky & Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (Cambridge, 2010)
Each era in the timeline below contributed a specific building block to the competitive authoritarian system now operating in the United States. The classical precursors provided the philosophical justification for executive supremacy. The fascists built the institutional playbook. The post-war underground kept the ideas alive through the liberal consensus era. The religious right provided the mass political base. NRx provided the Silicon Valley money and the updated vocabulary. Project 2025 translated theory into executive orders. The result is not a sudden rupture — it is the end of a very long road.
Every competitive authoritarian regime requires a philosophical justification for why strong executive rule is not merely expedient but correct — why the strongman is not a usurper but a natural sovereign. Three 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers provided that justification. Their ideas were marginalized by the liberal consensus after 1945 but never disappeared — they circulated in conservative and reactionary networks until the conditions were right for their re-emergence.
These three thinkers provide the philosophical bedrock for the specific mechanisms of competitive authoritarianism: Carlyle's Great Man Theory legitimizes the strongman's claim to rule by virtue rather than consent; de Maistre's divine sovereignty delegitimizes popular will as a source of legitimate authority; Schmitt's state of exception provides the legal mechanism for suspending constitutional norms whenever the executive declares a crisis. Together they answer the question every competitive authoritarian regime must answer: why should the people accept rule by one man over rule by law?
The philosophical justifications of Section I were operationalized by a generation of European theorists who built the institutional architecture of fascism: the leader principle, the organic state, the subordination of law to political will, and the elimination of independent institutions. These ideas were discredited by the Holocaust and World War II — but the institutional logic survived. It has re-entered mainstream discourse through the NRx movement, national conservatism, and post-liberal Catholic thought, stripped of explicit racial language but retaining the same structural logic.
Competitive authoritarianism is fascism's institutional successor: it achieves the same ends — executive supremacy, elimination of independent opposition, subordination of law to political will — without the formal abolition of elections. The fascist theorists below provided the vocabulary and the institutional playbook; competitive authoritarianism provides the updated operating system that makes those goals achievable within a nominally democratic framework. The key innovation: you don't need to abolish elections. You need to control the institutions that make elections meaningful.
After 1945, the explicit vocabulary of fascism became politically toxic. But the underlying ideas — executive supremacy, civilizational hierarchy, anti-egalitarianism, the illegitimacy of liberal institutions — did not disappear. They were repackaged, laundered through respectable academic and policy institutions, and transmitted to the next generation of thinkers who would eventually operationalize them. This is the period when the intellectual infrastructure of competitive authoritarianism was quietly assembled, piece by piece, within the mainstream of American conservatism.
This is the critical transmission period for competitive authoritarianism. The scholars below did not advocate for fascism — but they built the specific intellectual infrastructure that makes competitive authoritarianism possible: anti-egalitarian philosophy (Kirk) that legitimizes hierarchy; elite theory (Burnham) that reframes democracy as a facade; esoteric governance (Strauss) that justifies ruling through deception; metapolitical strategy (de Benoist) that targets institutions before elections; institutional infrastructure (Weyrich) that translates ideas into power; and populist mobilization theory (Francis) that provides the electoral base. Each piece was necessary. None was sufficient alone.
The intellectual traditions of Sections I–III had one critical weakness: they were elite theories with no mass political base. That gap was filled by a distinctly American theological tradition that provided the religious justification for authoritarian governance — and the tens of millions of voters needed to implement it. Running from R.J. Rushdoony's Christian Reconstructionism through Francis Schaeffer's culture-war theology to the Seven Mountains Mandate, this tradition transformed anti-democratic theory from an academic project into a mass political movement.
American competitive authoritarianism has a feature absent from its Hungarian or Turkish analogues: a mass religious movement that provides both electoral mobilization and theological legitimation for executive supremacy. The Dominionist tradition argues that democratic pluralism is itself a form of apostasy — that God's law supersedes human law, and that Christians are divinely mandated to govern all spheres of society. This makes the dismantling of democratic norms not merely politically expedient but spiritually obligatory. It also provides the competitive authoritarian regime with a self-renewing base of supporters who are ideologically committed to the project regardless of its democratic costs.
As the post-Cold War liberal consensus began to fracture, a new generation of political scientists and public intellectuals developed the theoretical framework for understanding what was happening — and what was coming. This section is where the concept of competitive authoritarianism was named, defined, and documented. The scholars below were not advocates for the system; they were its diagnosticians. Their frameworks are now being used to evaluate the United States in real time.
This section is the analytical core of the report. Levitsky and Way's concept of competitive authoritarianism — coined in 2002 to describe regimes in the post-Soviet periphery — has now been applied by its own authors to the United States. The progression from Zakaria's 'illiberal democracy' (1997) through Levitsky and Way's 'competitive authoritarianism' (2002) to Levitsky and Ziblatt's 'How Democracies Die' (2018) to the 2025 Foreign Affairs categorization of the U.S. is not a theoretical arc — it is a real-time diagnosis of a patient whose condition was identified before the symptoms became acute. Hungary (Orbán) and national conservatism (Hazony) complete the picture: the proof of concept and the mainstream political theory.
The intellectual traditions above were synthesized into a new, distinctly 21st-century form by a network of Silicon Valley technologists and investors who combined anti-democratic philosophy with the tools and resources of the tech industry. This is the most recent and most consequential development in the lineage: for the first time, the people who control the information infrastructure of modern society — social media platforms, AI systems, government data systems, financial networks — are ideologically aligned with the competitive authoritarian project.
NRx is competitive authoritarianism's technical upgrade. It provides three things the older traditions lacked: (1) a class of people — Silicon Valley technologists — with the skills and resources to actually implement the project; (2) an updated vocabulary ('Cathedral,' 'deep state,' 'regime') that makes anti-democratic ideas legible to a 21st-century audience; and (3) a direct line from theory to power through Peter Thiel's funding of Yarvin, Thiel's backing of Trump, Musk's appointment to DOGE, and JD Vance's vice presidency. The distance between Yarvin's blog and the Oval Office has collapsed to zero.
The intellectual lineage of Sections I–VI was translated into a concrete governing agenda through Project 2025 and a series of executive instruments deployed from January 20, 2025. This is where theory becomes practice — where the philosophical justifications of Carlyle and Schmitt, the institutional playbook of Gentile and the Führerprinzip, the transmission networks of Weyrich and Francis, the theological mandate of Rushdoony, and the technical vocabulary of Yarvin all converge in a single governing document and a single administration.
Each policy instrument below corresponds precisely to one of Levitsky and Way's four mechanisms of competitive authoritarianism: Schedule F converts the civil service from a neutral institution into a partisan instrument (abuse of state resources); DOGE defunds and dismantles institutions that resist the executive (harassment of opposition); executive orders targeting law firms and universities punish political opponents through legal mechanisms (selective application of law); and the administration's media strategy rewards friendly outlets and punishes critical ones (biased media access). This is not a coincidence. These are the four mechanisms of competitive authoritarianism, implemented systematically and simultaneously.
The intellectual lineage documented in Sections I–VII is not merely theoretical. It has produced measurable, documented outcomes that can be evaluated against the definition of competitive authoritarianism established in Section V. Three independent measurement frameworks — one European (V-Dem), one academic (Bright Line Watch), one from the scholars who coined the term (Foreign Affairs) — converge on the same conclusion: the United States has crossed the threshold.
The measurements below are the empirical confirmation of the entire argument of this report. The V-Dem 24% decline in a single year, the Bright Line Watch expert ratings at record lows, and the Foreign Affairs categorization by Levitsky and Way themselves all use different methodologies and arrive at the same conclusion: the United States meets the definition of competitive authoritarianism. The intellectual lineage traced in Sections I–VII is not a historical curiosity — it is the causal explanation for the numbers in this section. The ideas produced the outcomes. The outcomes confirm the ideas were real.
Competitive authoritarianism is not irreversible. Levitsky himself has stated that the United States' descent into competitive authoritarianism "can be reversed — and I think likely will be reversed." The historical record supports this: Hungary's trajectory was not inevitable, and the United States has institutional resources — a federal judiciary, a professional civil service, a free press, and a civil society — that most competitive authoritarian regimes lack. But reversal requires understanding the system being resisted, which is the purpose of this report.
The same framework that explains how competitive authoritarianism was built explains how it can be dismantled. Levitsky and Way's four mechanisms are the targets: restoring civil service independence (counter to abuse of state resources); protecting civil society and the press (counter to harassment of opposition); enforcing media pluralism (counter to biased media access); and restoring equal application of law (counter to selective prosecution). The 2026 midterm elections are the first institutional test. The courts are the second. Civil society is the third.
Sources: V-Dem Institute · Bright Line Watch · Foreign Affairs · Brennan Center · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Mises Institute · Cascade Institute · Wikipedia · The Guardian · Time Magazine
Compiled March 2026. All source links open primary documents. This report documents publicly available scholarship and does not constitute legal or political advice.