The Path to American Authoritarianism
What Comes After Democratic Breakdown
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way
February 11, 2025
While the authors correctly identify the risk of democratic breakdown, their analysis is unfortunately trapped in an outdated framework that fails to grasp two critical accelerants.
First, they underestimate how AI already weaponizes America’s buried atrocities. Unlike human narratives that often gloss over historical trauma, AI can instantaneously surface and connect centuries of state violence by normalizing it – from President Jackson’s genocidal Trail of Tears to President Wilson’s Red Summer of 1919 leading to Tulsa Massacre of 1921. AI doesn’t miss the subtext of racist deception in the Missouri Compromise or the brutally racist and illegal conquest of Texas and Florida to expand slavery. It can relentlessly illuminate how “America First” movements always consistently and repeatedly enabled American race-based authoritarianism since the late 1800s.
The authors vaguely suggest institutional guardrails could contain authoritarian power. But they fail to recognize how AI can weave foundational historical threads into devastating narratives that undermine faith in those very institutions. When AI connects the dots between a past of systemic state violence and the present institutional power of non-governmental “efficiency” (totalitarian) mercenaries called DOGE, it becomes much harder to believe in the protective power of courts or federalism.
Second, they dramatically underestimate the velocity of AI-powered narrative control. Their analysis feels like watching someone explain how decades of prior print media will hold the line on public opinion in 1933, while completely missing how the Nazi regime flooded radio waves and totally rewrote reality in just three months. 2025 AI is far more powerful than 1933 radio – it can generate, target, and amplify hateful messages at a scale that makes Hitler’s genocidal machines look primitive.
The authors worry about gradual institutional capture through bureaucratic maneuvering. But they miss how AI can simply flatten institutional resistance through overwhelming narrative force.
Why bother carefully pressuring judges and abiding by them when AI can flood every platform with unaccountable sock puppet messages demanding targeting judges to be eliminated if “woke” or opposed to “efficiency”? Already the White House has announced they will be “looking into” any judge who disagrees with “efficiency”. The speed and scale of AI-powered propaganda makes the old ways of careful institutional analysis feel quaint, like marching troops with slow-firing inaccurate muskets into a machine gun. Domain shifts are devastating to analysis that doesn’t account for what’s changed.
Therefore the Foreign Affairs assessment is not just wrong, it’s dangerously overconfident in the way that reduces opposition to mass unjust incarceration and death. By suggesting American institutions can weather authoritarian pressure through quaint concepts of traditional resistance, they underestimate how AI already fundamentally changes the game.
Quantum threats are basically here and some people still don’t know how to change their passwords.
Does anyone really think executive orders pumped out by the hundreds aren’t being written with software? Does anyone really not understand why a few college-aged kids who barely write software are being called “auditors” of “efficiency” on a highly complex financial system they can’t possibly understand?
They are feeding all, and I mean all, American citizen data into Elon Musk’s private unsafe AI infrastructure and asking it “what would Hitler do, in the voice of Goebbels?”
This won’t be a slow erosion of democracy through bureaucratic weaponization, waters creeping up on those who don’t have boats. It already is a tsunami-level warning of AI-powered narrative control that will catastrophically sweep away democratic institutions faster than any previous authoritarian transition.
The authors claim America won’t face “classic dictatorship.” But by failing to grasp how AI supercharges authoritarian power, they miss that we’re facing something potentially worse – a form of technologically-enhanced authoritarianism that could exceed anything in history. And this “Technocracy” disaster has been many decades in the making, a Musk family obsession since the 1930s as proven out in South African apartheid, not something political scientists today should be unfamiliar with.
Elon Musk’s grandfather making national security news with racist totalitarian “Technocracy”. Source: The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Tue, Oct 8, 1940, Page 16Elon Musk repeatedly promoted fascism on social media such as polling followers whether he should bring his Grandfather’s racist totalitarian Technocracy back by “colonizing Mars” and ignoring all laws. Source: Twitter
In case Elon Musk’s encoded speech pattern is unclear, planet “Mars” is used (incorrectly) to promote open violation of the law and disobeying law enforcement, like saying America will finally be as good as Mars when the white men who occupy it can’t be regulated: Occupy Mars = Aryan Nation.
We all know the children’s tale about what comes next if we don’t understand the threat. The institutional safeguards appear as straw huts against a coming huff-a-puff wolf. We need to wake up to the true scale and speed of the threat before it’s too late.
The simple reality is this: AI-powered authoritarianism won’t respect and carefully navigate around slow democratic institutions – it will overwhelm them in raw narrative force at unprecedented speeds causing disasters to force surrender and complacency.
To put it another way, Nazi generals carelessly sped full speed into France to overwhelm their targets while leaving themselves dangerously exposed. The French capitulated and resolved themselves to occupation instead of rapid counter attack that would have destroyed the Nazis. General Grant understood this in the 1860s yet the French didn’t grasp adequately the domain shift tactics of radios, planes and trucks.
The Foreign Affairs authors are analyzing how to defend against 20th century authoritarianism while missing that an AI invasion force already has landed and is expanding. They’re not just wrong about defenses, they’re complacent and leaving America dangerously unguarded.
I recently co-authored an expert analysis in Foreign Policy examining what may be the most significant security breach in U.S. government history.
The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history.
In the span of just weeks, the U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.
At the heart of this breach lies a troubling paradox: entry-level programmers, including the notably unprofessional “Big Balls” team, gained physical access to critical government systems despite having minimal understanding of federal operations or financial infrastructure. Their actions, masked behind a veneer of “efficiency” improvements, suggest a concerning pattern of rapid data extraction, likely intended for integration with unregulated AI systems.
The credibility of DOGE’s claims deserves particular scrutiny, especially given their connection to Grok, Elon Musk’s AI system, which has demonstrated a pattern of spreading lies, lies and more lies. A particularly alarming precedent emerged in April 2024, when Musk’s platform, known for amplifying Russian-aligned narratives, promoted disinformation about Iranian missile strikes in Israel.
When similar events actually occurred months later in October, causing significant damage, it raised disturbing questions about the relationship between seeding disinformation campaigns and causing subsequent real-world events.
Iranian missile barrage caused NIS 150m to NIS 200m in damage to property: Since the October 1 attack, about 2,500 compensation claims have been submitted for damage to buildings, vehicles, and contents, according to Israel Tax Authority data
This pattern suggests a more sinister possibility: DOGE’s current flood of claims about U.S. government operations may be testing public reaction to planned future actions. The risk here is not just about data theft, but about the potential manufacturing or manipulation of evidence to create predetermined narratives that could significantly damage American interests.
The contemporary threat landscape requires us to examine these connections between social media manipulation, AI systems, and national security with renewed vigilance. The DOGE attacks represent not just a technical breach, but a potential blueprint for how modern information warfare can be conducted under the false guise of technological innovation.
Department of Government Extermination (DOGE) Can’t Stop Talking Up Efficiency, as if Nobody Remembers What That Means in History
The disease of efficiency is so dangerous because at first it appears rational. Who opposes a little more efficiency? That’s the pitch. But this misses the point. Who judges the amount, the purpose, the speed and impact of reductions? Fever dreams of rapid efficiency actually foreshadow power and control being transferred catastrophically for the worst tragedies in human history.
Writing during the height of the Cold War, McCune saw how the pressure to compete with Soviet rocket ship propaganda advocating for extreme “efficiency” was creating dangerous impulses to sacrifice democratic freedoms for streamlined decision-making. (Khrushchev later admitted the efficiency of Soviet rocket engineering meant huge errors beyond several thousand kilometers, meaning he feared test launches could accidentally land on Alaska).
Many experts have pointed to SpaceX as a copy-paste of the worst ideas of Soviet engineering and thus experiencing similar “efficiencies” (rapid failure)
McCune’s clarion warning echoes through the decades: when institutions become obsessed with efficiency above all else, totalitarianism follows.
Danger of DOGE
McCune identified three specific dangers that emerge when societies prioritize efficiency over democracy. First is the loss of self-government through “the need for secrecy and dispatch”. We see that immediately already with DOGE. Second is the concentration of economic power in the name of efficiency, also seen in DOGE. Third is the abandonment of democratic processes in a “rush toward authoritarianism”, which we saw yesterday with Elon Musk standing in his platform shoes over two children, mocking the President like a scared little boy.
Elon Musk, standing in platform shoes to hover over everyone in a White House takeover speech, shows America how DOG-E means the sitting U.S. President is now his little bitch
These weren’t theoretical concerns then and they certainly aren’t today either. By 1958, the world had already seen how the language of efficiency enabled some of history’s greatest atrocities.
Efficiency of DOGE is the Atrocity Across Ideology
Fascist Nazi Germany: The Bureaucracy of Genocide
The Nazi regime represented the apotheosis of efficient mass murder. The Holocaust was planned at the Wannsee Conference like a business optimization meeting. IBM’s punch card technology helped track victims with industrial precision. The death camps themselves were designed with assembly-line efficiency in mind. The entire apparatus of genocide was wrapped in the bloodless language of administrative efficiency.
Fascist Apartheid South Africa: Efficient Segregation
The apartheid regime, which Elon Musk grew up with, used efficiency arguments to justify its entire system of racial oppression. The Group Areas Act was sold as efficient urban planning. The Bantustans were portrayed as an efficient administrative solution. Each “efficiency improvement” meant more rights stripped away, more lives destroyed.
Colonial Belgian King: The Efficient Colony
King Leopold II ran the Congo as history’s most efficient extraction operation, leading to millions of deaths. Every atrocity was justified by the need for efficient rubber quotas. Human beings were reduced to units of production in a horrifically efficient system.
Colonial British Raj: Efficient Famine
The British reorganized traditional Indian agriculture in the name of efficiency, contributing to devastating famines that killed millions. Traditional community systems that had worked for centuries were destroyed for “modern” efficiency.
Communist Soviet Union: The Efficient Farm
Stalin’s drive for agricultural “efficiency” through collectivization led directly to the deaths of millions in Ukraine. Traditional farming practices were declared inefficient and eliminated, replaced by centrally planned starvation. Human complexity was sacrificed on the altar of systematic efficiency.
Communist Khmer Rouge: Year Zero Efficiency
The Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero” policy sought to efficiently remake Cambodian society by eliminating intellectuals and urban dwellers. Their drive for agricultural efficiency led to killing fields. Human difference itself was treated as an inefficiency to be eliminated.
DOGE Destroying America
The same progression seen above is happening now in America in four stages. First, DOGE repeatedly pumps the message that efficiency alone is the highest value, promoting destruction of any and all aid or assistance to the needy. This is a cruel betrayal of humanity, a overt destruction of governance, wrapped in a the candy coating of saving money. Second, any human complexity or diversity is mapped as “inefficiencies” to be eliminated. Covering up posters, walls and wiping websites removes people who don’t “fit” the DOGE definition of the most “efficient” concepts of identity (either a white man or not).
Source: BlueSky
Third comes the use of technical, administrative language to mask moral horrors. How much money can be made from selling crematoriums? Wall Street seems to love the Tesla vehicles killing more people than ever in deadly fires, even as sales collapse. The last phase is an eventual elimination of human “inefficiencies” through violence.
DOGE Worse Than Toxic TechBros
Similar patterns have been emerging in more subtle forms for a decade already. The line from early tech “optimization” culture to DOGE is yet another proof of how unchecked “efficiency” will evolve toward the crime of authoritarianism if no prevention measures are implemented. DOGE is the extremist worst form of what has been allowed to bubble along in Silicon Valley, regression (lack of innovation) allowed to go unregulated for far too long:
Workplace surveillance justified as productivity optimization
Algorithmic decision-making promising efficient resource allocation while encoding bias
Healthcare systems that prioritize throughput over human care
Immigration systems that reduce complex human situations to simple go/no go criteria
Gender binary enforcement that treats human diversity as inefficient deviation
Educational standardization that eliminates “inefficient” forms of learning and teaching
That was all bad, and left unchecked it has fertilized something far, far worse. Following McCune’s framework, we see clearly that Elon Musk is emboldened to go around screaming from the top of a mountain that he is the Stalin of the Soviet Union, he is the Pol Pot of Cambodia, he is the Hitler of Nazi Germany, he is the AWB of South Africa.
A South African Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) member in 2010 (left) and a South African-born member of MAGA in the U.S. on 20 January 2025 (right). Source: The Guardian. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images, Reuters
The signals are obvious because Musk wants to socialize and normalize the most extreme harms. He is worse than someone saying he can shoot to death a stranger on 5th avenue and nobody would even notice. He is worse than someone saying he can grab women by their…. His escalation to even louder alarms are not exaggerations, because Musk brightly lights up all five reliable dictatorship indicators with overt moves to end American democracy.
Calls for “streamlining” democratic processes
The treatment of human complexity as an obstacle to be eliminated
The use of technical language to mask moral decisions
The portrayal of rights, regulations and protections as “inefficient friction”
The concentration of power in the name of efficient decision-making
Fatal Flaw of Musk Efficiency
Elon Musk has been a frequent promoter of an AfD (Nazi) Party in Germany, which generates widespread disgust and protests such as this graffiti outside the Berlin Tesla factory.
What McCune understood, and what we must remember, is that democracy is inherently and deliberately opposed to abuse of “efficient” ideas that are basically cheats and fraud to cause harms. Debate, dissent, checks and balances, and protecting rights all create friction in a system to force sustainable and healthy long-term outcomes instead of mass graves. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of avoiding “penny wise, pound foolish” self-destruction by dictators hiding bodies. The “inefficiencies” of democracy are exactly what protect from authoritarian overreach and genocide.
Efficiency at What Cost?
The pressure for efficiency isn’t going away. If anything, in an age of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making, it’s increasing. The question isn’t whether to be efficient or not, but rather:
Efficient for whom? At whose cost? Serving what values? To what end?
We face the same choice McCune identified in 1958: whether to sacrifice democratic freedoms on the altar of toxic efficiency headed towards an explosion of accidents, or to remember that human dignity often requires being willingly, proudly deliberate instead.
Elon Musk denied leading a “hostile takeover” of the US government and defended his cost-cutting plans… “It’s not like I think I can get away with something.” […] “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected”.
He’s saying he will be incorrect, like saying he will commit crimes.
Hostile takeover? Should be corrected. Go ahead. Try to catch him if you can.
Observe how his newest and best Tesla “driverless” software suddenly accelerates into a pole. This is a man who knows full well that he’s in blitzkrieg mode, flooding targets with a volume and velocity of damage (efficiently worse) to makes the trail of destruction impossible to correct.
Elon Musk declared to investors in 2025 his engineers had solved for crashes and there would be no more this year. Immediately afterwards, as if a robot wanted to quickly demonstrate the true meaning of reckless “efficiency”, Tesla’s latest version of “Full Self Driving” in their latest version of a Swasticar catastrophically drove itself into a pole.
Your humanity is not to be optimized away through rushed dangerous mistakes and cover-ups. Your rights are not obstacles to be streamlined away in the name of making Elon Musk more money faster while millions face starvation. Your dignity is not a resource to be extracted and given away.
When you hear DOGE pumping efficiency above all else, remember this history. Remember that before every great bloody atrocity came the bloodless disinformation of optimization.
Today’s efficiency metrics – from productivity scores to algorithmic decision-making – hide rampantly dehumanizing assumptions. The gig economy’s “efficient” allocation methods has shifted the entire tech industry towards treating people as interchangeable disposable parts rather than human beings. Round after round of layoffs in false claims of “optimization” has become endemic to Big Tech in America.
Half of the business leaders admitted that 75% or more of the layoffs at the company in the past year weren’t necessary for cutting costs. Also, about 62% of business leaders said that their company disguised performance-based terminations as layoffs in an effort to maintain company morale, while 59% said they did so in order to avoid wrongful termination claims.
What’s particularly chilling about learning history is how ordinary people – engineers, businessmen, bureaucrats – participate in catastrophic atrocities while viewing themselves as just doing some math rather than facilitating maniacal human rights violations. The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt termed it, often wore the mask of technical optimization.
We need to be deeply skeptical of technocratic approaches to human problems because they are rooted in fascism leading to optimized killing fields and crematoriums. Any real efficiency would account for sustainability instead with indicators of human dignity, rights, and wellbeing – not just mechanical redirection of wealth to a single insecure man wearing platform shoes throwing Hitler salutes.
The warning is clear: America needs to be deliberately and immediately ending Elon Musk’s latest attempts to destroy America and replace it with his “occupy Mars” (white supremacist colonialism) concept of Technocracy (fascism).
DOGE is quite simply banking on what Tesla has gotten away with for a decade already, moving so fast to break so many things so badly that families can only grieve their loved ones falling victim to a mass destruction for profit model.
Teslas notoriously “veer” uncontrollably to the right and crash, trapping everyone inside as intense flames burn them to death. Witnesses and emergency responders can only watch in horror, no matter how fast they respond. A lack of disaster prevention is how Elon Musk got rich, and thus why he plans to do the exact same thing with government.
The White House has launched an attack on judicial review that is very familiar to any historian of U.S. foreign intervention tactics (coups).
It raises the question, if someone is following a historical playbook for instituting martial law, but hasn’t gotten far enough to openly declare it yet, should we wait until they explicitly say “martial law” before using that term? This article makes a case that Vance is following specific steps from a documented pattern that historically led to martial law and military tribunals.
When he suggested that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance wasn’t drawing from American constitutional tradition – he was echoing the well-known playbook the United States repeatedly used to dismantle democratic institutions abroad.
Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. developed a clear pattern for supporting regime change: systematically undermining judicial independence as a crucial step toward establishing unchecked executive control. The parallels between these historical interventions and current rhetoric about limiting judicial review are striking and deeply concerning.
The Military Intervention Template
The U.S. playbook for overseas intervention typically followed a four stage plan to remove existing government and quickly replace it with a dictatorship:
Declare judicial oversight as obstruction of necessary reforms
Assert certain executive powers as beyond judicial review
Establish parallel systems (often military tribunals)
Eventually eliminate judicial independence entirely
Precedents Americans Tend to Forget, Because Somewhere Else
Chile 1973:
Following the U.S.-backed coup against Salvador Allende, Pinochet’s junta moved immediately to neutralize judicial oversight. By September 14, 1973 – just three days after the coup – the Constitutional Court was suspended. The regime argued that national security requirements superseded judicial authority, eerily similar to current arguments about executive privilege.
Guatemala 1954:
When the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected President Arbenz, the dismantling of judicial independence was swift and methodical. Within weeks of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas taking power in July 1954, the constitution was suspended and military tribunals replaced civilian courts. The justification? That the judiciary was impeding necessary anti-communist reforms and economic modernization.
Iran 1953:
Operation AJAX’s overthrow of Mossadegh was followed by a systematic purge of independent judges. By September 1953, civilian courts were subordinated to military authority. The Shah’s government claimed judicial oversight was hampering essential economic and security reforms – a recurring theme in attacks on judicial independence.
Need I go on?
Vance Brings it Home
Vance knows domestically it’s been ruled the judiciary can judge the executive, and he doesn’t care. When he suggests judges can’t review certain executive actions, he’s drawing from the foreign interventionist playbook that says the end of democracy is justified by corporations and Christians wanting more control (fewer liberties).
His specific examples about military operations and prosecutorial discretion mirror arguments used in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran to begin the process of eliminating judicial oversight and end democracy.
Iran’s trajectory in particular should terrify anyone following Bannon’s vision for America. After the U.S. helped overthrow its democratic government in 1953, the resulting authoritarian regime collapsed into the 1979 Islamic Revolution – creating precisely the kind of anti-American theocratic state that Bannon has repeatedly praised as a model of religious nationalism, while seemingly blind to how U.S. interference with Iran’s judiciary created the conditions for that revolution.
The connection runs deeper through the Reagan years into today. Many Reagan administration officials who later condemned Iran’s hostility had earlier supported dismantling its independent judiciary under the Shah. U.S. actions – including the systematic destruction of judicial review that Vance now promotes – helped transform Iran from a democracy into first a dictatorship and then a theocratic state. This same blueprint appears in Project 2025’s vision of “traditionalist” governance through expanded executive power and weakened courts.
This historical parallel exposes the dangerous consistency in Bannon’s position. The same playbook that helped create an anti-American Iran is now being proposed for use at home to create an anti-American America. When Bannon praises Iran’s religious nationalism while supporting attacks on America’s independent judiciary, he’s endorsing the very tactics that destroyed Iranian democracy and created the system of religious law he claims to admire – but this time, he wants to deploy them against American courts.
Project 2025: The Domestic Coup Playbook
Project 2025 makes the threat immediate. This Heritage Foundation blueprint combines historically proven tactics of institutional capture with direct control of federal operations – the first time foreign intervention tactics are being deployed domestically by actors controlling federal operations. Through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), it has already achieved what previous domestic coup attempts could not – institutional capacity for systemic capture without requiring military alignment.
When we see Vance echoing these same strategic approaches to judicial control, it’s not coincidental. Project 2025’s own documents reveal 72 attacks on American institutions completed so far, many through executive orders and agency-level directives – exactly the kind of systematic dismantling of oversight that preceded martial law in Iran, Chile, and Guatemala.
These aren’t just historical analogies; consider now the obvious parallels between Vance attacking America from within the White House versus the CIA attacking foreign governments:
Claims of executive domains beyond judicial review
Emphasis on security and efficiency justifications
Portrayal of judges as obstructing necessary changes
Gradual expansion of “unreviewable” executive power
The Time to Act is Before Martial Law
The United States has long experience with dismantling judicial independence abroad. When administration officials begin using rhetoric that echoes these foreign interventions back home, it should raise serious concerns.
The Vance attack on judicial review isn’t just a constitutional debate – it’s an attempt to import very well known and refined tactics previously secretly developed for regime change operations elsewhere, into overt domestic governance.
The historical record is clear: questioning judicial authority to review executive actions often marks the first step toward broader autocratic control. The fact that this rhetoric now echoes U.S. foreign intervention tactics with Bannon in the room makes it more concerning, not less – because we know exactly where this path leads. Vance said it himself months ago: Trump should “seize control, fire everyone and replace them with our people” and then, like Andrew Jackson, simply refuse to listen to judges:
The threat is enforcement. As George explains, when U.S. Marshals report to Trump, who will enforce the court orders?
The question isn’t whether Americans will recognize these tactics – we’re telling you what they are. The question is whether anyone will act before judicial review becomes another historical example of what Americans lost while waiting for someone else to save them.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
