It’s 2026: Experts Watch U.S. Democratic Erosion Deepen

Scholars confront what may be the defining stress test of American democracy

Trump New Years Open AI Photo / DALL

The democracy scholars who wrote the books, built the frameworks, and spent careers analyzing how free societies unravel in other countries are now watching those same patterns emerge at home — and their warnings have grown more urgent. This is no longer theoretical. The question they once posed abstractly — could it happen here? — has given way to a more pressing one: what happens now that it is?

Since January 20, 2025, President Trump’s second term has unfolded with a speed and systematization that distinguishes it fundamentally from his first. The pardons for approximately 1,500 January 6 defendants — including those convicted of violence against police officers — arrived immediately. The mass dismissals of inspectors general followed. The revival of Schedule F, which could reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees from protected civil servants to at-will workers, began in earnest. To scholars who have spent their lives studying democratic erosion in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and beyond, these are not isolated policy choices. They are textbook moves in a playbook they know by heart.

The Framework That Predicted This Moment

In 2018, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, a book that became something of a secular scripture for those worried about American institutions. They identified four warning signs of authoritarian behavior in elected leaders: rejection of democratic rules, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, tolerance or encouragement of violence, and willingness to curtail civil liberties. At the time, some readers found the comparisons to other countries alarmist. Surely American institutions were stronger, more resilient, more tested by history.

But Levitsky and Ziblatt’s deeper insight was about something more fragile than formal rules: the informal norms that make democracy work. They called these guardrails mutual toleration — accepting that your opponents are legitimate participants in the democratic process, not enemies to be destroyed — and institutional forbearance — exercising restraint in using your legal powers, not pushing every advantage to its maximum extent simply because you can.

The January 6 pardons represent the destruction of both guardrails simultaneously. They normalize political violence while using presidential power in an unprecedented manner to shield participants in an attack on democratic processes themselves. Legal scholars at the Brennan Center for Justice have noted what this signals: impunity. If those who stormed the Capitol face no lasting consequences, what message does that send about future political violence?

Why the Second Term Is Different

Scholars emphasize a categorical difference between Trump’s two terms — one that matters more than any single policy. The first term was often characterized by chaos, infighting, and the friction created by establishment Republicans and career officials who served as what observers called “the adults in the room.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation despite the president’s fury. Career diplomats testified before Congress. Internal resistance, however imperfect, created space for institutional pushback.

The second term arrived with a plan. Project 2025, developed by the Heritage Foundation and allied organizations, provided a comprehensive blueprint for restructuring federal agencies. Key positions have been filled exclusively with loyalists rather than establishment figures. The “unitary executive” theory — that the president has complete control over the executive branch — has become operational doctrine rather than legal theory. The Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling established broad protections for official acts, further emboldening executive action by reducing legal risk.

Georgetown University political scientist Julia Azari has documented how weak parties and strong partisanship enable norm violations: when party elites decline to check their own president, institutional constraints depend entirely on other branches. And when those branches are led by the same party, or when courts have been reshaped by that party’s appointments, the traditional separation of powers begins to collapse inward.

The Professional Civil Service Under Siege

The revival of Schedule F may sound technical, even bureaucratic, but it is neither. Schedule F would reclassify many mid‑ to high‑level civil servants into positions that could be more easily hired and fired, raising concerns about a return to a political “spoils system” rather than a merit‑based career service. The modern merit-based civil service originates in the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created competitive examinations and protections against political firings specifically to replace the old patronage system that had dominated earlier eras of American government.

At stake is something easily overlooked until it is gone: the idea that government should be staffed by people chosen for their expertise rather than their loyalty. Don Moynihan, a leading scholar of public administration at Georgetown, has warned that Schedule F would enable systematic purging of nonpartisan experts and their replacement with political loyalists — a pattern documented extensively in authoritarian backsliding cases around the world.

The administrative state, whatever its critics’ complaints about bureaucratic overreach, serves as a repository of institutional memory. The scientists at the EPA who understand pollution monitoring. The economists at the Federal Reserve who track inflation indicators. The lawyers at the Justice Department who know how to build cases against corruption. These are not interchangeable parts. When they are replaced by people selected primarily for political loyalty, the relationship between citizens and their government changes fundamentally.

The Hungary Model

Princeton’s University’s Kim Lane Scheppele has spent years documenting Hungary’s democratic decline under Viktor Orbán, and she sees direct parallels in what is now unfolding. Orbán similarly restructured Hungary’s civil service to enable replacement of professionals with loyalists — creating what she terms “institutional capture.” He packed courts, captured media, and restructured electoral systems to ensure his party’s continued dominance. He called what he built “illiberal democracy,” a term that revealed both his goals and his methods.

The Hungary comparison has gained particular salience because American conservatives have explicitly praised it as a model. The Conservative Political Action Conference held events in Budapest. Intellectual exchanges between Hungarian and American right-wing movements intensified. Scholars note this represents something historically unprecedented: a major American political movement looking to an autocratizing state as something to emulate rather than avoid.

Poland under the Law and Justice party and Turkey under Erdoğan provide additional reference points — particularly regarding judicial independence and how elected leaders can transform democracies through gradual accumulation of power rather than sudden seizure. The pattern is remarkably consistent: capture the courts, capture the civil service, capture the media, and redefine the rules in ways that appear legal while systematically tilting the playing field.

Justice as a Weapon

The appointment of Pam Bondi as Attorney General and the nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI have crystallized scholarly concerns about the independence of federal law enforcement. Bondi previously dropped a Florida investigation into Trump University after receiving a donation from the Trump Foundation. Patel authored a book explicitly listing individuals he intended to target — what experts describe as an “enemies list” approach to federal law enforcement.

Former federal prosecutors and constitutional law experts have warned that proposals to investigate or prosecute Biden family members and former officials who investigated Donald Trump would amount to politically motivated “revenge prosecutions,” echoing patterns seen in authoritarian contexts worldwide. Research from organizations like the NYU Brennan Center and Protect Democracy documents how efforts to turn prosecutors and police into tools of partisan retribution are characteristic of democratic erosion, as aspiring autocrats often move early to capture nominally independent law‑enforcement institutions.

The mass dismissal of inspectors general across federal agencies compounds these concerns. These positions exist specifically to provide independent accountability within the executive branch — investigating waste, fraud, and abuse regardless of political considerations. Their elimination removes the institutional capacity for internal checks on executive action.

The Debate Over Naming

Is this fascism? The question divides scholars who otherwise share concerns about democratic backsliding. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, argues that Trumpism exhibits core fascist characteristics: mythic past invocation, anti-intellectualism, hierarchy, and the construction of an alternate reality. Columbia historian Robert Paxton, who initially resisted applying the term to Trump, stated that January 6 crossed the threshold.

Others, like Sheri Berman, argue that the historical specificity of fascism — interwar Europe, mass movements, paramilitarism — makes it analytically imprecise for the contemporary American context. The term may generate more heat than light, obscuring the particular mechanisms at work.

What scholars more uniformly agree on is the framework of “democratic backsliding” or “democratic erosion.” Nancy Bermeo of Princeton calls it “executive aggrandizement” — incumbents using legal mechanisms to gradually expand power. Levitsky and his collaborator Lucan Way developed the concept of “competitive authoritarianism,” where democratic institutions exist but are systematically tilted toward incumbents. Harvard Law’s Mark Tushnet describes “constitutional hardball” — legal but norm-violating tactics that exploit gaps in constitutional design.

The common thread: modern democracy dies by a thousand cuts, not by a single dramatic blow.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

International democracy measurement organizations have documented U.S. democratic decline through quantitative indices. V-Dem at the University of Gothenburg, which provides the most comprehensive democracy dataset available, showed the U.S. exhibiting autocratization trends in its 2024 report. The Economist Intelligence Unit has classified the U.S. as a “flawed democracy” since 2016, with scores declining in subsequent years. Freedom House scores have dropped from 89 out of 100 in 2020, citing concerns about election integrity claims, judicial independence pressures, and polarization.

These quantitative measures face methodological debates — some argue they overweight procedural concerns or reflect researchers’ normative preferences. But the convergence across multiple independent assessments using different methodologies strengthens confidence in the finding. When different thermometers all register fever, something real is happening.

What Is Being Tested

Bright Line Watch, which surveys political scientists on democratic norms, has documented expert consensus that key democratic standards are under threat. Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt argues in Democracy Erodes from the Top that elite choices, not voter preferences, drive democratic erosion. Republican elites could have isolated Trump after January 6. They chose not to. Congressional Republicans’ response to second-term actions — acquiescence rather than oversight — enables executive overreach that would otherwise face partisan resistance.

Jacob Grumbach’s systematic analysis in Laboratories Against Democracy finds Republican-controlled states implementing policies that reduce democratic participation: voter restrictions, extreme gerrymandering, and election administration changes. The pattern, he documents, is not individual excess but party-wide strategy.

The Weight of This Moment

What scholars increasingly agree on is that the years from 2025 to 2029 constitute a stress test for American democratic institutions without precedent in the modern era. The frameworks developed to study democratic decline elsewhere — executive aggrandizement, institutional capture, norm erosion — now apply to the world’s oldest continuous democracy. The question is no longer whether democratic erosion is occurring. The January 6 pardons, Schedule F, the dismissal of inspectors general, and the politicization of the Justice Department are matters of public record.

Where debate remains is over trajectory. Many democratic-theory experts argue that the United States is now tracing the path seen in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey: competitive authoritarianism, where elections continue but the playing field tilts so steeply toward incumbents that genuine competition erodes. Others emphasize the resilience of American institutions, pointing to federalism, civil society, the courts, and the continuing possibility of electoral correction.

Backsliding and resilience are both real. Democracy is not a stable endpoint but an ongoing project — constructed through norms and institutions, and vulnerable when those norms are abandoned. What distinguishes this moment is not simply the scale of the threat, but the clarity with which it is visible. The frameworks exist. The comparative cases exist. The warning signs are well-documented, and they are no longer hypothetical.

Whether American institutions ultimately resist these pressures will shape not only the future of U.S. politics, but the global democratic order, given America’s historic role as exemplar. Scholars who once hoped their warnings would remain academic are now watching events in real time.

The guardrails are weakening. What remains to be seen is whether the system can still hold.