There’s a temptation to treat what’s happening to American democracy right now as a sudden break — a rupture, an aberration, a thing that came out of nowhere. It didn’t. What we’re watching is the endpoint of a road that’s been under construction for over forty years. We just weren’t told where it was going.
The Demolition Dressed as Freedom
Reagan didn’t invent the blueprint. Nixon cracked the foundation. Carter started selling off the load-bearing walls. But Reagan is where the ideology got the brand deal.
Reaganomics — the polite name for what economists call neoliberalism — operated on a simple premise: markets know better than governments, regulation is theft, and prosperity trickles down. What it actually did was something else entirely. It transferred an estimated $51 trillion from working-class Americans directly into the hands of the ultra-wealthy over the course of its reign. That’s not a side effect. That’s the mechanism.
The tax cuts, the union-busting, the deregulation wave — these weren’t just economic policies. They were a class project. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism, and destroys democracy. This wasn’t a secret. Economists warned about it. They got pushed out of academia and financial institutions for their trouble.
The promise was freedom. What it delivered was freedom for some — specifically, freedom from accountability for those at the top.
The Long Hollowing
The thing about institutional erosion is that it’s quiet. It happens in budget line items, in regulatory rollbacks, in the slow conversion of public servants into political liabilities.
For four decades, both parties participated in this. Democrats didn’t reverse Reaganomics — they adapted to it. Clinton finished deregulating the financial sector. Obama bailed out the banks and not the homeowners. The bipartisan consensus was: the market is the answer, government is the problem, and if you’re struggling, that’s a personal failure.
What this built was a country where people had every reason to distrust institutions — and no alternative framework for what to replace them with.
As welfare states eroded, precarious labor expanded, and public protections disappeared, a new atmosphere of insecurity emerged — one in which anger, fear, resentment, wounded pride, and a longing for belonging became powerful political currencies.
That’s the fuel. Authoritarianism is what happens when someone lights the match and points at a target.
The Strongman Fills the Void
Neoliberalism has so embittered the American electorate that demagogues are more than happy to supply a “them” as the villain — Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, liberals, the LGBTQ+ community, China. It doesn’t matter who the scapegoat is. What matters is that the anger gets redirected away from the wealth extraction that caused it.
This is not a new pattern. It’s how it went in Hungary. In Russia. In Weimar Germany. An economic system that cannot deliver on its promises produces a population that’s primed for a strongman who tells them the problem isn’t the system — it’s the enemies within it.
Trump 1.0 was a proof of concept. Trump 2.0 is the rollout.
Where We Are Now
The purge of the federal government in 2025 resulted in overt politicization of what had been a nonpartisan civil service and the dismantling of independent institutions. Actions ranged from attacking judges who challenged their policies and usurping basic powers of Congress, to exacting retribution against perceived opponents and seeking to exert political control over universities and other nongovernmental institutions.
A network of over 300 national and homeland security experts — former FBI directors, CIA executives, ambassadors — used the same tools once applied to assess foreign autocracies and found “unmistakable warning signs” of democratic erosion at home.
America has been backsliding for a decade. Between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House downgraded the United States. In 2025, the country is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.
The Constitution is not a shield. The same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. Parchment has never saved a republic on its own.
The Through-Line
None of this is disconnected. The deregulation of the 1980s fed the inequality of the 1990s and 2000s. The inequality fed the resentment of the 2010s. The resentment fed the authoritarian turn of the 2020s. Each stage was a choice made by people with power, for the benefit of people with more power, and rationalized to everyone else as economic necessity or freedom.
Neoliberal economics is nothing more than a mechanism to shift more power and wealth to a small group of individuals — an oligarchy — which ultimately leads to fascist authoritarianism. This is what Russia experienced when Putin eventually consolidated control over the oligarchs who built his rise.
We are not at the end of the story. The right wing has not yet succeeded in fully consolidating an authoritarian system. The United States’ size and diversity, tradition of independent civil society, its wealth, and its decentralized electoral system all make it difficult to lock down power entirely.
But make no mistake about the direction of travel. You don’t stumble into authoritarianism. You’re walked there, step by step, by people who told you the market was freedom and the government was the enemy — right up until the moment they needed the government to protect their position from the people they spent forty years impoverishing.
The road was always paved. We just weren’t supposed to notice where it ended.