Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.
不久前，我遇到了一个老朋友，一个备受赞誉的民主知识分子，他最近移交了我的权利，但仍然拥有自由主义的价值观，不是唐纳德·特朗普的支持者。在我们对最左派的过剩之后，我毫不犹豫地提到，特朗普的疯狂威权主义使民主党人无法将他们的行为变得如此糟糕。
He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation. Trump wasn’t canceling elections, he protested, nor was he calling brownshirts into the streets. So how could I call the president authoritarian?
令我惊讶的是，他愤慨地做出了反应。特朗普没有取消选举，他抗议，也没有打电话给街头。那么，我该怎么称呼总统专制主义者呢？
Many highly educated Americans share my friend’s intuition. They believe that if elections are occurring and criticism of the president is not banned outright, then democracy is not under threat. They fail to see the administration’s slow-moving efforts to break down the norms and institutional barriers that otherwise inhibit the ruling party from asphyxiating its opposition. Political scientists who study democracy have a term that clarifies the phenomenon: democratic backsliding. Backslide far enough, and you end up in something called “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections are still held, but the ruling party has commandeered so many institutions in society and has violated so many laws to enhance its own power that the opposition hardly stands a chance. These are dry phrases, but they capture the way in which democracy and authoritarianism are not binary alternatives, but values that lie on a continuum.
许多受过良好教育的美国人分享我朋友的直觉。他们认为，如果选举正在发生，对总统的批评没有被完全禁止，那么民主就不会受到威胁。他们看不到政府为打破规范和机构障碍而采取的缓慢努力，这些规范和机构障碍否则会阻止执政党窒息其反对派。研究民主的政治科学家的术语可以阐明这种现象：民主的后退。后滑动足够远，您最终会陷入“竞争性威权主义”。选举仍在举行，但执政党指挥了社会上如此众多的机构，并违反了许多法律来增强自己的权力，以至于反对派几乎没有机会。这些是干燥的短语，但它们捕捉了民主和威权主义不是二进制替代方案的方式，而是在连续体上的价值观。
Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism
史蒂文·列维茨基（Steven Levitsky）：新的威权主义
I thought back to my friend’s comments yesterday, because in a single day, Trump took or was revealed to have taken six shocking new assaults on liberal democracy. They would have been shocking, anyway, before he spent a decade bludgeoning our civic nerve endings to the point where these things now register as mere routine politics.
我昨天回想起我朋友的评论，因为在一天之内，特朗普拍摄或被揭示对自由民主进行了六次令人震惊的新攻击。无论如何，在他花了十年的时间将我们的公民神经末日大吃一惊之前，他们本来会很震惊。
Yesterday alone:
仅昨天：
1. Trump floated the notion of arresting New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The president was responding to a question about Mamdani’s promise to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.” But he proceeded to suggest that he was explicitly targeting Mamdani’s political beliefs—“We don’t need a communist in this country”—and publicly entertained the groundless accusation that Mamdani, a U.S. citizen, is “here illegally.”
1。特朗普提出了逮捕纽约市民主党市长佐伦·曼达尼（Zohran Mamdani）的概念。总统正在回答一个关于曼达尼（Mamdani）承诺“阻止蒙面冰球特工驱逐我们的邻居的问题”。但是他继续暗示，他明确针对曼达尼的政治信仰 - “我们不需要这个国家的共产党人” - 公开招致毫无根据的指控，即美国公民曼达尼（Mamdani）是“非法的”。
2. Trump threatened to prosecute CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that allows users to alert one another to ICE activity and on a Defense Intelligence Agency preliminary analysis suggesting that American air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced, referring to the ICE-app story, “because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.” Trump endorsed Noem’s threat, and added, “They may be prosecuted also for giving false reports on the attack on Iran.”
2。特朗普威胁要起诉CNN，以报告存在一个应用程序的存在，该应用程序允许用户互相提醒彼此进行冰活动，并对国防情报机构的初步分析进行了提醒，这表明美国的空袭仅几个月就将伊朗的核计划置于了几个月之下。国土安全部部长克里斯蒂·诺姆（Kristi Noem）宣布：“我们正在与司法部合作，看看是否可以起诉他们，”他指的是冰上的故事，“因为他们正在做的事情积极鼓励人们避免执法活动，行动，我们将实际去追随他们并起诉他们。”特朗普认可诺姆的威胁，并补充说：“他们可能因就伊朗袭击的虚假报道而受到起诉。”
3. The president mused about the prospect of financially punishing Elon Musk for criticizing the Republican megabill. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”
3。总统沉思于财政上惩罚埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）批评共和党大型巨型巨星的前景。他写道：“不再有火箭发射，卫星或电动汽车生产，我们的国家将节省一笔财富。”“也许我们应该让Doge善于努力，看看这个吗？
To examples such as these, my friend might reply that Trump doesn’t always deliver on his rhetoric. That is true, but only to a point. Especially in his second term, Trump follows through on quite a lot of his threats. Indeed, yesterday’s litany of authoritarian moves is not limited to words. It includes at least three actions:
为了这样的例子，我的朋友可能会回答说，特朗普并不总是以他的言辞来表达。是的，但这只是一点点。尤其是在第二任期，特朗普遵循了很多他的威胁。确实，昨天的专制举动不限于言语。它至少包括三个动作：
4. The New York Times reported that Trump has appointed Jared L. Wise to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group. In 2023, federal prosecutors had charged Wise, a former FBI agent, for participating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegedly egging on fellow rioters to assault police officers with shouts of “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Like the rest of the January 6 defendants, Wise was pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term. Now he is working under Ed Martin, a fellow supporter of Trump’s efforts to secure an unelected second term in 2021, and who has tried to intimidate various administration targets with a variety of legal and extralegal punishments.
4。《纽约时报》报道说，特朗普已任命贾里德·怀斯（Jared L. Wise）参加司法部的武器化工作组。2023年，联邦检察官指控前联邦调查局特工Wise于2021年1月6日参加了国会大厦的暴风雨，据称对Rioters的侵害向警察袭击了警察，并大喊“杀死Em！像1月6日的被告一样，怀斯在特朗普第二任期的第一天就被赦免。现在，他是在特朗普在2021年获得未当选第二任期的努力的支持者埃德·马丁（Ed Martin）的领导下工作的，他试图以各种法律和外部惩罚来恐吓各种行政目标。
Tom Nichols: Ed Martin has completely disqualified himself
汤姆·尼科尔斯（Tom Nichols）：埃德·马丁（Ed Martin）完全取消了自己的资格
5. The administration impounded $7 billion of Education Department funding for after-school and summer programs, English learners, teacher training, and other school functions. The funds had been appropriated by Congress, but Trump once again decided to seize the power of the purse from Congress for himself, in violation of the structure laid out by the Constitution.
5。政府扣押了70亿美元的教育部门资金，用于课后和夏季课程，英语学习者，教师培训和其他学校职能。这笔资金已由国会拨款，但特朗普再次决定为自己夺取国会钱包的权力，违反了宪法所规定的结构。
6. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled a groundless nuisance lawsuit Trump had filed against the CBS show 60 Minutes. The suit absurdly claims that Trump suffered mental distress because the show aired an interview with Kamala Harris in 2024 that had been edited for length (which is, in fact, standard practice in television news, as Trump and his lawyers surely know). The only apparent reason Paramount settled was to grease the skids for the Trump administration to approve the company’s bid to buy a Hollywood studio. (The company has denied that this was its motivation.)
6. CBS的母公司派拉蒙（Paramount）解决了特朗普针对CBS秀60分钟的毫无根据的滋扰诉讼。该诉讼荒谬地声称特朗普遭受了精神困扰，因为该节目于2024年播出了与卡马拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）的采访，该采访已被编辑为长时间（实际上，这是电视新闻中的标准实践，正如特朗普和他的律师肯定知道的那样）。派拉蒙（Paramount）解决的唯一明显原因是要使特朗普政府批准该公司购买好莱坞工作室的打滑赛。（该公司否认这是它的动力。）
None of these moves is a one-off. All follow what has become standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government’s powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends.
这些举动都不是一次性的。所有这些都遵循第二个特朗普任期内已成为标准实践的事物。总统宣布了一项新命令，在该命令中，他的起义支持者得到了辩护并摆脱了对罪行的任何后果，总统声称对政府支出和监管权的权力是唯一的权力，而这些权力只能被用来惩罚他的敌人并奖励他的朋友。
This new order, if unchecked, will at some point reach a level at which opposition becomes prohibitively dangerous and the commanding heights of business, media, and academia all submit to Trump’s whims. We might not arrive at that end point. But it is very clearly where Trump is trying to take us.
这个新命令，如果不受组织，在某个时候将达到反对派变得极为危险的水平，并且商业，媒体和学术界的高度都屈服于特朗普的异想天开。我们可能不会到达那个终点。但这很显然是特朗普试图带我们的地方。
