America’s Drift Toward Constitutional Authoritarianism

Over the past year, the Trump administration has demonstrated a distinctive governing logic: Democracy need not be destroyed to be neutralized. It can be preserved in form while altered in function. Authority is exercised through existing institutions rather than against them; legality is reinterpreted rather than discarded; emergency powers are normalized rather than declared. The result is a system that still appears constitutional but increasingly operates on executive prerogative.

This pattern is visible across domains. Domestically, federal agencies have been reorganized around loyalty rather than professional autonomy. Inspectors general and career officials have been dismissed or sidelined. Legal authority has been selectively deployed against perceived political adversaries or officials deemed insufficiently compliant, including independent institutional actors such as Federal Reserve Chair  Jerome Powell. Immigration enforcement has been militarized in both posture and practice, culminating in fatal encounters such as the killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents—an incident that officials described as lawful, procedural, and tragic, and which nonetheless illustrates how state violence can become routinized within bureaucratic norms rather than framed as exception.

Abroad, the same logic has unfolded with fewer restraints. The Trump administration has pursued the forcible removal of Venezuela’s president, attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities while openly contemplating intervention to support domestic unrest there, and revived territorial ambitions toward Greenland, a territory of a NATO ally. These actions are not aberrations but expressions of executive will operating with minimal regard for international law, which Trump has explicitly dismissed. When he told the New York Times that the only limit on his authority was his own morality and mind, he was not speaking metaphorically. He was articulating a governing doctrine.

What unites these episodes is not ideology alone but method. Trump has governed as if sovereignty resides not in institutions, laws, or alliances, but in the personal discretion of the executive. Legal frameworks become instruments rather than constraints. Domestic oversight becomes conditional. Power is exercised openly, justified retrospectively, and normalized through repetition.

This is not a dictatorship in the classic sense. It is something more elusive—and, in many ways, more durable and harder to reverse.

This is not a dictatorship in the classic sense. It is something more elusive—and, in many ways, more durable and harder to reverse. Modern authoritarianism does not announce itself with tanks in the streets or the suspension of constitutions. It advances through law, procedure, and administrative control. It preserves elections while narrowing contestation, maintains courts while encouraging deference, and invokes democracy even as it drains it of pluralist substance.

It is within this context that the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) must be read—not as a routine foreign-policy document but as the clearest doctrinal expression yet of a deeper transformation already underway.

Strategy documents rarely inaugurate political change. More often, they codify it. They take practices that have been improvised, normalized, and tested across institutions and elevate them into principle. In this sense, the NSS does not mark a departure in American statecraft so much as a moment of self-recognition. It translates a year of governing by executive discretion—at home and abroad—into an explicit theory of power.

Presented as a doctrine of national renewal, the strategy invokes the language of strength, sovereignty, and restoration. It depicts a world fractured by great-power rivalry, cultural contestation, and systemic vulnerability, and it argues that the United States must reclaim strategic autonomy, economic resilience, and civilizational confidence to prevail.

On its surface, it resembles an assertive attempt to reorder the United States’ engagement with an unsettled international system. Read more closely, however—and in light of the governing practices that preceded it—and the NSS reveals something more consequential. It does not merely catalog threats abroad; it reframes nearly every domain of American public life—economic policy, migration, industrial capacity, technology, culture, and identity—as part of a continuous national security terrain. In doing so, it expands executive discretion across areas that were historically insulated from national security logic. What emerges is not only a vision of the United States’ place in the world but a theory of domestic power—one that elevates sovereignty above pluralism, unity above disagreement, and security above democratic restraint.

To understand this process, the United States must be situated within a broader global pattern. Modern authoritarianism rarely arrives through rupture. It advances through law, procedural regularity, and the creative reinterpretation of constitutional powers. It spreads by example, with leaders learning from one another. And it thrives in systems where formal democratic institutions remain intact, even as their capacity to constrain power steadily erodes. What appears from the outside as a familiar constitutional order is, from within, slowly being rewired.

Modern authoritarianism rarely arrives through rupture. It advances through law, procedural regularity, and the creative reinterpretation of constitutional powers.

The most illuminating framework for understanding this phenomenon remains that articulated by legal theorist Ernst Fraenkel in his analysis of Nazi Germany: the “dual state.” In Fraenkel’s account, an authoritarian system can preserve a normative state—courts, procedures, legality—while simultaneously constructing a prerogative state that overrides or circumvents those constraints in the name of necessity, emergency, or national survival. Crucially, the two coexist. The persistence of legality masks the erosion of liberalism.

This is the essence of modern constitutional authoritarianism. Power is not exercised outside the law but through it. Repression takes bureaucratic rather than overtly brutal form. Elections continue but are stripped of genuine contestation. The press operates under economic, regulatory, or informal pressure. Courts rule but increasingly defer. Over time, the prerogative state grows within the shell of the normative state until the distinction itself loses meaning.

Democratic decline therefore becomes difficult to detect as it unfolds. Citizens are told the system is working—laws are passed, judges preside, ballots are counted. Yet each incremental legal change narrows the space for opposition and expands executive discretion. The dual state does not emerge in a single moment; it accretes through a series of small decisions—the politicized appointment, the targeted investigation, the one-off exception that becomes precedent. By the time that the consequences are unmistakable, the transformation is largely complete.

Martial law did not abolish Philippine democracy. It hollowed it out. Congress was sidelined, independent media was suppressed, and opponents were detained, all under a veneer of legal authority. Courts continued to function, though within sharply narrowed boundaries. Elections were staged and carefully managed. The constitution remained the regime’s shield even as its spirit evaporated.

Marcos manipulated the political operating system itself. He constructed a centralized patronage network in which loyalty and bloodline, rather than merit, determined access to state resources. Crony capitalism flourished. Economic growth fueled by foreign borrowing created an illusion of stability that concealed deepening structural decay. Marcos’s power peaked when repression, elite accommodation, and international support converged. It unraveled when those pillars weakened—when debt crises hit, elites defected and mass mobilization surged.

The relevance of the Marcos case lies not in analogy but in method: the use of legality as instrument, the manipulation of constitutional procedure, the performance of legitimacy, and the entrenchment of elite networks under the banner of national unity. Marcos demonstrated how repression, patronage, and corruption could be cloaked in constitutional language, with plebiscites and referendums staged to insist that he was democracy’s guardian rather than its gravedigger.

The election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as president in 2022 signaled not a return to dictatorship but a resurgence of authoritarian nostalgia. For many Filipinos, especially younger voters, the Marcos name evoked order, stability, and national pride. Recent protests amid corruption scandals, elite clan fissures, and governance failures suggest that nostalgia is again colliding with reality. The consequences of elite entrenchment and constitutional manipulation have reemerged, even without martial law.

Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan follows a parallel trajectory. Emergency powers invoked after a failed coup attempt in 2016 normalized exceptional authority. Purges reshaped the judiciary, bureaucracy, and military. Constitutional reforms expanded presidential power. Elections continued but increasingly functioned as instruments of ratification rather than genuine contestation. Over time, the prerogative state became permanent. Recently, Erdogan has been further consolidating his rule.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi illustrates how constitutional authoritarianism can be fused with majoritarian identity rather than relying solely on executive prerogative. Media pressure, regulatory harassment of civil society, politicized law enforcement, and the fusion of nationalism with cultural identity have narrowed dissent and reshaped institutional behavior. Courts continue to adjudicate but with growing deference on matters touching the regime’s ideological core.

Argentina under President Javier Milei represents another variation. Milei has governed within constitutional bounds, negotiating legislation and observing formal democratic procedures. Yet his scorched-earth rhetoric, delegitimization of opponents, and exaltation of personal mission reflect an authoritarian style of governance that can take root even when institutions remain formally intact. His embrace of Trump and other strongman figures underscores how illiberal norms now circulate transnationally.

Chile’s 2025 general election may offer a further variation. José Antonio Kast’s decisive victory, driven by anxiety over crime and migration, arrived without overt institutional defiance. His emphasis on civility and order has reassured many voters. Yet his lineage, alliances, and platform suggest not a rejection of far-right governance but its strategic adaptation—preserving democratic form while recalibrating its substance.

These cases differ in context and degree, but they share a common logic. Legality becomes a tool for consolidating power. Pluralism is gradually constricted. Sovereignty and national identity are elevated above institutional restraint. Democratic erosion unfolds as a sequence of tactical adjustments rather than a single decisive break.

Trump’s first presidency strained democratic norms. His second has altered American governance more fundamentally. As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has observed, Trump’s method resembles not the slow erosion typical of elected strongmen but the rapid consolidation associated with post-coup environments. The insurrection of Jan. 6, 2020—a coup attempt for which Trump has not been held accountable—remains central to this trajectory.

The transformation has been legal, administrative, and institutional rather than overtly repressive. Civil service protections have been weakened. Inspectors general marginalized. Prosecutorial independence compromised through loyalty tests and strategic appointments. Regulatory agencies redirected toward ideological aims. Media pressure now takes the form of economic coercion rather than censorship. Universities and research institutions face inquisitorial scrutiny. Courts are not displaced; they are recalibrated.

Initiatives such as Project 2025 articulate a broader effort to remake the federal bureaucracy as an instrument of personal and partisan loyalty rather than professional neutrality. Even where incomplete, these designs reshape incentives. Officials learn that survival depends less on competence than on fidelity.

The cumulative effect is a restructuring of the American state within constitutional form. The normative state remains visible. The prerogative state grows alongside it. Executive interpretation increasingly substitutes for legislative intent. Emergency becomes a standing rationale for centralization. Legality becomes an instrument rather than a limit.

This securitization expands presidential interpretive authority, concentrates discretion, and narrows space for dissent by framing disagreement as vulnerability. When nearly everything becomes security, it also becomes subject to executive prerogative.

The strategy’s treatment of Europe is particularly revealing. The NSS portrays European societies as politically enfeebled, culturally fragile, overwhelmed by migration, and constrained by speech norms that prevent confrontation with civilizational threats. Partnership is recast not around liberal democratic values but around ideological compatibility—sovereignty, cultural cohesion, and national renewal.

This framing marks a departure from the traditional American commitment to liberal democracy as the organizing principle of trans-Atlantic relations. In its place, the NSS elevates ideological compatibility—nationalist, sovereignist, culturally majoritarian—as the basis for partnership. This shift is reinforced by rhetoric from senior officials such as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who has argued that Europe’s security failures stem from attachment to globalist norms rather than material vulnerability. In this context, the NSS’s language about supporting leaders committed to sovereignty, cultural cohesion, and national renewal functions as a diplomatic green light for closer alignment with Europe’s hard-right forces.

The implication is clear. The United States appears willing to court or support European political movements that embrace illiberal visions, provided they align with Washington’s geopolitical preferences. Democracy promotion becomes secondary, even expendable, in favor of alignment promotion. The character of the Western alliance shifts—less pluralist, less liberal, more hierarchical, more majoritarian. A shared “civilizational” project displaces the older language of common democratic values.

Critics such as economist Jeffrey Sachs have warned that the NSS is grounded in grandiosity and Machiavellianism, substituting coercion for cooperation and dominance for legitimacy. Recent U.S. seizures of tankers on the high seas—justified by unilateral sanctions but lacking clear grounding in international law—illustrate the doctrine in practice. Whatever one makes of Sachs’s broader critique, the underlying pattern is difficult to miss: Sovereignty is defined as freedom from constraint, and international law is treated as an obstacle or irrelevant rather than as a framework.

Whether directed outward or inward, this conception of sovereignty elevates executive prerogative above institutional restraint. That is the essence of constitutional authoritarianism.

As philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, authoritarianism does not require the abolition of institutions, only the erosion of their animating principles. Courts may function while avoiding confrontation. Elections may occur amid structural asymmetries. Legislatures may operate while steadily ceding authority. The form endures; the substance fades.

Historian Timothy Snyder has warned that democracies often die through the normalization of the exceptional—emergency as governance, loyalty as qualification, disinformation as a political tool. Journalist Anne Applebaum has documented how elites accommodate themselves to illiberalism, finding advantage in proximity to power even as institutions decay. Philosophy professor Jason Stanley has shown how the erosion of shared reality and the moralization of political identity prepare the ground for authoritarian consolidation more reliably than legal change alone.

Democratic erosion can be slow, uneven, and, in some cases, reversible. But it is not self-correcting.

The United States exhibits elements of each. Democratic institutions remain strong enough to prevent outright collapse but are weakened enough to permit steady erosion. The NSS did not create this condition; it expresses it. It reflects a worldview in which sovereignty trumps pluralism, unity displaces disagreement, and security overrides liberty.

The United States may not face the abrupt collapse that defined Marcos’s fall or the dramatic constitutional rupture that marked Erdogan’s transformation of Turkey. Democratic erosion can be slow, uneven, and, in some cases, reversible. But it is not self-correcting.

Democratic unraveling is cumulative. It unfolds as norms are rewritten, institutional boundaries blurred, legality weaponized, emergency normalized, and dissent reframed as vulnerability. The NSS is a document of foreign policy, but it is also a mirror. It reflects not only how the United States sees the world but how it is remaking its own polity. The concern is not what the strategy claims to defend but what it reveals the country is becoming.