The risk for the U.S. is that maximalist posturing will result in political paralysis, creating a failed state rather than a dictatorship.
The events of the past month have some political observers wondering if the United States has begun, or is in the midst of, a slide toward authoritarianism under President Donald Trump. The worry is that, with the Republican Party apparently cowed by Trump and his political base, the constitutional system of checks and balances is no longer fit for purpose. Against this backdrop, the administration’s coarsened political rhetoric and policies against immigrants and asylum-seekers at the border are seen as precursors for broader restrictions of liberties moving forward.
At the same time, there is a backlash—from Trump supporters, but also some well-meaning Trump critics—against some of the more overt and confrontational tactics used by the self-described “resistance” to Trump’s creeping illiberalism, particularly the recent spate of public shaming and shunning of Trump administration officials. The worry here is either that the displays of so-called incivility will accelerate the descent of America’s political discourse into tribalism, or that they will prove to be counterproductive, energizing Trump’s supporters more than his opponents.
Both concerns are for now overblown. To date, most of Trump’s most noxious policies with regard to civil liberties—including the “zero tolerance” approach to asylum-seekers that led to the family separation policy at the border—have either been frozen, rolled back or moderated by the institutions of American democracy. While the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s entry ban on citizens of predominantly Muslim countries yesterday, the ruling came on the same day that a federal judge in California formally prohibited his administration’s family separation policy and ordered the government to reunite separated families within 30 days. There is still great damage being done under the radar by the Trump administration’s more mundane policies, to say nothing of its rampant corruption, both petty and grand. But as long as public demonstrations of moral indignation and judicial challenges remain effective constraints on executive power, talk of an authoritarian slide remains premature.
Similarly, the fixation on the current “incivility” in political discourse is a red herring. To begin with, incivility is often a charge used to cast opprobrium on the expression of opposing political views, by accusers willing to ignore equal and at times even more offensive transgressions of civility by partisan allies. What’s more, the current atmosphere of political polarization and debate in the U.S. pales in comparison to the most recent period of upheaval just 50 years ago.
But just because the alarm over Trump’s illiberal tendencies and partisan polarization is overblown doesn’t mean these trends aren’t reason for concern. The chances of the worst-case scenarios—dictatorship and civil war—are certainly remote. There are too many layers of government in the U.S. between the local and the federal levels for a centralized dictatorship to take hold. And there are no clearly recognizable ethnic, sectarian or geographic identifiers around which to feasibly organize a civil war in contemporary American society.
The more immediate danger is that the maximalist, zero-sum posturing currently on display will result in political paralysis: the U.S. as a failed state, rather than a dictatorship. The scenarios that could lead to such an impasse are more realistic, because they revolve around questions of political legitimacy. Claims of legitimacy require a set of commonly agreed upon facts, which are in short supply given the almost hermetically sealed and parallel epistemological universes that the most committed Trump supporters and critics inhabit. Here, the ground has also been laid by Trump himself, with his constant attacks on the press as “enemies of the people” and purveyors of fake news. So what sort of scenario could lead to such a crisis of legitimacy? An obvious one involves the upcoming midterm congressional elections, which both Republicans and Democrats have identified as a sort of existential litmus test. Any number of factors—revelations about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign for collusion with Russia, for instance, or more election-meddling by Russia or some other foreign actor—could lead to claims of interference that undermine the legitimacy of the outcome. Trump already said just that, regarding Mueller’s probe, in a typical early morning tweet last month.
America has successfully dealt with isolated cases of contested electoral outcomes in the past, with the 2000 Bush-Gore election the most prominent. But how resilient would today’s American polity be, wracked by hyper-partisanship and zero-sum politics, in the face of widespread doubt about the legitimacy of ballots in many heated races, in several states, with pivotal significance for the makeup of Congress?
Another easily imaginable scenario that would test America’s democratic norms would be the legal consequences of any formal findings by Mueller. Whether the report that Mueller eventually issues to Congress is damning or exculpatory for Trump, it will in all likelihood cause more division than consensus. And whether it results in congressional action or inaction with regard to impeaching Trump, large swaths of the country will likely challenge the political legitimacy of either outcome.
Both scenarios would strike close to the heart of any functioning democracy—the willingness to put process above partisan outcomes—because they would call into question the very process itself. What would such an American “color revolution,” only one in which both sides claim legitimacy and refuse to concede, mean for the country and the world?
Even in such a scenario, the many layers of local and state government beneath the federal level make it hard to picture the U.S. as a failed state, in the sense of an absence of governance. But it isn’t difficult to imagine the federal government paralyzed because of an executive or legislative branch whose legitimacy has been contested. Who or what would fill the void? How would a return to democratic legitimacy be engineered, and by whom?
These are questions we’re more familiar raising about countries on the periphery of the international order. To even think of applying them to the world’s most powerful country is new territory altogether. But if Trump’s presidency has already created a vacuum where American power used to be, a paralyzed federal government would exacerbate the global impact of that power vacuum exponentially.
In all of this, Trump is as much a symptom of the strains rending the American polity as their cause. It is very possible that America’s democracy will emerge unscathed from the Trump era, and that the U.S. will be able to restore its international standing and global role once he leaves the White House, whether that’s in two or six years’ time.
But as recent history has demonstrated with tragic frequency, the underpinnings of social stability depend more on alchemy than on science, and the descent into chaos can happen suddenly. Once the fabric that joins a disparate people into a single nation tears, it isn’t repaired easily.
It is premature to say the U.S. is bound to discover this the hard way. But it’s on a path that doesn’t rule out the possibility.
***Judah Grunstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. His WPR column appears every Wednesday. 
