In the Danger Zone

Warning signs are flashing, but we have time to stop the slide into full autocracy, as the weekend protests showed.

By Kim Lane Scheppele

As millions of Americans gathered across the country Saturday for “No Kings” marches to peacefully protest President Donald Trump’s expansion of executive power,, the president celebrated his 79^th birthday with a show of force. Tanks paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., and soldiers marched with braces of weapons in a lackluster military display to give Trump the illusion of strongman control. Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters engaged in a paroxysm of violence across the country.

In Minnesota, a gunman allegedly posing as a police officer entered the homes of two influential Democratic state legislators. He assassinated Melissa Hortman, the immediate past speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, along with her husband, and he left gravely wounded state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Not only was this an outrageous tragedy, but it had the possibility of shifting the balance of party power in the closely divided Minnesota legislature. The suspect’s car contained a list of some 70 other people believed to be his next targets, including abortion providers and more politicians.

This wasn’t the only violence on display on “No Kings” day. Some of the peaceful protests were interrupted by violence, virtually all of it at the hands of those whom Trump had sent in to control the demonstrations or by Trump supporters. In Los Angeles, where Trump has federalized 4,000 state guardsmen and added 700 Marines, protests were met with violence from Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies who claimed without confirmation from the many reporters on site that the protestors had started the violence. In Northern Virginia, a person driving a SUV “intentionally” crashed into a crowd of peaceful protestors, hitting at least one protestor, police said. The Texas State Capitol in Austin was evacuated because of threats to lawmakers who had been planning to attend the protests.

In other locations, Trump supporters gathered to menace protestors. Members of the Trump-loyal Proud Boys gathered at the “No Kings” protest in Atlanta. Near Mar-a-Lago in Florida, protestors were met by groups of Trump supporters.

In short, on “No Kings” day, the main violence in evidence was in defense of the man who would be king.

This is not surprising. Across the world in failing democracies, political violence increases as democracy declines. Barbara Walter’s influential account of civil wars shows that in full democracies and in full autocracies, political violence is rare. It’s when autocracy is on the way up – and when autocracy is on the way down – that the political order becomes unsettled and violence becomes more common.

Countries in transition often purge the government that previously stabilized daily life, getting rid of those with the ability to anticipate where problems will emerge and those with experience to handle conflict. The new government, however, without full control can’t yet mobilize all state resources to preserve civil peace. A transitional situation allows the state’s monopoly on violence to be contested, often by militias and various ragtag gangs, sometimes by individuals with political grievances.

Often, however, those who instigate violence are not just taking advantage of a weak moment in state control but are attempting to speed the consolidation of power by the new leader. A common pattern among today’s aspirational autocrats is that they withdraw state security forces from the protection of opponents and allow private actors to do the work of suppression for them. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil famously loosened the laws to enable the militias that were linked to him to thrive. Rodrigo Duterte worked under the table with violent gangs to assassinate drug dealers, something for which the International Criminal Court indicted him. Viktor Orbán has been known to work with football “ultras” to carry on his culture wars.

When private gangs, militias, and discontents use violence against the government’s opponents, autocratic government leaders appear to keep their distance by withdrawing the police to let the violence play out unhindered. Like a tsunami in which the main danger sign of an impending wave is water retreating from the shore before the tsunami crashes in, withdrawing police to let the violence play out is one hallmark of the new aspirational authoritarians.

Since Trump was inaugurated for a second time on Jan. 20, there has been an alarming rise in the number of threats directed mostly—though not exclusively—against Trump’s political opponents and those who might stand in the way of his consolidation of power. From pizza deliveries (which signal that the target’s address is known), some sent in the name of the murdered son of a federal judge, to an arson attack on the home of the Pennsylvania governor, these threats are now sufficiently common that many politicians and activists have adopted security measures or gone silent. And rather than investigate these events, Trump’s Justice Department gutted the office that fought domestic terrorism.

Of course, in the past few weeks, the United States has also witnessed a rise in official violence as well, as Trump has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use masked government agents without insignia or identification to snatch people off the streets as part of the president’s mass deportation agenda. With the president federalizing the California National Guard to control the protestors and the military parade in Washington, the sense that the United States is becoming militarized and hardened in shocking new ways has grown.

Trump’s ostentatious appearance as commander in chief of an army brought to Washington for his enjoyment (on his birthday, no less) was designed to generate the impression that he is already in full control. The United States is not an authoritarian regime—at least not yet. We are instead in transition, which is the danger zone for civil violence. But it is also the zone in which there is still room to stop the slide into full autocracy.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

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