Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.

The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

[Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy-industrial complex]

The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect, Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.

Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight, they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.

The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.

But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.

In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia, Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist was released from a Belarusian prison after nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.

Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Others will decide to cooperate with the new regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young, very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.

Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired, or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious. Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

To show that they are part of the new system, many loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.” If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,” Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.” Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical truths as well.

Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.

Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.

Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.

There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.

None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.

The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.

Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions. Musk, who is running point on Donald Trump’s efforts to unmask and destroy this internal conspiracy, claimed on X, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Trump, adopting an uncharacteristic tone of more-in-sadness-than-in-anger, told reporters in the Oval Office: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical-left lunatics.”

Soon Musk declared that he had uncovered explosive evidence for this belief: The agency had funneled $8 million to Politico. Why exactly the Marxist plotters at USAID would select Politico as the vehicle for their scheme—its owner, the German media giant Axel Springer, has right-of-center politics with a strong pro-Israel tilt—has not been fully explained. But Musk’s discovery soon rocketed across X, the social-media platform he owns and uses promiscuously, and became official government policy.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” Trump wrote on his own social-media site, Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000 … THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

In fact, USAID has not given millions to Politico. The agency subscribed to E&E News by Politico, a premium service that provides detailed, fairly boring, and decidedly noncommunist coverage of energy and environmental policy. Most of Politico’s paying subscribers, according to its editors, work in the private sector. Many of them are lobbyists, who are also, as a rule, unreceptive to communist ideology, and who pay for comprehensive coverage of the inner workings of Congress and the federal bureaucracy, which holds little interest for a general audience.

Government officials themselves also subscribe to Politico and other paywalled news sources. This is because, far from masterminding intricate conspiracies, public employees are often just trying to figure out what’s happening using the same information sources available to the public. Thus USAID spent $24,000 on E&E subscriptions for its staff in 2024, and $20,000 the year before. The $8 million figure encompasses Politico subscriptions across the entire executive branch. Musk has been conspiratorially describing these subscriptions as “contracts,” as if the government is paying Politico for something other than articles about the government.

If USAID is a secret left-wing plot, leftists themselves have not been let in on the secret. Actual Marxists despise USAID, which they consider a tool of American imperialism. Jacobin, a self-consciously radical-socialist journal, has spent years railing against the agency for “stealthily advancing the interests of the Salvadoran corporate class,” working to “augment center-right parties throughout much of the Global South,” and even having the effrontery to fund a rock band that criticized Hugo Chávez, among other nefarious capitalistic schemes.

Some leftists have noticed the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the hated agency, and they’re not angry. The journalist Ryan Grim, who has decidedly left-wing views on foreign policy, has optimistically asked whether Trump’s crusade against USAID indicates a desire “to unwind and reorient American empire.”

The left-wing critique of USAID is considerably more grounded in reality than Musk’s is. Although the agency carries out humanitarian works, those programs have a dual purpose of advancing American soft power and resisting propaganda from hostile countries—originally from the Soviet bloc, and today from China. Not long ago, USAID’s strongest advocates included some of the most anti-communist (and thus conservative) members of Congress. As recently as 2022, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who now praises Trump’s crackdown on the agency, was calling for it to boost staffing in order to more efficiently disburse humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

[Russell Berman: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

The process by which Musk came to his conclusions does not inspire great confidence. His expertise lies mostly outside public policy. He arrived in Washington, D.C., and quickly set out to prove that he could identify at least $1 trillion in annual waste and fraud, a figure wildly out of scale with the conclusions of every serious expert. He claims to be working 120 hours a week, yet is posting on X at a manic pace, sending more than 3,000 tweets a month, at all hours of the night. Musk has acknowledged that he has a prescription for ketamine, a drug that can cause unpredictable behavior if abused. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that people close to Musk worry that his recreational drug use—including “LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” according to the article—was driving his erratic behavior and could adversely affect his businesses. (His attorney accused the Journal of printing “false facts,” and told the paper that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)

It is entirely possible that Musk genuinely thinks he has stumbled upon a vast conspiracy, rather than an anodyne plan to give public employees access to a rather staid news source. Every response he has made to outside criticism tracks the most typical paranoid thought process. He believes that politicians criticize him because they, too, are collecting “kickbacks and bribes.” He has accordingly interpreted all opposition to his moves as just more proof that he is onto something big.

The ultimate conspiracy that Musk thinks he has uncovered goes far beyond even USAID. On Wednesday, Musk reposted an X post claiming that “all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants.” Musk’s commentary: “Yes.”

Any well-functioning political party would laugh off such claims as kookery. Musk, however, has attained a unique place of power because of his simultaneous position as Trump’s proxy and the owner of a powerful communications platform. X is teeming with accounts repeating and amplifying Musk’s firehose of nonsense, spinning it into a grand narrative in which Musk has heroically exposed a left-wing, taxpayer-funded cabal that has orchestrated various disasters behind the scenes.

What remains of the conservative establishment has mostly defaulted to applying a sheen of rationality to Musk’s paranoid fantasy. “Mr. Musk sometimes blows hot air, and he needs to be watched to stay within legal guardrails,” a Wall Street Journal editorial gently scolded. “But he’s also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

[Hana Kiros: America can’t just unpause USAID]

“The tofu-eating wokerati at the USAID are screaming like they’re part of a prison riot, because they don’t want us reviewing the spending,” Republican Senator John Kennedy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “But that’s all Mr. Musk is doing. And he’s finding some pretty interesting stuff.”

The result is that Musk’s most fervent devotees can believe that he has broken open a globalist plot responsible for stealing elections and manufacturing consent for the liberal agenda, while more responsible figures can pretend he’s doing nothing more than auditing funds for waste. This is the same justification process that enabled Trump’s insurrection after the 2020 election: The true believers said Trump had uncovered massive voter fraud, while the Republicans who knew better claimed he just wanted to use his legal right to count the votes and make sure the result was legit.

The Republican establishment may now be calculating that the smart move is to go along with Trump’s and Musk’s delusions. Just cancel some government-agency news subscriptions, maybe zero out a few spending programs, and wait for the howling mob to move on to new obsessions. But if the Republican Party’s leaders have proved anything over the past decade, it’s that the paranoid demagogues they think they can control are usually controlling them.

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life. Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists. Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same. He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another.

[Read: The spies are shown the door]

Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities. In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits.

The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment. Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged. At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition.

Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms. Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons). Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters.

[Read: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South. Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region.

Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly.

Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior. Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs.

But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation. Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it. Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists. Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance.

Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations. They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens.

Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines. But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game. How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism? How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution?

Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support. His approval rating has never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration. An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support. The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box.

Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

A friend of mine, an old-fashioned and very capable scholar, views analogies as the first step on the road to perdition—and, even worse, to political science. These days, he is right to scowl more than ever, because on top of watching Donald Trump trash precedent and common decency, launch initiatives that are likely unconstitutional, and behave vindictively and erratically, we also have to deal with a wave of ill-conceived analogies.

Even sober writers who know that the argument ad Hitlerum is always problematic are now using it. Or they invoke Benito Mussolini, or Viktor Orbán, or Hugo Chavez, or any of a number of other thuggish saboteurs and wreckers of democracy to help explain the current American moment. The words fascism and fascistic appear regularly. It is all terribly misplaced.

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

[Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism]

Nor is the United States like other countries in which democracy has perished. America has nearly a quarter millennium of legitimate self-government under its belt, unlike, say, Weimar Germany, which never had a majority coalition of parties that favored democracy. The U.S. has not experienced in recent years anything like the slaughter of World War I, the murderous chaos of post–World War I Europe, or half a century under the Soviet boot. It is a continental empire, as the Founders called it, and they argued—correctly—that its physical vastness, the diversity of its population, and the multilayered nature of its government would form unequaled (if never impregnable) obstacles to the mob rule or the despotisms experienced by city-states. It is not only much older than the democracies that failed or faltered in Germany, Italy, and Hungary, but nearly an order of magnitude larger in physical extent.

MAGA ideology is itself difficult to define—it lacks a poet like Gabriele d’Annunzio or a propagandist like Alfred Rosenberg to explain it to the masses. In fact, it reflects disparate and divergent tendencies, including the divisions between Silicon Valley techno-futurists and old-fashioned nativists, libertarians and pro-lifers, isolationists and those who look to confront China. In some respects it is ugly indeed, but unlike the ethno-nationalist movements of the right, the MAGA movement has grown more racially diverse over time (although there are racists in it and Trump is perfectly willing to exploit racist tropes), and it is more hostile toward government than eager to expand it.

Nor is it anti-Semitic—just the reverse, in fact. The Jews are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of Western civilization, and the undeniable truth is that MAGA is not only pro-Israel but anti-anti-Semitic, and sometimes fervently so. For Jews (like myself) and philo-Semites who despise Trump and Trumpism, that is a jarring thing to admit. But if you cannot handle cognitive dissonance, you cannot think clearly about politics.

Analogies have their place, although they are most useful as a means of sharpening our understanding of what is different about the past (and the past is always different) rather than purporting to explain the present or predict the future. Sometimes, analogies help us ask the right questions as well.

But for the most part, they are a distraction. Trump and Trumpism, the servility of the Republican Party, and the flight from a values-informed foreign policy are all thoroughly American phenomena, and need to be understood in that way. History can help us see not so much where we are going as how we got here, and the nature and magnitude of the political challenges we face.

Some Democratic politicians, such as Representative Richie Torres of New York, understand this, which is why they are using the moment to reflect on how their party lost the working class rather than to bleat in unremitting outrage. But there is much more to be done. How did the presidency end up with such excessive powers vis-à-vis Congress and the judiciary? Why have so many Americans come to mistrust the government’s expertise and its ability to serve them well? What led them to put in office for a second time an odious and erratic felon? The answers will not be found merely in excoriating one administration or two. These problems have been long in gestation, and only by acknowledging that can we reckon with them.

The despicable parts of the Trump enterprise are best understood in an American context, too—not through the framework of Mussolini’s goons administering castor oil to intellectuals, but rather through the cruelties of Andrew Jackson, America’s ur-populist, who presided over the Trail of Tears. Or think of the Palmer raids in 1919 and 1920, the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. (among others, to the fascination of the Kennedy administration), loyalty oaths, Ku Klux Klan marches, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—all of these help illustrate how America has gone astray in the past.

The personalities that so many find alarming in the Trump administration are best understood not as native variants of Martin Bormann and Nicolás Maduro, but as authentically American demagogues in the mold of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, not to mention business geniuses with wild and reprehensible ideas, such as Robert McCormick and Henry Ford. Indeed, it is only by seeing Trump’s subordinates and henchmen in their American context—in a land that has produced its share of racketeers, bullies, and thugs—that one can understand them at all.

For thoughtful patriots, the Trump moment needs also to be a reckoning with American history. We must come to accept that we are the country that was born with, and in some cases even embraced, the curse of slavery, but also with the principles that ultimately undermined it and which inspired the self-sacrifice of heroes who destroyed it. We despoiled much of our fabulous birthright of natural resources and beauty but also preserved huge swaths of it by creating the greatest national-park system in the world. We have supported dictators, and we have liberated nations. We produced Aaron Burr and George Washington, Preston Brooks and Abraham Lincoln, Donald Trump and John McCain. Historical analogies cause us to stare out the window, when what we really need to do is look in the mirror.