We are used to a tidy taxonomy of regimes. There are democracies, where power changes hands by election and is restrained by law, and there are dictatorships, where a single man or clique rules without restraint and the population has been stripped of any means of resistance. Most of the world fits somewhere on that line. But the United States has slipped into a condition for which the taxonomy has no ready word — a condition that, to my knowledge, has no real historical precedent. Here is a country that remains, at its core, a functioning democracy: it has independent courts, a parliament that can say no, a press nobody can silence by decree, fifty states with real sovereignty, and a citizenry that is armed. And this democratic country is led by a man and a faction whose views and methods can only be described as fascist — supported, it should be said plainly, by something close to half the population. The result is not a coup and not yet a dictatorship. It is a live, ongoing battle between a still-free nation and a clique that would very much like to make it unfree. And the most honest thing one can say is that the outcome of that battle is genuinely undecided.
I have come to call what this faction represents a kind of postmodern fascism — a twenty-first-century variant that keeps the computers and the markets and the spectacle, but reaches back for the substance of authoritarian rule: contempt for courts that rule against it, the urge to bend the constitution without amending it, the cult of the strong leader, the open admiration for foreign dictators. Naming it matters, because the comforting alternative — “he’s just a buffoon, an incompetent, a clown, why analyze his nonsense?” — is a trap. This is the most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth. His nonsense is consequential precisely because actions follow from it. So the question is not whether the threat is real. It is whether the machinery a democracy builds against exactly this threat will hold.
A nation that fights back through its courts
The first and most visible front of resistance is the judiciary, and it has been busy. When the administration imposed sweeping tariffs by claiming near-dictatorial powers over the economy, a federal trade court struck them down; the president’s response was to call the judges traitors and to insist that the only conceivable reason for the ruling was personal hatred of him. When the administration tried to bar a major university from admitting foreign students, a federal court in Boston blocked that too. Earlier, when it attempted to claw back roughly two billion dollars already owed for completed work abroad, even the Supreme Court — by a narrow five-to-four margin, with the chief justice and one of the president’s own appointees crossing over — refused to let it happen. And when the administration tried to abolish, by executive order, the birthright citizenship guaranteed for over a century by the Fourteenth Amendment, the lower courts blocked that as well.
This is what a democracy resisting itself looks like in practice: lawsuit after lawsuit, each decision appealed, each appeal climbing toward a final reckoning at the top. It is slow, it is grinding, and it is the real arena in which this struggle is being fought. But I want to be careful not to paint too bright a picture, because the courts are also where we can already see the resistance fraying. The Supreme Court’s partisan majority is, in some cases, eroding the very restraints it exists to uphold. In the birthright-citizenship matter, the same Court that once blocked the administration later issued a deeply partisan ruling — split strictly six to three along the lines of which president appointed which justice — that did not so much affirm the order as curtail the power of lower-court judges to suspend presidential decrees nationwide. The effect is that an executive order of dubious constitutionality begins to take hold, and real people, born on American soil and entitled to citizenship, find that entitlement suddenly in question. One of the dissenting justices described the ruling, with justified alarm, as an open invitation for the government to bypass constitutional norms. A battle was lost there. The war, I still believe, was not. But it is a warning.
Why a Putin-style subjugation cannot simply be copied here
It is tempting, especially for those of us who have watched a great country dismantled from the inside, to project that experience forward and assume America is merely a few years behind on the same road. The pessimistic forecast writes itself: first the legislature is brought to heel, then the constitution is rewritten to abolish term limits, then gubernatorial elections are cancelled and governors appointed from the center — exactly the sequence by which a free Russia was turned into an unfree one. I understand the fear. I do not share the conclusion, and the reasons are concrete rather than sentimental.
Begin with the arithmetic of consent. The Russian model of subjugation rested, at least at the outset, on genuine majority support and a population that could be managed. This faction does not have that. Some seventy-seven million people voted for the president out of a country of well over three hundred million; that is a formidable bloc, but it is nowhere near the fifty-five or sixty percent a would-be autocrat needs, and his approval since has hovered somewhere around the low forties. You cannot break a democracy over your knee with forty-four percent of the public behind you and the rest watching with growing alarm.
Then there is the structure of the country itself. Seen through eyes accustomed to a hyper-centralized state, the degree of sovereignty held by individual American states is almost unimaginable — the United States behaves less like a federation than like something close to a confederation. A large state such as California can mount its own resistance, set its own course, and refuse to be an instrument of the center. The president may dream of cancelling gubernatorial elections, but to reach that point he would have to overcome every governor in the country, and I do not believe a single one — not even from his own party — would assist in the abolition of their own office. That is not a soft barrier. It is close to insurmountable.
And finally there is the fact that distinguishes this situation most sharply from the one I know best: the United States is an armed nation, and the Second Amendment is not a museum piece. This is precisely where the Russian analogy breaks down. In Russia, converting discontent into effective resistance is nearly hopeless, because the population is unarmed; an unarmed people, however desperate, cannot stand against even the National Guard, let alone the full apparatus of the security state, which is exactly why protest there can be crushed. America is the opposite case. An armed citizenry sets a hard ceiling on how far any leader can go in dismantling the constitutional order by force, and that ceiling is understood by everyone, including the security forces themselves. Were someone to openly violate the core of American democracy — and were his own circle not to stop him first — the likely result would not be quiet submission. It would be something closer to civil war. That is not a future to wish for. But it is the reason the crudest authoritarian shortcut is foreclosed here in a way it was not foreclosed elsewhere.
Institutions do not run themselves
And yet I want to resist the opposite error just as firmly — the complacency of the long-time resident who, for decades, simply assumed that American democracy was self-correcting, that the genius of the founders’ design would protect the country no matter who sat in the chair, and who is now reading the news with a rising sense of having been naive. That faith is dangerous, because institutions are not machines that grind on by themselves. A court is people. A constitutional guarantee is only as strong as the human beings who choose to enforce it. Every one of these defenses — the judges, the legislators, the officials in the agencies — can be pressured, frightened, flattered, or bought. We have just watched a partisan majority on the highest court begin, in real time, to bend the very document it swore to defend. Having institutions is therefore no guarantee of anything. It is a precondition, not a result. The machinery exists; whether it holds depends entirely on whether enough people are willing to operate it honestly under pressure.
This is the unglamorous heart of the matter, and it is also where responsibility comes in. It is easy, watching from outside, to ask helplessly what ordinary people can possibly do against a force like this — to conclude that only elites ever really change anything and that the public is a spectator to its own fate. I reject that. The public is not a spectator; the public elected this president in the first place. Which means the public also retains real, usable power. People can vote in the next congressional elections and leave the leader without a compliant legislature. They can back the governors who stand against him and make federalism’s checks something more than a line in a textbook. They can fill the streets, and in an armed and litigious country those streets carry a weight they do not carry under a dictatorship. None of this is automatic and none of it is guaranteed to succeed. But it is available, and its availability is exactly what makes the American case different from the hopeless one. The responsibility that comes with citizenship has not been suspended. If anything, it has never been heavier.
So I do not offer reassurance, because reassurance would be a lie. What I offer instead is a clear-eyed description of a contest with no foregone conclusion. On one side stands a faction with genuine fascist designs and the most powerful office on earth at its disposal. On the other stands an entire civilization’s worth of accumulated restraint — courts, states, press, and an armed and not-yet-cowed people — much of it still functioning, some of it already cracking. The cracks are real and they are spreading; I will not pretend otherwise. But the structure has not fallen, and unlike the country I was forced to leave, this one still possesses every tool it needs to save itself. Whether it uses them is the open question of our moment. The answer will not be handed down by the design of the founders or the wisdom of the judges. It will be decided by whether enough Americans understand, in time, that the democracy resisting its own leader is not some abstraction defending them from a distance — it is them, and it works only if they make it work.