In a Harvard Kennedy School discussion on the changing state of American democracy, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky observed, “Authoritarianism is new to many Americans.” Levitsky, the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, has argued that the United States has entered a period of what he calls “competitive authoritarianism”—a political system in which leaders attain power through democratic elections but increasingly govern by weakening democratic institutions, undermining checks and balances, punishing political opponents, and tilting the electoral playing field in their favor. It is neither a full democracy nor a full authoritarian state.
History, however, suggests an important qualification. Authoritarianism may be new to many White Americans, but for African Americans it has been a defining feature of American history. Long before contemporary debates over executive power and democratic backsliding, African Americans lived under governments that demanded obedience while denying fundamental rights. What many Americans now fear as an emerging threat has deep historical roots.
Authoritarianism—the belief that political leaders should exercise broad power and enforce strict obedience while limiting dissent—did not suddenly emerge in the United States. One of its earliest and most enduring expressions developed in the antebellum South.
Robert Dipboye, in his 2024 book Authoritarianism in the American South: Beliefs that Led to Slavery and the Civil War, argues that the antebellum South was “not only a slave society but also an authoritarian society,” shaped by a worldview emphasizing hierarchy, dominance, obedience, an “us versus them” mentality, and resistance to competing ideas.
The Confederacy’s military defeat did not extinguish that worldview. It adapted to new political realities. Slavery gave way to convict leasing and sharecropping. Reconstruction was followed by nearly a century of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation through law, violence, and intimidation. The Ku Klux Klan, lynching, voter suppression, and state-sponsored terror were not isolated abuses. They were instruments for preserving an authoritarian social order.
For African Americans, authoritarianism was not an abstract political theory. It was a lived reality.
The persistence of authoritarian traditions in American history should not surprise us. They have been embedded in our political culture for generations.
Today, Project 2025 represents an authoritarian playbook that is pushing American democracy toward a constitutional breaking point. By concentrating unprecedented authority in the presidency, weakening the independence of federal institutions, and undermining the traditional system of checks and balances, it seeks to create an imperial presidency and, ultimately, an authoritarian state. The Trump administration appears to be following this playbook.
Why does this convergence of history and present-day events matter? Because history is more than a record of the past. It is a warning.
African Americans were the principal victims of authoritarian government in the antebellum South and throughout the Jim Crow era, but they were not its only victims. White Southerners who were not members of the ruling elite also paid a terrible price. Hundreds of thousands died in a bloody Civil War fought to preserve a social order built upon hierarchy and domination. Those who survived inherited generations of economic stagnation, limited educational opportunity, and political isolation. More than 160 years after Appomattox, much of the South continues to wrestle with the legacy of that authoritarian tradition.
The echoes remain unmistakable. In many states, battles over voting rights, public education, immigration, protest, reproductive rights, and civil rights continue to reflect a political culture that places authority above democratic participation. African Americans are too often portrayed not as fellow citizens but as political, cultural, or demographic threats. Such rhetoric is not new. It is the language of authoritarianism recycled for a new era.
At the national level, these same currents are again gathering strength. Divisions of race, class, religion, immigration, and culture are increasingly exploited to inflame fear and consolidate political power. As in the Confederacy, government is conceived not as an instrument for advancing the common good but as a means of preserving the power of those who govern while exercising greater control over those who do not.
American democracy has confronted authoritarianism before. Each time, its survival depended upon citizens willing to place constitutional government above personal loyalty and democratic principles above political expediency.
Our generation faces the same responsibility.
The tragedy of authoritarianism is that it rarely announces itself as tyranny. It arrives disguised as strength, patriotism, order, and security. Americans ignore that lesson at their peril.
For many Americans, authoritarianism is a new fear. For African Americans, it is an old experience.
The question is whether the nation has learned enough from its own history to prevent living it again.