Are we anxious this week? Between the “suspension” of Jimmy Kimmel and Vladimir Putin testing NATO’s “doorknobs” and “discovering is the US President is not at home,” you’d have reason to.

Over at Vox, Zack Beauchamp considers where all this is heading:

The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.

Such a government can be constructed along the lines of what Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele calls a “Frankenstate:” that is, “an abusive form of rule, created by combining the bits and pieces of perfectly reasonable democratic institutions in monstrous ways. … No one part is objectionable; the horror emerges from the combinations.”

Fascism will come to America hugging a flag and carrying a grudge.

The Frankenstate targets opposition parties through burdensome tax audits, dubious criminal investigations, and uneven application of campaign finance regulations. It also focuses on attacking the civil foundations of the opposition — meaning attacking the donors who might fund them, the activist groups who might stand up for their rights, and the free media they depend on to get their message out.

Silence or coopt enough of these voices, and the ruling party doesn’t actually have to outlaw political opposition or stuff ballot boxes. The opposition will simply be weak enough that letting them compete poses little threat.

There’s a lot here, including some advice for fighting back. As Beauchamps suggests, we need more senators to speak out and more corporations to step up. But waiting for that to happen is a fool’s game. The people we need to reach are not the teminally online.

And it means individual citizens attending protests and volunteering with the organizations under threat, as well as with political campaigns that could change things in 2026.

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