General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThese Mutha Fuckers are Assisting the Authoritarian takeover of this country
The Senate Republicans are laying down for Trump. They refuse to protect our country. They refuse to stand up to the unprecedented abuse of executive power. It is the authoritarian playbook. And it doesn't help that we have a Supreme Court that is in on it. They are the enemy and deserve to be treated as such. How they can possibly sleep at night just baffles me. They know that they are destroying our democracy and they don't care. Why??? How could they do that?? It doesn't make any sense to me.
The Autocratic Legal Playbook
UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming
UCLA School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 25-31
62 Pages Posted: 15 Aug 2025 Last revised: 3 Mar 2026
Scott L. Cummings
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - School of Law
Date Written: August 14, 2025
Abstract
This Article examines the development and rapid innovation of the autocratic legal playbook in America: the strategic blueprint used to destroy democracy through law. It argues that this playbook, with roots in autocratizing countries abroad, is now being implemented with brutal efficiency in the United States through the unprecedented abuse of executive power. The Article analyzes how autocracy has taken hold of the worlds oldest democracy with such velocity and examines what it means for the future of democracy around the world. It begins by defining the autocratic legal playbook as the roadmap for using law to undermine democratic guardrails that keep the executive within constitutional limits. The Article traces the evolution of the American playbook from Hungarys autocratic transformation after 2010, to President Trumps failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, to Project 2025, to the Trump 2.0 strategy of flooding the zone with executive orders. The Articles central contribution is to reveal the operating principles and tactical innovations of the American playbookpremised on the subversion of truth and the conflation of legitimate policy change with illegitimate democratic attackswhile demonstrating how these principles are being systematically mobilized to target and disable independent institutions that check executive power: government legal offices, law firms and the bar, courts, administrative agencies, universities, civil society, and the media. Because the core of autocratic legalism is creating the appearance of legality to justify attacks on the rule of law, the Article pays special attention to the legal profession, showing how actions against lawyers and courts are designed to achieve the ultimate autocratic objective: controlling the authority to define law. The Article concludes by considering how to reverse engineer the playbook, drawing on critical lessons from how democracies have died, and been resuscitated, in other countries to outline steps for saving American democracy in this watershed momentbefore it is too late.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5392409