Authoritarianism Is Colorblind: Why America’s Drift Matters for Israel
Recently I sat down with a dense, sobering article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Price of American Authoritarianism.” Three respected scholars argue that the United States under Trump’s second term has already slid into “competitive authoritarianism”: elections still happen, but the playing field is skewed, institutions are weaponized, and critics are punished. The game goes on, but the rules are being quietly rewritten.
They insist the story is not over. The drift is reversible. But they end with a chilling line: the most likely outcome is not a return to stable democracy, and not a full dictatorship either, but years of oscillation between “dysfunctional democracy” and “unstable competitive authoritarianism,” depending on who holds power.
Welcome to the new normal.
When I shared the piece with a thoughtful friend, their response was immediate: “This is about racism. White backlash. It always is.”
I don’t doubt racism plays a role in American politics; how could it not? But I walked away from the article with the opposite feeling: that turning this solely into a race story is a comforting evasion. A canard. A way of staying on familiar moral terrain while the real danger gathers off to the side.
And because I care about both American democracy and Israel’s survival, I worry that this evasion is blinding us in two theatres at once.
Racism as an explanation – and as a distraction
What struck me reading the Foreign Affairs analysis was how non-racial the authoritarian playbook now looks.
The authors detail how the Trump administration purges civil servants, replaces them with loyalists, and then turns key organs of the state – the Justice Department, the FBI, regulatory bodies – into political weapons. Critics are investigated for minor infractions, donors to the opposition are threatened with tax and legal action, media organizations are leaned on or sued, universities and law firms are intimidated and punished.
If you cross the president, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, Hispanic, Jewish, Christian, atheist, straight, gay, rich or poor. What matters is whether you’re useful or in the way.
That is not racial hierarchy. That is something colder: a loyalty state. A system in which power is secured by rewarding obedience and punishing dissent, without the need for a coherent ideology beyond “me and mine.”
When my friend says “It’s racism,” I understand the impulse. Racism is the American original sin. It’s familiar. It gives us a vocabulary of guilt and innocence, oppressor and oppressed, that we know how to navigate. We know where to stand.
But if we insist on reading everything primarily through that lens, we risk missing the specific, structural danger in front of us. The pattern the article describes is not Jim Crow 2.0. It’s closer to Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela: elected leaders who hollow out institutions, tilt the field, and make it increasingly costly to oppose them – all while holding elections and speaking the language of democracy.
Racism can certainly fuel that process. It can be one of the fears that demagogues exploit. But it is not the mechanism. The mechanism is institutional capture and the gradual normalization of fear.
What do Republicans actually want?
Here too, blaming racism lets everyone off the hook too easily.
Republican voters aren’t cartoon villains. Strip away the slogans and we actually want many of the same things: safe streets, decent housing, schools that work, some hope of affordability, a clean environment, the chance to raise children in peace. Many of us also want things that are in the abstract certainly not evil: continuity, cultural stability, control over borders, less technocratic arrogance, a sense that our children will not inherit a world they no longer recognize. Those desires are not confined to one skin color or one country. I’ve heard versions of them in conversations about Brexit, about Indian politics, about Israeli coalitions.
The deeper problem is the price we become willing to pay for those desires when we are afraid.
In the American case, a large part of the Republican political class now appears to be governed less by conviction than by terror of their own base and of Trump himself. One Republican senator admits in the article, “We are all afraid… I’m anxious about using my voice because retaliation is real.”
That sentence could have been uttered in any number of fragile democracies. It is not the language of a healthy party in a healthy system.
So yes, there are racists in the Republican coalition. There are also idealists, cynics, opportunists, frightened pensioners, devout Christians, exhausted parents, and people who simply hate being told what to think by coastal media. Reducing that whole world to “racism” is not analysis; it is a moral sedative for the other side.
We need a clearer category: authoritarian temptation – the willingness to sacrifice checks and balances, legal norms, and pluralism to secure an imagined safety.
That temptation is not confined to the right. It appears wherever people start to believe that “the other side” is so dangerous that anything done in the name of defeating them is permissible.
If that sounds uncomfortably familiar to Israeli readers, it should.
Israel, America, and the tyranny of the wrong analogy
One reason this Foreign Affairs piece hit me so hard is that I am already watching one embattled democracy – Israel – wrestle with its own version of these dynamics.
Here, too, accusations of racism and apartheid are thrown around with such abandon that they have become almost meaningless. Every checkpoint, every security measure, every demarcation line is plugged into an American racial script: white vs. black, oppressor vs. oppressed, settler vs. indigenous. Nuance evaporates. The history of Arab rejectionism, the traumas of 7 October, the basic fact of a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hostile neighbors – all of this is erased or patronizingly waved away.
It is easier, morally, to turn Israel into a Southern sheriff from 1963. We know how to feel about that story.
In the same way, it is easier to turn every malign trend in American politics into an extension of slavery and Jim Crow. We know how to feel about that story too.
But in both cases, the analogy is doing more work than the facts.
What Israel is wrestling with – in coalition crises, in judicial overhauls, in protests – is a raw struggle over power, identity, and the limits of majority rule in a permanently insecure state. What America is wrestling with – in this new age of “competitive authoritarianism” – is a raw struggle over power, identity, and the limits of majority rule in a permanently polarized state.
The repeating pattern is not racism. It is the fraying of democratic restraint.
And it matters tremendously to Israel which way the United States goes. A United States that drifts into long-term semi-authoritarian dysfunction will be a weaker ally, a more erratic patron, and a less credible voice in any regional settlement. People who care about Israel’s security cannot afford to treat American democracy as someone else’s problem.
The seductive fantasy of a third party
A brief confession: when I see the degradation of political life in the United States – the corruption of the Republicans on one side, the often-timid, morally confused Democrats on the other – I, too, dream of a clean third option.
A party of grown-ups. A party that is pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law, pro-Israel, and not captive to Twitter mobs or MAGA rallies.
The Foreign Affairs article, annoyingly, pours cold water on that fantasy. One of the key reasons they say America still has a chance is that, unlike in Hungary or Venezuela, the opposition is not hopelessly fragmented. There is one large, reasonably coherent party that can still win national elections and push back against institutional capture.
If that opposition splinters into a centrist vanity project and a purity-obsessed left, the road to entrenched authoritarianism gets shorter, not longer.
Again, there is an Israeli echo. When opponents of Netanyahu set aside their differences and ran together, they could briefly unseat him. When they fractured, he came back with an even more extreme coalition.
Authoritarians don’t need a majority. They need a divided opposition.
So maybe this is not the moment for an elegant new third party. Maybe this is the grubby, unromantic moment for strategic alliances, nose-holding coalitions, and a willingness to work with people we don’t entirely like to save something we cannot afford to lose.
Authoritarianism wins when we give up
The most haunting insight in the Foreign Affairs article is not about Trump at all. It is about us.
The authors argue that the real danger now is not mass repression but quiet demobilization. People deciding it’s all rigged. Donors deciding it’s not worth the hassle. Lawyers deciding not to take that case. Citizens deciding not to vote because “they’re all the same anyway.”
That is precisely how competitive authoritarianism stabilizes: not by total terror, but by a thousand little acts of withdrawal.
It is also how Israel’s enemies hope to win: not by conquering Tel Aviv militarily, but by exhausting Israelis and their allies morally, convincing us that the fight for a democratic Jewish state is hopeless, dirty, compromised beyond redemption.
But we will not defend them by telling ourselves soothing stories – whether that story is “it’s just about racism,” or “both sides are equally bad,” or “the system is too rotten to save.”
Authoritarianism is colorblind in its hunger for power. It will happily recruit minorities, punish whites, praise Jews one day and throw them under the bus the next, so long as it advances the only principle it really recognizes: loyalty to the leader.
If we want to resist that drift – in Washington and in Jerusalem – we need less slogan, more clarity. Less comfort, more courage. And a renewed willingness to fight, imperfectly, for the boring, fragile, invaluable machinery of liberal democracy, even when we are furious with the people operating it.
Because if we walk away, someone else will be very happy to inherit the controls.
