Kruse: Is it fair to see DeSantis as a very capable, committed student, whereas Trump is more of an instinctual autocrat?

Ben-Ghiat: There are limits to the comparison because Trump truly is an autocratic individual. He was as a businessman and he has surrounded himself with people from [Paul] Manafort and [Roger] Stone to [Steve] Bannon who have decades of experience helping and working for dictators. They’re on a crusade to ruin democracy. And DeSantis had a very different career path. And so what’s notable about him is he has sensed, like all smart politicians, what you need to get ahead in today’s America, in today’s GOP, what kind of leader you need to seem to be, what policies, what talking points, [such as] election fraud. What you need to do is turn citizens against each other, which he does with the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. His election security office has a hotline where you can call and tip off your fellow Floridians doing bad things. These are in themselves all things that match up with autocratic policies. Yes, he’s a very capable student of what is going to have success in today’s GOP and with today’s electorate.

Kruse: Is Ron DeSantis the non-Donald Trump politician doing this in the most stark, arguably most effective way, or are there others that you are paying attention to?

Ben-Ghiat: There are lots of others. In terms of his policies and his aggression, Greg Abbott stands out, of course. I’ll never forget that he posed smiling with his target practice sheet and joked about shooting journalists during the Trump years. But Ron DeSantis stands out because, one, he has made clear his aspirations to national leadership, and two, he’s smooth. Just as [Viktor] Orbán is a more palatable Putin — you don’t hear about poisoning [enemies], you don’t hear about people falling out of windows — DeSantis doesn’t have all that baggage Trump has. He’s younger and he’s smoother. He’s more measured in what he says. He’s trained as a lawyer. Trump is a much more outrageous personality and that’s the source of Trump’s charisma, but DeSantis is extremely popular. And so he has his own form of relating to audiences that people like.

Kruse: Given Trump, DeSantis, Abbott and so on, is the United States of America still a full democracy?

Ben-Ghiat: It’s deceptive because Trump did an enormous amount of damage. And that was why he was there. He was there to wreck our democracy. And then he was voted out. We can never forget that in the middle of a pandemic, 80 plus million people turned out to get rid of him. And that’s very rare in history where you interrupt an autocratic personality who’s in the middle of his project. And now the individual states are continuing this. And what’s so worrying is that they’re continuing it in a very accelerated fashion.

Also, the midterms are so close. I do believe if [Republicans] capture Congress after the midterms, you always have to assume the worst with people who have been very open about wanting to wreck democracy. And so that’s why they float these scary things, like making Trump speaker of the House. You have to realize that these people have left democracy, and nothing is off the table. And that’s why to go back to DeSantis, it’s very ominous that he established this office of election security. It’s very bad because it has its own prosecutors, and it makes things that used to be a misdemeanor a felony. If you look at the details of it, it’s not only an intimidation machine. It has some prosecutorial powers, and it has informing mechanisms, the tip line, and the whole idea of election integrity as this buzzword, which really means how are we going to start making elections come out the way we need to, is a very anti-democratic thing.

Kruse: So the answer I heard to the question — “Is America still a full democracy?” — was … maybe not?

Ben-Ghiat: No. David Pepper, who wrote this book Laboratories of Autocracy, has always said that many states are no longer functioning democracies. I would say that nationally, we are a functioning democracy. That’s how we got rid of Trump. But the system has been eroded and many states are shifting, are evolving over time to a condition where votes are going to mean less. And then you get into a situation which is like what happened in Hungary where over time Viktor Orbán has developed a system where it’s almost impossible for the opposition to win.

Kruse: Is it fair then to see the U.S. as an “anocracy,” neither completely democratic nor completely autocratic?

Ben-Ghiat: It’s in transition. However, I do believe it’s extremely important to never fall into fatalism. I believe it’s my job to warn people what could happen, but it’s very important — that’s why I keep bringing up the 2020 election and also the 2018 midterms — that these are recent events, and there is this energy of protest and love for democracy and freedom, real freedom, not the Republicans’ idea of freedom, that we can’t lose, because once you decide that it’s all rigged and there’s nothing you can do, then you do lose democracy.

Kruse: There has been increasing talk of the inevitability of civil strife, of civil war. And full democracies don’t have civil wars. Autocracies also don’t have civil wars, right? It’s sort of those places that are in some worrying state of transition that might be susceptible to that kind of violence. Are we on the way to civil war?

Ben-Ghiat: I actually believe the possibility of true, active civil war — meaning violence on both sides — is not likely. It’s something that the Republicans, the right, wants us to think is happening, and they use that to get people on their side as armed up as possible, as weaponized, literally weaponized, as possible, as fearful as possible. But I don’t think that we would fall into that state. It’s much more likely that the midterms go the Republicans’ way, and you fall into a system where your vote doesn’t mean much. I do see perhaps an increase of another round of protests. Often protests, big protests, materialize around an event. So the Women’s March was the shock of Trump winning and coming to power. Then you had George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests. I respect a lot Barbara Walter, who wrote the book about our likelihood [for civil war], where we’ve passed these guardrails. But the ones who really want a civil war, it’s only the extremist Republicans. Because civil war is bad for business. Civil war is bad for health. It’s bad for the nation. And so it’s really a scare talking point.

Kruse: A scholar who studies violent conflict, Thomas Homer-Dixon, recently wrote, “By 2025 American democracy could collapse causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” Does that sound right to you or too extreme?

Ben-Ghiat: It could happen in a quieter way. I think that it’s not out of the realm of possibility, because if the Republicans tried to impeach Biden and impeach Harris, there would be protests. Whether that becomes a civil war is very different because it’s predominantly only one side which is armed, first of all. So Walter is right. She wanted to point out how far our democracy has eroded. And it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we could end up with some kind of form of autocracy because that’s what’s being set up by all of the assaults on our electoral system. And Bannon’s been working very hard at this, too, from his own vantage point. It’s intimidation of voters, removing voters, look at all these threats to election officials — so you get them out of the system — this all corresponds to what we call “autocratic capture.” There’s a movement going on. This is what I mean by more — it’s more legalistic and quieter. And that doesn’t tend to bring out people into the streets. Because it’s an evolution and it’s happening slowly, slowly, slowly, and big protests are occasioned by an event.

Kruse: Are there signs in these developments of a particularly American style of autocracy?

Ben-Ghiat: The wild card is guns. No other country in peace time has 400 million guns in private hands. And no other country in peacetime has militias allowed to populate, has sovereign sheriffs, has so many extremists in the military, and that matters because of these other things. And in fact, if January 6 didn’t bring out a massive protest, what is going to bring out a massive protest? Because that showed that groups of people who were there were people unaffiliated with any Proud Boys or any radical group. And Robert Pape, who studied them, called them middle-aged, middle class, but they were all armed. Some of them had private arsenals and they showed up at January 6. So that’s the wild card. That’s one thing that’s extremely American, that violence, that the population believes it has the right to rebel against tyrannical government. Like Matt Gaetz says: The Second Amendment is not just about hunting. And here we go back to the idea of Biden as a dictator. And that only works if your citizenry is armed and ours is to a degree that no other country is in the entire world.

Kruse: Given the stakes, what are Democrats doing wrong right now?

Ben-Ghiat: The reason that Trump was able to shift the political culture, Trump and his allies, is that he imposed an authoritarian party culture [with] unified messaging. Propaganda needs to be repeated with small variations. All the different Fox News hosts, all the GOP politicians, you can tell when the various talking points come up, because they get echoed by all these lawmakers and throughout Fox. Now Democrats by their nature are not going to impose unified messaging. And so Democrats don’t have that force of concentration of message, that repetition, and that’s a failing in this environment.

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