Six weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, experts are sounding the alarm for democracy. Trump quickly followed his inauguration with an attack on the bureaucratic state, threats to the rule of law, and the invitation of wealthy corporate leaders, most notably Elon Musk, to remake the government according to their interests. Two political scientists, Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto, have been getting much-deserved attention for a thoughtful piece in Foreign Affairs that looks to elected dictators around the globe for clues about what Americans can expect after democratic breakdown. They argue that Trump’s return to the White House will bring “not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”
From the front lines of corporate capitalism, however, this assessment appears to miss something important: public and private governance are rapidly converging. The playbook for our current, anti-democratic turn in American politics comes from corporate governance, not authoritarian governments in far-off places like Hungary and Turkey. “Competitive authoritarianism” has another name in the United States
It’s called “corporate democracy.” It is the way that all American corporations are governed.
Corporate leaders don’t inherit their positions or grab them by brute force. They are elected to them through processes that involve the formal hallmarks of political democracy: voting rights, expressive rights, and election administration. Corporate elections happen so frequently that corporate leaders are nearly always in an election cycle or preparing for one. Yet who would say that corporations are recognizably democratic? The democratic features of American corporate governance lie dormant in a system that mostly produces election victories for those already at the corporation’s helm. So tilted is the playing field that, in most corporate elections, no one bothers to run against the incumbents. Why run when you have no chance of winning? Overwhelmingly, corporations have the form but not the substance of democracy.
This is the model that Trump and his supporters want to transfer over to our politics. Instead of “competitive authoritarianism,” we should recognize this as “corporate authoritarianism.”
The purpose of corporate authoritarianism is to entrench a small group at the top of a high-value enterprise, where they can enjoy wealth and power and little practical accountability. To get there, corporate authoritarianism uses real elections that, while not technically rigged, are so skewed as to be virtually opponent-proof. Chief executive officers like Musk may have never served in public office, but they have spent years honing a particular set of anti-democratic skills.
Levitsky and Way’s work draws insights from the behavior of elected dictators around the world to predict the future path of American authoritarianism. In truth, there is a direct corporate analog for virtually all of the strategies they cite as common to political dictators. Just as elected autocratic governments weaponize departments of justice and tax agencies and use lawsuits to go after their critics, corporate leaders do this too.
Years ago, General Motors went after a critic, Ralph Nader, so aggressively that it publicly apologized. More recently, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a supporter of climate solutions, has been a target of the fossil fuel industry. Last year, Exxon Mobil sued two of its own investors merely for requesting a shareholder vote on a climate-related issue. We shouldn’t mistake these as public relations moves; they are anti-democratic strategies designed to intimidate detractors and influence the outcome of corporate elections. And they are likely more familiar and inspiring to Trump than whatever Recep Erdoğan is doing in Turkey.
In short, if we’re looking for a roadmap for twenty-first-century authoritarianism, we should scrutinize the toolkit of strategies that corporate autocrats have developed for suppressing democracy inside their own organizations….