Yale’s Steve Skowronek is one of the leading scholars on the American presidency. His recent book is The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (2025); other books include Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive(with John Dearborn and Desmond King) and The Policy State: An American Predicament (with Karen Orren). For the NYU Democracy Project, his essay on authoritarianism then and now begins as follows:

“Government and politics in the United States have come to epitomize a world-wide drift toward authoritarianism. How is it, then, that America resisted a similar slide in the 1930s? The simple answer, not without weight, is that America in the 1930s was led by a charismatic president who was committed to democracy’s advance. But look closer, and several complications quickly come into view.

At the outset of his second term, that charismatic president, Franklin Roosevelt, opened a multi-front assault against constraints on his power. His challenge to the constitutional order featured a brazen plan to subordinate the judiciary to presidential will, a purge campaign aimed at building a personal party based on loyalty to his program, and a proposal to consolidate presidential control over the entire executive branch. In broad outline, those transformative ambitions are not all that different from the designs of our current president. And yet, in that earlier episode, defenders of the Constitution in both parties mounted stiff resistance. They denounced the president as a would-be dictator. All three of Roosevelt’s initiatives were defeated.

Leaving it at that, however, is also too simple. The sobering fact is that those faithful constitutionalists of the 1930s were not resisting presidential power on behalf of an advanced position on American democracy. At the heart of the coalition that defeated Roosevelt’s designs were Southern racists determined to protect oppressive forms of rule in their home region from the threat of unbridled presidentialism. In the 1930s, the U.S. sidestepped the risks of a strongman at the top, but that was because authoritarianism characterized so much of American governance at the local level.”