The Danger is Different Than We Think
Democracy is not on the verge of collapse. It’s also not sailing in safe waters anymore, either.
American democracy is under threat—make no mistake about that. However, its collapse is not imminent.
The debate about threats to American democracy has become as polarized as everything else in our political life. On the left, there is a sense that Donald Trump is on the cusp of establishing a dictatorship. Much of the right now either believes that Trump is saving democracy, or, among the less-than-Trumpy right, sees talk of a democratic threat as hyperbolic. Many of these people point to Trump’s first term as proof that institutions held firm and argue they will do so again. However, Trump’s first term inflicted significant institutional damage through his attacks on the integrity of elections and public faith in institutions. He is now openly intent on dismantling these institutions, and some people think that’s just fine because they believe these systems are irredeemably corrupt. This is a deeply confused view.
Rising above these polarized stances, the real danger lies in the convergence of several forces that few in these conversations fully grasp. First, the shift from healthy distributive debates to raw contests over power itself is an institutional failure—manifesting as a refusal to respect electoral outcomes and an inability to view political opponents as fellow citizens in a shared democratic project. Democracy relies on a fundamental cooperation: while there is political competition, it exists within shared commitments to norms and procedural democracy. Second, there is the concentration of private power to levels that can override democratic processes. Third, the state’s capacity to check these power concentrations is eroding. Finally, and perhaps most critically, we are losing shared mechanisms for determining truth. Without them, democratic deliberation becomes nearly impossible. It is unclear how we can return to a healthy politics of distribution when we no longer share a basic reality.
Moreover, the danger is not that Trump will declare himself dictator on day one of a second term. The danger is that he and his allies will spend the next four years systematically weakening the guardrails that protect democratic governance. In particular, this will manifest in attacks on civil service protections that uphold a permanent, professional civil service.
Figures like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—tasked with supposedly making the government more efficient—explicitly advocate for the president to have the power to hire or fire any civil servant at will. They argue that the permanent bureaucracy must be eliminated. But to understand the risks of such a shift, we must revisit why the United States developed a permanent bureaucracy and the history behind it.
The permanent bureaucracy in the federal government was established in 1883 when Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This reform wasn’t an arbitrary bureaucratic development—it was a direct response to the corruption that had flourished under the Spoils System. This system allowed new administrations to replace the entire federal workforce with political loyalists. The result was stunning incompetence and massive corruption, as government positions became rewards for political support rather than qualifications or a commitment to public service.
The reformers who passed the Pendleton Act understood something today’s would-be dismantlers of the system either fail to grasp or deliberately ignore: effective democratic governance requires institutions that operate according to professional standards and fidelity to law, not political loyalty. A permanent, professional bureaucracy isn’t an impediment to democracy—it is essential to preventing the kind of personalized rule that defines authoritarian systems.
What Ramaswamy, Musk, and others present as “efficiency” and “accountability” is actually a return to a system we already tried and rejected as dangerous to democratic governance. Their vision of direct political control over the entire federal workforce would transform the government from an institution bound by law and professional standards into a personal tool of whoever occupies the Oval Office.
If a president can fire lawyers in the civil service who advise against illegal actions, they can replace them with lawyers willing to sign off on anything. If a president can fire a tax auditor investigating a presidential ally, it creates a chilling effect that enables corruption. If a president can hire or fire the person who approves your passport or TSA PreCheck, your political loyalty—or lack thereof—could suddenly matter in your daily life as a citizen.
Many conservatives embrace the unitary executive theory, which argues that laws like the Pendleton Act were never constitutional. This theory claims the Constitution’s Vesting Clause implies Congress cannot limit the president’s unchecked control over the federal workforce. It’s a pernicious legal theory supported by some conservative Supreme Court justices, most notably Clarence Thomas.
These aren’t hypothetical concerns—they reflect how authoritarian systems operate. When every government function becomes an extension of personal political power, the distinction between state and ruler collapses. Authoritarian states don’t have independent civil services—they have systems of political loyalty that permeate all levels of governance.
The unitary executive theory, despite its constitutional pretensions, is essentially a blueprint for authoritarian governance disguised as legal theory. Its proponents claim to defend the Constitution’s original meaning, but they advocate a form of presidential power that would have horrified the Founders. The same Founders who wrote explicit checks and balances into the Constitution would hardly have intended for the president to have unchecked control over the entire federal government, nor for Congress to have no power to regulate such authority.
The consequences are even more dangerous because this transformation is cloaked in seemingly technical legal arguments about executive power. It attempts to make authoritarian control appear as a natural reading of the Constitution rather than its perversion.
Civil service protections don’t just guard against political interference; they shape how government employees approach their duties. When civil servants are protected from at-will dismissal, they prioritize legal compliance over political loyalty. This creates a culture of fidelity to the law rather than the whims of the president.
Dismantling these protections would reverse these incentives. If civil servants can be fired at will, they will prioritize pleasing the president over following the law. Even if they believe an action is illegal, the immediate threat of losing their job outweighs potential legal consequences. Worse, if the president abuses the pardon power, those legal consequences could be erased altogether. This is precisely why authoritarian systems eliminate civil service independence—so personal loyalty to the leader supersedes fidelity to the law. Figures like Steve Bannon explicitly frame their goal of dismantling the civil service as a way to eliminate the so-called “deep state.”
As long as civil servants fear the courts more than the president, there are limits to what a president can achieve through executive action. If that dynamic flips, those limits vanish.
This is a precarious moment, with multiple threats to our constitutional order converging. The attack on civil service independence would remove a critical check on executive power by fundamentally altering federal bureaucracy incentives. Legal theories like the unitary executive provide intellectual cover for authoritarian governance. And the erosion of shared truth-seeking mechanisms undermines our ability to discuss these threats coherently.
This isn’t just about Trump or any single election. These forces will persist and likely strengthen regardless of immediate political outcomes. What’s required is not just electoral victory but a rebuilding of democratic capacity—strengthening institutions to ensure they serve democratic ends, creating new checks on concentrated private power, and reconstructing shared mechanisms for truth-seeking. Without these foundations, even perfect electoral procedures won’t be enough to preserve democratic governance.
When Trump inevitably tests civil service protections in the Supreme Court, the Court’s ruling could determine whether American democracy descends into darkness or continues its gradual evolution toward greater justice. The stakes could not be higher.