How Authoritarians Take Over. The 7 Steps.

It unfolds slowly enough to be normalized and tolerated before most people understand what's being lost.

Mar 26, 2026

How Authoritarians Take Over

The steps have been documented and repeatable proven by history, it doesn’t make a difference if the country speaks Spanish, Turkish or Hungarian or if the leader wears a military uniform or a red hat.

The order of operations that scholars have documented across dozens of countries over the past century recognize the sequence.

Researchers like Timothy Snyder (who wrote On Tyranny) and Ruth Ben-Ghiat (who wrote Strongmen) have tracked these steps across continents and decades.

The seven steps:

Win an election
Manufacture a crisis
Name a scapegoat
Expand executive power
Attack the courts and the press
Destroy internal accountability
Make it all feel normal

It Starts With an Election

When most people picture a collapsing democracy, they picture war and a military general on TV announcing the government has been dissolved. Or they picture a coup like a sudden, violent seizure of power.

That’s not how it usually happens, anymore.

The thing about modern authoritarianism, a word that means a system where power gets concentrated in one leader or one group, and everyone else loses the ability to push back is that it almost always begins with a legitimate election. The leader wins a vote, sometimes even by a lot and that win becomes the foundation for everything that follows because the leader can always point back to it and say: the people chose me.

This is important to understand. The election is the first step. It’s what gives the public’s belief that a government has the right to govern. Authoritarian leaders work very hard to maintain the appearance of legitimacy even as they dismantle the systems.

The Seven Steps, Explained

We will keep coming back to these throughout the series, it’s worth taking a moment to familiarize yourself with what each step looks like.

Step 1: Win an election. This is the entry point. The leader comes to power through a democratic process.

Step 2: Manufacture or exaggerate a crisis. Every authoritarian leader needs a reason to demand more power than the office normally allows. The reason is almost always a crisis. Sometimes the crisis is real but exaggerated. Sometimes it’s invented entirely. (And the crisis becomes the justification for Step 4.)

If your neighbor told you they needed to install cameras pointing at every house on the street, you would probably say no. But if they told you there had been a wave of break-ins and your family was in danger, you might agree to things you would never normally accept. This is exactly how manufactured crisis works in politics. Fear changes what people are willing to tolerate.

Step 3: Name a scapegoat. Every story needs a villain. A scapegoat is a group of people who get blamed for the country’s problems, whether or not they actually caused them. In history, this has been immigrants, ethnic minorities, journalists, academics, LGBTQ+ communities, or political opponents.

The scapegoat serves two purposes :

It gives the public someone to be angry at
It gives the leader a target that justifies the use of force.

Step 4: Expand executive power. This is where structure of government starts to make way. Executive power means the authority held by the president or prime minister, the person at the top. In a healthy democracy, that power is limited by the courts and the legislature. In this step, Step 4, the leader starts finding ways around those limits. Emergency declarations, executive orders, reinterpreting existing laws to mean things they were never intended to mean. The word for these limits on power is checks and balances the idea that no single branch of government can act alone. Step 4 is where checks and balances start to weaken.

Step 5: Attack the courts and the press. Courts and journalists are the two institutions that can hold a leader accountable for the public. Courts can block illegal actions and the press can tell the public what’s happening. This is why they get attacked so heavily. The leader doesn’t usually shut them down outright, that would be too obvious. Instead, the attacks look like calling judges biased, calling reporters enemies, flooding the public with so much conflicting information that people stop trusting anyone. Their intention is to make the public stop believing in them.

Step 6: Destroy internal accountability. Inspectors general, the independent watchdogs inside federal agencies whose entire job is to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse, get fired or replaced. Career civil servants, the nonpartisan professionals who keep the government running regardless of which party is in power, get purged. Advisory boards get cut. The effect is that the executive branch no longer has anyone inside it whose job is to say you can’t do that. The leader’s own government stops being able to check the leader.

Step 7: Make it all feel normal. This is the most important step that most people overlook because you only see it if you’re paying attention. By the time a country reaches Step 7, all of the previous steps have happened slowly and gradually enough that each one felt like a reasonable response to circumstances. The crisis felt real and the scapegoat felt dangerous. The courts felt like they were overreaching and the press felt untrustworthy. None of it felt alarming at first, it felt like normal politics, it just felt like the news. Step 7 is when the public stops being alarmed because they got used to it and shrugged it off.

This is the structure that researchers use to track how democracies collapse.
Every country we cover in this series followed some version of these seven steps.
You now have the framework for understanding.
The rest of this series is about filling it with history and showing you where the United States sits in this sequence right now.

“But America Is Different”

America has the oldest continuous constitutional democracy in the world. We have an independent judiciary, a free press, a Bill of Rights, and institutional depth that most of the countries in this series never had when their democracies started falling apart.

While all of that’s true, it’s also what Hungarians said.

Hungary was a member of the European Union, one of the world’s most developed democratic alliances, with constitutional protections, an independent judiciary, and a free press when Viktor Orbán started hollowing it out from the inside. Turkey had one of the most robust secular democracies in the Muslim world before Erdoğan turned a failed coup into a permanent emergency. The institutional strength argument is comforting, but it gets history backwards.

Democracies die when the people inside those institutions decide they don’t care enough and when the public watches each individual violation and thinks, well, that’s bad, but it’s not that bad.
They die because the sequence moves one step at a time, and each step feels small enough to tolerate, until you look up and realize you are at Step 6.

We don’t have to guess what Step 5 looks like in the United States. American judges are telling us now.

A federal judge in Minnesota, appointed by George W. Bush, not a liberal activist, compiled a list of 96 court orders that ICE violated in a single month and wrote that the agency had likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, the second-highest-ranking law enforcement official in the country, said the administration is “at war” with the federal courts. In Oregon, a federal judge found a pattern of warrantless arrests where agents drew guns on people during civil administrative proceedings. These are non-criminal hearings. Agents detained a grandfather with a valid work permit for three weeks and created warrants after making arrests. The court described it as arrest first, justify later.

That’s Step 5. If you think America is immune, you’re not paying attention to what American judges are telling you.

Where This Series Is Going

We chose six countries for this series.
Each one shows different ways that these seven steps have shown up and how they might look different.

We’re not going to lay out all six here in one article. We will let them speak for themselves as the series unfolds. Here’s what’s coming first, and why:

Hungary is the closest parallel to where we are right now. Orbán didn’t overthrow the government, he renovated it. Imagine someone broke into your house, but instead of stealing anything, they changed all the locks. The walls and furniture all look the same but you can’t get into any of the rooms anymore. That’s what Orbán did to Hungarian democracy.

The country still holds elections, the parliament still meets, the courts still exist.

None of it works the way it used to.

Freedom House, an independent organization that has been rating the health of democracies worldwide since 1941, downgraded Hungary from “Free” to “Partly Free.” Orbán did it all without a single coup, a single tank in the street, or a moment dramatic enough for the world to say that was the day democracy ended. If you want to understand how a democracy dies while everyone is still insisting it is fine, Hungary is the case study.

Turkey is the crisis model. Erdoğan used a failed coup, one where part of the military tried to overthrow him in 2016 to purge tens of thousands of judges, teachers, and journalists overnight. Tens of thousands. And emergency powers were declared… they never expired. If you’re watching fentanyl get classified as a weapon of mass destruction, or immigration framed as an invasion requiring wartime authority, this is the strategy you’re watching. Take a crisis, real or inflated, and use it to claim powers that were never meant to be permanent.

The Philippines is where the law becomes optional. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency in 2016 and launched a “war on drugs” that killed thousands of people, many of them without arrest, trial, or any evidence. Law enforcement operated outside legal constraints with no accountability, cheered on by a public that had been taught the targets deserved it. If you’ve been following what’s happening in Minnesota, agents violating 96 court orders, drawing weapons during civil arrests, an ICE attorney begging a judge to hold her in contempt because she couldn’t get her own agency to follow the law, this one is going to feel uncomfortably familiar.

The rest of the series will cover three more countries. Each one will land differently.

Throughout this series, we will be identifying specific, recurring steps and strategies from the 1-7 authoritarian sequence.

By the final post, you’ll have a complete catalog and better understanding of every move this administration makes.

Think about the last time something happened in the news that made you uneasy. Maybe it was a policy announcement or a statement from an official that felt wrong but you couldn’t put your finger on why.

You probably said something like everything is crazy right now and kept scrolling.

That feeling… the sense that something is off but you don’t have the words for it, is a feature of the system. Authoritarian moves are designed to overwhelm us. They create so much noise and political drama that no single action stands out enough to become the thing people organize around.

Naming can change that: When you look at a headline and say that is Step #3, manufacturing a crisis to justify emergency powers, you have taken the power away from the tactic. You’re making it visible. And visible tactics are tactics you can counter.

That is what this series is truly about: Counter-intelligence.

This sequence has been broken a handful of times

Portugal lived under authoritarian rule for forty years, nearly half a century under a dictator.

It ended in a single day. On April 25, 1974, a group of military officers who had turned against the regime launched a largely bloodless revolution. Citizens poured into the streets and put carnations, the flower, in the barrels of soldiers’ rifles. It became known as the Carnation Revolution.

The dictatorship collapsed because enough people inside the system decided it was over.

South Korea’s democracy movement won against a military government. Millions of citizens organized, protested, and sustained pressure until the regime could no longer hold.

The people who ran the authoritarian sequence in those countries were not amateurs. Some had secret police, state media and every structural advantage. But, they still lost.

They lost because the strategy depends on the public not recognizing what’s happening until it is too late.

Every move in the sequence relies on the last one feeling normal. The moment a population sees it clearly and names it, the entire structure becomes less stable. Authoritarian systems look invincible right up until the moment they’re not.

Every post will connect directly to what’s happening in the United States right now. The ICE raids. The federal worker purges. The court order violations. The SNAP cuts.

One more thing. Strong borders are a legitimate policy position. Enforcing immigration law is a legitimate policy position. Drawing weapons on farmworkers during civil proceedings and ignoring 96 court orders in a single month is not a policy position. Look for what’s happening and practice naming it. Most Americans believe in both border security and due process. Both enforcing the law and following it. The position that law enforcement should obey the law should be the most uncontroversial stance imaginable. The fact that it’s become controversial is a sign in itself.

Hungary: How a Democracy Died While Still Holding Elections.

We’ll go over how Orbán did it. Step by step.
And we will show you where those same steps are being taken right now.

No Kings

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