Last week, after the Trump administration pressured ABC to drop Jimmy Kimmel from its late-night television lineup, a Daily Show guest summed up how Americans are reacting as the country slides into authoritarianism: We’re like deer in the headlights.
We’ve watched masked men surround a PhD student on a Boston street and force her into an unmarked van and prison in response to an article she’d written in a student newspaper. We’ve watched the government use the military to police citizens in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. We’ve watched President Trump grab power from Congress as he enacted tariffs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development. He’s threatened his opponents with retribution, accepted a $400 million gift jet from Qatar, and said that the Federal Communications Commission should pull the license of any TV station that criticized him. The list goes on.
The response to all of this has been slow from politicians and citizens alike. It’s similar to the attitudes toward climate change: We’re witnessing the worsening of the climate, but we’re still not stopping it.
“This is a well understood and disturbing phenomenon—that people do adjust to the circumstances around them, including to greater political repression, and the loss of important freedoms, and the erosion of support for free and fair elections,” says Michael Ross, a political science professor at UCLA. “People have a hard time living in a state of constant emergency. And for better or worse, humans have learned over the millennia to adjust to their social circumstances. That’s clearly happening now, and very quickly.”
In both cases, experts have been warning about the risks for years, but their concerns have either been downplayed or ignored. Climate scientists warned decades ago that a warming planet would lead to the record-breaking disasters we’re seeing now. Likewise, in the U.S., political scientists have spent years describing the growth of trends that led to authoritarianism in other countries.
It could have been possible to intervene earlier—better regulating social media, for example, could have helped reduce the extreme polarization that set up the conditions for authoritarianism—but we didn’t. And the majority of people aren’t acting now. As with climate, changes that seem shocking at first get normalized. People focus on their everyday lives; the impacts can seem distant at first. For both climate and the erosion of democracy, some damage has already been done. The question is whether we’ll change direction quickly enough to prevent the worst-case scenario.
The slide toward authoritarianism
Now, like climate change, authoritarianism in the U.S. is accelerating even faster than experts anticipated. “I have been kind of shocked by the first nine months of the Trump administration,” says John Carey, a government professor at Dartmouth University. “But frankly, I was surprised in the first Trump administration too. And now that feels like a simpler, more innocent time.”
Carey and colleagues run Bright Line Watch, a project that has been polling political scientists and the public about democracy since 2017. He expected a massive public response then that never came. “We were watching what we saw as key democratic transgressions in the 2016 campaign—calling for jailing your opponents, saying publicly that you might or might not accept the outcomes of the election,” he says. “We were watching them happen and thinking, When is the public going to turn?”
The “bright line” the group was looking for was the line that, if crossed, would create a huge backlash. “We’re frankly still waiting,” he says.
As our freedoms erode, new realities can become normalized. If the National Guard is deployed on the streets of D.C., it’s less shocking when it happens in Memphis. The same thing happens with climate impacts. Until recently, massive wildfires in Canada were unusual, for example. Now they’re beginning to feel expected, along with smoke drifting from the fires to parts of the U.S.
Human psychology makes it hard to tackle this type of social challenge
Like climate, some form of denial is common even when you’re well aware of what’s happening. It’s common to think that you have enough to deal with in your life already, says Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist who has studied why people are slow to act on climate change. In the case of growing authoritarianism, “Folks generally go on with a ‘double life’; on the one hand knowing that it is the unmaking of a century of democratic development, on the other hand just living-life-as-always without making a fuss about it,” he said via email.
The threat can also seem distant, in the same way that climate impacts often feel distant even if you’re living in a flood zone or wildfire zone. Oil companies fought climate action with misinformation; the Trump administration, similarly, insists that it’s doing nothing wrong. As polarization grows, each side believes the problems are the other’s fault and seeks out echo chambers. (In the case of climate change, although the majority of Americans now say the issue is important to them, a small segment of people still don’t think it’s happening or believe it isn’t caused by humans.) “Through confirmation bias, people will listen more to pundits and experts who confirm their view,” Stoknes says.
The scale of the problem, for both issues, can feel so overwhelming that people turn away. Messages of doom don’t help. “Folks adapt, habituate, and feel fatigue to messages and messengers that repeatedly (over)use threats about slow-moving abstract issues,” says Stoknes.
What messages work?
A positive message can be more effective than warnings about the breakdown of democracy. New York state Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is one example, says UCLA’s Ross. “You may or may not agree with him, but he has a positive agenda and people, I think, are really responding to that,” he says. “It’s not just, ‘I’m going to stop this thing from happening’ and ‘I won’t allow this.’ It’s ‘I want to do these new things.’ I think that’s what missing right now.”
For climate, that could include messages about better solutions, like cheap solar power, rather than focusing on the destruction of the planet. In both cases, Stoknes says it’s useful to keep talking to the people around you to help mobilize them, sharing small wins, and to give people simple things to do, whether that’s supporting local renewable energy or joining a No Kings protest.
It still isn’t too late to act, Ross says. It’s obvious that Americans are worried: By some estimates, the No Kings protest in June might have been the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. But more needs to happen. “The most effective social movements are ones that have an ongoing organization and a clear set of demands,” he says. “They may be regularly mobilizing people for protests, but they have a lot more going on. I think there’s a tendency, maybe because of social media, to think, Hey, if we all just get together and go out for a rally, you know, then we’ve done our work. And in fact, that’s just kind of the tip of the iceberg.”
There’s an extra challenge compared to trying to push for climate action: more personal risk. “If you don’t install solar and insulate your house, it’s bad for the climate and you’re not doing your part, but it’s not necessarily bad for you,” says Archon Fung, director of Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. “Whereas if you’re Jimmy Kimmel or the president of Harvard University or a law firm that stands up for democratic reform, then you [risk] being targeted by the government. And that’s an intrinsic part of how authoritarianism works that is different from climate.”
Both problems are intertwined: If democracy doesn’t function, climate action also won’t happen at the speed that it needs to. It doesn’t matter whether the majority of Americans support renewable energy if Trump unilaterally attacks it. Humans clearly aren’t good at tackling problems like this that gradually unfold. And the longer we wait to do something, the fewer tools we’ll have left to fight—if anyone can figure out how to do it.
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