Trump and the Dictatorship of the Upper Middle-Class Urbanites

The establishment press love to call U.S. President Donald Trump authoritarian, anti-democratic and sometimes even fascist.

These critiques bother me for all kinds of reasons. They are often relentlessly non-specific, to begin with, and their authors frequently just recycle the same vague slurs from each other ad nauseum as a kind incantatory media ritual with nary a novel observation. These attacks moreover generally suffer from an over-eagerness to equate that body of things which journalists simply don’t like with things that journalists decided five minutes ago are defining features of totalitarianism.

Here are six examples of the kind of reporting I’m talking about; the list could obviously be ten times as long, but this is enough to give you an idea:

• This 3 August 2025 New York Times article accuses Trump of following an “authoritarian playbook” for firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after a jobs report showed weaker growth than expected.

• This 15 July 2025 New York Times editorial by Thomas B. Edsall argues that “Trump is winning the battle to undermine democracy” and proceeds to rant and rant about a lot of things. Edsall opens, however, with a lament that the forty-seventh U.S. president has disadvantaged “federal workers, medical and scientific researchers, lawyers in politically active firms” and “prominent critics.”

• This 22 March 2025 Guardian article again raises a long list of charges, among other things complaining that “The Trump administration is descending into authoritarianism” by “Eviscerating the federal government … defying court orders and delegitimising judges … chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions” and “cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule.”

• This 6 March 2025 New York Times article quotes Harvard professor and professional democracy hyperventilator Steven Levitsky, who says it is authoritarianism “when you see important societal actors – be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors – changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government.”

• This 1 March AP article quotes a Dartmouth College political scientist named Brendan Nyhan, who argues that “Trump is using the classic elected authoritarian playbook.” Among other things, this is because Trump has “purged the Department of Justice” of his political enemies and “punished media outlets for coverage he dislikes.” His supporters have moreover “suggested he could defy court orders.” Scary.

• This 19 February 2025 NPR interview invites Anne Applebaum to expostulate at length on why such things as “dismantling the U.S. civil service system” and “attacks on judges” are part of a broader “playbook on undermining democracy,” which playbook she believes is followed not only by Trump but also by other notorious authoritarian villains like Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Note how much these people love to talk about playbooks.

I’ll confess that I’ve not chosen these pieces at random, and my summaries are also highly selective. I’ve compiled only concrete accusations of authoritarianism grounded in actions Trump has taken against specific parties, because here I want to investigate one very simple question:

Who, specifically, does an American president have to fire, defy, offend or intimidate to qualify as an evil antidemocratic authoritarian and possibly fascist politician?

The answer is plain: In the eyes of these journalists and their sources, Trump is anti-democratic and authoritarian for his pursuit of government bureaucrats, federal workers, scientists, lawyers, judges, journalists, CEOs, academics and leading politicians. Our society equates the job security and autonomy of precisely these kinds of people with a well-functioning liberal democratic order. Activist judges can go after the president and that’s just how democracy works, but if the president goes after activist judges Our Democracy is in danger. Scientists can intimidate the entire electorate with baseless virus panic propaganda and that’s just fine, but pursuing scientists professionally or otherwise is the very definition of totalitarianism.

Businessmen, lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, journalists and academics – these are the sacred cows of Our Democracy, because they all hail from the urbanite upper middle class. Western liberal democracies have become enslaved to this singular socioeconomic group, and uncontroversial establishment politics are little more than a reflection of what this group prefers. The dominance of these types is neither inevitable nor an accident. They are at most 10% of the population, and they owe their prominence to the peculiarities of democratic institutions. Efforts to break their power will inevitably be decried as antidemocratic, because this class self-identifies with democracy and they control all establishment discourse. These kinds of people love to talk about Our Democracy, but what they really mean when they say this is that it is their democracy and not yours.

Below the fold I will explain why it is like this.