Today’s aspiring autocrats are mobilizing voters to dismantle checks and balances.

There is a serious chance that American voters will deliver the presidency to a man who tried to overturn the results of the last election, who directed his supporters to storm the Capitol to keep him in power and who repeatedly calls for vengeance against his political opponents. He still won’t say whether he will accept the outcome of the November election.

Incongruous though the current moment might seem to the stunned old-school political class clinging to a belief in the resilience of long-standing political institutions, the erosion of America’s democratic norms fits into a broader trend that has been gathering steam around the world since at least the turn of the century, when the burst of democratization following the collapse of the Soviet Union started to flag.

The V-Dem Institute, which is run out of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, reports that 7 in 10 people today live in countries ruled by some form of autocratic government; 10 years ago, fewer than half did. Since 2009, more people have lived in countries that are becoming increasingly autocratic than in countries becoming increasingly democratic. Some 60 countries will hold or have held national elections in 2024. The institute identifies an erosion of democracy in 31 of them.

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The current autocratic turn is more subtle than during the Cold War, when military leaders, mostly across the Global South, toppled elected governments at the behest of the Soviet Union or the United States. Authoritarianism today is ushered in by elected incumbents, who erode democracy by undercutting institutions that can check their power, muzzling the media, limiting the scope of civil society and undermining the rule of law.

Think of Hungary’s new constitution, passed after Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won supermajorities in parliament, or the attempts by Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador to abolish the national election watchdog and replace the justices of the Supreme Court. Or in the United States, think of Project 2025, which would have a Trump administration reorganize the federal government to reward political allies and purge civil servants deemed disloyal.

Unlike the military dictatorships of yore, stained by their illegitimate use of force, the new authoritarians ride waves of popular support. They represent themselves as the righteous sword of some unitary, aggrieved “popular will” in an existential battle against not a standard political opponent but an illegitimate and corrupt enemy, whose defeat requires wielding power unfettered by irksome checks and balances.

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This new authoritarianism threatens long-standing liberal democracies beyond the Global South. American voters’ embrace of Donald Trump is comparable to French voters’ turn toward anti-immigrant right winger Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, who claims to represent the “real France.” It recalls........

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