Lucan

I was really struck by the way it mapped onto that New York Times editorial last week by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, in which they suggested that the way we know authoritarianism has meaningfully taken hold in a country is when people become too afraid to criticize the government for fear of retribution.

In a new article in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, political scientists Stephen Levitsky and Lucan A. Way describe this collapse, as “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the Second Trump administration in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy — full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties….”

As a teenager, living in Lucan, Dublin, he quit his job as an apprentice plumber to pursue a career in a sport that was relatively unknown in Ireland.

In a new book-length examination of every authoritarian government in the past century, the scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way arrived at one major factor: how that government came to power in the first place.

Lucan Way, whose books include “Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics,” tells The Associated Press that “in principle the clear and unambiguous defeat of anti-democratic actors” such as McCarthy might have a positive effect.