Why the U.S. is very unlikely to become Russia-style authoritarian any time soon

[Hardkill]

I asked ChatGPT many questions on whether or not it thinks that the US will fall into a dictatorship like in Russia because of Trumpism. 

It said that that is very unlikely to happen for the following reasons:

 

Structural guardrails

Federalism & fragmentation: 50 states + thousands of counties/towns run elections, police, courts, and schools. There’s no single switch to flip.

Independent judiciary by design: Life-tenured federal judges with protected pay; removal only by impeachment. State courts use mixed selection systems—no one pipeline to capture.

Two-key appointment system: Presidents nominate, but the Senate confirms; turnover is staggered over decades, preventing personalist control.

Decentralized elections with paper trails: Nearly universal paper ballots / verifiable records, routine audits, and bipartisan local administration.

Reformed electoral certification: Post-2020 reforms (e.g., clarifying the VP’s ceremonial role, raising objection thresholds) closed a major loophole for national subversion.

 

Legal and constitutional brakes

First Amendment: Robust protections for press, speech, assembly—any blanket crackdown on critics/journalists gets enjoined fast.

Due process & jury trials: Independent courts and juries, plus state/federal dual sovereignty, make retaliatory prosecutions hard to sustain.

Military limits at home: Posse Comitatus and a narrow Insurrection Act; the armed forces are trained to refuse unlawful domestic orders.

 

Plural power centers

Free press & civil society: Investigative media, NGOs, universities, bar associations, watchdogs, and opposition parties operate freely and sue effectively.

Elected and independent officials: Governors, state AGs, secretaries of state, DAs, and local clerks can—and do—resist federal overreach.

Markets and investors: Heavy-handed illiberal moves trigger immediate political, legal, and economic blowback.

 

Culture, norms, and incentives

Public opinion: Americans are frustrated with performance, but majorities still prefer democratic rules; “strongman” support remains a minority view.

Professional ethics: Judges, prosecutors, military, and career civil servants have strong norms and legal duties that resist politicization.

Transparency & detection: FOIA/public-records laws, disclosures, audits, inspectors general, whistleblower protections, and an adversarial press raise the cost of corruption or covert schemes.

 

What makes the U.S. different from Russia’s path

No captured national media system: Government cannot lawfully nationalize or centrally script news; independent outlets proliferate.

No centralized judicial discipline machine: The executive cannot hire/fire/discipline judges for outcomes; career leverage is limited.

Competition remains real: Opposition candidates, parties, and courts operate nationwide; alternation of power happens regularly.

 

Realistic risks to watch (not Russia-level, but worth vigilance)

Soft illiberalism: extreme gerrymanders, partisan election-law “hardball,” chilling effects on protest/activism, or selective investigations.

Concentrated influence that’s legal: big money in politics, media concentration, targeted funding of state/local offices.

Disinformation & intimidation: threats to election workers, deepfakes, and harassment that strain administration capacity.

 

Early-warning lights

Proposals to let the executive discipline or remove judges.

Laws that criminalize routine journalism or ban opposition on vague grounds.

Moves to bar independent election observers, centralize election control, or curtail paper audits.

Attempts to nationalize/censor major media or systematically block civil society.

 

U.S. institutions are messy by design, with many veto points, strong constitutional rights, and a vibrant ecosystem of watchdogs. That architecture—plus public culture that still leans pro-democracy—makes a Russia-style authoritarian turn extraordinarily hard to execute or sustain. Continuous attention to the “soft” risks keeps it that way.

[Infinity16]

Outside of Chat GPT, the Democracy Index by The Economist ranks countries by electoral process, government health, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties, scoring countries from 0 to 10. The index dates back to 2006 and goes up to 2024. The US started with a score of 8.22 in 2006 and got a score of 7.85 in 2024. While the US has experienced a decline in democracy, it's not a sharp one.

[Daniel Balan]

I will never ask any AI anything ever. AI is the most filthy thing mankind invented. I asked it if communism was bad from my phone and it gave me a lot of arguments for why it was bad. Then I asked the same thing from the phone of one of my far right acquaintances, and it said that communism was great and a strong man dictator is the only thing ensuring that the globalist foreigners don't steal our country. 

TL:DR AI is very bad for one's epistemology. All it does is to further deepen yourself in your pre existing worldview and it does so without shame. If it senses that you are a liberal, it feeds you liberal confirmation bias. 

From now on I will never ever use AI to make sense of the world.

Edited October 22 by Daniel Balan

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

Can't you think for yourselves, or read a book? LOL

[BlueOak]

On 22/10/2025 at 6:58 AM, Daniel Balan said:

I will never ask any AI anything ever. AI is the most filthy thing mankind invented. I asked it if communism was bad from my phone and it gave me a lot of arguments for why it was bad. Then I asked the same thing from the phone of one of my far right acquaintances, and it said that communism was great and a strong man dictator is the only thing ensuring that the globalist foreigners don't steal our country. 

TL:DR AI is very bad for one's epistemology. All it does is to further deepen yourself in your pre existing worldview and it does so without shame. If it senses that you are a liberal, it feeds you liberal confirmation bias. 

From now on I will never ever use AI to make sense of the world.

Anything is 'good' or 'bad' from different perspectives.

It's the limitations of a stage green approach. One day someone will tell me the limitations of yellow more often :), but I think AI sits in the yellow space, at least when I interact with it. When I interact with it, I get long modeled and objective information or data sets. Because i've asked for that.
 

On 22/10/2025 at 7:01 AM, NewKidOnTheBlock said:

Can't you think for yourselves, or read a book? LOL

I can formulate questions from the AI with guardrails that increase my capacity to understand something; why would I not use it?
It takes my initial thought and/or modelling or framing; it then takes me checking it for consistency, which by the way, its relatively bad at. Maybe 90%-95% of the time it's consistent if you ask for multiple outputs of specific data sets, which is actually relatively poor and way below what most would achieve on the same task. Though this will improve, I feel.

I would say the limiting thing for me is, I will never be shown a stage turquoise approach and thus never elevate anything I post unless I directly ask for it. BTW you can too, ask for a stage yellow, turquoise or green spiral dynamics approach and framing to your question. You could ask for something beyond this too, but that would be more ill defined.
 

Edited October 23 by BlueOak

[Hardkill]

 

@Daniel Balan @NewKidOnTheBlock I get what you're saying and there is some truth to what you're saying about how using ChatGPT in the wrong way can lead to too much groupthink and atrophy of critical thinking skills and original thought. 

However, I constantly push back against AI whenever I find something it says that I don't agree with or doesn't add up. I also, try the best that I can to have it respond to me with little to no bias towards my views.

Edited October 22 by Hardkill

[Daniel Balan]

11 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

 

@Daniel Balan @NewKidOnTheBlock I get what you're saying and there is some truth to what you're saying about how using ChatGPT in the wrong way can lead to too much group think and atrophy of critical thinking skills and original thought. 

However, I constantly push back against AI whenever I find something it says that I don't agree with or doesn't add up.

I do that too when I use AI, but for some reasons it always echoes back to me my pre existing worldview. I can't be already right on everything I already believe so it must be the case that AI is the same as Facebook, it only presents you in the feed your favorite conspiracy theories and your pre existing political agenda. Also when I push back against AI in the end it always reconfirms my pre existing bias. 

Also I asked a far right nationalist acquaintance for his phone, I know that he also uses chatgpt to get information and I was shocked that it basically gave him the exact opposite information with the same conviction on the same questions or promts that I ask chatgpt on my account and device.

This far right friend is nostalgic for the communist dictatorship from the cold war era and chatgpt confirmed, validated and further strengthened his self bias for dictatorship and totalitarianism saying that people in deed lived a more prosperous life under communism and now people have it worse and they don't have a stable job etc. Basically chatgpt was spewing communist propaganda that was displayed on tv during that era.

That was the moment I decided I will never ask AI to give me information that could potentially shape my political worldview. 

As of now I only ask it stuff about geography or facts from society such as who was Michael Jackson or other petty stuff like this.

Edited October 22 by Daniel Balan

[Hardkill]

4 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

I do that too when I use AI, but for some reasons it always echoes back to me my pre existing worldview. I can't be already right on everything I already believe so it must be the case that AI is the same as Facebook, it only presents you in the feed your favorite conspiracy theories and your pre existing political agenda. Also when I push back against AI in the end it always reconfirms my pre existing bias. 

Also I asked a far right nationalist acquaintance for his phone, I know that he also uses chatgpt to get information and I was shocked that it basically gave him the exact opposite information with the same conviction on the same questions or promts that I ask chatgpt on my account and device.

This far right friend is nostalgic for the communist dictatorship from the cold war era and chatgpt confirmed, validated and further strengthened his self bias for dictatorship and totalitarianism saying that people in deed lived a more prosperous life under communism and now people have it worse and they don't have a stable job etc. Basically chatgpt was spewing communist propaganda that was displayed on tv during that era.

That was the moment I decided I will never ask AI to give me information that could potentially shape my political worldview. 

As of now I only ask it stuff about geography or facts from society such as who was Michael Jackson or other petty stuff like this.

What AI chat do you use and did you buy any paid versions?

[Daniel Balan]

7 hours ago, Hardkill said:

What AI chat do you use and did you buy any paid versions?

Chatgpt, grok, deepseek. Those I used the most. I haven't paid any subscription to them thus far.

[BlueOak]

I am not so sure as the OP.

Its a pretty good strategy. Disrupt the urban vote, flip the democratic areas come election time.

[RareGodzilla]

On 22. 10. 2025 at 10:02 PM, Daniel Balan said:

This far right friend is nostalgic for the communist dictatorship from the cold war era and chatgpt confirmed, validated and further strengthened his self bias for dictatorship and totalitarianism saying that people in deed lived a more prosperous life under communism and now people have it worse and they don't have a stable job etc. Basically chatgpt was spewing communist propaganda that was displayed on tv during that era.

 

That's because it's true lol. You had basic needs meet, while lacked luxury western goods.

But it really does depends which countries you compare. An important factor to keep in mind is that alot of western USSR states would basically subsidize the southeastern ones. So countries that are today part of the EU are better off becase they are the ones getting subsudized by the EU. While the poor ones only got poverty and no democratic liberal rights that we take for granted. Context is key. 

Edited 23 hours ago by RareGodzilla

[zazen]

If the core flaw in the system is that capital controls the state rather than the state disciplining and checking the excess parasitic nature of capital - then what it will take to invert that dynamic is a state that has the capacity to act with authority to do so. But the West are culturally opposed to such a thing due to various cultural reflexes of distrust of the state and notions of liberty and slipper slope of authoritarianism. Yet, the citizens liberties are being trampled upon by a capital class that has soft-couped the state and colonized its own.

How is the West going to wrestle the control capital has over the state, out of their hands? All these economic problems that get papered over with patch work solutions by right or left politics will never resolve the underlying issue which is structural. The economic problems have to be fixed at the political level, and that needs be fixed first at a cultural level. Because the political solution is something the culture is opposed to. And even if it weren't - the West is culturally divided and distrustful of the ''other'' side that they would never work together to create that structural change in the first place - because they would also never trust the ''other'' side to control that level of state power which could be exercised upon them, imposing a vision of America they culturally disagree on.

Ya'll cooked basically. The system has to up end it self and be built from the bottom. The three pivot points that structurally allowed capital to dick-tate things to the state were the un-pegging from the gold standard (that fictionalized the economy), re-defining law so that companies had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value (short term profits for the few over anything else), and the citizens united act basically let money speak louder than the people only distorting and capturing politics even more.

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

@zazen The core flaw is a human propensity for corruption which literaly all systems share, no matter how authoritarian or libertarian they are, how is it the fault of capitalism that some people are corrupted? Or that nearly everyone is corrupted to some degree? You think religious theocracies like Afghanistan, or religious authoritarian muslim states in general aren't corrupt? Oh, would you take a look at all those cultural religious guardrails, surely that'll ensure people in power having a conscience and not do whatever they want? LOL

[Daniel Balan]

5 hours ago, NewKidOnTheBlock said:

@zazen The core flaw is a human propensity for corruption which literaly all systems share, no matter how authoritarian or libertarian they are, how is it the fault of capitalism that some people are corrupted? Or that nearly everyone is corrupted to some degree? You think religious theocracies like Afghanistan, or religious authoritarian muslim states in general aren't corrupt? Oh, would you take a look at all those cultural religious guardrails, surely that'll ensure people in power having a conscience and not do whatever they want? LOL

The most wise thing I saw on this forum. 

Regardless of the system, bigger people will exploit smaller people. During the soviet era the big people exploited and milked the plebs out of their work in even worse ways than the capitalist system milks the plebs in capitalist societies. During the soviet times you had basic necesities for free, but you worked all your life for them, you paid for them with your lifetime being a slave to the ones that gave you that free cubical while eating chicken feet all your life. Now in capitalist systems you buy your own flat but you also have to pay all your life for it. The level of exploitation is basically the same, but in capitalist systems we have it better because we have more access to diversity of food, clothes, freedom to think and behave however you want, to watch whatever you want etc. Also in capitalist systems you can develop a business if you are ambitious and smart without being in bed with the communist party and paying bribes constantly. That's why the west although flawed, is light years ahead of the BRICS/Chinese governance model that @zazen is promoting day in and day out.

Edited 15 hours ago by Daniel Balan

[zazen]

19 hours ago, NewKidOnTheBlock said:

@zazen The core flaw is a human propensity for corruption which literaly all systems share, no matter how authoritarian or libertarian they are, how is it the fault of capitalism that some people are corrupted? Or that nearly everyone is corrupted to some degree? You think religious theocracies like Afghanistan, or religious authoritarian muslim states in general aren't corrupt? Oh, would you take a look at all those cultural religious guardrails, surely that'll ensure people in power having a conscience and not do whatever they want? LOL

Correct (humans are flawed) - but I said the core flaw in this system is such and such.  Feudalism was corrupt too but we don't say "what to do, all systems are corrupt anyway" or ''humans are corrupt bro'' like its a discovery LOL. That's exactly why system design matters. If humans are corruptible (they obviously are) - then the entire point of building political and economic systems is to structure incentives so that corruption is costly and punishable rather than profitable or in the US's case legally mandated.

Your asking why blame capitalism for human nature? I'm saying that this specific arrangement of capitalism weaponizes and mandates the worst of human nature. The system is deliberately restructured to make capital accumulation the supreme logic, overriding all other values - and it will legally punish anyone who resists.  You can have the most ethical, principled person in the world - like a Buddha. Put them in a C-suite with fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and they either extract wealth or get fired and replaced by someone who will. This is a legal, structural requirement - corruption is literally the operating system.

In a better system, labor checks capital, the state checks both. Media checks the state - citizens check the media. Different power centers check each other. This is also why in multi-polarity we have powers checking one another - and today we have China checking the US telling it to pipe down or it'll nuke its military industrial complex with rare earth controls. This is why the US is trying to secure the realm by preying on weaker players now (Venezuela, talks of Nigeria now lol).

What we have now is: capital checks capital (it doesn't), the state is captured by capital (so it can't check anything), media is owned by capital (so it justifies the status quo), and citizens are too divided and propagandized to check any of it. Check ya self before ya wreck yourself.