“This is a new dimension,” Levitsky told Status. Yet as Levitsky notes, even Orbán has stopped short of the kind of paramilitary street enforcement emerging in the US. “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” the Harvard academic claimed. As University of Tulsa economic historian Clara Mattei has argued, the groundwork for democratic erosion was laid decades ago through neoliberal austerity policies that hollowed out the economic foundations of American democracy. “We’re not going to step back to a democracy with strong constitutional guardrails.