That’s the conclusion of Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University who has studied “how healthy democracies can slide into authoritarianism.”

He was interviewed this past week on NPR’s “Fresh Air” about his views in a recent article published in the journal Foreign Affairs, in which he and a co-author wrote, “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.”

You can listen to the 36-minute interview or read the transcript via the NPR website.

Levitsky sets the stage by citing the annual global freedom index produced since 1973 by the nonprofit group, Freedom House, that ranks countries from most democratic to most authoritarian based on assessments of a number of factors.

“For each country and territory, Freedom in the World analyzes the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, the functioning of the government, freedom of expression and of belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights,” according to the Freedom House website.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has dropped from being among the mainstream comparable to other western democracies, and is now considered a much lower quality democracy, comparable to Panama, Romania and Argentina, Levitsky said.

It’s a sobering assessment of where we are as a country, and where we could be going.

Here is the final interview question and Levitsky’s cautiously optimistic reply.

DAVIES: Final question – how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the future of American democracy?

LEVITSKY: I think the way the debate goes these days, I’m still somewhere in the middle. I’m very pessimistic in the short term. In fact, I would go as far as to say that today, we are no longer living in a democratic regime. I think we have already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism very quickly. In a democracy, there should not be a risk or a cost to publicly opposing the government. And I think now it’s pretty clear, just in four months, with the weaponization and the attacks against law firms and the threats against CEOs and media and universities and NGOs and individual critics of the Trump administration, that today there is a cost to publicly opposing the government. One runs a credible risk of government retribution if one opposes the government.

So people, individuals, organizations all over this country today have to think twice about engaging in public opposition because they know there’s a credible threat that something will happen to them. They’re not going to be jailed or killed or exiled, but they may face some pretty difficult circumstances if they oppose the government. That to me, the fact that there’s a price, that there’s a cost to opposing the government, means that we are already in an authoritarian situation. It is – it’s mild compared to others. It is eminently reversible, but we’re not living in a fully democratic regime today. And so I’m very pessimistic about our ability to revert that in the short term.

Our society, our very muscular civil society, has not stepped up, for the most part. There are signs that this is changing, but we’ve been very, very slow to respond. And the wealthiest, most prominent, most powerful, most privileged members of our civil society have, for the most part, remained on the sideline, and that’s allowing Trump to do much more damage than I expected him to be able to do. Again, in the long run, I think we continue to have a number of institutional channels to contest Trump, and we continue to have the muscle, the organizational, financial muscle in society to sustain opposition.