Creeping Authoritarianism: How the Far Right Is Hijacking Community Governance

It’s tempting to think of democracy’s fragility only in terms of presidential elections, Supreme Court rulings, or congressional paralysis. But democracy doesn’t falter only on the national stage. Its erosion begins in smaller, less visible places – in school boards, utility districts, and city councils – where citizens assume politics remains practical and nonpartisan, consensus-driven, and immune to the toxic currents of Washington. That assumption, as Arizona and other states are learning, is dangerously naïve.

What we’re witnessing is part of a systematic pattern of authoritarian consolidation. What appear to be isolated skirmishes in small towns and counties are, in fact, part of a coordinated campaign to erode inclusive governance, dismantle professional administration, and weaponize local power against pluralism.

It often begins with a local grievance. For example, in Scottsdale Arizona, voter anger over rapid development opened the door to candidates who campaigned not only against new housing but also against so-called “woke” policies. By riding frustration over zoning, they gained a much broader mandate than voters realized.

Once in office, these officials imported national talking points. Council debates shifted from water, parks, and potholes to culture-war rhetoric, casting DEI and sustainability as Trojan horses for liberal ideology.

This strategy now extends into Arizona’s utility sector. Turning Point Action, the political arm of Charlie Kirk’s far-right youth organization, is targeting the 2026 elections for the Salt River Project’s boards and councils – critically important where a small turnout can tip the balance. Important because SRP controls water and power, the very lifeblood of Arizona’s future. By stacking the ballot with loyalists, the goal is to block clean-energy advocates and redirect long-term policy.

The same shift is evident nationwide:

Consider Florida where nonpartisan school boards have been turned into ideological battlegrounds. In Hillsborough County alone, more than 600 titles – including The Diary of Anne Frank: The Graphic Adaptation – were pulled from the shelves after the state threatened legal action. A federal judge has since struck down key portions of the law, ruling that librarians, not politicians, should decide what belongs on shelves. Yet the damage is done: educators are chilled, students deprived, and school boards politicized.

Or Idaho, where the Idaho Freedom Foundation has wielded outsized influence, helping elect far right candidates to school boards and even to the governing board of North Idaho College. Their interference nearly cost the college its accreditation and sent shockwaves through higher education. The same forces have targeted local libraries, threatening to defund unless books on LGBTQ identity and racial justice were removed.

In August, the Calvert County Board of Education in Maryland voted to repeal its anti-racism Policy 1018, adopted five years earlier in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Board members claimed that existing anti-discrimination laws made the policy redundant. The decision sparked public protests and statements from groups including the Calvert NAACP and the League of Women Voters, warning that the repeal undermined progress on social justice.

Michigan offers another cautionary tale. In Ottawa County, a far-right bloc captured the county commission and promptly set about dismantling its diversity office, firing senior administrators, and replacing them with loyalists. The goal was not reform but domination – converting a county government into a megaphone for a national culture war agenda.

In Texas, state lawmakers stripped cities like Austin and Dallas of their power to set local policies, gutting home rule and consolidating power in the statehouse.

And in California’s Shasta County, conspiracy-fueled activists leveraged anger over pandemic policies into a political machine that flipped the county board of supervisors. Once in power, they pushed to replace voting machines with error-prone hand counts, sowing chaos in election administration and undermining public trust in democratic institutions.

White Lies #1” by Ann Lewis (2017) – An inverted American flag inscribed with falsehoods from President Trump’s first year, highlighting the distortion of truth that fuels authoritarianism. Featured in the White Lies: One Year of Resistance exhibition.

Taken together, these episodes – whether in a desert city council, a Midwestern county commission, a community college board, or a rural California county – reveal the movement’s playbook: exploit low-turnout elections, seize control of the small levers of government that few are watching, and then use them as ideological laboratories where the public becomes the guinea pigs. The results are devastatingly effective. Educators resign. Administrators are purged. Public trust frays. And the government closest to the people becomes a tool for exclusion and control rather than representation and service.

The endgame is the hollowing out of pluralism itself. Across states and sectors, the spirit of pragmatic governance is being eliminated, replaced by rigid ideological control. Loyalty tests replace debate, and compromise is punished as betrayal.

Why it matters

Political scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) warn that authoritarian consolidation rarely begins with a dramatic coup. It spreads gradually through overlooked institutions where norms are weakened step by step.

Arizona scholars Barbara Norrander and Tom Volgy have likewise cautioned that hyper-partisanship in city halls erodes trust and undermines the very problem-solving residents expect.

What we’re seeing is not random dysfunction. It is a deliberate strategy. Authoritarian movements thrive not by storming national capitals but by capturing unnoticed spaces – shifting norms until dissent is marginalized and democracy itself feels unworkable.

The danger to democracy metastasizes from the ground up. These takeovers are training grounds for national strategies, testing how far culture war agendas can stretch before meeting resistance. They normalize authoritarian tactics – control, censorship, intimidation – at the very level of government meant to be most responsive to everyday citizens.

If democracy fails, it won’t be in one grand collapse. It will die by a thousand cuts in the unnoticed corners of civic life: a council meeting here, a school board recall there, a utility election no one thought mattered. By the time the broader public realizes what has happened, the stages of infiltration, indoctrination, occupation, and elimination may already be complete.

That is why citizens need to look beyond the headline races and pay attention to the “boring” elections. These are the places where the future of democracy is being decided, often without the glare of public scrutiny.

Defending democracy, then, can’t be left to presidential elections or Supreme Court confirmations. It needs to begin in school board meetings, in county commission chambers, and at library trustee tables. The front lines of authoritarianism are in our own neighborhoods. And the fight to preserve democracy will be won or lost where we live.

The pattern represented by the above examples is spreading. The question is not whether it will continue. The question is whether enough citizens will notice and act before the consolidation of authoritarian power is complete.