If you’ve recently scanned the pages of any major media outlet or had the misfortune to listen to cable news, you’ve likely heard the words authoritarian or authoritarianism thrown around repeatedly, whether in reference to domestic or international news. As these outlets describe it, authoritarianism refers to the type of governance practiced by U.S. rivals like Russia and China, where all dissent is ruthlessly suppressed, civil liberties like free speech are nonexistent, and an undemocratic government exercises absolute control over the population with zero checks on its authority.

In fact, it’s become common practice for outlets to interview “experts” on the matter from prominent think-tanks and universities, who are quick to warn fearful audiences that this Orwellian style of rule is on the rise worldwide, and even threatens the very existence of American democracy from within.

And they aren’t alone.

The White House has loudly sounded the alarm on this growing threat, with President Biden going as far as to declare that “the defining challenge of our time” will be defending democracy in the global battle against authoritarianism. With such worrying pronouncements coming from the so-called “leader of the free world,” you’d be forgiven for assuming that we’re on the precipice of something like a new Cold War. However, the reality of the matter is far more complex than either Washington or cable news anchors tend to let on.

The term authoritarianism itself is a slippery one with competing definitions, however, in its most straightforward form it refers to an unquestioning obedience to authority and/or an excessive application of authority by the state. Predictably, such a nebulous definition obscures far more about the phenomenon than it illuminates and means that the term can be applied in various ways by different commentators, depending on their individual understanding of what exactly constitutes excessive authority. Indeed, multiple Republican lawmakers and conservative media outlets accused Biden himself of authoritarianism following his announcement of a now overturned policy that would have required Americans to present proof of vaccination or a negative test result for COVID-19 before returning to the workplace.

Some “experts” have attempted to cut through the partisan rhetoric and clarify the term with more concrete examples from abroad, such as the much-maligned exporting of Chinese technology and surveillance equipment, which they argue provides a clear example of Beijing’s desire to extend its authoritarian model across the globe, particularly among developing states. Yet more honest authors have been quick to note that the U.S. and its allies are quite well versed in the surveillance technology business themselves, both at home and abroad, although they’ve been more adept at shielding their actions from harsh public criticism. Ironically, it was actually western companies like Cisco that first leapt at the chance to sell such technology to China in the early 2000s.

However, this isn’t to say that authoritarianism is only a political football for U.S. domestic politics or a convenient rhetorical tool to browbeat official rivals like Russia and China, although it sees plenty of use in both of those capacities. Authoritarianism is a very real political phenomenon, which has been discussed for centuries in different forms by political theorists across the ideological spectrum, specifically in regards to the need for and proper balance of state authority to ensure public welfare.

In his seminal work The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli drew on historical examples from European monarchs and ancient civilizations to argue that a diligent employment of violence that ensured state authority was necessary to maintain public order and lay the foundations for prosperous societies. About a century later, Thomas Hobbes contended in his Leviathan that the legitimacy and utility of the state derived from its unique ability to impose order through violence and beat back the wild lawlessness of nature which made life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short;” a premise John Locke would later borrow and revise to argue for a more liberal construction of the state in the second half of his Two Treatises of Government.

Creeping into modernity, V.I. Lenin’s State & Revolution cited Friedrich Engels to describe the state as a “special repressive force” which creates “special bodies of armed men” to enforce the will of different classes of elites against the lower classes throughout history, e.g., slaveowners vs. slaves in antiquity, nobility vs. peasants in the medieval era, and capitalists vs. workers in modern day. The celebrated German sociologist Max Weber, taking a decidedly non-Marxist view in his treatise Politics as a Vocation, concurred with Lenin on this central point by highlighting the critical importance of the state enforcing a legitimized “monopoly on violence” within a defined territory in order to properly function and carry out routine administrative tasks. Several decades later across the border in France, Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish would chronicle how the development of the modern carceral system was intimately connected to the exercise of state authority, becoming more ever refined and systematized with the passage of time.

This very brief overview obviously only scratches the surface of political philosophy; however, it clearly demonstrates that theorists from various ideological persuasions throughout history have underscored the intimate connection between state authority and the employment of physical violence and control. With this context in mind, it becomes apparent that authoritarianism isn’t a governing philosophy unique to any particular state, but rather a defining characteristic of the state as an institution. Yet although there is some latent authoritarian DNA lurking in the genes of every state by default, that certainly doesn’t mean that all states will express their authoritarian traits in the same manner or degree, such that a nominally democratic republic like South Africa would be on par with a theocracy like Afghanistan in its application of violence and control.

Rather, what must be understood is that every state, by virtue of if being a state, retains the capacity to exert violence force and control over the population it governs and will do so whenever its authority is seriously challenged. Consider for example the recent anti-war protests in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. When thousands of Russians poured into the streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg to challenge the authority of the state, they were met with police brutality, intense censorship, and mass arrests unseen since the days of the Soviet Union as Putin called for a “cleansing of society” to reify state authority in the face of an unprecedented challenge from the Russian public. The unprecedented crackdown that followed has only further worsened what was already an absolutely dismal situation for human rights like free speech and assembly in the country, in which Moscow regularly violates its own draconian laws in the name of suppressing dissent and controlling the narrative.

Similarly, when millions of Americans turned out in the summer of 2020 to protest the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd and the broader issues of unaccountable police and institutionalized racism in the U.S., the state responded by arresting over 10,000 demonstrators, assaulting and/or arresting more than 100 journalists, and deploying some 75,000 national guard and several military detachments on top of the nearly 800,000 police officers already responding to the events. Much like their Russian counterparts, American officials from the Secretary of Defense down to congressional representatives employed dehumanizing language to characterize the uprisings, calling for the national guard to “dominate the battlespace” and give “no quarter” to the largely peaceful protestors they labelled as “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” In contrast to the Russian case, however, the American state’s response was more constrained and operated within a predefined set of institutional parameters serving as guardrails on its authoritarian impulses. For instance, arrests of journalists notwithstanding, there was never the slightest possibility that the state would or even could impose widespread censorship of the unrest, nor any legal avenues for critical media outlets to be closed down for their unfavorable coverage of the state response.

Briefly put, all states will revert to their more primal authoritarian instincts – to varying degrees – when their authority is challenged, even within states like the U.S. which often present themselves as standard bearers of democracy holding the line against the advancing authoritarian menace. What this phenomenon suggests then, is that the defining challenge of our time, as President Biden put it, will not be a simple binary conflict between democrats and authoritarians, but rather a protracted struggle between opposing authoritarianisms, with each state concerned competing to advance its particular geopolitical interests. What we’re dealing with is a difference of degree rather than type.

What the future of this developing competition could look like is still an open question, but it certainly won’t be the simplistic hero vs. villain portrait being served to us by Washington and its ancillaries.