I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time, and this is the third time I’ve ridden this escalator from democracy into a very dark place.
What we’re seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia, and particularly to what happened in Hungary. But Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it’s going to fail with tanks in the streets, it’s going to fail with some radical rupture, it’s going to fail with the normal ceasing to be normal. If you look at how autocracy works these days in the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the back of a free and fair election. Somebody who is a “populist”—you can call them whatever, a charismatic leader who promises to shake things up—gets elected. It’s often fair and square the first time. If you go back and you look at the election monitor’s reports from when Hugo Chávez was elected in Venezuela or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Viktor Orbán was elected the first time in Hungary, the election monitors all said, “Free and fair election. No problem.” And then as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power.
Their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people, so now we’re seeing immigration crackdowns, we’re seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we’re seeing attacks on affirmative action, we’re seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. What all that rhetoric is disguising, and this was true in Hungary, in Venezuela, and in Turkey, it’s disguising the real work of autocracy, which is removing all checks on executive power. A lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that’s where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.