Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?

Opinion

Guest Essay

Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?

Jan. 15, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/opinion/trump-democracy-autocracy.html

By Kim Lane Scheppele and Norman Eisen

 

Professor Scheppele teaches sociology and international affairs at Princeton and lived and worked in Hungary for many years as a researcher at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. Mr. Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and served as the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014.

 

Since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have witnessed striking accommodations to his narrow win and mandate, what has been called “anticipatory obedience.”

 

Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and would be glad if the threat does not materialize. But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and under-discussed possibility. We know well other nations, including Hungary and Poland, where leaders have steered policies that lead to a backsliding of democracy. We see eerie similarities between what transpired in those countries and what Mr. Trump and his transition team have already done and promise to do.

 

Fortunately, we also have examples of countries that have pushed back on threats to democracy, and we can learn from them.

 

The Trump transition has featured the rapid-fire appointments of several cabinet officials who are both unqualified and potentially dangerous to the security and health of the American people. The transition has also included a flurry of actual and threatened libel actions against critics, followed by several media executives and owners caving in.

 

Business leaders with economic interests dependent on the federal government have also made nice with the president-elect, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to pick favorites.

 

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s actions may be even more dangerous because he is now following the playbook created by Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who after losing and then regaining office moved his country from a democracy into an “illiberal state,” as he put it. It was one of the faster collapses of a robust democracy on record.

 

As we have seen in other democracies, autocracy is not built out of the whims of a leader but only becomes entrenched when it has been certified by legalism — exploiting legal means to serve autocratic ends. After Mr. Orbán paid his third visit of 2024 to Mar-a-Lago in early December, and after revelations that Mr. Orbán’s people were involved in influencing policy in Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Trump’s affinity for the Orbán playbook should not be surprising.

 

Mr. Orbán used law as a weapon against Hungarian democracy. When he came to power in 2010, he unleashed a pack of laws designed to bring the courts to heel and to scare the media and political opposition into submission. He consolidated power in an ever-expanding Office of the Prime Minister, bypassing his cabinet and giving orders directly to the bureaucracy, which he had reconstructed by changing the civil service law to fire those who were not already on his team and elevate allies to key positions. Mr. Orbán’s rise to power was accompanied by the aggressive use of libel actions to drain the resources of critics and to chill the aspirations of new challengers. He packed the courts with loyalists.

 

Mr. Trump promises to do much the same, including through his embrace of Project 2025 ideas and their proponents, many of whom are populating his administration. Project 2025 lays out a 180-day playbook for capturing government quickly, using legal tools.

 

The plan envisions a bulked-up White House Office and Executive Office of the President of the United States embracing a unitary executive theory that “it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority.” Project 2025 then relies on reinstating Mr. Trump’s 2020 executive order creating Schedule F, which permits the reclassification of civil service positions as at-will jobs so that the president can remove bureaucrats who are not on his team.

 

Even before Mr. Trump’s appointees have entered their designated offices, however, Mr. Trump and his admirers have launched libel cases and threats of criminal investigation to intimidate journalists and political opponents, just as Mr. Orbán did. ABC News just settled one such case for $15 million rather than risk the cost and Trumpian ire of defending its journalist. Mr. Trump has made no secret of wanting to weaken the landmark Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which creates a high bar for proving libel against public officials. (In 2014, Mr. Orbán’s government changed the country’s libel law to make it easier for public officials to win libel cases after a constitutional amendment nullified the Hungarian Constitutional Court decision to the contrary.)

 

By entering office with a blitz of legislation and outrageous policy proposals in 2010, Mr. Orbán divided the opposition. Those who cared about media freedom embraced one set of initiatives; those who worried about judicial independence started another; still others focused on prisoners and migrants. Crucially, the opposition only rarely united when faced with attacks on multiple fronts.

 

Mr. Trump is already using this tactic of flooding the zone with legal challenges designed to divide and conquer his opposition. His political opposition may be next. Strongly united during the presidential campaign, it must take care not to splinter. Some are prioritizing the coming fight against mass deportations; others are doubling down on trans rights; attorneys are focusing on protecting the Justice Department from bringing wrongful prosecutions against Mr. Trump’s political opponents (and responding if it happens); former judges are focused on judicial decision-making and appointments if the rule of law comes under attack.

 

But the unified purpose and energy that dominated the presidential campaign must be maintained, making political opposition resistant to a divide-and-conquer strategy.

 

Lessons from other attempts at autocratic takeover provide more guidance for democratic self-defense.

 

In Poland, where the Law and Justice government also cemented its power by law using the Orbán playbook, masses of Polish citizens went to the streets demanding protection of the judiciary. When the next election neared, opposition parties set aside their differences to establish a campaign that focused on the threats to constitutional democracy. They won, albeit narrowly, in 2023.

 

But the Polish electoral victory also shows how hard it is to un-entrench a government that has entrenched itself by law. With the holdover Law and Justice-affiliated president blocking new legislation with his veto and the packed Constitutional Tribunal overturning other initiatives, the government that ran on a platform of restoring democracy can barely make headway and is already falling in the polls because it looks ineffective.

 

The lesson Poland teaches us is that would-be autocrats can be pushed back if the opposition is united, but also that a country stands a better chance of recovery if it blocks autocracy before it becomes legally entrenched. As in Poland, Mr. Trump was able to solidify a clear majority at the Supreme Court during his first term, and its rulings contributed to the delay for any possible reckoning by a federal court for his conduct.

 

In Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro ruled like Mr. Trump with whim and revenge, the 2022 election narrowly toppled him, after he cast doubt on the process.

 

But because Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, did not fully entrench himself by law in his first term, the still independent Supreme Federal Court was able to disqualify Mr. Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years, and the still-independent federal prosecutors are now examining overwhelming evidence that he had planned a coup. Here, too, however, democratic recovery depends on crucial institutions remaining independent and not packed with loyalists during the period of attempted autocratic capture.

 

Defenders of democracy will have to stay united, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions elude capture. Otherwise, America will indeed find itself sleepwalking into autocracy.

 

Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, lived and worked in Hungary for many years as a researcher at the Hungarian Constitutional Court and at Central European University. Norman Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former ambassador to the Czech Republic. Mr. Eisen is the publisher of, and Ms. Scheppele a contributor to, The Contrarian.