Where is that commenter? You seem to replied to someone who thinks USA democratic system is very flawed - seems like an rational opinion considering that you can lose popular vote and still win.
Just looking at vote totals and seat numbers doesn't tell you whether a country is gerrymandered. But this is not the only information available, you can actually look at the maps and how they were drawn.
After winning the first time, Orban's party immediately redrew the maps in such a way as to break up opposition consituencies and secure as many 'safe' seats as possible. Now gerrymanders can break if there is a sufficient swing against the incumbent party, or if new coalitions form (both of these happened at the same time in this recent election). But that doesn't make the concept of gerrymandering meaningless.
There are other ways of analyzing this as well. The most objective is to draw random algorithmically generate maps and see if the actual map is within the bounds of what a fair process would produce.
Wisconsin was, and North Carolina is, actually small scale illiberal democracies with fairly radical gerrymandering. In fact some years had worse results than the ones you mentioned.
And the Dems have tried to push for unilateral disarmament by limiting gerrymandering as national policy but it is a no go for the GOP for fairly obvious reasons.
I also wonder about this. The number of pre-likes I get in the first three minutes is very variable based on post type, so maybe people are liking the fact that I wrote about a particular topic?
I usually like posts that write about a subject I'm interested in, not necessarily as a sign of approval of the contents or the conclusion. It would be nice if there was an LW-style differentiator between "posts I like" and "posts I agree with" but alas, one 'like' thingy is all we have.
As somebody who does in fact do this some of the time, it’s more that I can generally tell from reading the first couple pages whether I will like a post or not, and if you already think there is a 70 to 90% chance of liking the post after reading it might as well do it now since you can always change your mind later.
I often like your posts at the beginning before reading, so I don’t accidentally forget to like them once I’m finished. I have not once read a post of yours that didn’t make a point worth liking, even if I don’t agree with you every time, so I just cut to the chase. It’s good to signal boost your excellent writing. I could always unlike the post later, but it’s never happened.
A mystery to me too: even my small newsletter, launched a few months ago, gets *automatically* three-four likes every time I push a new piece. Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for.
"...Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for."
The likes for your small newsletter may be protective coloration for the bots. So that they appear less like focused bots to whatever software might be scanning for them.
I have a number of followers on disqus. Maybe three of them appear to be real humans. I figure something similar is happening on disqus.
You can click on the names of the people who voted on an article, and then click on their blogs... so maybe redirecting some of the attention to their blogs was the goal?
Probably not very effective, but hey, it only costs them one click. If you are the kind of person who doesn't mind spamming others, this would be worth doing even manually.
There are some social medias where I would "like" posts as a save/bookmark feature, as it lacked a native one. I'm sure there are other people who did the same, maybe carried the habit forward.
I have people who consistently like posts within minutes of them being posted, so there is definitely some kind of automation at work. I have no idea why someone would want to do this, however.
Oh, exciting! My algorithm is that I always press the like button for the sheer joy of making the little heart go red and feeling that I've done a nice thing. After all if the essay turns out to be boring I will be surprised, notice, and can go back and make the heart go back to white.
But it looks like some people might actually be reading the title first, which strikes me as silly. The title doesn't tell me much about whether the essay is good!
I think this is pretty ubiquitous across all platforms that have like buttons. There's a reason why everyone focuses so hard on titles and thumbnails, and it's because a like is just as much a signal of agreement as it is a signal that you enjoyed reading the post in particular: you don't have to read the post to know that you agree that Orban Was Bad. Some platforms try to get around this (e.g. Less Wrong differentiates between karma upvotes and agreement upvotes, as you know) but even there, a lot of people upvote posts that resonate and downvote posts that irritate.
I like every post from you and other writers before even reading it, just as thanks for the free entertaining content. Same for good YouTube channels. If it turns out to be a bad piece I can unlike it. But I'm 90% likely to like it so might as well do while I remember.
I like almost all YT vids I watch before I start them because I basically always know -- just from who it came from, or the subject matter -- I almost certainly will like it. If I find I don't then I simply unlike. I imagine some people are doing something similar here.
The probability of me liking a favourite author's post is high enough that spending time to determine whether or not I do is a waste of time. If I actually don't like it I can just unlike it halfway through
Hardly ever comment here, but love Scott's posts. I learned from other content creators on YouTube - please please leave a like, so if I *already* like someone I’ll hit the like button early because otherwise I’ll get distracted, leave their page, do some work, come back to some other page… never leave a like. And that, my friends, is BAD karma.
Is it dishonest to give to a charity? Or to recommend a previous employee to a new company? Not trying to be annoyingly snarky there. But the metaphor seems relevant. Let's imagine that I like the charity's, or my old employee's, previous work. I trust they will continue to perform admirably due to their track record. I give my endorsement via money or recommendation or whatever, even though I am not going to be following up on whether they actually help people with my money or do a good job in their new role -- I might change my mind if I hear something bad! But I'm happy to boost their visibility to the (human or non-human, as the case may be) algorithm.
The difference here may be the interpretation of what a "like" on Substack means. To me, it means "boost this to more readers," because that's what it actually does. I think some people want likes to mean, "I like this," but unfortunately that's not what likes do.
Clicking "like" on a post doesn't mean "I have read this". It means "I am a modern human being who understands that the only purpose of likes, especially on a for-profit VC funded platform, is to feed an algorithm and I, for whatever reason, have chosen to do so".
I have heard that Orban is no more - and probably less - corrupt than most of his predecessors.
But that doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is that Orban held back the tsunami of globalism and loss of national sovereignty, and Russophobia, that has swept over so Europe. This makes him a hero in my eyes.
I personally attach some non-zero value to democratic institutions, but I also attach non-zero value to governments that are interested in the non-extinction of their people, and Orban scores noticeably higher than his predecessors on that front.
This isn't a subjective preference, by the way- you don't have democracy without survival. Try solving for that equilibrium.
Can you explain what you mean? I usually hear this used about immigration, but even non-Orban Eastern European countries have very few immigrants. Czechia and Poland, the two countries I checked as natural comparison points, both seem to be between 0.5 - 1% nonwhite. Czechia's government is moderate, Poland's is conservative but hasn't attracted the same kind of democracy fears as Fideisz. Is your argument that, absent Orban, Hungary would have many more immigrants than its neighbor/comparison countries?
Are you sure you checked the correct governments for Czechia and Poland?
Current government of Czechia is a coalition between populist catch all russian adjacent Babiš and with smaller far right parties (SPD and motorists). The previous government was moderate spanning from center-left to conservative, and the current president is moderate, but it's a parliamentary republic where the president mostly has a representative role.
This last point is also true for poland (although the president has a veto power there). The president is from PiS (very conservative right wing) but the government is a coalition spanning across center-left to right with Tusk (KO, center-right/right). Former government was from PiS, for which there was antidemocratic concerns in a similar direction as Fidesz (reform of constitutional court and strong control of public TV), but to a much weaker extent.
Edit: "Russian adjacent" is maybe too strong and unfair for Babiš, especially as I haven't been following much his position on this since the election. During the campaign he focused a lot on criticizing military aid to Ukraine.
In the specific case of Hungary, I don't think migrants are even the primary concern so much as an internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates. Orban's pro-natalism hasn't been very effective, but trying at least counts for something, and I would like our ruling class to spend as much time, energy and ingenuity on eugenic pro-natalism as they expended on left-wing social programs over the past 50 years before declaring "nothing works".
I think it's totally plausible Hungary would have had more suspiciously-tanned-Ukrainian refugees in the non-Orban scenario, but I suppose I can't prove it. My broader point is that you're starting with this implicit argument that Preserving Democracy is the ultimate and overriding moral consideration here, and while I have no especial love for dictators I can imagine a world where less democracy could be a lesser evil.
I see what you're saying, but this just seems like the SBF argument for it sometimes being okay to do evil for the greater good. I think the reason we have deontological bars against this kind of reasoning is to encode a heuristic that this works much less than you would think - people do the evil, and then the greater good doesn't result, and you're just stuck with evil, and sometimes even less good than you started with because your plan has backfired (as SBF's did with effective altruism).
For example, it seems like Hungary had all the normal downsides of illiberalism over the past few years - poor economy, people so unhappy that they overcome all these obstacles and kicked out Orban in a landslide. But it also seems like the native fertility rate has done *worse* than in all the other comparison countries - the way I phrased it last links post was "Hungary now has a lower birthrate than all the surrounding countries, a greater 2-year drop in birthrate (by far) than any surrounding country, and the second highest ten year drop...proposed causes include declining approval ratings for Orban, who has become associated with pronatalist policies in the Hungarian mind..." (see https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3910901/hungary-little-baby-bust/ ).
So although I agree that in principle, you should sometimes be consequentialist about this sort of thing, I think there's rightly an incredibly high bar.
Arctotherium did a pretty lengthy breakdown on the topic here, but it's possible Orban's pro-natal incentives were less than successful because they primarily went to mothers, not fathers.
I think the economic arguments for left-wing/liberal policies are entirely myopic, of course, since there are few migrant groups that are net economic benefits in the 2nd/3rd generation and the exceptions are just unsustainable zero-sum brain drain. Suppressing family formation likewise does wonders for GDP in the short-term until you run out of people, so it's a totally misleading metric. But you know this already.
The politicians should have very high bars for doing this, but voters shouldn't be quite as cautious; something can easily be obviously bad without being overridingly so.
"Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe (not even the far-right minority party "Our Homeland" officially says that's a problem). Orbán's worry was general population decline, ie. the population of the country getting smaller due to a below-2 fertility rate.
While this seems to have been one of the very few things Orbán honestly cared about besides stealing lots of money (unlike his anti-immigration and pro-Russia sentiment which have been pretty clearly dictated by political convenience), his efforts have been net negative - the quality of health care and education plummeted, and that deterred the middle class that was the target of his tax exemption based fertility policies. Also the middle class probably got significantly smaller during his reign, due to a mix of botched economic policies and constant brain drain to more liberal countries.
As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism. If we grade regimes based on actual outcomes, the winners will be ones that are light on intentions (ie. free markets and lots of individual and group freedoms, with the state having very limited ability to shape things according to its intentions). Orbán's regime was another predictable example of heavy state meddling into economy, culture and public discourse making everything worse.
(Mostly in non-fertility-policy-related ways, mind you. His fertility policies, which consisted of various forms of tax relief, would be entirely compatible with more democratic governments, I just wouldn't expect them to be effective.)
> ""Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe"
I'm honestly baffled as how they can pretend this isn't a major problem, unless their plan is to have the Roma running their society by end-of-century.
> "As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism"
I don't regard equality of outcome as a good thing, so I really don't see how this follows.
I also think arguments pertaining to "but we must preserve our health and education systems!" are basically bogus, since there is, e.g, no correlation between health spending and lifespan within the OECD, and similarly no correlation between homework assigned and PISA scores. The outcomes here are overwhelmingly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to government systems, and vast increases in spending on health/education across the western world have all yielded marginal or nonexistent returns on investment since the 1970s. These systems are all going to be bankrupted by a combination of demographic ageing and welfare bloat in the not too distant future (barring miracles in the automation or biotech sector), so I'm not going to penalise Orban for not caring about them.
I also don't think much of "the Hungarian middle class are fleeing to more liberal countries" argument. Any country that tries to move in a more right-wing- i.e, socially sane- direction, is going to face a problem where high-IQ-but-self-interested people don't want to shoulder the moral burdens now expected of them. Emigration needs to be shut down as much as immigration, and you logically cannot constrict the latter without reducing options for the former. The alternative is the current pattern of the world's talent being slowly devoured by IQ shredders, and I am not signing up for that.
That *REALLY* depends on the specific problem. Getting the lead out of gasoline definitely required government level intervention. So do many other problems, like keeping the streets paved. The problem is keeping the interventions to the domain where they are the preferable solution. (Preferred by who? is a real problem. And regulatory capture needs to *strenuously* be avoided. I recommend that regulators be forever forbidden from taking any payment of any nature from those the ever regulated.)
I just finished reading about the anti-Roma racism and segregation in Hungary. So I asked ChatGPT "Tell me about the fertility rates of Roma vs other Hungarians", and it says their fertility rate is driven by socioeconomic status, as "Highly educated Roma women → fertility similar to non-Roma" and "Low-education non-Roma women → fertility closer to Roma levels". Well, somehow I doubt Orbán segregating Roma children in into their own lower-quality schools was exploiting this.
(P.S. anyone who knows how humans work knows it's incredibly suspicious to suggest that a particular ethnic group, with no unifying ideology, is vermin-like going to out-reproduce the other humans in an area. Because that's just classic racist dehumanization.)
Their TFR might or might not be driven by SES, but SES is hugely influenced by genetic factors, so I'm a little skeptical about how sustainable anti-poverty initiatives can be without massive perpetual welfare transfers.
The year is 2060. With a population swollen by ethnically-exclusive pronatalist policies, gypsies sweep the Hungarian state, allied parties taking practically every seat in Parliament. They may be dusky, and suspiciously tanned, but they are FINE: rippling muscles, gleaming hair, perfect teeth. Seems like they’ve been practicing a “gypsy eugenics” of their own, through partner selection. Death of a nation, nary a pale face to be seen. But take heart: Rod Dreher’s corpse is spinning so fast in his coffin it provides a 100% clean renewable power source nationally. He’s finally earned his state salary.
"He did something. I mean obviously it didn't work, like all those evil bad globalists would have predicted immediately, and it caused various side effects and forms of suffering in the process, but he did something!"
I think the topic of birthrates should be less taboo in liberal spaces but that's where the agremeent ends. No, I don't think "ruling classes spending time on eugenic pro-natalism" would be good or useful. It wasn't the last time it happened.
I often wonder, if you went back in time and talked to Reagan and Bush Sr and told them "in 40 years time, the political party you are leading will advocate for the end of democracy," what would they say? Would they shed a tear? I have to think Reagan would, given his entire foreign policy mission was the dissolution of the soviet union in favor of new democratic institutions in western Europe.
Respectfully, when Poland's government was standing with Orban against the EU's desire to let in migrants, there were LOTS of complaints that the ruling "Law and Justice" party and its leader Kaczynski (no relation to Uncle Ted, I think) were massively undemocratic. This was particularly because the party undertook judicial reforms which led to the disempowerment of sitting progressive judges which had attempted to force Poland's border policy into alignment with the EU's more permissive stance.
Surely, to the extent that a country is a democracy, the organs of state including the judiciary, must do what the people want.
So if judges want to force though immigration, against the will of the people as expressed in an election, it is democratically right that they should be removed.
If the ex-judges don't like it, they can set up their own political party and contest the next election and (again, to the extent that the country is a democracy) they will win seats proportional to their vote share.
Aristotle would have called elected rulers replacing unelected judges "democracy."
Of course, Aristotle didn't favor democracy.
Lately, though, we are supposed to use the term "democracy" to refer to whatever the pundit considers to be good government, such as a democratically-elected rightwing government's powers being ham-strung.
Of course even if one thinks that it was wise of Orban to keep out migrants, it does not follow that he should fire schoolteachers with contrary political views, use government money to gain control of media outlets, or be re-elected prime minister forever no matter how badly he screws up everything else.
Approximately zero Syrian refugees wanted to go to Hungary; it was just between them and Germany / Sweden / the Netherlands etc. The actual problem there was that the EU (or more accurately the Schengen area) has an internal return policy, where the country where illegal immigrants first entered needs to take those immigrants back from other EU countries (even if those immigrants set out because the chancellor of Germany invited them). Orbán tried for a couple weeks to just ship refugees across the country, then richer EU countries started getting cold feet, he got cold feet that they will ship those people back to Hungary and he won't be able to send them anywhere else, and built the fence.
This was a somewhat legitimate problem, unfortunately Orbán realized that scaremongering with refugees works extremely well, so even though the migrant crisis ended, state propaganda media continued to pretend that Hungary is being besieged by Asian hordes.
Comparing Orban strictly to his predecessors I think is a category error as a rebuttal to this sort of argument.
It is great that Orban was able to win an election against bad predecessors by talking about all the ways his ideas were better than theirs.
It is bad that it became increasingly uncertain that he would have anything other than a hand picked *successor* and that the strength of their arguments or improvement in quality of life would not be relevant.
I liked that line. Using a TC quip against a comment in a post that in large part is also a counter to TC. But your observation may also be literally true. For all 3 of us.
In this context it means, "if everybody thinks this way, what is the result," i.e. you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views.
For every action, there's often an opposite and (approximately) equal reaction. In this specific case, Scott is worried about escalation. If the Rightwing breaks the rules of Liberal Democracy, the Leftwing will break the rules as well.
And yeah, it's Tyler Cowen's tagline. Basically a restatement of Supply & Demand.
The Leftwing is already breaking them and this: "you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views" is definitely happening on both sides already. As an example:
Pedro Sanchez, president of Spain and current world bastion of the Socialdemocratic Left:
-stuffed ballots to get elected in his party's primaries
- drive to power funded by his father-in-law's prostitution business
-got into power on a no-confidence vote because of corruption proceedings against the governing right-wing party
-now has three of his own ministers, including his right-hand man sitting in jail on corruption charges
- his wife on trial for corruption (she somehow managed to become a tenured professor at one of Spain's most respected public universities, despite having only a high-school degree)
- his brother on trial for corruption
- his Attorney General convicted of revealing private information (against a prominent right-wing regional governor) and defenestrated
- Constitutional Courts completely under his control
- State statisics office (responsable for polls) completely under his control, and routinely giving his party 5-10% better results than actually end up happening
- State TV and radio completely sycophantic towards him
- promotion of laws to silence any right to far-right media outlets who are naturally critical with him
- his government routinely critical in the media about judges who rule against his interests (such as the judge who convicted his attorney general and the judge who has brought his wife to trial) undermining the separation of powers
- lost his second election but managed to stay in power by forming a coalition with right-wing separatists who had perpetrated a coup by unilaterally declaring Catalunya a separate country, and whom he said, before the election, he would never form a coalition with and never pardon
- after being elected pardoned the right-wing separatists whom he promised never to pardon
- invited into his coalition the basque separatist party comprised of ex ETA members, who were assassinating people up until about 2003, and have never apologised for doing so
- has not managed to pass a budget in the entire 4 years of his second term
- has justified not stepping down (despite all of the above) because "Spain needs to build a wall against the far-right and the right" (ie everybody to the right of his party, over 55% of the voters based on polls at the moment) because they are a "threat to democracy" (but somehow insisting there is only one legitimate party that everyone "who values democracy" must vote for isn't a threat to said democracy...)
- has brought in a law to give automatic citizenship to grandchildren of people exiled during Franco's dictatorship, as they will all presumably vote sympathetically to him
- constantly likens the far-right and right to Franco, and to dictatorships, but is currently best friends with Xi Jinping
There is actually more, but I will leave it there as I think it paints an adequate picture.
Sanchez is currently trying to sell himself as a great champion against Trump (because his domestic popularity is such a disaster), but he has done much of the same anti-democratic stuff as Trump, he's just left-wing... and left-wing sympathizers naturally seem to look the other way in his case.
I think the counterfactual was demonstrated 20 years ago: a proud, beautiful, but starkly post-Soviet country with few exports and a weak economy. Orban's rise was disappointing but not shocking, and something similar could happen again.
It is complicated. Orbán basically invented the word "illiberalism", and that is largely because partially Western liberalism came to Hungary in a wrong way, and was not even ready for it even if it would have been the right way.
Let's talk about the right way first. For example all those white Americans in 1965 who supported the civil rights movement of blacks, they understood it is going to cost them. But they had so much surplus that they felt they can sacrifice for justice. It does not work in a poor country. Hungarians feel they themselves are the victims of poor circumstances, so they have nothing to offer to the Roma or to gays or trans people or anything like that. They were not ready.
Now as for the wrong kind of liberalism. First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country. Same as in Russia. Then it was that kind of liberalism that is talked about it here, too, that somehow tolerance means tolerating crime and disorder.
So Orbán's illiberalism was a rebellion against this.
> First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country.
The realistic alternative was to get the country looted by the local strongman.
For example, in 1990s Slovakia during Mečiar's regime, instead of selling the state property on a free market (where mostly the foreign investors would buy it), it was sold (so cheaply that it was practically donated) to local entrepreneurs from Mečiar's party. His voters applauded this, as from their perspective it meant that the national wealth will stay in the nation.
What actually happened was that these entrepreneurs turned out to be so incompetent that they ruined the companies overnight, and then there was 22% unemployment (on average, which means that in some regions it approached 50%). Some companies went bankrupt, the rest was sold to foreign investors for about 10% of the original price (and the money now went to private pockets, instead of the national budget).
Today, the situation is back to normal, and yes the major employers are German (Volkswagen, Kaufland, Lidl, HELLA, Henkel, Slovak Telekom), American (U.S. Steel), Brittish (Tesco, Mondi), Irish (Accenture), Swiss (Swiss Re), French (Orange), Dutch (ING), South Korean (Kia, Samsung), Chinese (Volvo) etc. (Stellantis) companies.
So it seems to me that the situation is opposite to what most people naively predict. "Keeping your national treasures" gets people unemployed and starving, "being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed.
Unfortunately, this sometimes creates a self-reinforcing loop. The more you ruin your country by "protecting" it, the more people get convinced that the situation is so bad that they need more protection.
I think the main issue here is that neither paths lead you to what "feels fair" and what "was promised" -- the "well-fed" still means "pretty far from Western Europe, and huge internal differences" (both in the society and geographically). And this logically leads to people being unhappy from time to time, and want to "try some other way".
Unironically using the term Russophobia while Russia is in the fifth year of an all-out invasion of a neighhoring country, while also launching sabotage attacks and trying tp subvert democracy in the rest of Europe, is a bit rich.
Really depends on how aware they were of what they were doing. Although personally I support life in prison rather than death penalty in pretty much all cases.
It is not all-out - Russia didn't mobilize men (except for one episode in 2022, and still relying on volunteers; borders are still open). Industry/economy also was largely left as is.
>> subvert democracy in the rest of Europe
And how is that subversion going? Any tangible results favoring Russia? Perhaps, another set of sanctions was blocked? Or maybe some European country experienced a coup?
Can you maybe explicitly state what you are trying to argue?
It seems that there might be some confusion between 2 points I've replied to above?
1. all-out vs. limited war - this indeed killed a lot of people (but how do you know which, if any, of them are 'my people'?)
2. strength of Russian government propaganda effort - which is objectively very weak ('nerf gun'), and not having much of an impact.
IMO, US / European governments routinely do much more press control / narrative shaping / psyops (in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe), quite often get desired results... but then exactly the same actions are somehow very evil if attempted by China / Russia / Gulf States.
LOL at Russophobia. That is a bit like Gengiskhanophobia.
You're a free person, you can take a vacation in Kyiv and enjoy the raining Iskanders and Shaheds yourself. I'd be surprised if it didn't make you at least a teeny bit Russophobic.
By indirect connection, I could name a few thousand people who are actively helping Ukraine by gathering unused meds, fixing wheelchairs, donating tourniquets, donating time and fuel with their truck to get the stuff over there, etc.
Try and find someone who is even thinking of helping Russia in the same way. Not even any of the Russians I know know any other Russians that are willing to help Russia materially (other than being "jerks" and supporting them vocally, while cozying up in western Europe, of course)).
Ukraine is considered a US / EU ally, and helping Ukraine socially and legally (i.e. not risking fines / jail time) is way, way easier that helping Russia. So people helping Russia and living in US / EU probably won't talk about it much (if at all).
I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Don't hear much about that either, though. The only people I ever met that defend Russia verbally come across as the type of person that don't give a fish about helping anyone but themselves.
Whereas, on the other side, I have met dozens of Russians sacrificing free time to aid Ukrainians with humanitarian needs. Talking with these people gives quite the opposite impression - level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things. Some with pain in their heart about what their own relatives and friends back home are still saying about them, Ukraine, and the war. The kind of people that would rather work to make an honest living for themselves without trampling over others.
As much as I try to steelman then other side, nothing comes of it. My own experience is obviously skewed *and* biased, but I'm no stranger to self-criticism. And yet, crickets.
>> I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians (i.e. individuals with Russian citizenship who might or might not be living in Russia, and might or might not agree with official Russian state policies); and same thing with Ukraine (state) vs. Ukrainians.
Helping individuals is much easier; but I would be surprised if from a legal standpoint helping Russia (state) would be no different from helping Ukraine (state), at least in Europe.
Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
>> level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things <...>
There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
>> Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians
Yeah, obviously. But strictly humanitarian help is not sanctioned to the best of my knowledge, even for the state of Russia. But I'm not 100% sure on that one and could ask around if you want a more certain answer.
If you want to send Russians, not the state, strictly humanitarian help - knock yourself out. Nobody is going to stop you.
>> Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
You load up (a) truck(s) with humanitarian aid and drive it to Russia. Just like we and many other private persons do to Ukraine, every week.
As for money/wire transfers, I don't know. Easiest is cash, but crypto or other paypal-like services probably exist.
>>And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
EU border agents would probably search your truck for sanctioned goods. What else is there to do?
>>There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
Sure. But for some weird reasons, I can find thousands after thousands of people helping Ukraine outside of Ukraine, non-Ukrainians even. Does that tell you anything?
The same or worse? Did I miss the U.S. ground invasion seeking to annex Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran? Did I miss U.S. soldiers raping and massacring civilians?
They were talking about Israel, which has had annexations or prolonged occupations of parts of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria in the past and has made clear its continuation of intent to do so very recently. It also, to not get into detail, definitely has cases of soldiers raping or massacring civilians (as do both Ukraine and Russia, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah - this is just a thing that happens in sufficiently large scale conflicts. You can deny it's a structural problem but not really that it happens at a baseline.)
I was talking about both, I don't think you can neatly separate Israeli atrocities from its main patron and enabler, especially as there's been direct US involvement in Gaza (it's why Bushnell self-immolated) and Iran.
Not sure re: Lebanon but it wouldn't surprise me there either.
The phrase many (and myself) have interpreted as an intention to annex in the near future is "the new Israeli border must be the Litani", a river about a tenth of the way into Lebanon (30ish km) from the Israeli border, by the Finance Minister. Other officials tend to use the term "security zone" or "buffer zone" or such to imply an occupation rather than actual annexation, but when asked to comment on the Finance Minister's explicit intent to annex none of them chose to disavow it.
Assuming that's the part you weren't sure on since it's a relatively recent development.
"Closely wedded" means what in your book? There are diplomatic relations between Israel and the EU, but nowhere near the level of closeness as between the US and Israel, and some EU member countries are quite openly hostile to Netanyahu's government.
Regardless, it is quite natural that wars happening in your own backyard will provoke more of a reaction that more distant wars. For example, the Arab world does not care much about Ukraine either and is happy to welcome Russian potentates - that does not mean that Arab complaints about Palestine are "hard to take seriously". Or does it?
I just want to note here, that within the EU, Orban himself was probably the strongest and most consistent supporter of Israel and especially Netanyahu.
Well, yeah, you can also visit Tehran (although getting a visa might be trickier) and then enjoy nearby denotations of US and Israel missiles. Or you can go to Donetsk and experience Ukrainian drone strikes.
... but how would you decide which <insert country name>-phobia to feed in the first place?
Careful about that first proposal, the Iranian regime is not above using visitors as hostages or hanging them as spies.
There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard. Russia is a clear aggressor in that war and Putin himself broke a treaty he signed, do you know? Treaty on the Russian–Ukrainian border, 2003.
Equivocating between Russia and Ukraine is like equivocating between a SS guard and a Jewish prisoner who got hold of a gun.
>> There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard.
In which regard?
My claim is that if you knowingly and intentionally go to the area under attack by country / armed group X, and see that attack (or its aftermath) with your own eyes, then most likely you would dislike group X more (they are shooting at me/people around me!).
But your choice to go to the side opposing X means you already dislike side X more.
This is fine, everybody entitled to have their sympathies; but I am much more interested in discussing various policies based on their merits, regardless of which side might be implementing those policies.
You heard that very wrong, Orbán was much more corrupt than his predecessors (who were also pretty significantly corrupt).
One way to measure it is kickbacks (ie. whenever you get a grant or win a tender or are otherwise paid from public funds based on the decision of some government body, you have to secretly give the people in that body some part of the money). In the pre-Orbán times, a 10-20% kickback was common. In the Orbán regime, the kickback is usually the majority of the money (e.g. the latest major corruption story [1] involved a 75% kickback).
We're 'Murrican. We don't "bribe" other countries. We "generously offer assistance in international development" which has the "unfortunate" side-effect of destabilizing inconvenient regimes and removing inconvenient politicians from office.
I would say, kickbacks are even the wrong word or approach for what happened. In case of kickbacks, a company takes the initiative to bribe someone from the state, it is very individual. But it was more like a state-ran organized corruption machine where it was the state who took the initative to use business as a cover for shoveling money out of the state. It was the state who decided we want X money, let's figure out what can we build for X*1.25 money, and then distribute the X among political loyalists, propagandists etc. I think the correct term for this is political machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
Corrupt and undemocratic leaders are bad in their own right. Corruption reduces government efficacy by MUCH more than what the people siphon off (say, you give a $200m contract to a worse company, costing the tax payers $20m, in exchange for a $1m payoff), so you get less of everything including what you want.
Undemocratic policies undermine the democratic mechanisms that encourage good policy: normally, voters get mad at gas prices/inflation/losing their jobs/whatever and vote you out, and the fear of this makes you try not to let those things get bad in the first place. If you don't fear getting kicked out, then you have less reason to care about gas prices, and more reason to care about making all the bank notes multiples of nine.
So you just get worse, shittier governance. Then you get negative polarization against all their signature special interest policies, because those things get associated with their shitty government.
We're not talking about the alternative being "don't spend the money," though. We're talking about the alternative being "spend the same money for a worse version of the same thing, or more money for the same thing, or some combination thereof."
It is difficult for me to imagine the kind of asymmetric dystopia you desire, or the kind of suffering and toil you want to sentence the vast majority of human beings to experience from behind eyes and inside minds that are just as real and wondrous as your own, even if they may in some cases rotate hammers in their mind slightly slower or less accurately (or whatever kind of ‘peasants are NPCs’ BS this implies).
I think corruption is even worse than that. In capitalism people innovate or provide good services to customers because that is the only way to get rich. So when you can get rich on corruption, the desire to innovate or provide good services goes away. So it kills the marketplace as much as badly thought out socialism does.
If the typical free market margin rate is 20%, at least as margin1, it means $100 stolen displaces $500 worth of products and services of the kind that customers actually want.
You are right about the effect of corruption; on the other hand, "capitalism" also includes to build a monopoly (buy out your competitors) and then just collect the money as there is no more alternative. This is also not "doing good work" and "satisfying customers". :-)
Please define globalism, Russophobia and how Orban's policies actually stopped this half formed concepts (also loss of national sovereignity).
Russophobia in particular I have often seen it used as a term to say opposing current Russian expansionism (which in cases of countries bordering Russia could be rebranded as basic common sense). Safe to say at the beginning of WW2 no american was considered Germanophobic for condemning Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Of course there are other use of the word, but not ones that Iv'e personally heard often
I do think there's a genuine phenomenon where Russian culture as a whole becomes stigmatised out of opposition to Putin's current regime - concert halls cancelling performances of 19th century Russian music and the like - and if we're willing to distinguish anti-Zionism (and indeed, even more narrowly, anti-Netenyahu-ism) from antisemitism, it should likewise be possible to acknowledge that there can be a problem of anti-Russian xenophobia without going soft on the current regime.
It should be noted that Putin's war is also a cultural war. His policy is to eradicate Ukrainin culture in the occupied territories, to completely "russify" the people starting with the children. Other countries pushing back on Russia's cultural influence is not a phobia, it's entirely justifiable.
I can understand that in Eastern European countries which are actually at risk of having their culture overwritten by Russia, but I hardly think that cancelling a Tchaikovsky concert in Paris or New York is doing anything to thwart Russian expansionism.
Yeah, well, I didn't talk about Russian expansionism, but about the cultural war; that is a parallel battlefield. Boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest is not likely to save a single Palestinian or Lebanese life either. Sometimes "business as usual" is just even less appropriate.
My point is that Tchaikovsky concerts in the West, or classes about Tolstoy on western syllabuses, are not being advanced by agents of Putin's regime. The comparison to Eurovision is fair to a degree, but we're not talking about cultural events organised *by* Russia, just classics of global arts and culture that happen to have been created by centuries-old Russians. Israel's relative youth as a nation makes it difficult to find an exact analogue, but there is such a thing as Israeli cinema, and if some TV station pulled a previously-scheduled rerun of a 1950s Israeli film that had been scheduled internally with no influence by the current Israeli government, I would consider that prejudiced overreach too.
Let's say, you are in charge of providing basic education to the population on the territory controlled by US in Afghanistan or Israel in Gaza.
Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Also, how do you think your policies would look from the outside, if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
>Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Granted, it's not entirely off the mark to compare the Russia-Ukrain war with your examples. But if you believe that your points are all that's happening in Ukraine, let me add some more questions:
What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense. What would it look like if I also mandated that all edcuation has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed. What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
Do you need more? I could go on.
>if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
You know, sometimes being unfriendly is the objectively correct behaviour. As is the case with Russia.
End of your reply suggests that you made up your mind and whatever I can say probably would be in vain, but let me try anyway:
>> What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense.
Afghanistan under Taliban harbored jihadi training camps, as well and Al-Qaeda leadership, and was not willing/capable to arrest jihadists and Osama ben Laden, so yes, it is fair to point out this in school books, and say that US attacked Afghanistan to eliminate any possibility of another 9/11 (which was clearly an atrocity, with ~3000 civilian victims).
>> What would it look like if I also mandated that all education has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed.
>> What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
If those kids are indeed orphans (i.e. there are no relatives who have legal custody, regardless of why it happened), then the state has the duty to provide them with food/shelter/education (especially if it considers these kids its own citizens), including via adoption; doesn't look very good - but alternatives seems worse.
There can be and it's generally performative and useless to actually affect the Russian war effort. Still I find the comparison with antisemitism unconvincing. Antisemitism is based on centuries of proven hate and violence inflicted against an isolated and during the time of persecution innocent ethnic group.
This is not remotely close to what's happening today against Russia.
No, the amount his buddies were stealing literally led to a serious dysfunction in public services, in the trains catching fire due to lack of maintenance way. And sorry to say that but after 2022 Russophobia is objectively correct and globalism looks a whole lot better than that.
One of my closest online friends lives in Pittsburgh! She says “very cool working class culture, lots of anarchist punks and other lovely counter-cultural weirdos”, I guess working class culture can also mean “kinda poor”
"It's fine to bend democratic as long as you advance <purely ideological ill defined pet cause>" isn't a great way of doing things and not how the west has worked or achieved its success until now. People who often claim about wanting to preserve the keys to that success should pay more attention to what they keys *are* instead of just going with vibes.
If there is any embodiment for "loss of national sovereignty", "globalism" and "corruption" that's Russia
Every single Russian politician who didn't use the term Russian as a slur, is killed by Putin in not so subtle way
(most translations ignore it, but Putin uses colonial term for Russia like "Cisleithania" for Hungary)
And it's not a linguistic quirk, you may look on Putin government and institutions and find how much length he went to make majority-minority rule in 85% Russian country
Yo
Or you may look into constitution, and find that Russia belongs to "Multi-ethnic Cisleithanian people"
Or finally you may look at his foreign policy and find he spend last 12 years in cringe cold and then hot war with Ukraine, Ukrainians closer to Russians than Berliners to Bavarians, painting very soft protection of Ukrainian culture as something only nazi would do
Like, Russia is in real life all the "globohomo gay agenda Klaus Schwab eat bugs own nothing be happy" state that exists only in memes outside of Russia
>In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!)
Which Wikipedia pages have notably cursed headings?
The one for Australian film producer Pat Sullivan takes you on a pretty wild ride. "Rape Conviction." "Racism." "Involvement in the creation of Felix the Cat".
Orban reminded me of the the Daleys, who were mayors of Chicago for over 40 years between them. Orban, like the Daleys, was a pretty crooked political machine boss.
In the late 1960s, student radicals tended to refer to Richard J. Daley as a Fascist, but that quickly calmed down and largely vanished before his death in, I believe, 1976. Very few people called Richard M. Daley a Fascist.
The Daley family was so little suspected of Fascism in this century that Barack Obama selected William Daley, son of Richard J. and brother of Richard M. Daley, as his Chief of Staff for his third and fourth years in office.
Of course, the Daleys weren't a threat to Democracy.
How could they be? They were loyal Democrats.
For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley held back the last Cook County precincts until the downstate Republican machine caved in and laid all their cards on the table, setting off an appreciative celebration of Mayor Daley in Hyannisport among Kennedy staffers (according to Theodore White's memoir "In Search of History").
There were two massive cases of vote fraud in Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs) involving Democrats when I lived there in the 1980s:
The 1982 Senatorial election when the Democrat Adlai Stevenson the Something did improbably better than all the polls predicted until finally, several days after the election, the Republicans scraped together enough votes in DuPage County to end it. Stevenson, a naive blue blood, kept demanding a recount although all his boys kept telling him that, you know, Adlai, we gave it our best shot, so it would be best to let bygones be bygones and not turn over too many rocks with a recount. Stevenson's recount led to several dozen Democrats and a few Republicans being convicted of vote fraud.
Then the Democratic mayoral primary in 1987 appears to have had massive vote fraud on various sides.
Neither scandal directly involved a Daley, however.
For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
> For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley...1982...1987...
> For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
Why are you stopping at 1960? Go back further, you may find more interesting and highly relevant information for 2026 voters. For example, my understanding is that there was significant voter fraud among the hunter gatherers in the Jeaga tribe who used to occupy the Palm Beach area. In fact, they didn't even have voting! So we should be somewhat suspicious of the current president, who spends quite a bit of time in that region.
It's a perfectly reasonable description of the highly successful narrative engineering that biased elites engage in. Canada just got a majority by the fairly manifest bribery of opposition MPs, the media are glowing about it
1. Do you think this tactic used by Democrats, of unfairly calling their political opponents threats to democracy, has been effective? Have Republicans been harmed by it? Should they be worried?
2. Assuming the implied obverse is also true--that Republicans, by contrast, more consistently refer to their political opponents using unexaggerated & readily defensible language--does it suggest some kind of path forward or actionable outcome for Republicans? I.e. What would you wish Republicans to do with the information you've provided?
It's extremely easy to find many examples of Democrats referring to victories by Democrats as being fraudulent. In many of those cases Democrats would be quicker to say so than Republicans.
The Daleys won a dozen or so Chicago mayoral elections. Maybe they cheated once or twice, but still ... the Daleys, for better or worse, more or less represent democracy in action.
Personally, I'm pretty pro-democracy. Let the people have what they want, good and hard.
But I'm also aware that smarter guys than me such as Plato were not pro-democracy.
Orban has only won five out of eight elections to be Hungary's supremo, but it sure seems that the people who claim to be "pro-democracy" are much, much angrier toward him about the five times he won than they are about the three times he lost.
I don't think anyone is angry about Orban *winning* elections. Rather people are angry what shady things he did in order to support himself winning the elections, and how to build large parliamentary majorities out of very thin popular vote majorities.
But all of this is already in Scott's blogpost above. So your argument seems rather disingenious.
Yep, the Daleys were corrupt and bad and undermined democracy.
Maybe would have been fascist or authoritarian if they had had the power to be so. But since Chicago is a small part of a larger mainly-democratic polity, we (fortunately) never got to find out.
The Daleys are my go-to example for "good corrupt government." Yes, they were corrupt machine politicians who made Chicago their personal fiefdom. But they were genuinely attached to it. "This is MY city, so it better be functional (or it makes me look bad), semi-solvent (or it can't pay me off), beautiful (because I'll always live here), host important events (to show off my importance)." The Daleys, for all their faults, cared about the long-term health and well-being of THEIR city, perhaps mostly for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it put guardrails on it. The current Mayor Johnson, and previous Mayor Lightfoot, are excellent examples of the perils of the alternative - also corrupt, but more ideological and rootless, with less location-permanence and personal investment in the cities they run. You get the sense they'd abandon the place in a heartbeat to advance themselves (e.g. Lightfoot getting booted and immediately going to Harvard / Michigan).
*Noblesse Oblige* is a very real concept, in my experience. The nobles expect to get *paid* and *respected* for their *oblige*, and they don't expect the rules to apply to them, but there's a massive difference between an upper class who feels a responsibility and ownership toward their local town or city and one who doesn't.
I knew my (small-town rich) grandparents-in-law as fairly narcissistic, small-minded people. But at their funeral, it was amazing to hear all of the work and donations they had done for the benefit of their hometown. They really cared about it, and their actions showed it.
Yes, exactly. Today's upper classes, it seems to me, still expect to get paid, demand respect, and to have the rules not apply to them - but without any corresponding responsibility for the ongoing health of the polity. Sure, you'd be better off with honest government officials who aren't quasi-feudal, but that's not the choice available. More often it's either pure climbers, ideologues, and looters, or else the feudal fief model where at least there's some personal connection and stake in the enterprise by the local nobility.
I might reconsider that go-to example, at least in the case of Daley Jr. He was responsible for a number of public finance blunders, most infamously the parking deal which is sending our meter revenue to Abu Dhabi for the next 50 years. Johnson and Lightfoot haven't done anything close to that. And Johnson is very much a Chicago-bred machine politician in the mold of Daley, not a parachuting elite, so your criticism of him from that angle doesn't make much sense.
Really though this entire subthread is kind of silly. "Chicago politics" is a punchline due to the kind of stunts that the Daleys pulled, and to spin that into some sort of partisan victimhood narrative is a stretch. I'm glad that Chicago has moved on from the Daleys, and glad that Hungary has now moved on from Orban.
Johnson in particular is so unpopular that his worst ideas have often been killed off. That he is a creature of, by, and for the CTU, with a dash of befuddled woke for flavor, does not inspire confidence that he is permanently yoked to the city, although he's so incompetent and hated that he may not have a featherbed landing elsewhere like Lightfoot. Instead the city remains billions in deficit and with dismal credit / bond ratings. In 2008, the year of the "worst deal of the century" (no question it was bad), Chicago's bonds were rated AA. Now they're BBB. I would happily take Richard J. or Richard M. over Brandon Johnson any day of the week, and based on his single-digit approval ratings I'd guess that large portions of Chicago's electorate would as well.
EDIT: Also, as to "partisan victimhood," all of the above are Democrats, as you know. If anything it's a generational question - old vs. new Democrats. I wouldn't call that "partisan."
The decline in bond rating just proves my point, Daley got a bailout that screwed over the city's finances in the long term. And he had other similar deals like the Skyway tolls, the parking meters deal was just the worst of them. I'm not going to defend Johnson, I just don't think it's accurate to say he isn't attached to the city, nor is it really relevant to his (lack of) effectiveness. Rahm has been our best mayor this century IMO, and he went off to be the ambassador of Japan or whatever after he left office.
Re: partisan victimhood, I was referring to the original comment comparing Orban and the Daleys, not anything in your reply. Sorry for the confusion.
The brother of a friend of mine in Chicago was a U.S. Senator. He didn't even bother running for a second term because, being a rare honest man in Illinois politics, everybody who was anybody in the state was mad at him.
There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion". I think this is a reasonable argument to hold against people who say any threat to democratic values must come strictly before any other election issue - a candidate who seems 10% more authoritarian than the alternative but who you agree with strongly on many other issues probably is a better choice to vote for in many cases.
(In practice people almost exclusively accuse only people who's other policies they don't like anyway of being authoritarian, so not sure how many such people even think they have to make this tradeoff).
I basically agree, but the more you separate out "real dictatorship" as a category containing only the worst and most unlikely outcomes, the more that real dictatorship is very bad and even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent.
I also think there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things. The same way that a candidate with good policies who also rapes children might be consequentially better for the country than a candidate with bad policies who doesn't, but you can have a win-win bargain between different parties by all of them agreeing never to vote in someone like that no matter how good their policies seem.
In general dictatorship seems to be a high variance mode so most of the worst failures of government are pretty dictatorial (Stalin, pol pot etc - Mao is a clear example of how a single bad leader can deliver much worse results than the baseline for his system if he has enough power). So it makes sense to worry about it.
But it has to not be the *only* thing you worry about, because that leads to paralysis and "nobody should ever be allowed to do anything", which is also really bad. The example of this is New York after Robert Moses, which decided "hey a guy with too much power pushed city planning in a direction we didn't like, let's make sure nobody ever has the power to change anything again" and thus got eternally stuck in its post-moses planning.
To my eyes, your first paragraph doesn’t say much except, “No, you’re wrong, it *is* a slippery slope.” I wonder if maybe AI has gotten you too much in the habit of thinking in apocalyptic terms.
Your second paragraph is sounder, but if you accept that both sides have to be constantly vigilant that potential autocrats don’t gain power, I don’t see why you imagine that such an agreement could be arrived at.
(I *especially* don’t see how you imagine it could be struck in the US after the last twenty years. But you’re talking about theory and principles, not the situation on the ground.)
"Small chance" is very much *denying* "slippery slope". The point of the slippery slope metaphor is to argue that something is likely. Scott's point is that if something is bad, then even small chances are relevant.
Also, no one should be saying "both sides" have to be vigilant that autocrats don't gain power - *all* sides should be vigilant, and we shouldn't pretend that people who opt out of two major parties can ignore autocracy.
Agreed, if you want to criticize it it's more Pascal's mugging then slippery slope. Argument was trading off some democratic value support for support in other categories may be worth it. Rebuttal is ant-democratic can be really bad even a small chance is therefore bad. But without saying how small and how bad it leans into Pascal's mugging style argument.
Fair enough; I agree with tg56’s assessment. But if Scott doesn’t think it’s a slippery slope then I’m not sure his call for action (“even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent”) makes sense. A concerted political effort to stem potential autocracy seems quite likely to produce the autocracy it seeks to prevent, either by direct action or by reaction. What we need is a cooling off, a stepping back. We’ve had two decades with an atmosphere of “it’s now or never” on both sides.
To get in a panic over Trump, the first Chief Executive in my lifetime to actually reduce the size of the executive branch, is indicative of this mood, not of Trump’s actual threat.
I think it's a bit weird to focus on the *size* of the executive branch, while ignoring the degree of centralization. Trump is the first president to make personal demands about what people at so many levels of the executive branch were supposed to do! (Everything from asking them to cancel individual grants to finding reasons to prosecute particular people to renaming parts of the country, on the basis of "the president's priorities", rather than treating the executive branch as a system, the way previous administration had done.) The Supreme Court has endorsed this idea, that perhaps the executive branch is meant to function as a "unitary" agent. But this is definitely a move towards concentrating power in an individual, not distributing it!
But overall, I agree - many attempts to enshrine policies that oppose autocracy tend to push towards autocracy as well. It's often hard to distinguish anti-virus software from malware, given the control it has over your computer, and the immune system is actually the cause of many diseases (like lupus and arthritis and allergies), even as it protects against others.
Well, there is only so much the Executive can do by his own hand. If your point is that the executive branch is working against the wishes of the Executive, then I can only agree, but in that case an autocracy by Trump seems even more remote.
The centralization of the executive branch isn't a threat to democracy -- in fact, it's putting the power back in someone *elected*'s hands, instead of a bunch of unelected, almost completely unaccountable (look at the struggles to even slightly reduce their numbers or fire the ones that were actively sabotaging changes in policy from the political side) bureaucrats.
Now if it's power that the executive branch *shouldn't have* (because the federal government shouldn't have it OR because one of the other branches should have it), that's more of a concern. But no one's actually talking about changing *that*--in fact, the Democrats have been pushing for *more* independent (ie unaccountable to anyone, including Congress) agencies!
The executive power belongs entirely to the President and him alone. He can (and often should) choose to delegate, but he cannot legitimately be *forced* to delegate. The prosecutors and grant writers aren't some independent branch with independent authority. Either they have legislative power (which is a separation of powers problem and itself a threat to democracy), judicial power (same deal), or they have executive power (which isn't theirs but only delegated), or some combination.
And IMO Congress delegating *legislative* or *judicial* authority to the executive (see all the rule-making executive branches and the whole administrative judge complex) is a *way* bigger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done.
“there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things”
But this is undermined by your (correct!) point that “antidemocratic” is a spectrum, and approximately every ruling party is at least a bit antidemocratic when they have the power to be and think they can get away with it.
You can consider dictator risk before other things, but if the choice is between 10% dictator risk with 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, and a 15% dictator risk with 100% of your other preferred policies being enacted… is that really a clear choice to pick the former?
How about "consider relevant differences in dictatorship risk between the candidates"? Obviously nobody is worried about a 1% difference, especially not if other concerns point in a much different direction.
Sure, but that starts to sound less like a “deontological bar” and more like regular old consequentialism.
And in any case, endlessly arguing about whether the difference in risk is 1% or 10% is kind of where we’re at right now. It doesn’t seem like a clean solution.
Per your last paragraph: If you think that there is 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, than I hope it sparks some reflection. Either your assessment of likelihood is very bad or your preferred policies are very bad in the sense of "approximately 0% of other voters/citizens in my democracy want the same or similar policies". The latter is actually a feature of democracy, no? And if you think you know better and still think those policies should be enacted, and you better bend the system in order to achieve it.. then I hope at some point you are going to ask "are we the baddies?"
Being enacted *under the alternative leader*. In this hypothetical we're talking about a potentially authoritarian leader who still has a decent chance of winning the election (despite being perceived as authoritarian even by some of his own supporters), so presumably his actual policies aren't unpopular.
Yes, this is what I meant. You’re choosing between two democratically viable candidates (so, both are pretty popular), one of whom has a somewhat higher chance of becoming a dictator but whose other policies are much more aligned with your preferences.
And obviously in any realistic democracy, the candidates with a viable chance to win don’t literally disagree on 100% of policies - but it may be the case that they disagree on all, or nearly all, of the policies that are “up for debate” or likely to change over the course of the next administration. For example, I think it would be fair to say that a Trump 2024 voter likely disagreed with ~100% of the immigration policy changes during the Biden administration.
There’s also the case that a lot of good things in society are downstream from democracy (via corruption and undermining institutions etc) and that the damage is similarly continuous. There’s no sharp threshold so modeling it as a Risk for some sort of Event which marks the point of no return misses a lot of the negative consequences.
This is true but a different mechanism - e.g. New York or California governance isn't exactly authoritarian but as one party states they still suffer all the other downsides of being weak democracies (like the corruption and weak institutions).
I think, ultimately, there are unfortunately sometimes blurry lines between "ordinary politics" and the meta-politics about whether anyone is undemocratic (and thus undermining the conditions of ordinary politics). Or the entrenchedness of parties can be bad even if they aren't doing anything concrete to undermine democracy. But at the same time, I feel like this blurriness can be used to obscure the plurality of mechanisms by which the spectrum of democratic backsliding affects people negatively.
Yeah. The issue with there being multiple mechanisms which enable democratic backsliding is that they often imply different solutions - for example if you're worried about an executive concentrating power and restricting free elections you want to double down on voting for your own party (assuming you're a partisan who believes only the other party's candidates do this, which most voters are). But if you're worried about single party rule and lack of accountability you want to be more open to voting for the other party.
The California gerrymandering thing is a good example of this tension.
(There are solutions that work for both - e.g. I generally support voting for more palatable candidates in the opposite party's primary and think it's good for both these issues - but there are tensions).
Someone who's got sufficiently extreme bad behavior in their personal life - and thus, presumably, is a good enough liar to avoid having that land them in prison - might reasonably turn out to also be lying about what their public policies will be, and/or the expected results of those policies.
> There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion".
Could you explain what you mean with the first ("charitable") part? Aren't there quite obviously antidemocratic leaders who are like 95% worse on democratic values (Kim Jong Un, or Stalin, or Hitler, or whomever you consider to be an *actual* dictator)?
Charitably/uncharitably towards the anti democratic leader. In practice "willingness to break democratic norms" is a spectrum among politicians, so if you live in a fairly democratic society you're much more likely to have a candidate who's like, 20% more willing to be norm breaking than his alternative. While obviously there exist people at the end of the scale, most people on the authoritarian spectrum aren't at the end of it.
I think it's pretty obvious that democracy is a spectrum. As Scott said, wannabe authoritarians are going to push as hard as they can, until they can't. Judging where that stopping point lies is tricky, and the price of failure is revolution -- and thus Orban chickened out. Trump is also famously known for chickening out; but the situation in the US is different. We are halfway down the road to a cult of personality, and are long past the tipping point of the cult of political identity; thus, Americans are much easier to manage than Hungarians.
I feel like we should be able to do better than calling democracy a "spectrum"; there's multiple different ways that democracy can go wacky.
1. A country where the party in power routinely rigs the system in their favour, but not enough to stop themselves from losing, and then the other party comes in and rigs the system in their own favour, so it doesn't really matter that much.
2. A country where there's two parties that alternate power, but neither of them actually satisfies the populace's preferences on some particular issue.
3. A country where all the democratic institutions seem to be there and working, but there's a weird equilibrium where one party keeps getting voted in decade after decade.
3 is Japan, and for a few decades was also India, Canada, and Mexico.
2 is the United States on many things, and I'm sure some other relevant countries.
Has 1 happened anywhere? In any case, it seems unlikely to me that "it doesn't really matter that much" if you get long periods with one party in power through rigged elections, followed by long periods with another party in power through rigged elections.
I think you see something like #1 in the UK where both parties have an opportunity to appoint life peers to try to stuff the House of Lords, but they only do it when a prime minister steps down so it is designed to be self balancing.
In Japan, getting a female PM from the conservative wing of the conservative party that has ruled the country nearly uninterrupted since the end of WW2 is apparently so much the only slightest glimmer of reformist the populace can imagine getting that they give her the first ever super majority.
I feel like I should be learning more about something by witnessing it close up. But all I can manage so far is stuttering "guys you know its just going to be more of the same right?". Its not even that I want the opposition to win. Its just i feel baffled by the expectations gap.
There are also a lot of countries with more than two parties, which adds other options, for example, a coalition dominated by one party that keeps adding more extreme parties to remain in power.
I think there's both a spectrum, and a quite clear difference between cases like Communist countries where there's no opposition party allowed to compete with them, and cases like Orban where he just stays in power longer than we in the US would permit with our term limits after FDR but can eventually come up short in his Nth election.
In Orban's case, it's not just that elections were perfectly normal and everyone got to campaign fairly and he just happened to keep winning, the way that it has often been the case in places like Canada and the UK. You should re-read Scott's post, and maybe his earlier posts on Orban, to get a sense of what he actually did.
I read Scott's post and his original on Orban, and don't think there's a simple definition of "normal" or "fairly". People can always claim an election is "unfair". An actual transfer of power to an opposition party via election is a proof by example that we don't see in any Communist dictatorship.
Yes, people can always *claim* an election to be unfair. But nevertheless, there are differences of degree of fairness, and you might look through Scott's list to see proof by example that many other democratically-challenged leaders have also actually transferred power to opposition parties via election. Being communist isn't the only way of being bad.
Orbán completey rewrote the election law pretty much first thing after election. It contains several slight nuances, each adding just a couple of seats to his party -- if you are really interested, I can list half a dozen similar stuff. And these are just the election laws, for example, Scott's estimate of the 90% party-controlled media is roughly correct. The elections in 2014, 2018 and 2022 were clearly and obviously "unfair".
(2026 as well BTW, just now so many people were fed up with Orbán that they vote for Magyar pretty much "no matter what". Magyar is also a right-wing populist, BTW.)
In part, yes. (Though Orbán took the time to gerrymander as well, and the population of the districts is not uniform either -- the law expects some 30% maximal difference (or maybe +/-15% from the average, I can't recall exactly), while the max/min ratio is now around 2. (Orbán's party, as most right-wing parties are, is more popular in the rural areas, and of course districts in the cities are more populous.) There was also a minority seat (for the German minority), who also voted with Orbán. There are unverified votes from the neighbouring countries (cca. 200k from the total of usually 5M), usually 90% Fidesz (this time "only" 84%).
The strategy BTW built on the demographics factors: the supporters of Orbán's party (itself a moderately right-wing, populist party, roughly) is of a similar demographics, while the opposition is fractioned into several groups (far-right (formerly the Jobbik, now Mi Hazánk), "commie nostalgics", city liberals, all their separate parties in most cases). So yes, when these groups run with independent parties (which would be the case in a normal European democracy), the Fidesz wins, and wins large, due to the several tricks. (As happened in 2014 and 2018.) When the opposition joins forces, they can be mocked as the Coalition With the Devil (former PM Ferenc Gyurcsány), and becomes unpopular, as it happened in 2022.
Currently, the Tisza proved to be the largest party by far (the far-right party got 6%, which is pretty much what anyone expected; the nostalgic commies and the liberals/protest party got like 1-1% each -- 1-2 years ago they were around (more like slightly below) the parliamentary limit, i.e. 5%). The reason is that lots of people fed up with Fidesz, practically casting a protest vote (pretty much a "with us or against us" situation).
But this is temporary, as the demographics are still quite different. Furthermore, Tisza currently looks like a right-wing populist party (i.e. a better version of Fidesz, e.g. Fidesz 15-20 years ago), which is again not to anyone's taste. I mean, the three parties in the Parliament are all right-wing, and all are populist... This is not a long-term equillibrium.
Tyler Cowen using the fact that Orbán conceded as proof that Trump isn’t a threat to US democracy is a little rich considering he rather famously did not concede last time he lost. Which I would go so far as to suggest indicates that he might even be a fair bit worse in terms of character than Orbán.
He didn't concede but he also didn't _not_ concede.
He didn't say "I concede" but he did all the actions of a person who has conceded -- he didn't need to be physically removed from the Oval Office, nor did he set up a White House In Exile and continue to issue orders. He put on a big show of not conceding but in practice he conceded.
He attempted a coup. After it was thwarted, he remained uncooperative with the transition team. Then he left with his tail between his legs. That's not conceding, not even "in practice."
Which part was wrong? He very famously didn't cooperate with the transition team, and while there's some reason to dispute whether Trump himself attempted the coup in 2021, it's clear that he didn't do much to try to stop it.
No, if you'll forgive me citing Tyler Cowen again marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html it was a riot. Riots are of course bad, and Trump should be condemned for pardoning rioters (along with basically every other pardon), and the President's pardon power should be removed.
No, it was a coup. You seem to be rounding down everything Trump did to January 6th, which was just one of many things he tried to do to overturn the election.
I actually agree that "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" was a major and under-discussed issue after Jan 6th. And it does reflect poorly on the Dems and people in the administration that went along with it.
But to be clear, it reflects poorly because they *didn't* impeach him even though if they were all worried that he'd launch nukes for no reason ... and it reflects *much more poorly* on Trump and on Republicans who continued to support him.
Like, there's a reason Republicans don't go around yelling about the one thing that actually happened that legitimately looks like the deep state coup-ing Trump.
That simply isn’t historically true. Elections are very often a prelude to coups. Virtually the entire history of the French Revolution is a list of elections that were followed by coups
Just because something is a riot doesn't mean it's not a coup. I don't think Trump intentionally instigated a coup attempt, but he doesn't intentionally do a lot of the things that he eventually takes advantage of.
A coup is a sudden strike to seize power. You can only pull it off if organized in a military manner. A riot is when there's a large enough crowd breaking laws that local law enforcement is overwhelmed. Rioters can't hold up to actual militaries (hence the Iranian regime remaining in power).
No, it was a coup attempt. Donald Trump created a series of false slates of electors in seven states he lost, then attempted to pressure Mike Pence to use them to throw out the true slates, then when Mike Pence refused, sent a mob of violent people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" at the Capitol Building to try to pressure him even more.
That’s really a very specific type of coup that you’re describing. The typical developing country coup in the 20th century where a faction in the armed forces arrests the President and occupies the TV station.
But historically most coups aren’t that. It’s usually some faction in the regime using some mixture of force and procedural shenanigans to seize power. It doesn’t have to be the army proving the teeth. On that model Jan 6 looks like an incompetent attempt at a coup. The rioters intimidate Congress into using an unprecedented legal theory to recognize alternate slates of electors, the case goes to SCOTUS and they approve the result, either due to more intimidation or because they approve the scheme.
I don’t think the argument that just because this was done incompetently it wasn’t a coup attempt really stands up. The best argument it wasn’t a coup is that is there wasn’t the required element of coordination between the regime and that rioters. I don’t really buy this but I can see that it’s a possible objection
His attorneys assembled "alternate" electors as a necessary part of their lawsuits challenging the results in those states (as has been done in the past) to avoid a procedural hurdle known as "mootness." Without alternates that the court could hypothetically bless upon a successful claim, the courts would not have been able to rule on the merits of his challenges, something that I hope we can agree every losing candidate should be entitled to.
He then pressured Mike Pence to delay certification as those lawsuits played out, which he refused. They lost the lawsuits anyway, so their electors who were explicitly conditioned on winning those challenges would never have been certified regardless.
He pressured Mike Pence into throwing out seven lawful slates of electors. If these electors had been thrown out, either he would have a majority of remaining electors, or he would have forced it into a vote by the majority of representatives from each state in the House, which he expected to win.
Then, after doing that, he sent a violent mob at the capital, telling them that "if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election" and watching and sipping Diet Coke as they beat cops.
He did some effort to not concede, which failed. It's very charitable on your side to say "in practice he conceded" after he called Georgia secretary of state to "find votes" to secure his win, after he called several governors to pressure them to not certify Biden's victory in their state, and after he put pressure on Pence to not certify the election. And that's forgetting all the false claims he made about the elections.
Given that the entire National Security and Intelligence Team (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) said there was nothing to any of the cheating allegations, causing Trump to try to do an end run around them, my priors don't change at all.
After 240 something years, the end of Trump 1 made it so we can no longer say that America has an uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power. That cannot be considered a concession
Sure, and if there's any such dispute in fifty years, some future person will do what you're doing and say "after 300 something years …." There have been plenty of similar cases of some unrest after elections in the past, quite famously in 1876, as the easiest example.
Can you elaborate on the 1876 comparison? My understanding is that the dispute was institutional, with competing certified slates that required a resolution mechanism, and that Tilden accepted the outcome once it was reached. This seems like an entirely separate category from a losing candidate personally choosing to resist a clear result. Is there something I'm missing that makes it a closer parallel?
It is my understanding that there were plenty of armed Southern militias credibly threatening a march on Washington to get Tilden into office, and managed to exact significant concessions from Hayes in exchange for not starting a civil war.
I don't think they had the capability of threatening DC. But the military occupation of the south had lost political support over time, so they were willing to give that up while retaining most power at the federal level.
Yes, but Tilden didn't direct the militias (afaik) or refuse to concede. I'm fairly certain he was happy about being able to both have the popular vote victory and escape the stress of the presidency. Doesn't the relevant parallel require the losing candidate to be the one resisting the peaceful transfer of power, rather than the supporters and surrounding unrest which the candidate eventually quelled?
I wouldn't. Not an example of violence used to prevent the transfer of power to the winner of the election. The Battle of Fort Sumter didn't start until more than a month after Lincoln assumed office, uncontested.
You might have to throw in Presidential assassinations as well. Hard to argue it's a peaceful transfer of power when the pervious occupant was violently murdered.
I'm not the OP but what's the answer to this rhetorical question? I assume it's something to do with not stepping down but I wasn't sure of the exact reason you're hinting at.
The reason is that Pence refused to certify a set of fraudulent electoral slates from states that were won by Biden, but those slates claimed those states for Trump. If Pence had co-operated with the plan, Trump would either have successfully stolen the election or there would be some sort of constitutional crisis.
The point of the rethorical question is to say that the US was one man's integrity away from a successful Trump coup.
When you say “the Supreme Court [was] investigating the election,” what are you referring to? Did the Supreme Court ask anyone to send more elector slates? Worth noting that the Eastman memo explicitly advised Trump/Pence not to check with the courts before executing the plan.
Consider that his opponents technically conceded when he won, but proceeded to launch a national scale conspiracy theory that Russia got him elected, which was deeply democratically corrosive. After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election. What he did was wrong - was it more wrong? It was really just more stupid. I hated the idea of Trump but by that point I didn't really consider him to be breaking norms in the way that they already had
Conceding but definitely not conceding in the most sophisticated and effective way you can is just as much of a threat. The J6 people got Shanghaied in extraordinarily hostile court settings. And pretty much nothing, to my knowledge, has happened to the collusion conspiracists
Yeah and in 2016 they also launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits, repeated ad nauseam the claim that the election was outright stolen and that Trump did not win the votes attributed to him, phoned election administrators to try and strong arm them into “finding” votes, insisted on vetting all future hires on a purity test of agreeing that the election was stolen, and never officially conceded.
(Sarcasm aside since I’m sure you’ve had enough and feel sorry for being so silly. It actually is a recognised fact that Russia DID attempt to intervene in favour of Trump. That is verified. Whether it was decisive is unknown and unlikely.)
My understanding of the Georgia phone call was that Trump honestly believed that the votes could be "found" - though I have no expectation that that was an accurate belief. You may be unfamiliar with the civil judgment against Trump which was and is extraordinarily salient to his supporters. This kind of thing basically melts the "quality liberal democracy" fuse. For instance, it's entirely out of my character to have no concern about Trump making a huge amount of money with his gaudy meme coin after his election. But because of the half billion judgment against him, which was later voided, I have literally no issue with it. It's an efficient way for him to fund defenses against future lawfare. This is Grok's summary:
"A Trump supporter might reasonably see the New York civil fraud case as extraordinary lawfare because Attorney General Letitia James— who campaigned explicitly on targeting Trump—used a rarely invoked state statute to pursue a real-estate developer over asset valuations that caused no proven losses to sophisticated banks and insurers, who did their own due diligence and profited anyway. Judge Engoron then imposed a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty (with interest) plus a three-year ban on new loans from New York financial institutions, which Trump's team argued made posting a full appeal bond "practically impossible."
To outsiders, it looked like selective persecution: the massive "fine" was later thrown out entirely by an appeals court as an unconstitutional excessive penalty, yet the fraud label and some restrictions lingered, saddling Trump with huge legal costs and publicity damage during his campaign—without the state ever showing real public harm. In a city where such valuation practices are common, it appeared less like neutral enforcement and more like stretching the law to financially and reputationally cripple a political opponent."
You write this like that Democrats conceded but only in some narrow technical sense that's actually misleading. There's no sense in which they didn't concede. Not only did Hillary concede the next day, but Obama invited Trump to the White House a few days after, said that he was the president elect and he'd work with him on the transition - something every president in recent history has done, except for Trump in 2020.
> After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election
There was no such abuse, and even if there was, this doesn't follow at all. But of course if it did follow, it would follow all the more so that Democrats would think that *Trump* would try to steal the election in 2024 and would justify Dems stealing *that* election ...
It's certainly debatable as to whether Trump no longer had a reasonable expectation that norms would be respected but you might find it interesting to ask your local LLM this: "Are there any classic quotes in which Hillary or other Democrats described Trump's victory in 2016 as illegitimate in an unusual way for American politics?"
Then I asked if anything similar happened with Obama in 2008 or 2012 and it gave 8 examples.
But of course both are small potatoes compared to Trump's (and other Republicans') comments - and actions - in/since 2020. To bring up the previous example, Bush had Obama at the White House, Obama had Trump, Trump didn't have Biden because he never acknowledged he lost and his administration didn't cooperate with the transition, then Biden had Trump.
On the most basic level he's the only one not to concede, and saying "but Hillary called Trump illegitimate 3 years later" is very obviously not the same thing.
We are not too likely to persuade each other any farther, but I appreciate the reminder about the birth certificate people - especially when I asked the question and found one of them was Trump, though he eventually disavowed it
The episode was especially painful, because it was a great opportunity to change the law so Schwarzenegger could run 😅
Orban's situation was quite different, too: he lost 55% to 36% with 80% turnout. That means that anyone not deeply beholden to him is going to defect immediately. Trying to fight in that situation could land you prison or dead. Trump lost by only a percent or two and had a reasonable chance of a comeback.
I like the percentage scale! You could even directly couple it to the election result, as in, “this democracy has a 4% deformation, because one party can shift the result 4% in their favor”
I think gini ratio should be a nice equivalent. Truly egaliteratian republic should have "power inequality" of zero while full dictatorship have the opposite. There's also equivalent mechanism of money begets money, power begets power.
That doesn't count, because 4% is just Lizardman's Constant, which I have just realized explains quite a bit about the smaller weirdnesses of many elections.
You would need to scale those 4% to the amount necessary to reliably win the election. If one party only needs 4% deformation to reliably seize power, then they have little incentive to do more than 4%, and those 4% are effectively 100%.
For a stable electorate that may be true, but I think the US is a good example of a system where it is a bit more nuanced.. These things tend to shift over time, but let's say that for a given decade party A has an unfair advantage of 4% in the house of representatives (because of more successful gerrymandering, poll access, etc). That means that party B would have to lead the generic congressional poll by 4+ percentage points to have a good chance of winning the house. I think it's a useful metric to describe this as a 4%-deformed democracy.
Other than dictatorships with sham elections, the American electorate is the most stable I can think of (basically 51-49 one way or the other), so I may misunderstand what you mean by that.
Your numbers have a difference of less than 9 and 3 points, respectively. I consider that stable because relatively few people, on the whole, change their vote from election to election; there is low variance in the results. In such a scenario, little cheating is required and would be hard to detect by the numbers alone.
For example, if you had a country where every election usually varies widely from 70-30 to 30-70, the amount of fraud necessary to invert the overall result would be much more obvious. But in a US scenario, a few percentage points can make a huge difference and are, on the surface, not obviously suspicious.
Edit: Therefore, if one party can swing the result of an election by a flat 4 points, that effect would be much higher in the US than in the hypothetical other country, and calling them both "4% deformed" would be misleading.
I see what you mean! Let's say there was a country of 1 million + 1 people, of which exactly 500k are die-hard team green and exactly 500k are die-hard green red. Oh and there is also one dude who really doesn't care and just always votes red because the red party slips him a few bucks. Therefore the red party is perpetually in power. This would arguably be a very broken democracy.
I'm not so sure though that this applies to the US. Democrats have recently managed to win elections under conditions that unfairly disfavored them by a few percent. And we have excellent estimates on how much their disadvantage was.
In Canada the media is subsidized to the tune of about 20%. This isn't really necessary for their support, but it's not their money so it's a good deal all around
Hopefully all the non-US anglophone countries can learn from the new Hungarian leader's shut down of the state media
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that state subsidy to media, is the same as state-run media, is the same as media run by friends of the leader with an explicit political slant?
The effectivenes of biased media has two driving factors. The level of bias, and the level of credibility. Media that is plausibly ambiguous in terms of bias and control can have an equal or greater effect than straightforward state media
Surely this is a spectrum. On one end, there's a state-run media that says exactly what the president wants said and nothing else, never contradicts the party line, etc. On another end, all media are 100% independent of government and are entirely free to say whatever they like.
If I'm paying your bills, I have some influence over you. Media organizations can and do try to build some kind of insulation between the owners/donors and news operations, but those don't always work. There are many cases of network TV news stories being influenced (and sometimes killed) by the parent company of the network. If Disney owns your network, there are some stories you are not able to run. If Bezos owns your newspaper, likewise, there are some stories you probably won't be able to run (or at least, if you do, it will be bad for your career). You can also have some insulation in the funding mechanisms, like having a government grant to some media outlet that tries to prevent anyone pressuring the media outlet to change its coverage. But again, this is always imperfect, and of course a lot of the partisan decision is which media to subsidize. If we lived in a world where the public radio stations getting government funding were mostly conservative Christian stations, the Republicans and Democrats would basically swap sides on what kind of funding was appropriate for those stations.
I feel like we have a set of recent worked examples where institutional controls on bias were defeated by ideological takeover in a bunch of media outlets, and a current set of worked examples where norms and rules in executive-branch agencies intended to insulate those agencies from politics have been defeated by a president who DGAF about those norms. This should make us all a lot more skeptical about both kinds of controls to avoid bias.
I think it's fuzzy, but there was a real and important difference in 1970 between Pravda and the New York Times.
What I want from news/information sources is an honest and competent effort to tell me what's going on. It is inevitable that the people doing that will sometimes get things wrong due to biases, their background assumptions, lack of relevant knowledge, lack of resources, etc. It is not inevitable that the people doing that will knowingly lie, omit information they know to be relevant to spin the story or avoid trouble with their coworkers, phrase things in a misleading way in hopes of confusing people, etc. That's all a choice.
NPR can't help being NPR--a news operation staffed overwhelmingly by educated urban liberals of a particular bent, with all the blind spots and biases that ensures. But they can decide whether or not to, say, refuse to report on some stories for ideological or political reasons, or whether or not to omit relevant details of some story in order to try to shape the political impact of the story. Once they start doing that, their value as a news source goes way, way down for me.
And this is true for every news source. Perfection isn't available, but honesty and competence and due dilligence in getting the facts right is within reach of professional journalistic organizations.
In the Netherlands we have a system where editorial decisions aren't made by one centralized public media broadcaster like the BBC or CBC. Instead, there are a number of different broadcasting associations that get time allotted to them according to their membership. Which they can use for whatever content they wish. This system is a holdover from a previous "pillerised" time, but I think more countries should adopt it
Interesting. So essentially the way it would work is the voter gets a ballot with a number of media organizations, and media organizations get broadcast time according to their vote count?
Do you feel this aspect of the system is essential to its success? From my point of view it seems like it could worsen polarization. And overrepresent the views of wealthy people I suppose.
The anti-Orban activity outside of Hungary was 99% institutions who didn't like his policies (being anti the policies of the EU, which is another insane anti-democracy). Go look at the recent election in Romania to find out what kind of democracy the EU likes.
As to Hungary having no tradition of democracy: they had a "Magna Carta moment" 100 years before Britain. (I only know about this from) Mike Johnson's "Revolutions" podcast:
Yes, we can't have a serious discussion about the political nature of European states and leaders without looking at the big picture and going beyond the scope of a sole country like Hungary.
The EU cancels binding referendums when the result displeases its leadership and then just enacts the same laws under a different name (European Constitution Referendum in 2005) or legitimises and endorses an outright judicial coup annulling a completely free election if they don't like the winner (Romanian Presidential Election in 2024).
The EU establishment also has zero issue with highly gerrymandered voting systems like the one France has, which was explicitly conceived in order to assure the ruling President's party could get an easy parliamentary majority with as little as a third of the popular vote.
Nor does the EU seem to particularly mind nepotistic distribution of government positions, since Ursula von der Leyen was literally weaselled into the position of Commission President through a series of backroom deals despite not even being on the ballot for the 2019 EU elections.
Why do we have a decade-long torrent of mediatic and diplomatic warfare between the EU leadership and Viktor Orban?
Because he made a fool of them during the 2015 refugee Crisis, was able to prove to the European community that you can resist accepting huge amounts of illegal migrants without any serious consequences, and has exercised his sovereign diplomatic right to curate positive relations with Russia at a time when the EU demands closed ranks on this matter. Virtually none of these things have any relation on his supposed autocracy or corrupt nature - he was simply pursuing political goals they disagreed with.
I understand the reluctance to use 'dictator' or 'autocrat' until someone is immune to losing power at the ballot box. But what's wrong with 'strongman'? Fujimori and Juan Peron are both classic strongmen and neither ever outright successfully stole an election (Fujimori tried).
I feel like machine poltiics in the US in the early-to-mid 1900s gives a lot of examples of this kind of leader--the machine does all it can to fix elections in its direction, but its abilities are limited, so it has to actually keep the voters reasonably happy or lose power.
An interesting example -- those city "machines" often were very responsive to the masses, in that they provided a system of patronage that took care of the needs of a lot of incompletely-assimilated (and often not English-speaking) immigrants.
But that does expose another dimension: Orban was a "strongman" in that his power was very personalized. The city machines were much more institutionalized, it seems to me, with the same machine surviving for decades with considerable turnover of personnel.
"Cheater" only applies if there's an actual rule violation. I'm not deeply read about Orban, but it's not clear to me that he ever did anything strictly illegal.
Installing cronies in the media, banning opponents from appearing on TV, tapping phones, and gerrymandering the country feel like cheating to me. The other stuff in Scott's list don't feel like the rise to the same level - more like "dirty tricks".
I'm not clear how the "did he do anything strictly illegal" threshold works when we're talking about running a country. Wouldn't someone on this spectrum of authoritarianism be actively changing the rules/laws in their favor and by definition do a lot of things that would colloquially count as cheating but be technically legal under their newly-written laws?
How does Trump being put on trial and convicted of a felony by his political opponents rate in the "Orban tilts the playing field" scale? Yeah, the Democrats lost anyway; so did Orban.
If it's so easy to convict someone of a felony they didn't really do, why is it that Trump isn't able to do it against the vast number of political enemies that he's tried it against? The obvious answer is that, while, yes, the New York case was selective prosecution, he did actually commit those crimes. And, moreover, he stole classified documents from the government and tried to overturn a fair election -- two far more serious crimes that he will never pay the price for because of partisan judges.
The issue of contention in Trump "stealing" classified documents isn't that the government no longer had them, and its operation was impeded by their absence, the issue is that Trump was very likely selling access to national secrets for personal gain, which is a crime which under ordinary circumstances is treated very seriously and has very severe penalties. If Trump had simply forgotten to return classified documents, and then returned them on request, the whole thing would never have been a newsworthy story among everything else he's done.
>If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
By doing what, specifically? The case was going to trial, the prosecution felt that they could prove the case to a jury, the judge violated procedure in numerous ways to stall the case until Trump was elected. What specifically do you think the FBI would have done to "stop Trump being a candidate" if the evidence was there?
The answer is "Trump doesn't have the deep state on his side".
And it's not "a felony he didn't do", it's "three felonies a day". Everyone with any money or political presence has actually done something that would be a felony, to a zealous prosecutor.
You have a good chance of getting a jury to convict a ham sandwich.
And I'm sure he did do the felony; the problem is that everyone in his position has committed a felony so the selective prosecution is actually important. It's impossible to not commit a felony in his position.
Comey and James got off because Trump's prosecutor got kicked out by a Clinton appointed judge, who he didn't have on his side. He's still trying to get Powell.
That's specifically a grand jury, because a grand jury is shown the prosecution's case and not the case of any hypothetical defense. It's not trivial to convict people of crimes: nor should it be.
And, of course, the standard of proof in a grand jury is just "probable cause" (the same standard for making an arrest, or getting a warrant), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Famously, Trump's people couldn't even succeed in indicting the guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. You can say that it's easy to convict people of felony, because laws are written in a way that lots of people are technically guilty, but in practice it's actually pretty hard to even indict if someone hasn't really committed a crime!
If laws are written in such a way that lots of people are technically guilty, then lots of people have really committed a crime, so are not hard to indict for something.
I don't think comparing the difficulty of indicting someone for a particular action and the difficulty of indicting someone for at least something in their life is really comparable (I didn't follow the Trump case enough to know whether it was reasonable or not so this is just general principles)
A New York jury is not a regular jury. Political orientation, I hear, is now the largest source of bias in the US. You should see the D.C. Mark Steyn case where he was "convicted" of slander. The prosecution didn't even try to prove a primary component of the case and the jury found there were $1 of damages - and assessed $1 million dollars of punitive damages against Steyn. This was overturned as the traditional maximum multiplier was about 7x, with I believe $1,000 punitive chosen by the judge. It was a political circus
wait until you hear about how mossad controls the deep state, the illuminati control mossad, and steve irwin controls the illuminati from a secret base on antarctica
More to the point, Trump's nature and followers make it hard for him to get a lot of first-rate people to work for him. He's a legendarily terrible boss who has no loyalty to anyone but close family. A different leader with the same broad set of beliefs but without Trump's flaws would have a lot more Marco Rubios and a lot fewer Pam Bondis working for him, and that would probably make it easier for him to tell his underlings to get his enemies and have it actually happen. Further, Trump and his followers just absolutely do not do subtlety or nuance. ISTM that Trump doesn't just want to prosecute his enemies, he wants to be *seen* to prosecute his enemies, and brag about it, and loudly demand that his subordinates get those bastards, and that's the sort of thing that makes judges, grand juries, and juries all balk.
If you pay hush money with your private money, that's illegal because it helps with your campaign. If you pay hush money with your campaign money, that's illegal because you're using your campaign money for private stuff, and also you have to disclose it, but that violates the whole point of paying hush money. But I guess we want to make sure that if any politician pays hush money, whoever they were paying now can blackmail them for having committed a felony.
If this is the worst Trump has done, then he is a far, far better man than I imagined. Probably better than virtually all politicians.
Given what a genuinely sketchy life Trump seems to have lived, it's actually kinda shocking that motivated prosecutors couldn't find more convincing stuff to charge him with.
The felonies Trump was convicted of in NY were really a stretch. They found a way to charge him in NY for violating federal campaign financing laws using a questionable legal framework. I think he's a terrible president but that doesn't mean hitting him with that particular suit was a good precedent.
The election interference case in Georgia was much more serious. I wish it had been allowed to continue.
"Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia is at 70%, and North Korea is at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. "
...so I guess I'm committed to saying it's 2/7 as bad as what Orban did, which sounds about right.
What I would say about the cases against Trump is that, whatever you think of the NY state cases, they aren't nearly as bad as the other cases against Trump being undermined by his political supporters in the government.
The classified documents case and the Jan 6 related charges, all very serious, all with a mountain of evidence, all stopped by Trump appointees/supporters in the judiciary and elsewhere (including the supreme court inventing a "the president is almost entirely above the law" doctrine).
I think we gauge how democratic some country or state is largely on vibes. I mean, our political system has extensive gerrymandering, including legally-required gerrymandering to ensure majority-minority districts in some places. The way presidential elections work make sure that no California Republican or Texas Democrat will ever have a say in who becomes president. Appointed judges routinely overturn laws that are put in place by elected legislators or plebicite. Pretty much every state has ballot access laws that make it very hard for third parties or independents to get elected anywhere. And so on.
Now, I'd say we're still a pretty democratic country--power can and does change hands based on election results, and I certainly think the difficulty of defeating the incumbent party is much less here than in Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey. But also, it's pretty easy to just gloss over the antidemocratic stuff we're familiar and comfortable with.
The problem with that reasoning is that you're trying to say that Trump is particularly bad because he does this sort of stuff. You can't *simultaneously* say that when Trump does it, that's particularly bad, and that when the Democrats do it, it may be bad but it's just something that everyone in power does, unless you actually try to compare both sides and argue that one is worse, not just say "look, Trump did bad things".
I'm not sure what you mean. I think on this hypothetical scale, the US Democrats are (let's say) 10%, and Trump is (let's say) 20%. I agree that if this had been the point of my post, I would have had to explain exactly what things Trump did worse than the Democrats, but since it's an unrelated question, I'll just say that I think it's consistent to think everyone is at various (different) gradations of badness.
(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats! There's a tension between 'it's easy to seize power by convicting your enemies in show trials' and 'you can't have a blanket assumption that no powerful person has ever committed a crime'. I think the Democrats probably let Trump's status as their political enemy push them somewhat in how hard they prosecuted him, and failed to follow a sort of appearance-of-virtue-based caution against prosecuting political enemies even when they're guilty except in the most extreme cases, but this is consistent with my claim that they're 10% bad. I think Trump does many worse things, which is consistent with my claim that he's 20% bad.)
If you are claiming that your post does not say that Trump is particularly bad compared to his opponents, I don't believe you. It is true that you didn't add the literal words "... and the Democrats aren't", but principles of implicature make it communicate that you think Trump is particularly bad.
>(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats
Come on, you haven't heard of three felonies a day? It's not as if he was convicted of murder or counterfeiting. All important politicians have committed something that a hostile court could call a felony; whether they get prosecuted is just a matter of whether the people prosecuting have the power and the will.
I guess it depends on how strong the evidence was that Trump really did commit the crimes in question. I mean, what would be the alternative? Give Trump carte blanche for any crime as long as he isn't in power because prosecuting him would be "lawfare" and "election interference", and also giving him carte blanche while he IS in power because presidential immunity yada yada? Oh wait, that's exactly how it turned out... and it's not democratic either.
It's very hard in the US to find someone guilty for something they didn't do. But there's often a lot of latitude in whether to prosecute something in the first place. So the real question there is, did Trump do something that was technically a crime but is done by a lot of people and usually ignored? That might be the case in the Stormy Daniels case (although certainly not in most of his other cases, about refusing to return confidential documents, and his attempt to steal the election).
He was reelected democratically though. I would characterize a lot of his actions as president as undemocratic, but the election itself was democratic.
Ultimately the Ds never learned the lesson that Trump behaving badly wouldn't give them a "win one free election" card. You still have to put a ticket together, and make sure both candidates can string a sentence together.
I'm divided on the utility of prosecuting Trump's crimes after he leaves in 2028. He definitely deserves it, but I also don't want to spend the next four elections relitigating this disaster.
And what exactly Orban did to make salaries not increase? I always find such simplistic appeals to economy weird. Russia experienced massive growth in 2000s and early 2010s, but according to Putin's opponents, it's all just because of oil prices and he had very little to do with that. Afterwards this growth slowed down greatly, and that, of course, according to Putin's opponents, was now entirely his own fault, because he has too much corruption or something (I'm talking about late 2010s-early 2020s, pre-Ukraine war, let's not get into that).
Economies are very complex things, depending on many structural and external factors, there aren't really any guaranteed recipes for continuous growth, especially past middle-income zone, and there's only so much that even a 100% dictatory dictator can do, or, for that matter, a 100% democratey democracy can do to make salaries larger, even if they really want to. Case in point, in Finland, widely considered one of the most democratic countries in the world, real incomes have famously not grown for 15 years or more at this point, basically since great financial crisis and subsequent Nokia crash. In fact, it seems that it's exactly the stagnation and backslides in living conditions in much of the Western world that brings characters such as Trump to power; whatever liberal democracies have been doing seems to have stopped working. At the end of the day, it's not like Western people are so enlightened and freedom-loving, it's just that under the current system they have enjoyed high standards of life for decades or more, but exactly to which extent this has been helped by democracy is not at all obvious.
I would generally also say that people who never lived in more than one country typically seem to have very little perspective on whether things in their country are actually unusually bad (or good) or in line with trends. If you look at GDP per capita trajectory of Hungary, it actually tracks Poland quite closely (and, for example, tracks Romania with a rather consistent gap, in favor of Hungary). Or, as someone in another comment complains: "Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating." Um, minus the "educated accused of leftism" part, that happens kinda everywhere now! In Finland for sure.
He created a mafia state where the primary means for companies of being successful is playing the corruption game better, rather than fulfilling consumers' needs better, resulting in approximately zero productivity growth over sixteen years. (Wrecking the education system and the scientific institutions also didn't help.)
He did significantly increase the labor force participation rate during the first half of his reign, which along with the influx of EU funds led to a pretty significant increase in real wages, so he was genuinely popular until the late 2010's; also the regime was significantly less oppressive during that time, although I wouldn't call it a democracy past 2014. But labor force participation can only be increased once while productivity can increase forever, so his system very predictably became a dead-end.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, as I obviously can't show clear links between these difference in salary growth with Orban policies (Gergő Tisza's comment address this better than I could anyway). My point was that one's nationalistic rhetoric doesn't necessarily imply that one deeply care about the wellbeing of the population of one's nation, or that one's policies would provide obvious benefits to one's nation. But I think it's generally fair to assume that corruption and embezzlement correlate with weaker economic performance.
Where do you get your GDP per capita from? Is it adjusted for PPA/inflation? In the data I see Hungary performed worse than Poland, Romania and Croatia over the last 16 years and better than Slovakia (not known to be the least corrupted country in central Europe either)
Yes, that's exactly the narrative that keeps them in power and let's them do whatever they want.
As someone from Eastern Europe, I can say they are not heroes. I wouldn't go as far as saying we are suffering, but it is slow landslide for us, who are trying to live their own lives, start a business and a family.
Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
>Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
To be fair, apart from the "educated accused of leftism" bit (they're more likely to be accused of not being leftist), that's happening basically everywhere now.
You are right, that's happening everywhere. And there are other factors involved, like COVID and wars. That's the price for oversimplification of my comment to keep it short.
So let's put some numbers. Prices of accommodation in the last 10 years more than tripled here. I checked and now you need roughly 1.5 annual median salaries to buy average house in US according to Gemini (which might be wrong of course). Here, it's more than 15 annual salaries. Why is that? Houses are kept by a few, usually connected to people on the right places. And there are very friendly laws for them. E.g. housing tax is very low, like 3 Starbucks coffees annually. For every house you own.
Inflation? Super high because no investments in anything over the last few years. Half of GDP goes to retirements, so ruling parties are winning all old people votes.
So basically - you put the entire economy in sustaining very few. And there's new term for that I discovered recently - neoroyalism. It's basically feudalism where vassals are companies and friends loyal to the ruling family/party. Downside? It will economically decimate the country as whole in a few decades.
Again, that's not really specific to Hungary. In the UK, where I live, real wages have barely risen since 2008, average house price went up from c. 3.1 times the average salary in 1993 to 8.5 times the average salary in 2022 (and even higher today, of course, but the source I looked at only went to 2022). We have this thing called the triple lock, which means that state pensions are guarenteed to increase by either the rate of inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%, whatever is highest. As for starting a business, energy costs, regulation, and tax rates mean that you can pretty much forget about it, even if none of the Prime Minister's friends are interested in the sector. Plus we have loads of extra welfare spending, because we have millions of economically unproductive immigrants in the country. All of which is to say -- maybe Hungary's economy would be doing better if someone other than Orban were in charge, but it's far from guaranteed.
I know it's not ideal in UK either. However, it's important to keep in mind that democracy doesn't imply wealth. Autocracy, on the other hand, almost guarantees the contrary. Sometimes I also think of UK and Japan economic potential as very non-linear, with many cycles of growth/stagnation/downhills, probably given the limited resources islands have to offer. Foreign buyers of houses in London that is generally limited in space is probably not really helping either.
However, I checked numbers again, this time for retirements. UK has replacement rate of 25-30% and average pension is roughly 38% of median salary. Czech Republic has replacement rate of 50-55% and average pension is roughly 59% of median salary. And then there are subsidiaries for rents.
In our house, there are only 2 flats that are not inhabited by people 60+. This is the direct product of pro-russian Billionaire running the country for his 4th term, slowly taking over everything in the state, including media and business. So retirees are far better in Czechia than in UK. But the same can happen in UK if people like Nigel Farage lead the country for some time.
As with being better with someone else than Orban. 20 years ago, the entire V4 economy was highly successful. A lot of young and highly educated people willing to make a difference. Nowadays, it's a totally different picture after 4 terms of populist leaders in 3 out of 4 of those countries. You can ask GPT to compare economies of last 20 years of Hungary and Poland.
So it's not impossible that if Trump people stay there for another 10 years, houses will have 10 times more price tag, usually owned by people connected to trumpists, who collect money on rents. Mortgage will be accessible only to those who work at Google/OpenAI. I mean accessible, on 30 years loan, they still won't be able to buy it right away.
Then you get the same Orbán/Fico/Babiš reality we are facing right now. That is the price for autocrats/neoroyalists/illiberal democrats or whatever name you find for them.
And then there's business part I forgot to mention.
You can do your business in your field usually until some rulers friend wants to start own business in the same field. Traditionally it was construction, but there are new ones, IT or even environmental magnates recently. Oh, psychological counselor? Be afraid of a day some king's friend with a degree from health studies will want to do the same. Then they impose new rules that are hard to follow and easy to break. So you either join them, keep very low profile or face penalties and prepare for endless battles.
This logic is beyond stupid. Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project? Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it? You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
"Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively."
That is not a reason *why* normal people should care, the vast majority of which do not.
"Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?"
Institutions are materially beneficial for people's lives, even people outside of Hungary, whereas culture is a simulacrum, a form of high level human social role playing basically. It means nothing concretely, and can easily be changed.
"This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want."
Not if they are damaging their own people, which in this case they were, for 16 years.
As Bret Devereaux notes, the United States is not, and never has been, the homeland of an ethnic group. So as an American, I consider "He kept Hungary for the Hungarians." to be a *primary* reason I don't want to see any US politician copy him.
> I’ve also heard the term “hybrid regime”, but you can’t naturally say “Viktor Orban, the hybrid regimester of Hungary…”
Regimester is too fun a word, we've got to use it now. A regimester, you know, somebody who's crookedly in the bag for a regime, but a smidgen lovable at the same time.
As a dyed in the wool classical liberal, I definitely would prefer liberal democracy, but I'm not sure calling Orban anti-democratic is the right frame. I think the right distinction here is liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. There have been all sorts of schemes that polled some segment of the population in order to determine who was in office. In many times and places, framing opponents, or preventing them from addressing the voting public through various means, or using dirty tricks to smear opponents were considered within the norms. It's mainly been in the last 130 years or so with the destruction of machine politics things have gotten increasingly tight about using the power of government to stay in office. The spoils system was used in the US for the first ~40% of it's existence and we'd consider that wildy corrupt today.
Using dirty tricks to smear opponents isn't illiberal, it's just corrupt.
Honestly this feels like the best way to discuss the likes of Orban without it turning into a right-vs-left political shitfight, he was a corrupt leader who, while acting within a democratic system, used all sorts of dirty tricks to benefit himself and his party. He wasn't ideologically opposed to democracy, he was just keen on the idea of getting his own way.
Putting it this way I think emphasises the spectrum of continuity between Orban and ordinary politicians in our own countries, rather than emphasising the spectrum of continuity between Orban and Kim Jong Un.
His old friend, Lőrinc Mészáros is now the richest man in the country (his total assets are around 5B USD). This guy had around 100k USD in 2010, and it is pretty obvious that he is one of the figureheads of Orbán himself (who is officially far from being rich). Mészáros got rich mostly by making business with the state itself (for example, his company manages the highways for some 35 years).
Interestingly, Orbán's father and his son-in-law (István Tiborcz, if you feel like googling him) also made a fortune. But no, Orbán cannot be corrupt.
I agree that "illiberal democracy" is one of the better framings, but it does bother me that even extreme dictators like Putin hold elections. The only thing you can accuse Putin of not conducting the election freely and fairly, which is the same thing you can accuse Orban of. So can Putin claim to be an "illiberal democrat"?
It seems like you’re putting too much weight on the elections as a signifier of democracy rather than looking at the whole picture. You can accuse Putin of killing political opponents. That’s a difference in kind that takes someone from illiberal democrat to authoritarian in my opinion. You could also put throwing people in jail in that bucket. Or operating outside the law (though changing the law to let you throw your opponents in jail I’d need to think some about).
But "operating outside of the law" is a spectrum. Was Biden an autocrat for illegally cancelling student loans (even though he probably knew he would lose at the Supreme Court)?
I don't know what the test for true disregard of the law is, but I seriously doubt it's "this will lose at the supreme court". Prosecuting someone when you know it will lose at the supreme court is generally scummy, but when it comes to other government matters, there's no harm in forcing the court to actually state its convictions, in order to put in line for public and elite pressure etc. If you think the supreme court has it wrong, and you think pushing them on it will be salubrious, that seems fine to me.
It's like with the filibuster. Letting senators filibuster is one thing (a bad thing in my view), but letting them filibuster without having to have the courage of their convictions and actually filibuster publicly- that's worse.
I have no doubt conservative and liberal majority courts would exercise far more extensive and unchecked power if governments tried to avoid ever pushing them into saying no.
I would say that if you knew you’d lose, that’s illiberal and if you ignore a court order, that’s an authoritarian move, especially if it’s related to holding onto power.
This is the Fukuyama 'end of history' thesis, btw. The idea is not that history actually stops, but that liberal democracy, at least for now, is the Final Boss of legitimacy, such that even obvious dictators have at least pretend to be doing democracy. Even literal autocrats realize that only democracy is legitimate, so they go through the motions.
Elections are nothing more that a conventional orderly and non-violent mechanism of legitimizing power. Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion. Legitimization is important, as you can't rule without consent of a significant fraction of those being ruled (not for a very long time, typically, anyway). But ultimately elections serve this purpose both in liberal democracies and in Russia. Sure, in Russia Putin won't let anyone potentially dangerous to him anywhere close to elections, but he still needs elections to see and to demonstrate that he has still enough loyalty to him among the populace.
One aspect I always found interesting is the personification of these things. I don't know that much about Orban; I know a bit more about Putin, so let me use that example. Of course, all of this is conjecture, not based on any insider knowledge of Putin’s mind or the exact workings of the Moscow power apparatus, and many will disagree, but for what it’s worth: I do *not* think that Putin rigs elections.
Now, the Russian elections are obviously nowhere near being either free or fair. But, if I had to bet, I’d say Putin really, honestly doesn’t know that. Of course, nobody thinks he personally tells people to stuff ballots here and change the numbers there; I do not think he tells people to tamper with the elections at all, and wouldn’t, by now, believe anyone telling him this happens. I think that most initially elected strongmen, authoritarian rulers, perhaps even dictators start out believing they are democratic and popular – and, since they just won elections, this seems at least broadly true. And then, when something happens that seems to challenge their power, they – at least on a conscious level - *have* to interpret them as nefarious plots, by outside ill-wishers or fifth columnists. When Putin said time and again that the 2011 protests following the rigged elections you mentioned were nothing but a plot hatched, financed and ordered by the US, I believe he meant every word of it. In his mind, he was a popular leader, the elections had been free and fair – what other explanation, then, could there have been for protests?
And, crucially, the more entrenched they become, the less they are able to hear uncomfortable truths, and the less those around them are willing to tell them. I think this was a major cause of the 2022 Ukraine debacle (not just in that it was and is horrible for Ukraine, and bad for most of the world – but also in that it turned out to be a debacle for Russia); apparently, hardly anybody was willing to tell Putin this was a bad idea. I don’t know in how far Orban went down that particular road; perhaps not that far, given that he conceded his defeat quickly and quietly. And I don’t know how far Trump is down that road; whether, say, his behavior after the 2020 elections was just the tantrum of someone who knows they’ve lost and tries their best to hold on – or the righteous indignation of someone who is completely certain they did have the largest inauguration crowd, they are the greatest President in US history, they have actually won the election.
So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements. Given what we see from Trump in public, I have no trouble at all believing this is true; and I do think it’s a major reason not just for foreign disasters, but also for, yes, a threat to domestic democracy.
>In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats,
Can people stop using "gerrymandering" to refer to any deviation from proportionality?
Yeah, something like 90% of parliamentary majority governments throughout history have been people winning a plurality in a majority of seats. That's not gerrymandering, it's just...how the system works.
The US senate deviates from proportionality, but unlike the House cannot be gerrymandered. So the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones (which are themselves known to be dysfunctional in practice).
As NLRG notes, the Senate can be gerrymandered, just not on an every-few-years basis like the House can. If a future Democratic strongman president rams through a split of California into twenty 60% Dem states, that's also a gerrymander.
I know most proportionate systems have boundary conditions where you need a certain percent, so even they aren't perfectly proportionate, but I was simplifying.
That's not what I was saying. As long as the pool of winners is smaller than the pool of voters, the results will never be proportionate to share of votes. Boundary conditions are not necessary to the result.
The disconnect comes from the fact that winners have to be chosen in integer numbers, and vote share doesn't.
had you heard of direct representation democracy? from wikipedia:Direct representation is a hybrid form of democracy that combines elements of direct and representative systems to create a more authentic political connection between voters and officials. Unlike conventional representative democracy where representatives are elected by geographic districts, direct representation allows voters to choose any candidate in the entire country, with each representative's voting power weighted by the number of citizens who selected them.
If the vote of each representative is wheigted on how many votes he got you got perfect proportionality. edited for spelling
49% refers to the United Russia results as a fraction of all cast votes (including invalid votes and including ballots for parties that got less than 7% which was required to get into Duma). 52% refers to the United Russia result as a fraction of all valid votes for parties obtaining at least 7%.
Do we know what percent were "invalid" vs for parties getting less than 7%? Also, my understanding is that Russia currently has half proportionate & half first-past-the-post district representation in the State Duma. Was it purely proportional back then?
It might be good to include that the party won a plurality of the vote, with the second most popular party only getting 19. As written, most readers would assume that there was some other party that was more popular. It's not uncommon for large parties to be overepresented and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Why not just say something like “because of their political structure”? The 2021 Canadian election resulted in the 2nd place party having the most seats and that usually isn't described as the result of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the drawing of districts in a way that distorts electoral outcomes in an intended manner. People like to focus on partisan gerrymandering, but there's plenty of examples of racial gerrymandering, pro-incumbent gerrymandering, gerrymandering to dilute representation of particular locations regardless of party, and other cases.
But when you're dealing with districts, even if no one intends any particular distorted electoral outcome, there will be distortions. It is nearly impossible to draw a contiguous congressional district in Massachusetts that a Republican can win, even though nearly 40% of Massachusetts voters vote for Republicans. (The regions that are majority Republican are big enough to make up a single district, but they're separated from each other by some blue regions and state borders.)
Mathematicians have recently developed techniques to effectively sample from the space of all possible districtings of a state, to estimate the distribution. They find that with the voting patterns in Pennsylvania, a strong majority of districtings end up with a larger fraction of Republicans elected than the Republican vote share, just because of how Democrats and Republicans have spread themselves across the map. But the point of using this technique was to identify the distribution of these districtings, and prove that the Republican implemented plan was *even more* tilted towards the Republicans than 95% of all plans, making it unlikely that it was drawn unintentionally.
It's very hard to know unless you do a detailed analysis (or have records of the debates) whether a single case is just the inherent difficulty of putting districts on the map in a way that results in proportional outcomes, or whether it's intentional gerrymandering.
Appreciate you bringing this up - disproportionality is inevitable in *some* metric, and it's just a matter of if you're writing up the system in a way to maximally favor along a specific metric. And to be fair, people often are, but it's still very important to remember that the alternative is just "less severe, less intentional favoring of a possibly incidental group" and not proportional representation in a shining platonic form.
"Getting 52% of the seats due to three parties not reaching the vote threshold." The 49%->52% boost was totally normal, it was getting 49% of the votes that pissed people off.
The real outright manipulation of the legal system happened in the next election, when single-member constituencies were reintroduced in addition to proportional voting. Putin's party won nearly all of them due to having a plurality, thus securing 50% of the seats easily.
First past the post. The US is an outlier because it has two parties, but the last UK election saw Labour get 34.7% of the vote and 64.2% of the seats. This is normal and the main argument in favour of FPTP.
Yes. It strengthens the winning party. A perfectly proportional system could lead to deadlock in the legislature. Allowing the winning party to win by more leads to consolidation of power so they can govern.
It's similar to how some governments prefer a strong executive. It's even more "wildly undemocratic" that 100 percent of the presidency is republican, despite that party winning only about half the vote.
As opposed to right now, where the FPTP system surely is not in legislative deadlock, especially not compared to the many representative democracies in the world.
"Undemocratic" and "proportionate" aren't synonyms. The arguments for a winner-takes-all system (FPTP or Majority Bonus) are:
1) It maximises the number of people who get what they want. Relatively few people want a coalition, so the number of people getting their preferred policies approximates zero.
2) It incentivises parties to win broad appeal. In a proportionate system (which, again, means coalitions), a handful of narrow sections of the population can cobble together a coalition by all scratching each other's backs. If the only route to power is to be the most popular, you generally have to argue for something that at least approximates the national interest.
3) It kills unpopular ideas that attract fanaticism. In a coalition system, the party that really passionately cares about teachers pensions or agricultural subsidies or vegetarianism or whatever can side with others and insist on their thing as a concession, even if most people don't like it.
4) It allows decisive changes of government and lets the populace straightforwardly eject failures. Labour won the last election in the UK mostly because people wanted to get rid of the Tories* and were able to straightforwardly do so. This compares to Germany, for example, where it looks like the SPD are now going to be a component of every coalition going forward, or the Netherlands where Rutte was prime minister for 14 years in spite of not being that popular purely by being head of the party that was floating in the middle of the political spectrum.
*Labour's share of the vote barely changed.
5) It allows unified/decisive government, instead of endless compromise and cludge.
None of these make up for the fact that it allows a government to pass policies that barely over a third of the population want. Or a fifth, judging by recent polling. Is there really a British consensus for banning repeated protests and jury trials?
If democracy means anything it means majority rule.
Banning repeated protests probably has majority support (in the abstract, there's a majority view that policing of protests in the UK is correct or too lenient, in spite of being fairly draconian by Western standards). There's a majority against scrapping juries, which has been an obsession of parts of the civil service and some activists since the early 2000s, but that's the sort of thing you get more of in a proportionate system; if Labour had been permanently in various coalitions for the last 20 years, it's likely to be one of the things they pushed for. If it doesn't happen, it will either be because enough Labour MPs don't want to lose their majorities, or because the Lords blocks it (not FPTP, also not democracy).
If you want straight-up majority-wins democracy, the key is public initiative referenda and other direct democracy measures that bypass elite consensus. You'd find yourself getting some very right-wing social policies (eg. capital punishment would make a comeback) and some very left-wing economic policies (price controls), but that should be the point.
Is it really true that relatively few people want a coalition? In my representative democracy (the Netherlands), the fact that different parties of different political leanings have to work together is usually seen as a feature, not a bug. By that nature, it solves problem 3).
Also, you say it allows for decisive government without endless compromise, but you've simply moved the compromise to an earlier stage, in point 2).
At least in a representative democracy you can actually vote for someone that represents your ideals. In the FPTP system, you will forever have to choose between 2 candidates you're at most kind of lukewarm on.
I don't know, but if a 49% plurality winning 52% of seats is proof of gerrymandering then it literally applies to every non-explicitly proportional allocated legislative body in the world (and even most proportional ones since they usually exclude fringe parties by having a min threshold).
I would actually take a 49% plurality winning only 52% of seats as evidence that a place was not particularly gerrymandered, that's pretty close! The most recent UK election saw the Labour Party win >60% of seats with a plurality of < 40% of the vote. And the UK is not considered to have much of a gerrymandering problem with independent districting, etc. Whatever Putin is/was doing to stay in power around then Gerrymandering doesn't seem to have been a big part.
In the Russian case it was the electoral threshold that excluded small parties. Gerrymandering is something done to districts, there were no districts in Russia to gerrymander because it was (at the time) a pure proportional system.
In other cases, the "gerrymandering" is just the natural result of FPTP being a winner-take-all system. People said that it was "gerrymandering" when the U.K. Labour party won 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote in the last election, yet it couldn't have been gerrymandering since the maps were drawn by the outgoing Conservative government. In the Hungarian case it was because the far-right Jobbik party did not ally with the left (as they would do later), splitting the anti-Orban vote and allowing him to sweep the FPTP seats. Not that that was an accident, Orban set up the system knowing that would happen.
Claude tells me there are no districts in Russia to gerrymander and that what did the work here was a cutoff for proportional representation that systematically benefits large parties. This coupled with the fact that large oppositions get banned in Russia is a good way to keep an edge (but even without banning a large opposition I think 49pct would always put you over the top in a PR with cutoff scheme). I agree that the term gerrymander doesn't quite feel right and probably wasnt the decisive rigging tool when taking it all apart.
I guess the interesting question that everyone's actually asking for is, how correlated is current authoritarianism quotient with rate of change of authoritarianism quotient? What's dx in x?
I guess "liberal" would argue that it correlate positively, any x above zero will accelerate dx further and further until it reaches 100% (or even beyond!). One simple mechanism is that a party that has power to influence election will use it to further and further their grip of power until there's nothing to grip anymore. With this perspective, it's a sliding slope and any x beyond zero must be resisted by any means. Maybe including violence (or even beyond!).
"Conservative" would argue that it correlate negatively. The more x is, the harder it's to raise x even further. Maybe too much x will even make it start to decrease. For an example of this, we can imagine a multi faction civil war where any party that's deemed too strong will soon be ganged up by other parties. With this perspective, high x is not a problem at all and it'll fix itself sooner or later. Any awareness about high x is deemed unnecessary and even fearmongering, especially if it includes a call for violence. We can even be funny and try to induce high x to trigger distaste of other parties and make x go even lower than before.
All variables here is up to debate and ambiguous. I can't even say that if that dx equation converges for any time or place. Maybe it's a chaotic fractal that resist comprehension. It's even more complicated if our target ideal x is not zero. Maybe we can try to oscillate x around our ideal x, but it seems like a very unstable solution.
But this is not a new problem. Ancient Greeks had debated about the ideal x for centuries. Maybe it does resist comprehension.
* liberal and conservative here is in quotes because it obviously doesn't square completely with any real liberal and conservative in any country
Perhaps in your model, when x is less than 50%, dx tends to be negative, and when x goes greater than 50%, dx is positive. Then things tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, and shifts from one pole to the other tend to be naturally resisted up to a breaking point.
This implies that maximum resistance would only become necessary when you started getting near 50%.
It resists comprehension because every power struggle has unique confounders that you can't control for, trivially starting with the given time and place of the struggle. History rhymes, but it doesn't repeat like a scientific experiment, let alone a mathematical model.
Possibly the "conservative" perspective is true, but an additional factor is that sudden changes in the magnitude of x lead to major negative consequences in their own right, from economic disruption (like Russia in the 90s) to outright civil war. It may therefore be worthwhile to try to keep x low even though it is true in principle that a high-x society is unstable and will eventually revert to low-x.
This seems like it could risk endogeneity problems. What if dx is negative but part of the mechanism that makes it negative is people saying "x is quite big and in danger of getting bigger! Sound the alarm! Let's all act to bring x down"
If somebody responded to that by saying "no, don't worry, we actually have good reason to believe dx is negative", they'd be missing the point
(Is "anti-inductive" what I'm gesturing at here? Seems slightly similar to an investment bank saying "no point in us trying to pick winners - don't you know you can't beat the market?")
If dx is random then having positive x is still bad. Assuming 100pct is a barrier where we get authoritarian lock in. The closer we are to the barrier the higher the chance we get randomly locked in. So it is then important that we dont just assume the correlation is negative but actively make it so by voting out material positive x governments.
Edit: I suppose at full generalization this is claiming a complex level dependent dx, but I see less disagreement about what dx tends towards when x=100.
Is it the case that authoritarianism is a directional quantifiable variable? I's say that the fractal/chaos theory comparison is apt, at best, it's a dimensionless quantity. If we state that authoritarianism is related to the institutional reduction of the freedom of citizens, then it follows that the methodological problem is that there is no objective measurement of freedom.
This is a philosophical issue:
One might even state that the creation of a quantifiable definition of freedom necessarily entails that any individual who adheres to it is no longer maximally free.
So while I do think it's a fun idea, the philsoohical paradox at the core of the issue makes X and dX unsolvable variables.
A tangential, but still important point: democracy is _always_ under threat, same as human rights, piece, etc. Things can be OK in a given place at a given time, but they can go very bad very fast.
Places which have had a long period of democratic handovers of power don't seem to "go very bad very fast" in practice. They could be conquered by an enemy, in which case their old traditions might be irrelevant, but their endogenous behavior seems to be more conservative. Although I'm speaking more of the modern world, as the ancient Greeks & Romans were different.
As far as I know, the full list of cases of authoritarianism winning (due to internal factors) in modern countries which have had at least one generation (30 years) of democratic rule are Imperial Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and Italy.
And conversely, (either outsiders or insiders) attempting to install a democracy in a country with little history of democracy seems to almost always rapidly turn into some sort of autocracy, machine politics, or tyranny.
Also: an anyone give me a defense of their position that illiberalism doesn't matter because... [your argument] that you think is likely to sound reasonable enough to consider to someone both extremely convinced of personal liberty and who has somewhat idiosyncratic views of social policy, but ones which would (for example) consider saying 'we should incentivize not being gay for [legitimate social concern]' be unacceptably bad, and which give some credence to tradition due to epistemic doubt, and which generally do not consider the nation to be an important thing?
This is not my position but I think they'd say (for example, with regards to immigration) that countries are the way they are because of the traits of the people living there and if you like the fact that your country is liberal, you should support preserving the nation because other nations are less liberal-minded. This is true even if it requires restricting liberalism to some extent because you're doing it to avoid even greater restrictions on liberalism in the future by the more illiberal population you'd have if you didn't.
I can imagine a situation in which this would be optimal, but I don't think the numbers it would take for this to be real are... well... real. you'd need to be taking in, like, full percents of your population of literal Disney villains and it would need to be preventable with very small liberty violations I think... and even then the norms damage could be brutal. feels like the sort of weird hyperbole you get in constrained media/social ecosystems.
Political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to personal liberty. In most autocracies you are in practice free to live your life as you wish, insofar as you don't engage in meaningful levels of political dissent (and the vast majority of people don't really do that under any system).
I think political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to autocracy.
I agree that autocracies are often authoritarian rather than totalitarian, and don't necessarily restrict non-political personal liberties that much. However, I think that there are quite a few autocracies where the restrictions are much tighter (not just North Korea and *cough* Hitler *cough*). Perhaps more importantly, I think the example of Russian development over the past years shows that authoritarian states can become totalitarian and clamp down on the remaining liberties much faster and easier than truly democratic ones.
Of course, but you can have a society some prople are free because their views align with the collective, while others are not. If the latter people are removed... are the remaining people free?
Maybe it's better that we have Waffle-House-teleporter guy now? He did everyone a service by making it clear he was a crackpot and not to be taken seriously, instead of having a fake veneer of respectability for his dumb ideas.
As opposed to the stupid biases of the earlier leftist experts. E.g. when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
Gregg Phillips telling everyone not to use radios during a FEMA operation because it might teleport you 50 miles into a Waffle House is in res ipsa loquitur territory. Who would listen to something that pants on head crazy? A bit different when the U of Washington faculty and over 1,000 people officially endorse stupidity.
The main issue is that the earlier leftist experts are so much more competent that even when they handicap themselves by prioritizing anti-racism, they can still be more effective at containing covid than the current elites would be.
The worse that could happen? Is that a rethorical question?
The actual worst that could happen is that the pandemic happens now and instead of Operation Warp Speed like we got during Trump 1 we will get.... free bleach? I don't even know what RFK thinks would be appropriate in that situation.
Don't forget there was a time Trump endorsed the vaccine and leading Democratic candidates did not.
I do think there is significant value in "this guy is all-around crackpot" versus "this guy is 80% normie, 20% crackpot, and uses the normie to launder the crackpot." Funny enough thanks to our dear host's extensive writing history, he even has an essay on that topic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
>When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Though I disagree somewhat with that specific statement, as "misinformation" was created as a category to describe those not-explicitly-lying situations but from the other side.
The "apologize now" people have leftist derangement syndrome. Its completely consistent that prominent media leftists fearmonger and take enormous numbers of shortcuts in their reasoning all the time, and are right about some things some of the time.
I'm a bit confused by the tone of this comment. <Something> Derangement Syndrome has tended to be a rather inflammatory way to call out someone you think is completely irrational in the pursuit of harming <Something> that they have decided is their priority outgroup threat. But the rest of your post indicates you think the <Something> in question also *are* overwhelmingly irrational (enormous numbers of shortcuts in reasoning) and harmful (fearmonger).
It feels like saying people have derangement syndrome just because they thought people who are wrong 95% of the time are in fact wrong 100% of the time is a bit needlessly extreme/inflammatory?
I think the "apologize now" people are gravely mistaken, but the reasoning leading to their position as called out by Scott seems like pretty mundane tribal bias and doesn't require them to be deranged?
I might just read the term "derangement syndrome" as being much stronger than you do - I've tended to see it as pure political shit-slinging that never benefits a measured discussion. The following comment on your part being much more even-handed thus has me confused.
It was the name of the nomadic steppe ethnicity that founded the country. I think the best analogue for the US might be John Pilgrim. Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
But you wouldn't call someone "John [the] American" if you were both currently living in America. Surnames, historically, are like nicknames, to distinguish one particular John from the dozens that are already living in your village. If your surname, then, is "Hungarian", it implies that they got their surname when they were living outside Hungary entirely, but already identified as Hungarian.
Seems like a real equivelent (in the sense that it is an actual, real name) would be Peter English, for an English person. And yeah according to Wikipedia: "The name is attested from the 12th century. From parts of Great Britain near the borders of England with Scotland and Wales, it may have been applied to people who spoke English, or to distinguish people of English ancestry from Celts"
Well it doesn't strictly _matter_, since it's a mild joke. It's equally mild pushback against the implication that someone named after their home country must be particularly patriotic and thus the ideal leader of that country, because their family got their name while living abroad.
Literally Hungary's name, in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország' . Country of Magyars. It refers both to the ethnic group and the country name, like England or Scotland.
John Pilgrim seems like a poor analogue. People in the USA today don't identify themselves as Pilgrims as people living in Hungary/Magyarország identify as Magyars.
There was a Twitter thread about other examples of this. Charles de Gaulle was one. But there were also some messups, like Francisco Franco (Frenchman France) leading Spain.
Actually de Gaulle's name is probably not linked etymologically with "Gaul" (Gaule in french). De Gaulle's name is derived from ancient dutch "de Walle" (from the wall). Ofc that's less fun.
Not sure, Jews around that time (and a bit before that) were known to change their family names to better fit the local context. Too bad it did not work, most of the time...
Then there are examples of nominative anti-determinism. E.g. "Jack Lynch" was culture minister of France, which meant he was in charge of keeping France free of creeping Anglicisms.
I haven't looked into his family history at all, but if his family got their surname in the traditional way, as a distinguishing feature, then they got it at a time when they were already Hungarians but were living outside Hungary.
We also have a commenter her going by Gergo Tisza, the equivalent of George Democrat I suppose? (Tisza was, as we recall, the party winning the election.) No wait, it seems it would be George Respect and Freedom.
Tisza is also the second largest river in Hungary, and, as opposed to the "international" Danube, it is held as a symbol of Hungary/Hungarians (both in good and bad sense). (Before WW1, it was located entirely in Hungary.)
Orban was bad because his government was corrupt (in the mundane, venal sense) and had anti-growth economic policies, not because of anything to do with "democracy."
Can you explain? I tried to give many examples of ways he was bad for democracy. Are you claiming that my examples are false, that they're not really bad, or some other thing?
I'm not claiming that your examples are not factual. (I withhold judgment on that).
I'm claiming that they are not bad in context, especially given the degree to which EU bureaucracy freely and blatantly engages in non-democratic interventions to override disfavored democratic outcomes among member states.
Orbán needed to dismantle fundamentals of liberal democracy (such as separation of powers and rule of law) to achieve the levels of corruption he did. You could debate whether that dismantling was inherently bad, or bad because of the corruption it paved the way for, but it seems somewhat academic.
I like the term "wannabe dictator." As far as I can tell, Orban wanted to be a dictator and had no reverence for democracy, but he couldn't make himself dictator because his power had limits and people resisted (and if he had tried to more aggressively become a dictator, people would have pushed back harder, and he feared losing).
I dislike the term "strongman" because because "strong" on its own has a good connotation, and here we are appending it to a neutral word to try to describe something evil.
Also strongman is a bit nebulous. Is Al-Shaara a strongman, was Ataturk a strongman? They both ruled with force and came from military backgrounds, so the dictionary definition could apply here, but obviously these people are very different from Gaddafi and the like.
He was gradually turning himself into a dictator. He got maybe 50% of the way before he bungled up; every year he was more powerful and his regime more oppressive (although still not powerful and oppressive enough, by 2026, to survive the combination of popular sentiment turning against him, a talented and energetic new opponent, and some bad luck).
Also, using median voter theory and consolidating around a guy who is maybe two millimeters to his left (Magyar was a Fidesz member until 2024 and left after they pardoned somebody for covering up CSA).
Two millimeters to the left of where Orbán started in 2010, maybe. But present-day Orbán is on the far right while Magyar is center-right. I'm not even sure it's median voter theory, it's more like attacking the left flank of Orbán's voter coalition in the knowledge that anyone who doesn't like Orbán will vote for Magyar regardless of his policies.
By no means do I think Orban is perfect, nor should he be immune from criticism. But there have been all sorts of shenanigans from the European Establishment (including the so-called center-right parties, and everyone to their left). Most notable is probably annulling the 2024 Romanian presidential election; also egregious are the threats by Thierry Breton to nullify elections in Germany if there's evidence of so-called evidence (but only if AfD wins, of course). https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1877861172306673790
There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008. I think it's hypocritical to call Orban anti-democratic for changing election rules and then look on happily when multi-party systems marginalize right-wing parties that are winning 20-30% or more of the popular vote, often gaining a plurality.
The nullification thing is a fair point. I don't know enough about coalition politics to have a sense of whether the cordon sanitaires are antidemocratic vs. something the system always allowed.
Some stuff is fair, I think. Other stuff clearly goes against well-established convention (e.g. not allowing the AfD to have a Vice President while allowing smaller parties to have them). And I think it's pretty clear (both from opinion polls, and from election results, especially the two rounds of the 2024 French elections) that a significant portion of rank-and-file voters of center-right parties such as the CDU/CSU in Germany and LR in France, would prefer the right-wing parties to the center-left parties if forced to choose between them.
AfD/Vice-president issue is something that goes against previous convention, but at the same time it is something the system always allowed. In the Bundestag, there is no legal procedure or right for the AfD to get voted in their preferred VPs.
As the AfD is considered to be a risk for our democracy, and parts of the party are officially considered a threat to democracy as confirmed by courts, why should the other parties honour a convention that was traditionally extended to all parties that do not intend to openly dismantle our democratic traditions.
You imply this is not fair, and I imply that it clearly is. There is no point in tolerating those that do not wish to return the favor and are therefore an existential threat to "our way of life".
Among other things, the AfD officially called the EU a "failed project" and is generally highly critical of anything EU-related. There have been ideas floated of "Dexit", leaving the Euro-zone, or otherwise diminishing German participation in EU. That alone I would call trying to "openly dismantle our democratic traditions". I'll be the fist-shaking old man here and say "read some books" about history, to understand the importance of the EU and how intertwined and fundamental it is in recent German history.
They also want to massively decrease tax for high incomes and rich people. Again, direct attack on the fundamental post-WW2-German way of life and economics ("social market economy"). This kind of policy is even generally anti-democratic, as it further increases wealth-gaps and turns us back into a quasi-feudal economy.
In foreign policy, they want less coordination and cooperation with EU, and increased cooperation and alignment with Russia. Do I need to comment any further how this endangers our democratic traditions, and democracy in general? In the AfDs most recent election manifesto of 2025, they do not even mention the Russian invasion as anything to be condemned, and instead demand lifting of sanctions and unbridled trade with Russia.
In a previous manifesto, they asked for Bundeswehr (our armed forces) to be used internally for certain purposes. This demand is in direct violation to one of our most sacred constitutional paragraphs, that completely bars the use of Bundeswehr inside Germany in peacetime, borne out of historical experience. Salami-tactics..
In environmental politics, they see our "Energiewende" (energy transition) as a danger to our national energy needs. How ironic! Renewables provide >50% of our electricity and have considerably decreased our need of fossil fuels from Russia and other countries that could extort us (and that includes the US, by now).
You can't just call tax breakes antidemocratic, large amounts of wealth inequality don't automatically lead to dictatorship. Same with leaving the EU, Britain left the EU but didn't turn into a dictatorship.
And them being against Renewables has nothing to do with democracy at all. Mostly it seems like you just don't like the AFD's policies.
Of course, "existential threat to 'our way of life'" is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider vehicle-ramming attacks at Christmas markets and trade union protests a threat to your way of life, but feel free to disagree.
I find it immensely hypocritical when "democratic" is defined as "my people win an election" and "anti-democratic" is defined as "the other people win an election."
Your accusation is completely off the mark. There is plenty of "others" here to win that I'd call democratic. In fact, our current ruling party is the "other" for me personally, that I happily accept as perfectly democratic, but very unaligned with my own position.
AfD has openly racist influential party figures that are directly flirting with literal Nazi-rhetoric, as well as bending historical facts to downplay the Holocaust and other wrongdoings.
There is plenty of room in democracy to fight terrorists and even be immigration-critical without reviving Nazi-rhetoric. But you seem to have just assumed that I'm a far-left "no borders" type of guy, right?
What is "literal nazi rhetoric"? I only see handwaving and baseless accusations. I assume you are the type to undermine democracy and freedom in the name of fighting "nazis" and "racists" while claiming to defend it.
Cordon sanitaires are basically fair game. You know them as partisan politics, I believe. That level of granularity it would take to call that undemocratic is not something any known system of democracy can model.
Most democracies are representative - you elect politicians, they go to the capital, and there they go underground to work in the Politics mines 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their constituents expect results, not so much how exactly they wield the pickaxe.
Even direct democracy can only go so far to take direct control of the process, such as holding a vote on the occasional single law proposal.
I'd like to read more into the Romanian thing - the guy was also apparently charged with plotting a coup (not in some flimsy "do pro-Russia tiktok ads" sense but in the "get a bunch of mercenaries with guns to raid the capital" sense), my default view is that it was still fucked up and a subversion of democracy to annul the election but willing to be convinced otherwise. I don't think you have to have a "no annulling elections ever" rule to be pro-democracy, on some level certain choices by candidates force you into situations where any option is a bad one.
But even if it was completely wrong, in the US at least, nobody holds up anyone in Romania as a paragon of true democracy and wise leadership, unlike the treatment of Orban.
Also cordon sanitaires aren't only against the right. The treatment of Arab parties in Israel comes to mind, and IIRC communist/socialist parties at various times/places.
Outside of “relative to other middle eastern countries” has anyone ever held up Israel as a model of democracy? That’s not rhetorical, although I am incredulous.
Winning 30% of the vote puts you at a worst-case result of coming in third overall in an election.
There are systems where this could translate into nothing, but the only one you're likely to see described as "democratic" is the case where the total number of seats in government is less than three.
The entire purpose of the cordon sanitaire is to thwart the expressed desires of the voters. How do you describe that as anything other than "undemocratic"?
I mean, back in 1977 Labor became the largest party (a little over 33%) in The Netherlands after leading the most far-left cabinet in our history, but the Christian Democrats (32%) and the centre-right (18%) decided to form a right-wing cabinet.
Winning 50% of the seats, rounded down, does not entitle you to participating in government, if the other side can put together 50% rounded up. What's so controversial about that?
It depends on system what 30% of votes translate to. In Hungary's lopsided, inner-rewarding system, Orbán's 39% translates to 52 out of 199 MP, barely more than a fourth of seats, and gives them zero say in the government.
In two-round elections, its common for a relatively strong extremist party to totally fall out and barely win anything in second round since there's almost no voters who have them as secondary preference (France's RN being the most obvious example).
To govern, you always need majority of seats, and 30% pretty much never delivers that alone.
That is fake news. The EU did not nullify the Romanian election, a Romanian court did. And Breton did not talk about the EU nullifying elections (in either Romania or Germany), he talked about the EU enforcing its social media laws in both countries. Here is a description of the specific social media law enforcement that was done in Romania:
Having laws about what companies can do surrounding elections is perfectly reasonable. And I think it's reasonable that there would be situations where a court may have to step in and order an election to be re-run. But that should be an extreme last resort, especially in the current world, where bots (Russian or otherwise) are always going to be on TikTok, X, and various other internet platforms.
>There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008.
First, a firewall is a term for a normal political activity: the decision who to cooperate with on the legislative level. Just because a party has seats in a multi-party system, doesn't mean they are entitled to being worked with proportionally.
Second, "mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US" are, at any point post-Tea Party or so, clearly to the right of mainstream non-US positions and so are not representative for the EU.
What's the most important difference between European center-right and right-wing parties? Immigration. If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened. Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
>If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened.
Doubtful. In Germany at least, proposed immigration policies are largely the core of the far-right's undemocratic qualities. If the center-right adopted those policies, they would either have to weaken them to remain on the constitutional playing field, in which case people would still choose the far-right because they are the undiluted original, or the center-right would become indistinguishable from the far-right, which doesn't exactly weaken the far right in any practical sense.
And none of that even touches on the positive aspects of immigration, which would be lost in any case.
I think some of the proposals by various right-wing parties are bad (forced remigration stuff). But I think it's entirely possible for centrist, even left-of-center parties like Denmark's Social Democrats, to take a stricter line on immigration.
I assume some of those immigrants in the source I linked to may have only stayed temporarily and then left, so they wouldn't necessarily increase the population by 17.5 million.
Annulling the Romanian election was questionable, although (unlike in the US where it is often thrown around as a charge, but with very little substance) Russian election interference is a real and major problem in Eastern European countries, and did clearly happen in the course of that election. Mostly the issue was the secret services sitting on that information and waiting to see first whether they like the election results.
In any case, the "European Establishment" is one of those shallow conspiracy theories where people try to organize everything they don't like into a single shadowy opponent (like George Soros or the Elders of Zion). Romanian democracy has well known problems, although in a different direction -- "deep state" also gets thrown around a lot with no substance, but Romania actually has a deep state problem, with the security services (which largely remained intact during the fall of Communism) having an undue influence on things with not enough accountability or oversight. That has nothing to do with the rest of Europe though.
Right, the US would Never sponsor an investigative journalist who just happened to be investigating a politician we didn't like in order to influence the outcome of the election of a NATO country. Oh wait....
I see that EU will consider releasing $35bn of 'frozen' funds to Hungary now that Orban is gone. E.g., "EU ties €35bn fund release to Hungary's break with Orbán era" (Financial Times) or "EU rushes to Budapest talks with Magyar team to unlock frozen funds amid Ukraine tensions" (MSNBC).
The funds were blocked due to EU concerns over some policies which Orban refused to address. Magyar promised to solve the issues so the money (probably) will get unblocked. Orban could have done the same at any time.
The better comparison would be trump linking university funding to, I think it was more effort against antisemitism?
Is this extortionary? I guess you have to decide case by case, but generally linking funding to the compliance with some predefined rules is fine with me. You just have to make sure that the enforcement of these rules does not become arbitrary.
Just one example, Orbán created the "foundational model" (or whatnot) for the previously state-owned universities, which became "private" universities governed by some hastily set-up board, full of party members and party-related people. (Everything was quite tricky, for example the substitute of a dropout member is chosen by the remaining members.) At the same time, transparency fell back a lot, and state funds were secured by long-term contracts.
(This, to date, affected thirty-something universities, so all except like two.)
This all happened shortly after the EU announced that in its next fiscal period it will increase funding for research.
From this, one can hardly think of anything else that they want to channel the money towards their own pockets (done before on several other levels). So, in response, the EU excluded these universities from the EU-funded research grants (e.g. H2020).
Long story short, if you want to steal a large part of our money, you get none. Yes, ignoring democratic conventions might had also played a role in all this, but overall this is clearly a dont-steal-our-money scenario.
(Now, don't get me wrong, Western EU members are more than happy to keep their money as frequently as they can. Scientific research funds are quite rare east of the Elbe.)
It is a continuum but there is a big leap at the point of stuffing ballot boxes. There are lots of parties and power players who will accept legal and political shenanigans and pressure on the media even at extreme levels but wouldn't tolerate ballot stuffing.
AFAIK, that's pretty much the distinction between free elections (the votes are cast and counted correctly) and fair elections (the pre-voting process like registration and campaigning is open and equal-opportunity).
I feel kind of silly that I've read the words "free and fair elections" so many times and never stopped to dwell on which details fall under "free" and which under "fair."
To be fair, in most cases, people using these words don't really distinguish between these aspects, either. It's become just a shorthand for "good" elections.
Fun fact, a part of the Hungarian votes (about 200k, i.e. 4%) are cast without any meaningful check. There is dual citizenship for ethnic Hungarians living in the neighbouring countries, who can also vote (it is quite common in the area, Romania, Serbia and Croatia surely has some method to handle it). Since it cannot be expected from the Slovak or Romanian authorities to cooperate in such a voting (e.g. Slovakia explicitly forbids dual citizenship), the ballots are sent by mail (simply by post!), and they have to come back in some way (e.g. post, or local volunteers collect them, maybe even helping the citizens in the voting). There is not even a reliable registration of voters, yes, something happens like every 10 years, but whoever dies in the meantime goes unnoticed.
So this is one huge security hole. Not explicit ballot stuffing, but well, you know.
Usually, 90% of these votes go to Orbán's party (this time it was 84%).
(Around the Ukranian border, there were some villages with hundreds of temporary citizens as well, registering just before the election. Sometimes 100+ people registering to the very same address. Not a huge help, but, you know.)
BTW I don't fully get it. I mean, the question was pretty much that is it cheating or not?
To sum it up, Orbán created a mechanism, over which there is no democratic control (or any control at all), but where his people can interfere (he has many active fans in the neighbouring countries who can "help" to "fill" and "deliver" the ballots, but the general sentiment is pro-Orbán there anyway), and which clearly benefits his party. Well, this is pretty much the definition of cheating.
Yes, it is small-scale (resulting in like two extra seats, out of the 199); part of his strategy was to have many small-scale changes, which all happened to favor his party, but which are quite hard to point out (since, you know, "this is only two extra seats").
Well, I stand by my point: creating a mechanism which benefits you, and where some (or even several) people will eventually tamper with the ballots (and they will do it to your advantage, and you know it perfectly well up front, as it is clear as day to pretty much anyone) is cheating.
Or, to put it even simpler: encouraging your fants to cheat on your behalf is cheating. (Allowing them to cheat on your behalf is cheating as well, BTW.)
They all seem bad, but "undemocratic" isn't the word I'd use for most of them (gerrymandering was the only one directly related to democratic elections). Lots of policies strike me as bad, but I can't get everyone else to agree that all deviations from libertarianism on the part of governments are inherently suspect and deserve the same degree of scrutiny as restrictions on the franchise.
> In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election.
No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite. All people could vote for instead of his continued rule was "No". Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
> In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life.
A referendum is, again, not the same thing as an election. He didn't have to step down from power, handing it over to anyone else.
> Why did these people hold elections at all?
I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
> Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem.
Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
> Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them.
Communist regimes also effectively solved that first one, such as via purging the military, and I think largely solved the second by purging them as well.
> and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide)
That theory really annoys me, as I recall the blogger "agnostic" at akinokure.blogspot.com trumpeting how it was impossible for Trump to lose in 2020 because even if they cheated his victory would still overwhelm them... and then Biden won, he claimed he was only wrong by underestimating how MUCH they would cheat, and then claiming that this had completely discredited the election in the eyes of the public because we're all now aware it was a sham. The simpler explanation is just that none of the elections were stolen, Trump won twice and lost once. I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
> use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller
I think he was more of an "opponent" in Trump's mind. He wasn't an actual politician.
> This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as “not that bad, really”
No, most of them never lost an election (not a referendum or plebiscite) and then handed over power. It should be noted that Charles de Gaulle also stepped down after losing one to amend the Constitution, rather than losing an actual election to some other politician. He could have stayed on and tried again, but he made the choice to leave. This is separate from being a dictator vs democratic politician.
That makes sense, though I believe in Czechoslovakia they first grabbed a foothold of power within a larger government, then used that to seize power without killing that many people initially.
I guess it was the same in most EE countries (in Hungary for sure). Still, there was some killing, but not that much; during and after the revolution of 1956, there was again some; then the system consolidated and went on without murders. (There were other measures like pushing people towards exile, jailing them, or firing them from their jobs (being unemployed was a crime BTW), blackmailing and this stuff.) It could have been going on forever, but well, the economy...
This is pretty much unrelated to the events following WW2. The Soviets occupied Hungary just as they occupied Czechoslovakia (which was not involed in Barbarossa -- well, yes, Slovakia was, but everyone pretended to forget about that). In both places, first a coalition of several parties started governing, there were elections and all that, but of course the Soviets made sure that the communists were included. Then the independent parties were destroyed, one after the other.
It is quite related to the post BTW: even though the Soviets were capturing the country (countries), they pretended that there are free and fair elections, and tried to take over the countries formally following the law, operating behind the scenes as much as possible.
(Oh, and the people rose against both communist governments, although in Hungary it happened a lot earlier.)
> I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
What makes you think that? The only charitable explanation for what he's done to the political system of Russia is that he really sees what's happening only in terms of Russell's conjugations.
I'm not sure what they meant, but I think there's often a meaningful distinction of how democratic a leader considers themselves to be and how democratic the system around them actually is.
Putin's first priority is to ensure that he remains in power. Since the "divine right of kings" doctrine is thoroughly discredited these days, even dictators pretend that their power derives from the will of the people, and maintaining this pretense goes much smoother if you're actually popular.
Part of construal level theory is that we perceive things far from us (both in terms of literal distance as well as the more metaphorical sort) as more simple/homogenous while the local/familiar is more detailed. Most Americans don't know the name of Putin's party, or what the biggest opposition parties are. People actually reporting from Russia tend to note that Putin is genuinely popular there (perhaps less so since his botched invasion of Ukraine and the hit the Russian economy has taken), but Americans don't know much about that and don't feel like we need to know.
The political system of Russia wasn't in any great condition prior to Putin.
I'd say he's close to Trump in the nature of his popularity. Both are the kind of leaders that I once heard someone call "folk heroes". Americans have low trust in their institutions, as do Russians. Yet somehow a lot of them think that a single man can be "on their side", that he can spend five or twenty-six years draining the swamp, but the swamp remains, the swamp lets him remain in charge and at the same time he's neither a useful idiot nor one with the swamp.
The difference is that Trump is organic (I hope), Putin is originally hydroponic. He was reportedly picked as the successor because 1998-1999 sentiment surveys regularly identified Max Otto von Stierlitz (an undercover Soviet spy inside the SS) as the most popular fictional character people would have liked to see in charge of Russia: phlegmatic, reserved, quietly competent.
The basic story appeared to be KGB/FSB saw Russia under Yeltsin going to hell, suffering rampant organized crime, being plundered by oligarchs, hyperinflation, etc, and decided that something had to be done. Once elected, Putin executed a successful turnaround. He remains popular (?).
(Intelligence services are underrated btw when it comes to their roles in democracy.)
> No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite.... Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
There was no parliament at the time. So unless he called an election for an "elected dictator" to continue ruling without a parliament, calling an election would have necessarily implied a simultaneous parliamentary election. And he may have considered the possibility of winning the presidency in such scenario, assuming the center and left parties couldn't agree on a single candidate, but even then he must have known there was a high likelihood of having to rule with an opposition-controlled parliament.
There was to be a parliamentary election anyway in case Pinochet won. But if that had been the case (legitimately, no fraud) then he could be confident of ruling with a complaisant parliament.
Having a plebiscite was the pragmatic choice for him.
> Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
They did face a genuine risk of revolution though, which is what Scott said. In most Communist countries this was suppressed by the military might of Russia; once Communism in Russia collapsed, it collapsed almost everywhere else basically instantly.
> I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
In the sense that the official vote count accurately reflected the vote slips people dropped in ballot boxes, yes. (But then, you could say the same about most Communist countries.) But the voting was increasingly influenced by all kinds of illegal practices, some of which are mentioned in the post.
In most Communist countries, opposition parties weren't actually allowed to compete. That's a different category from merely "influenced", and it resulted in Communists never losing power via such elections, whereas Orban just did.
The coalition partners were placed on the same list people could vote for, it wasn't possible to vote for an opposition party and not the Communist party.
Hungary, Russia, Venezuela etc. are a different type of oppressive regime than North Korea or the Soviet Union era Eastern European countries. Nobody denies that. It's just annoying to see biased but real elections being touted as the proof of democracy. At the risk of repeating what Scott already said in the post, plenty of oppressive regimes hold elections. And sometimes, oppressive regimes fall as the result of an election. That does not exonerate them retroactively. (They do deserve some credit if it turns out they could have used violence or rigged the vote but have chosen not to, although I doubt that's the case here.)
The Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990 (Statecraft has a fun recollection [1]). PRI in Mexico in 2000. And many cases of the regime needing to rig an election they knew they would otherwise lose, and that leading to an irrecoverable loss of legitimacy - the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Velvet Revolution in Armenia, the fall of Milošević in Serbia.
Amen! And I think you are being overly-scrupulous in the footnote. If someone is doing several things to subvert free and fair elections that might remove them from power I think it is okay to call them a dictator. We don’t need to wait and see if they were bad at those things and they eventually didn’t work and say maybe they are only a 35% dictator. Weak tea is still tea.
> accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography
There's a running joke in the US that lots of right-wing people get caught possessing child pornography ("pedocon theory"), so it seems like a pretty standard technique.
Really? I haven't heard of many politicians of any sort getting caught possessing child pornography! And the most prominent people to have credible allegations of child sexual abuse are not particularly partisan people like Jeffrey Epstein.
Not CSAM, but sex crimes. Jackson famously had a bullet in his chest from a duel started by Dickinson accusing his wife of bigamy. Cleveland and the "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa" scandal. LBJ's "I can't prove it, but I can make him deny it."
Doing some quick but dangerous googling reveals "Trans Democrat's Child Porn Charges Spark Conservative Fury" (Newsweek), "Ex-NYC councilman Dan Halloran caught with 1,000 child porn films" (NY Daily News) and a Wikipedia page "List of federal political sex scandals in the United States".
Define "allow". It wouldn't surprise me if he claimed it was illegitimate, but I don't think it will be his call, and I don't think any particular subordinate will be up to try stopping it.
Hasn’t Vance repeatedly promised that he would subvert any transfer of power by doing what Pence did not? And, in this case, he may well be able to do it on his own behalf.
The prediction markets give remarkably high odds on Trump being out of office before 2029. And low odds for him being impeached. There seems to be a substantial risk that his health will give out before the end of his term.
And it seems to me that pulling any serious shenanigans at the end of his term would be quite difficult. There would be no plausible excuse for denying the applicability of the 20th and 22nd Amendments and the people in his coalition would already be chomping the bit to be the next Republican President.
If only there were a mental technique that could help people think more deeply about interminable debates over whether some leader qualifies as a dictator or not, we'd think so much more clearly about the issue. It's like, either you think it's fine for a leader to ban their opponents from the media or not, but debates about what exactly counts as a dictator aren't very productive.
> If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump
Or, you know, anyone with eyes and ears and thoughts.
If you’re a Democrat and don’t believe this happened, then the impasse is so high I’ll find everything else you have to say to be less credible.
Same as Republicans and their God belief (be it Trump or God).
Also, until this article I just assumed Orban was a dictator. Which goes to show how propaganda works - I’m one of the most virulent anti msm people and yet I just always assumed.
> Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent
What do you mean by 'strong-armed'. The definition of 'strong-armed' is "use force or violence against". I do not think the Democrats used force or violence, or even threatened to use force or violence, against Facebook generally or Zuckerberg personally. (I also have problems with the words "censor" and "dissent" but lets start with strong-armed).
> launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump
What does 'politically-motivated' mean? The definition of 'politically' is "in a way that relates to the government or public affairs of a country." I do think that the prosecutions of Trump relate to the government and public affairs of the country. I do think that the people who prosecuted trump were motivated by their politics, such as their commitment to democracy and the republic. Is that what you mean?
Also, Trump was indicted four times. Which of the four do you think were politically motivated? All of them? (As a reminder, he was indicted for business fraud, stealing and concealing national secrets, federal election interference, and state election interference). Lets pick, eg, concealing national secrets. What specifically did you feel was problematic about prosecuting Trump for this?
>The definition of 'strong-armed' is "use force or violence against"
Ehh... how is jawboning *not* a threat of force? I think it fits. Government is supposed to be a monopoly on force, so "nice business you got there, be a shame if we regulate it if you don't do what we ask" is a threat of force; "nice business you got there, be a shame if I break your knees if you don't do what we ask" is a threat of violence.
Personally I think it's telling that Murthy v. Missouri was decided on standing more than a "real holding," especially since how on earth is a person going to have explicit evidence of the government's motivations *before* reaching primary injunction and discovery, but that's a bit tea-leaf-reading. So it goes.
That's a really shrewd observation. It reminds me I once tried to make an index of whether a democracy had been established, whether there had been two peaceable changes of ruling party.
I've been following Scott since before 2016 and this is the first time I can recall him acknowledging that maybe the prior woke regime wasn't the worst of all possible worlds, or saying that he apologized to people who were concerned about Trump in his first term. Where/when did this apology take place? Because I recall even after January 6th he posted that people calling that an attempted coup were just proving his point that everyone overreacts about Trump. I know that the term coup is open for legitimate challenge, I also know that asking anyone who changes their mind to make a big public spectacle of it is obnoxious and raises the cost of doing so, but I am really just curious if there was some clear watershed "I was wrong about Trump" post I missed or if he's mostly referring to sentiments he's expressed privately.
I think he's had several of these posts in the past year, particularly during the period when Elon Musk was trying to destroy the institutions of science and public health.
A lot of those posts were behind paywall. I also mentally noted that this was one of the first where he said so openly (which, to be clear, I think is really great, and strongly encourage more of!)
Just going off of memory of those posts, I don't recall anything close to what he expressed in the OP - "Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back."
Maybe I missed it (and I need to reread those) but what sticks in my mind is (a) the whole Tyler Cowen / PEPFAR thing and (b) an increasingly explicit anti-Trump message in the posts.
That’s true. And also the central point of this post is much closer to acknowledging that flawed experts may well in fact be the best system humans have ever come up with, despite the flaws.
The thing is people act like center-left folks who spoke out against woke and Covid CPI excesses don't exist. We do exist! There are actually WAY more of us than the far left. Maybe more people acknowledging that instead of going into the arms of right wing grift-a-thon would've prevented this nonsense.
But the easiest way to remove the left from power for the foreseeable future would be to form a coalition with the right. There are far better ways to go about getting what the center wants than to keep voting for Democrats who go out of their way to protect and work with leftists.
I'm sorry? Did I say anything particularly objectionable? If you have a common enemy, you have a common interest. If there are truly "way more" of your people than the far left, then combined with the right, you would utterly outnumber them. Working together, you could collude so that the far left never has a say in policy. It simply requires abandoning tribalism for pragmatism.
>There are actually WAY more of us than the far left.
Not a relevant statistic. In the words of Ford Prefect, "they care. We don't. They win."
>Maybe more people acknowledging that instead of going into the arms of right wing grift-a-thon would've prevented this nonsense.
I had a conversation about this with someone else the other day, and I think it underrates the difficulty here. Specifically it was about Coleman Hughes' career, relative to Ibram Kendi's.
For the better part of a decade, any critique of Kendi was, simply, not going to get published by a major mainstream source. If you were independently wealthy or ran a highly popular independent blog (ahem nudge nudge wink wink), maybe you felt brave enough to do that. Or maybe not. But to try to walk a traditional, journalistic path while holding that position got you shuttled out of that mainstream circuit and into, at best, Quillette.
And I think it even overestimates the "grift a thon" availability for people with so much as a scrap of respectability. Nobody was giving Hughes $10 million dollars! Nobody was offering him a university department! Yeah, Kendi wasted both, but he had the opportunity.
Surely if there's so many center-left people speaking out against woke, some of them could've put together a grant for a saner alternative?
This analysis has a history problem. Was America more or less democratic in the 1700s and 1800s than we are today? There was indisputably more voter intimidation and outright fraud; lying in the papers was endemic, including disgusting personal insults that even Trump wouldn't stoop to today. But at the same time, voter turnout was consistently well over 85%, political clubs and associations were mainstays of social life, and Alexis De Tocqueville was so impressed with the amount of ordinary, day-to-day self-government Americans showed that he wrote a whole book about it. Congress - the people's branch of government - was a hot-bed of policy debate and productive legislation.
Nowadays our elections are a lot cleaner and more inclusive, but almost no-one knows who their congressperson is, let alone bothers to try and vote them out based on policy; state and local elections have miserable turnout rates; most people vote (if they do at all) on national slogans and personality or vibes, and we've basically given up on trying to solve problems legislatively; we've handed things over to bureaucracies in administrative agencies for technical real-world issues, and judges for procedural ones.
Democracy is a multi-dimensional thing. There are many ways in which bureaucracies and judges structuring policies with only indirect input from elected officials and elections can be more democratic than putting things up for a direct vote by people who have opinions on the outcome but don't understand which policies will have what effect. Just as there are many ways in which the reverse is true.
That's just normal evolution of democracies. In the beginning there are genuine opportunities for change and for the country to choose its way, and the barrier of entry into politics is low. Eventually, however, institutions and laws become entrenched and ossified, and it becomes harder and harder fighting against status quo, to the degree that real change becomes all but impossible, politics becomes more of a career than anything, and people stop bothering following much. This can be overturned pretty much only by some existential crisis, like a major war. But it really needs to be existential, COVID for example was not big enough in the end.
The US, being a particularly old and change-resistant democracy, retains so many weird features that it seems by now it can be pretty much ruled at all only by various workarounds, mostly involving executive or judicial power. Among those weird features are for example the whole Senate filibuster thing, the unusual power of Supreme Court, the disproportionate importance of swing states, and the overall treatment of the constitution as some kind of holy scripture that judges, like priests, must interpret. I'm not a fan of European democracies either, but they at least can, you know, actually enact new laws as situation demands; while in the US, it seems, only 2.3% of proposed bills actually passed in 2025, and of those only a fraction included any actual policy changes; see https://www.billtrack50.com/info/blog/the-year-congress-introduced-everything-again-and-passed-almost-nothing-again
Amount of voter turnout and self-governance may well be natural reactions to how functional a political system is. If things are going relatively smoothly, people don't feel overly compelled to do their part, but if they feel things are going sideways, they participate more in whichever way is appropriate at the moment. By that model, the 1700s and 1800s were "less democratic", or whatever else the people at the time felt was wrong, than today.
I usually rely on Scott to be historically literate, but I agree this wasn't his best. Not engaging with the historical examples (spoils system, Adams passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, outright electoral fraud in multiple presidential elections, machine politics, media dominance in multiple other settings including state-sponsored) seems to indicate a partisan blind spot.
Orbàn was called bad words for (1) massive corruption and nepotism, directing government contracts and regulatory favors to companies owned by relatives and close friends (2) spending public monies on himself and relatives, including building football stadiums in small towns to skim off the top (3) destroying the Hungarian economy through favoritism and protectionist measures (4) a disastrous foreign policy that aligned Hungary with Russia and China (5) fostering anti semitism through his bizarre fixation on his formal sponsor George Soros, who is currently a 95 year old man(6) using foreign money, including Austrian and Russian, to buy out and castrate any media company that attempted to be independent of Fidesz (7) railing on about “sovereignty” and “immigration” while allowing foreign capital to control key industries like the automobile sector and energy. Also allowing Hungary to be a safe base for Chinese espionage efforts. (8) defended pedophiles and gay sex offenders in his own cabinet, opening him up to obvious charges of hypocrisy
Note that Denmark actually has a fairly humane and effective policy for restricting and integrating Muslim immigrants, and no one accuses Danes of being fascists.
In Orban’s defense, he arguably wasn’t much worse than Berlusconi. Berlusconi was a disaster for the Italian economy and also very anti democratic but he was an attractive alpha male so didn’t generate the same opprobrium the unattractive little toad Orban got.
Why would he? Stammer is weak and ineffectual, so people call him exactly that. If you do what your supporters don’t want you to do and have to kowtow to more powerful interests, people don’t usually call you authoritarian. To Orban’s credit he actually was doing what his core supporters wanted him to do.
I don't know about those cases. I just disagree with Gian's point that "Nobody from the left is ever called these words" and I provided some examples. Sounds like you agree with me.
There have been plenty of officials in plenty of countries who oppose LGBT ideology the same way as Orban, but don't get called anti-democratic. And there are plenty of people that get called anti-democratic without opposing LGBT ideology. You're wrong if you think there's no content.
It’s easy to come up with a bunch of elected officials in various countries who oppose gay rights, if you just notice that it’s only a couple dozen countries that have protected gay rights. Many of the others still have various levels of democracy, whether it’s Japan or India or South Korea or Singapore or Malaysia or Indonesia.
My wife is from Gambia, which had a dictator who held rather rigged elections (along with usual dictator hobbies of disappearing political foes and the like), until in 2016 he was hampered in doing so by domestic and external factors, lost the election, and fled the country when his initial attempt to stay in power anyhow resulted in an international force intervening.
I've seen plausible conspiracy theories that the 1989 Chilean grape scare was done by the Reagan administration to warn Chilean big agriculture (who apparently supported Pinochet) not to back any shenanigans by Pinochet.
And the US pushed South Korea hard to make its government more democratic once there were massive pro-democracy rallies.
So yeah, international pressures can be important.
When it comes to international relations, scholars have theories such as autocratic legalism or competitive authoritarianism that is used to make predictions that do not appear to be strongly compatible with the newest round of evidence. With difficulty you might be able to save the theories. But keep in mind, it didn't just explain a handful of bad things the government did, scholars made cases that Orban *could not give up power* or he would face arrest.
Or in other critiques it was said that the regime was not just a political power source, but an economic one - surrendering power would result in loss of financial assets - an existential threat. The "Post communist mafia" critique.
The correct answer was: 'for various reasons, including the EU, there were always 'soft floors' on how far a European democracy can fall.' or 'For various reasons, the hungarian government failed to achieve economic growth, limiting their ability to retain power on populist issues.'
But a more nuanced take would likely invite similar criticisms of other so-called-democracies.
Like, our friends to the north just had a multi-year crisis over government approved witch hunts based on controversies over Indian burial grounds. No one is adding Canada to a 'failed democracy' index because they expanded MAID or cracked down on those truck driver protests.
We criticize some European countries for being too close to Russia, when plenty of democracies across Oceania and the Western Hemisphere have sold their entire telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei, meaning every cell phone is potentially comprisable by the Chinese government. Few in the expert class are criticizing Carney for being a Xi stooge cause he's going to allow China to dump tens of thousands of EVs for the exchange for some relief for Canadian farmers. Remember when two years ago China was engaging in transnational repression of Canadians while operating illegal "police stations" in major cities? Or when China tried to influence Canadian elections? Congrats on your 'New Strategic Partner'.
In the end it sometimes seems like there is a class of 'experts' who makes a statements of what are 'real democracies' and what gets to be the quirky eccentricities of local populism. On the outside who gets to be put in which category often looks to be decided on culture war issues. Nor do they seem to acknowledge that the problems they are identifying might be directly related to democracy, and not necessarily any specific regime. 10% Less democracy, or perhaps 10% more.
I'm not sure what this passage is suppsoed to mean:
But a more nuanced take would likely invite similar criticisms of other so-called-democracies.
Like, our friends to the north just had a multi-year crisis over government approved witch hunts based on controversies over Indian burial grounds. No one is adding Canada to a 'failed democracy' index because they expanded MAID or cracked down on those truck driver protests.
We criticize some European countries for being too close to Russia, when plenty of democracies across Oceania and the Western Hemisphere have sold their entire telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei
In what way is any of the Canada criticism similar to any of the criticism of Orban's elections and media interference? I can see that there is a problem in selling telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei, but that seems very different from allying with Russia. Do you see some direct one-to-one way of rating these things?
Democracies have failure points. It's difficult to protect minority rights, they can be captured by interested parties at the expense of the uninterested masses, no voting method satisfies rational decision making theories, expertise can be difficult to build up, it can be captured by bureaucracy, it can be captured by oscillating kleptocratic groups, and democracies overspend on some categories and underspend on others. The list goes on and on.
One might say democracies are bad, but they're better than alternatives. Hungary is on an extreme end of some of these problems, but they stood out for being compared against EU, and not like against India or Kenya. But the many of the problems in Hungary emerged because the people voted for them and they were popular. Democracies can make mistakes. They elected people into office who were corrupt and not competent. They chose policies that were bad for their economy. Ultimately they failed to achieve any of the goals of the population, because econ maxing is the only policy that matters on a long enough time frame. Democracy is hard to preserve, but it's also the only system that is self-correcting, which is hopefully something we just saw. This is not failure, this is the system working as intended.
The language used around Hungary, by foreign policy expert class, was bombastic and exclusionary, and often used as a metaphor for populist right wing movements from Italy to America. In many cases the experts made specific predictions that no longer appear to be true. I'm not saying they cherry picked examples, but democracies engaging in anti-liberal and corrupt behavior is sometimes normal. I could just as easily make the case that Canada is a failed democracy under many of the same criteria, especially if I slightly change a few value preferences. I could make the case that Montgomery County Maryland is a failed democracy because the government is captured by self-enriching groups.
The problem is these theories, these models, were never robust and do not appear to appreciate what was actually happening in Hungary, compared to Russia or Venezuela, and they did not actually attempt to grapple with how highly ranked countries on their democracy indexes can have just as many problems. They look, coincidentally, like clubs wielded by an expert academic class, that justified raising up in groups and pushing down out-groups.
A lot of what you say is reasonable, especially the first half. But this point just doesn’t sound plausible to me: “I could just as easily make the case that Canada is a failed democracy under many of the same criteria”. First, I’m not sure how many people were saying Hungary was a *failed* democracy. But I’d be interested in seeing how you do make a comparably plausible case about Canada.
I strongly dislike the conflation of dictatorship with the presence or absence of elections. They're orthogonal concepts. Dictatorship is about how concentrated the political power is *at one moment in time*. We get the term dictator from a polity that intentionally elected people to an established term-limited role of dictator numerous times. And one of the most famous events in all of politics is one such dictator being *further* granted the role dictator *for life*, as a distinct action.
Dictators clearly aren't necessarily for life/with an undefined term of office, otherwise, what sense would it make to talk about a "dictator for life"?
The fact that dictators on occasion get themselves instated for life no more makes that part of what the term dictator means, than the fact that presidents sometimes get themselves instated for life means that being a president implies no end to their term other than death.
> We get the term dictator from a polity that intentionally elected people to an established term-limited role of dictator numerous times.
Well, the biggest problem here is that the meaning of "dictator" in Latin bears no particular relationship to the meaning of the same word, borrowed from Latin, in some other language. German got "Kaiser" and Russia got "tsar" from the Latin word Caesar, which meant... the name of a particular family. If you tried to translate the Latin word into modern American English, you'd get something like "Kennedy". If you translate "tsar" into modern English, you get a completely different concept.
The smaller issue is that the role of dictator was "term-limited" only in the sense that it occurred in defined terms. There was no limit on serving multiple terms, which is what "term-limited" means in English today.
> Dictators clearly aren't necessarily for life/with an undefined term of office, otherwise, what sense would it make to talk about a "dictator for life"?
It would make sense when talking about someone who has awarded himself that title. Titles aren't bound by external logic. Elizabeth II was "Queen of all the Britains". (Note, that's Britains, not Britons.)
Simply *having* terms after which re-appointment or re-election is required is still a very important limit. Perhaps not "Term Limited" if there's such strong consensus for that as a phrase, but still "term limited".
Even in English, the root is very clear. A dictator is one who dictates. It's about their level of authority. Nothing about dictating, or the construction of the term itself *implies* an indefinite/for life term of rule. It also just leads to difficulty in language, adding more and more conditions to the same term - which is partially at the root of the trouble this piece is describing.
If you don't have separate words for someone's level of authority, their stance towards democracy, their stance towards rule of law, their liberalism, and the nature of their length of stay in office, then most combinations that exist will simply not have words to describe them, and you become very likely to encounter examples that cannot be easily described. The world is not simple. We can't easily have single words that are both well known and capture *that* much detail without causing confusion.
Whether someone has the *title* Dictator is also quite separate from whether they are *de facto* a dictator - you can be either one without being the other. But that's true of every piece of descriptive language; people can always adopt any words as titles. That doesn't mean we should cede to those people the power of language; we can still describe the actual reality as best we are able.
> Simply *having* terms after which re-appointment or re-election is required is still a very important limit.
That's true. There is a limit, and it's meaningful. But it's not a term limit, and your desire to call it one is strangely at odds with the rest of your comment. Do you think that when we use established words, we should feel bound by the meanings they are already agreed to have... or not?
> Perhaps not "Term Limited" if there's such strong consensus for that as a phrase, but still "term limited".
> Even in English, the root is very clear. A dictator is one who dictates. It's about their level of authority.
That's... not at all clear. By far the most prominent use of the 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣 "dictate" in English is to refer to speaking, without reference to any authority of any kind. You're right about the meaning, but you can't get there by looking at the root. Do you really want to stand there arguing that "dictation" is about level of authority?
> Whether someone has the *title* Dictator is also quite separate from whether they are *de facto* a dictator - you can be either one without being the other. But that's true of every piece of descriptive language; people can always adopt any words as titles. That doesn't mean we should cede to those people the power of language; we can still describe the actual reality as best we are able.
This suggests to me nothing so much as the idea that you didn't actually read the paragraph it appears to be responding to. Yes, it's appropriate to "cede the power of language" to people by referring to them using their own titles. That's all titles are.
You argued that the existence of the phrase "dictator for life" implies something about the meaning of "dictator". I pointed out that your argument is specious. The fact that people can adopt any title they want is not a counterargument - it supports me ("the phrase exists because it refers to a title, and titles can be anything"), while negating your original point, which was "the phrase can only exist by contrast with an assumed dictator-for-a-temporary-period".
Dictation is all about authority. Dictation requires (or did, prior to computers) two people. The dictator speaks, and expects their words to be recorded exactly, word-for-word, without any agency on the part of the scribe. The dictator is dehumanizing the scribe and literally using them as a simple tool, a mere vessel through which their will is made manifest in the world.
"Dictation" doesn't describe the simple act of speaking; it describes a two-person activity implying a very specific type of power relationship.
wrt the idea that "the root is clear", I think it's worth noting that the root is much clearer in Latin, but the verb 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 and the agent noun 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳 that transparently derives from it don't seem to share their senses any better than the English words "dictator" and "dictate" do.
Lewis and Short notes that 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 is the frequentative form of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘰 ["speak; say"], and therefore gives the primary meaning as "to say often; to pronounce, declare, or assert repeatedly".
But it has specialized meanings, and the primary one of those seems to be the same one preserved in English, the sense of speaking to someone else who will write your words down. (Which then specialized further into the meaning "write", with no third party involved!) There is also a sense of "prescribe, recommend, order"... which presents difficulties. L&S notes this sense in particular as "the primitive of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳", but also notes that there are no known examples before Augustus. Since the office of dictator predates Augustus by several centuries, there is a strong suggestion that this sense of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 derives from the noun and not the other way around.
I'm really not an expert, but I get the sense that dictate also have the second meaning of more generally deciding exactly how something is to be (a natural extension of someone writing down your words exactly) - and this meaning seems much closer to the understanding of dictator Emily was gesturing towards, as one who has the power to decide unilaterally.
>Elizabeth II was "Queen of all the Britains". (Note, that's Britains, not Britons.)
I don't think so; per Wikipedia, her official style was "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and Sovereign of the Most Noble Order of the Garter."
Though there are cases of this sourt of thing; Nicholas II, for example, was "Emperor and Auctocrat of all the Russias".
(The innovation attributed to the Earl of Rosebery is just the use of the word "all"; Victoria's coin doesn't say "Queen of all the Britains", but it does say "Queen of the Britains", or in full "Victoria by the grace of God Queen of the Britains and defender of the faith".)
You think she officially claimed the title, but that nevertheless it wasn't part of her official titulature? Or you think the Royal Mint was acting without her authorization?
>I strongly dislike the conflation of dictatorship with the presence or absence of elections. They're orthogonal concepts. Dictatorship is about how concentrated the political power is *at one moment in time*.
I don't know about that. France under Louis XIV had all political power concentrated in the person of the king, but we don't call it a dictatorship.
Rather, I think the term is used to refer to a concentration of power *in a way that is against the law, or at least against how the law was intended to operate*. So, for example, a head of government who stays in power through massive vote-rigging, or who manages to browbeat the legislature into giving him unlimited power, would be considered a dictator because his country (presumably) wasn't supposed to be run like that. Conversely, an absolute monarch in a country where absolute monarchy is the accepted way of running things would not count as a dictator.
An elaboration on your point that keeps the term consistent with its Roman origins would be that a dictator is one who has centralized absolute political power within themselves *outside* of the law. A Roman dictator's authority was perfectly legitimate, but the entire point was that his authority was not bound by law within the legitimate bounds of his time in office. A dictatorship means the suspension of lawful constraints on the leader's power.
She declared a state of Emergency for several years in the 1970s, so she could suspend elections and hold onto power - but then she ended the Emergency and lost the next election, the only time in the first 50 years of Indian history when her party lost a national election. Notably, she herself won the next one, but then was assassinated by her bodyguards when she sent the army to raid the holiest site of their religion.
Question is whether she was justified to impose emergency. You may note the cries of Total Revolution were in the air. So there were people and movements that aimed to topple the entire constitutional system for some Total Revolution.
You are probably right. She got money for sterilization from LBJ. I'm just saying the people whose tubes she snipped might have at least been pissed off and voted against them.
My favourite Feynman quote is "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He was talking about nanotechnology, but it also works for politics and leadership. It can *always* get worse.
What's your threshold for 'particularly threatening'? I know it's hard to specify precisely, but e.g. where is your line relative to what happened in 2020-2021?
Something you hinted at, but I think should be made more explicit, is that all of this is happening on some probability distribution and that we should be grateful that the sample turned our way.
When Trump won in 2016, Nate Silver predicted a 30% chance of victory, which was way higher than everyone else but still less than 50% or, like, 100%. Obviously the outcome of the 2016 election was binary. So should we rake Silver over the coals for being off by 70%? No, of course not. In fact, we ought to make fun of the people who do not understand probabilities. If someone says that Silver shouldn't be trusted because "he got 2016 wrong", you can easily write off everything else that person says.
I think the same thing is true here. There was _some probability_ that Orban refused to concede the election. 10%? 20%? 70%?** We don't live in the hypothetical world where Orban did refuse because we got lucky that the weighted coin flip was heads instead of tails, but I strongly suspect that the same people coming out crowing about how Orban wasnt that bad would simply find some other motivated argument about how the situation doesn't apply. IMO the "no risk to democracy at all" people ought to be given a remedial course in statistics before engaging with anything else they say, and even then it may not be worth it.
**Prediction markets had Orban at 35% on April 8th, which was well after polling showed Magyar was going to win. So that 35% consists of (% wins election | poor polling) + (% cheats the election in some way | losing the election). Obviously not easy to know the exact split.
I think one underappreciated cause of the smooth transition is how Orban et al expected to get a much better results. Just as often in the US, partisan polls are used to bolster supporters and not actually measure reality, so a large portion of Orban voters and supporters thought they are the majority, even when independent researchers showed otherwise. Even if the inner circle had a better idea, they most likely believed they can even out the odds by the time election day comes. This way they trapped themselves and could not back out post hoc. I was kind of expecting them to change the election system and/or the constitution with their supermajority to make sure that even after a loss they are in a good position. But they expected to win and hence "winner takes all" seemed like a good idea that time.
Silver's actual percentage was 79%, which from what I recall was fairly low among his peers but still quite mistaken. He was handing out more like 4-1 odds rather than 2-1.
"To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from".
Not exactly. In this case it was a matter of "bad institutions" convincing a sufficient amount of people that those institutions had gone rogue. That "mess would have to do until the real mess came around", you might say, but either mess was enough for me to abstain from choosing between them, since I have standards. I simply saw one as causing the other.
I find the list at the outset of the article rather unimpressive, in truth. The gerrymandering one in particular — Fidesz “only” got 49% of the vote, but the second place party got under 33%. A gap that big in the UK would produce a similar or greater majority — in 1997 Blair got 63% on 43% of the vote.
Similarly, using false claims to launch a general fishing expedition of the opponent, if that is in fact what happened, also characterizes the Russia collusion probe. In Germany, the government has attempted to impose special surveillance on the AfD party because it opposes immigration, and an outright ban is a live possibility. Orban never attempted to ban his chief opposition afaik.
I don’t know much about the latest complaints re: Hungarian media, but a few thoughts come to mind:
-Whatever the nature of things, clearly the effort to suppress Magyar was utterly unsuccessful, which ought to generate skepticism about how “controlled” the environment was.
-There doesn’t seem to be any indication anyone was ever forced to sell a newspaper; Orban supporters just were there to buy them when they were up for sale. In fact, one of the biggest purchases that ppl freaked out about (the tabloid Blikk, Hungary’s largest) was just last fall. If the media environment was so authoritarian, why did they only get around to buying the biggest tabloid 15 years into their run?
-If they were significantly censoring X or other social media, or blocking foreign news outlets, I imagine you’d have mentioned it. If that didn’t happen, it’s a glaring hole in the claim of a suffocating, autocratic media environment.
-When I paid more attention a big complaint was that Fidesz passed a law imposing “government control” of the top media regulator. Oh no! They made it like the FCC!
I’m not Hungarian and I’m sure Orban’s government did plenty I’d dislike. They might even be more corrupt than the state of California, though I doubt it. But ultimately articles like this (and there are a lot, tracing back to Orban’s first term) always seem rooted in him being an electorally successful right-winger. I don’t think a long article justifying an authoritarian-ey label for a government that consistently holds regular fair elections would get written about a government with different core beliefs.
>In Germany, the government has attempted to impose special surveillance on the AfD party because it opposes immigration, and an outright ban is a live possibility.
First, the AfD is considered a fundamentally anti-democratic party, working against the German constitution, which is a lawful reason to put them under surveillance; even that assessment which is quite obvious for most people, is under judicial review and might not hold.
Second, in any case, it has nothing to do with immigration, other than the most extreme positions that contribute to the anti-democracy assessment as above. The current ruling party (CDU) is also mostly anti-immigration, and they were not put under surveillance when they were not in power.
Third, while a ban is a "live possibility", it's quite remote at this point because 1) banning parties is an ultima ratio that is intended to be difficult, and 2) quite practically, the last two attempts to ban a party went embarrassingly wrong (NPD, twice), and nobody wants to see another failed attempt.
They are considered "fundamentally anti-demicratic party" by their political opponents as a pretext to banning them. CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity. Under Merkel it was very much not anti-immigration party in practice if not in rhetoric.
>CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity.
Then you don't know your German history very well. CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl privately had plans to halve the Turkish population in Germany, and publicly stated that the number of immigrants must not rise. That was in the early 1980s. Shortly after there were also actual laws with financial incentives for immigrants to leave, which had a real effect, but not lasting.
That was not the assertion, however. The assertion was that the CDU was immigration-friendly in her entire history until the end of the era Merkel: "CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity".
Also let's not forget that the immigration surge under Merkel had a reason other than some supposed "open borders" ideology. It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants. War or natural disaster is about the most ethical reason for accepting refugees, also enshrined in German and European law, and really a fundamental practice across human history. If you oppose even that minimum of hospitality, then at least in terms of policy you're indistinguishable from the actual xenophobes. My impression, FWIW, is that the similarity goes beyond policy.
>It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants
Strange how many Algerians and Afghans came from the Syrian crisis, huh? And the disproportionate numbers of men and women! Strange indeed.
I won't deny that assisting refugees is a good thing. I also won't ignore that it was used as a broad welcome mat, intentionally or not.
>really a fundamental practice across human history
My understanding of history is that they weren't treated nearly as well, up until post-WW2 Europe and embarrassment about a certain particular failure of accepting them.
> My impression, FWIW, is that the similarity goes beyond policy.
I have no doubt that you will make many uncharitable assumptions about people that don't agree.
>That was not the assertion, however. The assertion was that the CDU was immigration-friendly in her entire history until the end of the era Merkel: "CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity".
That's not the only way of reading the assertion, and it's not the charitable way, either.
>It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants.
So why couldn't fellow Arab countries let the refugees in, seeing as how they're closer both physically and culturally?
1. Not considering Magyar's party to be fundamentally anti-democratic
2. Not passing a law to make it legal to surveil them for this.
It is not consistent to be maximally skeptical of the motives of everything Orban does but maximally unskeptical of everything the German government does.
Something worth considering: we -or "democratic backsliding experts" for that matter- don't have to qualify Hungary under Orbán as an "illiberal democracy".
He's been doing so himself since 2014. He very clearly uses "liberal" in the European, not Democratic Party sense, even going as far as citing as examples to follow and replicate "[countries] none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies", putting the whole focus on economic success over individual freedom and saying that "liberal democratic stats can't remain globally competitive". Of course, here in the West we mostly believe economic success originates from individual freedom, even in the kind of left wing parties that normally arrive to the government. But his examples of success include, tellingly, China.
Anyone saying that Orbán was not trying to move back democracy and freedoms as usually understood in the West is doing a disservice to his explicitly stated ideology!
One of the more fun theories is that Trump already rigged the previous elections by tampering with voting machines, in some stories through a Starlink internet connection. While there seems little evidence it's the kind of thing people who previously believed someone like Trump could never get elected (definitely not twice), want, or have, to believe in order to match it with their views about their country. Similarly I feel like modern (pseudo-)dictators need elections, to match it with their own view of being the rightful leader (liked by the people, doing good, etc.). The 'tampering with elections ' part is just one of those inconvenient facts they choose to ignore in defending themselves.
This is nitpicking, but I'd argue with the assertion that North Korea is 100% on the democracy vs. dictatorship scale.
They still do maintain the veneer of democracy. Sure, it's a very thin veneer and very easy to see through (I'm by no means a North Korean apologist), but it is there. They do have elections, the latest one even ended in a 99% vote for Kim instead of the usual 100%; no idea who the brave 1% is and whether they're real.
To me, 100% on this scale would be publicly admitting that "actually, that democracy thing those Americans are doing over there is bad and counterproductive, look at how much better your lives are under my dictatorship, letting you vote would just let our enemies manipulate you into taking control of the country, we won't bother with pesky elections here." No idea if anybody actually does this, quick Googling says that Saudi Arabia and the UAE both openly admit to having a king and don't even pretend to have a fake democracy, and I'd much rather live there than in North Korea.
I am kind of curious what North Korea's veneer of democracy is actually for. I don't think they're convincing anyone outside the country they're actually democratic, and presumably their own citizens know that they aren't allowed to vote for anyone else and are capable of drawing the obvious conclusion that the election result doesn't actually indicate popular support.
Whatever it's for, there's a surprising correlation between authoritarianism and the number of pro-democratic adjectives in a country name.
Compare "United States" (0), or "the Republic of Poland" (1) versus "People's Democratic Republic of Korea" (3).
If it really existed, the Star Wars galactic Empire wouldn't have been officially called a galactic empire, it would have been called "Free Democratic People's Republic of independent planets."
One of the aspects of the Orbán fiasco that no one seems to be commenting upon is the total lack of help from Trump. Sending Vance to say a few words on the eve of the election does not count.
Orbán would probably still have won if Hungarian economy was booming, which it very much isn't. Already in January 2025, Trump could have "asked nice" his tech bros to invest some substantial money into Hungary, which is, after all, a highly educated EU nation, and with some dedicated funds, could play the role of Ireland 2.0.
But that didn't happen. For all the verbal respect that MAGA gives Orbán, they don't seem to consider his government to be an ally on the level of Israel, e.g. actually worthy some help. More like "useful cucks".
Good point. He literally saved Milei with a giant loan and lowered tariffs. But when Vance gave his pro-Orban speech he did a little 'should I call president Trump?' bit and it just went straight to voicemail.
He could certainly have done more. Maybe he could have shifted the result by 1-2% and prevented the opposition from gaining a qualified majority (which would have been consequential, as a qualified majority is needed to purge all the theoretically-independent-from-government institutions that Orbán occupied). He almost certainly couldn't have helped Orbán win the elections, the gap was huge. And Hungary isn't that poor, it's mostly just mismanaged (which makes it less than ideal as an investment target).
The way I'd frame it, Orbán bought some nice gestures from Trump by e.g. funding CPAC a couple times, but that was small change and could only buy that much. And Orbán's Hungary wasn't actually a great US ally (too cozy with Russia and China). He should just have wired money to Trump directly, maybe that would have worked better.
If Trump's cronies plunged billions of dollars into the Hungarian economy in time (e.g. a year ago, not two weeks ago), the resulting economic jump would swing more than 1-2 per cent of voters. It is extremely rare for governments overseeing massive economic growth to lose elections.
People don't seem to realise that the biggest damage that people like Trump and Orban do is not through the direct impact of their overt acts against their opponents but through the damage done by packing the system with corrupt officials. For example, the biggest legacy of Trump will probably be his packing of the Supreme Court with judges willing to set a precedent that basically shreds the Constitution and makes the president far less accountable than any mere monarch currently living. That damage cannot be easily undone and makes it that much easier for the next would be tyrant to seize yet more power.
>For example, the biggest legacy of Trump will probably be his packing of the Supreme Court with judges willing to set a precedent that basically shreds the Constitution
I'm afraid that ship already sailed with Wickard v. Filburn.
Wickard v. Filburn relates to the power of the federal state not the president. Most governments in the world have that sort of power but most other democratic governments do not have a president who can do whatever he wants if he just says "national emergency" or be immune from prosecution for anything that is even vaguely related to his position as president
My sense is that Orbán was happy to use State power to try to put his finger on the scales including control of the media. That seems bad but not exactly unheard of in Europe.
Regarding 49% of the vote getting you 68% of the seats I’d just mention that here in the UK the Labour Party got 33% of the vote and got 63% of the seats! In some systems it helps if the opposition is not divided!
And look to Scotland for businesses being frightened to speak out of turn. The governing SNP controls the spending purse strings and (well, so it is said, and I believe it’s) isn’t afraid to punish its critics.
I think Orban’s government was highly corrupt and people punished it for that. Perhaps if it had been economically successful people would have forgiven it. It wasn’t. Talk of dictatorship felt to me like an abuse of language owing more to dislike of his anti liberal policies (anti immigrant, pro Russia etc) than anything else. Not to say he didn’t try to manipulate state power to try to get an unfair advantage over his opponents but when I hear about the gerrymandering that goes on in the US . . .
Certainly a major factor was that the economy wasn't doing well, and the voters care about that. I wonder, though, whether corruption was hindering economic development rather directly -- it gets hard to attract foreign investment if it's clear that your investment has no defense if the government decides to take it outright. China is such a good place to do business that investors have been willing to tolerate that risk, but few other countries have such advantages. E.g. Venezuela has lots of oil, but the press says that since they've nationalized the oil industry twice, no foreign company is willing to invest in rebuilding it. Hungary is a well-educated European country, but there are a lot of those that they have to compete with for FDI.
Has anyone ever written up an explanation of how Trump or Vance or whoever comes along to succeed them could possibly pull of a turn to dictatorship in the presence of 500 million guns? The US is the leader in the guns-per-capita metric not just among the OECD, but among the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country [note how the 2nd place is Kurdistan - a region that successfully resisted the Iraqi central government for many years]
Hungary has 0.1 guns per capita, the US has 1.2 guns per capita or 12x more, not to mention the fact that Americans have access to far more powerful weapons (all the way to grenades) than legal gun owners in Hungary. It seems to me that converting Hungary into a dictatorship is far easier at the very least because you have to worry about a far smaller number of gun owners.
Most of those guns are in the hands of people who would, despite their claims that they own them to resist tyranny, back a right-wing dictatorship to the hilt, if push came to shove.
If you're asking because you're open to the possibility it's true, then feel free to do the necessary research yourself. The correlating information, re: the political disparities in American gun ownership and the favorable disposition of reactionaries toward authoritarian governments who share their politics, is widely available. If, more likely given the bent of the commentariat here, you're a reactionary making an isolated demand for rigor, go waste someone else's time.
I haven't looked at this at all and I don't have a firm opinion - but I think that not everyone failing to "strongly support" a position will take arms to physicall fight it. Isn't the more relevant question how many gun owners *strongly opposed* January 6th?
Surveys of support for January 6 within a year or so of its occurrence, and surveys of it now, after it was fraudulently retconned into a peaceful protest and/or an FBI conspiracy by the right and by Trump… are not the same thing. But “strongly support” is not that useful. If those with guns strongly support or weakly support or are neutral, and those who strongly oppose are mostly unarmed, the battle will be wildly asymmetric.
Interesting - I'd have expected the per-capita weapons difference to be much higher.
On the other hand, when looking up the stats just now, I learned that US civilians own almost exactly three times more firearms than all the world's militaries - including the US - combined (although of course this doesn't include the big stuff like rocket launchers and artillery and whatnot).
That's an "average person has one testicle" kind of thing - some people in the US are weapon enthusiasts and have a whole armory. Percent of households owning a gun is a better metric, and on that the US is less of an outlier (on par with Finland and about 4x of Hungary).
So the gap is even narrower than the gap I overestimated previously. *And* there are a lot more people with big guns than people with small guns. My intuitions about this are *so* bad.
Per-capita still matters because, unlike testicles, guns can be shared among one's neighbors if it ever comes to a civil war-like scenario. At the very least you'll see siblings sharing guns among each other, children giving guns to parents (and vice versa), and friends trying to ensure everyone in their close circle is armed.
The US is also unique for not requiring a license to own a gun - and not requiring (most) guns to be registered, so it would be a challenge to figure out who the gun owners are compared to Hungary or Finland. Just imagine how differently 1956 in Hungary could've turned out if they had 120 guns per capita...
Probably not very different, civilians with guns stand very little chance against an actual army. Especially an invading army without split loyalties. Fair point though, per-capita does make some difference.
You are right, it would've probably gone down the same way, but the *perception* of the odds of victory on behalf of the Soviets would've been different, possibly leading them to avoid invading in the first place. To some degree this is also how the American deterrent-against-dictators works: you don't necessarily need a detailed mechanism covering for every possible contingency, just enough of a shared knowledge that shit might hit the fan if you tried to become a dictator.
Finland has in fact been invaded by the Soviets. Did the high number of guns by capita make much difference? (Or maybe it only became high as a result? No idea where to find historical data.)
I think America's incredible civilian arsenal makes it nigh-impossible for a foreign invasion to be successful. I don't think it precludes the possibility of homegrown dictators, or just the worsening of small-d democratic norms. Things have to get very, very bad before an armed uprising of the people is really on the table.
Does loosing an election make an illiberal strongman not a dictator? Or perhaps just an incompetent dictator / dictator wannabee - somebody who was genuinely trying the dictatorship route, just failed to navigate it well enough and lost control on an unexpected sharp turn? (The incompetent dictator wannabee designation IMHO applies at least partially to Trump 2020, whereas Putin 2011 proved to be just a bump on otherwise competent enough steering - to be clear, IMHO very far from perfectly competent, but unfortunately competent enough).
I think the gerrymandering accusation is too harsh. The key reason for Fidesz (and now Tisza) having disproportionate seats in the parliament is that the original Hungarian constitution was written to favor the winning party to make it easier to form a governing majority. This is literally just things working as originally intended. Fidesz did do some redistricting when the existing borders exceeded the legal limits, and they did gain a couple of seats (out of 199) on the net, but I don't think this really deserves to be on the same list with their other crimes. They also gave votes to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries who then vote almost exclusively for them (1-2 net seats again), but again, there are various reasons why this is defnensible, especially as their votes are effectively worth less per capita.
Okay so they did a little bit of this, which is not objectionable, and a little bit of that, which is also not objectionable, so the conclusion is that the sum of such actions is also not objectionable?
To be clear, I fully agree it was an autocratic/illiberal regime and they did even more than what Scott mentions, my goal is not absolving them of their sins, all I want to highlight is that I don't think that the gerrymandering accusation is fair. The main source of imbalance between vote weights is due to the original electoral system and not the electoral borders. I also think this is one more thing Orbán needs to be given credit for: he did not meaningfully mess with the election rules although he had all the power to do so and there were many proposals going around, especially the last 2 years.
FWIW the original constitution involved more seats distributed much more proportionally, and Orbán changed that first thing after gaining power. But yes, while there was some gerrymandering (and also some malapportionment - technically a different thing, and more impactful), it would not have been considered extreme in the US. (Although maybe that says more about the US being shockingly undemocratic in a few ways, while being very democratic in most.)
Hungary uses a mixed voting system of proportional for (slightly under) half the seats and first-past-the-post for (slightly over) half the seats, and large seat shares with much smaller vote shares is normal in first-past-the-post systems. (E.g. in the last UK election, which was fully first-past-the-post, Labour got 63% of the seats with 35% of the vote.)
The real problem was massive vote buying and voter intimidation (estimated to affect ~5% of the votes - there is a recent documentary [1] about it), and of course the wider context of propaganda, non-neutrality of the state, disproportionate resources, use of secret services etc. etc.
You got it completely the other way round, I think.
After his first victory, Orbán rewrote Hungarian election rules to give disproportional number of seats to the strongest party. The idea was that even if he later becomes less popular, as long as the opposition is fragmented, he will stay at power. (And that it would be difficult for the opposition to coordinate if all the media are in Orbán's hands so they can't even make an election campaign. The rural voters might not even know that any opposition exists.)
The only way to defeat Orbán was for the entire opposition to agree to vote for one guy, and then get a majority. Which is what they did, and suddenly the election rules *as Orbán rewrote them* gave the new winner disproportional power. (So kinda working as *Orbán* intended, but for a different guy.)
They got the 2/3 majority (68% of seats) to do that with 53% of the votes in the first place, so it's not like it ever was a proportional system. But also, as far as I know this doesn't meet the definition of gerrymandering. True, with many tiny opposition parties things became even more skewed compared to the original constitution, but if they took things to the limit with a first-past-the-post system, that also wouldn't be gerrymandering in my opinion.
> But also, as far as I know this doesn't meet the definition of gerrymandering.
When Orbán rewrote the election rules, a vote of someone living in Budapest had 10x less weight than a vote of some rural voter. Does this satisfy the definition?
How did you calculate the 10x? The maximal difference between any 2 districts is 40%. If your logic is that depending on the final vote share the value of a vote can shift, you could argue for infinite relative differences because if a party doesn't make it into the parliament their voters' votes are worthless. I maintain that inequal vote weights that have nothing to do with electoral borders do not qualify for gerrymandering, simply favoring the winner, whoever that may be, has no inherent bias towards Fidesz as the latest election demonstrates.
Political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alaister Smith, under their Selectorate Theory, might say that Orban shrank the size of the minimum winning coalition size needed. Gerrymandering in general does so in a numerically obvious way, but his media suppression also shrinks the pool of 'infliential supporters" who might become winning coalition members.
It's often difficult for would-be authoritarian leaders to shrink their coalition sizes since there are many individuals and institutions with incentive and ability to resist that shrinkage because they wish to remain in the winning coalition or as influential selectors rather than interchangeable selectors.
I appreciate you taking this topic on so clearly in the post. I have been unusually triggered by the passing comments I saw about Orban. How come the online discussions even here have become so strongly apologetic of right-wingers, would-be-democracy dismantlers and outright dictators? It is such a weird, and hopefully not successful, pushing of the Overton window.
How will you know when leftists are gone, and you are willing to return to a model where dictators and subverting of the electoral process should no longer be condoned?
Like are you looking for a world where no one in the Democratic party holds any national office, because the leftists who (I will agree) pushed their agenda too far were part of the Democratic party? How many years do the Democrats need to be out of power?
Or do politicians in power need to say something to indicate that they're not leftists?
> How will you know when leftists are gone, and you are willing to return to a model where dictators and subverting of the electoral process should no longer be condoned?
The same way Orban lost: the people with leverage become unhappy with the leadership, and make it difficult for them to maintain power despite their attempts to hold onto it. Either the administration runs out of scapegoats and people start getting unhappy with the economy, or they fail to even efficiently deal with the scapegoats in the first place. Autocrats aren't invincible. They still require the consent of other people to maintain their rule. And then, if they so choose, they can bring back democracy, now that they know their voters are on the same page.
> Or do politicians in power need to say something to indicate that they're not leftists?
You can't prove a negative. The most you can do is make sure you don't provide any evidence that you harbor leftist sympathies.
The administration that's seizing power by less-than-democratic means. This would be the right, in this case. I'm just describing how I think it would go, and it's really not that disasterous as long as you're not one of the groups getting scapegoated. And most of the people here are not going to be in those groups.
The administration tried pretty hard to get Jack Citerrelli as governor of NJ instead of Sherrill. As a Democrat in New Jersey, I think that would have been very bad for NJ. I'm not sure if you would count that as "scapegoating" a "leftist" but something I'm glad they failed at.
What was pushed too far? I find the incredible tolerance for mass corruption and dishonesty and horrifyingly anti human mass scale policies by the right being paired up with annoyance about HR ladies and pronouns.. to be among the most dispiriting and horrifying tendencies I’ve ever dreamed of.
To be clear, I definitely agree with you. I'm trying to understand Dust's viewpoint, and (s)he seems to think "leftists" pushed things too far.
FWIW, on the merits (and ignoring the terrible damage Trump is doing now) I disagree with most of the right wing grievances but some of it has some merit - I do think we were too lax on immigration, and I think the progressive movement shifted too far on some non-trivial cultural topics. I don't think the HR ladies and pronouns, on their own, were all that significant.
What immigration or cultural issues? I still don’t get the actual issue with immigration. People panicking about birth rates and social welfare, crime, and debt issues don’t have a legitimate reason to oppose even Biden era immigration figures. Not from any objective metrics or logic at least.
Happy to discuss more about the specifics once you've read that, it literally describes it at a level of detail I couldn't capture in a comment thread.
Cultural issues - even more complex and multi-faceted, so I'll just pick 2:
- Over-focus on equality of outcomes to the point that there has been a degradation in meritocracy. I see this in progressive school districts that have removed a lot of the Gifted/Talented programs or advanced offerings because of lack of equal representation. Also saw this in the significant prioritization of DEI in, for example, corporate interview processes.
- Over relaxation of criminal enforcement, also due to concerns of unequal outcomes of policing.
To be clear - I am not saying discrimination is a solved problems. For instance, I'm sure policing is discriminatory in many places, and we should keep fighting back against that. But non-enforcement of some crimes is not the answer.
Another good summary is Matt Y's manifesto - I agree with pretty much every one of his 9 points:
Are you among those people? If so, honest question, why would you want them "gone"?
I have more liberal, sometimes leftist, sometimes conservative opinions. I do not want the right-wingers and hardcore conservatives gone. I'd like to convince them with arguments, just like I am sometimes convinced by their arguments. I'd like to experiment with different policies and make real-world assessments of their effects wherever possible. This is not always going to be possible in a clean way, as life gets in the way. But I disagree with handwaving policies based on opinion *alone*, without taking into consideration evidence.
I'm pro-pluralism, because I recognize and accept that my knowledge is finite, my wisdom still grows, and my opinions have and will keep changing over time. I extend the favor of that insight to all of my democratic peers. So I don't want anyone gone, I want everyone enlightened (in the renaissance-sense) in their own ways.
Hungarians are probably seeing that "strong men" make for short blips in economic well-being, followed by a sharp decrease when the favours the strong man asked are being cashed in by his now-billionaire buddies, by squeezing them (the people). That's my opinion and take on the situation.
> I'd like to convince them with arguments, just like I am sometimes convinced by their arguments.
People have tried that for years. It's like talking to a brick wall. None of this would be necessary if there was any possibility for mutual understanding. There is simply a gap in values that cannot be bridged.
I'm not even through half my expected lifespan and yet already old enough to remember when "both sides of the aisle" (in the US) could regularly bridge gaps.
Maybe you haven't had the luck seeing that, fair enough. But the massive polarization is new and precarious. I'm sure it is partly facilitated, and there is plenty of evidence going to back to Cambridge Analytica, and it can be reasonably suspected that this was just the tip of an iceberg.
> Why did Putin bother sending friendly voters to multiple precincts, when he could have just faked the count? For that matter, why did he do either of these things when he could have just thrown anyone who ran against him in jail? The answer has to be that more blatant interventions carried a greater risk of discovery, or a greater risk of public backlash if they were discovered. Putin tried to fake the elections with the lightest touch possible.
It wasn't about the lightest touch. This kind of distributed manipulation serves two things:
- it's a sort of a Gish gallop. If you're really persistent, you can win the court case that proves that history teacher Svetlana Petrova did stuff the ballot box at polling station #3265, nullify the results from this polling station and get her removed from the commission (though in 2026 your case will simply get thrown out as "deepfakes and perjury"). Can you really do this 4999 more times to prove that the country-wide result is significantly affected?
- it's a loyalty metric. There are eighty-nine governors in Russia, and they are stack ranked against each other based on how many votes Putin or United Russia got in the last election in their region. They themselves repeat this process in their own subdivisions.
I think the term you are looking for is "a normal person in power" | Orban's behavior is simply the behavior of any normal person in power; When there's no 2nd branch of government to stop them. E.g. maga behavior seems similar to orban (and obana democratic behavior too, though less bad) - but at a scale of 300m people you can't ban individual school teachers due to sheet administrational complexity so you settle for college ones
also, arguably, the us has more checks and balances than hungary. But I think you are crediting orban as being some sort of odd thing when instead we is simply a dude with power that's trying to maximize for a single objective (get more money and power for me and friends). To Hungary's benefit and downside it never had a secret police (see latest Romanian elections), mafia (see latest Bulgarian tax code or peace in the Balkans), or church (see Poland not having gone full national socialist yet) to intervene.
> one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism
The Right Wing Authoritarianism scale is somewhat unfortunately named. Bob Altemeyer explains:
[begin quote from The Authoritarians]
In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often <em>turn out</em> to be political conservatives... But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my <em>psychological</em> right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.
You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted <em>their</em> chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao.... But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.
[end quote]
To steelman Scott’s statement, the central issue seems to be whether the RWA scale is politically biased. In other words, does is measure authoritarianism, or some combination of authoritarianism and political conservatism? If it measures the latter, you would expect people on the political right to score higher on it even if people on the political right are not (on average) more authoritarian than people on the left.
The quoted passage was written in 2006 and the RWA scale is considerably older. It seems like there are a fair number of authoritarian followers on the political left now, but at the time the RWA scale was developed, there weren’t enough authoritarians on the political left to test the scale for political neutrality.
There is another authoritarianism scale, developed (or at least used by) Stanley Feldman, that uses questions about child rearing. I believe this scale unlikely to have political bias because the questions don’t involve political topics. On surveys that include both the RWA scale and the child rearing scale, the effects are stronger for the RWA scale than the child rearing scale, but the directionality is the same for both scales. Individuals scoring higher on authoritarianism on either scale are more likely to approve of Trump. They are more likely to trust Fox News.
I can think of two possible reasons why the effect size is larger for the RWA scale. One is that the RWA scale is politically biased. If conservatives and authoritarians are both more likely to trust Fox News, a scale that measures a combination of conservatism and authoritarianism might be a better predictor of trust in Fox News than a scale that measured pure authoritarianism.
The second possibility is that the child rearing scale is a less accurate measure. One reason to suspect this is that the RWA scale has 22 questions and the child rearing scale has 4 questions. If you reduced the RWA scale to the four best-performing questions, you would also get a less accurate result.
I can’t make a solid case that either scale has political bias. Both scales are, as far as I know, generally accepted as valid by people more qualified than me to evaluate them. So I think they should be taken seriously.
Correction: there was no gerrymandering involved in the Russian 2011 election. That 2011 election was direct and proportionate, so the concept of gerrymandering did not apply. The 49% turned into 52% after the invalid ballots and the results of small parties not reaching 7% (which was required to get into Duma) were discarded.
Orban was deemed a dictator because he stood up to the woke european political consensus. Neighboring Romania is more corrupt and more authoritarian but because the political establishment is aligned with the european consensus nobody batted an eye when they canceled the 1st round of 2024 presidential elections for fake reasons. It has been a year and a half and they still provided no evidence for their claims.
So who gets to decide if a regime is a democracy or authoritarian? Mass media?
Funny how people who oppose Orbán talk about what he did *domestically*, and people who support Orbán talk about internet culture wars and other countries.
> If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that..
You kinda forgot to mention the assassinations and assassination attempts. Orban, if he goes to court, can argue that he did none of the things on that list. He only surrounded himself with people willing to do anything, the worst kinds of ideologs and bureaucrats. Then spread propaganda to make it seem like the opposition would literally destroy the country. Then let everyone else do his bidding, from his inner circle to random civilians. That's the same playbook of calling Trump literally hitler. I think this is the most powerful political weapon at the moment, and the easiest one to get away with too.
I notice I am confused. However we measure the degree to which the Orban regime deviated from democracy, the specific measures they got away with seem like those that usually go hand-in-hand with undermining or falsifying elections. I'm talking especially of:
"Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV, Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans, Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state [...]
Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly [...] , [...] ~80-90% of Hungarian media was under these people’s control."
I'm confused because these imply such a large degree of control over the state apparatus and the ability to direct it to corrupt ends, that falsifying election counts or individual precinct returns or both seems well-covered by the same umbrella. And that is in fact the norm in various dictatorial and authoritarian regimes (like Russia). Yet it didn't happen here. Why?
I don't want to rush to an answer. I suspect this is a genuinely puzzling question the answer to which may not be apparent to Hungarians (geographic outsides often exaggerate the degree to which geographic insiders are "in the know"). Learning more about how the regime functioned may teach us something nontrivial about such regimes and whether the danger of backsliding in other democratic regimes is serious or exaggerated.
Therefore I'm as annoyed as Scott in this post at those who rush to a glib answer "there was never any danger to democracy to begin with, it's all liberal propaganda". That glib answer is silly and not rooted in reality. Appearing on state TV yesterday, Peter Magyar pointedly remarked that this is the first time in 1.5 years he was allowed an appearance. That's unthinkable in any normally functioning democracy, and the glib-answer-likers know it, they just want to ignore it (or are very uninformed about Hungary).
On the other hand, I dislike this post to the degree it, too, tries to airbrush the confusion away from existence. Scott tries to say "it's no big deal, this happens all the time". Of the 4 examples he gives, only one sort of works - Pinochet. However, the referendum (not elections) that Pinochet lost came with media access to both sides: "both options were guaranteed free electoral advertising spaces—franjas—of 15 minutes each, broadcast late at night or early in the morning. (Separate prime-time slots were also available, but only to the government.)" (Wikipedia). I think perhaps the notable thing about the Pinochet regime was that it always functioned openly as a military dictarorship, never masquerading itself as the legitimate democratic civilian government (as in Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), and the rhetoric of the dictatorship, including inside the new Constitution it created, always called for the eventual return to civilian rule.
The other three examples obscure the real confusion with the Orban regime, I would argue. Milosevic was not nearly as dictatorial *within Serbia* as all these other leaders (as opposed to brutal military actions, ethnic cleansing, etc. in other parts of former Yugoslavia). Chavez and Putin got away with what they wanted despite a referendum loss for one and unexpectedly low election results for the other. The real measure of a regime's deviation from democracy ought to be, after all, not "able to rig an election", but rather "able to avoid their power checked by democratic elections". Chavez could afford to simply try again. Putin's hold on power was never in doubt w.r.t. that election - the United Russia's "humiliatingly low" 52% Duma seats should be seen together with three other "managed opposition" parties, all praising Putin and loyal to the regime, taking the rest. The few real opposition parties that remained by that time were scattered, harangued, falsified away and never crossed the election threshold.
I think it's worth holding on to the confusion, and trying to understand better what could and could not have happened with the elections in Hungary.
>I'm confused because these imply such a large degree of control over the state apparatus and the ability to direct it to corrupt ends, that falsifying election counts or individual precinct returns or both seems well-covered by the same umbrella. And that is in fact the norm in various dictatorial and authoritarian regimes (like Russia). Yet it didn't happen here. Why?
Because Russia doesn't get billions from the EU budget on the condition that the level of corruption is kept manageable. Hungary does.
A competently designed election process is very hard to falsify (without producing clear proof that it has been falsified), and the Hungarian one is decent. Opposition parties can delegate their members to overview the counting of the votes, which happens immediately when voting ends, so the opposition knows the true vote count.
I guess that just shifts the question to, why didn't Orbán change the process? Maybe he didn't think he'd get away with it. Way more people understand the significance of falsifying ballots than the significance of biased state media etc, so it would have been a big loss of legitimacy.
(Personally I was pretty surprised, I was pretty sure he'd either postpone the elections or rig them, and that the transfer of power would have to happen via mass protests. He just seemed to be threatened too much personally by a transfer of power. Really curious what he'll do once police starts investigating his criminal network in earnest.)
I thought “hybrid regime” was a terrible name for something halfway a sliding scale (eg a hybrid car doesn’t use some fuel that’s halfway gas and electricity)
but maybe there’s also a sliding scale between a sliding scale and a true combination hybrid
I often half-jokingly, since my girlfriend works with autistic kids a lot, refer to people who exhibit some similar clusters of traits but don't rise to the level of significant neurodivergence as "on the spectrum spectrum." It'd partner well with your sliding scale of sliding scales.
Liked it. Less the Tyler-bashing (again). TC says he does not see the US in "serious danger" to stop being a valid democracy in Trump's time. That does NOt mean he sees "no danger". Obviously there are many threats to the status-quo "balance of powers'. A balance btw, I do not consider very well balanced at all. And I see a higher chance that Trump's attempts will eventually lead to less powers to the POTUS. Which is good. And sadly, still no option for a third or fourth term - Adenauer, Merkel and Kohl managed to do that, and we would all loved if Bill resp. Barrack could have. Philippines have only one term, a guarantee that nothing will ever change for better. Thank you for your attention to this matter ;) as for a better word for 10-40% dictators: I wished we even had the word 'Strongman' in German. The important point should be to name the dynamic of pushing the scale from say 10% to 15%, from 25 to 35 and so on. I like 'strongman', we now just have to make others understand it our way :D
You always have the option again. Seems the parties (esp. D) are the ones really interested in just a 'soon-to-be-lame-duck+ex-president' instead of someone who rules not just the country but the party, too. Kohl and Merkel did. If Trump had a good presidency and much-more-brain: he could remake R even as an ex-POTUS. Just too hard in that scenario to see D agree.
A filipino one-term-president will probably never get to change anything relevant.
TC wrapped his stated view in a snide attack on others. Not "I dont see serious danger here is why" but "ppl who see this need to seriously rethink their views". Scott gives him much better treatment than he gives by articulating the reasons why some danger is warranted and why the dismissal isnt helping. TC is very gracious once names get mentioned, but not so much when his opponents remain anonymous. Its his version of a motte and bailey
For some a bug, for him a feature. Are there ppl who write, read and talk about Trump breaking democracy? Yes there are. And there should be. But taking it seriously to an extent to really believing this has any chance significantly higher than, say: 2% - not a sign of proper understanding, indeed "ppl who see this need to seriously rethink their views" (Seeing a danger of 2% is reason enough to worry and discuss. And sure, protest. But a lot of the protesters seem to actually believe a (much) higher risk. And that is wrong, if you care about understanding reality. Ok, I stop repeating myself. - I did see a higher than 2% chance of Orban+friends directly manipulating the vote just enough to win. Relieved and rethinking my views.
Where do people get the idea that the old biased left-wing experts went anywhere? They still literally hold exactly the same positions in the same institutions, are still gatekeeping them and dissenting from their view will make you VERY quickly a target for removal.
I'm really not a Trump supporter or even generally consider myself right-wing, but I'm completely baffled by this insistence that a right-wing government somehow made "wokeness go away" or however you want to put it. If you're in academia, absolutely nothing changed. Not only are they just as biased as they have always been; the problem is still, if anything, getting worse.
I'm a geneticist and I'm looking back wistfully at the time when the main threat appeared to be creationists who argued against evolution, but didn't actually had a lot of ways to impact the research funding for genetics. Nowadays I can't even argue with the far-left activists in powerful academic positions, I just keep my head down, try to phrase my research in a way that doesn't attract the Eye of Sauron, and hope that the funding for my research into the causes of serious inheritable disabilities is not cancelled due to having problematic ableist implications.
I'm not even making this up, I have colleagues who're "working together" with social scientists due to shared funding from an excellence initiative and the "collaboration" consists mainly off the social scientists trying to get the geneticists fired for ableism and complaining of not getting enough funding for their activism. They don't even call themselves researchers, they have instead "activist-scholar" in their academic bio. And these people get funded by a nominally right-wing government!
In most western countries right now the pattern appears to be that when a left-wing government is in power, they get to purge academics they don't like, jurists they don't like, and bureaucrats they don't like. When the right-wing government is in power, nobody gets to purge anyone, and when the right-wing government even feebly attempts to do it with even very few individual extreme cases, it's treated as a major threat to democracy and usually either quickly reversed or the person is shuffled into another state-financed position if sufficiently unpopular. All of these groups are, unsurprisingly, majority left-wing by a significant margin nowadays; Of course they weren't always, it was a result of this practice.
You had a friend who was taking a poison daily that was going to kill him slowly. Now, he’s taking 60% of that poison daily, but also another poison that is killing him twice as fast. Yes, I get triage logic here, but how about getting the friend to stop taking all the poisons once and for all???
(Maybe a better metaphor is doing heroin and then switching to crack, now the friend is addicted to both but “ignore the heroin, and maybe some Piker brand heroin is just what we need” might not be the way out of this.)
"If you're in academia, absolutely nothing changed."
This is not the universal experience. The experience at my institute probably isn't either, but I was shocked at how quickly and severely things changed for the worse following his inauguration.
>>> So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears, ditching the “democratic backsliding” paradigm would be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
Strong vibes in this last set of "qualifying quotes"! Am I alone in feeling the annoyance at having to add these everywhere so he's allowed to discuss controversial things without having a dogpile now that the blog is "visible" to the "mainstream"? I do not remember seeing these in SSC.
What are "qualifying quotes"? A quick attempt at a search didn't tell me. I can understand from context the general concept you're referring to (spending time overly signalling to the naive normies that you aren't doing two-party-political-shit-slinging-as-usual and are actually trying to discuss an issue). I'm just not clear on what specific part of the quoted line you feel is doing that to an excessive degree.
Ah, might be lost in translation sorry. I was referring to the addtion of quotes (understood as adding some uncertainty/qualifications to a statement) around things that do not need it. Here: the baby with the bathwater. This is a well known saying, and adding yet another set of "" just makes the act of "" become ironic to me...
Huh, interesting. I don't think you're mistaken here although I'd probably have to pay closer attention in the future on how quotes are used on common phrases like this. He might've also just used quotes because he already had them in mind after writing "democratic backsliding." But I do think I see what you mean in it coming across as making the rhetoric seem a bit less direct.
Although it also makes me doubt it's a big factor in this case just because "democratic backsliding exists to some degree" if anything feels like something that's probably *more* palpable to the mainstream than the old SSC audience that was more comfortable openly discussing the merits and failings of different government structures rather than taking "democracy good" for granted the way the mainstream does.
I never spent much time worrying about Hungary and it being a dictatorship, it’s in the EU, being declared a total dictatorship would have seen it kicked out. Not that the EU itself is highly democratic, the executive isn’t elected, the parliament is not law making, but it does assume democracy in its constituent countries. A forced Hungarian exit would be a much greater disaster than Brexit. Britain is bigger.
However there are 60-90 dictatorships in the world, the west is allied with many of them, and has even created or enabled some. Al Queda has come to power in Syria, and is an ally of the West to little or no bed-wetting from the usual suspects.
Orban was an authoritarian prime minister. Now he’s gone. Same with the supposedly fascist political party in Poland, also now gone. Turns out they were in fact democrats, that’s the major criteria - handing over power after losing elections. (Being a strong man or controlling state media isn’t unique to Orban).
I suspect that the real problem wasn’t how he governed but what he believed.
As for Trump, if he tries to hold onto power - by which i don’t mean supporting a few guys with foam fingers protesting but through sine kind of military or other coup - then he will be a dictator, and I’ll agree that he’s a dictator or fascist or something. Until then, no.
(Nitpick/fun fact: “Aung San Suu Kyi” is a four-word-long given name and she has no last/family/sur- name, so abbreviating to “Kyi” on second reference is incorrect.)
I think your interpretation of why putin use so many different and contradicting methods to rig elections is quite far from what is happening. He actually uses only few methods but main is asking “why people aren’t happy with me in area you are responsible for? Are you doing bad job?” in very stern voice and let local authorities figure out how to fix this and how to relay the message further. So governor can start asking local social service “why old people aren’t voting? Are you doing bad job informing them?” and so on.
Of course there is centralised election rigging as well, but lots of things happening not by direct orders but by creating system that will award election rigging and make it seem necessary for all loyal politicians and government workers. It’s much easier and gives plausible deniability in case some province gets out of control.
Not only that, but the winning Labour party actually got *fewer* votes in 2024 than they had in the previous election, which they lost quite badly, but because the right-wing vote was now split between the Conservatives and Reform Labour managed to pick up a load of seats anyway.
> Supposedly, this is still an unproven rumor, got someone to date his opponent, record a sex tape, and try to blackmail them with it.
It's unproven in the sense of not having been prosecuted in a court (since this kind of thing does not get to the courts in an autocracy), but it's pretty obviously true. The new PM's ex-girlfriend leaked a bunch of snippets from secret audio recordings of their private discussions; then the press unearthed that she got a bunch of money from an oligarch close to Orbán around the time those recordings were made; then an anonymous source alleged having the sex tape and revealed a shot made by secret camera from a bedroom, and said ex-girlfriend admitted to having invited the (then opposition leader) PM to the party where that room was and having sex there; later the details of a police investigation leaked, which involved some secret agent (who was involved in various operations against the opposition party) saying to some collaborator that the ex-girlfriend is being managed by his boss.
I think this debate is also confused by people's narrow historical knowledge. People think Trump is the next Hitler because that's the only history they know.
There's much closer historical examples of countries back sliding from democracy, sliding back to democracy or remaining somewhere in between.
Back in the 1980s, Senator Edward Kennedy put in an amendment to a budget bill carefully crafted to impose an additional tax ONLY on NewsCorp that had an annoying (to Kennedy) habit of bringing up Mary Jo Kopechne.
*Mind, these television and internet-era pols have nothing on the 19th Century. Imagine if they had cell phones.
The "tilting the playing field" list is underselling Orbán a bit.
- He replaced everyone in all the theoretically independent institutions (Supreme Court, the prosecutor's office, the media regulator, the competition regulator, the election monitor etc. etc.) with spineless lackeys who did his every bidding.
- He built a vast system of corruption, the full extent of which we'll only understand now that he is out of power and the justice system starts working again, but a journalist's investigation [1] identified about 11B HUF worth of taxpayer funds extracted into his and his cronies' private enterprises (that's on average about 1.5% of the national budget, so it's as if Trump were stealing a hundred billion dollars every year).
- He used those funds to buy all Hungarian media that was available to buy, bully the rest by initimidating would-be advertisers, and use that and the state media and other national communication resources to run a propaganda machine only matched in its size and unhingedness by the darkest Communist and Nazi regimes. Since it was all running on essentially unlimited taxpayer funds, and courts were partially under his control anyway, libel law basically became irrelevant; the major publications regularly accused opposition politicians and critics of crimes, gay affairs, pedophilia, being enemy agents and spies etc. His election campaign mostly consisted of creating fake platform documents for the opposition (describing huge tax hikes and sending the youth to fight in Ukraine) and propagating it much more widely than the opposition could propagate its actual election promises.
- This was bolstered by huge spending on ads, posters etc, and a large network of paid influencers. In the 2022 election campaign the opposition estimated being outspent 100 to 1. Many economically downtrodden voters' information diet consisted of nothing but government propaganda.
- He used the tax office, food safety regulator and similar institutions to bully businesses that associated with the opposition (ranging from businesses owned by relatives of politicians to restaurants willing to provide space for a meetup for local activists), and made pro-government businesses fire people for openly associating with the opposition (often as much as liking a Facebook post).
- He sent the secret services to not only surveil the opposition but attack their IT infrastructure. The main opposition party's supporter database was stolen and leaked, and used to intimidate supporters.
- Along with fellow Putin ally Vučić (the Serbian PM), he organized a fake terrorist attack the weekend before the election.
And it was all getting continously worse, he expanded his powers significantly in every new cycle. He promised a big crackdown on independent media after the current elections, for example. Commentators often said Hungary was running the same trajectory as Russia, just ~15 years behind (although I don't know enough about Russia to really evaluate that).
External economic shocks (COVID, the war) combined with incompetent policies and vast levels of corruption resulting in a prolonged stagflation crisis, the remaining free media doing a good job of exposing said corruption, the fractured opposition suffering a humiliating defeat in 2022 which set the stage for a new party unifying opposition voters (and so having a fighting chance in first-past-the-post elections), a "spark" moment of a series of child abuse scandals reaching to the highest levels of government (after their 2022 campaign was built around protecting children from the dangers of wokism), a talented new politician making use of that moment, many people being resilient in the face of constant threats, harassment and slander, and some catastrophically bad campaign strategy decisions from Orbán.
And the fact Orban has become his own Portrait of Dorian Gray, while Magyar is model handsome while also having the most perfectly vibes based name for a nationalist revolutionary moment.
> Some “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased and left-wing (one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism).
I mean, right-wing thought _is_ inherently more authoritarian. The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy. The fundamental basis of right-wing thought is that there are natural hierarchies to persons - that is, that all persons are not equal (whether the basis of that inequality is wealth [as in libertarianism or oligarchy], or birth [as in monarchy/aristocracy], or power [as in oligarchy or dictatorship], etc. etc.). That is inherently conducive to monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.
This goes back to the very earliest use of left- and right-wing, where the "left wing" were the supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité, and the "right wing" were the supporters of the king and the ancien regime, and continues to be true today.
Let's not do a false equivalence and pretend that left-wing and right-wing thought are equally conducive to democracy.
If that obsession with "liberté, fraternité, egalité" ultimately leads them to suppress threats to their vision, then what's the difference? They're both just self-preserving ideologies, and self-preservation requires power and authority.
>The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy.
That is only conducive to democracy to the extent that it is actually true, everyone agrees that it's true, and everyone behaves as atomic individuals.
The idea that all persons aren't equal is despicable and leads directly to things like the Holocaust. Once some people are more human and others less, you can eventually justify any enormity.
Well, you get your wish eleven months of the year. Somehow that will have to be enough for your bigoted, nasty little heart.
You are very very obviously not ok with gay people, or this wouldn't even occur to you. "New Left Religion"?? You need professional help dude, you're delusional.
That's why I think there was immense value to the concept of Imago Dei, even if Christians weren't consistently good at applying it seriously. Even without the religious backstop, Enlightenment liberalism did try to keep some concept of universal human *dignity*, and that's faded over the years.
The idea that all people are equal *and must be made so* leads directly to atrocities too.
You also left off the other two clauses. Even if people are equal in some meaningful way (we're not all 1-meter grey blobs so it's not literal), they don't all act that way!
> The idea that all people are equal *and must be made so* leads directly to atrocities too.
People are equal in value or they're not, you can't make them so or not so, it's an axiomatic belief about the world that you hold or don't hold.
And if you don't hold it, basically, you're a bad person, frankly.
> Even if people are equal in some meaningful way (we're not all 1-meter grey blobs so it's not literal), they don't all act that way!
When people talk about "everyone is equal", they mean in _value_ or moral worth. Not in terms of outcomes, ability, height, etc., those are quite obviously trivially untrue.
I have, and I have not observed that. At all. I suspect if you're honest, you haven't either.
And I've spent more time than is pleasant in spaces that are hotbeds of the worst excesses of so-called "left-wing" idpol (which ofc is not actually left-wing at all, being as it is obsessed with categorizing and measuring humanity).
>I mean, right-wing thought _is_ inherently more authoritarian. The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy. The fundamental basis of right-wing thought is that there are natural hierarchies to persons - that is, that all persons are not equal (whether the basis of that inequality is wealth [as in libertarianism or oligarchy], or birth [as in monarchy/aristocracy], or power [as in oligarchy or dictatorship], etc. etc.). That is inherently conducive to monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.
That's only the case if all persons actually are equal. If they aren't, we should expect left-wing thought to consistently trend in the direction of demanding more and more state intervention to try and force everybody to be equal and squash the hierarchies that would naturally emerge if people were left to their own devices.
>This goes back to the very earliest use of left- and right-wing, where the "left wing" were the supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité, and the "right wing" were the supporters of the king and the ancien regime, and continues to be true today.
And where these supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité promptly executed 10,000 of their political opponents.
> That's only the case if all persons actually are equal. ...
What a despicable comment. The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. Get yourself straight.
> And where these supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité promptly executed 10,000 of their political opponents.
Hardly in a vacuum, which you would know and acknowledge if you were trying to engage constructively. For anyone else reading, the missing context is that all the power structures of the ancien regime and every country in Europe was trying to crush the revolution, an environment that naturally needs paranoia and overreaction. The terror was absolutely horrible, but let's not pretend it happened just for fun with no context.
"The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. "
What about all the communist atrocities?
As for the reign of terror, I don't think it's fair to say that not giving a history lecture is the same as not engaging constructively. In another comment you brought up the holocaust. Would it be fair for another commenter to claim you were not engaging constructively by leaving out the missing context of "all the largest empires in the world were trying to crush Germany, an environment that naturally breeds paranoia and overreaction. The death camps were absolutely horrible, but..."
(I'm not claiming the holocaust and the reign of terror are comparable, I'm using it as an extreme example to demonstrate that the "hardly in a vacuum, missing context"-argument could apply more widely than you probably intended.)
You will notice, if you have any intellectual honesty or curiousity, that "communist" atrocities have almost invariably been performed by governments that are essentially right-wing and hierarchical. Neither the USSR nor "Communist" China were run on left-wing lines in most important ways - there was a strict hierarchy, and while there was the trappings and outward performance of "socialism" or "communism", in fact you had pretty bog-standard right-wing dictatorships.
So, yes, all those "communist" atrocities were again, the result of hierarchical right-wing power structures. Anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian.
>What a despicable comment. The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. Get yourself straight.
Firstly, that's just straight-up untrue -- around 100 million people were killed by communist regimes, for example.
Secondly, even if it were true, it still wouldn't logically follow that people actually are equal. Someone might be motivated to do a bad thing by a true belief.
>Hardly in a vacuum, which you would know and acknowledge if you were trying to engage constructively. For anyone else reading, the missing context is that all the power structures of the ancien regime and every country in Europe was trying to crush the revolution, an environment that naturally needs paranoia and overreaction. The terror was absolutely horrible, but let's not pretend it happened just for fun with no context.
Lots of regimes have been overthrown or almost overthrown without resorting to mass executions. The French monarchy, for example, was overthrown four times (the French Revolution, the Hundred Days, the July Revolution, and the 1848 Revolution), without holding its own Reign of Terror. Pretty odd, if right-wing thought is so much more conducive to authoritarianism than left-wing thought.
> Firstly, that's just straight-up untrue -- around 100 million people were killed by communist regimes, for example.
You will notice, if you have any intellectual honesty or curiousity, that "communist" atrocities have almost invariably been performed by governments that are essentially right-wing and hierarchical. Neither the USSR nor "Communist" China were run on left-wing lines in most important ways - there was a strict hierarchy, and while there was the trappings and outward performance of "socialism" or "communism", in fact you had pretty bog-standard right-wing dictatorships.
So, yes, all those "communist" atrocities were again, the result of hierarchical right-wing power structures. Anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian. Hanging a poster that says "communism" outside a regular old dictatorship does not make it left-wing.
> Lots of regimes have been overthrown or almost overthrown without resorting to mass executions.
So... the forces of Europe were _not_ arrayed against the Revolution? What an irrelvant point.
> Pretty odd, if right-wing thought is so much more conducive to authoritarianism than left-wing thought.
Left-wing thought is inherently inimical to authoritarianism, more or less by definition. To the extent that something is autocratic, it's right-wing. And to the extent it's democratic and egalitarian, it's left-wing.
> Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats.
In 2022 Orbán’s party won 54% of the popularity vote (gaining 48 out of 93 seats – instead of 50 – because of “compensation lists” aiding smaller parties), and won all but two of the districts outside the capital Budapest (87 out of 106, in a FPTP system, with 52% of the constituency votes FWIW), which can be hardly ascribed to gerrymandering, especially if you look at the map.
> won all but two of the districts outside the capital Budapest (87 out of 106, in a FPTP system, with 52% of the constituency votes FWIW), which can be hardly ascribed to gerrymandering, especially if you look at the map.
?? Winning 87 out of 106 constituencies in a FPTP system with 52% of the vote sounds insanely gerrymandered? The actual defense is that the next largest party had only 37% of the vote, since there were a number of smaller parties splitting opposition seats.
No-no-no-no-no. If, hypothetically, you distribute the 52% evenly across the country (meaning every district has 52% voting A and 48% B or anyone else), then in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, A will win all the seats.
Since Fidesz rewrote the districts, they probably skewed them in their favor, but that's backwards reasoning. The district outlines also look often funny (linked in parent), so P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)... All I'm saying is that winning 68% of total seats (or 87/106 constituency seats) does not mean *anything* bad.
> No-no-no-no-no. If, hypothetically, you distribute the 52% evenly across the country (meaning every district has 52% voting A and 48% B or anyone else), then in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, A will win all the seats.
Hypothetically, yes. Practically, no. I would absolutely not expect a system which uses some gerrymandering-neutral method to get an extremely thin vote majority (+4) in a two party system to have a huge electoral majority, outside of VERY weird edge cases. The cube rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_rule) would suggest you'd expect a 52-48 result to result in ~56% of the seats going to the winning party.
>All I'm saying is that winning 68% of total seats (or 87/106 constituency seats) does not mean *anything* bad.
The constituency seats are the only ones that are can be gerrymandered! You can't gerrymander a party-list seat!
I'm not convinced at all, and I fail to see how outside of very weird edge cases why a small majority in votes wouldn't turn into a big majority in seats.
And the small majority where gerrymandering matters is not 52-48: the capital was won by the opposition, and Fidesz had approx. 40% there. Meaning outside the capital it was 54% for Fidesz. And the other 46% is split among three parties. The numbers paint a pretty consistent picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hungarian_parliamentary_election_results_by_constituency
The cube rule is an empirical observation, and even according to the article it's like "a broken clock is right twice a day": "The approximation can work well; it matched the 2002 U.S. House elections to within one seat. However, ..."
> You can't gerrymander a party-list seat!
Of course, I never said otherwise, but Scott's article talked about "68%", as if *that* mattered. (Granted, had he said 87/106=82%, I'd have said the same.)
And contrast your arguments with 2026: this year the Tisza party won 93/106 constituency seats with only 54% of constituency votes. Does that imply gerrymandering? Why doesn’t the cube rule apply here, if this *was* a two-party election, unlike 2022?
Orbán is basically a category of his own, the completely non-violent autocrat. Like how most autocrats are basically violent bullies, including Putin, while Orbán is more like the Master Thief, the level20 hobbit thief/rogue, who sneaks into the well-guarded castle and steals democracy from it without any violence or even the threat of it. And I speak the language, I am well informed.
>Why did these people hold elections at all?
Scott, you are making the same category mistake as nearly everyone on the Internet: a dictatorship or autocracy is not a monarchy!
A dictatorship or autocracy should be defined as a distorted democracy, ran by criminals who break their own laws.
For example, Hitler was legally given absolute power by a legally elected Bundestag several times, look up the Enabling Act. The Nazi regime was formally a democracy. The trick was that very illegal, very bad things would have happened to those representatives who do not vote for that act. Of course the Holocaust was 100% illegal and kept in secret too, an SS Judge called Dr. Konrad Morgen tried to prosecute those responsible, because they never ever dared to make law saying killing people is okay. The Gestapo disappearing dissidents was also illegal and so on.
Similarly, the Soviet Constitution under Stalin seemed normal, like freedom of speech, assembly etc. most laws seemed entirely normal. There was no law that you get shot for disagreeing with Stalin. Instead, those people got shot illegally, for example, sentencing them for things like espionage or sabote without evidence. The police was breaking the Soviet law, the courts were breaking Soviet law, that's how it worked.
Remember this: the dictator is defined as the criminal government that breaks its own, mostly quite democratic laws. Not a king.
Now Orbán's genius is that he could do this non-violently, basically just stealing money and bribing everybody to obey him, more or less. Master Thief of democracy.
I humbly submit my own blog post on the resilience of law in the face of "tyranny" and the fact that tyranny is kind of a spectrum. Tyrants work very hard to preserve the veneer of subservience to the rule of law, and in doing so, the law actually rules them: https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/mad-kings-magic-words-the-light-and
Not a regular “Scott post liker” here — I used to read them in full, but they took real time. These days I mostly scan or just ask an LLM for a summary. My inner model keeps seeing fewer and fewer genuinely new ideas, concepts, or facts, and life is getting shorter and shorter.
From my two-minute scan (TL;DR): Scott seems pleased that Orbán lost the election. He’d heard all the usual accusations — unfair, undemocratic, dictator-like behavior — and apparently agrees they were real enough to matter.
I often struggle with the bright line into authoritarianism/dictatorship/autocracy/strongmanhood whatever.
A lot of people who debate with me will use "defying the courts" as some kind of bright line, but I think that happens in a fairly routine fashion all the time if "defying the courts" means "ignoring some court ruling." Basically every criminal case is going to involve the defense arguing that the cops or prosecutors are, in some way, ignoring a court ruling and thus the case should be thrown out...or evidence suppressed...or some other thing should happen that helps the defendant. Very often, they're right!
"defying the courts" in the more flagrant sense of "ignoring court orders" is quite difference, but even in the present state of things in the united states, the administration is obeying quite a lot of court orders that strongly inhibit the things it would most like to do.
Does anyone know Orban's track record here? how often did he "defy" the courts?
This ties into a point I make on the blog post I mention supra, which is that I'm generally skeptical of the idea that court is "frictionless" for the government. Going to war against a children's toy company on the tarriffs issue cost the administration a ton of time, money, and political goodwill. It wasn't costless and no one in the administration with an ounce of legal acumen would consider it costless. (Source: Am federal lawyer)
How does packing the courts fit into your views here? If someone gets into power and defies the courts a bunch into whatever most-blatant way you'd like, but hangs on in having done so, and 10 years later the courts are filled with cronies who declare the initial court condemnation in error. Are you judging them by the new crony court, the one that existed when they seized power, or by your own standards on what the law should be based on some external values?
"Willing to ignore court orders under any condition" does sound like a clear line, but I also imagine you'd catch some legit governments doing some legit thing, having a court call it out as illegal, but then realizing it should probably be rendered legal given changing standards, requirements, culture, whatever.
This might be just me being weird, but I tend to take a very cynical legal realist approach to "the law." The law is whatever the courts say it is, and that's super important in discussions on "slides into autocracy." Hitler never needed to "defy the courts". I think it's very possible the modal authoritarian dictator doesn't.
What I think gets elided in a lot of court-packing arguments in the US in particular is that to "pack the courts", the hypothetical court packer would need significant buy-in from the legislative branch. Far from some kind of autocratic override, It would be "what the people wanted" if it happened.
Stuff like Scott's recentish post about SEIU abusing democracy initiatives is a good example of the chasm between "sounds good on the surface" and "actually what people want", and sadly legislature is also pretty prone to following surface cues these days.
But nevertheless as far as a useful metric that can be applied across continents and centuries I think you've got a decent point here. It's still a meaningful hard line and it's somewhat telling who does and doesn't cross it - and a deeper dive into the reasons probably has a lot to say about both the leader in question's movement and the underlying culture. Seems like a handy heuristic for compare/contrasting the nature of different strongocracyships if nothing else.
Yeah, it seems like the "classical dictators" that are part of modern mythology: Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mussolini, all come to power in an environment where they don't need to "defy the courts" in a significant way.
That phobia might even be a particular symptom of america due to our very sharp separation of powers.
It seems like "illiberal democracy" is the best term for this spectrum. It states what you're talking about. Liberalism is a set of ideas about how to organize society that is at a certain level agnostic about how the rulers are chosen. Democracy is a method for choosing rulers.
Of course they do come together in practice - liberalism is how you ensure that future elections will still be held, and conversely democracy has traditionally reinforced liberalism because liberal societies are better places to live for most people.
But there's always the temptation to think that you've found a way to get what you want by trampling liberalism. And people have to repeatedly find out why that isn't so. Unless one day, it is. The future is uncertain after all.
Illiberal democracy is a term that is correct but doesn't tell us where the country is relative to the inflection point: can people vote the person/party abusing the rules out of power?
For example, people are reasonably sure that the GOP will lose their trifecta in the upcoming midterms. It's much less likely, but LDP in Japan can lose again if they screw the pooch like they did under Taro Aso. It's not impossible that AfD becomes the ruling party in Germany. Many people thought that Hungary was past the point of no return, drifting towards Turkey, various African countries, Russia and North Korea.
I propose we call the two types of illiberal democracies a "flawed democracy" and a "decorative democracy".
I would just never have put Turkey, Hungary, and to a lesser extent even Russia in the same category as NK. A collapse in public approval world matter a fair amount in every one of those countries, and even in places like China that don't run elections. That's because they are modern states run through impersonal systems that require some type of rule-following.
On the other hand NK and many African countries seem to be operating under feudal rules.
It's a spectrum, just like you've said. Erdogan isn't allowed to run the next election, but he has already had the most popular opposition candidate arrested. We might see him do some constitutional shenanigans again to stay in power.
> A collapse in public approval
Yeltsin famously had an approval rating in the single digits and still won the 1996 election and successfully nominated a successor in the 2000 one.
How much of the ballot stuffing in Russia 2011 election may have been local? How much of the ballot stuffing may have been against Putin or the party most associated with Putin vs. for the opposition? Russia which I visited in the early 2000s was so rotten and corrupt that it was more like a loose confederation of mafia states, and most of these mafia states had much more than zero interest in preventing a strong(er) central government.
CIA rag called Wikipedia: "In the wake of Beslan, the government proceeded to toughen laws on terrorism and expand the powers of law-enforcement agencies.[8]
In addition, Putin signed a law that replaced the direct election of the heads of the federal subjects of Russia with a system in which they are proposed by the president of Russia and approved or disapproved by the elected legislative bodies of the federal subjects."
Direct elections were reintroduced in 2012, eight years later. That is, after the political system was "tightened up".
I don't think this is a central example of the argument. Most Democrats and "elites" (1) are not arguing that Trump represents a moderate decline in democracy in America, say moving from a 80% democracy under the old "elections happen, all judges/journalists/bureaucrats are liberal/Democrats" to a 70% democracy under Trump where he destroys old, ill-functioning institutions and replaces them with broken ones or none at all. They're arguing that Trump is Special and, because he's Special, anything can be allowed to fight him.
I don't want to relitigate everything around Trump but an example that will hopefully provide more light than fire is General Mark Miley's actions during the first Trump administration. To quote:
"In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved." (2)
To be as fair to General Milley as possible, this was done in the immediate aftermath of January 6th. Still, this is, to be blunt, the intentional removal of civilian control (the president) from the military and Milley is pretty blunt about it. This is an extremely bad no good super undemocratic thing. The head of the US military, the most powerful military on the planet with enough nuclear weapons to end the world multiple times, unilaterally decided to no longer accept civilian control. Under any other president, this would be grossly unacceptable. This would be horrific. But Trump is Special and because Trump is Special, anything goes.
I'll save the specific litigation of these events for the notes (4) but the hopefully productive note here is that while Scott and a few others might legitimately view "democratic backsliding" as a useful concept and Trump representing a decline from an 80% democratic society to a 70% democratic society, that is not the way it is overwhelmingly used in media or in real life. It is overwhelmingly used as Trump being a Special and unique threat to democracy, which justifies allowing the FBI to spy on him, to ban him off social media, to remove civilian oversight of the military, to prosecute the opposition candidate 4 times in the runup to the election, to throw his closest advisors in jail for crimes half of DC is guilty of, and to riot in the street to prevent a legal agency from executing the laws of the country.
I believe this is what liberals/democrats actually mean about Trump because, A, I expect at least half of them to read this and say "Yeah, that's true, he's an incipient dictator who actually will end democracy in the US" and also because their actions to limit Trump in many cases represent actual risks to democracy. If Trump is "democratic backsliding" then you actually weigh out the costs and benefits to democratic institutions of banning presidential candidates off social media. You recognize there's a cost in democratic norms/legitimacy to that, you weigh it against the likelihood of success and the harm Trump would do, and then you act appropriately. This is not what liberals/Democrats at large have done. They have never, ever, weighed the risks and consequences of their actions to democratic norms; they have always treated Trump as a Special and maximum risk to democracy against whom almost anything is justified.
So I don't think Sailer, Cowen, et al are arguing against Scott's reasonable "democratic backsliding", they're arguing against Trump being Special because that's what's generally being argued. In a similar way, many in Europe have argued that Orban isn't just bad, he's Special and, well, he isn't.
(1) Sorry, I hate the term for multiple reasons, I don't have a better one.
(4) I don't think any of the January 6th allegations are true. I'm open to being convinced otherwise and the standard of evidence I've set is "can this be proven in a court of law?" And it hasn't...in over 5 years at this point with the alleged traitor reelected to office. I'm not interested in your super special standard that has convinced you, we have clear and longstanding norms regarding who has committed a crime, it's the court system, and Trump hasn't.
To make a perhaps uncharitable but correct summary: Scott found evidence that disproves one of his claims. He doubled down on the claim instead, writing about how his claim is all true anyway.
Evidence against a claim *should* lead you to update in a direction against the claim, not make a big post about how that big piece of evidence doesn't matter.
(And there's also the issue of Democrats doing strongman-like things too. I already brought up them convicting Trump on a process crime. That's third world autocracy stuff right there. You've also got the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, Biden censoring social media behind the scenes, and Russiagate. And remember Trump being banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitch, and Snapchat?)
How about widespread collusion to hide Biden's mental state. I still don't think Scott, or indeed many on the left, have yet properly updated on what that implies about everything else.
If your predictions are consistently wrong in the same direction, that says something important about how you are arriving at those predictions.
>I still don't think Scott, or indeed many on the left
Not unlike COVID-era issues more broadly, there's a sense of "let's just sweep it under the rug and forget now that he's out of the picture." Which, yes, says something important about those predictions and how people respond 'in the moment' with such things.
Given that the sources of information that left-leaning people rely on were willing to lie to them about one thing, this should increase your expectations that they are lying to you about other things, and therefore you should update your expectations of a truthful accounting of the state of affairs to be farther to the right / more friendly to the right than you previously believed.
Insofar as you think the Republicans are right-wing and the Democrats are left-wing, at least; I don't think this is remotely correct, or at least it results in a very inconsistent reference for what "left" and "right" actually point to, but that is its own topic. (Short version: The current incarnation of the Republican party is slightly left-leaning, and the current incarnation of the Democratic party is not so slightly right-leaning, relative to historic conceptualizations of left and right.)
>I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
>So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears,
Does the dynamic described in the first section not perhaps represent a Utilitarian argument against the strategy described in the second?
Maybe we shouldn't be 'calling out' things that are better-than-replacement already? Don't attack what you don't wish to see destroyed?
Or maybe we should have a form of constructive criticism that's more complimentary than 'call-outs'? Something that doesn't leave the reader with the impression this is a worse-than-replacement person or movement, which we'd all benefit from annihilating?
I think there's an inherent isolated-demand-for-rigor problem that falls along the lines of what currently exists and what doesn't. Like, yes, there was a liberal orthodoxy among universities, therefore we got to observe every mistake or gaffe or unavoidable compromise a liberal orthodoxy would ever make and call every one of them out. Meanwhile the conservative orthodoxy across universities didn't currently exist, so nothing was written about how much worse it would be, because we didn't have live evidence to look at and write about...
Except, we a little bit did. FIRE explicitly chose to exclude anti-free-speech actions by Christian universities because those schools had *explicit* policies against certain types of speech and speakers. You could look at the policies and actions of the smaller number of right-wing universities and ask if that would be a better way for the entire system to be run. You could read the output of right-wing 'intellectual' foundations like Project 2025, and ask whether replacing the current dominant intellectual framework with that one would be an improvement.
But people are always more angry at the nearby outgroup than the far group. Someone who *did* annoy you at lunch yesterday feels a million times worse than someone who *would*destroy your entire way of life if given the chance, but is currently too far away to do it.
Which is fine, you should care about things that do happen rather than things that don't. But there should be a *huge* impetus to think carefully about what things you're helping to make possible with your actions, that aren't possible today... and in a country where political power usually changes hands several times a decade, you should *always* be aware that the far group could have complete power over you in a few years if you help weaken their opponents.
> Maybe we shouldn't be 'calling out' things that are better-than-replacement already? Don't attack what you don't wish to see destroyed?
But people do wish to see it destroyed. There's no guarantees that the replacement will be better, of course, but if it was worse, then they can be destroyed as well. And we can keep burning it down, over and over, until we end up with a system that works. Or die trying. But then, a better system will come to replace it anyways.
Better-than-replacement by definition means that whatever comes next will be worse by your own values.
If you're saying you don't want to do the boring work of predicting what will come next and just like burning things down like pulling a roulette wheel, then yes, I am against you and everything you stand for.
If you want something better, then build it first, and put it in pace to take over after you burn down the current system. That's what the people in power today did, slowly and carefully and in a unified manner.
If you want change but are unwilling to do that much work, then you don't care enough to be making decisions for everyone else and should just pay attention to sports or something instead.
> If you want something better, then build it first, and put it in pace to take over after you burn down the current system. That's what the people in power today did, slowly and carefully and in a unified manner.
How are you supposed to do that when the existing system is resisting all attempts at change? Methods can't be put into practice until the old order is supplanted. Of course, you can't expect people to simply reason a good system into existence when they're incapably of truly understanding these systems and their consequences. So the only solution is to keep building and keep burning. Again, and again, and again, until you get something viable. Some of them will survive, and that's good enough.
The liberal proclivity for hysteria finds its traditional complement in the conservative reflex of glib dismissal. As hysteria ramps up across all political quarters, "pooh pooh" becomes cutting-edge analysis. "Orban wasn't a dictator, just a sparkling authoritarian" is a technically correct take; fortunately so, because there's no thought behind it.
Just want to say I'm glad there are writers who can still take arguments at face value even when they seem objectively ridiculous. I spent my early life priding myself on my ability to do this, and I'm losing it with age and as the world becomes more ridiculous. When I see someone claiming Orban wasn't a strongman, all I can hear is "ooh! I think I can stick it to the libs with this!" And if I'm honest, even though I agree, when I see someone say Orban is a strongman, all I can hear is "oooh! This is another argument we can use to show we're smarter than Trump voters and see through his lies!"
Sometimes I find the insistence on treating these people as though they're speaking in good faith infuriating. Sometimes I even lash out in the comments when you do this. But please try to keep that object-level perspective. Some of us sorely need it.
I don't know why right-wingers defend Orban so vehemently, and claim it's just that people don't like him because he's right-wing. If that were the case, why would the very same people be celebrating the victory of Peter Magyar, a right-wing politician who until 2024 was a member of Fidesz, and who quit because they pardoned people for covering up child molestation?
I hesitate to even make this argument for obvious reasons but here goes:
Elections serve an important legitimating function for the state. Humans are social animals, acutely attuned to group dynamics, swayed by social consensus, and many are willing to go with the flow. Elections create common knowledge that "at least half the people" agree with this guy's plans. Visibly faked elections do not do this - when 99% of the vote goes to Big Brother, or there are a suspicious number of thugs looking over your shoulder at the ballot box, we all know that the result isn't a real representation of popular assent. So even would be authoritarians have to be careful not to spoil the game and keep things in the ambiguous gray zone if they're going to bother holding elections at all.
With all that said, I have to make a pretty undemocratic observation. I have never witnessed what I would consider a "free and fair election" in my 42 years of life, and it's not even clear to me what that would mean. First of all, the information environment is extremely hostile (astroturfing, private and government sponsored botnets, media manipulation), and the actual drivers of government policy are opaque/classified to an extent that renders control of the state by "the people" sort of ridiculous. It's also clearly true that a plurality of the people have no business opining on matters of state because they are poorly informed, they've been parasitized by some terrible ideology, or their brains are just scrambled so badly that their political views are disconnected from reality. If you add in the self-interested climbers and outright sociopaths who reliably end up becoming politicians, we've ended up in a very predictable failure mode.
Maybe it's true that it's the "least bad" system of government, but I hope that we can do better.
Prior innovations in communication technology sparked a wave of democratic revolutions across the world and enabled the rise of bureaucratic states, and I suspect many of us once harbored hope the internet would do something similar. After a disappointing "Empire Strikes Back" period, it feels like it could be getting closer. I just fear that the current version of "democracy" might get way more visibly dysfunctional first.
Was Magyar banned from appearing on Hungarian TV, or only banned from State TV?
From what I can tell, it was State TV, and Magyar was still allowed to appear (and did appear) on private Hungarian TV channels.
The impression I got from Scott and others was that there was no Hungarian-language TV channel available in Hungary that Magyar was allowed to appear on, and that seems to be straight-up false.
Banning the opposition from State TV is bad of course, but I’m not even convinced that this is worse than New York trying to put Trump in jail for minor paperwork errors. It’s pretty far from the total media blackout that the people insisting that, “No! We weren’t crying wolf this time. Orban really is significantly worse than normal political corruption in first world countries,” seemed to be implying.
When you wrote your first post on Orbán, back in 2021/2022, I objected to calling him a dictator and I said that that should be reserved for systems where there is not legitimate criticism existing within the system; thus, Putin's Russia (where all parties support the leader, and in the rare cases where someone who's anti-Putin gets elected to a serious post -- look up Sergey Furgal, Governor of Khabarovsk Krai in the 2010s -- they can get sent to forced labor camps) would count, but something like Erdogan's Turkey (where open opponents of Erdogan are Mayors of many important cities, lead important provinces) really shouldn't.
I feel like since then I've been willing to step back on this a little, especially in reading about the 1990s in Peru -- Alberto Fujimori did a plainly illegal self-coup in 1992, then held totally legitimate elections in 1995 (at which he personally won in a landslide but many of his allies did terribly), then ran for another term in 2000 even though it was against his own Constitution, in which the first round was free-ish but the second was rigged. Fujimori had many classic dictatorship trappings, like a secret police with torturing and widespread propaganda, even though for the vast majority of his time in office Congress was full of his enemies, and he ultimately had to be overthrown in a revolution in 2001! This feels more dictator-y to me; maybe the difference is in how you steer the system (since, in Erdogan's defense, lots of the stuff like arresting journalists over insulting the country's founding fathers is actually cross-party consensus in Turkey, while Fujimori's stuff was very much not), but in that case Orbán was pretty explicit about wanting an "illiberal democracy".
I think he was a bad guy who wanted a dictatorship but never progressed far enough to really be called a dictator. Orbán kept doing elections which were free (if not fair), at which real opponents of his ran and eventually won; patronage networks are bad and gerrymandering is bad and dominant-party systems are bad and court-packing is bad, but all of these things happen in some democracies. (In many ways Orbán looks like a big-city boss to me -- he reminds me of Richard Daley in 1960s Chicago, down to the part where ultimately he controlled one small part of a large system -- in Daley's case the US and in Orbán's the EU -- which checked him enough that he wasn't "really" a dictator).
But I don't think the attacks on Orbán were crying wolf. Sometimes dictatorship does happen gradually, as in Venezuela or Russia, and sometimes you can have a secret-police-style dictatorship and a liberal democracy overlap in the same country controlling different parts of policy, as in 1990s Peru. Orbán openly wanted to entrench himself and sometimes these things evolve in that direction.
> These people aren’t arguing that although Orban was undemocratic, the term “dictator” goes a little far. They seem to be saying that it was a misstep to see any threat to democracy at all in Orban’s actions.
I see them saying that Orban's actions did not prevent democracy. I don't see them saying that he did nothing to undermine the democratic process.
The distortions in arguments over whether or not Orban is "democratic" come from the fact that it's a proxy issue for whether or not it is good for people who are threatened by the invasion of postcolonial moralism in american institutions (and possibly their own wallets) to rely on moral majoritarians to bolster a political defense. (It's bad)
I think an interesting perspective might be to allow for the sake of argument that Trump and Maga are more significant threats to quality democracy in the US than the relatively competent woke institutions. But to then consider the question of where Trump came from. I'm not American but I'm fairly connected to the milieu of the US conservatives. Trump was a total joke to me, like completely, when he came in. So I definitely thought about why he won for quite some time. My impression is that it was illegal immigration.
The other Republicans were at least nominally opposed to illegal immigration, but there was a palpable sense that Jeb Bush would never really close the border if it meant his kids would be called racist at prep school. Political correctness worked. People no longer have the choice to be both polite and conservative.
A woke stranglehold on institutions, elite universities with 80% liberal professors, etc, means that by definition their opponents will not be elite people. Their opponents will be Trump. The equilibrium is disturbed first by progressives who believe that society is a zero-sum competition between groups and therefore the most powerful groups must be oppressed. These people don't believe in liberal democracy for the same reason they don't believe in liberal markets, seeing both as a playground for the powerful to abuse and exploit others. They violate democratic norms out of principle, rather than avarice, let's say. So they won't stop.
They may run things better, and they may be less of an absolute threat to quality democracy, but they are also the element which produces the less sophisticated, potentially more dangerous counterpart on the right.
>Meanwhile, the right wants to argue that “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased liberals who accuse any successful right-wing leader of being an incipient dictator.
Do we so quickly forget Joe "Romney's gonna put yall back in Chains" Biden?
You do yourself a disservice. Like with the average person that was concerned about COVID was also concerned about 9 other pandemics that didn't happen, the average backsliding expert has been dead fucking wrong about 99% of other potential right-wing leaders while studiously ignoring any vaguely left-wing authoritarianism.
> I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back.
They're still around, sadly. The racist freaks at Harvard and UPenn that said white people should die of COVID for "health equity" didn't get fired, didn't get washed down a chasm, and had no consequences other than the NYT is not currently asking them for quotes because there's not currently a pandemic.
These kinds of lowbrow partisan schlock comments really stick out because they're not the kinds of comments you usually see here. Go back to Breitbart.
Frankly, idk anything about this topic, so I'll concede for the sake of the argument.
> The racist freaks at Harvard and UPenn that said white people should die of COVID for "health equity"
I did find this hyperbolic as well, tbh. Though in ProfGerm's defense, I do think it points to something real, so I'm more willing to give it a pass. Namely, it points to the rhetoric about the privileging of certain groups wrt vaccine distribution.
Concretely, here's a paper [0] which discusses "equity for disadvantaged groups" and triage by zipcode. The first two listed contributors are Harald Schmidt and Rebecca Weintraub. Schmidt hails from UPenn and Weintraub hails from Harvard.
> Do we so quickly forget Joe "Romney's gonna put yall back in Chains" Biden?
Headline [1]: "Biden tells African-American audience GOP ticket would put them 'back in chains' ". This is from CBS btw.
I think another parameter to consider is the strength of the country's political/judicial institutions, not merely the behaviour of the political leader. For example, consider some of the things that Orban did (according to Scott):
* Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV.
* Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans.
* Falsely accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography to get an excuse to search and confiscate their records.
Apparently the Hungarian people finally had enough of this stuff, and good for them. But it's hard to imagine something like that happening in Denmark or Finland. If their Prime Minister tried any of these things, then it's likely that employees of TV stations, police, or the courts, would simply refuse to obey him. If they did obey him and he got caught, the result wouldn't merely be an election loss -- it would be incarceration and likely destruction of his political party.
Thus, paradoxically, such relatively constrained system ends up being more democratic. In a total democracy, the leader can say, "yes I did ban my opponents for appearing on national TV, but it's for the Greater Good, trust me bro" -- and if his approval rating is high enough and people would still vote for him, he can do so with impunity. In a legislative democracy (or whatever you want to call it), this would be much harder to pull off (though admittedly not impossible), regardless of how charismatic the leader is.
Seems like the tension is between "how much can 'the people' exercise their will now?" vs "how much do 'the people' retain the ability to exercise their will in the future?".
A larger-scale analogy to "should a libertarian be free to sell themselves in slavery?".
No, not under a normal definition of democracy. None of the things you listed have anything to do with political systems except the gerrymandering which is fairly common in such systems. It is a fairly standard definition of bad though. That's where I would cash out: bad but not undemocratic. This is also where I cash out about Orban.
The issue is the people using the word dictator are conflating regime type with ideology. That was always the issue and it's convenient because if you make the "liberal" in liberal democracy left wing you can endlessly say that right wingers are a threat to democracy. Democratic backsliding exists but that what is included or excluded is fairly blatantly partisan.
I have no issue holding two things at once: such experts are blatantly biased and invent entire new categories to try to attack their political opponents. And also Trump and Orban have been bad for their countries' institutions in various ways. Where I suspect I will depart from others is the socialists and Democrats have also been very bad in ways left wingers have avoided confronting. (Note: socialists is a self-description of Orban's original opposition.)
Orbán’s biggest constraint was the EU itself, which is why he constantly tried to delegitimize it. If he had clung to power, they would’ve sanctioned and likely expelled Hungary. They did something similar with Austria in the nineties.
There is no mechanism in the EU Treaties to expel a country against its will (it can leave voluntarily, though). The most you can do is take away its vote.
I think part of the problem here is that hyperbole is often lauded on important issues. 'Trump threatens democracy' and 'fascism on the rise' are part of the (not yet-pithily named) phenomenon of 'bad thing is *literally* other bad thing.
That is, there is a whole cohort of people who think that it is better to be hyperbolic than to present the more literal headline of "Trump Weakens Democratic Institutions".
But this is a mistake. The discussion often derails into an argument about whether American is literally on the verge of dictatorship. That question is tertiary. The primary concern is whether it is important to be protecting and expanding democratic intuitions. Assuming yes, the productive thing to do is cooperate: create the largest coalition possible (which in and of itself serves as a protection for democracy.)
I like DCB for Democratically Constrained Brute. It's close to "strongman" but I prefer "brute" better than strongman because strong is too neutral to describe someone who will *brutalize* democracy every chance he gets. It puts the accent of the lack of respect for norms and others, reveals a me-first policy and nothing else matters.
Most likely, nothing at first. His administration had enough influence over the other three parties that it would be able to secure the majority of the votes. However, if the protests had succeeded in overturning the results and holding a new, freer and fairer election, then it would've established an important precedent.
>Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia at 70%, and North Korea at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. What do you call somewhere that’s 35% of the way to being a dictatorship?
Good point! We have a variety of emphasis words, but no clean way to state a numerical scale in ordinary conversation, which is frustrating. A similar problem applies to e.g. probabilities. I estimate P(doom) at 57% (recently updated because of Hassabis's endorsement of a conditional pause (+5%) and a discussion of large numbers of instances of weakly superhuman AIs (+2%)). About the cleanest available way to describe this colloquially is 'more likely than not'. Sigh.
The post is altogether very reasonable, but it overclaims Orban's badness.
"Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV."
The claim is that his main opponent was not allowed to appear on *state* television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn't fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar's rise.
"Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state, all the way down to ordinary schoolteachers."
My memory is that there have been a few examples of ordinary schoolteachers got into trouble for criticizing the regime, which is very bad, but this was the rare exception, not the rule.
"Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats."
This is very weak evidence for gerrymandering. To a first approximation, half the seats in the Hungarian parliament belong to individual candidates elected in their districts in a first-past-the-post way, and the other half gets distributed proportionally among the parties. (Plus there is an extra rule which makes the result a little closer to full proportionality.)
This is in theory more proportional than the US Congress which only has the fist-past-the-post districts. But in practice, there is much less geographical variation in politics in Hungary than in the US or even in Britain, so all the districts often move together, so you can still get 2/3 of the seats with 50% of the vote.
My understanding is that probably the government attempted a bit of gerrymandering, but when some social scientists tried to look, they didn't find it very egregious. This election, Orban's opponent got 52% of the vote, won the vast majority of districts and has 2/3 majority in the parliament.
----
The other examples listed by Scott are largely true, and the government interfered with the political process in various other unfair ways. As I said, I agree with Scott's broader point that some leaders can be a threat to democracy without immediately being dictators.
Still, I think Western commentators have consistently overclaimed Orban's badness, and I think people should somewhat update on the fact that Orban in fact lost and conceded an election once the opposition finally found a real leader.
For example, Scott's last book review about Orban, from 4 years ago claimed that:
"He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts. Left-wing voters were crammed into a few very large districts; likely Fidesz voters were put into many much smaller ones. The big districts and the small districts each elect one MP; as a result, one observer calculates that in terms of power to elect parliamentarians, “1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes = 2.6 Jobbik votes = 3.1 LMP votes”"
I think that the fact that now Orban's opponent got 2/3 majority with 52% of the vote is pretty strong evidence that Scott's source for this was making things up. (This was also knowable at the time - it was easy to check that the districts were similarly sized.)
Later in the book review:
"Lendvai concludes that “the bastion of power constructed since 2010 is, as far as it is humanly possible to tell, impregnable to external assault”"
Turns out, Lendvai was pretty over-confident here.
Later in the comments of that post, Scott said:
"First, if a majority of people voted against Orban, he would still win handily from the gerrymandering, the ethnic-Hungarians-abroad vote, and the possible voter fraud, and the laws favoring his party and causes would still be in the Constitution and require opponents to win by 2/3 to repeal. So I think it would take something like 80 - 90% of Hungarians voting against him to change policy very much."
Turns out, 52% voting for the opposition was enough.
I don't really blame Scott, it's hard to get a good understanding of a foreign country's politics without spending a huge amount of time on it. But I think the supposed experts Scott was relying on were painting a pretty misleading picture, and some of them should probably apologize now that their predictions turned out wrong.
Wikipedia claims that Magyar's party got 54.41% of the vote and Orban's got only 37.77%. That's a big gap - bigger than in any American presidential election since 1984, in which Reagan won every state but one.
Interesting, it looks like English Wikipedia's numbers are a few days outdated. I think the final numbers are 52% and 39.5%. But yes, it's a pretty big gap.
Just wanna note that if you don't consider mail-in votes, the distribution of the popular vote domestically 55.76% for Peter Magyar (TISZA) and only 36.33% for Orban (FIDESZ).
My understanding is that the mail-in votes are mainly from the Hungarian minorities living in Romania & Slovakia, who have voting rights on the popular lists, but do not have corresponding "constituency" seats in the parliament.
The reason that the gerrymandering failed was a nearly unprecedented defection by FIDESZ voters that turned a very effective and safe gerrymander/proportionality system into a dummymander. If you were to predict the likelihood of this happening, given the political demography of the country, it would have been an extremely low probability outcome, especially given the near complete crowd-out/blackout of actual opposition news sources.
The fact it happened doesn’t retroactively mean that the unbalanced democracy was actually more fair than we thought. It just means the black swan was born and lived.
> The fact it happened doesn’t retroactively mean that the unbalanced democracy was actually more fair than we thought. It just means the black swan was born and lived.
No, I think it means the former.
I think Hungary is “known” in the US because the US left has decided it was part of the evil cabal threatening democracy. I bet less than 5% of the people who know about it would be able to find it on a map. It’s the American left’s Cuba or Venezuela.
Every so often the US likes to believe that it’s not running the world and it’s the Hungarians, or Cubans. Or the Chinese. Or “white supremacy”. Or Islamofascism - unless you need Al Queda in power.
There’s no losing this perspective. This thread is full of sceptical posters from Hungary and Americans full of certainty because they read the Atlantic
You are obviously right. Orban was obviously undemocratic; just too weak to achieve his undemocratic goals - sometimes fortunately happens. The view espoused by people like Cowen makes only sense to me only if they adopt a very broad definition of the democratic mandate: once elected I can do whatever I want (including acting against the law), until I lose the next election. Which incidentally is very close to Orban’s “illiberal democracy”.
I remember reading Bob Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarianism book back in ~2012 and I feel like it was kind of prescient for what's happened in the 10 years of American politics. I didn't like your dismissal of it in this post.
I agree that fans of the idea probably include a lot of partisans that just want to dunk on the right, but, at least according to Altemeyer's claims, he started out with testing left and right the same, and the title is just him reporting the head line result that right wingers were more authoritarian.
I think this coheres with Tanner Greer's idea that the GOP is a leader-oriented organization, while the Democratic party is more a coalition of different interests, and this changes how the parties operate, with the right deferring more to their leader, and therefore being more authoritarian.
I was a very different person in 2012 at age 21 with not nearly all of the epistemic tools that I have today, so I don't claim strongly that it holds up (It's pre-replication crisis psychology research and I don't begrudge someone for disbelieving it just because of that), but I think it deserves consideration.
Hungarian economy wasn't booming exactly because Orban wasn't competent and was stealing too much. Incompetence is not a unique feature of autocrats but autocrats tend to be incompetent.
So, saying that he would have won elections if the economy was booming, is to say that he would be elected if he wasn't Orban.
Trump is equally not competent. Asking tech bros to invest would not have worked. Investments take time to show results. Investors are not stupid, would not invest in kleptocracy etc. Trump could do nothing and he was only destined to make it worse for Orban.
The only surprising thing here is that people voted against him. That's unusual. People in current dictatorships like Russia or Cuba or Venezuela while generally suffer and blame the government, actually do not vote against their dictators even if given chance. Usually this is because they have no idea how things can be different. They see corruption and naturally despise it but they have no experience how western style democracy could work for them and fear and distrust it. For example, Russians have impression that westerners are woke and would force them all to become gays and that's worse than their corruption. Cubans are dreaming of supermarkets full of food products but are against any inequality so much that they are afraid that capitalism will create different classes in the society and that's not acceptable to them.
Apparently Hungarians being a small country with open borders in the heart of Europe could better learn and understand how modern developed societies work and could not be convinced by Orban's scare tactics.
It proves that his bid to become an autocrat failed *because the people who denounce him as a would-be autocrat worked so damn hard to throw him out and barely managed to do it*.
While I had already reached similar conclusions before I read this article, I am glad that Scott has explained this succinctly, much better than I would have been able and he clearly proves that autocrats can lose elections and that does not mean that they are not autocrats or at least very bad leaders with autocratic tendencies.
As for calling Orban an autocrat, I would still call him like that and my thoughts are as follows:
People create labels for their own needs instead of labels controlling people.
This is the same that saying that a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Technically maybe you are right (and not right at the same time because fish is not a taxonomy category) but if some leader creates fishing ministry that includes issues with whales then technicalities are no longer important. Someone prefers to include whales under the banner of fish and it is less confusing than use more wordy descriptions.
The same with Orban. I prefer to refer to him as autocrat, then so be it. There is no single definition what autocrat even is. In my native language autocrat can be a strong ruler who does not like his rule challenged. Even Random House Webster gives several definitions and one of them is 3.a person who behaves in an authoritarian manner; a domineering person.
Again, by the definitions we use, he definitely was.
You imagine some idealized unchanging language which is not how people really use it nowadays.
Something similar happens when people who claim that covid vaccines are not vaccines because they do not conform to the original definition of vaccines. So what? People change definitions and use the words in new meanings.
I can almost imagine Scott writing an article – covid jabs are good, we just don't have good words to describe them as calling them vaccines are hyperbole :) But he doesn't need to write such an article because it doesn't matter, everybody calls covid jabs vaccines and that's it, except for a small group of critical people. The benefits and risks of covid jabs are clearly known and a shortcut or a label is to call them vaccines. That's good enough.
The same thing about Orban, he was an autocrat (according to more loosely current definition) and that's it. Why would you need to defend him?
I don't think Cuban (dictators) leaders really is the enemy of the US. They just want to be left in peace. Obviously they are worried that the US may force democracy on them but apart from that they have no illusions that Cuba is too small to fight the US and they would never attempt to do that and would avoid harming the US in any way.
Cuban leaders may verbally criticise the US but the aim is more to keep their own ideological purity than start a fight with the US.
If you're a selfish corrupt politician with no real ideological aims other than doing well for yourself the Orban play is the better one. A full coup or complete abolition of the Democratic system is a very dangerous thing -- it's very hard to retire without getting killed.
OTOH if you just stack the system in your favor you can enrich yourself and your cronies while leaving in place enough guardrails to allow yourself a peaceful retirement. Once you discard any fig leaf of an orderly legal system your successor has no incentive to let you live.
The "dictator" angle of Orban is mainly a red herring - the vast majority of his abuses of power directly concern corruption, which is not a phenomena solely reserved to dictatorships nor necessarily indicative of them.
As a matter of fact, each individual Hungarian corruption scandal in isolate has happened in some form or another in most EU countries - Italy under Berlusconi would be an eminent example, but as an Austrian what comes to mind for me instantly is that our public broadcast network ORF has long been known to act in the interests of the long-ruling Austrian Conservative Party (ÖVP), going as far as blacklisting people from receiving invitations to appear on state TV and shutting down entire news programs if they veered too critical of the wrong people.
Orban enacted a policy by which all state workers, even elementary school teachers, had to prove political loyalty or risk loosing their profession? Austria had EXACTLY that system as a matter of state policy for most of its postwar history - the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives carved up the entire state apparatus between themselves in a policy called "Proporz". For decades, it was essentially impossible for a card carrying member of a third party to get any kind of government job. Especially the education sector was infamous for this - there virtually weren't any school principals in the country that weren't open members of either party.
Orban changed the Constitution to favour large parties over representative distribution and gerrymandered the voting system to the point that 49% of votes gave him 68% of seats? Well, so did Charles de Gaulles when he almost single-handedly engineered the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. That's how Macron's party was able to capture 60% of seats with 49% of the vote in the 2017 Legislative elections.
That's also why France has a "Constitutional Council" that can strike down any law for the vaguely defined reason of going "against the spirit of the Constitution". Who is this Council composed of, you ask? By all former Presidents of France and a rotating body of 9 political allies elected by the Government and its Parliamentary majority.
France's current Constitution also allows the Government to pass a law without holding a vote - an emergency measure that gradually became a standard tool of French politics.
As to the wiretapping of political opponents - the currently ruling conservative Government in Greece massively wiretapped and surveilled their political opponents as a matter of state policy. The scandal broke in 2022 and they comfortably won reelection the next year.
Orban abused judicial power to harass his political opponents? The French judiciary had the authority and obligation to pursue Marine Le Pen for misappropriation of EU funds all the way back in 2017, but sat on the case for almost a decade and purposefully waited until she was a credible favourite for the next presidential election to try and condemn her, going as far as using an emergency motion complicating her right to appeal the verdict (on the basis that she might "reoffend", a literal impossibility considering the trial concerned her power abuse as an MEP, a position she hasn't held in 9 years) - this condemnation of course bars her from standing in elections for 5 years, just in time to miss next year's presidential election.
We could go one like this for hours - Belgian political scandals alone, which I haven't even touched on, would fill half a library.
Corruption, delegation of ostensibly neutral government positions to political allies (or "friend economics" as it's called in Austria), putting governmental pressure on state broadcasting institutions, adapting the Constitution to favour the status quo, abusing police power to harass and spy on political opponents, all these phenomena are completely standard excesses of European democracies and happen routinely in all EU states to varying degrees (i.e., a Danish corruption scandal will probably be much more mild than an Italian one) without notable exception.
What makes Orban different is that he was far more brazen in the scale, volume, and tempo of his abuses. The EU establishment enacts "democratic backsliding", "corruption", or whatever one wants to call it by means of a slow ossification process, that eventually becomes political normality and custom. The Fifth French Republic had an authoritarian tinge from the start, but only gradually enabled outright anti-democratic actions (such as the notorious Article 49.3) over the course of decades of normalisation. Orban essentially speedran the process and made no efforts to cover up his intentions.
As an Austrian, who grew up in close vicinity to Hungary, I must also remark that there was a distinct vibe-shift around how European media covered Orban - he transformed almost overnight from "crony Eastern European corrupt showman" to "authoritarian despot who rules over Hungary with an iron fist" during the 2015 Refugee crisis. That was also the exact moment when EU Commission President Jean-Claude Junker made international headlines for greeting Orban with "Hello, Dictator" at an EU conference. The EU Establishment and their vassal power brokers in media really soured on him when he turned against them on mass migration and essentially challenged them to question Hungary's territorial sovereignty.
Orban was certainly a crook, but the nature of the political transformation of Hungary under his tenure is in no way more innately dictatorial or autocratic than France since De Gaulle, Austria under the ÖVP, or Italy under Berlusconi - at the end of the day, democracy does give you the legitimate power and mandate to enact legal changes that are themselves more undemocratic than what they are replacing. All the legal changes, Constitutional amendments, distributions of government loans and positions, etc, were all achieved by parliamentary votes resulting from free elections. If we have an existential problem with that, then we have a problem with parliamentary democracy as it exists in Europe.
If people had a bit more historical knowledge, then they wouldn’t shout fascist at every single ruler (or ideology) they disagree with. If you want a name for an authoritarian democrat who has a cult of personality, media control, judicial interference and populism - but is popular and has won elections - the term that might be appropriate is Peronist. Not that Trump is exactly that either.
Everybody actually agrees with the historians - who say the fascists were definitively only the Nazis, fascist Italy (natch), and Franco’s Spain.
The historians don’t call Portuguese dictator Salazar a fascist, even though he’s actually of the era. Neither does anybody else.
So if somebody says Trump is a fascist, ask them to name actual fascists. They also won’t include Salazar (nor any of the other right wing dictators who were called have receded from memory).
Being critical of EU has nothing to do with democracy, those two things are not even related. Same with taxes, foreign matters and environmental protections - those are normal policy disagreements. Using armed forces internally is much more questionable, but it largely depends on the intended purpose of their use.
What I find annoying about the Orban discourse is that the people who call him bad/dictator/autocrat etc. are no better themselves. Consider what the German regime parties or their cronies have done:
- put numerous citizens in prison or apply monetary fines for criticizing/satirizing/insulting the government
- have control over state media, which rarely mentions the main opposition party (AfD, will call opposition from now on), and when it does, it's negative coverage. Much less likely to mention political violence done against the opposition than other parties.
- use the secret service to spy on dissidents, infiltrate the opposition party, brand it as right-wing extremist
- discuss banning the opposition party
- make it difficult for opposition party members to be in the state service
- reverse the result of a state election where Merkel did not like the result
- using old majorities after an election to change cutoffs for opposition right just above the voting share that the opposition party got
- discriminate against the opposition party by not allowing them to lead committees, excluding them from defense related committees, giving them small faction halls, not allowing them to have Bundestag and Bundesrat vice presidents
- fund left-wing NGOs who produce fake news about plans of the opposition party to conduct mass deportations, leading to mass protests and voter loss
- flood the countries with millions of "refugees", then turbo naturalize them to gain more voters
If you are going to claim that Germany is as corrupt and undemocratic as Hungary under Orban, I think you should at least back up your claims with some actual sources.
Agreed. Orban was far worse than this list even if it's true. Also "the opposition party" is actually just one party in Germany. Other opposition parties are not treated that way.
It is forbidden for German parties to receive fund from foreign states. So, exactly 0 parties in Germany are being funded by the Russians, government and opposition alike. (Technically, the cap is not 0 EUR but 1000 EUR, but that will not allow a party to get anywhere.)
- no one has been put into jail for satirizing the government. You won't be able to find one single source
- the public media regular report on the AfD, their leaders and their positions
- the Federal Republic of Germany has no laws against opposition party members being in state service.
- no state election was ever reversed by Merkel. Which state are you referring to?
- the AfD is allowed to lead committees, and has actually led committees in the past. It just so happens that the near-totality of the people they nominate fail to find approval in parliament.
The points above show that you either do not know what you are talking about or that you are acting in bad faith.
Somehow this always happens to rightwingers. Almost as if this was a punishment for his political activity, rather than anything else.
- Aron Pielka (rightwing Youtuber) was in prison for 9 months, mostly for playing a racially insensitive song (not exactly related to the government itself but nevertheless a ridiculous thing to happen. Should have added it to the list!):
Consider Table 3 and Figure 4. 3% of the speakers in the state media were from the AfD, much less than their vote share. 81% of the comments about the AfD were negative, much higher than for all other parties.
"- the Federal Republic of Germany has no laws against opposition party members being in state service."
I didn't say there was such a law. But the interior secret service (i.e. the interior ministry) classifying the AfD as right-wing extremist can be a factor in either not hiring them or getting rid of them, i.e. making it harder to be in the state service, as I have said.
"- no state election was ever reversed by Merkel. Which state are you referring to?"
Thuringia, 2020, election of Kemmerich (FDP). He was elected with the help of AfD voters. Merkel publicly said that this would have to be undone. Then it was undone, Kemmerich pulled back due to the resulting political pressure. Even the Bundesverfassungsgericht said that Merkel has violated the AfDs right for equality of opportunity in the political realm:
"- the AfD is allowed to lead committees, and has actually led committees in the past. It just so happens that the near-totality of the people they nominate fail to find approval in parliament."
Sure, it's a violation of good democratic procedure, not law. But that's the point, no? To understand practices that erode Democracy that aren't a full-blown dictatorship. This certainly goes against the spirit of these positions. Historically, the opposition always got to lead several committees in order to be able to control the government. I suppose you won't have a problem if the AfD achieves a total majority and then gives the other parties nothing?
- Merkel did not reverse the state election. All members of parliament kept their seats. The elected minister president (who was not even from Merkel's party) resigned.
- It regularly happens to the Left party, but also to the green and socialist party, that their nominees do not find approval. Most recent is the case where the SPD nominee for the constitutional court was not supported by the CDU/CSU. Typically, they switch to another candidate afterwards. The AfD typically fielded candidates which would clearly be unacceptable to the other parties, and predictably failed to win support. Over time, the other parties somehow switched to "auto-reject" for AfD nominees. I think that this is bad practice, and if the AfD presented a moderate candidate, that candidate should be allowed to chair. It is conceivable, however, that indeed all AfD nominees are crackpots.
How do you explain the David Bendels case then? He put up a picture on which Nancy Faeser holds up a paper saying "I hate freedom of speech". Obviously satire to any reasonable observer but the court clearly didn't see it that way (luckily it was overturned later, but the initial ruling is still insane).
What is moderate? For example, I don't think it's moderate to mass import foreigners and then mass naturalize them. I suppose whoever is in power decides what moderate is. I'm just saying don't complain afterwards if the AfD is in power and then has a different idea of what moderate is than you do.
My frustration is that in the comments here everyone is taking for granted that “dictator” is the term normally chosen for Orban’s critics to describe him. This doesn’t seem correct to me.
I’ve been reading about Orban for years. Lots of investigative journalism of the kind that casts him as a threat to *the right of citizens to choose their government by majority vote*. My impression is that they do not normally refer to him as a “dictator” per se, because they have much more accurate terms to describe his “badness”. In other words, I feel that commenters here are attacking a strawman (or at least a weakman - since there probably are some twitter shitposts hastily calling him a dictator).
For a quick and dirty check of my impressions, I went and picked the first link from google news circa 2020 about Orban’s notorious power-consolidation attempts. It’s an investigative journalism piece that also seems like it was written by activists and is patently critical towards Orbán; if anyone is likely to call him a dictator it’s people like this. The article is “Orban: The Art of Eroding a Democracy”. Civil Rights Defenders, Nov. 16 2020. https://crd.org/vorban/
Results: the article says a lot about Orban, but as I suspected, never calls him a *dictator*.
What it does say: “he and his party, Fidesz, have systematically undermined the country’s legal system and changed its electoral system to ensure future electoral victories”; “it is becoming harder and harder to criticize the government”, “restrictions by the government on freedoms for media and civil society”; “rigged election system”; “vote buying”; “tampering of votes”; “abusing power”; “xenophobic rhetoric”, “discrediting of free media”, “not much room for open democratic debate”; “oppressive machinery”; “power to withdraw media licenses and fine journalists without providing good reasons, which means that independent media often censor their content”; “ownership of the media increasingly shifting to oligarchs allied with” him; “human rights organizations and human rights defenders under constant attack”, “stigmatizing rhetoric” portraying human rights defenders as “traitors and mercenaries”; “dismantling of democracy”.
These things are true, and widely considered bad, especially when you do all of them, not just once but chronically.
Now, I realize this isn’t a truly scientific test; maybe my randomly selected sample isn’t representative, and it actually is widespread practice to call him a dictator (in actual serious media, not just twitter shitposts). But I would need to be convinced, because it’s not just the one sample I checked, but my whole memory of following this topic for years that suggests to me that this is how it is. He is not generally called a dictator. He is generally referred to as someone taking measures to actively undermine the ability of citizens to remove him from power by majority vote (which is true, even though his measures turned out to not be quite enough *when the people calling him undemocratic worked really hard to overcome them*.
Three pieces which refer to Orban as a dictator in the headline but use more nuanced language in the piece, two which argue that the fact that Orban lost shows he’s not a dictator, and one where a college professor refers to Orban as a dictator in a radio interview.
A Google news search for with the query terms "Orban" and "dictator" reports about 1,960 results. Eliminating "dictator" from the query gives about 3,730,000 results.
The prime minister of Hungary probably is not the only person named "Orban", so I repeated the searches replacing "Orban" with "Viktor Orban" (in double quotes). The numbers were 1,100 and 1,700,000, respectively. I also tried adding "Hungary" to the searches. The numbers were 1,030 and 84,900, respectively.
So I think that Jim Palatano has identified a weakman; it’s rare for Orban critics to refer to him as a dictator, and when they do the word may be a shorthand (e.g. to save space in a headline, or a professor trying to make a point in a limited amount of time on the radio).
Orban was bad because of bad policies and corruption. Lee Kuan Yew was similarly anti-democratic, or at a minimum, a practitioner of managed democracy and is lauded as a great statesman. The value of a system of government is purely instrumental. No one really believes that democratic governance somehow channels the general will of the people into power and this is intrinsically good. If I live in New York City, certain powers that govern me reside at each of the city, state, and federal levels. In various respects, I am governed by the preferences of the populations of these jurisdictions but the distribution of powers among them and their borders are fairly arbitrary. If I were governed by the democratic will of the people of my apartment building, the outcomes would be completely different.
The only reason an election in a country with a population smaller than LA is getting international reactions and attention is because it was a small reprieve amidst the real-time decline of the EU's own managed "democracy." I think your framing is mostly correct. Political scientists, legal experts, wonks, libertarians, and nerds care about the straining of checks and balances and the functioning of institutions. What 90% of people participating in this debate care about is trying to claim the moral legitimacy generated by those institutions as their own to use as instrumental means of imposing their ideology.
"Whataboutism" has its flaws, but accusations of being "undemocratic" for 1980's-style shady politician behavior ring hollow when the strategy of all of his opponents is pretty openly to just import a bunch of people who will vote for them no matter what.
If Orban were a U.S. Senator fifty years ago, the accusations listed off in the article would make him kind of questionable. Today, none of it stacks up viscerally against Rotherham, or procedurally against Romania outright annulling its elections when a result they didn't like took place.
One of the common themes of enquires into Rotherham etc. is that police officers and local politicians would form ethnic mafias covering up, or often actively abetting, the crimes of their co-ethnics. That sort of thing strikes me as far more corrupt and societally corrosive than anything Orban is accused of doing, and I would be shocked if similar things weren't happening in other Western countries, but for some reason pro-immigration politicians don't get accused of destroying civil society.
My mother smoked her entire life and developed COPD. But when she quit the COPD got better, so maybe smoking isn't so bad after all. She claimed this repeatedly. (Actually, she later developed dementia from a series of strokes, which I suspect was related to a lifetime of smoking, but no one knew that while she was in remission).
Hungary ousted their leader, so everything is fine. Not only that, it was always fine. There can't possibly be any further problems, now or in the future, because they replaced their leader, so everything is fine.
The United States is in great shape, democratically, because the Republicans seem set to lose big in the midterms. Everything is fine.
I would apologize to my mother for ever doubting her, but she's passed.
As a Hungarian, I agree with your estimation of Orbán's Hungary being 35% dictature in relation to the other points of reference you gave on that spectrum.
Hungarian perspective here. Orbán had no workable violent option after alienating the police, the armed forces and likely the secret services too. But it seems to me that this depended on congingent factors such as individual personalities that caused Orbán, an intellectual with little connection to uniformed services, to make these mistakes.
Police: His interior/police minister Pintér is a J Edgar Hoover-type careful survivor from the chaotic 1990s, likely with leverage over Orbán and not wanting to spoil his legacy. Rank and file police were alienated by low pay and an Orbán ally's tabloid recently driving a popular district police chief to suicide.
Armed Forces: The opposite, his minister was considered a clown by the troops. They tried multiple purges which ended up driving a very popular ex-general to opposition politics. Rank and file soldiers kept being more attracted by the professionalism they saw from NATO allies rather than the official pro-Russia line. There was a high-profile soldier turned whistleblower in the last week too.
It's interesting how (in my view) the reddit comments for this are totally normal while the Substack comments are akin to an insane asylum.
You all know Scott has always been a pro-democracy liberal who likes trans people, immigration, immigrants, institutions, the rule of law, freedom, etc., right? If you oppose such things you're just gonna get angry if you keep reading and replying to every blog post. He very vocally endorsed Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Harris in 2024. You're barking up the wrong tree.
I imagine a lot of the cultist right mistook him as an ally since he's never shyed away from criticizing silly factions/aspects of the American left. Add that seeking upsetting content is a hobby for many online normies, and most comments stop being surprising. As consensus reality breaks down, I'm gaining appreciation for the glimpses into other worlds/truths they provide.
It seems to me to be under-emphasized how democratic-ness is "sticky" on both the upside and the downside. Orban ultimately was done in by causing the public to be unhappy with the economy and enough people were wedded to democracy that the vote stuck. OTOH, there have been many places where democratic systems have been installed (imposed?) on cultures with no history of democracy, and almost always they rapidly turn into autocracies of various sorts. It seems to me that this hearkens back to the sociologists' concept of "legitimacy" -- the populace has a certain ideal of how power is attained and if someone gains power in a practical way but doesn't satisfy the peoples' sense of legitimacy, their power will be very fragile. But that cuts both ways -- if the populace thinks legitimate power is due to the divine right of kings, they won't mind a new king declaring his divine right.
Orban actually built a fence around his country's borders to keep mass third world immigration out during the migrant waves of ~2015. Therefore, regardless of how democratic he was or wasn't, I propose he was a good thing for the people of Hungary. It doesn't matter how you get or stay in power, it matters what you do with it, and he did provably good things for his country.
This all seems very basic to someone who has been tuned into world politics and not inside the right-wing bubble, but I really appreciate the good work you are doing in getting this message to the members of your audience who are not in that category.
the lack of a perfect word is actually the point isnt it. 'soft authoritarianism' sounds too gentle, 'fascism' sounds too dramatic, so people just shrug. the vocabulary failure is doing real political work
I agree that the American system falls short of democracy, and has historically long done so, in many different ways.
I disagree that this is okay, or that the public should accept this.
Where is that commenter? You seem to replied to someone who thinks USA democratic system is very flawed - seems like an rational opinion considering that you can lose popular vote and still win.
Just looking at vote totals and seat numbers doesn't tell you whether a country is gerrymandered. But this is not the only information available, you can actually look at the maps and how they were drawn.
After winning the first time, Orban's party immediately redrew the maps in such a way as to break up opposition consituencies and secure as many 'safe' seats as possible. Now gerrymanders can break if there is a sufficient swing against the incumbent party, or if new coalitions form (both of these happened at the same time in this recent election). But that doesn't make the concept of gerrymandering meaningless.
There are other ways of analyzing this as well. The most objective is to draw random algorithmically generate maps and see if the actual map is within the bounds of what a fair process would produce.
Wisconsin was, and North Carolina is, actually small scale illiberal democracies with fairly radical gerrymandering. In fact some years had worse results than the ones you mentioned.
And the Dems have tried to push for unilateral disarmament by limiting gerrymandering as national policy but it is a no go for the GOP for fairly obvious reasons.
Putin isn’t in power.
People are just pre-read liking Scott’s posts, it’s only been up for three minutes I know forty of you are not done yet.
I also wonder about this. The number of pre-likes I get in the first three minutes is very variable based on post type, so maybe people are liking the fact that I wrote about a particular topic?
Maybe people are using AI agents to summarize the posts in a few sentences ?
I think this happened even before AI agents took off.
Oh, then I think your explanation (people liking the mere fact that you wrote about a topic) is the most likely one.
I dated a speed reader once. He could definitely have finished this post in three minutes.
I stand corrected, and a little frightened !
My girlfriend is like this.
I usually like posts that write about a subject I'm interested in, not necessarily as a sign of approval of the contents or the conclusion. It would be nice if there was an LW-style differentiator between "posts I like" and "posts I agree with" but alas, one 'like' thingy is all we have.
It happens with OTs too.
I don’t have a more reasonable explanation than that.
I liked the fact that it was a free post
I liked the fact that it was a post at all, on up-to-date matters, proving that Scott didn't go blind staring into the sun.
He may have dictated the post.
If only we had a word for someone who does that..
Omg that's funny. Very clever!
I wouldn't go that far. At worse, I illiberal-democracied it.
Well, given that, I definitely want to be able to like comments again.
"I strongmanned it" is the phrase you're looking for.
I seem to recall something about the hospital where he did his residency giving out a "Best Dictator Award" to doctors.
As somebody who does in fact do this some of the time, it’s more that I can generally tell from reading the first couple pages whether I will like a post or not, and if you already think there is a 70 to 90% chance of liking the post after reading it might as well do it now since you can always change your mind later.
Yeah some posts earn their like early
I often like your posts at the beginning before reading, so I don’t accidentally forget to like them once I’m finished. I have not once read a post of yours that didn’t make a point worth liking, even if I don’t agree with you every time, so I just cut to the chase. It’s good to signal boost your excellent writing. I could always unlike the post later, but it’s never happened.
A mystery to me too: even my small newsletter, launched a few months ago, gets *automatically* three-four likes every time I push a new piece. Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for.
"...Bots, obviously, but I am wondering who or what they work for."
The likes for your small newsletter may be protective coloration for the bots. So that they appear less like focused bots to whatever software might be scanning for them.
I have a number of followers on disqus. Maybe three of them appear to be real humans. I figure something similar is happening on disqus.
Didn't think of that !
You can click on the names of the people who voted on an article, and then click on their blogs... so maybe redirecting some of the attention to their blogs was the goal?
Probably not very effective, but hey, it only costs them one click. If you are the kind of person who doesn't mind spamming others, this would be worth doing even manually.
Although I'm not one of those 40s, but I generally like every post I open. I do it at the start and I rarely have to unlike.
There are a surprising number of internet users who just click the like button on everything to make it change colour.
Wait, that’s not the point of clicking it?
I totally do this, especially if it's a nice change like 'make heart go red'. Also it serves as a 'you have already read this one' marker.
There are some social medias where I would "like" posts as a save/bookmark feature, as it lacked a native one. I'm sure there are other people who did the same, maybe carried the habit forward.
I have people who consistently like posts within minutes of them being posted, so there is definitely some kind of automation at work. I have no idea why someone would want to do this, however.
Oh, exciting! My algorithm is that I always press the like button for the sheer joy of making the little heart go red and feeling that I've done a nice thing. After all if the essay turns out to be boring I will be surprised, notice, and can go back and make the heart go back to white.
But it looks like some people might actually be reading the title first, which strikes me as silly. The title doesn't tell me much about whether the essay is good!
I think this is pretty ubiquitous across all platforms that have like buttons. There's a reason why everyone focuses so hard on titles and thumbnails, and it's because a like is just as much a signal of agreement as it is a signal that you enjoyed reading the post in particular: you don't have to read the post to know that you agree that Orban Was Bad. Some platforms try to get around this (e.g. Less Wrong differentiates between karma upvotes and agreement upvotes, as you know) but even there, a lot of people upvote posts that resonate and downvote posts that irritate.
I like every post from you and other writers before even reading it, just as thanks for the free entertaining content. Same for good YouTube channels. If it turns out to be a bad piece I can unlike it. But I'm 90% likely to like it so might as well do while I remember.
Indeed, I think some folks just hit like based on a title.
I like almost all YT vids I watch before I start them because I basically always know -- just from who it came from, or the subject matter -- I almost certainly will like it. If I find I don't then I simply unlike. I imagine some people are doing something similar here.
In this case (and others) the post title is a thesis statement not just a topic statement, people might like because they agree with it.
I don't read, I osmose. My osmosis of Scott's piece generated a like. Sorry.
The tiktok generation at work again
The probability of me liking a favourite author's post is high enough that spending time to determine whether or not I do is a waste of time. If I actually don't like it I can just unlike it halfway through
Hardly ever comment here, but love Scott's posts. I learned from other content creators on YouTube - please please leave a like, so if I *already* like someone I’ll hit the like button early because otherwise I’ll get distracted, leave their page, do some work, come back to some other page… never leave a like. And that, my friends, is BAD karma.
hasn't he earned it though?
No one has earned it. "Liking" something you don't actually know whether you like is dishonest.
Is it dishonest to give to a charity? Or to recommend a previous employee to a new company? Not trying to be annoyingly snarky there. But the metaphor seems relevant. Let's imagine that I like the charity's, or my old employee's, previous work. I trust they will continue to perform admirably due to their track record. I give my endorsement via money or recommendation or whatever, even though I am not going to be following up on whether they actually help people with my money or do a good job in their new role -- I might change my mind if I hear something bad! But I'm happy to boost their visibility to the (human or non-human, as the case may be) algorithm.
The difference here may be the interpretation of what a "like" on Substack means. To me, it means "boost this to more readers," because that's what it actually does. I think some people want likes to mean, "I like this," but unfortunately that's not what likes do.
Clicking "like" on a post doesn't mean "I have read this". It means "I am a modern human being who understands that the only purpose of likes, especially on a for-profit VC funded platform, is to feed an algorithm and I, for whatever reason, have chosen to do so".
I always thought it meant "BLOOD AND SOULS FOR ARIOCH".
It's two hours after it went up; I got home from work, read it, and liked it after reading your comment.
You are clearly not who the comment was aimed at.
Hahahaha.
I have heard that Orban is no more - and probably less - corrupt than most of his predecessors.
But that doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is that Orban held back the tsunami of globalism and loss of national sovereignty, and Russophobia, that has swept over so Europe. This makes him a hero in my eyes.
Orban's predecessors were bad in lots of ways, but not the particular form of corruption and undemocraticness that he has. You can see more at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban .
As for you not caring how corrupt and undemocratic he is as long as he shares your views, solve for the equilibrium.
I personally attach some non-zero value to democratic institutions, but I also attach non-zero value to governments that are interested in the non-extinction of their people, and Orban scores noticeably higher than his predecessors on that front.
This isn't a subjective preference, by the way- you don't have democracy without survival. Try solving for that equilibrium.
Can you explain what you mean? I usually hear this used about immigration, but even non-Orban Eastern European countries have very few immigrants. Czechia and Poland, the two countries I checked as natural comparison points, both seem to be between 0.5 - 1% nonwhite. Czechia's government is moderate, Poland's is conservative but hasn't attracted the same kind of democracy fears as Fideisz. Is your argument that, absent Orban, Hungary would have many more immigrants than its neighbor/comparison countries?
Are you sure you checked the correct governments for Czechia and Poland?
Current government of Czechia is a coalition between populist catch all russian adjacent Babiš and with smaller far right parties (SPD and motorists). The previous government was moderate spanning from center-left to conservative, and the current president is moderate, but it's a parliamentary republic where the president mostly has a representative role.
This last point is also true for poland (although the president has a veto power there). The president is from PiS (very conservative right wing) but the government is a coalition spanning across center-left to right with Tusk (KO, center-right/right). Former government was from PiS, for which there was antidemocratic concerns in a similar direction as Fidesz (reform of constitutional court and strong control of public TV), but to a much weaker extent.
Edit: "Russian adjacent" is maybe too strong and unfair for Babiš, especially as I haven't been following much his position on this since the election. During the campaign he focused a lot on criticizing military aid to Ukraine.
__browsing proposed Hungarians could become "extinct" but for Orbán.
In the specific case of Hungary, I don't think migrants are even the primary concern so much as an internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates. Orban's pro-natalism hasn't been very effective, but trying at least counts for something, and I would like our ruling class to spend as much time, energy and ingenuity on eugenic pro-natalism as they expended on left-wing social programs over the past 50 years before declaring "nothing works".
I think it's totally plausible Hungary would have had more suspiciously-tanned-Ukrainian refugees in the non-Orban scenario, but I suppose I can't prove it. My broader point is that you're starting with this implicit argument that Preserving Democracy is the ultimate and overriding moral consideration here, and while I have no especial love for dictators I can imagine a world where less democracy could be a lesser evil.
I see what you're saying, but this just seems like the SBF argument for it sometimes being okay to do evil for the greater good. I think the reason we have deontological bars against this kind of reasoning is to encode a heuristic that this works much less than you would think - people do the evil, and then the greater good doesn't result, and you're just stuck with evil, and sometimes even less good than you started with because your plan has backfired (as SBF's did with effective altruism).
For example, it seems like Hungary had all the normal downsides of illiberalism over the past few years - poor economy, people so unhappy that they overcome all these obstacles and kicked out Orban in a landslide. But it also seems like the native fertility rate has done *worse* than in all the other comparison countries - the way I phrased it last links post was "Hungary now has a lower birthrate than all the surrounding countries, a greater 2-year drop in birthrate (by far) than any surrounding country, and the second highest ten year drop...proposed causes include declining approval ratings for Orban, who has become associated with pronatalist policies in the Hungarian mind..." (see https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/3910901/hungary-little-baby-bust/ ).
So although I agree that in principle, you should sometimes be consequentialist about this sort of thing, I think there's rightly an incredibly high bar.
Arctotherium did a pretty lengthy breakdown on the topic here, but it's possible Orban's pro-natal incentives were less than successful because they primarily went to mothers, not fathers.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/communist-pro-natalism
I think the economic arguments for left-wing/liberal policies are entirely myopic, of course, since there are few migrant groups that are net economic benefits in the 2nd/3rd generation and the exceptions are just unsustainable zero-sum brain drain. Suppressing family formation likewise does wonders for GDP in the short-term until you run out of people, so it's a totally misleading metric. But you know this already.
The politicians should have very high bars for doing this, but voters shouldn't be quite as cautious; something can easily be obviously bad without being overridingly so.
"Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe (not even the far-right minority party "Our Homeland" officially says that's a problem). Orbán's worry was general population decline, ie. the population of the country getting smaller due to a below-2 fertility rate.
While this seems to have been one of the very few things Orbán honestly cared about besides stealing lots of money (unlike his anti-immigration and pro-Russia sentiment which have been pretty clearly dictated by political convenience), his efforts have been net negative - the quality of health care and education plummeted, and that deterred the middle class that was the target of his tax exemption based fertility policies. Also the middle class probably got significantly smaller during his reign, due to a mix of botched economic policies and constant brain drain to more liberal countries.
As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism. If we grade regimes based on actual outcomes, the winners will be ones that are light on intentions (ie. free markets and lots of individual and group freedoms, with the state having very limited ability to shape things according to its intentions). Orbán's regime was another predictable example of heavy state meddling into economy, culture and public discourse making everything worse.
(Mostly in non-fertility-policy-related ways, mind you. His fertility policies, which consisted of various forms of tax relief, would be entirely compatible with more democratic governments, I just wouldn't expect them to be effective.)
> ""Internal Roma population with much higher fertility rates" was a concern of the far-right / neo-nazi fringe"
I'm honestly baffled as how they can pretend this isn't a major problem, unless their plan is to have the Roma running their society by end-of-century.
> "As others have noted, if we grade regimes based on their intentions rather than their actual outcomes, the best regime is socialism"
I don't regard equality of outcome as a good thing, so I really don't see how this follows.
I also think arguments pertaining to "but we must preserve our health and education systems!" are basically bogus, since there is, e.g, no correlation between health spending and lifespan within the OECD, and similarly no correlation between homework assigned and PISA scores. The outcomes here are overwhelmingly driven by genetic and lifestyle factors external to government systems, and vast increases in spending on health/education across the western world have all yielded marginal or nonexistent returns on investment since the 1970s. These systems are all going to be bankrupted by a combination of demographic ageing and welfare bloat in the not too distant future (barring miracles in the automation or biotech sector), so I'm not going to penalise Orban for not caring about them.
I also don't think much of "the Hungarian middle class are fleeing to more liberal countries" argument. Any country that tries to move in a more right-wing- i.e, socially sane- direction, is going to face a problem where high-IQ-but-self-interested people don't want to shoulder the moral burdens now expected of them. Emigration needs to be shut down as much as immigration, and you logically cannot constrict the latter without reducing options for the former. The alternative is the current pattern of the world's talent being slowly devoured by IQ shredders, and I am not signing up for that.
That *REALLY* depends on the specific problem. Getting the lead out of gasoline definitely required government level intervention. So do many other problems, like keeping the streets paved. The problem is keeping the interventions to the domain where they are the preferable solution. (Preferred by who? is a real problem. And regulatory capture needs to *strenuously* be avoided. I recommend that regulators be forever forbidden from taking any payment of any nature from those the ever regulated.)
I just finished reading about the anti-Roma racism and segregation in Hungary. So I asked ChatGPT "Tell me about the fertility rates of Roma vs other Hungarians", and it says their fertility rate is driven by socioeconomic status, as "Highly educated Roma women → fertility similar to non-Roma" and "Low-education non-Roma women → fertility closer to Roma levels". Well, somehow I doubt Orbán segregating Roma children in into their own lower-quality schools was exploiting this.
(P.S. anyone who knows how humans work knows it's incredibly suspicious to suggest that a particular ethnic group, with no unifying ideology, is vermin-like going to out-reproduce the other humans in an area. Because that's just classic racist dehumanization.)
Their TFR might or might not be driven by SES, but SES is hugely influenced by genetic factors, so I'm a little skeptical about how sustainable anti-poverty initiatives can be without massive perpetual welfare transfers.
The year is 2060. With a population swollen by ethnically-exclusive pronatalist policies, gypsies sweep the Hungarian state, allied parties taking practically every seat in Parliament. They may be dusky, and suspiciously tanned, but they are FINE: rippling muscles, gleaming hair, perfect teeth. Seems like they’ve been practicing a “gypsy eugenics” of their own, through partner selection. Death of a nation, nary a pale face to be seen. But take heart: Rod Dreher’s corpse is spinning so fast in his coffin it provides a 100% clean renewable power source nationally. He’s finally earned his state salary.
"He did something. I mean obviously it didn't work, like all those evil bad globalists would have predicted immediately, and it caused various side effects and forms of suffering in the process, but he did something!"
I think the topic of birthrates should be less taboo in liberal spaces but that's where the agremeent ends. No, I don't think "ruling classes spending time on eugenic pro-natalism" would be good or useful. It wasn't the last time it happened.
I often wonder, if you went back in time and talked to Reagan and Bush Sr and told them "in 40 years time, the political party you are leading will advocate for the end of democracy," what would they say? Would they shed a tear? I have to think Reagan would, given his entire foreign policy mission was the dissolution of the soviet union in favor of new democratic institutions in western Europe.
Respectfully, when Poland's government was standing with Orban against the EU's desire to let in migrants, there were LOTS of complaints that the ruling "Law and Justice" party and its leader Kaczynski (no relation to Uncle Ted, I think) were massively undemocratic. This was particularly because the party undertook judicial reforms which led to the disempowerment of sitting progressive judges which had attempted to force Poland's border policy into alignment with the EU's more permissive stance.
Replacing the judiciary with your own people is generally considered undemocratic, yes.
Surely, to the extent that a country is a democracy, the organs of state including the judiciary, must do what the people want.
So if judges want to force though immigration, against the will of the people as expressed in an election, it is democratically right that they should be removed.
If the ex-judges don't like it, they can set up their own political party and contest the next election and (again, to the extent that the country is a democracy) they will win seats proportional to their vote share.
Aristotle would have called elected rulers replacing unelected judges "democracy."
Of course, Aristotle didn't favor democracy.
Lately, though, we are supposed to use the term "democracy" to refer to whatever the pundit considers to be good government, such as a democratically-elected rightwing government's powers being ham-strung.
I think this is actually true. The path of European migrants leaving Asia took them to/through Hungary, not Czechia or Poland. Check out the map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_European_migrant_crisis
Of course even if one thinks that it was wise of Orban to keep out migrants, it does not follow that he should fire schoolteachers with contrary political views, use government money to gain control of media outlets, or be re-elected prime minister forever no matter how badly he screws up everything else.
Approximately zero Syrian refugees wanted to go to Hungary; it was just between them and Germany / Sweden / the Netherlands etc. The actual problem there was that the EU (or more accurately the Schengen area) has an internal return policy, where the country where illegal immigrants first entered needs to take those immigrants back from other EU countries (even if those immigrants set out because the chancellor of Germany invited them). Orbán tried for a couple weeks to just ship refugees across the country, then richer EU countries started getting cold feet, he got cold feet that they will ship those people back to Hungary and he won't be able to send them anywhere else, and built the fence.
This was a somewhat legitimate problem, unfortunately Orbán realized that scaremongering with refugees works extremely well, so even though the migrant crisis ended, state propaganda media continued to pretend that Hungary is being besieged by Asian hordes.
Comparing Orban strictly to his predecessors I think is a category error as a rebuttal to this sort of argument.
It is great that Orban was able to win an election against bad predecessors by talking about all the ways his ideas were better than theirs.
It is bad that it became increasingly uncertain that he would have anything other than a hand picked *successor* and that the strength of their arguments or improvement in quality of life would not be relevant.
What does “solve for the equilibrium” mean?/gen
It means someone has been reading too much Tyler Cowen.
You're being Straussian.
I liked that line. Using a TC quip against a comment in a post that in large part is also a counter to TC. But your observation may also be literally true. For all 3 of us.
In this context it means, "if everybody thinks this way, what is the result," i.e. you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views.
For every action, there's often an opposite and (approximately) equal reaction. In this specific case, Scott is worried about escalation. If the Rightwing breaks the rules of Liberal Democracy, the Leftwing will break the rules as well.
And yeah, it's Tyler Cowen's tagline. Basically a restatement of Supply & Demand.
The Leftwing is already breaking them and this: "you'll get everybody electing corrupt and undemocratic leaders who also share their views" is definitely happening on both sides already. As an example:
Pedro Sanchez, president of Spain and current world bastion of the Socialdemocratic Left:
-stuffed ballots to get elected in his party's primaries
- drive to power funded by his father-in-law's prostitution business
-got into power on a no-confidence vote because of corruption proceedings against the governing right-wing party
-now has three of his own ministers, including his right-hand man sitting in jail on corruption charges
- his wife on trial for corruption (she somehow managed to become a tenured professor at one of Spain's most respected public universities, despite having only a high-school degree)
- his brother on trial for corruption
- his Attorney General convicted of revealing private information (against a prominent right-wing regional governor) and defenestrated
- Constitutional Courts completely under his control
- State statisics office (responsable for polls) completely under his control, and routinely giving his party 5-10% better results than actually end up happening
- State TV and radio completely sycophantic towards him
- promotion of laws to silence any right to far-right media outlets who are naturally critical with him
- his government routinely critical in the media about judges who rule against his interests (such as the judge who convicted his attorney general and the judge who has brought his wife to trial) undermining the separation of powers
- lost his second election but managed to stay in power by forming a coalition with right-wing separatists who had perpetrated a coup by unilaterally declaring Catalunya a separate country, and whom he said, before the election, he would never form a coalition with and never pardon
- after being elected pardoned the right-wing separatists whom he promised never to pardon
- invited into his coalition the basque separatist party comprised of ex ETA members, who were assassinating people up until about 2003, and have never apologised for doing so
- has not managed to pass a budget in the entire 4 years of his second term
- has justified not stepping down (despite all of the above) because "Spain needs to build a wall against the far-right and the right" (ie everybody to the right of his party, over 55% of the voters based on polls at the moment) because they are a "threat to democracy" (but somehow insisting there is only one legitimate party that everyone "who values democracy" must vote for isn't a threat to said democracy...)
- has brought in a law to give automatic citizenship to grandchildren of people exiled during Franco's dictatorship, as they will all presumably vote sympathetically to him
- constantly likens the far-right and right to Franco, and to dictatorships, but is currently best friends with Xi Jinping
There is actually more, but I will leave it there as I think it paints an adequate picture.
Sanchez is currently trying to sell himself as a great champion against Trump (because his domestic popularity is such a disaster), but he has done much of the same anti-democratic stuff as Trump, he's just left-wing... and left-wing sympathizers naturally seem to look the other way in his case.
Hungary isn't western Europe and you shouldn't assume it would be the same in a counterfactual without Orban.
I think the counterfactual was demonstrated 20 years ago: a proud, beautiful, but starkly post-Soviet country with few exports and a weak economy. Orban's rise was disappointing but not shocking, and something similar could happen again.
It is complicated. Orbán basically invented the word "illiberalism", and that is largely because partially Western liberalism came to Hungary in a wrong way, and was not even ready for it even if it would have been the right way.
Let's talk about the right way first. For example all those white Americans in 1965 who supported the civil rights movement of blacks, they understood it is going to cost them. But they had so much surplus that they felt they can sacrifice for justice. It does not work in a poor country. Hungarians feel they themselves are the victims of poor circumstances, so they have nothing to offer to the Roma or to gays or trans people or anything like that. They were not ready.
Now as for the wrong kind of liberalism. First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country. Same as in Russia. Then it was that kind of liberalism that is talked about it here, too, that somehow tolerance means tolerating crime and disorder.
So Orbán's illiberalism was a rebellion against this.
> First it was mostly neoliberalism that talked about the wonderful market and effectively meant allow international businesses to loot the country.
The realistic alternative was to get the country looted by the local strongman.
For example, in 1990s Slovakia during Mečiar's regime, instead of selling the state property on a free market (where mostly the foreign investors would buy it), it was sold (so cheaply that it was practically donated) to local entrepreneurs from Mečiar's party. His voters applauded this, as from their perspective it meant that the national wealth will stay in the nation.
What actually happened was that these entrepreneurs turned out to be so incompetent that they ruined the companies overnight, and then there was 22% unemployment (on average, which means that in some regions it approached 50%). Some companies went bankrupt, the rest was sold to foreign investors for about 10% of the original price (and the money now went to private pockets, instead of the national budget).
Today, the situation is back to normal, and yes the major employers are German (Volkswagen, Kaufland, Lidl, HELLA, Henkel, Slovak Telekom), American (U.S. Steel), Brittish (Tesco, Mondi), Irish (Accenture), Swiss (Swiss Re), French (Orange), Dutch (ING), South Korean (Kia, Samsung), Chinese (Volvo) etc. (Stellantis) companies.
So it seems to me that the situation is opposite to what most people naively predict. "Keeping your national treasures" gets people unemployed and starving, "being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed.
Unfortunately, this sometimes creates a self-reinforcing loop. The more you ruin your country by "protecting" it, the more people get convinced that the situation is so bad that they need more protection.
I think the main issue here is that neither paths lead you to what "feels fair" and what "was promised" -- the "well-fed" still means "pretty far from Western Europe, and huge internal differences" (both in the society and geographically). And this logically leads to people being unhappy from time to time, and want to "try some other way".
""being looted by foreign companies" keeps them well fed."
That neither! They immediately closed them down because they only wanted to buy market share, and 30% unemployment.
best thing would have been to keep them as state property and hire an international, capitalism-expert board of directors and CEO
Companies can have competent native owners as well as incompetent ones.
Foreign purchases can be at a fair price as well as a knock down one.
Rights doesn't have to mean cash transfers.
Unironically using the term Russophobia while Russia is in the fifth year of an all-out invasion of a neighhoring country, while also launching sabotage attacks and trying tp subvert democracy in the rest of Europe, is a bit rich.
Really depends on how aware they were of what they were doing. Although personally I support life in prison rather than death penalty in pretty much all cases.
>> of an all-out invasion
It is not all-out - Russia didn't mobilize men (except for one episode in 2022, and still relying on volunteers; borders are still open). Industry/economy also was largely left as is.
>> subvert democracy in the rest of Europe
And how is that subversion going? Any tangible results favoring Russia? Perhaps, another set of sanctions was blocked? Or maybe some European country experienced a coup?
If I shoot you and miss, would you say its ok?
If you do it with a nerf gun - yes!
I'm not sure we can map the inoffensiveness of a nerf gun onto a conflict that's killed 100,000ish of your people...
Can you maybe explicitly state what you are trying to argue?
It seems that there might be some confusion between 2 points I've replied to above?
1. all-out vs. limited war - this indeed killed a lot of people (but how do you know which, if any, of them are 'my people'?)
2. strength of Russian government propaganda effort - which is objectively very weak ('nerf gun'), and not having much of an impact.
IMO, US / European governments routinely do much more press control / narrative shaping / psyops (in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe), quite often get desired results... but then exactly the same actions are somehow very evil if attempted by China / Russia / Gulf States.
LOL at Russophobia. That is a bit like Gengiskhanophobia.
You're a free person, you can take a vacation in Kyiv and enjoy the raining Iskanders and Shaheds yourself. I'd be surprised if it didn't make you at least a teeny bit Russophobic.
Just commenting here to support you.
By indirect connection, I could name a few thousand people who are actively helping Ukraine by gathering unused meds, fixing wheelchairs, donating tourniquets, donating time and fuel with their truck to get the stuff over there, etc.
Try and find someone who is even thinking of helping Russia in the same way. Not even any of the Russians I know know any other Russians that are willing to help Russia materially (other than being "jerks" and supporting them vocally, while cozying up in western Europe, of course)).
Deeds over words.
Ukraine is considered a US / EU ally, and helping Ukraine socially and legally (i.e. not risking fines / jail time) is way, way easier that helping Russia. So people helping Russia and living in US / EU probably won't talk about it much (if at all).
I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Don't hear much about that either, though. The only people I ever met that defend Russia verbally come across as the type of person that don't give a fish about helping anyone but themselves.
Whereas, on the other side, I have met dozens of Russians sacrificing free time to aid Ukrainians with humanitarian needs. Talking with these people gives quite the opposite impression - level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things. Some with pain in their heart about what their own relatives and friends back home are still saying about them, Ukraine, and the war. The kind of people that would rather work to make an honest living for themselves without trampling over others.
As much as I try to steelman then other side, nothing comes of it. My own experience is obviously skewed *and* biased, but I'm no stranger to self-criticism. And yet, crickets.
>> I guarantee you that there is no jail time or fines on *humanitarian* help for Russia/Russians here in Europe.
Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians (i.e. individuals with Russian citizenship who might or might not be living in Russia, and might or might not agree with official Russian state policies); and same thing with Ukraine (state) vs. Ukrainians.
Helping individuals is much easier; but I would be surprised if from a legal standpoint helping Russia (state) would be no different from helping Ukraine (state), at least in Europe.
Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
>> level-headed people, with lots of varied views on things <...>
There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
>> Well, there is a difference between helping Russia (as a state) and Russians
Yeah, obviously. But strictly humanitarian help is not sanctioned to the best of my knowledge, even for the state of Russia. But I'm not 100% sure on that one and could ask around if you want a more certain answer.
If you want to send Russians, not the state, strictly humanitarian help - knock yourself out. Nobody is going to stop you.
>> Next - how would you technically send humanitarian help to Russia? (Do wire transfers work? Are there well-known NGOs transferring money and supplies to Russia?)
You load up (a) truck(s) with humanitarian aid and drive it to Russia. Just like we and many other private persons do to Ukraine, every week.
As for money/wire transfers, I don't know. Easiest is cash, but crypto or other paypal-like services probably exist.
>>And if you send purely humanitarian help to Russia, what are the chances you would be suspected of _non-humanitarian_ aid to Russian military, and then would have to prove your innocence?
EU border agents would probably search your truck for sanctioned goods. What else is there to do?
>>There are a lot of such people helping Russia - but most of them live in Russia, so - if you are in Europe - you have pretty minimal chance of meeting them / talking to them...
Sure. But for some weird reasons, I can find thousands after thousands of people helping Ukraine outside of Ukraine, non-Ukrainians even. Does that tell you anything?
hard to take that complaint seriously while the EU remains closely wedded to a regime doing the same or worse in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran
The same or worse? Did I miss the U.S. ground invasion seeking to annex Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran? Did I miss U.S. soldiers raping and massacring civilians?
They were talking about Israel, which has had annexations or prolonged occupations of parts of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria in the past and has made clear its continuation of intent to do so very recently. It also, to not get into detail, definitely has cases of soldiers raping or massacring civilians (as do both Ukraine and Russia, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah - this is just a thing that happens in sufficiently large scale conflicts. You can deny it's a structural problem but not really that it happens at a baseline.)
I was talking about both, I don't think you can neatly separate Israeli atrocities from its main patron and enabler, especially as there's been direct US involvement in Gaza (it's why Bushnell self-immolated) and Iran.
Not sure re: Lebanon but it wouldn't surprise me there either.
The phrase many (and myself) have interpreted as an intention to annex in the near future is "the new Israeli border must be the Litani", a river about a tenth of the way into Lebanon (30ish km) from the Israeli border, by the Finance Minister. Other officials tend to use the term "security zone" or "buffer zone" or such to imply an occupation rather than actual annexation, but when asked to comment on the Finance Minister's explicit intent to annex none of them chose to disavow it.
Assuming that's the part you weren't sure on since it's a relatively recent development.
"Closely wedded" means what in your book? There are diplomatic relations between Israel and the EU, but nowhere near the level of closeness as between the US and Israel, and some EU member countries are quite openly hostile to Netanyahu's government.
Regardless, it is quite natural that wars happening in your own backyard will provoke more of a reaction that more distant wars. For example, the Arab world does not care much about Ukraine either and is happy to welcome Russian potentates - that does not mean that Arab complaints about Palestine are "hard to take seriously". Or does it?
Heck, the ruling Saudi and Yemen and Qatari folks would vastly prefer working with Israel over the Palestinians. They just can't say so too loudly.
I just want to note here, that within the EU, Orban himself was probably the strongest and most consistent supporter of Israel and especially Netanyahu.
i dont give a shit about the turd world.
Well, yeah, you can also visit Tehran (although getting a visa might be trickier) and then enjoy nearby denotations of US and Israel missiles. Or you can go to Donetsk and experience Ukrainian drone strikes.
... but how would you decide which <insert country name>-phobia to feed in the first place?
Careful about that first proposal, the Iranian regime is not above using visitors as hostages or hanging them as spies.
There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard. Russia is a clear aggressor in that war and Putin himself broke a treaty he signed, do you know? Treaty on the Russian–Ukrainian border, 2003.
Equivocating between Russia and Ukraine is like equivocating between a SS guard and a Jewish prisoner who got hold of a gun.
>> There is no symmetry between Ukraine and Russia in this regard.
In which regard?
My claim is that if you knowingly and intentionally go to the area under attack by country / armed group X, and see that attack (or its aftermath) with your own eyes, then most likely you would dislike group X more (they are shooting at me/people around me!).
But your choice to go to the side opposing X means you already dislike side X more.
This is fine, everybody entitled to have their sympathies; but I am much more interested in discussing various policies based on their merits, regardless of which side might be implementing those policies.
You heard that very wrong, Orbán was much more corrupt than his predecessors (who were also pretty significantly corrupt).
One way to measure it is kickbacks (ie. whenever you get a grant or win a tender or are otherwise paid from public funds based on the decision of some government body, you have to secretly give the people in that body some part of the money). In the pre-Orbán times, a 10-20% kickback was common. In the Orbán regime, the kickback is usually the majority of the money (e.g. the latest major corruption story [1] involved a 75% kickback).
[1] https://kontroll.hu/cikk/belfold/2026/03/28/evek-ota-eredmenytelenuel-nyomoz-egy-jegybanki-vesztegetes-uegyeben-az-ah-es-az-nni
We're 'Murrican. We don't "bribe" other countries. We "generously offer assistance in international development" which has the "unfortunate" side-effect of destabilizing inconvenient regimes and removing inconvenient politicians from office.
I would say, kickbacks are even the wrong word or approach for what happened. In case of kickbacks, a company takes the initiative to bribe someone from the state, it is very individual. But it was more like a state-ran organized corruption machine where it was the state who took the initative to use business as a cover for shoveling money out of the state. It was the state who decided we want X money, let's figure out what can we build for X*1.25 money, and then distribute the X among political loyalists, propagandists etc. I think the correct term for this is political machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
This.
Corrupt and undemocratic leaders are bad in their own right. Corruption reduces government efficacy by MUCH more than what the people siphon off (say, you give a $200m contract to a worse company, costing the tax payers $20m, in exchange for a $1m payoff), so you get less of everything including what you want.
Undemocratic policies undermine the democratic mechanisms that encourage good policy: normally, voters get mad at gas prices/inflation/losing their jobs/whatever and vote you out, and the fear of this makes you try not to let those things get bad in the first place. If you don't fear getting kicked out, then you have less reason to care about gas prices, and more reason to care about making all the bank notes multiples of nine.
So you just get worse, shittier governance. Then you get negative polarization against all their signature special interest policies, because those things get associated with their shitty government.
Government efficacy is undesirable when governments do generally bad things.
They don't, though, they mostly build and fund schools and hospitals and roads and pay for pensions and unemployment insurance and things like that.
Tanks too.
Paying for pensions and insurance and schools over time translates into a massive drain on the economy, so it would be better if all that stopped.
We're not talking about the alternative being "don't spend the money," though. We're talking about the alternative being "spend the same money for a worse version of the same thing, or more money for the same thing, or some combination thereof."
It is a tragedy that right wing governments have yet to figure out how to remove pensions, yes.
It is difficult for me to imagine the kind of asymmetric dystopia you desire, or the kind of suffering and toil you want to sentence the vast majority of human beings to experience from behind eyes and inside minds that are just as real and wondrous as your own, even if they may in some cases rotate hammers in their mind slightly slower or less accurately (or whatever kind of ‘peasants are NPCs’ BS this implies).
Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
I think corruption is even worse than that. In capitalism people innovate or provide good services to customers because that is the only way to get rich. So when you can get rich on corruption, the desire to innovate or provide good services goes away. So it kills the marketplace as much as badly thought out socialism does.
If the typical free market margin rate is 20%, at least as margin1, it means $100 stolen displaces $500 worth of products and services of the kind that customers actually want.
You are right about the effect of corruption; on the other hand, "capitalism" also includes to build a monopoly (buy out your competitors) and then just collect the money as there is no more alternative. This is also not "doing good work" and "satisfying customers". :-)
Please define globalism, Russophobia and how Orban's policies actually stopped this half formed concepts (also loss of national sovereignity).
Russophobia in particular I have often seen it used as a term to say opposing current Russian expansionism (which in cases of countries bordering Russia could be rebranded as basic common sense). Safe to say at the beginning of WW2 no american was considered Germanophobic for condemning Hitler's invasion of Poland.
Of course there are other use of the word, but not ones that Iv'e personally heard often
I do think there's a genuine phenomenon where Russian culture as a whole becomes stigmatised out of opposition to Putin's current regime - concert halls cancelling performances of 19th century Russian music and the like - and if we're willing to distinguish anti-Zionism (and indeed, even more narrowly, anti-Netenyahu-ism) from antisemitism, it should likewise be possible to acknowledge that there can be a problem of anti-Russian xenophobia without going soft on the current regime.
It should be noted that Putin's war is also a cultural war. His policy is to eradicate Ukrainin culture in the occupied territories, to completely "russify" the people starting with the children. Other countries pushing back on Russia's cultural influence is not a phobia, it's entirely justifiable.
I can understand that in Eastern European countries which are actually at risk of having their culture overwritten by Russia, but I hardly think that cancelling a Tchaikovsky concert in Paris or New York is doing anything to thwart Russian expansionism.
Yeah, well, I didn't talk about Russian expansionism, but about the cultural war; that is a parallel battlefield. Boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest is not likely to save a single Palestinian or Lebanese life either. Sometimes "business as usual" is just even less appropriate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwy9n786n0o
My point is that Tchaikovsky concerts in the West, or classes about Tolstoy on western syllabuses, are not being advanced by agents of Putin's regime. The comparison to Eurovision is fair to a degree, but we're not talking about cultural events organised *by* Russia, just classics of global arts and culture that happen to have been created by centuries-old Russians. Israel's relative youth as a nation makes it difficult to find an exact analogue, but there is such a thing as Israeli cinema, and if some TV station pulled a previously-scheduled rerun of a 1950s Israeli film that had been scheduled internally with no influence by the current Israeli government, I would consider that prejudiced overreach too.
Let's say, you are in charge of providing basic education to the population on the territory controlled by US in Afghanistan or Israel in Gaza.
Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Also, how do you think your policies would look from the outside, if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
>Would you keep education as it was before US/Israel occupation (with very strong 'kill all infidels/invaders at any cost' component), or would you go for policies/education promoting peaceful coexistence?
Granted, it's not entirely off the mark to compare the Russia-Ukrain war with your examples. But if you believe that your points are all that's happening in Ukraine, let me add some more questions:
What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense. What would it look like if I also mandated that all edcuation has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed. What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
Do you need more? I could go on.
>if relayed to readers by unfriendly mass media?
You know, sometimes being unfriendly is the objectively correct behaviour. As is the case with Russia.
End of your reply suggests that you made up your mind and whatever I can say probably would be in vain, but let me try anyway:
>> What would it look like if I mandated teaching material that says that Afghanistan was the aggressor against the US and the US attack on it was self-defense.
Afghanistan under Taliban harbored jihadi training camps, as well and Al-Qaeda leadership, and was not willing/capable to arrest jihadists and Osama ben Laden, so yes, it is fair to point out this in school books, and say that US attacked Afghanistan to eliminate any possibility of another 9/11 (which was clearly an atrocity, with ~3000 civilian victims).
>> What would it look like if I also mandated that all education has to happen in the English language, and that the native languages are outlawed.
Bad analogy - Russian is (one of / majority) native language in those regions, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language_in_Ukraine#Polls (pre-war data); Ukrainian is also one of the official languages in Crimea and Russia-controlled part of Kherson region. Ukrainian is not outlawed in any of the Russian-controlled territory (compare with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Ukraine_"On_protecting_the_functioning_of_the_Ukrainian_language_as_the_state_language"/).
>> What would it look like if I flew airplanes full of Afghani orphans (that my government caused) to the US, to be adopted against their relatives' will.
If kids are not orphans (which might take some time to ascertain during the ongoing war), then kids should be returned to their legal guardians. However, there are stories like this - https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/virginia-supreme-court-rules-us-marines-adoption-afghan-orphan-stands-rcna258881
If those kids are indeed orphans (i.e. there are no relatives who have legal custody, regardless of why it happened), then the state has the duty to provide them with food/shelter/education (especially if it considers these kids its own citizens), including via adoption; doesn't look very good - but alternatives seems worse.
There can be and it's generally performative and useless to actually affect the Russian war effort. Still I find the comparison with antisemitism unconvincing. Antisemitism is based on centuries of proven hate and violence inflicted against an isolated and during the time of persecution innocent ethnic group.
This is not remotely close to what's happening today against Russia.
No, the amount his buddies were stealing literally led to a serious dysfunction in public services, in the trains catching fire due to lack of maintenance way. And sorry to say that but after 2022 Russophobia is objectively correct and globalism looks a whole lot better than that.
One of my closest online friends lives in Pittsburgh! She says “very cool working class culture, lots of anarchist punks and other lovely counter-cultural weirdos”, I guess working class culture can also mean “kinda poor”
Nothing says "upholding national sovereignty" like supporting Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.
He was free to leave the EU whenever he wanted.
"It's fine to bend democratic as long as you advance <purely ideological ill defined pet cause>" isn't a great way of doing things and not how the west has worked or achieved its success until now. People who often claim about wanting to preserve the keys to that success should pay more attention to what they keys *are* instead of just going with vibes.
No idea what's your problem with Russophobia
If there is any embodiment for "loss of national sovereignty", "globalism" and "corruption" that's Russia
Every single Russian politician who didn't use the term Russian as a slur, is killed by Putin in not so subtle way
(most translations ignore it, but Putin uses colonial term for Russia like "Cisleithania" for Hungary)
And it's not a linguistic quirk, you may look on Putin government and institutions and find how much length he went to make majority-minority rule in 85% Russian country
Yo
Or you may look into constitution, and find that Russia belongs to "Multi-ethnic Cisleithanian people"
Or finally you may look at his foreign policy and find he spend last 12 years in cringe cold and then hot war with Ukraine, Ukrainians closer to Russians than Berliners to Bavarians, painting very soft protection of Ukrainian culture as something only nazi would do
Like, Russia is in real life all the "globohomo gay agenda Klaus Schwab eat bugs own nothing be happy" state that exists only in memes outside of Russia
As a Russian, I can confidently say that Europe isn't as Russophobic as it should be.
>In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, whose Wikipedia page includes a “Murders Of Political Opponents” section (always a good sign!)
Which Wikipedia pages have notably cursed headings?
The one for Australian film producer Pat Sullivan takes you on a pretty wild ride. "Rape Conviction." "Racism." "Involvement in the creation of Felix the Cat".
It seems unfair to have a whole section labelled "Racism" for someone born in 1885.
(Especially when there's nothing there except a second-hand report of a single incident where he didn't hire some black guy.)
It's Wikipedia! Would you also remark upon, say, the Daily Stormer's lack of even-handed coverage of people of Jewish ancestry?
Are you alleging that Wikipedia feels the same way about Australians as the Daily Stormer does about Jewish people?
No, the relevant bias here is not against Australians.
Who is it bias against?
Whatever happened to be the bias of the editor who last touched that page.
It's pretty pervasive on political articles.
The same people that the (left-leaning) mainstream media is biased against, because they're the only allowed "reliable sources". See here for elaboration: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin
Well, it's really a sub-section of controversies, so I feel its a bit fairer.
Lord Dawson used to have a heading "Regicide of George V". Sadly, this got edited to the mealy-mouthed heading "Death of George V".
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1665/
Orban reminded me of the the Daleys, who were mayors of Chicago for over 40 years between them. Orban, like the Daleys, was a pretty crooked political machine boss.
In the late 1960s, student radicals tended to refer to Richard J. Daley as a Fascist, but that quickly calmed down and largely vanished before his death in, I believe, 1976. Very few people called Richard M. Daley a Fascist.
The Daley family was so little suspected of Fascism in this century that Barack Obama selected William Daley, son of Richard J. and brother of Richard M. Daley, as his Chief of Staff for his third and fourth years in office.
Of course, the Daleys weren't a threat to Democracy.
How could they be? They were loyal Democrats.
For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley held back the last Cook County precincts until the downstate Republican machine caved in and laid all their cards on the table, setting off an appreciative celebration of Mayor Daley in Hyannisport among Kennedy staffers (according to Theodore White's memoir "In Search of History").
ah, didn't read your comments before recalling that old joke!
There were two massive cases of vote fraud in Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs) involving Democrats when I lived there in the 1980s:
The 1982 Senatorial election when the Democrat Adlai Stevenson the Something did improbably better than all the polls predicted until finally, several days after the election, the Republicans scraped together enough votes in DuPage County to end it. Stevenson, a naive blue blood, kept demanding a recount although all his boys kept telling him that, you know, Adlai, we gave it our best shot, so it would be best to let bygones be bygones and not turn over too many rocks with a recount. Stevenson's recount led to several dozen Democrats and a few Republicans being convicted of vote fraud.
Then the Democratic mayoral primary in 1987 appears to have had massive vote fraud on various sides.
Neither scandal directly involved a Daley, however.
For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
> For example, in the 1960 Presidential election counting Richard J. Daley...1982...1987...
> For some reason, though, we don't hear much about how the Democratic Party of Cook County was a threat to Democracy, especially not when a Cook County Democrat was elected President.
Why are you stopping at 1960? Go back further, you may find more interesting and highly relevant information for 2026 voters. For example, my understanding is that there was significant voter fraud among the hunter gatherers in the Jeaga tribe who used to occupy the Palm Beach area. In fact, they didn't even have voting! So we should be somewhat suspicious of the current president, who spends quite a bit of time in that region.
How are Democrats immune from being threats to Democracy?
Democracy is when Democrats win.
This is really low effort and makes the comment threads way worse. Less of this please.
It's a perfectly reasonable description of the highly successful narrative engineering that biased elites engage in. Canada just got a majority by the fairly manifest bribery of opposition MPs, the media are glowing about it
Who says that?
Democrats.
Two basic sets of questions for you.
1. Do you think this tactic used by Democrats, of unfairly calling their political opponents threats to democracy, has been effective? Have Republicans been harmed by it? Should they be worried?
2. Assuming the implied obverse is also true--that Republicans, by contrast, more consistently refer to their political opponents using unexaggerated & readily defensible language--does it suggest some kind of path forward or actionable outcome for Republicans? I.e. What would you wish Republicans to do with the information you've provided?
It's extremely easy to find many examples of Democrats referring to victories by Democrats as being fraudulent. In many of those cases Democrats would be quicker to say so than Republicans.
What if the Daleys and Orban were both threads to democracy?
The Daleys won a dozen or so Chicago mayoral elections. Maybe they cheated once or twice, but still ... the Daleys, for better or worse, more or less represent democracy in action.
Personally, I'm pretty pro-democracy. Let the people have what they want, good and hard.
But I'm also aware that smarter guys than me such as Plato were not pro-democracy.
Orban has only won five out of eight elections to be Hungary's supremo, but it sure seems that the people who claim to be "pro-democracy" are much, much angrier toward him about the five times he won than they are about the three times he lost.
I don't think anyone is angry about Orban *winning* elections. Rather people are angry what shady things he did in order to support himself winning the elections, and how to build large parliamentary majorities out of very thin popular vote majorities.
But all of this is already in Scott's blogpost above. So your argument seems rather disingenious.
Yep, the Daleys were corrupt and bad and undermined democracy.
Maybe would have been fascist or authoritarian if they had had the power to be so. But since Chicago is a small part of a larger mainly-democratic polity, we (fortunately) never got to find out.
The Daleys are my go-to example for "good corrupt government." Yes, they were corrupt machine politicians who made Chicago their personal fiefdom. But they were genuinely attached to it. "This is MY city, so it better be functional (or it makes me look bad), semi-solvent (or it can't pay me off), beautiful (because I'll always live here), host important events (to show off my importance)." The Daleys, for all their faults, cared about the long-term health and well-being of THEIR city, perhaps mostly for selfish reasons, but nevertheless it put guardrails on it. The current Mayor Johnson, and previous Mayor Lightfoot, are excellent examples of the perils of the alternative - also corrupt, but more ideological and rootless, with less location-permanence and personal investment in the cities they run. You get the sense they'd abandon the place in a heartbeat to advance themselves (e.g. Lightfoot getting booted and immediately going to Harvard / Michigan).
*Noblesse Oblige* is a very real concept, in my experience. The nobles expect to get *paid* and *respected* for their *oblige*, and they don't expect the rules to apply to them, but there's a massive difference between an upper class who feels a responsibility and ownership toward their local town or city and one who doesn't.
I knew my (small-town rich) grandparents-in-law as fairly narcissistic, small-minded people. But at their funeral, it was amazing to hear all of the work and donations they had done for the benefit of their hometown. They really cared about it, and their actions showed it.
Yes, exactly. Today's upper classes, it seems to me, still expect to get paid, demand respect, and to have the rules not apply to them - but without any corresponding responsibility for the ongoing health of the polity. Sure, you'd be better off with honest government officials who aren't quasi-feudal, but that's not the choice available. More often it's either pure climbers, ideologues, and looters, or else the feudal fief model where at least there's some personal connection and stake in the enterprise by the local nobility.
I might reconsider that go-to example, at least in the case of Daley Jr. He was responsible for a number of public finance blunders, most infamously the parking deal which is sending our meter revenue to Abu Dhabi for the next 50 years. Johnson and Lightfoot haven't done anything close to that. And Johnson is very much a Chicago-bred machine politician in the mold of Daley, not a parachuting elite, so your criticism of him from that angle doesn't make much sense.
Really though this entire subthread is kind of silly. "Chicago politics" is a punchline due to the kind of stunts that the Daleys pulled, and to spin that into some sort of partisan victimhood narrative is a stretch. I'm glad that Chicago has moved on from the Daleys, and glad that Hungary has now moved on from Orban.
Johnson in particular is so unpopular that his worst ideas have often been killed off. That he is a creature of, by, and for the CTU, with a dash of befuddled woke for flavor, does not inspire confidence that he is permanently yoked to the city, although he's so incompetent and hated that he may not have a featherbed landing elsewhere like Lightfoot. Instead the city remains billions in deficit and with dismal credit / bond ratings. In 2008, the year of the "worst deal of the century" (no question it was bad), Chicago's bonds were rated AA. Now they're BBB. I would happily take Richard J. or Richard M. over Brandon Johnson any day of the week, and based on his single-digit approval ratings I'd guess that large portions of Chicago's electorate would as well.
EDIT: Also, as to "partisan victimhood," all of the above are Democrats, as you know. If anything it's a generational question - old vs. new Democrats. I wouldn't call that "partisan."
The decline in bond rating just proves my point, Daley got a bailout that screwed over the city's finances in the long term. And he had other similar deals like the Skyway tolls, the parking meters deal was just the worst of them. I'm not going to defend Johnson, I just don't think it's accurate to say he isn't attached to the city, nor is it really relevant to his (lack of) effectiveness. Rahm has been our best mayor this century IMO, and he went off to be the ambassador of Japan or whatever after he left office.
Re: partisan victimhood, I was referring to the original comment comparing Orban and the Daleys, not anything in your reply. Sorry for the confusion.
I don't know how many states have one of these, but I bet it's less than 50.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Illinois
The brother of a friend of mine in Chicago was a U.S. Senator. He didn't even bother running for a second term because, being a rare honest man in Illinois politics, everybody who was anybody in the state was mad at him.
Daley II had a pretty good record for awhile so when the now infamous parking meter deal came along, people were too trusting.
There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion". I think this is a reasonable argument to hold against people who say any threat to democratic values must come strictly before any other election issue - a candidate who seems 10% more authoritarian than the alternative but who you agree with strongly on many other issues probably is a better choice to vote for in many cases.
(In practice people almost exclusively accuse only people who's other policies they don't like anyway of being authoritarian, so not sure how many such people even think they have to make this tradeoff).
I basically agree, but the more you separate out "real dictatorship" as a category containing only the worst and most unlikely outcomes, the more that real dictatorship is very bad and even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent.
I also think there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things. The same way that a candidate with good policies who also rapes children might be consequentially better for the country than a candidate with bad policies who doesn't, but you can have a win-win bargain between different parties by all of them agreeing never to vote in someone like that no matter how good their policies seem.
In general dictatorship seems to be a high variance mode so most of the worst failures of government are pretty dictatorial (Stalin, pol pot etc - Mao is a clear example of how a single bad leader can deliver much worse results than the baseline for his system if he has enough power). So it makes sense to worry about it.
But it has to not be the *only* thing you worry about, because that leads to paralysis and "nobody should ever be allowed to do anything", which is also really bad. The example of this is New York after Robert Moses, which decided "hey a guy with too much power pushed city planning in a direction we didn't like, let's make sure nobody ever has the power to change anything again" and thus got eternally stuck in its post-moses planning.
To my eyes, your first paragraph doesn’t say much except, “No, you’re wrong, it *is* a slippery slope.” I wonder if maybe AI has gotten you too much in the habit of thinking in apocalyptic terms.
Your second paragraph is sounder, but if you accept that both sides have to be constantly vigilant that potential autocrats don’t gain power, I don’t see why you imagine that such an agreement could be arrived at.
(I *especially* don’t see how you imagine it could be struck in the US after the last twenty years. But you’re talking about theory and principles, not the situation on the ground.)
"Small chance" is very much *denying* "slippery slope". The point of the slippery slope metaphor is to argue that something is likely. Scott's point is that if something is bad, then even small chances are relevant.
Also, no one should be saying "both sides" have to be vigilant that autocrats don't gain power - *all* sides should be vigilant, and we shouldn't pretend that people who opt out of two major parties can ignore autocracy.
Agreed, if you want to criticize it it's more Pascal's mugging then slippery slope. Argument was trading off some democratic value support for support in other categories may be worth it. Rebuttal is ant-democratic can be really bad even a small chance is therefore bad. But without saying how small and how bad it leans into Pascal's mugging style argument.
Fair enough; I agree with tg56’s assessment. But if Scott doesn’t think it’s a slippery slope then I’m not sure his call for action (“even small chances of it are worth spending a lot of effort to prevent”) makes sense. A concerted political effort to stem potential autocracy seems quite likely to produce the autocracy it seeks to prevent, either by direct action or by reaction. What we need is a cooling off, a stepping back. We’ve had two decades with an atmosphere of “it’s now or never” on both sides.
To get in a panic over Trump, the first Chief Executive in my lifetime to actually reduce the size of the executive branch, is indicative of this mood, not of Trump’s actual threat.
I think it's a bit weird to focus on the *size* of the executive branch, while ignoring the degree of centralization. Trump is the first president to make personal demands about what people at so many levels of the executive branch were supposed to do! (Everything from asking them to cancel individual grants to finding reasons to prosecute particular people to renaming parts of the country, on the basis of "the president's priorities", rather than treating the executive branch as a system, the way previous administration had done.) The Supreme Court has endorsed this idea, that perhaps the executive branch is meant to function as a "unitary" agent. But this is definitely a move towards concentrating power in an individual, not distributing it!
But overall, I agree - many attempts to enshrine policies that oppose autocracy tend to push towards autocracy as well. It's often hard to distinguish anti-virus software from malware, given the control it has over your computer, and the immune system is actually the cause of many diseases (like lupus and arthritis and allergies), even as it protects against others.
Well, there is only so much the Executive can do by his own hand. If your point is that the executive branch is working against the wishes of the Executive, then I can only agree, but in that case an autocracy by Trump seems even more remote.
The centralization of the executive branch isn't a threat to democracy -- in fact, it's putting the power back in someone *elected*'s hands, instead of a bunch of unelected, almost completely unaccountable (look at the struggles to even slightly reduce their numbers or fire the ones that were actively sabotaging changes in policy from the political side) bureaucrats.
Now if it's power that the executive branch *shouldn't have* (because the federal government shouldn't have it OR because one of the other branches should have it), that's more of a concern. But no one's actually talking about changing *that*--in fact, the Democrats have been pushing for *more* independent (ie unaccountable to anyone, including Congress) agencies!
The executive power belongs entirely to the President and him alone. He can (and often should) choose to delegate, but he cannot legitimately be *forced* to delegate. The prosecutors and grant writers aren't some independent branch with independent authority. Either they have legislative power (which is a separation of powers problem and itself a threat to democracy), judicial power (same deal), or they have executive power (which isn't theirs but only delegated), or some combination.
And IMO Congress delegating *legislative* or *judicial* authority to the executive (see all the rule-making executive branches and the whole administrative judge complex) is a *way* bigger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done.
“there might be a sort of deontological bar to consider dictatorship risk before other things”
But this is undermined by your (correct!) point that “antidemocratic” is a spectrum, and approximately every ruling party is at least a bit antidemocratic when they have the power to be and think they can get away with it.
You can consider dictator risk before other things, but if the choice is between 10% dictator risk with 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, and a 15% dictator risk with 100% of your other preferred policies being enacted… is that really a clear choice to pick the former?
How about "consider relevant differences in dictatorship risk between the candidates"? Obviously nobody is worried about a 1% difference, especially not if other concerns point in a much different direction.
Sure, but that starts to sound less like a “deontological bar” and more like regular old consequentialism.
And in any case, endlessly arguing about whether the difference in risk is 1% or 10% is kind of where we’re at right now. It doesn’t seem like a clean solution.
Per your last paragraph: If you think that there is 0% of your other preferred policies being enacted, than I hope it sparks some reflection. Either your assessment of likelihood is very bad or your preferred policies are very bad in the sense of "approximately 0% of other voters/citizens in my democracy want the same or similar policies". The latter is actually a feature of democracy, no? And if you think you know better and still think those policies should be enacted, and you better bend the system in order to achieve it.. then I hope at some point you are going to ask "are we the baddies?"
Being enacted *under the alternative leader*. In this hypothetical we're talking about a potentially authoritarian leader who still has a decent chance of winning the election (despite being perceived as authoritarian even by some of his own supporters), so presumably his actual policies aren't unpopular.
Yes, this is what I meant. You’re choosing between two democratically viable candidates (so, both are pretty popular), one of whom has a somewhat higher chance of becoming a dictator but whose other policies are much more aligned with your preferences.
And obviously in any realistic democracy, the candidates with a viable chance to win don’t literally disagree on 100% of policies - but it may be the case that they disagree on all, or nearly all, of the policies that are “up for debate” or likely to change over the course of the next administration. For example, I think it would be fair to say that a Trump 2024 voter likely disagreed with ~100% of the immigration policy changes during the Biden administration.
There's almost always a spectrum in any deontological category.
You can still have simple rules. Pick a threshold of democratisation, and vote only for candidates expected to be above that threshold.
If all candidates are below,l the threshold, vote strictly for the candidate more likely to have the higher democratisation.
There’s also the case that a lot of good things in society are downstream from democracy (via corruption and undermining institutions etc) and that the damage is similarly continuous. There’s no sharp threshold so modeling it as a Risk for some sort of Event which marks the point of no return misses a lot of the negative consequences.
This is true but a different mechanism - e.g. New York or California governance isn't exactly authoritarian but as one party states they still suffer all the other downsides of being weak democracies (like the corruption and weak institutions).
I think, ultimately, there are unfortunately sometimes blurry lines between "ordinary politics" and the meta-politics about whether anyone is undemocratic (and thus undermining the conditions of ordinary politics). Or the entrenchedness of parties can be bad even if they aren't doing anything concrete to undermine democracy. But at the same time, I feel like this blurriness can be used to obscure the plurality of mechanisms by which the spectrum of democratic backsliding affects people negatively.
Yeah. The issue with there being multiple mechanisms which enable democratic backsliding is that they often imply different solutions - for example if you're worried about an executive concentrating power and restricting free elections you want to double down on voting for your own party (assuming you're a partisan who believes only the other party's candidates do this, which most voters are). But if you're worried about single party rule and lack of accountability you want to be more open to voting for the other party.
The California gerrymandering thing is a good example of this tension.
(There are solutions that work for both - e.g. I generally support voting for more palatable candidates in the opposite party's primary and think it's good for both these issues - but there are tensions).
Someone who's got sufficiently extreme bad behavior in their personal life - and thus, presumably, is a good enough liar to avoid having that land them in prison - might reasonably turn out to also be lying about what their public policies will be, and/or the expected results of those policies.
> There's a case to be made of a mix of (charitably) "even supposedly anti democratic leaders are only like 10% worse on democratic values" and (uncharitably) "democracy is far less fragile than you think and even evil rulers can't easily undermine it" which together boil down to "democratic backsliding isn't a slippery slope, it's a high friction slope with some reversion".
Could you explain what you mean with the first ("charitable") part? Aren't there quite obviously antidemocratic leaders who are like 95% worse on democratic values (Kim Jong Un, or Stalin, or Hitler, or whomever you consider to be an *actual* dictator)?
Charitably/uncharitably towards the anti democratic leader. In practice "willingness to break democratic norms" is a spectrum among politicians, so if you live in a fairly democratic society you're much more likely to have a candidate who's like, 20% more willing to be norm breaking than his alternative. While obviously there exist people at the end of the scale, most people on the authoritarian spectrum aren't at the end of it.
I think it's pretty obvious that democracy is a spectrum. As Scott said, wannabe authoritarians are going to push as hard as they can, until they can't. Judging where that stopping point lies is tricky, and the price of failure is revolution -- and thus Orban chickened out. Trump is also famously known for chickening out; but the situation in the US is different. We are halfway down the road to a cult of personality, and are long past the tipping point of the cult of political identity; thus, Americans are much easier to manage than Hungarians.
I feel like we should be able to do better than calling democracy a "spectrum"; there's multiple different ways that democracy can go wacky.
1. A country where the party in power routinely rigs the system in their favour, but not enough to stop themselves from losing, and then the other party comes in and rigs the system in their own favour, so it doesn't really matter that much.
2. A country where there's two parties that alternate power, but neither of them actually satisfies the populace's preferences on some particular issue.
3. A country where all the democratic institutions seem to be there and working, but there's a weird equilibrium where one party keeps getting voted in decade after decade.
3 is Japan, and for a few decades was also India, Canada, and Mexico.
2 is the United States on many things, and I'm sure some other relevant countries.
Has 1 happened anywhere? In any case, it seems unlikely to me that "it doesn't really matter that much" if you get long periods with one party in power through rigged elections, followed by long periods with another party in power through rigged elections.
I think you see something like #1 in the UK where both parties have an opportunity to appoint life peers to try to stuff the House of Lords, but they only do it when a prime minister steps down so it is designed to be self balancing.
I would assume #1 happened in Bangladesh but don't know for sure.
Congress and then the BJP in India seems a pretty good example there.
3 is also true of a number of state and city governments in the United States and is often associated with a lot of soft corruption
In Japan, getting a female PM from the conservative wing of the conservative party that has ruled the country nearly uninterrupted since the end of WW2 is apparently so much the only slightest glimmer of reformist the populace can imagine getting that they give her the first ever super majority.
I feel like I should be learning more about something by witnessing it close up. But all I can manage so far is stuttering "guys you know its just going to be more of the same right?". Its not even that I want the opposition to win. Its just i feel baffled by the expectations gap.
There are also a lot of countries with more than two parties, which adds other options, for example, a coalition dominated by one party that keeps adding more extreme parties to remain in power.
Seems like a democracy that has gone "wacky" is not easy to differentiate from one that hasn't.
I think there's both a spectrum, and a quite clear difference between cases like Communist countries where there's no opposition party allowed to compete with them, and cases like Orban where he just stays in power longer than we in the US would permit with our term limits after FDR but can eventually come up short in his Nth election.
In Orban's case, it's not just that elections were perfectly normal and everyone got to campaign fairly and he just happened to keep winning, the way that it has often been the case in places like Canada and the UK. You should re-read Scott's post, and maybe his earlier posts on Orban, to get a sense of what he actually did.
I read Scott's post and his original on Orban, and don't think there's a simple definition of "normal" or "fairly". People can always claim an election is "unfair". An actual transfer of power to an opposition party via election is a proof by example that we don't see in any Communist dictatorship.
Yes, people can always *claim* an election to be unfair. But nevertheless, there are differences of degree of fairness, and you might look through Scott's list to see proof by example that many other democratically-challenged leaders have also actually transferred power to opposition parties via election. Being communist isn't the only way of being bad.
No, not via election. Most of his examples were referenda/plebiscites and/or didn't result in transferring power.
Orbán completey rewrote the election law pretty much first thing after election. It contains several slight nuances, each adding just a couple of seats to his party -- if you are really interested, I can list half a dozen similar stuff. And these are just the election laws, for example, Scott's estimate of the 90% party-controlled media is roughly correct. The elections in 2014, 2018 and 2022 were clearly and obviously "unfair".
(2026 as well BTW, just now so many people were fed up with Orbán that they vote for Magyar pretty much "no matter what". Magyar is also a right-wing populist, BTW.)
My understanding is that the system benefits the largest party, which was previously Fidesz and is now Tisza.
In part, yes. (Though Orbán took the time to gerrymander as well, and the population of the districts is not uniform either -- the law expects some 30% maximal difference (or maybe +/-15% from the average, I can't recall exactly), while the max/min ratio is now around 2. (Orbán's party, as most right-wing parties are, is more popular in the rural areas, and of course districts in the cities are more populous.) There was also a minority seat (for the German minority), who also voted with Orbán. There are unverified votes from the neighbouring countries (cca. 200k from the total of usually 5M), usually 90% Fidesz (this time "only" 84%).
The strategy BTW built on the demographics factors: the supporters of Orbán's party (itself a moderately right-wing, populist party, roughly) is of a similar demographics, while the opposition is fractioned into several groups (far-right (formerly the Jobbik, now Mi Hazánk), "commie nostalgics", city liberals, all their separate parties in most cases). So yes, when these groups run with independent parties (which would be the case in a normal European democracy), the Fidesz wins, and wins large, due to the several tricks. (As happened in 2014 and 2018.) When the opposition joins forces, they can be mocked as the Coalition With the Devil (former PM Ferenc Gyurcsány), and becomes unpopular, as it happened in 2022.
Currently, the Tisza proved to be the largest party by far (the far-right party got 6%, which is pretty much what anyone expected; the nostalgic commies and the liberals/protest party got like 1-1% each -- 1-2 years ago they were around (more like slightly below) the parliamentary limit, i.e. 5%). The reason is that lots of people fed up with Fidesz, practically casting a protest vote (pretty much a "with us or against us" situation).
But this is temporary, as the demographics are still quite different. Furthermore, Tisza currently looks like a right-wing populist party (i.e. a better version of Fidesz, e.g. Fidesz 15-20 years ago), which is again not to anyone's taste. I mean, the three parties in the Parliament are all right-wing, and all are populist... This is not a long-term equillibrium.
Tyler Cowen using the fact that Orbán conceded as proof that Trump isn’t a threat to US democracy is a little rich considering he rather famously did not concede last time he lost. Which I would go so far as to suggest indicates that he might even be a fair bit worse in terms of character than Orbán.
He didn't concede but he also didn't _not_ concede.
He didn't say "I concede" but he did all the actions of a person who has conceded -- he didn't need to be physically removed from the Oval Office, nor did he set up a White House In Exile and continue to issue orders. He put on a big show of not conceding but in practice he conceded.
He attempted a coup. After it was thwarted, he remained uncooperative with the transition team. Then he left with his tail between his legs. That's not conceding, not even "in practice."
Which part was wrong? He very famously didn't cooperate with the transition team, and while there's some reason to dispute whether Trump himself attempted the coup in 2021, it's clear that he didn't do much to try to stop it.
This is a poor way to hold a discussion. Please do not do this.
Banned for this comment.
No, if you'll forgive me citing Tyler Cowen again marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html it was a riot. Riots are of course bad, and Trump should be condemned for pardoning rioters (along with basically every other pardon), and the President's pardon power should be removed.
No, it was a coup. You seem to be rounding down everything Trump did to January 6th, which was just one of many things he tried to do to overturn the election.
See: https://benthams.substack.com/p/trump-attempted-a-coup for a complete rundown.
I actually agree that "people taking the nuclear codes away from Trump" was a major and under-discussed issue after Jan 6th. And it does reflect poorly on the Dems and people in the administration that went along with it.
But to be clear, it reflects poorly because they *didn't* impeach him even though if they were all worried that he'd launch nukes for no reason ... and it reflects *much more poorly* on Trump and on Republicans who continued to support him.
Like, there's a reason Republicans don't go around yelling about the one thing that actually happened that legitimately looks like the deep state coup-ing Trump.
He says that Trump tried to steal the election. But coups normally happen without elections at all! That's a separate thing.
That simply isn’t historically true. Elections are very often a prelude to coups. Virtually the entire history of the French Revolution is a list of elections that were followed by coups
Just because something is a riot doesn't mean it's not a coup. I don't think Trump intentionally instigated a coup attempt, but he doesn't intentionally do a lot of the things that he eventually takes advantage of.
A coup is a sudden strike to seize power. You can only pull it off if organized in a military manner. A riot is when there's a large enough crowd breaking laws that local law enforcement is overwhelmed. Rioters can't hold up to actual militaries (hence the Iranian regime remaining in power).
Yes but riots can be used as part of a larger scheme to facilitate a coop.
No, it was a coup attempt. Donald Trump created a series of false slates of electors in seven states he lost, then attempted to pressure Mike Pence to use them to throw out the true slates, then when Mike Pence refused, sent a mob of violent people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" at the Capitol Building to try to pressure him even more.
He tried to cheat. A coup requires security forces seizing the area.
That’s really a very specific type of coup that you’re describing. The typical developing country coup in the 20th century where a faction in the armed forces arrests the President and occupies the TV station.
But historically most coups aren’t that. It’s usually some faction in the regime using some mixture of force and procedural shenanigans to seize power. It doesn’t have to be the army proving the teeth. On that model Jan 6 looks like an incompetent attempt at a coup. The rioters intimidate Congress into using an unprecedented legal theory to recognize alternate slates of electors, the case goes to SCOTUS and they approve the result, either due to more intimidation or because they approve the scheme.
I don’t think the argument that just because this was done incompetently it wasn’t a coup attempt really stands up. The best argument it wasn’t a coup is that is there wasn’t the required element of coordination between the regime and that rioters. I don’t really buy this but I can see that it’s a possible objection
His attorneys assembled "alternate" electors as a necessary part of their lawsuits challenging the results in those states (as has been done in the past) to avoid a procedural hurdle known as "mootness." Without alternates that the court could hypothetically bless upon a successful claim, the courts would not have been able to rule on the merits of his challenges, something that I hope we can agree every losing candidate should be entitled to.
He then pressured Mike Pence to delay certification as those lawsuits played out, which he refused. They lost the lawsuits anyway, so their electors who were explicitly conditioned on winning those challenges would never have been certified regardless.
You can see more from Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law here: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-constitution-protects-fake-electors-law-history-presidential-election-722c9db0
He pressured Mike Pence into throwing out seven lawful slates of electors. If these electors had been thrown out, either he would have a majority of remaining electors, or he would have forced it into a vote by the majority of representatives from each state in the House, which he expected to win.
Then, after doing that, he sent a violent mob at the capital, telling them that "if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election" and watching and sipping Diet Coke as they beat cops.
He did some effort to not concede, which failed. It's very charitable on your side to say "in practice he conceded" after he called Georgia secretary of state to "find votes" to secure his win, after he called several governors to pressure them to not certify Biden's victory in their state, and after he put pressure on Pence to not certify the election. And that's forgetting all the false claims he made about the elections.
Given that the entire National Security and Intelligence Team (such as Attorney General Bill Barr) said there was nothing to any of the cheating allegations, causing Trump to try to do an end run around them, my priors don't change at all.
After 240 something years, the end of Trump 1 made it so we can no longer say that America has an uninterrupted chain of peaceful transfers of power. That cannot be considered a concession
Sure, and if there's any such dispute in fifty years, some future person will do what you're doing and say "after 300 something years …." There have been plenty of similar cases of some unrest after elections in the past, quite famously in 1876, as the easiest example.
Can you elaborate on the 1876 comparison? My understanding is that the dispute was institutional, with competing certified slates that required a resolution mechanism, and that Tilden accepted the outcome once it was reached. This seems like an entirely separate category from a losing candidate personally choosing to resist a clear result. Is there something I'm missing that makes it a closer parallel?
It is my understanding that there were plenty of armed Southern militias credibly threatening a march on Washington to get Tilden into office, and managed to exact significant concessions from Hayes in exchange for not starting a civil war.
I don't think they had the capability of threatening DC. But the military occupation of the south had lost political support over time, so they were willing to give that up while retaining most power at the federal level.
Yes, but Tilden didn't direct the militias (afaik) or refuse to concede. I'm fairly certain he was happy about being able to both have the popular vote victory and escape the stress of the presidency. Doesn't the relevant parallel require the losing candidate to be the one resisting the peaceful transfer of power, rather than the supporters and surrounding unrest which the candidate eventually quelled?
Did the militias actually come?
I'd say the easiest example would be the election of 1860. I heard there might have been some violence after that one.
I wouldn't. Not an example of violence used to prevent the transfer of power to the winner of the election. The Battle of Fort Sumter didn't start until more than a month after Lincoln assumed office, uncontested.
Are you not counting the Civil War?
You might have to throw in Presidential assassinations as well. Hard to argue it's a peaceful transfer of power when the pervious occupant was violently murdered.
Presidential deaths aren't transfers of power - the same electoral slate remains in office.
"I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is President!"
You’re omitting some actions he took between November 3 and January 20 that were the opposite of conceding.
Hey quick question, why didn't Trump stick with Mike Pence as his VP?
I'm not the OP but what's the answer to this rhetorical question? I assume it's something to do with not stepping down but I wasn't sure of the exact reason you're hinting at.
The reason is that Pence refused to certify a set of fraudulent electoral slates from states that were won by Biden, but those slates claimed those states for Trump. If Pence had co-operated with the plan, Trump would either have successfully stolen the election or there would be some sort of constitutional crisis.
The point of the rethorical question is to say that the US was one man's integrity away from a successful Trump coup.
Submitting fraudulent certificates of ascertainment is illegal, and rightfully, several people were indicted for it.
When you say “the Supreme Court [was] investigating the election,” what are you referring to? Did the Supreme Court ask anyone to send more elector slates? Worth noting that the Eastman memo explicitly advised Trump/Pence not to check with the courts before executing the plan.
Consider that his opponents technically conceded when he won, but proceeded to launch a national scale conspiracy theory that Russia got him elected, which was deeply democratically corrosive. After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election. What he did was wrong - was it more wrong? It was really just more stupid. I hated the idea of Trump but by that point I didn't really consider him to be breaking norms in the way that they already had
Conceding but definitely not conceding in the most sophisticated and effective way you can is just as much of a threat. The J6 people got Shanghaied in extraordinarily hostile court settings. And pretty much nothing, to my knowledge, has happened to the collusion conspiracists
Yeah and in 2016 they also launched dozens of frivolous lawsuits, repeated ad nauseam the claim that the election was outright stolen and that Trump did not win the votes attributed to him, phoned election administrators to try and strong arm them into “finding” votes, insisted on vetting all future hires on a purity test of agreeing that the election was stolen, and never officially conceded.
(Sarcasm aside since I’m sure you’ve had enough and feel sorry for being so silly. It actually is a recognised fact that Russia DID attempt to intervene in favour of Trump. That is verified. Whether it was decisive is unknown and unlikely.)
My understanding of the Georgia phone call was that Trump honestly believed that the votes could be "found" - though I have no expectation that that was an accurate belief. You may be unfamiliar with the civil judgment against Trump which was and is extraordinarily salient to his supporters. This kind of thing basically melts the "quality liberal democracy" fuse. For instance, it's entirely out of my character to have no concern about Trump making a huge amount of money with his gaudy meme coin after his election. But because of the half billion judgment against him, which was later voided, I have literally no issue with it. It's an efficient way for him to fund defenses against future lawfare. This is Grok's summary:
"A Trump supporter might reasonably see the New York civil fraud case as extraordinary lawfare because Attorney General Letitia James— who campaigned explicitly on targeting Trump—used a rarely invoked state statute to pursue a real-estate developer over asset valuations that caused no proven losses to sophisticated banks and insurers, who did their own due diligence and profited anyway. Judge Engoron then imposed a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty (with interest) plus a three-year ban on new loans from New York financial institutions, which Trump's team argued made posting a full appeal bond "practically impossible."
To outsiders, it looked like selective persecution: the massive "fine" was later thrown out entirely by an appeals court as an unconstitutional excessive penalty, yet the fraud label and some restrictions lingered, saddling Trump with huge legal costs and publicity damage during his campaign—without the state ever showing real public harm. In a city where such valuation practices are common, it appeared less like neutral enforcement and more like stretching the law to financially and reputationally cripple a political opponent."
The knots you tie yourself in….
> his opponents technically conceded
You write this like that Democrats conceded but only in some narrow technical sense that's actually misleading. There's no sense in which they didn't concede. Not only did Hillary concede the next day, but Obama invited Trump to the White House a few days after, said that he was the president elect and he'd work with him on the transition - something every president in recent history has done, except for Trump in 2020.
> After this abuse of institutions, norms, and trust Trump no longer had any reasonable expectation to think that they wouldn't try to steal an election
There was no such abuse, and even if there was, this doesn't follow at all. But of course if it did follow, it would follow all the more so that Democrats would think that *Trump* would try to steal the election in 2024 and would justify Dems stealing *that* election ...
It's certainly debatable as to whether Trump no longer had a reasonable expectation that norms would be respected but you might find it interesting to ask your local LLM this: "Are there any classic quotes in which Hillary or other Democrats described Trump's victory in 2016 as illegitimate in an unusual way for American politics?"
I did and it gave 7 examples.
Then I asked if anything similar happened with Obama in 2008 or 2012 and it gave 8 examples.
But of course both are small potatoes compared to Trump's (and other Republicans') comments - and actions - in/since 2020. To bring up the previous example, Bush had Obama at the White House, Obama had Trump, Trump didn't have Biden because he never acknowledged he lost and his administration didn't cooperate with the transition, then Biden had Trump.
On the most basic level he's the only one not to concede, and saying "but Hillary called Trump illegitimate 3 years later" is very obviously not the same thing.
We are not too likely to persuade each other any farther, but I appreciate the reminder about the birth certificate people - especially when I asked the question and found one of them was Trump, though he eventually disavowed it
The episode was especially painful, because it was a great opportunity to change the law so Schwarzenegger could run 😅
Tyler Cowen is such a twit sometimes
I continue to think this overestimates Trump’s ability to plan
Edit: rather than being obscenely lucky and having absurd instincts.
Orban's situation was quite different, too: he lost 55% to 36% with 80% turnout. That means that anyone not deeply beholden to him is going to defect immediately. Trying to fight in that situation could land you prison or dead. Trump lost by only a percent or two and had a reasonable chance of a comeback.
I like the percentage scale! You could even directly couple it to the election result, as in, “this democracy has a 4% deformation, because one party can shift the result 4% in their favor”
I think gini ratio should be a nice equivalent. Truly egaliteratian republic should have "power inequality" of zero while full dictatorship have the opposite. There's also equivalent mechanism of money begets money, power begets power.
That doesn't count, because 4% is just Lizardman's Constant, which I have just realized explains quite a bit about the smaller weirdnesses of many elections.
What poll is that?
You would need to scale those 4% to the amount necessary to reliably win the election. If one party only needs 4% deformation to reliably seize power, then they have little incentive to do more than 4%, and those 4% are effectively 100%.
For a stable electorate that may be true, but I think the US is a good example of a system where it is a bit more nuanced.. These things tend to shift over time, but let's say that for a given decade party A has an unfair advantage of 4% in the house of representatives (because of more successful gerrymandering, poll access, etc). That means that party B would have to lead the generic congressional poll by 4+ percentage points to have a good chance of winning the house. I think it's a useful metric to describe this as a 4%-deformed democracy.
Other than dictatorships with sham elections, the American electorate is the most stable I can think of (basically 51-49 one way or the other), so I may misunderstand what you mean by that.
In 2018 the vote for the house was 53.4%-44.8% D and in 2022 it was 50.0%-47.3% R (wikipedia). Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
Your numbers have a difference of less than 9 and 3 points, respectively. I consider that stable because relatively few people, on the whole, change their vote from election to election; there is low variance in the results. In such a scenario, little cheating is required and would be hard to detect by the numbers alone.
For example, if you had a country where every election usually varies widely from 70-30 to 30-70, the amount of fraud necessary to invert the overall result would be much more obvious. But in a US scenario, a few percentage points can make a huge difference and are, on the surface, not obviously suspicious.
Edit: Therefore, if one party can swing the result of an election by a flat 4 points, that effect would be much higher in the US than in the hypothetical other country, and calling them both "4% deformed" would be misleading.
I see what you mean! Let's say there was a country of 1 million + 1 people, of which exactly 500k are die-hard team green and exactly 500k are die-hard green red. Oh and there is also one dude who really doesn't care and just always votes red because the red party slips him a few bucks. Therefore the red party is perpetually in power. This would arguably be a very broken democracy.
I'm not so sure though that this applies to the US. Democrats have recently managed to win elections under conditions that unfairly disfavored them by a few percent. And we have excellent estimates on how much their disadvantage was.
In Canada the media is subsidized to the tune of about 20%. This isn't really necessary for their support, but it's not their money so it's a good deal all around
Hopefully all the non-US anglophone countries can learn from the new Hungarian leader's shut down of the state media
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that state subsidy to media, is the same as state-run media, is the same as media run by friends of the leader with an explicit political slant?
The effectivenes of biased media has two driving factors. The level of bias, and the level of credibility. Media that is plausibly ambiguous in terms of bias and control can have an equal or greater effect than straightforward state media
Surely this is a spectrum. On one end, there's a state-run media that says exactly what the president wants said and nothing else, never contradicts the party line, etc. On another end, all media are 100% independent of government and are entirely free to say whatever they like.
If I'm paying your bills, I have some influence over you. Media organizations can and do try to build some kind of insulation between the owners/donors and news operations, but those don't always work. There are many cases of network TV news stories being influenced (and sometimes killed) by the parent company of the network. If Disney owns your network, there are some stories you are not able to run. If Bezos owns your newspaper, likewise, there are some stories you probably won't be able to run (or at least, if you do, it will be bad for your career). You can also have some insulation in the funding mechanisms, like having a government grant to some media outlet that tries to prevent anyone pressuring the media outlet to change its coverage. But again, this is always imperfect, and of course a lot of the partisan decision is which media to subsidize. If we lived in a world where the public radio stations getting government funding were mostly conservative Christian stations, the Republicans and Democrats would basically swap sides on what kind of funding was appropriate for those stations.
I feel like we have a set of recent worked examples where institutional controls on bias were defeated by ideological takeover in a bunch of media outlets, and a current set of worked examples where norms and rules in executive-branch agencies intended to insulate those agencies from politics have been defeated by a president who DGAF about those norms. This should make us all a lot more skeptical about both kinds of controls to avoid bias.
This sounds right. Especially because “avoid bias” is a hopelessly ill defined concept.
I think it's fuzzy, but there was a real and important difference in 1970 between Pravda and the New York Times.
What I want from news/information sources is an honest and competent effort to tell me what's going on. It is inevitable that the people doing that will sometimes get things wrong due to biases, their background assumptions, lack of relevant knowledge, lack of resources, etc. It is not inevitable that the people doing that will knowingly lie, omit information they know to be relevant to spin the story or avoid trouble with their coworkers, phrase things in a misleading way in hopes of confusing people, etc. That's all a choice.
NPR can't help being NPR--a news operation staffed overwhelmingly by educated urban liberals of a particular bent, with all the blind spots and biases that ensures. But they can decide whether or not to, say, refuse to report on some stories for ideological or political reasons, or whether or not to omit relevant details of some story in order to try to shape the political impact of the story. Once they start doing that, their value as a news source goes way, way down for me.
And this is true for every news source. Perfection isn't available, but honesty and competence and due dilligence in getting the facts right is within reach of professional journalistic organizations.
In the Netherlands we have a system where editorial decisions aren't made by one centralized public media broadcaster like the BBC or CBC. Instead, there are a number of different broadcasting associations that get time allotted to them according to their membership. Which they can use for whatever content they wish. This system is a holdover from a previous "pillerised" time, but I think more countries should adopt it
Interesting. So essentially the way it would work is the voter gets a ballot with a number of media organizations, and media organizations get broadcast time according to their vote count?
Not quite. You actually have to become a due-paying member, it's not a free vote.
Do you feel this aspect of the system is essential to its success? From my point of view it seems like it could worsen polarization. And overrepresent the views of wealthy people I suppose.
It's not an essential feestje, but just hope it works over here.
The anti-Orban activity outside of Hungary was 99% institutions who didn't like his policies (being anti the policies of the EU, which is another insane anti-democracy). Go look at the recent election in Romania to find out what kind of democracy the EU likes.
As to Hungary having no tradition of democracy: they had a "Magna Carta moment" 100 years before Britain. (I only know about this from) Mike Johnson's "Revolutions" podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/7-06-the-kingdom-of-hungary/id703889772?i=1000391364389
Having to reach back 800 years to some document giving constitutional rights for *nobles* is just conceding the point.
Ya gotta start somewhere.
Literally Magna Carta
Mike Duncan! Love that dude.
I am shamed. I even looked up his podcast.
We'll let it slide this time, but if it happens again, it's the Earl of Strafford sentence for you.
Yes, we can't have a serious discussion about the political nature of European states and leaders without looking at the big picture and going beyond the scope of a sole country like Hungary.
The EU cancels binding referendums when the result displeases its leadership and then just enacts the same laws under a different name (European Constitution Referendum in 2005) or legitimises and endorses an outright judicial coup annulling a completely free election if they don't like the winner (Romanian Presidential Election in 2024).
The EU establishment also has zero issue with highly gerrymandered voting systems like the one France has, which was explicitly conceived in order to assure the ruling President's party could get an easy parliamentary majority with as little as a third of the popular vote.
Nor does the EU seem to particularly mind nepotistic distribution of government positions, since Ursula von der Leyen was literally weaselled into the position of Commission President through a series of backroom deals despite not even being on the ballot for the 2019 EU elections.
Why do we have a decade-long torrent of mediatic and diplomatic warfare between the EU leadership and Viktor Orban?
Because he made a fool of them during the 2015 refugee Crisis, was able to prove to the European community that you can resist accepting huge amounts of illegal migrants without any serious consequences, and has exercised his sovereign diplomatic right to curate positive relations with Russia at a time when the EU demands closed ranks on this matter. Virtually none of these things have any relation on his supposed autocracy or corrupt nature - he was simply pursuing political goals they disagreed with.
Thank you for your eloquence where I could only gibber.
akkor menj a faszomba moszkvába geci
hát akkor a kurva anyád
I understand the reluctance to use 'dictator' or 'autocrat' until someone is immune to losing power at the ballot box. But what's wrong with 'strongman'? Fujimori and Juan Peron are both classic strongmen and neither ever outright successfully stole an election (Fujimori tried).
Yeah, I think "strongman" is probably the best compromise, although unfortunately it sounds kind of based.
Trump would very clearly like being called a strongman. But, regardless, I think Juan Peron is the historical figure and movement he best resembles.
I proposed „elected strongman“ (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-orban/comment/3580969), maybe the dissonant combination can help: he’s a strongman, yes, but apparently nevertheless constrained to some extent by some system of rules that forced him to go through elections.
I feel like machine poltiics in the US in the early-to-mid 1900s gives a lot of examples of this kind of leader--the machine does all it can to fix elections in its direction, but its abilities are limited, so it has to actually keep the voters reasonably happy or lose power.
An interesting example -- those city "machines" often were very responsive to the masses, in that they provided a system of patronage that took care of the needs of a lot of incompletely-assimilated (and often not English-speaking) immigrants.
But that does expose another dimension: Orban was a "strongman" in that his power was very personalized. The city machines were much more institutionalized, it seems to me, with the same machine surviving for decades with considerable turnover of personnel.
That expression is still often used to refer to athletes focusing on strength training:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strongman
How about "cheater"?
"Cheater" only applies if there's an actual rule violation. I'm not deeply read about Orban, but it's not clear to me that he ever did anything strictly illegal.
Installing cronies in the media, banning opponents from appearing on TV, tapping phones, and gerrymandering the country feel like cheating to me. The other stuff in Scott's list don't feel like the rise to the same level - more like "dirty tricks".
I'm not clear how the "did he do anything strictly illegal" threshold works when we're talking about running a country. Wouldn't someone on this spectrum of authoritarianism be actively changing the rules/laws in their favor and by definition do a lot of things that would colloquially count as cheating but be technically legal under their newly-written laws?
How does Trump being put on trial and convicted of a felony by his political opponents rate in the "Orban tilts the playing field" scale? Yeah, the Democrats lost anyway; so did Orban.
If it's so easy to convict someone of a felony they didn't really do, why is it that Trump isn't able to do it against the vast number of political enemies that he's tried it against? The obvious answer is that, while, yes, the New York case was selective prosecution, he did actually commit those crimes. And, moreover, he stole classified documents from the government and tried to overturn a fair election -- two far more serious crimes that he will never pay the price for because of partisan judges.
The issue of contention in Trump "stealing" classified documents isn't that the government no longer had them, and its operation was impeded by their absence, the issue is that Trump was very likely selling access to national secrets for personal gain, which is a crime which under ordinary circumstances is treated very seriously and has very severe penalties. If Trump had simply forgotten to return classified documents, and then returned them on request, the whole thing would never have been a newsworthy story among everything else he's done.
>If anyone could prove anything remotely close to "selling national secrets" Trump would not have been allowed to run for National Office again**. The FBI is pretty damn good at getting people to resign/no longer run for office if they're dirty. That's a hell of a lot easier than actually putting them in front of a jury, and "It's how things are done."
By doing what, specifically? The case was going to trial, the prosecution felt that they could prove the case to a jury, the judge violated procedure in numerous ways to stall the case until Trump was elected. What specifically do you think the FBI would have done to "stop Trump being a candidate" if the evidence was there?
The answer is "Trump doesn't have the deep state on his side".
And it's not "a felony he didn't do", it's "three felonies a day". Everyone with any money or political presence has actually done something that would be a felony, to a zealous prosecutor.
You realize that it was just a regular jury that convicted him?
You have a good chance of getting a jury to convict a ham sandwich.
And I'm sure he did do the felony; the problem is that everyone in his position has committed a felony so the selective prosecution is actually important. It's impossible to not commit a felony in his position.
Again, if that’s the case, why is he not able to get past a grand jury against Powell or Comey or Tish James?
The expression is ‘indict a ham sandwich’ — which he can’t do —, not convict a ham sandwich (juries find people not guilty all the time)
Comey and James got off because Trump's prosecutor got kicked out by a Clinton appointed judge, who he didn't have on his side. He's still trying to get Powell.
That's a GRAND jury, not a regular jury, which would INDICT, rather than convict, the sandwich. Ham sandwiches are too popular to be convicted!
That's specifically a grand jury, because a grand jury is shown the prosecution's case and not the case of any hypothetical defense. It's not trivial to convict people of crimes: nor should it be.
And, of course, the standard of proof in a grand jury is just "probable cause" (the same standard for making an arrest, or getting a warrant), not "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Famously, Trump's people couldn't even succeed in indicting the guy who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. You can say that it's easy to convict people of felony, because laws are written in a way that lots of people are technically guilty, but in practice it's actually pretty hard to even indict if someone hasn't really committed a crime!
If laws are written in such a way that lots of people are technically guilty, then lots of people have really committed a crime, so are not hard to indict for something.
I don't think comparing the difficulty of indicting someone for a particular action and the difficulty of indicting someone for at least something in their life is really comparable (I didn't follow the Trump case enough to know whether it was reasonable or not so this is just general principles)
A New York jury is not a regular jury. Political orientation, I hear, is now the largest source of bias in the US. You should see the D.C. Mark Steyn case where he was "convicted" of slander. The prosecution didn't even try to prove a primary component of the case and the jury found there were $1 of damages - and assessed $1 million dollars of punitive damages against Steyn. This was overturned as the traditional maximum multiplier was about 7x, with I believe $1,000 punitive chosen by the judge. It was a political circus
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-change-on-trial/id1713827256
Did you actually read the book "three felonies a day"? All the examples are of people who were doing pretty obviously sketchy things.
wait until you hear about how mossad controls the deep state, the illuminati control mossad, and steve irwin controls the illuminati from a secret base on antarctica
It's not THAT easy to get a conviction in the US, and Trump is incompetent.
More to the point, Trump's nature and followers make it hard for him to get a lot of first-rate people to work for him. He's a legendarily terrible boss who has no loyalty to anyone but close family. A different leader with the same broad set of beliefs but without Trump's flaws would have a lot more Marco Rubios and a lot fewer Pam Bondis working for him, and that would probably make it easier for him to tell his underlings to get his enemies and have it actually happen. Further, Trump and his followers just absolutely do not do subtlety or nuance. ISTM that Trump doesn't just want to prosecute his enemies, he wants to be *seen* to prosecute his enemies, and brag about it, and loudly demand that his subordinates get those bastards, and that's the sort of thing that makes judges, grand juries, and juries all balk.
If you pay hush money with your private money, that's illegal because it helps with your campaign. If you pay hush money with your campaign money, that's illegal because you're using your campaign money for private stuff, and also you have to disclose it, but that violates the whole point of paying hush money. But I guess we want to make sure that if any politician pays hush money, whoever they were paying now can blackmail them for having committed a felony.
If this is the worst Trump has done, then he is a far, far better man than I imagined. Probably better than virtually all politicians.
Given what a genuinely sketchy life Trump seems to have lived, it's actually kinda shocking that motivated prosecutors couldn't find more convincing stuff to charge him with.
The felonies Trump was convicted of in NY were really a stretch. They found a way to charge him in NY for violating federal campaign financing laws using a questionable legal framework. I think he's a terrible president but that doesn't mean hitting him with that particular suit was a good precedent.
The election interference case in Georgia was much more serious. I wish it had been allowed to continue.
+1
IIRC, that was derailed by the state AG hiring her boyfriend to prosecute the case.
I think you're referring to Fani Willis, the prosecutor in the Georgia election interference case. A real debacle.
In the post, I wrote:
"Coming from the other direction, even flourishing democratic regimes have some funny business. If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump (the Stormy Daniels case), and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide). If you’re a US Democrat, you may believe the Republicans shamelessly gerrymander any state they have control of, use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller, and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election with strategies ranging from pathetic skullduggery to outright violence3. Still, the 2028 presidential election is a toss-up, and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia is at 70%, and North Korea is at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. "
...so I guess I'm committed to saying it's 2/7 as bad as what Orban did, which sounds about right.
What I would say about the cases against Trump is that, whatever you think of the NY state cases, they aren't nearly as bad as the other cases against Trump being undermined by his political supporters in the government.
The classified documents case and the Jan 6 related charges, all very serious, all with a mountain of evidence, all stopped by Trump appointees/supporters in the judiciary and elsewhere (including the supreme court inventing a "the president is almost entirely above the law" doctrine).
I think we gauge how democratic some country or state is largely on vibes. I mean, our political system has extensive gerrymandering, including legally-required gerrymandering to ensure majority-minority districts in some places. The way presidential elections work make sure that no California Republican or Texas Democrat will ever have a say in who becomes president. Appointed judges routinely overturn laws that are put in place by elected legislators or plebicite. Pretty much every state has ballot access laws that make it very hard for third parties or independents to get elected anywhere. And so on.
Now, I'd say we're still a pretty democratic country--power can and does change hands based on election results, and I certainly think the difficulty of defeating the incumbent party is much less here than in Orban's Hungary or Erdogan's Turkey. But also, it's pretty easy to just gloss over the antidemocratic stuff we're familiar and comfortable with.
This is a late reply but I just noticed this now.
The problem with that reasoning is that you're trying to say that Trump is particularly bad because he does this sort of stuff. You can't *simultaneously* say that when Trump does it, that's particularly bad, and that when the Democrats do it, it may be bad but it's just something that everyone in power does, unless you actually try to compare both sides and argue that one is worse, not just say "look, Trump did bad things".
I'm not sure what you mean. I think on this hypothetical scale, the US Democrats are (let's say) 10%, and Trump is (let's say) 20%. I agree that if this had been the point of my post, I would have had to explain exactly what things Trump did worse than the Democrats, but since it's an unrelated question, I'll just say that I think it's consistent to think everyone is at various (different) gradations of badness.
(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats! There's a tension between 'it's easy to seize power by convicting your enemies in show trials' and 'you can't have a blanket assumption that no powerful person has ever committed a crime'. I think the Democrats probably let Trump's status as their political enemy push them somewhat in how hard they prosecuted him, and failed to follow a sort of appearance-of-virtue-based caution against prosecuting political enemies even when they're guilty except in the most extreme cases, but this is consistent with my claim that they're 10% bad. I think Trump does many worse things, which is consistent with my claim that he's 20% bad.)
>since it's an unrelated question
If you are claiming that your post does not say that Trump is particularly bad compared to his opponents, I don't believe you. It is true that you didn't add the literal words "... and the Democrats aren't", but principles of implicature make it communicate that you think Trump is particularly bad.
>(in this particular case, I do think the fact that Trump was in fact guilty of the felony he was convicted of is pretty exculpatory for the Democrats
Come on, you haven't heard of three felonies a day? It's not as if he was convicted of murder or counterfeiting. All important politicians have committed something that a hostile court could call a felony; whether they get prosecuted is just a matter of whether the people prosecuting have the power and the will.
I guess it depends on how strong the evidence was that Trump really did commit the crimes in question. I mean, what would be the alternative? Give Trump carte blanche for any crime as long as he isn't in power because prosecuting him would be "lawfare" and "election interference", and also giving him carte blanche while he IS in power because presidential immunity yada yada? Oh wait, that's exactly how it turned out... and it's not democratic either.
It's very hard in the US to find someone guilty for something they didn't do. But there's often a lot of latitude in whether to prosecute something in the first place. So the real question there is, did Trump do something that was technically a crime but is done by a lot of people and usually ignored? That might be the case in the Stormy Daniels case (although certainly not in most of his other cases, about refusing to return confidential documents, and his attempt to steal the election).
The Stormy Daniels case was not very interesting but the other 3 cases were serious accusations of serious crime which all warranted charges
He was reelected democratically though. I would characterize a lot of his actions as president as undemocratic, but the election itself was democratic.
Ultimately the Ds never learned the lesson that Trump behaving badly wouldn't give them a "win one free election" card. You still have to put a ticket together, and make sure both candidates can string a sentence together.
I'm divided on the utility of prosecuting Trump's crimes after he leaves in 2028. He definitely deserves it, but I also don't want to spend the next four elections relitigating this disaster.
With any luck he'll be convicted of many more once he's out. If you commit crimes, you should be charged with them.
He and his coalition are pretty unprecedentedly corrupt and anti-democratic, relative to American history.
Who gives a f _ ck
He kept Hungary for the Hungarians.
He kept Hungary for his gang.
Hungarian average salary increased little in the last 16 years compared to other countries in the region.
Given last election's results, I guess most Hungarian voters do care.
Banned for this comment.
And what exactly Orban did to make salaries not increase? I always find such simplistic appeals to economy weird. Russia experienced massive growth in 2000s and early 2010s, but according to Putin's opponents, it's all just because of oil prices and he had very little to do with that. Afterwards this growth slowed down greatly, and that, of course, according to Putin's opponents, was now entirely his own fault, because he has too much corruption or something (I'm talking about late 2010s-early 2020s, pre-Ukraine war, let's not get into that).
Economies are very complex things, depending on many structural and external factors, there aren't really any guaranteed recipes for continuous growth, especially past middle-income zone, and there's only so much that even a 100% dictatory dictator can do, or, for that matter, a 100% democratey democracy can do to make salaries larger, even if they really want to. Case in point, in Finland, widely considered one of the most democratic countries in the world, real incomes have famously not grown for 15 years or more at this point, basically since great financial crisis and subsequent Nokia crash. In fact, it seems that it's exactly the stagnation and backslides in living conditions in much of the Western world that brings characters such as Trump to power; whatever liberal democracies have been doing seems to have stopped working. At the end of the day, it's not like Western people are so enlightened and freedom-loving, it's just that under the current system they have enjoyed high standards of life for decades or more, but exactly to which extent this has been helped by democracy is not at all obvious.
I would generally also say that people who never lived in more than one country typically seem to have very little perspective on whether things in their country are actually unusually bad (or good) or in line with trends. If you look at GDP per capita trajectory of Hungary, it actually tracks Poland quite closely (and, for example, tracks Romania with a rather consistent gap, in favor of Hungary). Or, as someone in another comment complains: "Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating." Um, minus the "educated accused of leftism" part, that happens kinda everywhere now! In Finland for sure.
He created a mafia state where the primary means for companies of being successful is playing the corruption game better, rather than fulfilling consumers' needs better, resulting in approximately zero productivity growth over sixteen years. (Wrecking the education system and the scientific institutions also didn't help.)
He did significantly increase the labor force participation rate during the first half of his reign, which along with the influx of EU funds led to a pretty significant increase in real wages, so he was genuinely popular until the late 2010's; also the regime was significantly less oppressive during that time, although I wouldn't call it a democracy past 2014. But labor force participation can only be increased once while productivity can increase forever, so his system very predictably became a dead-end.
I mostly agree with what you're saying, as I obviously can't show clear links between these difference in salary growth with Orban policies (Gergő Tisza's comment address this better than I could anyway). My point was that one's nationalistic rhetoric doesn't necessarily imply that one deeply care about the wellbeing of the population of one's nation, or that one's policies would provide obvious benefits to one's nation. But I think it's generally fair to assume that corruption and embezzlement correlate with weaker economic performance.
Where do you get your GDP per capita from? Is it adjusted for PPA/inflation? In the data I see Hungary performed worse than Poland, Romania and Croatia over the last 16 years and better than Slovakia (not known to be the least corrupted country in central Europe either)
Yes, that's exactly the narrative that keeps them in power and let's them do whatever they want.
As someone from Eastern Europe, I can say they are not heroes. I wouldn't go as far as saying we are suffering, but it is slow landslide for us, who are trying to live their own lives, start a business and a family.
Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
>Businesses go bankrupt. Educated accused of leftism. Accommodation prices and inflation are sky-rocketing. Salaries stagnating. I can go on and on.
To be fair, apart from the "educated accused of leftism" bit (they're more likely to be accused of not being leftist), that's happening basically everywhere now.
You are right, that's happening everywhere. And there are other factors involved, like COVID and wars. That's the price for oversimplification of my comment to keep it short.
So let's put some numbers. Prices of accommodation in the last 10 years more than tripled here. I checked and now you need roughly 1.5 annual median salaries to buy average house in US according to Gemini (which might be wrong of course). Here, it's more than 15 annual salaries. Why is that? Houses are kept by a few, usually connected to people on the right places. And there are very friendly laws for them. E.g. housing tax is very low, like 3 Starbucks coffees annually. For every house you own.
Inflation? Super high because no investments in anything over the last few years. Half of GDP goes to retirements, so ruling parties are winning all old people votes.
So basically - you put the entire economy in sustaining very few. And there's new term for that I discovered recently - neoroyalism. It's basically feudalism where vassals are companies and friends loyal to the ruling family/party. Downside? It will economically decimate the country as whole in a few decades.
Again, that's not really specific to Hungary. In the UK, where I live, real wages have barely risen since 2008, average house price went up from c. 3.1 times the average salary in 1993 to 8.5 times the average salary in 2022 (and even higher today, of course, but the source I looked at only went to 2022). We have this thing called the triple lock, which means that state pensions are guarenteed to increase by either the rate of inflation, average earnings growth, or 2.5%, whatever is highest. As for starting a business, energy costs, regulation, and tax rates mean that you can pretty much forget about it, even if none of the Prime Minister's friends are interested in the sector. Plus we have loads of extra welfare spending, because we have millions of economically unproductive immigrants in the country. All of which is to say -- maybe Hungary's economy would be doing better if someone other than Orban were in charge, but it's far from guaranteed.
I know it's not ideal in UK either. However, it's important to keep in mind that democracy doesn't imply wealth. Autocracy, on the other hand, almost guarantees the contrary. Sometimes I also think of UK and Japan economic potential as very non-linear, with many cycles of growth/stagnation/downhills, probably given the limited resources islands have to offer. Foreign buyers of houses in London that is generally limited in space is probably not really helping either.
However, I checked numbers again, this time for retirements. UK has replacement rate of 25-30% and average pension is roughly 38% of median salary. Czech Republic has replacement rate of 50-55% and average pension is roughly 59% of median salary. And then there are subsidiaries for rents.
In our house, there are only 2 flats that are not inhabited by people 60+. This is the direct product of pro-russian Billionaire running the country for his 4th term, slowly taking over everything in the state, including media and business. So retirees are far better in Czechia than in UK. But the same can happen in UK if people like Nigel Farage lead the country for some time.
As with being better with someone else than Orban. 20 years ago, the entire V4 economy was highly successful. A lot of young and highly educated people willing to make a difference. Nowadays, it's a totally different picture after 4 terms of populist leaders in 3 out of 4 of those countries. You can ask GPT to compare economies of last 20 years of Hungary and Poland.
So it's not impossible that if Trump people stay there for another 10 years, houses will have 10 times more price tag, usually owned by people connected to trumpists, who collect money on rents. Mortgage will be accessible only to those who work at Google/OpenAI. I mean accessible, on 30 years loan, they still won't be able to buy it right away.
Then you get the same Orbán/Fico/Babiš reality we are facing right now. That is the price for autocrats/neoroyalists/illiberal democrats or whatever name you find for them.
And then there's business part I forgot to mention.
You can do your business in your field usually until some rulers friend wants to start own business in the same field. Traditionally it was construction, but there are new ones, IT or even environmental magnates recently. Oh, psychological counselor? Be afraid of a day some king's friend with a degree from health studies will want to do the same. Then they impose new rules that are hard to follow and easy to break. So you either join them, keep very low profile or face penalties and prepare for endless battles.
Like a recent law against "international agents".
This logic is beyond stupid. Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project? Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it? You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
>Why should we care about your little nationalist pet project?
Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively.
>Why is hungarian culture so important you need to destroy institutions to achieve it?
Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?
>You live in a globalised world with other people now, your culture will be changed, get over it.
This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want.
"Obviously a lot of people do care about it, both positively and negatively."
That is not a reason *why* normal people should care, the vast majority of which do not.
"Why are the institutions so important that Hungarian culture should be sacrificed in order to keep them alive?"
Institutions are materially beneficial for people's lives, even people outside of Hungary, whereas culture is a simulacrum, a form of high level human social role playing basically. It means nothing concretely, and can easily be changed.
"This isn't the nineteenth century any more, countries should be free to be as globalist or protectionist as they want."
Not if they are damaging their own people, which in this case they were, for 16 years.
The Hungarians got sick of him and elected someone else "for the Hungarians".
In fact, they elected Mr Hungarian (Magyar) himself!
Hungary for Hungarians, and Mr. Hungarian for Hungary!
What's that supposed to mean, no migrants? The rest of eastern Europe also has close to no migrants.
As Bret Devereaux notes, the United States is not, and never has been, the homeland of an ethnic group. So as an American, I consider "He kept Hungary for the Hungarians." to be a *primary* reason I don't want to see any US politician copy him.
> I’ve also heard the term “hybrid regime”, but you can’t naturally say “Viktor Orban, the hybrid regimester of Hungary…”
Regimester is too fun a word, we've got to use it now. A regimester, you know, somebody who's crookedly in the bag for a regime, but a smidgen lovable at the same time.
Regimester, said like "jester".
Regimestermaxxing
As a dyed in the wool classical liberal, I definitely would prefer liberal democracy, but I'm not sure calling Orban anti-democratic is the right frame. I think the right distinction here is liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. There have been all sorts of schemes that polled some segment of the population in order to determine who was in office. In many times and places, framing opponents, or preventing them from addressing the voting public through various means, or using dirty tricks to smear opponents were considered within the norms. It's mainly been in the last 130 years or so with the destruction of machine politics things have gotten increasingly tight about using the power of government to stay in office. The spoils system was used in the US for the first ~40% of it's existence and we'd consider that wildy corrupt today.
Using dirty tricks to smear opponents isn't illiberal, it's just corrupt.
Honestly this feels like the best way to discuss the likes of Orban without it turning into a right-vs-left political shitfight, he was a corrupt leader who, while acting within a democratic system, used all sorts of dirty tricks to benefit himself and his party. He wasn't ideologically opposed to democracy, he was just keen on the idea of getting his own way.
Putting it this way I think emphasises the spectrum of continuity between Orban and ordinary politicians in our own countries, rather than emphasising the spectrum of continuity between Orban and Kim Jong Un.
I think the better term is "scummy" or "dishonest" than "corrupt". Taking a bribe is corrupt, lying for your own benefit is dishonest.
He is corrupt as hell.
His old friend, Lőrinc Mészáros is now the richest man in the country (his total assets are around 5B USD). This guy had around 100k USD in 2010, and it is pretty obvious that he is one of the figureheads of Orbán himself (who is officially far from being rich). Mészáros got rich mostly by making business with the state itself (for example, his company manages the highways for some 35 years).
Interestingly, Orbán's father and his son-in-law (István Tiborcz, if you feel like googling him) also made a fortune. But no, Orbán cannot be corrupt.
Kim Jong Un got reelected every four years just like Orbán! It's all very democratic.
I agree that "illiberal democracy" is one of the better framings, but it does bother me that even extreme dictators like Putin hold elections. The only thing you can accuse Putin of not conducting the election freely and fairly, which is the same thing you can accuse Orban of. So can Putin claim to be an "illiberal democrat"?
He hasn't actually lost power yet.
It seems like you’re putting too much weight on the elections as a signifier of democracy rather than looking at the whole picture. You can accuse Putin of killing political opponents. That’s a difference in kind that takes someone from illiberal democrat to authoritarian in my opinion. You could also put throwing people in jail in that bucket. Or operating outside the law (though changing the law to let you throw your opponents in jail I’d need to think some about).
But "operating outside of the law" is a spectrum. Was Biden an autocrat for illegally cancelling student loans (even though he probably knew he would lose at the Supreme Court)?
I don't know what the test for true disregard of the law is, but I seriously doubt it's "this will lose at the supreme court". Prosecuting someone when you know it will lose at the supreme court is generally scummy, but when it comes to other government matters, there's no harm in forcing the court to actually state its convictions, in order to put in line for public and elite pressure etc. If you think the supreme court has it wrong, and you think pushing them on it will be salubrious, that seems fine to me.
It's like with the filibuster. Letting senators filibuster is one thing (a bad thing in my view), but letting them filibuster without having to have the courage of their convictions and actually filibuster publicly- that's worse.
I have no doubt conservative and liberal majority courts would exercise far more extensive and unchecked power if governments tried to avoid ever pushing them into saying no.
I would say that if you knew you’d lose, that’s illiberal and if you ignore a court order, that’s an authoritarian move, especially if it’s related to holding onto power.
This is the Fukuyama 'end of history' thesis, btw. The idea is not that history actually stops, but that liberal democracy, at least for now, is the Final Boss of legitimacy, such that even obvious dictators have at least pretend to be doing democracy. Even literal autocrats realize that only democracy is legitimate, so they go through the motions.
Elections are nothing more that a conventional orderly and non-violent mechanism of legitimizing power. Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion. Legitimization is important, as you can't rule without consent of a significant fraction of those being ruled (not for a very long time, typically, anyway). But ultimately elections serve this purpose both in liberal democracies and in Russia. Sure, in Russia Putin won't let anyone potentially dangerous to him anywhere close to elections, but he still needs elections to see and to demonstrate that he has still enough loyalty to him among the populace.
> Autocrats/dictators usually need them too since the concept of king's divine right is now out of fashion.
North Korea has a hybrid system in that sense - sham elections and divine providence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_cult_of_personality
There is outright fraud in Russian elections. Not so in Hungary, I believe.
https://cedarus.io/research/evolution-of-russian-elections
I don't know if he can, but I suspect he would.
One aspect I always found interesting is the personification of these things. I don't know that much about Orban; I know a bit more about Putin, so let me use that example. Of course, all of this is conjecture, not based on any insider knowledge of Putin’s mind or the exact workings of the Moscow power apparatus, and many will disagree, but for what it’s worth: I do *not* think that Putin rigs elections.
Now, the Russian elections are obviously nowhere near being either free or fair. But, if I had to bet, I’d say Putin really, honestly doesn’t know that. Of course, nobody thinks he personally tells people to stuff ballots here and change the numbers there; I do not think he tells people to tamper with the elections at all, and wouldn’t, by now, believe anyone telling him this happens. I think that most initially elected strongmen, authoritarian rulers, perhaps even dictators start out believing they are democratic and popular – and, since they just won elections, this seems at least broadly true. And then, when something happens that seems to challenge their power, they – at least on a conscious level - *have* to interpret them as nefarious plots, by outside ill-wishers or fifth columnists. When Putin said time and again that the 2011 protests following the rigged elections you mentioned were nothing but a plot hatched, financed and ordered by the US, I believe he meant every word of it. In his mind, he was a popular leader, the elections had been free and fair – what other explanation, then, could there have been for protests?
And, crucially, the more entrenched they become, the less they are able to hear uncomfortable truths, and the less those around them are willing to tell them. I think this was a major cause of the 2022 Ukraine debacle (not just in that it was and is horrible for Ukraine, and bad for most of the world – but also in that it turned out to be a debacle for Russia); apparently, hardly anybody was willing to tell Putin this was a bad idea. I don’t know in how far Orban went down that particular road; perhaps not that far, given that he conceded his defeat quickly and quietly. And I don’t know how far Trump is down that road; whether, say, his behavior after the 2020 elections was just the tantrum of someone who knows they’ve lost and tries their best to hold on – or the righteous indignation of someone who is completely certain they did have the largest inauguration crowd, they are the greatest President in US history, they have actually won the election.
So, one of the biggest alarm bells for me were reports that started during Trump’s first term, that his advisors tended not to tell him things he didn’t want to hear, and that intelligence chiefs in particular were warned not to tell Trump things that contradict his world view or public statements. Given what we see from Trump in public, I have no trouble at all believing this is true; and I do think it’s a major reason not just for foreign disasters, but also for, yes, a threat to domestic democracy.
>In 2011, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party suffered an unexpected setback, winning only 49% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Thanks to gerrymandering, they still barely scraped through a majority of 52% of parliamentary seats,
Can people stop using "gerrymandering" to refer to any deviation from proportionality?
Yeah, something like 90% of parliamentary majority governments throughout history have been people winning a plurality in a majority of seats. That's not gerrymandering, it's just...how the system works.
What would be a better word here?
The US senate deviates from proportionality, but unlike the House cannot be gerrymandered. So the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones (which are themselves known to be dysfunctional in practice).
splitting the dakotas was gerrymandering!
As NLRG notes, the Senate can be gerrymandered, just not on an every-few-years basis like the House can. If a future Democratic strongman president rams through a split of California into twenty 60% Dem states, that's also a gerrymander.
> the term for that is just "not proportionate to share of votes", which is a feature of every system other than the proportional ones
No, it's also a feature of proportional systems. You can never get rid of it as long as the pool of electees is smaller than the pool of voters.
I know most proportionate systems have boundary conditions where you need a certain percent, so even they aren't perfectly proportionate, but I was simplifying.
That's not what I was saying. As long as the pool of winners is smaller than the pool of voters, the results will never be proportionate to share of votes. Boundary conditions are not necessary to the result.
The disconnect comes from the fact that winners have to be chosen in integer numbers, and vote share doesn't.
had you heard of direct representation democracy? from wikipedia:Direct representation is a hybrid form of democracy that combines elements of direct and representative systems to create a more authentic political connection between voters and officials. Unlike conventional representative democracy where representatives are elected by geographic districts, direct representation allows voters to choose any candidate in the entire country, with each representative's voting power weighted by the number of citizens who selected them.
If the vote of each representative is wheigted on how many votes he got you got perfect proportionality. edited for spelling
The Russian 2011 Duma election WAS proportionate.
49% refers to the United Russia results as a fraction of all cast votes (including invalid votes and including ballots for parties that got less than 7% which was required to get into Duma). 52% refers to the United Russia result as a fraction of all valid votes for parties obtaining at least 7%.
Do we know what percent were "invalid" vs for parties getting less than 7%? Also, my understanding is that Russia currently has half proportionate & half first-past-the-post district representation in the State Duma. Was it purely proportional back then?
Sure, you can see all the numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Russian_legislative_election#Results. There was 1.5% invalid ballots and about 5% combined for three parties that were on the ballot but did not get to 7%.
To your second question: yes, exactly. This was changed after the 2011 election.
It might be good to include that the party won a plurality of the vote, with the second most popular party only getting 19. As written, most readers would assume that there was some other party that was more popular. It's not uncommon for large parties to be overepresented and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Why not just say something like “because of their political structure”? The 2021 Canadian election resulted in the 2nd place party having the most seats and that usually isn't described as the result of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the drawing of districts in a way that distorts electoral outcomes in an intended manner. People like to focus on partisan gerrymandering, but there's plenty of examples of racial gerrymandering, pro-incumbent gerrymandering, gerrymandering to dilute representation of particular locations regardless of party, and other cases.
But when you're dealing with districts, even if no one intends any particular distorted electoral outcome, there will be distortions. It is nearly impossible to draw a contiguous congressional district in Massachusetts that a Republican can win, even though nearly 40% of Massachusetts voters vote for Republicans. (The regions that are majority Republican are big enough to make up a single district, but they're separated from each other by some blue regions and state borders.)
Mathematicians have recently developed techniques to effectively sample from the space of all possible districtings of a state, to estimate the distribution. They find that with the voting patterns in Pennsylvania, a strong majority of districtings end up with a larger fraction of Republicans elected than the Republican vote share, just because of how Democrats and Republicans have spread themselves across the map. But the point of using this technique was to identify the distribution of these districtings, and prove that the Republican implemented plan was *even more* tilted towards the Republicans than 95% of all plans, making it unlikely that it was drawn unintentionally.
It's very hard to know unless you do a detailed analysis (or have records of the debates) whether a single case is just the inherent difficulty of putting districts on the map in a way that results in proportional outcomes, or whether it's intentional gerrymandering.
Appreciate you bringing this up - disproportionality is inevitable in *some* metric, and it's just a matter of if you're writing up the system in a way to maximally favor along a specific metric. And to be fair, people often are, but it's still very important to remember that the alternative is just "less severe, less intentional favoring of a possibly incidental group" and not proportional representation in a shining platonic form.
"Getting 52% of the seats due to three parties not reaching the vote threshold." The 49%->52% boost was totally normal, it was getting 49% of the votes that pissed people off.
The real outright manipulation of the legal system happened in the next election, when single-member constituencies were reintroduced in addition to proportional voting. Putin's party won nearly all of them due to having a plurality, thus securing 50% of the seats easily.
First past the post. The US is an outlier because it has two parties, but the last UK election saw Labour get 34.7% of the vote and 64.2% of the seats. This is normal and the main argument in favour of FPTP.
Wildly undemocratic outcomes are an argument *in favour* of FPTP?
It's not a terrible argument. I don't want Alex Jones in the U.S. Senate.
Yes. It strengthens the winning party. A perfectly proportional system could lead to deadlock in the legislature. Allowing the winning party to win by more leads to consolidation of power so they can govern.
It's similar to how some governments prefer a strong executive. It's even more "wildly undemocratic" that 100 percent of the presidency is republican, despite that party winning only about half the vote.
As opposed to right now, where the FPTP system surely is not in legislative deadlock, especially not compared to the many representative democracies in the world.
There's no need to be sarcastic.
Do you agree that first past the post tends to consolidate power?
"Undemocratic" and "proportionate" aren't synonyms. The arguments for a winner-takes-all system (FPTP or Majority Bonus) are:
1) It maximises the number of people who get what they want. Relatively few people want a coalition, so the number of people getting their preferred policies approximates zero.
2) It incentivises parties to win broad appeal. In a proportionate system (which, again, means coalitions), a handful of narrow sections of the population can cobble together a coalition by all scratching each other's backs. If the only route to power is to be the most popular, you generally have to argue for something that at least approximates the national interest.
3) It kills unpopular ideas that attract fanaticism. In a coalition system, the party that really passionately cares about teachers pensions or agricultural subsidies or vegetarianism or whatever can side with others and insist on their thing as a concession, even if most people don't like it.
4) It allows decisive changes of government and lets the populace straightforwardly eject failures. Labour won the last election in the UK mostly because people wanted to get rid of the Tories* and were able to straightforwardly do so. This compares to Germany, for example, where it looks like the SPD are now going to be a component of every coalition going forward, or the Netherlands where Rutte was prime minister for 14 years in spite of not being that popular purely by being head of the party that was floating in the middle of the political spectrum.
*Labour's share of the vote barely changed.
5) It allows unified/decisive government, instead of endless compromise and cludge.
None of these make up for the fact that it allows a government to pass policies that barely over a third of the population want. Or a fifth, judging by recent polling. Is there really a British consensus for banning repeated protests and jury trials?
If democracy means anything it means majority rule.
Banning repeated protests probably has majority support (in the abstract, there's a majority view that policing of protests in the UK is correct or too lenient, in spite of being fairly draconian by Western standards). There's a majority against scrapping juries, which has been an obsession of parts of the civil service and some activists since the early 2000s, but that's the sort of thing you get more of in a proportionate system; if Labour had been permanently in various coalitions for the last 20 years, it's likely to be one of the things they pushed for. If it doesn't happen, it will either be because enough Labour MPs don't want to lose their majorities, or because the Lords blocks it (not FPTP, also not democracy).
If you want straight-up majority-wins democracy, the key is public initiative referenda and other direct democracy measures that bypass elite consensus. You'd find yourself getting some very right-wing social policies (eg. capital punishment would make a comeback) and some very left-wing economic policies (price controls), but that should be the point.
Is it really true that relatively few people want a coalition? In my representative democracy (the Netherlands), the fact that different parties of different political leanings have to work together is usually seen as a feature, not a bug. By that nature, it solves problem 3).
Also, you say it allows for decisive government without endless compromise, but you've simply moved the compromise to an earlier stage, in point 2).
At least in a representative democracy you can actually vote for someone that represents your ideals. In the FPTP system, you will forever have to choose between 2 candidates you're at most kind of lukewarm on.
I don't know, but if a 49% plurality winning 52% of seats is proof of gerrymandering then it literally applies to every non-explicitly proportional allocated legislative body in the world (and even most proportional ones since they usually exclude fringe parties by having a min threshold).
I would actually take a 49% plurality winning only 52% of seats as evidence that a place was not particularly gerrymandered, that's pretty close! The most recent UK election saw the Labour Party win >60% of seats with a plurality of < 40% of the vote. And the UK is not considered to have much of a gerrymandering problem with independent districting, etc. Whatever Putin is/was doing to stay in power around then Gerrymandering doesn't seem to have been a big part.
The legislative system in Russian 2011 election was 100% proportionate, so the concept of gerrymandering simply did not apply.
In the Russian case it was the electoral threshold that excluded small parties. Gerrymandering is something done to districts, there were no districts in Russia to gerrymander because it was (at the time) a pure proportional system.
In other cases, the "gerrymandering" is just the natural result of FPTP being a winner-take-all system. People said that it was "gerrymandering" when the U.K. Labour party won 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote in the last election, yet it couldn't have been gerrymandering since the maps were drawn by the outgoing Conservative government. In the Hungarian case it was because the far-right Jobbik party did not ally with the left (as they would do later), splitting the anti-Orban vote and allowing him to sweep the FPTP seats. Not that that was an accident, Orban set up the system knowing that would happen.
Claude tells me there are no districts in Russia to gerrymander and that what did the work here was a cutoff for proportional representation that systematically benefits large parties. This coupled with the fact that large oppositions get banned in Russia is a good way to keep an edge (but even without banning a large opposition I think 49pct would always put you over the top in a PR with cutoff scheme). I agree that the term gerrymander doesn't quite feel right and probably wasnt the decisive rigging tool when taking it all apart.
I guess the interesting question that everyone's actually asking for is, how correlated is current authoritarianism quotient with rate of change of authoritarianism quotient? What's dx in x?
I guess "liberal" would argue that it correlate positively, any x above zero will accelerate dx further and further until it reaches 100% (or even beyond!). One simple mechanism is that a party that has power to influence election will use it to further and further their grip of power until there's nothing to grip anymore. With this perspective, it's a sliding slope and any x beyond zero must be resisted by any means. Maybe including violence (or even beyond!).
"Conservative" would argue that it correlate negatively. The more x is, the harder it's to raise x even further. Maybe too much x will even make it start to decrease. For an example of this, we can imagine a multi faction civil war where any party that's deemed too strong will soon be ganged up by other parties. With this perspective, high x is not a problem at all and it'll fix itself sooner or later. Any awareness about high x is deemed unnecessary and even fearmongering, especially if it includes a call for violence. We can even be funny and try to induce high x to trigger distaste of other parties and make x go even lower than before.
All variables here is up to debate and ambiguous. I can't even say that if that dx equation converges for any time or place. Maybe it's a chaotic fractal that resist comprehension. It's even more complicated if our target ideal x is not zero. Maybe we can try to oscillate x around our ideal x, but it seems like a very unstable solution.
But this is not a new problem. Ancient Greeks had debated about the ideal x for centuries. Maybe it does resist comprehension.
* liberal and conservative here is in quotes because it obviously doesn't square completely with any real liberal and conservative in any country
Thanks, this is an interesting way to look at things.
Perhaps in your model, when x is less than 50%, dx tends to be negative, and when x goes greater than 50%, dx is positive. Then things tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, and shifts from one pole to the other tend to be naturally resisted up to a breaking point.
This implies that maximum resistance would only become necessary when you started getting near 50%.
It resists comprehension because every power struggle has unique confounders that you can't control for, trivially starting with the given time and place of the struggle. History rhymes, but it doesn't repeat like a scientific experiment, let alone a mathematical model.
Possibly the "conservative" perspective is true, but an additional factor is that sudden changes in the magnitude of x lead to major negative consequences in their own right, from economic disruption (like Russia in the 90s) to outright civil war. It may therefore be worthwhile to try to keep x low even though it is true in principle that a high-x society is unstable and will eventually revert to low-x.
This seems like it could risk endogeneity problems. What if dx is negative but part of the mechanism that makes it negative is people saying "x is quite big and in danger of getting bigger! Sound the alarm! Let's all act to bring x down"
If somebody responded to that by saying "no, don't worry, we actually have good reason to believe dx is negative", they'd be missing the point
(Is "anti-inductive" what I'm gesturing at here? Seems slightly similar to an investment bank saying "no point in us trying to pick winners - don't you know you can't beat the market?")
If dx is random then having positive x is still bad. Assuming 100pct is a barrier where we get authoritarian lock in. The closer we are to the barrier the higher the chance we get randomly locked in. So it is then important that we dont just assume the correlation is negative but actively make it so by voting out material positive x governments.
Edit: I suppose at full generalization this is claiming a complex level dependent dx, but I see less disagreement about what dx tends towards when x=100.
Is it the case that authoritarianism is a directional quantifiable variable? I's say that the fractal/chaos theory comparison is apt, at best, it's a dimensionless quantity. If we state that authoritarianism is related to the institutional reduction of the freedom of citizens, then it follows that the methodological problem is that there is no objective measurement of freedom.
This is a philosophical issue:
One might even state that the creation of a quantifiable definition of freedom necessarily entails that any individual who adheres to it is no longer maximally free.
So while I do think it's a fun idea, the philsoohical paradox at the core of the issue makes X and dX unsolvable variables.
Happy to hear your thoughts though!
This really ought to be elaborated on more. This thought can possibly go places
A tangential, but still important point: democracy is _always_ under threat, same as human rights, piece, etc. Things can be OK in a given place at a given time, but they can go very bad very fast.
"Never more than one generation from extinction."
Places which have had a long period of democratic handovers of power don't seem to "go very bad very fast" in practice. They could be conquered by an enemy, in which case their old traditions might be irrelevant, but their endogenous behavior seems to be more conservative. Although I'm speaking more of the modern world, as the ancient Greeks & Romans were different.
How long is long?
Generations, I'd guess.
Probably a pretty limited sample size then.
As far as I know, the full list of cases of authoritarianism winning (due to internal factors) in modern countries which have had at least one generation (30 years) of democratic rule are Imperial Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and Italy.
Thank you for the evidence
And conversely, (either outsiders or insiders) attempting to install a democracy in a country with little history of democracy seems to almost always rapidly turn into some sort of autocracy, machine politics, or tyranny.
Good write-up, Scott.
Also: an anyone give me a defense of their position that illiberalism doesn't matter because... [your argument] that you think is likely to sound reasonable enough to consider to someone both extremely convinced of personal liberty and who has somewhat idiosyncratic views of social policy, but ones which would (for example) consider saying 'we should incentivize not being gay for [legitimate social concern]' be unacceptably bad, and which give some credence to tradition due to epistemic doubt, and which generally do not consider the nation to be an important thing?
This is not my position but I think they'd say (for example, with regards to immigration) that countries are the way they are because of the traits of the people living there and if you like the fact that your country is liberal, you should support preserving the nation because other nations are less liberal-minded. This is true even if it requires restricting liberalism to some extent because you're doing it to avoid even greater restrictions on liberalism in the future by the more illiberal population you'd have if you didn't.
I can imagine a situation in which this would be optimal, but I don't think the numbers it would take for this to be real are... well... real. you'd need to be taking in, like, full percents of your population of literal Disney villains and it would need to be preventable with very small liberty violations I think... and even then the norms damage could be brutal. feels like the sort of weird hyperbole you get in constrained media/social ecosystems.
Political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to personal liberty. In most autocracies you are in practice free to live your life as you wish, insofar as you don't engage in meaningful levels of political dissent (and the vast majority of people don't really do that under any system).
I think political illiberalism is mostly orthogonal to autocracy.
I agree that autocracies are often authoritarian rather than totalitarian, and don't necessarily restrict non-political personal liberties that much. However, I think that there are quite a few autocracies where the restrictions are much tighter (not just North Korea and *cough* Hitler *cough*). Perhaps more importantly, I think the example of Russian development over the past years shows that authoritarian states can become totalitarian and clamp down on the remaining liberties much faster and easier than truly democratic ones.
Man is political... if you do not have preferences about the rules the govern you, something is wrong; if you cannot voice them, you cannot be free.
Of course, but you can have a society some prople are free because their views align with the collective, while others are not. If the latter people are removed... are the remaining people free?
Thanks for writing this. Excellent points all around.
Maybe it's better that we have Waffle-House-teleporter guy now? He did everyone a service by making it clear he was a crackpot and not to be taken seriously, instead of having a fake veneer of respectability for his dumb ideas.
Are you really saying that endorsing the covid vaccine is equally dumb and just has a fake veneer of respectability?
As opposed to the stupid biases of the earlier leftist experts. E.g. when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
Gregg Phillips telling everyone not to use radios during a FEMA operation because it might teleport you 50 miles into a Waffle House is in res ipsa loquitur territory. Who would listen to something that pants on head crazy? A bit different when the U of Washington faculty and over 1,000 people officially endorse stupidity.
The main issue is that the earlier leftist experts are so much more competent that even when they handicap themselves by prioritizing anti-racism, they can still be more effective at containing covid than the current elites would be.
The worse that could happen? Is that a rethorical question?
The actual worst that could happen is that the pandemic happens now and instead of Operation Warp Speed like we got during Trump 1 we will get.... free bleach? I don't even know what RFK thinks would be appropriate in that situation.
> when various elites used their institutional prestige to launder the view that opposing racism was more important than containing covid.
This is a value claim, not a fact claim, so it is also res ipsa loquitur.
If you want to say it was a fact claim, well - Covid didn't spike after the protests, so I guess it was fine to protest racism.
Don't forget there was a time Trump endorsed the vaccine and leading Democratic candidates did not.
I do think there is significant value in "this guy is all-around crackpot" versus "this guy is 80% normie, 20% crackpot, and uses the normie to launder the crackpot." Funny enough thanks to our dear host's extensive writing history, he even has an essay on that topic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies
>When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.
Though I disagree somewhat with that specific statement, as "misinformation" was created as a category to describe those not-explicitly-lying situations but from the other side.
The "apologize now" people have leftist derangement syndrome. Its completely consistent that prominent media leftists fearmonger and take enormous numbers of shortcuts in their reasoning all the time, and are right about some things some of the time.
I'm a bit confused by the tone of this comment. <Something> Derangement Syndrome has tended to be a rather inflammatory way to call out someone you think is completely irrational in the pursuit of harming <Something> that they have decided is their priority outgroup threat. But the rest of your post indicates you think the <Something> in question also *are* overwhelmingly irrational (enormous numbers of shortcuts in reasoning) and harmful (fearmonger).
It feels like saying people have derangement syndrome just because they thought people who are wrong 95% of the time are in fact wrong 100% of the time is a bit needlessly extreme/inflammatory?
I think the "apologize now" people are gravely mistaken, but the reasoning leading to their position as called out by Scott seems like pretty mundane tribal bias and doesn't require them to be deranged?
I might just read the term "derangement syndrome" as being much stronger than you do - I've tended to see it as pure political shit-slinging that never benefits a measured discussion. The following comment on your part being much more even-handed thus has me confused.
The winner of the election is named Peter Magyar. Magyar in Hungarian means Hungarian. It would be like a US president named Charlie American.
It was the name of the nomadic steppe ethnicity that founded the country. I think the best analogue for the US might be John Pilgrim. Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
> Or John Scots-English-Borderer, if that was a single word.
So like if Hope Hicks became president?
Okay, I'm convinced. Vance–Hicks 2028.
It's also the name of the ethnicity that currently lives in the country; that's why the equivalent is Charlie American.
But you wouldn't call someone "John [the] American" if you were both currently living in America. Surnames, historically, are like nicknames, to distinguish one particular John from the dozens that are already living in your village. If your surname, then, is "Hungarian", it implies that they got their surname when they were living outside Hungary entirely, but already identified as Hungarian.
Why does it matter when the surname came about?
Seems like a real equivelent (in the sense that it is an actual, real name) would be Peter English, for an English person. And yeah according to Wikipedia: "The name is attested from the 12th century. From parts of Great Britain near the borders of England with Scotland and Wales, it may have been applied to people who spoke English, or to distinguish people of English ancestry from Celts"
Well it doesn't strictly _matter_, since it's a mild joke. It's equally mild pushback against the implication that someone named after their home country must be particularly patriotic and thus the ideal leader of that country, because their family got their name while living abroad.
Literally Hungary's name, in Hungarian, is 'Magyarország' . Country of Magyars. It refers both to the ethnic group and the country name, like England or Scotland.
John Pilgrim seems like a poor analogue. People in the USA today don't identify themselves as Pilgrims as people living in Hungary/Magyarország identify as Magyars.
There was a Twitter thread about other examples of this. Charles de Gaulle was one. But there were also some messups, like Francisco Franco (Frenchman France) leading Spain.
Actually de Gaulle's name is probably not linked etymologically with "Gaul" (Gaule in french). De Gaulle's name is derived from ancient dutch "de Walle" (from the wall). Ofc that's less fun.
Yes, he sould definitely have led Wallonia instead.
Leon Britain in the UK.
His parents were Lithuanian Jews who had migrated to Britain before the Second World War, which makes it all the weirder.
Not sure, Jews around that time (and a bit before that) were known to change their family names to better fit the local context. Too bad it did not work, most of the time...
Then there are examples of nominative anti-determinism. E.g. "Jack Lynch" was culture minister of France, which meant he was in charge of keeping France free of creeping Anglicisms.
I haven't looked into his family history at all, but if his family got their surname in the traditional way, as a distinguishing feature, then they got it at a time when they were already Hungarians but were living outside Hungary.
We also have a commenter her going by Gergo Tisza, the equivalent of George Democrat I suppose? (Tisza was, as we recall, the party winning the election.) No wait, it seems it would be George Respect and Freedom.
Tisza is also the second largest river in Hungary, and, as opposed to the "international" Danube, it is held as a symbol of Hungary/Hungarians (both in good and bad sense). (Before WW1, it was located entirely in Hungary.)
(Also it is an abbreviation, that is for sure.)
This is as balanced, clear and thoughtful a take on this topic as I can imagine.
Orban was bad because his government was corrupt (in the mundane, venal sense) and had anti-growth economic policies, not because of anything to do with "democracy."
Can you explain? I tried to give many examples of ways he was bad for democracy. Are you claiming that my examples are false, that they're not really bad, or some other thing?
I'm not claiming that your examples are not factual. (I withhold judgment on that).
I'm claiming that they are not bad in context, especially given the degree to which EU bureaucracy freely and blatantly engages in non-democratic interventions to override disfavored democratic outcomes among member states.
The whole point of OPs post is that there are degrees of anti democratic tomfoolery. The EU is not equivalent to Orban in this regard
Yeah, I disagree.
> Yeah, I disagree.
Which is fine, but you haven't presented any facts or made an argument, so what are we supposed to take from this?
That EU be worse. (A sentiment with which I would agree, btw.)
these are not necessarily unrelated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
Orbán needed to dismantle fundamentals of liberal democracy (such as separation of powers and rule of law) to achieve the levels of corruption he did. You could debate whether that dismantling was inherently bad, or bad because of the corruption it paved the way for, but it seems somewhat academic.
I like the term "wannabe dictator." As far as I can tell, Orban wanted to be a dictator and had no reverence for democracy, but he couldn't make himself dictator because his power had limits and people resisted (and if he had tried to more aggressively become a dictator, people would have pushed back harder, and he feared losing).
I dislike the term "strongman" because because "strong" on its own has a good connotation, and here we are appending it to a neutral word to try to describe something evil.
Also strongman is a bit nebulous. Is Al-Shaara a strongman, was Ataturk a strongman? They both ruled with force and came from military backgrounds, so the dictionary definition could apply here, but obviously these people are very different from Gaddafi and the like.
He was gradually turning himself into a dictator. He got maybe 50% of the way before he bungled up; every year he was more powerful and his regime more oppressive (although still not powerful and oppressive enough, by 2026, to survive the combination of popular sentiment turning against him, a talented and energetic new opponent, and some bad luck).
Also, using median voter theory and consolidating around a guy who is maybe two millimeters to his left (Magyar was a Fidesz member until 2024 and left after they pardoned somebody for covering up CSA).
Two millimeters to the left of where Orbán started in 2010, maybe. But present-day Orbán is on the far right while Magyar is center-right. I'm not even sure it's median voter theory, it's more like attacking the left flank of Orbán's voter coalition in the knowledge that anyone who doesn't like Orbán will vote for Magyar regardless of his policies.
I like the old joke of Jack, Bobby and Daley in a lifeboat that will only support one person.
Jack argues that it should be him because he is the President.
Bobby argues that it should be him because he is the future of the Party.
Daley says, "Come gentlemen, we're all Democrats here, let's vote on it!" and Daley wins by 4 votes.
By no means do I think Orban is perfect, nor should he be immune from criticism. But there have been all sorts of shenanigans from the European Establishment (including the so-called center-right parties, and everyone to their left). Most notable is probably annulling the 2024 Romanian presidential election; also egregious are the threats by Thierry Breton to nullify elections in Germany if there's evidence of so-called evidence (but only if AfD wins, of course). https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1877861172306673790
There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008. I think it's hypocritical to call Orban anti-democratic for changing election rules and then look on happily when multi-party systems marginalize right-wing parties that are winning 20-30% or more of the popular vote, often gaining a plurality.
The nullification thing is a fair point. I don't know enough about coalition politics to have a sense of whether the cordon sanitaires are antidemocratic vs. something the system always allowed.
Some stuff is fair, I think. Other stuff clearly goes against well-established convention (e.g. not allowing the AfD to have a Vice President while allowing smaller parties to have them). And I think it's pretty clear (both from opinion polls, and from election results, especially the two rounds of the 2024 French elections) that a significant portion of rank-and-file voters of center-right parties such as the CDU/CSU in Germany and LR in France, would prefer the right-wing parties to the center-left parties if forced to choose between them.
AfD/Vice-president issue is something that goes against previous convention, but at the same time it is something the system always allowed. In the Bundestag, there is no legal procedure or right for the AfD to get voted in their preferred VPs.
As the AfD is considered to be a risk for our democracy, and parts of the party are officially considered a threat to democracy as confirmed by courts, why should the other parties honour a convention that was traditionally extended to all parties that do not intend to openly dismantle our democratic traditions.
You imply this is not fair, and I imply that it clearly is. There is no point in tolerating those that do not wish to return the favor and are therefore an existential threat to "our way of life".
AfD does not intend to openly dismantle any democratic traditions. It's just an excuse elites make to suppress dissent.
Among other things, the AfD officially called the EU a "failed project" and is generally highly critical of anything EU-related. There have been ideas floated of "Dexit", leaving the Euro-zone, or otherwise diminishing German participation in EU. That alone I would call trying to "openly dismantle our democratic traditions". I'll be the fist-shaking old man here and say "read some books" about history, to understand the importance of the EU and how intertwined and fundamental it is in recent German history.
They also want to massively decrease tax for high incomes and rich people. Again, direct attack on the fundamental post-WW2-German way of life and economics ("social market economy"). This kind of policy is even generally anti-democratic, as it further increases wealth-gaps and turns us back into a quasi-feudal economy.
In foreign policy, they want less coordination and cooperation with EU, and increased cooperation and alignment with Russia. Do I need to comment any further how this endangers our democratic traditions, and democracy in general? In the AfDs most recent election manifesto of 2025, they do not even mention the Russian invasion as anything to be condemned, and instead demand lifting of sanctions and unbridled trade with Russia.
In a previous manifesto, they asked for Bundeswehr (our armed forces) to be used internally for certain purposes. This demand is in direct violation to one of our most sacred constitutional paragraphs, that completely bars the use of Bundeswehr inside Germany in peacetime, borne out of historical experience. Salami-tactics..
In environmental politics, they see our "Energiewende" (energy transition) as a danger to our national energy needs. How ironic! Renewables provide >50% of our electricity and have considerably decreased our need of fossil fuels from Russia and other countries that could extort us (and that includes the US, by now).
Care to rebut me?
You can't just call tax breakes antidemocratic, large amounts of wealth inequality don't automatically lead to dictatorship. Same with leaving the EU, Britain left the EU but didn't turn into a dictatorship.
And them being against Renewables has nothing to do with democracy at all. Mostly it seems like you just don't like the AFD's policies.
Of course, "existential threat to 'our way of life'" is in the eye of the beholder. I'd consider vehicle-ramming attacks at Christmas markets and trade union protests a threat to your way of life, but feel free to disagree.
I find it immensely hypocritical when "democratic" is defined as "my people win an election" and "anti-democratic" is defined as "the other people win an election."
Your accusation is completely off the mark. There is plenty of "others" here to win that I'd call democratic. In fact, our current ruling party is the "other" for me personally, that I happily accept as perfectly democratic, but very unaligned with my own position.
AfD has openly racist influential party figures that are directly flirting with literal Nazi-rhetoric, as well as bending historical facts to downplay the Holocaust and other wrongdoings.
There is plenty of room in democracy to fight terrorists and even be immigration-critical without reviving Nazi-rhetoric. But you seem to have just assumed that I'm a far-left "no borders" type of guy, right?
What is "literal nazi rhetoric"? I only see handwaving and baseless accusations. I assume you are the type to undermine democracy and freedom in the name of fighting "nazis" and "racists" while claiming to defend it.
Democracy can't be left to the voters.
Better: Democracy is too important to be left to the voters.
Could be both, couldn’t it?
Cordon sanitaires are basically fair game. You know them as partisan politics, I believe. That level of granularity it would take to call that undemocratic is not something any known system of democracy can model.
Most democracies are representative - you elect politicians, they go to the capital, and there they go underground to work in the Politics mines 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Their constituents expect results, not so much how exactly they wield the pickaxe.
Even direct democracy can only go so far to take direct control of the process, such as holding a vote on the occasional single law proposal.
I'd like to read more into the Romanian thing - the guy was also apparently charged with plotting a coup (not in some flimsy "do pro-Russia tiktok ads" sense but in the "get a bunch of mercenaries with guns to raid the capital" sense), my default view is that it was still fucked up and a subversion of democracy to annul the election but willing to be convinced otherwise. I don't think you have to have a "no annulling elections ever" rule to be pro-democracy, on some level certain choices by candidates force you into situations where any option is a bad one.
But even if it was completely wrong, in the US at least, nobody holds up anyone in Romania as a paragon of true democracy and wise leadership, unlike the treatment of Orban.
Also cordon sanitaires aren't only against the right. The treatment of Arab parties in Israel comes to mind, and IIRC communist/socialist parties at various times/places.
Outside of “relative to other middle eastern countries” has anyone ever held up Israel as a model of democracy? That’s not rhetorical, although I am incredulous.
i don't see why a cordon sanitaire is undemocratic. winning 30% of the vote doesn't entitle you to a seat in government.
What a beautiful pair of sentences.
Please explain what you mean, preferably without being snarky.
Winning 30% of the vote puts you at a worst-case result of coming in third overall in an election.
There are systems where this could translate into nothing, but the only one you're likely to see described as "democratic" is the case where the total number of seats in government is less than three.
The entire purpose of the cordon sanitaire is to thwart the expressed desires of the voters. How do you describe that as anything other than "undemocratic"?
I mean, back in 1977 Labor became the largest party (a little over 33%) in The Netherlands after leading the most far-left cabinet in our history, but the Christian Democrats (32%) and the centre-right (18%) decided to form a right-wing cabinet.
Seems perfectly fair to me.
What does "a seat" mean to you?
Winning 50% of the seats, rounded down, does not entitle you to participating in government, if the other side can put together 50% rounded up. What's so controversial about that?
It depends on system what 30% of votes translate to. In Hungary's lopsided, inner-rewarding system, Orbán's 39% translates to 52 out of 199 MP, barely more than a fourth of seats, and gives them zero say in the government.
In two-round elections, its common for a relatively strong extremist party to totally fall out and barely win anything in second round since there's almost no voters who have them as secondary preference (France's RN being the most obvious example).
To govern, you always need majority of seats, and 30% pretty much never delivers that alone.
That is fake news. The EU did not nullify the Romanian election, a Romanian court did. And Breton did not talk about the EU nullifying elections (in either Romania or Germany), he talked about the EU enforcing its social media laws in both countries. Here is a description of the specific social media law enforcement that was done in Romania:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_6487
Having laws about what companies can do surrounding elections is perfectly reasonable. And I think it's reasonable that there would be situations where a court may have to step in and order an election to be re-run. But that should be an extreme last resort, especially in the current world, where bots (Russian or otherwise) are always going to be on TikTok, X, and various other internet platforms.
>There's also the various examples of cordon sanitaires or firewalls in various countries, targeting political parties whose politics are squarely within what would've been considered mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US circa 2008.
First, a firewall is a term for a normal political activity: the decision who to cooperate with on the legislative level. Just because a party has seats in a multi-party system, doesn't mean they are entitled to being worked with proportionally.
Second, "mainstream positions for Republican to hold in the US" are, at any point post-Tea Party or so, clearly to the right of mainstream non-US positions and so are not representative for the EU.
What's the most important difference between European center-right and right-wing parties? Immigration. If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened. Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
>If the center-right parties were willing to crack down on immigration (especially Muslim immigration), the right-wing parties in Europe would be greatly weakened.
Doubtful. In Germany at least, proposed immigration policies are largely the core of the far-right's undemocratic qualities. If the center-right adopted those policies, they would either have to weaken them to remain on the constitutional playing field, in which case people would still choose the far-right because they are the undiluted original, or the center-right would become indistinguishable from the far-right, which doesn't exactly weaken the far right in any practical sense.
And none of that even touches on the positive aspects of immigration, which would be lost in any case.
I think some of the proposals by various right-wing parties are bad (forced remigration stuff). But I think it's entirely possible for centrist, even left-of-center parties like Denmark's Social Democrats, to take a stricter line on immigration.
> Instead you get people like Angela Merkel enabling massive amounts of immigration (17.5 million in Germany from 2015-2024, according to statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers-germany/).
Yeah, no. Germany's population didn't increase by anything close to 17.5 million in the last 10 years, that would have been an increase of more than 20%. Instead, it was around 1.3 million. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/672608/development-population-numbers-germany/
And I'm pretty sure Germany didn't get rid of 16.2 million Germans in the same time to make room for all those immigrants.
I assume some of those immigrants in the source I linked to may have only stayed temporarily and then left, so they wouldn't necessarily increase the population by 17.5 million.
And in any cases, the number of deaths in Germany has been greater than the number of births, so you'd have expected a population decline of 3.9 million over that time period with no immigration. (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Population/Births/Tables/lrbev04.html#242410)
According to this there currently live 16.4 million first-generation immigrants in Germany https://www.dw.com/en/germany-1-in-4-residents-has-immigration-history/a-76764004
So close to your number but not restricted to 10 years, and we should keep in mind that this includes inner-EU migration as well.
Merkel is usually only blamed for Syrian immigration which amounts to just 1 million
Also, how many of those first-gen immigrants are from other EU countries?
It is very important since no government can ban that.
statista is notoriously ass for these figures, and this also ignores that most migrants are from the EU.
Annulling the Romanian election was questionable, although (unlike in the US where it is often thrown around as a charge, but with very little substance) Russian election interference is a real and major problem in Eastern European countries, and did clearly happen in the course of that election. Mostly the issue was the secret services sitting on that information and waiting to see first whether they like the election results.
In any case, the "European Establishment" is one of those shallow conspiracy theories where people try to organize everything they don't like into a single shadowy opponent (like George Soros or the Elders of Zion). Romanian democracy has well known problems, although in a different direction -- "deep state" also gets thrown around a lot with no substance, but Romania actually has a deep state problem, with the security services (which largely remained intact during the fall of Communism) having an undue influence on things with not enough accountability or oversight. That has nothing to do with the rest of Europe though.
Right, the US would Never sponsor an investigative journalist who just happened to be investigating a politician we didn't like in order to influence the outcome of the election of a NATO country. Oh wait....
I see that EU will consider releasing $35bn of 'frozen' funds to Hungary now that Orban is gone. E.g., "EU ties €35bn fund release to Hungary's break with Orbán era" (Financial Times) or "EU rushes to Budapest talks with Magyar team to unlock frozen funds amid Ukraine tensions" (MSNBC).
That's a bit misleading.
The funds were blocked due to EU concerns over some policies which Orban refused to address. Magyar promised to solve the issues so the money (probably) will get unblocked. Orban could have done the same at any time.
The better comparison would be trump linking university funding to, I think it was more effort against antisemitism?
Is this extortionary? I guess you have to decide case by case, but generally linking funding to the compliance with some predefined rules is fine with me. You just have to make sure that the enforcement of these rules does not become arbitrary.
Just one example, Orbán created the "foundational model" (or whatnot) for the previously state-owned universities, which became "private" universities governed by some hastily set-up board, full of party members and party-related people. (Everything was quite tricky, for example the substitute of a dropout member is chosen by the remaining members.) At the same time, transparency fell back a lot, and state funds were secured by long-term contracts.
(This, to date, affected thirty-something universities, so all except like two.)
This all happened shortly after the EU announced that in its next fiscal period it will increase funding for research.
From this, one can hardly think of anything else that they want to channel the money towards their own pockets (done before on several other levels). So, in response, the EU excluded these universities from the EU-funded research grants (e.g. H2020).
Long story short, if you want to steal a large part of our money, you get none. Yes, ignoring democratic conventions might had also played a role in all this, but overall this is clearly a dont-steal-our-money scenario.
(Now, don't get me wrong, Western EU members are more than happy to keep their money as frequently as they can. Scientific research funds are quite rare east of the Elbe.)
It is a continuum but there is a big leap at the point of stuffing ballot boxes. There are lots of parties and power players who will accept legal and political shenanigans and pressure on the media even at extreme levels but wouldn't tolerate ballot stuffing.
AFAIK, that's pretty much the distinction between free elections (the votes are cast and counted correctly) and fair elections (the pre-voting process like registration and campaigning is open and equal-opportunity).
I agree and think that is an important and useful distinction.
I feel kind of silly that I've read the words "free and fair elections" so many times and never stopped to dwell on which details fall under "free" and which under "fair."
To be fair, in most cases, people using these words don't really distinguish between these aspects, either. It's become just a shorthand for "good" elections.
Fun fact, a part of the Hungarian votes (about 200k, i.e. 4%) are cast without any meaningful check. There is dual citizenship for ethnic Hungarians living in the neighbouring countries, who can also vote (it is quite common in the area, Romania, Serbia and Croatia surely has some method to handle it). Since it cannot be expected from the Slovak or Romanian authorities to cooperate in such a voting (e.g. Slovakia explicitly forbids dual citizenship), the ballots are sent by mail (simply by post!), and they have to come back in some way (e.g. post, or local volunteers collect them, maybe even helping the citizens in the voting). There is not even a reliable registration of voters, yes, something happens like every 10 years, but whoever dies in the meantime goes unnoticed.
So this is one huge security hole. Not explicit ballot stuffing, but well, you know.
Usually, 90% of these votes go to Orbán's party (this time it was 84%).
(Around the Ukranian border, there were some villages with hundreds of temporary citizens as well, registering just before the election. Sometimes 100+ people registering to the very same address. Not a huge help, but, you know.)
That kind of thing is both very dodgy and legitimate.
Especially if your buddy is the chief prosecutor.
BTW I don't fully get it. I mean, the question was pretty much that is it cheating or not?
To sum it up, Orbán created a mechanism, over which there is no democratic control (or any control at all), but where his people can interfere (he has many active fans in the neighbouring countries who can "help" to "fill" and "deliver" the ballots, but the general sentiment is pro-Orbán there anyway), and which clearly benefits his party. Well, this is pretty much the definition of cheating.
Yes, it is small-scale (resulting in like two extra seats, out of the 199); part of his strategy was to have many small-scale changes, which all happened to favor his party, but which are quite hard to point out (since, you know, "this is only two extra seats").
It isn't cheating, it is bad policy but that is a different flaw.
Well, I stand by my point: creating a mechanism which benefits you, and where some (or even several) people will eventually tamper with the ballots (and they will do it to your advantage, and you know it perfectly well up front, as it is clear as day to pretty much anyone) is cheating.
Or, to put it even simpler: encouraging your fants to cheat on your behalf is cheating. (Allowing them to cheat on your behalf is cheating as well, BTW.)
> are these things bad and undemocratic?
They all seem bad, but "undemocratic" isn't the word I'd use for most of them (gerrymandering was the only one directly related to democratic elections). Lots of policies strike me as bad, but I can't get everyone else to agree that all deviations from libertarianism on the part of governments are inherently suspect and deserve the same degree of scrutiny as restrictions on the franchise.
> In 1988, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, famous for seizing power in a coup and having his opponents thrown out of helicopters, lost an election.
No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite. All people could vote for instead of his continued rule was "No". Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
> In 2007, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed a constitutional referendum that would end term limits and let him rule for life.
A referendum is, again, not the same thing as an election. He didn't have to step down from power, handing it over to anyone else.
> Why did these people hold elections at all?
I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
> Although the popular imagination pictures dictatorship as trivial - just shoot anyone who disagrees with you - in real life it can be a hard problem.
Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
> Or the dictator’s own military or secret police might turn against them.
Communist regimes also effectively solved that first one, such as via purging the military, and I think largely solved the second by purging them as well.
> and maybe even stole the 2020 election (but couldn’t steal the 2024 election, because that one was too much of a landslide)
That theory really annoys me, as I recall the blogger "agnostic" at akinokure.blogspot.com trumpeting how it was impossible for Trump to lose in 2020 because even if they cheated his victory would still overwhelm them... and then Biden won, he claimed he was only wrong by underestimating how MUCH they would cheat, and then claiming that this had completely discredited the election in the eyes of the public because we're all now aware it was a sham. The simpler explanation is just that none of the elections were stolen, Trump won twice and lost once. I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
> use political prosecutions to punish Trump opponents like Robert Mueller
I think he was more of an "opponent" in Trump's mind. He wasn't an actual politician.
> This would retroactively legitimize Putin, Milosevic, Chavez, and Pinochet as “not that bad, really”
No, most of them never lost an election (not a referendum or plebiscite) and then handed over power. It should be noted that Charles de Gaulle also stepped down after losing one to amend the Constitution, rather than losing an actual election to some other politician. He could have stayed on and tried again, but he made the choice to leave. This is separate from being a dictator vs democratic politician.
communists regimes generally achieved power by killing a bunch of people, which maybe makes it easier to keep killing people in office
That makes sense, though I believe in Czechoslovakia they first grabbed a foothold of power within a larger government, then used that to seize power without killing that many people initially.
The bolsheviks did the same in Russia, if memory serves.
There was a Civil War in Russia as a result.
I guess it was the same in most EE countries (in Hungary for sure). Still, there was some killing, but not that much; during and after the revolution of 1956, there was again some; then the system consolidated and went on without murders. (There were other measures like pushing people towards exile, jailing them, or firing them from their jobs (being unemployed was a crime BTW), blackmailing and this stuff.) It could have been going on forever, but well, the economy...
My recollection is that Hungary joined in Operation Barbarossa during WW2, but the Red Army won and took over.
This is pretty much unrelated to the events following WW2. The Soviets occupied Hungary just as they occupied Czechoslovakia (which was not involed in Barbarossa -- well, yes, Slovakia was, but everyone pretended to forget about that). In both places, first a coalition of several parties started governing, there were elections and all that, but of course the Soviets made sure that the communists were included. Then the independent parties were destroyed, one after the other.
It is quite related to the post BTW: even though the Soviets were capturing the country (countries), they pretended that there are free and fair elections, and tried to take over the countries formally following the law, operating behind the scenes as much as possible.
(Oh, and the people rose against both communist governments, although in Hungary it happened a lot earlier.)
> I think that Putin is genuinely more democratic than many Americans believe him to be, though less so than Orban.
What makes you think that? The only charitable explanation for what he's done to the political system of Russia is that he really sees what's happening only in terms of Russell's conjugations.
I'm not sure what they meant, but I think there's often a meaningful distinction of how democratic a leader considers themselves to be and how democratic the system around them actually is.
Putin's first priority is to ensure that he remains in power. Since the "divine right of kings" doctrine is thoroughly discredited these days, even dictators pretend that their power derives from the will of the people, and maintaining this pretense goes much smoother if you're actually popular.
Part of construal level theory is that we perceive things far from us (both in terms of literal distance as well as the more metaphorical sort) as more simple/homogenous while the local/familiar is more detailed. Most Americans don't know the name of Putin's party, or what the biggest opposition parties are. People actually reporting from Russia tend to note that Putin is genuinely popular there (perhaps less so since his botched invasion of Ukraine and the hit the Russian economy has taken), but Americans don't know much about that and don't feel like we need to know.
The political system of Russia wasn't in any great condition prior to Putin.
I'd say he's close to Trump in the nature of his popularity. Both are the kind of leaders that I once heard someone call "folk heroes". Americans have low trust in their institutions, as do Russians. Yet somehow a lot of them think that a single man can be "on their side", that he can spend five or twenty-six years draining the swamp, but the swamp remains, the swamp lets him remain in charge and at the same time he's neither a useful idiot nor one with the swamp.
The difference is that Trump is organic (I hope), Putin is originally hydroponic. He was reportedly picked as the successor because 1998-1999 sentiment surveys regularly identified Max Otto von Stierlitz (an undercover Soviet spy inside the SS) as the most popular fictional character people would have liked to see in charge of Russia: phlegmatic, reserved, quietly competent.
The basic story appeared to be KGB/FSB saw Russia under Yeltsin going to hell, suffering rampant organized crime, being plundered by oligarchs, hyperinflation, etc, and decided that something had to be done. Once elected, Putin executed a successful turnaround. He remains popular (?).
(Intelligence services are underrated btw when it comes to their roles in democracy.)
> No, there wasn't an "election". There was a plebisicite.... Perhaps he didn't consider that "No" would lack the baggage of any specific individual!
There was no parliament at the time. So unless he called an election for an "elected dictator" to continue ruling without a parliament, calling an election would have necessarily implied a simultaneous parliamentary election. And he may have considered the possibility of winning the presidency in such scenario, assuming the center and left parties couldn't agree on a single candidate, but even then he must have known there was a high likelihood of having to rule with an opposition-controlled parliament.
There was to be a parliamentary election anyway in case Pinochet won. But if that had been the case (legitimately, no fraud) then he could be confident of ruling with a complaisant parliament.
Having a plebiscite was the pragmatic choice for him.
It could have been pragmatic, but the fact that there was no parliament at the time seems extremely relevant to contrast with Orban!
> Communist regimes effectively solved this "problem" for decades. They faced no genuine risk of losing any elections.
They did face a genuine risk of revolution though, which is what Scott said. In most Communist countries this was suppressed by the military might of Russia; once Communism in Russia collapsed, it collapsed almost everywhere else basically instantly.
> I also think Orban genuinely won 5 times and lost 3 times.
In the sense that the official vote count accurately reflected the vote slips people dropped in ballot boxes, yes. (But then, you could say the same about most Communist countries.) But the voting was increasingly influenced by all kinds of illegal practices, some of which are mentioned in the post.
In most Communist countries, opposition parties weren't actually allowed to compete. That's a different category from merely "influenced", and it resulted in Communists never losing power via such elections, whereas Orban just did.
This is only partially correct. They usually had pliant coalition partners involved in broader alliances, with token numbers of parliamentary seats.
The US system, where the pliant parties alternate in (nominal) power while serving the same donors, however, appears far more effective.
The coalition partners were placed on the same list people could vote for, it wasn't possible to vote for an opposition party and not the Communist party.
Hungary, Russia, Venezuela etc. are a different type of oppressive regime than North Korea or the Soviet Union era Eastern European countries. Nobody denies that. It's just annoying to see biased but real elections being touted as the proof of democracy. At the risk of repeating what Scott already said in the post, plenty of oppressive regimes hold elections. And sometimes, oppressive regimes fall as the result of an election. That does not exonerate them retroactively. (They do deserve some credit if it turns out they could have used violence or rigged the vote but have chosen not to, although I doubt that's the case here.)
Which other oppressive regimes have fallen as the result of actual elections?
The Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990 (Statecraft has a fun recollection [1]). PRI in Mexico in 2000. And many cases of the regime needing to rig an election they knew they would otherwise lose, and that leading to an irrecoverable loss of legitimacy - the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Velvet Revolution in Armenia, the fall of Milošević in Serbia.
[1] https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-win-an-election-against-the
Amen! And I think you are being overly-scrupulous in the footnote. If someone is doing several things to subvert free and fair elections that might remove them from power I think it is okay to call them a dictator. We don’t need to wait and see if they were bad at those things and they eventually didn’t work and say maybe they are only a 35% dictator. Weak tea is still tea.
> accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography
There's a running joke in the US that lots of right-wing people get caught possessing child pornography ("pedocon theory"), so it seems like a pretty standard technique.
Accusing your political enemies of sex crimes is as old as politics itself.
Really? I haven't heard of many politicians of any sort getting caught possessing child pornography! And the most prominent people to have credible allegations of child sexual abuse are not particularly partisan people like Jeffrey Epstein.
Not CSAM, but sex crimes. Jackson famously had a bullet in his chest from a duel started by Dickinson accusing his wife of bigamy. Cleveland and the "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa" scandal. LBJ's "I can't prove it, but I can make him deny it."
Eric Swalwell just the other day.
Doing some quick but dangerous googling reveals "Trans Democrat's Child Porn Charges Spark Conservative Fury" (Newsweek), "Ex-NYC councilman Dan Halloran caught with 1,000 child porn films" (NY Daily News) and a Wikipedia page "List of federal political sex scandals in the United States".
Orban sounds similar to Biden.
Low effort/high temperature comment, please expand / provide more evidence or expect a ban next time.
Because his surname ends with the letter "n"? It's supposed to be given names for boys which end with that letter now https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/05/14/the_trend_in_la/
Is there a prediction market for whether Trump will allow a peaceful transfer of power when his term is up?
Define "allow". It wouldn't surprise me if he claimed it was illegitimate, but I don't think it will be his call, and I don't think any particular subordinate will be up to try stopping it.
One more term! One more term!
It's the will of the electorate, guys!
Hasn’t Vance repeatedly promised that he would subvert any transfer of power by doing what Pence did not? And, in this case, he may well be able to do it on his own behalf.
Not exactly this, but close to it:
https://manifold.markets/SuryaPali/2028-us-election-peaceful-transfer
https://manifold.markets/BryceBowemd39/will-the-us-have-a-free-and-fair-pr
https://manifold.markets/AlexanderTheGreater/trump-seriously-attempts-3rd-term-i
The prediction markets give remarkably high odds on Trump being out of office before 2029. And low odds for him being impeached. There seems to be a substantial risk that his health will give out before the end of his term.
And it seems to me that pulling any serious shenanigans at the end of his term would be quite difficult. There would be no plausible excuse for denying the applicability of the 20th and 22nd Amendments and the people in his coalition would already be chomping the bit to be the next Republican President.
If only there were a mental technique that could help people think more deeply about interminable debates over whether some leader qualifies as a dictator or not, we'd think so much more clearly about the issue. It's like, either you think it's fine for a leader to ban their opponents from the media or not, but debates about what exactly counts as a dictator aren't very productive.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words
> If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that the Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent, launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump
Or, you know, anyone with eyes and ears and thoughts.
If you’re a Democrat and don’t believe this happened, then the impasse is so high I’ll find everything else you have to say to be less credible.
Same as Republicans and their God belief (be it Trump or God).
Also, until this article I just assumed Orban was a dictator. Which goes to show how propaganda works - I’m one of the most virulent anti msm people and yet I just always assumed.
fine, ill bite.
> Democrats strong-armed social media giants like Facebook to censor dissent
What do you mean by 'strong-armed'. The definition of 'strong-armed' is "use force or violence against". I do not think the Democrats used force or violence, or even threatened to use force or violence, against Facebook generally or Zuckerberg personally. (I also have problems with the words "censor" and "dissent" but lets start with strong-armed).
> launched a politically-motivated prosecution against Donald Trump
What does 'politically-motivated' mean? The definition of 'politically' is "in a way that relates to the government or public affairs of a country." I do think that the prosecutions of Trump relate to the government and public affairs of the country. I do think that the people who prosecuted trump were motivated by their politics, such as their commitment to democracy and the republic. Is that what you mean?
Also, Trump was indicted four times. Which of the four do you think were politically motivated? All of them? (As a reminder, he was indicted for business fraud, stealing and concealing national secrets, federal election interference, and state election interference). Lets pick, eg, concealing national secrets. What specifically did you feel was problematic about prosecuting Trump for this?
>The definition of 'strong-armed' is "use force or violence against"
Ehh... how is jawboning *not* a threat of force? I think it fits. Government is supposed to be a monopoly on force, so "nice business you got there, be a shame if we regulate it if you don't do what we ask" is a threat of force; "nice business you got there, be a shame if I break your knees if you don't do what we ask" is a threat of violence.
I do not think the Democrats threatened to use force or violence against Facebook generally or zucc personally
Personally I think it's telling that Murthy v. Missouri was decided on standing more than a "real holding," especially since how on earth is a person going to have explicit evidence of the government's motivations *before* reaching primary injunction and discovery, but that's a bit tea-leaf-reading. So it goes.
Democracy is "a system in which parties lose elections". The rest is commentary.
That's a really shrewd observation. It reminds me I once tried to make an index of whether a democracy had been established, whether there had been two peaceable changes of ruling party.
I've been following Scott since before 2016 and this is the first time I can recall him acknowledging that maybe the prior woke regime wasn't the worst of all possible worlds, or saying that he apologized to people who were concerned about Trump in his first term. Where/when did this apology take place? Because I recall even after January 6th he posted that people calling that an attempted coup were just proving his point that everyone overreacts about Trump. I know that the term coup is open for legitimate challenge, I also know that asking anyone who changes their mind to make a big public spectacle of it is obnoxious and raises the cost of doing so, but I am really just curious if there was some clear watershed "I was wrong about Trump" post I missed or if he's mostly referring to sentiments he's expressed privately.
I think he's had several of these posts in the past year, particularly during the period when Elon Musk was trying to destroy the institutions of science and public health.
A lot of those posts were behind paywall. I also mentally noted that this was one of the first where he said so openly (which, to be clear, I think is really great, and strongly encourage more of!)
Just going off of memory of those posts, I don't recall anything close to what he expressed in the OP - "Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back."
Maybe I missed it (and I need to reread those) but what sticks in my mind is (a) the whole Tyler Cowen / PEPFAR thing and (b) an increasingly explicit anti-Trump message in the posts.
That’s true. And also the central point of this post is much closer to acknowledging that flawed experts may well in fact be the best system humans have ever come up with, despite the flaws.
The thing is people act like center-left folks who spoke out against woke and Covid CPI excesses don't exist. We do exist! There are actually WAY more of us than the far left. Maybe more people acknowledging that instead of going into the arms of right wing grift-a-thon would've prevented this nonsense.
But the easiest way to remove the left from power for the foreseeable future would be to form a coalition with the right. There are far better ways to go about getting what the center wants than to keep voting for Democrats who go out of their way to protect and work with leftists.
Lol
I'm hoping this post was satire.
I'm sorry? Did I say anything particularly objectionable? If you have a common enemy, you have a common interest. If there are truly "way more" of your people than the far left, then combined with the right, you would utterly outnumber them. Working together, you could collude so that the far left never has a say in policy. It simply requires abandoning tribalism for pragmatism.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
>There are actually WAY more of us than the far left.
Not a relevant statistic. In the words of Ford Prefect, "they care. We don't. They win."
>Maybe more people acknowledging that instead of going into the arms of right wing grift-a-thon would've prevented this nonsense.
I had a conversation about this with someone else the other day, and I think it underrates the difficulty here. Specifically it was about Coleman Hughes' career, relative to Ibram Kendi's.
For the better part of a decade, any critique of Kendi was, simply, not going to get published by a major mainstream source. If you were independently wealthy or ran a highly popular independent blog (ahem nudge nudge wink wink), maybe you felt brave enough to do that. Or maybe not. But to try to walk a traditional, journalistic path while holding that position got you shuttled out of that mainstream circuit and into, at best, Quillette.
And I think it even overestimates the "grift a thon" availability for people with so much as a scrap of respectability. Nobody was giving Hughes $10 million dollars! Nobody was offering him a university department! Yeah, Kendi wasted both, but he had the opportunity.
Surely if there's so many center-left people speaking out against woke, some of them could've put together a grant for a saner alternative?
I haven't read the article but there's a headline going around of Ezra Klein saying "Hasan Piker is not the enemy"
There were so many other links, I thought it bizarre that he referred to it as "my Apology Form" and yet made no citation that I could ascertain...
This analysis has a history problem. Was America more or less democratic in the 1700s and 1800s than we are today? There was indisputably more voter intimidation and outright fraud; lying in the papers was endemic, including disgusting personal insults that even Trump wouldn't stoop to today. But at the same time, voter turnout was consistently well over 85%, political clubs and associations were mainstays of social life, and Alexis De Tocqueville was so impressed with the amount of ordinary, day-to-day self-government Americans showed that he wrote a whole book about it. Congress - the people's branch of government - was a hot-bed of policy debate and productive legislation.
Nowadays our elections are a lot cleaner and more inclusive, but almost no-one knows who their congressperson is, let alone bothers to try and vote them out based on policy; state and local elections have miserable turnout rates; most people vote (if they do at all) on national slogans and personality or vibes, and we've basically given up on trying to solve problems legislatively; we've handed things over to bureaucracies in administrative agencies for technical real-world issues, and judges for procedural ones.
Democracy is a multi-dimensional thing. There are many ways in which bureaucracies and judges structuring policies with only indirect input from elected officials and elections can be more democratic than putting things up for a direct vote by people who have opinions on the outcome but don't understand which policies will have what effect. Just as there are many ways in which the reverse is true.
That's just normal evolution of democracies. In the beginning there are genuine opportunities for change and for the country to choose its way, and the barrier of entry into politics is low. Eventually, however, institutions and laws become entrenched and ossified, and it becomes harder and harder fighting against status quo, to the degree that real change becomes all but impossible, politics becomes more of a career than anything, and people stop bothering following much. This can be overturned pretty much only by some existential crisis, like a major war. But it really needs to be existential, COVID for example was not big enough in the end.
The US, being a particularly old and change-resistant democracy, retains so many weird features that it seems by now it can be pretty much ruled at all only by various workarounds, mostly involving executive or judicial power. Among those weird features are for example the whole Senate filibuster thing, the unusual power of Supreme Court, the disproportionate importance of swing states, and the overall treatment of the constitution as some kind of holy scripture that judges, like priests, must interpret. I'm not a fan of European democracies either, but they at least can, you know, actually enact new laws as situation demands; while in the US, it seems, only 2.3% of proposed bills actually passed in 2025, and of those only a fraction included any actual policy changes; see https://www.billtrack50.com/info/blog/the-year-congress-introduced-everything-again-and-passed-almost-nothing-again
Amount of voter turnout and self-governance may well be natural reactions to how functional a political system is. If things are going relatively smoothly, people don't feel overly compelled to do their part, but if they feel things are going sideways, they participate more in whichever way is appropriate at the moment. By that model, the 1700s and 1800s were "less democratic", or whatever else the people at the time felt was wrong, than today.
I usually rely on Scott to be historically literate, but I agree this wasn't his best. Not engaging with the historical examples (spoils system, Adams passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, outright electoral fraud in multiple presidential elections, machine politics, media dominance in multiple other settings including state-sponsored) seems to indicate a partisan blind spot.
Cleaner but still no voter ID though? A pretty major loophole, one might say.
(Read the room, Slowday.)
Tyrant works, though sounds medieval.
Despot is nice. And sounds like an insult.
Orbàn was called bad words for (1) massive corruption and nepotism, directing government contracts and regulatory favors to companies owned by relatives and close friends (2) spending public monies on himself and relatives, including building football stadiums in small towns to skim off the top (3) destroying the Hungarian economy through favoritism and protectionist measures (4) a disastrous foreign policy that aligned Hungary with Russia and China (5) fostering anti semitism through his bizarre fixation on his formal sponsor George Soros, who is currently a 95 year old man(6) using foreign money, including Austrian and Russian, to buy out and castrate any media company that attempted to be independent of Fidesz (7) railing on about “sovereignty” and “immigration” while allowing foreign capital to control key industries like the automobile sector and energy. Also allowing Hungary to be a safe base for Chinese espionage efforts. (8) defended pedophiles and gay sex offenders in his own cabinet, opening him up to obvious charges of hypocrisy
Note that Denmark actually has a fairly humane and effective policy for restricting and integrating Muslim immigrants, and no one accuses Danes of being fascists.
In Orban’s defense, he arguably wasn’t much worse than Berlusconi. Berlusconi was a disaster for the Italian economy and also very anti democratic but he was an attractive alpha male so didn’t generate the same opprobrium the unattractive little toad Orban got.
Stramer was pretty authoritarian himself against anti-immigration protestors but he would never be called bad names.
Nobody from the left is ever called these words. There are no left-wing strongmen.
Stramer is massively unpopular and people on the left are always screaming about his immigration policies. Bad example.
Does he gets to be called these names, strongman, dictator, authoritarian etc etc?
Why would he? Stammer is weak and ineffectual, so people call him exactly that. If you do what your supporters don’t want you to do and have to kowtow to more powerful interests, people don’t usually call you authoritarian. To Orban’s credit he actually was doing what his core supporters wanted him to do.
Stalin was a left wing strongman and he gets a lot of grief. Aren't several of the south american leaders also left wing strongmen?
I don't know about those cases. I just disagree with Gian's point that "Nobody from the left is ever called these words" and I provided some examples. Sounds like you agree with me.
There have been plenty of officials in plenty of countries who oppose LGBT ideology the same way as Orban, but don't get called anti-democratic. And there are plenty of people that get called anti-democratic without opposing LGBT ideology. You're wrong if you think there's no content.
Plenty of officials? I can't name even one who opposes LGBT.
It’s easy to come up with a bunch of elected officials in various countries who oppose gay rights, if you just notice that it’s only a couple dozen countries that have protected gay rights. Many of the others still have various levels of democracy, whether it’s Japan or India or South Korea or Singapore or Malaysia or Indonesia.
Mike Pence!
It sure was an even more impressive election result, if it was caused by no good reason at all.
Banned for this comment.
My wife is from Gambia, which had a dictator who held rather rigged elections (along with usual dictator hobbies of disappearing political foes and the like), until in 2016 he was hampered in doing so by domestic and external factors, lost the election, and fled the country when his initial attempt to stay in power anyhow resulted in an international force intervening.
I've seen plausible conspiracy theories that the 1989 Chilean grape scare was done by the Reagan administration to warn Chilean big agriculture (who apparently supported Pinochet) not to back any shenanigans by Pinochet.
And the US pushed South Korea hard to make its government more democratic once there were massive pro-democracy rallies.
So yeah, international pressures can be important.
When it comes to international relations, scholars have theories such as autocratic legalism or competitive authoritarianism that is used to make predictions that do not appear to be strongly compatible with the newest round of evidence. With difficulty you might be able to save the theories. But keep in mind, it didn't just explain a handful of bad things the government did, scholars made cases that Orban *could not give up power* or he would face arrest.
Or in other critiques it was said that the regime was not just a political power source, but an economic one - surrendering power would result in loss of financial assets - an existential threat. The "Post communist mafia" critique.
The correct answer was: 'for various reasons, including the EU, there were always 'soft floors' on how far a European democracy can fall.' or 'For various reasons, the hungarian government failed to achieve economic growth, limiting their ability to retain power on populist issues.'
But a more nuanced take would likely invite similar criticisms of other so-called-democracies.
Like, our friends to the north just had a multi-year crisis over government approved witch hunts based on controversies over Indian burial grounds. No one is adding Canada to a 'failed democracy' index because they expanded MAID or cracked down on those truck driver protests.
We criticize some European countries for being too close to Russia, when plenty of democracies across Oceania and the Western Hemisphere have sold their entire telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei, meaning every cell phone is potentially comprisable by the Chinese government. Few in the expert class are criticizing Carney for being a Xi stooge cause he's going to allow China to dump tens of thousands of EVs for the exchange for some relief for Canadian farmers. Remember when two years ago China was engaging in transnational repression of Canadians while operating illegal "police stations" in major cities? Or when China tried to influence Canadian elections? Congrats on your 'New Strategic Partner'.
In the end it sometimes seems like there is a class of 'experts' who makes a statements of what are 'real democracies' and what gets to be the quirky eccentricities of local populism. On the outside who gets to be put in which category often looks to be decided on culture war issues. Nor do they seem to acknowledge that the problems they are identifying might be directly related to democracy, and not necessarily any specific regime. 10% Less democracy, or perhaps 10% more.
I'm not sure what this passage is suppsoed to mean:
But a more nuanced take would likely invite similar criticisms of other so-called-democracies.
Like, our friends to the north just had a multi-year crisis over government approved witch hunts based on controversies over Indian burial grounds. No one is adding Canada to a 'failed democracy' index because they expanded MAID or cracked down on those truck driver protests.
We criticize some European countries for being too close to Russia, when plenty of democracies across Oceania and the Western Hemisphere have sold their entire telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei
In what way is any of the Canada criticism similar to any of the criticism of Orban's elections and media interference? I can see that there is a problem in selling telecommunications infrastructure to Huawei, but that seems very different from allying with Russia. Do you see some direct one-to-one way of rating these things?
Democracies have failure points. It's difficult to protect minority rights, they can be captured by interested parties at the expense of the uninterested masses, no voting method satisfies rational decision making theories, expertise can be difficult to build up, it can be captured by bureaucracy, it can be captured by oscillating kleptocratic groups, and democracies overspend on some categories and underspend on others. The list goes on and on.
One might say democracies are bad, but they're better than alternatives. Hungary is on an extreme end of some of these problems, but they stood out for being compared against EU, and not like against India or Kenya. But the many of the problems in Hungary emerged because the people voted for them and they were popular. Democracies can make mistakes. They elected people into office who were corrupt and not competent. They chose policies that were bad for their economy. Ultimately they failed to achieve any of the goals of the population, because econ maxing is the only policy that matters on a long enough time frame. Democracy is hard to preserve, but it's also the only system that is self-correcting, which is hopefully something we just saw. This is not failure, this is the system working as intended.
The language used around Hungary, by foreign policy expert class, was bombastic and exclusionary, and often used as a metaphor for populist right wing movements from Italy to America. In many cases the experts made specific predictions that no longer appear to be true. I'm not saying they cherry picked examples, but democracies engaging in anti-liberal and corrupt behavior is sometimes normal. I could just as easily make the case that Canada is a failed democracy under many of the same criteria, especially if I slightly change a few value preferences. I could make the case that Montgomery County Maryland is a failed democracy because the government is captured by self-enriching groups.
The problem is these theories, these models, were never robust and do not appear to appreciate what was actually happening in Hungary, compared to Russia or Venezuela, and they did not actually attempt to grapple with how highly ranked countries on their democracy indexes can have just as many problems. They look, coincidentally, like clubs wielded by an expert academic class, that justified raising up in groups and pushing down out-groups.
A lot of what you say is reasonable, especially the first half. But this point just doesn’t sound plausible to me: “I could just as easily make the case that Canada is a failed democracy under many of the same criteria”. First, I’m not sure how many people were saying Hungary was a *failed* democracy. But I’d be interested in seeing how you do make a comparably plausible case about Canada.
I strongly dislike the conflation of dictatorship with the presence or absence of elections. They're orthogonal concepts. Dictatorship is about how concentrated the political power is *at one moment in time*. We get the term dictator from a polity that intentionally elected people to an established term-limited role of dictator numerous times. And one of the most famous events in all of politics is one such dictator being *further* granted the role dictator *for life*, as a distinct action.
Dictators clearly aren't necessarily for life/with an undefined term of office, otherwise, what sense would it make to talk about a "dictator for life"?
The fact that dictators on occasion get themselves instated for life no more makes that part of what the term dictator means, than the fact that presidents sometimes get themselves instated for life means that being a president implies no end to their term other than death.
> We get the term dictator from a polity that intentionally elected people to an established term-limited role of dictator numerous times.
Well, the biggest problem here is that the meaning of "dictator" in Latin bears no particular relationship to the meaning of the same word, borrowed from Latin, in some other language. German got "Kaiser" and Russia got "tsar" from the Latin word Caesar, which meant... the name of a particular family. If you tried to translate the Latin word into modern American English, you'd get something like "Kennedy". If you translate "tsar" into modern English, you get a completely different concept.
The smaller issue is that the role of dictator was "term-limited" only in the sense that it occurred in defined terms. There was no limit on serving multiple terms, which is what "term-limited" means in English today.
> Dictators clearly aren't necessarily for life/with an undefined term of office, otherwise, what sense would it make to talk about a "dictator for life"?
It would make sense when talking about someone who has awarded himself that title. Titles aren't bound by external logic. Elizabeth II was "Queen of all the Britains". (Note, that's Britains, not Britons.)
Simply *having* terms after which re-appointment or re-election is required is still a very important limit. Perhaps not "Term Limited" if there's such strong consensus for that as a phrase, but still "term limited".
Even in English, the root is very clear. A dictator is one who dictates. It's about their level of authority. Nothing about dictating, or the construction of the term itself *implies* an indefinite/for life term of rule. It also just leads to difficulty in language, adding more and more conditions to the same term - which is partially at the root of the trouble this piece is describing.
If you don't have separate words for someone's level of authority, their stance towards democracy, their stance towards rule of law, their liberalism, and the nature of their length of stay in office, then most combinations that exist will simply not have words to describe them, and you become very likely to encounter examples that cannot be easily described. The world is not simple. We can't easily have single words that are both well known and capture *that* much detail without causing confusion.
Whether someone has the *title* Dictator is also quite separate from whether they are *de facto* a dictator - you can be either one without being the other. But that's true of every piece of descriptive language; people can always adopt any words as titles. That doesn't mean we should cede to those people the power of language; we can still describe the actual reality as best we are able.
> Simply *having* terms after which re-appointment or re-election is required is still a very important limit.
That's true. There is a limit, and it's meaningful. But it's not a term limit, and your desire to call it one is strangely at odds with the rest of your comment. Do you think that when we use established words, we should feel bound by the meanings they are already agreed to have... or not?
> Perhaps not "Term Limited" if there's such strong consensus for that as a phrase, but still "term limited".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/term%20limit
> Even in English, the root is very clear. A dictator is one who dictates. It's about their level of authority.
That's... not at all clear. By far the most prominent use of the 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣 "dictate" in English is to refer to speaking, without reference to any authority of any kind. You're right about the meaning, but you can't get there by looking at the root. Do you really want to stand there arguing that "dictation" is about level of authority?
> Whether someone has the *title* Dictator is also quite separate from whether they are *de facto* a dictator - you can be either one without being the other. But that's true of every piece of descriptive language; people can always adopt any words as titles. That doesn't mean we should cede to those people the power of language; we can still describe the actual reality as best we are able.
This suggests to me nothing so much as the idea that you didn't actually read the paragraph it appears to be responding to. Yes, it's appropriate to "cede the power of language" to people by referring to them using their own titles. That's all titles are.
You argued that the existence of the phrase "dictator for life" implies something about the meaning of "dictator". I pointed out that your argument is specious. The fact that people can adopt any title they want is not a counterargument - it supports me ("the phrase exists because it refers to a title, and titles can be anything"), while negating your original point, which was "the phrase can only exist by contrast with an assumed dictator-for-a-temporary-period".
Dictation is all about authority. Dictation requires (or did, prior to computers) two people. The dictator speaks, and expects their words to be recorded exactly, word-for-word, without any agency on the part of the scribe. The dictator is dehumanizing the scribe and literally using them as a simple tool, a mere vessel through which their will is made manifest in the world.
"Dictation" doesn't describe the simple act of speaking; it describes a two-person activity implying a very specific type of power relationship.
wrt the idea that "the root is clear", I think it's worth noting that the root is much clearer in Latin, but the verb 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 and the agent noun 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳 that transparently derives from it don't seem to share their senses any better than the English words "dictator" and "dictate" do.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=dicto
Lewis and Short notes that 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 is the frequentative form of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘰 ["speak; say"], and therefore gives the primary meaning as "to say often; to pronounce, declare, or assert repeatedly".
But it has specialized meanings, and the primary one of those seems to be the same one preserved in English, the sense of speaking to someone else who will write your words down. (Which then specialized further into the meaning "write", with no third party involved!) There is also a sense of "prescribe, recommend, order"... which presents difficulties. L&S notes this sense in particular as "the primitive of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳", but also notes that there are no known examples before Augustus. Since the office of dictator predates Augustus by several centuries, there is a strong suggestion that this sense of 𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰 derives from the noun and not the other way around.
I'm really not an expert, but I get the sense that dictate also have the second meaning of more generally deciding exactly how something is to be (a natural extension of someone writing down your words exactly) - and this meaning seems much closer to the understanding of dictator Emily was gesturing towards, as one who has the power to decide unilaterally.
Yes, indeed -- we might say, for example, that a victorious general "dictated the terms of surrender" to his enemies.
>Elizabeth II was "Queen of all the Britains". (Note, that's Britains, not Britons.)
I don't think so; per Wikipedia, her official style was "Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and Sovereign of the Most Noble Order of the Garter."
Though there are cases of this sourt of thing; Nicholas II, for example, was "Emperor and Auctocrat of all the Russias".
> I don't think so
It's not a matter of opinion. It's printed on her coins. (And the coins of several other early modern British monarchs.)
Here's one (of Queen Victoria) that makes the word fully explicit: https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explore-our-collection/highlights/CM51878-1933 . Note that the accompanying article mistranslates the Latin. You can find it translated correctly here: https://onlinecoin.club/Info/Legends/ab6bc03e-1a6f-11e6-8ff1-00163e09c6a7/ .
(The innovation attributed to the Earl of Rosebery is just the use of the word "all"; Victoria's coin doesn't say "Queen of all the Britains", but it does say "Queen of the Britains", or in full "Victoria by the grace of God Queen of the Britains and defender of the faith".)
"Omnium Britanniarum" was never part of Elizabeth's official titulature, and was dropped from coins in 1954.
Which is to say, I think it is debatable, and thus, a matter of opinion.
You think she officially claimed the title, but that nevertheless it wasn't part of her official titulature? Or you think the Royal Mint was acting without her authorization?
>German got "Kaiser" and Russia got "tsar" from the Latin word Caesar, which meant... the name of a particular family.
In a similar way, the word for "king" in a lot of Eastern European languages derives from "Carolus", i.e., Charlemagne.
>If you tried to translate the Latin word into modern American English, you'd get something like "Kennedy".
It would be kind of hilarious if in the distant future a load of languages derived their word for a political leader from the family name Kennedy.
There's a Slavic tongue twister about King Karl and Queen Clara.
>I strongly dislike the conflation of dictatorship with the presence or absence of elections. They're orthogonal concepts. Dictatorship is about how concentrated the political power is *at one moment in time*.
I don't know about that. France under Louis XIV had all political power concentrated in the person of the king, but we don't call it a dictatorship.
Rather, I think the term is used to refer to a concentration of power *in a way that is against the law, or at least against how the law was intended to operate*. So, for example, a head of government who stays in power through massive vote-rigging, or who manages to browbeat the legislature into giving him unlimited power, would be considered a dictator because his country (presumably) wasn't supposed to be run like that. Conversely, an absolute monarch in a country where absolute monarchy is the accepted way of running things would not count as a dictator.
An elaboration on your point that keeps the term consistent with its Roman origins would be that a dictator is one who has centralized absolute political power within themselves *outside* of the law. A Roman dictator's authority was perfectly legitimate, but the entire point was that his authority was not bound by law within the legitimate bounds of his time in office. A dictatorship means the suspension of lawful constraints on the leader's power.
You might add Indira Gandhi to that list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi
She declared a state of Emergency for several years in the 1970s, so she could suspend elections and hold onto power - but then she ended the Emergency and lost the next election, the only time in the first 50 years of Indian history when her party lost a national election. Notably, she herself won the next one, but then was assassinated by her bodyguards when she sent the army to raid the holiest site of their religion.
Question is whether she was justified to impose emergency. You may note the cries of Total Revolution were in the air. So there were people and movements that aimed to topple the entire constitutional system for some Total Revolution.
Incredible. She won election not just after suspending parliament but also after forcing sterilizing 6 million people
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/india-adopts-compulsory-birth-control
I wonder if forced sterilizations were politically controversial? I think back to the eugenics era in the US...
You are probably right. She got money for sterilization from LBJ. I'm just saying the people whose tubes she snipped might have at least been pissed off and voted against them.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/legacy-indias-quest-sterilize-millions-men
My favourite Feynman quote is "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He was talking about nanotechnology, but it also works for politics and leadership. It can *always* get worse.
Bet you $20 nothing particularly threatening happens *re* Trump leaving power after 2028.
What's your threshold for 'particularly threatening'? I know it's hard to specify precisely, but e.g. where is your line relative to what happened in 2020-2021?
Something you hinted at, but I think should be made more explicit, is that all of this is happening on some probability distribution and that we should be grateful that the sample turned our way.
When Trump won in 2016, Nate Silver predicted a 30% chance of victory, which was way higher than everyone else but still less than 50% or, like, 100%. Obviously the outcome of the 2016 election was binary. So should we rake Silver over the coals for being off by 70%? No, of course not. In fact, we ought to make fun of the people who do not understand probabilities. If someone says that Silver shouldn't be trusted because "he got 2016 wrong", you can easily write off everything else that person says.
I think the same thing is true here. There was _some probability_ that Orban refused to concede the election. 10%? 20%? 70%?** We don't live in the hypothetical world where Orban did refuse because we got lucky that the weighted coin flip was heads instead of tails, but I strongly suspect that the same people coming out crowing about how Orban wasnt that bad would simply find some other motivated argument about how the situation doesn't apply. IMO the "no risk to democracy at all" people ought to be given a remedial course in statistics before engaging with anything else they say, and even then it may not be worth it.
**Prediction markets had Orban at 35% on April 8th, which was well after polling showed Magyar was going to win. So that 35% consists of (% wins election | poor polling) + (% cheats the election in some way | losing the election). Obviously not easy to know the exact split.
I think one underappreciated cause of the smooth transition is how Orban et al expected to get a much better results. Just as often in the US, partisan polls are used to bolster supporters and not actually measure reality, so a large portion of Orban voters and supporters thought they are the majority, even when independent researchers showed otherwise. Even if the inner circle had a better idea, they most likely believed they can even out the odds by the time election day comes. This way they trapped themselves and could not back out post hoc. I was kind of expecting them to change the election system and/or the constitution with their supermajority to make sure that even after a loss they are in a good position. But they expected to win and hence "winner takes all" seemed like a good idea that time.
Silver's actual percentage was 79%, which from what I recall was fairly low among his peers but still quite mistaken. He was handing out more like 4-1 odds rather than 2-1.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/nate-silver-who-will-be-president-prediction-224931
In a post-election interview with the Harvard Gazette, it had been adjusted down to 71% though.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/03/nate-silver-says-conventional-wisdom-not-data-killed-2016-election-forecasts/
He flubbed Trump's nomination as well.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
Personally, it all led me to take these predictions, forecasts and so on with a large grain of salt.
"To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from".
Not exactly. In this case it was a matter of "bad institutions" convincing a sufficient amount of people that those institutions had gone rogue. That "mess would have to do until the real mess came around", you might say, but either mess was enough for me to abstain from choosing between them, since I have standards. I simply saw one as causing the other.
"If the institutions you followed brought you to this, of what use were your institutions?"
Good one. Someone knew how to turn a phrase.
I find the list at the outset of the article rather unimpressive, in truth. The gerrymandering one in particular — Fidesz “only” got 49% of the vote, but the second place party got under 33%. A gap that big in the UK would produce a similar or greater majority — in 1997 Blair got 63% on 43% of the vote.
Similarly, using false claims to launch a general fishing expedition of the opponent, if that is in fact what happened, also characterizes the Russia collusion probe. In Germany, the government has attempted to impose special surveillance on the AfD party because it opposes immigration, and an outright ban is a live possibility. Orban never attempted to ban his chief opposition afaik.
I don’t know much about the latest complaints re: Hungarian media, but a few thoughts come to mind:
-Whatever the nature of things, clearly the effort to suppress Magyar was utterly unsuccessful, which ought to generate skepticism about how “controlled” the environment was.
-There doesn’t seem to be any indication anyone was ever forced to sell a newspaper; Orban supporters just were there to buy them when they were up for sale. In fact, one of the biggest purchases that ppl freaked out about (the tabloid Blikk, Hungary’s largest) was just last fall. If the media environment was so authoritarian, why did they only get around to buying the biggest tabloid 15 years into their run?
-If they were significantly censoring X or other social media, or blocking foreign news outlets, I imagine you’d have mentioned it. If that didn’t happen, it’s a glaring hole in the claim of a suffocating, autocratic media environment.
-When I paid more attention a big complaint was that Fidesz passed a law imposing “government control” of the top media regulator. Oh no! They made it like the FCC!
I’m not Hungarian and I’m sure Orban’s government did plenty I’d dislike. They might even be more corrupt than the state of California, though I doubt it. But ultimately articles like this (and there are a lot, tracing back to Orban’s first term) always seem rooted in him being an electorally successful right-winger. I don’t think a long article justifying an authoritarian-ey label for a government that consistently holds regular fair elections would get written about a government with different core beliefs.
>In Germany, the government has attempted to impose special surveillance on the AfD party because it opposes immigration, and an outright ban is a live possibility.
First, the AfD is considered a fundamentally anti-democratic party, working against the German constitution, which is a lawful reason to put them under surveillance; even that assessment which is quite obvious for most people, is under judicial review and might not hold.
Second, in any case, it has nothing to do with immigration, other than the most extreme positions that contribute to the anti-democracy assessment as above. The current ruling party (CDU) is also mostly anti-immigration, and they were not put under surveillance when they were not in power.
Third, while a ban is a "live possibility", it's quite remote at this point because 1) banning parties is an ultima ratio that is intended to be difficult, and 2) quite practically, the last two attempts to ban a party went embarrassingly wrong (NPD, twice), and nobody wants to see another failed attempt.
They are considered "fundamentally anti-demicratic party" by their political opponents as a pretext to banning them. CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity. Under Merkel it was very much not anti-immigration party in practice if not in rhetoric.
>CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity.
Then you don't know your German history very well. CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl privately had plans to halve the Turkish population in Germany, and publicly stated that the number of immigrants must not rise. That was in the early 1980s. Shortly after there were also actual laws with financial incentives for immigrants to leave, which had a real effect, but not lasting.
That was a long time ago, you picked examples from 1980s, like half a century old.
I know, right. Knowing a bit of history does feel like cheating, and I understand your resentment at being treated unfairly in this manner.
I sure does help with adding random irrelevant facts.
Anti-immigrant in the 80s and anti-immigrant now still leaves room for the Merkel maximalism in between.
That was not the assertion, however. The assertion was that the CDU was immigration-friendly in her entire history until the end of the era Merkel: "CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity".
Also let's not forget that the immigration surge under Merkel had a reason other than some supposed "open borders" ideology. It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants. War or natural disaster is about the most ethical reason for accepting refugees, also enshrined in German and European law, and really a fundamental practice across human history. If you oppose even that minimum of hospitality, then at least in terms of policy you're indistinguishable from the actual xenophobes. My impression, FWIW, is that the similarity goes beyond policy.
>It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants
Strange how many Algerians and Afghans came from the Syrian crisis, huh? And the disproportionate numbers of men and women! Strange indeed.
I won't deny that assisting refugees is a good thing. I also won't ignore that it was used as a broad welcome mat, intentionally or not.
>really a fundamental practice across human history
My understanding of history is that they weren't treated nearly as well, up until post-WW2 Europe and embarrassment about a certain particular failure of accepting them.
> My impression, FWIW, is that the similarity goes beyond policy.
I have no doubt that you will make many uncharitable assumptions about people that don't agree.
>That was not the assertion, however. The assertion was that the CDU was immigration-friendly in her entire history until the end of the era Merkel: "CDU only recently assumed anti-immmigration stance as a reaction to AfD rising popularity".
That's not the only way of reading the assertion, and it's not the charitable way, either.
>It was the very real Syrian refugee crisis which nobody ever seems to mention when they are angry at Merkel and immigrants.
So why couldn't fellow Arab countries let the refugees in, seeing as how they're closer both physically and culturally?
Then the mistake Orban made was
1. Not considering Magyar's party to be fundamentally anti-democratic
2. Not passing a law to make it legal to surveil them for this.
It is not consistent to be maximally skeptical of the motives of everything Orban does but maximally unskeptical of everything the German government does.
Something worth considering: we -or "democratic backsliding experts" for that matter- don't have to qualify Hungary under Orbán as an "illiberal democracy".
He's been doing so himself since 2014. He very clearly uses "liberal" in the European, not Democratic Party sense, even going as far as citing as examples to follow and replicate "[countries] none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies", putting the whole focus on economic success over individual freedom and saying that "liberal democratic stats can't remain globally competitive". Of course, here in the West we mostly believe economic success originates from individual freedom, even in the kind of left wing parties that normally arrive to the government. But his examples of success include, tellingly, China.
Anyone saying that Orbán was not trying to move back democracy and freedoms as usually understood in the West is doing a disservice to his explicitly stated ideology!
Oh, back to one of my favorite genres - Scott owning the illibs
(I'm kidding of course this is a reasonable discourse not some ragebait nonsense)
One of the more fun theories is that Trump already rigged the previous elections by tampering with voting machines, in some stories through a Starlink internet connection. While there seems little evidence it's the kind of thing people who previously believed someone like Trump could never get elected (definitely not twice), want, or have, to believe in order to match it with their views about their country. Similarly I feel like modern (pseudo-)dictators need elections, to match it with their own view of being the rightful leader (liked by the people, doing good, etc.). The 'tampering with elections ' part is just one of those inconvenient facts they choose to ignore in defending themselves.
Great article and great write-up.
Reading the comments, I think it's clear that you should do a deep dive post on the "Russia Hoax."
You need to help some readers change their priors.
This is nitpicking, but I'd argue with the assertion that North Korea is 100% on the democracy vs. dictatorship scale.
They still do maintain the veneer of democracy. Sure, it's a very thin veneer and very easy to see through (I'm by no means a North Korean apologist), but it is there. They do have elections, the latest one even ended in a 99% vote for Kim instead of the usual 100%; no idea who the brave 1% is and whether they're real.
To me, 100% on this scale would be publicly admitting that "actually, that democracy thing those Americans are doing over there is bad and counterproductive, look at how much better your lives are under my dictatorship, letting you vote would just let our enemies manipulate you into taking control of the country, we won't bother with pesky elections here." No idea if anybody actually does this, quick Googling says that Saudi Arabia and the UAE both openly admit to having a king and don't even pretend to have a fake democracy, and I'd much rather live there than in North Korea.
I am kind of curious what North Korea's veneer of democracy is actually for. I don't think they're convincing anyone outside the country they're actually democratic, and presumably their own citizens know that they aren't allowed to vote for anyone else and are capable of drawing the obvious conclusion that the election result doesn't actually indicate popular support.
Whatever it's for, there's a surprising correlation between authoritarianism and the number of pro-democratic adjectives in a country name.
Compare "United States" (0), or "the Republic of Poland" (1) versus "People's Democratic Republic of Korea" (3).
If it really existed, the Star Wars galactic Empire wouldn't have been officially called a galactic empire, it would have been called "Free Democratic People's Republic of independent planets."
One of the aspects of the Orbán fiasco that no one seems to be commenting upon is the total lack of help from Trump. Sending Vance to say a few words on the eve of the election does not count.
Orbán would probably still have won if Hungarian economy was booming, which it very much isn't. Already in January 2025, Trump could have "asked nice" his tech bros to invest some substantial money into Hungary, which is, after all, a highly educated EU nation, and with some dedicated funds, could play the role of Ireland 2.0.
But that didn't happen. For all the verbal respect that MAGA gives Orbán, they don't seem to consider his government to be an ally on the level of Israel, e.g. actually worthy some help. More like "useful cucks".
Good point. He literally saved Milei with a giant loan and lowered tariffs. But when Vance gave his pro-Orban speech he did a little 'should I call president Trump?' bit and it just went straight to voicemail.
Vance is getting thrown under one bus after another by Trump, at least in foreign policy. What was the last W that Vance arguably brought home?
He could certainly have done more. Maybe he could have shifted the result by 1-2% and prevented the opposition from gaining a qualified majority (which would have been consequential, as a qualified majority is needed to purge all the theoretically-independent-from-government institutions that Orbán occupied). He almost certainly couldn't have helped Orbán win the elections, the gap was huge. And Hungary isn't that poor, it's mostly just mismanaged (which makes it less than ideal as an investment target).
The way I'd frame it, Orbán bought some nice gestures from Trump by e.g. funding CPAC a couple times, but that was small change and could only buy that much. And Orbán's Hungary wasn't actually a great US ally (too cozy with Russia and China). He should just have wired money to Trump directly, maybe that would have worked better.
Trump sent Vance to Hungary because he knew it was a lost cause, is my theory anyway.
"Only Vance could go to Hungary."
"Because nobody else volunteered"
If Trump's cronies plunged billions of dollars into the Hungarian economy in time (e.g. a year ago, not two weeks ago), the resulting economic jump would swing more than 1-2 per cent of voters. It is extremely rare for governments overseeing massive economic growth to lose elections.
People don't seem to realise that the biggest damage that people like Trump and Orban do is not through the direct impact of their overt acts against their opponents but through the damage done by packing the system with corrupt officials. For example, the biggest legacy of Trump will probably be his packing of the Supreme Court with judges willing to set a precedent that basically shreds the Constitution and makes the president far less accountable than any mere monarch currently living. That damage cannot be easily undone and makes it that much easier for the next would be tyrant to seize yet more power.
>For example, the biggest legacy of Trump will probably be his packing of the Supreme Court with judges willing to set a precedent that basically shreds the Constitution
I'm afraid that ship already sailed with Wickard v. Filburn.
Wickard v. Filburn relates to the power of the federal state not the president. Most governments in the world have that sort of power but most other democratic governments do not have a president who can do whatever he wants if he just says "national emergency" or be immune from prosecution for anything that is even vaguely related to his position as president
My sense is that Orbán was happy to use State power to try to put his finger on the scales including control of the media. That seems bad but not exactly unheard of in Europe.
Regarding 49% of the vote getting you 68% of the seats I’d just mention that here in the UK the Labour Party got 33% of the vote and got 63% of the seats! In some systems it helps if the opposition is not divided!
And look to Scotland for businesses being frightened to speak out of turn. The governing SNP controls the spending purse strings and (well, so it is said, and I believe it’s) isn’t afraid to punish its critics.
I think Orban’s government was highly corrupt and people punished it for that. Perhaps if it had been economically successful people would have forgiven it. It wasn’t. Talk of dictatorship felt to me like an abuse of language owing more to dislike of his anti liberal policies (anti immigrant, pro Russia etc) than anything else. Not to say he didn’t try to manipulate state power to try to get an unfair advantage over his opponents but when I hear about the gerrymandering that goes on in the US . . .
this seems less like an argument that Hungary is democratic than an argument that Britain isn't
if so, I agree
Certainly a major factor was that the economy wasn't doing well, and the voters care about that. I wonder, though, whether corruption was hindering economic development rather directly -- it gets hard to attract foreign investment if it's clear that your investment has no defense if the government decides to take it outright. China is such a good place to do business that investors have been willing to tolerate that risk, but few other countries have such advantages. E.g. Venezuela has lots of oil, but the press says that since they've nationalized the oil industry twice, no foreign company is willing to invest in rebuilding it. Hungary is a well-educated European country, but there are a lot of those that they have to compete with for FDI.
Has anyone ever written up an explanation of how Trump or Vance or whoever comes along to succeed them could possibly pull of a turn to dictatorship in the presence of 500 million guns? The US is the leader in the guns-per-capita metric not just among the OECD, but among the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country [note how the 2nd place is Kurdistan - a region that successfully resisted the Iraqi central government for many years]
Hungary has 0.1 guns per capita, the US has 1.2 guns per capita or 12x more, not to mention the fact that Americans have access to far more powerful weapons (all the way to grenades) than legal gun owners in Hungary. It seems to me that converting Hungary into a dictatorship is far easier at the very least because you have to worry about a far smaller number of gun owners.
Most of those guns are in the hands of people who would, despite their claims that they own them to resist tyranny, back a right-wing dictatorship to the hilt, if push came to shove.
Other than 'vibes', do we have any evidence that this is true? I.e. what % of gun owners strongly supported Jan 6th?
If you're asking because you're open to the possibility it's true, then feel free to do the necessary research yourself. The correlating information, re: the political disparities in American gun ownership and the favorable disposition of reactionaries toward authoritarian governments who share their politics, is widely available. If, more likely given the bent of the commentariat here, you're a reactionary making an isolated demand for rigor, go waste someone else's time.
I did my research and less than 20% of gun owners strongly supported January 6th as per the most charitable interpretation of such surveys.
That still leaves 400 million guns out there to defend against any wannabe dictator.
I haven't looked at this at all and I don't have a firm opinion - but I think that not everyone failing to "strongly support" a position will take arms to physicall fight it. Isn't the more relevant question how many gun owners *strongly opposed* January 6th?
So you didn't even do the cursory research that would have shown you that about half of all those guns belong to 3% of owners?
This doesn't mean that 80% of gun owners would strongly _oppose_ a coup.
Surveys of support for January 6 within a year or so of its occurrence, and surveys of it now, after it was fraudulently retconned into a peaceful protest and/or an FBI conspiracy by the right and by Trump… are not the same thing. But “strongly support” is not that useful. If those with guns strongly support or weakly support or are neutral, and those who strongly oppose are mostly unarmed, the battle will be wildly asymmetric.
Interesting - I'd have expected the per-capita weapons difference to be much higher.
On the other hand, when looking up the stats just now, I learned that US civilians own almost exactly three times more firearms than all the world's militaries - including the US - combined (although of course this doesn't include the big stuff like rocket launchers and artillery and whatnot).
That's an "average person has one testicle" kind of thing - some people in the US are weapon enthusiasts and have a whole armory. Percent of households owning a gun is a better metric, and on that the US is less of an outlier (on par with Finland and about 4x of Hungary).
So the gap is even narrower than the gap I overestimated previously. *And* there are a lot more people with big guns than people with small guns. My intuitions about this are *so* bad.
Per-capita still matters because, unlike testicles, guns can be shared among one's neighbors if it ever comes to a civil war-like scenario. At the very least you'll see siblings sharing guns among each other, children giving guns to parents (and vice versa), and friends trying to ensure everyone in their close circle is armed.
The US is also unique for not requiring a license to own a gun - and not requiring (most) guns to be registered, so it would be a challenge to figure out who the gun owners are compared to Hungary or Finland. Just imagine how differently 1956 in Hungary could've turned out if they had 120 guns per capita...
Probably not very different, civilians with guns stand very little chance against an actual army. Especially an invading army without split loyalties. Fair point though, per-capita does make some difference.
You are right, it would've probably gone down the same way, but the *perception* of the odds of victory on behalf of the Soviets would've been different, possibly leading them to avoid invading in the first place. To some degree this is also how the American deterrent-against-dictators works: you don't necessarily need a detailed mechanism covering for every possible contingency, just enough of a shared knowledge that shit might hit the fan if you tried to become a dictator.
Finland has in fact been invaded by the Soviets. Did the high number of guns by capita make much difference? (Or maybe it only became high as a result? No idea where to find historical data.)
I think America's incredible civilian arsenal makes it nigh-impossible for a foreign invasion to be successful. I don't think it precludes the possibility of homegrown dictators, or just the worsening of small-d democratic norms. Things have to get very, very bad before an armed uprising of the people is really on the table.
Does loosing an election make an illiberal strongman not a dictator? Or perhaps just an incompetent dictator / dictator wannabee - somebody who was genuinely trying the dictatorship route, just failed to navigate it well enough and lost control on an unexpected sharp turn? (The incompetent dictator wannabee designation IMHO applies at least partially to Trump 2020, whereas Putin 2011 proved to be just a bump on otherwise competent enough steering - to be clear, IMHO very far from perfectly competent, but unfortunately competent enough).
I think the gerrymandering accusation is too harsh. The key reason for Fidesz (and now Tisza) having disproportionate seats in the parliament is that the original Hungarian constitution was written to favor the winning party to make it easier to form a governing majority. This is literally just things working as originally intended. Fidesz did do some redistricting when the existing borders exceeded the legal limits, and they did gain a couple of seats (out of 199) on the net, but I don't think this really deserves to be on the same list with their other crimes. They also gave votes to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries who then vote almost exclusively for them (1-2 net seats again), but again, there are various reasons why this is defnensible, especially as their votes are effectively worth less per capita.
Okay so they did a little bit of this, which is not objectionable, and a little bit of that, which is also not objectionable, so the conclusion is that the sum of such actions is also not objectionable?
To be clear, I fully agree it was an autocratic/illiberal regime and they did even more than what Scott mentions, my goal is not absolving them of their sins, all I want to highlight is that I don't think that the gerrymandering accusation is fair. The main source of imbalance between vote weights is due to the original electoral system and not the electoral borders. I also think this is one more thing Orbán needs to be given credit for: he did not meaningfully mess with the election rules although he had all the power to do so and there were many proposals going around, especially the last 2 years.
FWIW the original constitution involved more seats distributed much more proportionally, and Orbán changed that first thing after gaining power. But yes, while there was some gerrymandering (and also some malapportionment - technically a different thing, and more impactful), it would not have been considered extreme in the US. (Although maybe that says more about the US being shockingly undemocratic in a few ways, while being very democratic in most.)
Hungary uses a mixed voting system of proportional for (slightly under) half the seats and first-past-the-post for (slightly over) half the seats, and large seat shares with much smaller vote shares is normal in first-past-the-post systems. (E.g. in the last UK election, which was fully first-past-the-post, Labour got 63% of the seats with 35% of the vote.)
The real problem was massive vote buying and voter intimidation (estimated to affect ~5% of the votes - there is a recent documentary [1] about it), and of course the wider context of propaganda, non-neutrality of the state, disproportionate resources, use of secret services etc. etc.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCwQR5HRWR8
You got it completely the other way round, I think.
After his first victory, Orbán rewrote Hungarian election rules to give disproportional number of seats to the strongest party. The idea was that even if he later becomes less popular, as long as the opposition is fragmented, he will stay at power. (And that it would be difficult for the opposition to coordinate if all the media are in Orbán's hands so they can't even make an election campaign. The rural voters might not even know that any opposition exists.)
The only way to defeat Orbán was for the entire opposition to agree to vote for one guy, and then get a majority. Which is what they did, and suddenly the election rules *as Orbán rewrote them* gave the new winner disproportional power. (So kinda working as *Orbán* intended, but for a different guy.)
They got the 2/3 majority (68% of seats) to do that with 53% of the votes in the first place, so it's not like it ever was a proportional system. But also, as far as I know this doesn't meet the definition of gerrymandering. True, with many tiny opposition parties things became even more skewed compared to the original constitution, but if they took things to the limit with a first-past-the-post system, that also wouldn't be gerrymandering in my opinion.
> But also, as far as I know this doesn't meet the definition of gerrymandering.
When Orbán rewrote the election rules, a vote of someone living in Budapest had 10x less weight than a vote of some rural voter. Does this satisfy the definition?
How did you calculate the 10x? The maximal difference between any 2 districts is 40%. If your logic is that depending on the final vote share the value of a vote can shift, you could argue for infinite relative differences because if a party doesn't make it into the parliament their voters' votes are worthless. I maintain that inequal vote weights that have nothing to do with electoral borders do not qualify for gerrymandering, simply favoring the winner, whoever that may be, has no inherent bias towards Fidesz as the latest election demonstrates.
You are right, 10x was an exaggeration.
Political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alaister Smith, under their Selectorate Theory, might say that Orban shrank the size of the minimum winning coalition size needed. Gerrymandering in general does so in a numerically obvious way, but his media suppression also shrinks the pool of 'infliential supporters" who might become winning coalition members.
It's often difficult for would-be authoritarian leaders to shrink their coalition sizes since there are many individuals and institutions with incentive and ability to resist that shrinkage because they wish to remain in the winning coalition or as influential selectors rather than interchangeable selectors.
I appreciate you taking this topic on so clearly in the post. I have been unusually triggered by the passing comments I saw about Orban. How come the online discussions even here have become so strongly apologetic of right-wingers, would-be-democracy dismantlers and outright dictators? It is such a weird, and hopefully not successful, pushing of the Overton window.
People just really want leftists gone. What else is there to say?
How will you know when leftists are gone, and you are willing to return to a model where dictators and subverting of the electoral process should no longer be condoned?
Like are you looking for a world where no one in the Democratic party holds any national office, because the leftists who (I will agree) pushed their agenda too far were part of the Democratic party? How many years do the Democrats need to be out of power?
Or do politicians in power need to say something to indicate that they're not leftists?
> How will you know when leftists are gone, and you are willing to return to a model where dictators and subverting of the electoral process should no longer be condoned?
The same way Orban lost: the people with leverage become unhappy with the leadership, and make it difficult for them to maintain power despite their attempts to hold onto it. Either the administration runs out of scapegoats and people start getting unhappy with the economy, or they fail to even efficiently deal with the scapegoats in the first place. Autocrats aren't invincible. They still require the consent of other people to maintain their rule. And then, if they so choose, they can bring back democracy, now that they know their voters are on the same page.
> Or do politicians in power need to say something to indicate that they're not leftists?
You can't prove a negative. The most you can do is make sure you don't provide any evidence that you harbor leftist sympathies.
Sorry which people? Which administration? I admit I'm quite confused by what you wrote.
The administration that's seizing power by less-than-democratic means. This would be the right, in this case. I'm just describing how I think it would go, and it's really not that disasterous as long as you're not one of the groups getting scapegoated. And most of the people here are not going to be in those groups.
The administration tried pretty hard to get Jack Citerrelli as governor of NJ instead of Sherrill. As a Democrat in New Jersey, I think that would have been very bad for NJ. I'm not sure if you would count that as "scapegoating" a "leftist" but something I'm glad they failed at.
What was pushed too far? I find the incredible tolerance for mass corruption and dishonesty and horrifyingly anti human mass scale policies by the right being paired up with annoyance about HR ladies and pronouns.. to be among the most dispiriting and horrifying tendencies I’ve ever dreamed of.
The asymmetry in real world harm is so radical.
To be clear, I definitely agree with you. I'm trying to understand Dust's viewpoint, and (s)he seems to think "leftists" pushed things too far.
FWIW, on the merits (and ignoring the terrible damage Trump is doing now) I disagree with most of the right wing grievances but some of it has some merit - I do think we were too lax on immigration, and I think the progressive movement shifted too far on some non-trivial cultural topics. I don't think the HR ladies and pronouns, on their own, were all that significant.
What immigration or cultural issues? I still don’t get the actual issue with immigration. People panicking about birth rates and social welfare, crime, and debt issues don’t have a legitimate reason to oppose even Biden era immigration figures. Not from any objective metrics or logic at least.
On immigration, I would read this by Josh Barro - I agree a lot with what he wrote:
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/democrats-need-to-re-learn-the-valid
Happy to discuss more about the specifics once you've read that, it literally describes it at a level of detail I couldn't capture in a comment thread.
Cultural issues - even more complex and multi-faceted, so I'll just pick 2:
- Over-focus on equality of outcomes to the point that there has been a degradation in meritocracy. I see this in progressive school districts that have removed a lot of the Gifted/Talented programs or advanced offerings because of lack of equal representation. Also saw this in the significant prioritization of DEI in, for example, corporate interview processes.
- Over relaxation of criminal enforcement, also due to concerns of unequal outcomes of policing.
To be clear - I am not saying discrimination is a solved problems. For instance, I'm sure policing is discriminatory in many places, and we should keep fighting back against that. But non-enforcement of some crimes is not the answer.
Another good summary is Matt Y's manifesto - I agree with pretty much every one of his 9 points:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-common-sense-democrat-manifesto
Are you among those people? If so, honest question, why would you want them "gone"?
I have more liberal, sometimes leftist, sometimes conservative opinions. I do not want the right-wingers and hardcore conservatives gone. I'd like to convince them with arguments, just like I am sometimes convinced by their arguments. I'd like to experiment with different policies and make real-world assessments of their effects wherever possible. This is not always going to be possible in a clean way, as life gets in the way. But I disagree with handwaving policies based on opinion *alone*, without taking into consideration evidence.
I'm pro-pluralism, because I recognize and accept that my knowledge is finite, my wisdom still grows, and my opinions have and will keep changing over time. I extend the favor of that insight to all of my democratic peers. So I don't want anyone gone, I want everyone enlightened (in the renaissance-sense) in their own ways.
Hungarians are probably seeing that "strong men" make for short blips in economic well-being, followed by a sharp decrease when the favours the strong man asked are being cashed in by his now-billionaire buddies, by squeezing them (the people). That's my opinion and take on the situation.
> I'd like to convince them with arguments, just like I am sometimes convinced by their arguments.
People have tried that for years. It's like talking to a brick wall. None of this would be necessary if there was any possibility for mutual understanding. There is simply a gap in values that cannot be bridged.
I'm not even through half my expected lifespan and yet already old enough to remember when "both sides of the aisle" (in the US) could regularly bridge gaps.
Maybe you haven't had the luck seeing that, fair enough. But the massive polarization is new and precarious. I'm sure it is partly facilitated, and there is plenty of evidence going to back to Cambridge Analytica, and it can be reasonably suspected that this was just the tip of an iceberg.
> Why did Putin bother sending friendly voters to multiple precincts, when he could have just faked the count? For that matter, why did he do either of these things when he could have just thrown anyone who ran against him in jail? The answer has to be that more blatant interventions carried a greater risk of discovery, or a greater risk of public backlash if they were discovered. Putin tried to fake the elections with the lightest touch possible.
It wasn't about the lightest touch. This kind of distributed manipulation serves two things:
- it's a sort of a Gish gallop. If you're really persistent, you can win the court case that proves that history teacher Svetlana Petrova did stuff the ballot box at polling station #3265, nullify the results from this polling station and get her removed from the commission (though in 2026 your case will simply get thrown out as "deepfakes and perjury"). Can you really do this 4999 more times to prove that the country-wide result is significantly affected?
- it's a loyalty metric. There are eighty-nine governors in Russia, and they are stack ranked against each other based on how many votes Putin or United Russia got in the last election in their region. They themselves repeat this process in their own subdivisions.
I think the term you are looking for is "a normal person in power" | Orban's behavior is simply the behavior of any normal person in power; When there's no 2nd branch of government to stop them. E.g. maga behavior seems similar to orban (and obana democratic behavior too, though less bad) - but at a scale of 300m people you can't ban individual school teachers due to sheet administrational complexity so you settle for college ones
also, arguably, the us has more checks and balances than hungary. But I think you are crediting orban as being some sort of odd thing when instead we is simply a dude with power that's trying to maximize for a single objective (get more money and power for me and friends). To Hungary's benefit and downside it never had a secret police (see latest Romanian elections), mafia (see latest Bulgarian tax code or peace in the Balkans), or church (see Poland not having gone full national socialist yet) to intervene.
> one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism
The Right Wing Authoritarianism scale is somewhat unfortunately named. Bob Altemeyer explains:
[begin quote from The Authoritarians]
In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often <em>turn out</em> to be political conservatives... But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my <em>psychological</em> right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.
You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted <em>their</em> chosen authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao.... But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.
[end quote]
To steelman Scott’s statement, the central issue seems to be whether the RWA scale is politically biased. In other words, does is measure authoritarianism, or some combination of authoritarianism and political conservatism? If it measures the latter, you would expect people on the political right to score higher on it even if people on the political right are not (on average) more authoritarian than people on the left.
The quoted passage was written in 2006 and the RWA scale is considerably older. It seems like there are a fair number of authoritarian followers on the political left now, but at the time the RWA scale was developed, there weren’t enough authoritarians on the political left to test the scale for political neutrality.
There is another authoritarianism scale, developed (or at least used by) Stanley Feldman, that uses questions about child rearing. I believe this scale unlikely to have political bias because the questions don’t involve political topics. On surveys that include both the RWA scale and the child rearing scale, the effects are stronger for the RWA scale than the child rearing scale, but the directionality is the same for both scales. Individuals scoring higher on authoritarianism on either scale are more likely to approve of Trump. They are more likely to trust Fox News.
I can think of two possible reasons why the effect size is larger for the RWA scale. One is that the RWA scale is politically biased. If conservatives and authoritarians are both more likely to trust Fox News, a scale that measures a combination of conservatism and authoritarianism might be a better predictor of trust in Fox News than a scale that measured pure authoritarianism.
The second possibility is that the child rearing scale is a less accurate measure. One reason to suspect this is that the RWA scale has 22 questions and the child rearing scale has 4 questions. If you reduced the RWA scale to the four best-performing questions, you would also get a less accurate result.
I can’t make a solid case that either scale has political bias. Both scales are, as far as I know, generally accepted as valid by people more qualified than me to evaluate them. So I think they should be taken seriously.
Correction: there was no gerrymandering involved in the Russian 2011 election. That 2011 election was direct and proportionate, so the concept of gerrymandering did not apply. The 49% turned into 52% after the invalid ballots and the results of small parties not reaching 7% (which was required to get into Duma) were discarded.
Orban was deemed a dictator because he stood up to the woke european political consensus. Neighboring Romania is more corrupt and more authoritarian but because the political establishment is aligned with the european consensus nobody batted an eye when they canceled the 1st round of 2024 presidential elections for fake reasons. It has been a year and a half and they still provided no evidence for their claims.
So who gets to decide if a regime is a democracy or authoritarian? Mass media?
Funny how people who oppose Orbán talk about what he did *domestically*, and people who support Orbán talk about internet culture wars and other countries.
Orban was a failure since 2020 but foreigners who oppose him call him a dictator not a poor manager and that's wrong.
BTW I dislike Orban and always did. It just bothers me how dishonest political discourse is.
> If you’re a US Republican, you may believe that..
You kinda forgot to mention the assassinations and assassination attempts. Orban, if he goes to court, can argue that he did none of the things on that list. He only surrounded himself with people willing to do anything, the worst kinds of ideologs and bureaucrats. Then spread propaganda to make it seem like the opposition would literally destroy the country. Then let everyone else do his bidding, from his inner circle to random civilians. That's the same playbook of calling Trump literally hitler. I think this is the most powerful political weapon at the moment, and the easiest one to get away with too.
You should probably just say "attempts" unless you meant to talk about Melissa Hortman.
I notice I am confused. However we measure the degree to which the Orban regime deviated from democracy, the specific measures they got away with seem like those that usually go hand-in-hand with undermining or falsifying elections. I'm talking especially of:
"Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV, Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans, Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state [...]
Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly [...] , [...] ~80-90% of Hungarian media was under these people’s control."
I'm confused because these imply such a large degree of control over the state apparatus and the ability to direct it to corrupt ends, that falsifying election counts or individual precinct returns or both seems well-covered by the same umbrella. And that is in fact the norm in various dictatorial and authoritarian regimes (like Russia). Yet it didn't happen here. Why?
I don't want to rush to an answer. I suspect this is a genuinely puzzling question the answer to which may not be apparent to Hungarians (geographic outsides often exaggerate the degree to which geographic insiders are "in the know"). Learning more about how the regime functioned may teach us something nontrivial about such regimes and whether the danger of backsliding in other democratic regimes is serious or exaggerated.
Therefore I'm as annoyed as Scott in this post at those who rush to a glib answer "there was never any danger to democracy to begin with, it's all liberal propaganda". That glib answer is silly and not rooted in reality. Appearing on state TV yesterday, Peter Magyar pointedly remarked that this is the first time in 1.5 years he was allowed an appearance. That's unthinkable in any normally functioning democracy, and the glib-answer-likers know it, they just want to ignore it (or are very uninformed about Hungary).
On the other hand, I dislike this post to the degree it, too, tries to airbrush the confusion away from existence. Scott tries to say "it's no big deal, this happens all the time". Of the 4 examples he gives, only one sort of works - Pinochet. However, the referendum (not elections) that Pinochet lost came with media access to both sides: "both options were guaranteed free electoral advertising spaces—franjas—of 15 minutes each, broadcast late at night or early in the morning. (Separate prime-time slots were also available, but only to the government.)" (Wikipedia). I think perhaps the notable thing about the Pinochet regime was that it always functioned openly as a military dictarorship, never masquerading itself as the legitimate democratic civilian government (as in Russia, China, North Korea, etc.), and the rhetoric of the dictatorship, including inside the new Constitution it created, always called for the eventual return to civilian rule.
The other three examples obscure the real confusion with the Orban regime, I would argue. Milosevic was not nearly as dictatorial *within Serbia* as all these other leaders (as opposed to brutal military actions, ethnic cleansing, etc. in other parts of former Yugoslavia). Chavez and Putin got away with what they wanted despite a referendum loss for one and unexpectedly low election results for the other. The real measure of a regime's deviation from democracy ought to be, after all, not "able to rig an election", but rather "able to avoid their power checked by democratic elections". Chavez could afford to simply try again. Putin's hold on power was never in doubt w.r.t. that election - the United Russia's "humiliatingly low" 52% Duma seats should be seen together with three other "managed opposition" parties, all praising Putin and loyal to the regime, taking the rest. The few real opposition parties that remained by that time were scattered, harangued, falsified away and never crossed the election threshold.
I think it's worth holding on to the confusion, and trying to understand better what could and could not have happened with the elections in Hungary.
In plenty of democratic countries with state media, the media has a bias. And democratic European countries do even ban parties they don’t like.
Either way given the number of actual dictatorships in the world, why such panic over a nation of 5 million?
>I'm confused because these imply such a large degree of control over the state apparatus and the ability to direct it to corrupt ends, that falsifying election counts or individual precinct returns or both seems well-covered by the same umbrella. And that is in fact the norm in various dictatorial and authoritarian regimes (like Russia). Yet it didn't happen here. Why?
Because Russia doesn't get billions from the EU budget on the condition that the level of corruption is kept manageable. Hungary does.
A competently designed election process is very hard to falsify (without producing clear proof that it has been falsified), and the Hungarian one is decent. Opposition parties can delegate their members to overview the counting of the votes, which happens immediately when voting ends, so the opposition knows the true vote count.
I guess that just shifts the question to, why didn't Orbán change the process? Maybe he didn't think he'd get away with it. Way more people understand the significance of falsifying ballots than the significance of biased state media etc, so it would have been a big loss of legitimacy.
(Personally I was pretty surprised, I was pretty sure he'd either postpone the elections or rig them, and that the transfer of power would have to happen via mass protests. He just seemed to be threatened too much personally by a transfer of power. Really curious what he'll do once police starts investigating his criminal network in earnest.)
> Really curious what he'll do once police starts investigating his criminal network in earnest.
Flee to Rostov-on-Don?
I thought “hybrid regime” was a terrible name for something halfway a sliding scale (eg a hybrid car doesn’t use some fuel that’s halfway gas and electricity)
but maybe there’s also a sliding scale between a sliding scale and a true combination hybrid
I often half-jokingly, since my girlfriend works with autistic kids a lot, refer to people who exhibit some similar clusters of traits but don't rise to the level of significant neurodivergence as "on the spectrum spectrum." It'd partner well with your sliding scale of sliding scales.
Liked it. Less the Tyler-bashing (again). TC says he does not see the US in "serious danger" to stop being a valid democracy in Trump's time. That does NOt mean he sees "no danger". Obviously there are many threats to the status-quo "balance of powers'. A balance btw, I do not consider very well balanced at all. And I see a higher chance that Trump's attempts will eventually lead to less powers to the POTUS. Which is good. And sadly, still no option for a third or fourth term - Adenauer, Merkel and Kohl managed to do that, and we would all loved if Bill resp. Barrack could have. Philippines have only one term, a guarantee that nothing will ever change for better. Thank you for your attention to this matter ;) as for a better word for 10-40% dictators: I wished we even had the word 'Strongman' in German. The important point should be to name the dynamic of pushing the scale from say 10% to 15%, from 25 to 35 and so on. I like 'strongman', we now just have to make others understand it our way :D
You always have the option again. Seems the parties (esp. D) are the ones really interested in just a 'soon-to-be-lame-duck+ex-president' instead of someone who rules not just the country but the party, too. Kohl and Merkel did. If Trump had a good presidency and much-more-brain: he could remake R even as an ex-POTUS. Just too hard in that scenario to see D agree.
A filipino one-term-president will probably never get to change anything relevant.
TC wrapped his stated view in a snide attack on others. Not "I dont see serious danger here is why" but "ppl who see this need to seriously rethink their views". Scott gives him much better treatment than he gives by articulating the reasons why some danger is warranted and why the dismissal isnt helping. TC is very gracious once names get mentioned, but not so much when his opponents remain anonymous. Its his version of a motte and bailey
For some a bug, for him a feature. Are there ppl who write, read and talk about Trump breaking democracy? Yes there are. And there should be. But taking it seriously to an extent to really believing this has any chance significantly higher than, say: 2% - not a sign of proper understanding, indeed "ppl who see this need to seriously rethink their views" (Seeing a danger of 2% is reason enough to worry and discuss. And sure, protest. But a lot of the protesters seem to actually believe a (much) higher risk. And that is wrong, if you care about understanding reality. Ok, I stop repeating myself. - I did see a higher than 2% chance of Orban+friends directly manipulating the vote just enough to win. Relieved and rethinking my views.
Where do people get the idea that the old biased left-wing experts went anywhere? They still literally hold exactly the same positions in the same institutions, are still gatekeeping them and dissenting from their view will make you VERY quickly a target for removal.
I'm really not a Trump supporter or even generally consider myself right-wing, but I'm completely baffled by this insistence that a right-wing government somehow made "wokeness go away" or however you want to put it. If you're in academia, absolutely nothing changed. Not only are they just as biased as they have always been; the problem is still, if anything, getting worse.
I'm a geneticist and I'm looking back wistfully at the time when the main threat appeared to be creationists who argued against evolution, but didn't actually had a lot of ways to impact the research funding for genetics. Nowadays I can't even argue with the far-left activists in powerful academic positions, I just keep my head down, try to phrase my research in a way that doesn't attract the Eye of Sauron, and hope that the funding for my research into the causes of serious inheritable disabilities is not cancelled due to having problematic ableist implications.
I'm not even making this up, I have colleagues who're "working together" with social scientists due to shared funding from an excellence initiative and the "collaboration" consists mainly off the social scientists trying to get the geneticists fired for ableism and complaining of not getting enough funding for their activism. They don't even call themselves researchers, they have instead "activist-scholar" in their academic bio. And these people get funded by a nominally right-wing government!
In most western countries right now the pattern appears to be that when a left-wing government is in power, they get to purge academics they don't like, jurists they don't like, and bureaucrats they don't like. When the right-wing government is in power, nobody gets to purge anyone, and when the right-wing government even feebly attempts to do it with even very few individual extreme cases, it's treated as a major threat to democracy and usually either quickly reversed or the person is shuffled into another state-financed position if sufficiently unpopular. All of these groups are, unsurprisingly, majority left-wing by a significant margin nowadays; Of course they weren't always, it was a result of this practice.
The problem with Trump is not that he presents a more credible threat to being "90% democratic", but that he does so with worse aesthetics
When I was reading that part, I attributed it to the combination of three factors:
1. They now hold less power/use their power less. This is not true, based on your comment;
2. They are less heard/seen than before. This depends on one's bubble, of course;
3. More of their opinions look reasonable compared to unreasonable opinions from the other side.
This might be the most first world problem bitching imaginable right now
You had a friend who was taking a poison daily that was going to kill him slowly. Now, he’s taking 60% of that poison daily, but also another poison that is killing him twice as fast. Yes, I get triage logic here, but how about getting the friend to stop taking all the poisons once and for all???
(Maybe a better metaphor is doing heroin and then switching to crack, now the friend is addicted to both but “ignore the heroin, and maybe some Piker brand heroin is just what we need” might not be the way out of this.)
>Where do people get the idea that the old biased left-wing experts went anywhere?
A silly rhetorical flourish from someone that should know his commentariat is *extremely* literal.
"If you're in academia, absolutely nothing changed."
This is not the universal experience. The experience at my institute probably isn't either, but I was shocked at how quickly and severely things changed for the worse following his inauguration.
>>> So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears, ditching the “democratic backsliding” paradigm would be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
Strong vibes in this last set of "qualifying quotes"! Am I alone in feeling the annoyance at having to add these everywhere so he's allowed to discuss controversial things without having a dogpile now that the blog is "visible" to the "mainstream"? I do not remember seeing these in SSC.
What are "qualifying quotes"? A quick attempt at a search didn't tell me. I can understand from context the general concept you're referring to (spending time overly signalling to the naive normies that you aren't doing two-party-political-shit-slinging-as-usual and are actually trying to discuss an issue). I'm just not clear on what specific part of the quoted line you feel is doing that to an excessive degree.
Ah, might be lost in translation sorry. I was referring to the addtion of quotes (understood as adding some uncertainty/qualifications to a statement) around things that do not need it. Here: the baby with the bathwater. This is a well known saying, and adding yet another set of "" just makes the act of "" become ironic to me...
Huh, interesting. I don't think you're mistaken here although I'd probably have to pay closer attention in the future on how quotes are used on common phrases like this. He might've also just used quotes because he already had them in mind after writing "democratic backsliding." But I do think I see what you mean in it coming across as making the rhetoric seem a bit less direct.
Although it also makes me doubt it's a big factor in this case just because "democratic backsliding exists to some degree" if anything feels like something that's probably *more* palpable to the mainstream than the old SSC audience that was more comfortable openly discussing the merits and failings of different government structures rather than taking "democracy good" for granted the way the mainstream does.
The more I listen to Pesca, the less I want to hear from him
I never spent much time worrying about Hungary and it being a dictatorship, it’s in the EU, being declared a total dictatorship would have seen it kicked out. Not that the EU itself is highly democratic, the executive isn’t elected, the parliament is not law making, but it does assume democracy in its constituent countries. A forced Hungarian exit would be a much greater disaster than Brexit. Britain is bigger.
However there are 60-90 dictatorships in the world, the west is allied with many of them, and has even created or enabled some. Al Queda has come to power in Syria, and is an ally of the West to little or no bed-wetting from the usual suspects.
Orban was an authoritarian prime minister. Now he’s gone. Same with the supposedly fascist political party in Poland, also now gone. Turns out they were in fact democrats, that’s the major criteria - handing over power after losing elections. (Being a strong man or controlling state media isn’t unique to Orban).
I suspect that the real problem wasn’t how he governed but what he believed.
As for Trump, if he tries to hold onto power - by which i don’t mean supporting a few guys with foam fingers protesting but through sine kind of military or other coup - then he will be a dictator, and I’ll agree that he’s a dictator or fascist or something. Until then, no.
(Nitpick/fun fact: “Aung San Suu Kyi” is a four-word-long given name and she has no last/family/sur- name, so abbreviating to “Kyi” on second reference is incorrect.)
I think your interpretation of why putin use so many different and contradicting methods to rig elections is quite far from what is happening. He actually uses only few methods but main is asking “why people aren’t happy with me in area you are responsible for? Are you doing bad job?” in very stern voice and let local authorities figure out how to fix this and how to relay the message further. So governor can start asking local social service “why old people aren’t voting? Are you doing bad job informing them?” and so on.
Of course there is centralised election rigging as well, but lots of things happening not by direct orders but by creating system that will award election rigging and make it seem necessary for all loyal politicians and government workers. It’s much easier and gives plausible deniability in case some province gets out of control.
> Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats.
That's nothing! In Britain you can get 2/3s of the seats with 1/3rd of the vote, as happened in 2024.
Not only that, but the winning Labour party actually got *fewer* votes in 2024 than they had in the previous election, which they lost quite badly, but because the right-wing vote was now split between the Conservatives and Reform Labour managed to pick up a load of seats anyway.
> Supposedly, this is still an unproven rumor, got someone to date his opponent, record a sex tape, and try to blackmail them with it.
It's unproven in the sense of not having been prosecuted in a court (since this kind of thing does not get to the courts in an autocracy), but it's pretty obviously true. The new PM's ex-girlfriend leaked a bunch of snippets from secret audio recordings of their private discussions; then the press unearthed that she got a bunch of money from an oligarch close to Orbán around the time those recordings were made; then an anonymous source alleged having the sex tape and revealed a shot made by secret camera from a bedroom, and said ex-girlfriend admitted to having invited the (then opposition leader) PM to the party where that room was and having sex there; later the details of a police investigation leaked, which involved some secret agent (who was involved in various operations against the opposition party) saying to some collaborator that the ex-girlfriend is being managed by his boss.
If I remember, Napoleon held several elections. And was insanely successful as a "democrat."
These were not elections but plebiscites/referendums
I think this debate is also confused by people's narrow historical knowledge. People think Trump is the next Hitler because that's the only history they know.
There's much closer historical examples of countries back sliding from democracy, sliding back to democracy or remaining somewhere in between.
Had Orban adopted different foreign policy attitudes and his opponents were pro-Russian, the eu would have sung Orban's praises.
See, e.g., Romania, were election results that TPTB didn't like were simply canceled.
You youngsters don't remember the Classics*
Back in the 1980s, Senator Edward Kennedy put in an amendment to a budget bill carefully crafted to impose an additional tax ONLY on NewsCorp that had an annoying (to Kennedy) habit of bringing up Mary Jo Kopechne.
*Mind, these television and internet-era pols have nothing on the 19th Century. Imagine if they had cell phones.
Hunter Biden..
The "tilting the playing field" list is underselling Orbán a bit.
- He replaced everyone in all the theoretically independent institutions (Supreme Court, the prosecutor's office, the media regulator, the competition regulator, the election monitor etc. etc.) with spineless lackeys who did his every bidding.
- He built a vast system of corruption, the full extent of which we'll only understand now that he is out of power and the justice system starts working again, but a journalist's investigation [1] identified about 11B HUF worth of taxpayer funds extracted into his and his cronies' private enterprises (that's on average about 1.5% of the national budget, so it's as if Trump were stealing a hundred billion dollars every year).
- He used those funds to buy all Hungarian media that was available to buy, bully the rest by initimidating would-be advertisers, and use that and the state media and other national communication resources to run a propaganda machine only matched in its size and unhingedness by the darkest Communist and Nazi regimes. Since it was all running on essentially unlimited taxpayer funds, and courts were partially under his control anyway, libel law basically became irrelevant; the major publications regularly accused opposition politicians and critics of crimes, gay affairs, pedophilia, being enemy agents and spies etc. His election campaign mostly consisted of creating fake platform documents for the opposition (describing huge tax hikes and sending the youth to fight in Ukraine) and propagating it much more widely than the opposition could propagate its actual election promises.
- This was bolstered by huge spending on ads, posters etc, and a large network of paid influencers. In the 2022 election campaign the opposition estimated being outspent 100 to 1. Many economically downtrodden voters' information diet consisted of nothing but government propaganda.
- He used the tax office, food safety regulator and similar institutions to bully businesses that associated with the opposition (ranging from businesses owned by relatives of politicians to restaurants willing to provide space for a meetup for local activists), and made pro-government businesses fire people for openly associating with the opposition (often as much as liking a Facebook post).
- He sent the secret services to not only surveil the opposition but attack their IT infrastructure. The main opposition party's supporter database was stolen and leaked, and used to intimidate supporters.
- Along with fellow Putin ally Vučić (the Serbian PM), he organized a fake terrorist attack the weekend before the election.
And it was all getting continously worse, he expanded his powers significantly in every new cycle. He promised a big crackdown on independent media after the current elections, for example. Commentators often said Hungary was running the same trajectory as Russia, just ~15 years behind (although I don't know enough about Russia to really evaluate that).
[1] https://www.valaszonline.hu/2026/02/25/ner-aktak-korrupcio-tenyfeltaras-bodis-andras-valasz-offline/
How did he manage to lose, then?
People voted against him.
External economic shocks (COVID, the war) combined with incompetent policies and vast levels of corruption resulting in a prolonged stagflation crisis, the remaining free media doing a good job of exposing said corruption, the fractured opposition suffering a humiliating defeat in 2022 which set the stage for a new party unifying opposition voters (and so having a fighting chance in first-past-the-post elections), a "spark" moment of a series of child abuse scandals reaching to the highest levels of government (after their 2022 campaign was built around protecting children from the dangers of wokism), a talented new politician making use of that moment, many people being resilient in the face of constant threats, harassment and slander, and some catastrophically bad campaign strategy decisions from Orbán.
And the fact Orban has become his own Portrait of Dorian Gray, while Magyar is model handsome while also having the most perfectly vibes based name for a nationalist revolutionary moment.
> Some “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased and left-wing (one favorite trick is to conduct studies showing that right-wingers are more authoritarian on average, by using a construct literally called right-wing authoritarianism).
I mean, right-wing thought _is_ inherently more authoritarian. The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy. The fundamental basis of right-wing thought is that there are natural hierarchies to persons - that is, that all persons are not equal (whether the basis of that inequality is wealth [as in libertarianism or oligarchy], or birth [as in monarchy/aristocracy], or power [as in oligarchy or dictatorship], etc. etc.). That is inherently conducive to monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.
This goes back to the very earliest use of left- and right-wing, where the "left wing" were the supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité, and the "right wing" were the supporters of the king and the ancien regime, and continues to be true today.
Let's not do a false equivalence and pretend that left-wing and right-wing thought are equally conducive to democracy.
If that obsession with "liberté, fraternité, egalité" ultimately leads them to suppress threats to their vision, then what's the difference? They're both just self-preserving ideologies, and self-preservation requires power and authority.
Hardly happened in a vacuum. The revolutionaries were facing practically the whole of Europe and all the might of the ancien regime opposing them.
Remove the reaction of the right wing reactionaries and counter revolutionaries, and there's no terror.
>The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy.
That is only conducive to democracy to the extent that it is actually true, everyone agrees that it's true, and everyone behaves as atomic individuals.
The idea that all persons aren't equal is despicable and leads directly to things like the Holocaust. Once some people are more human and others less, you can eventually justify any enormity.
Might as well just gather up all the undesirables in one place, right? Concentrate them together in some kind of ersatz habitation?
Jesus fucking Christ, dude. You need to find your humanity.
Well, you get your wish eleven months of the year. Somehow that will have to be enough for your bigoted, nasty little heart.
You are very very obviously not ok with gay people, or this wouldn't even occur to you. "New Left Religion"?? You need professional help dude, you're delusional.
That's why I think there was immense value to the concept of Imago Dei, even if Christians weren't consistently good at applying it seriously. Even without the religious backstop, Enlightenment liberalism did try to keep some concept of universal human *dignity*, and that's faded over the years.
The idea that all people are equal *and must be made so* leads directly to atrocities too.
You also left off the other two clauses. Even if people are equal in some meaningful way (we're not all 1-meter grey blobs so it's not literal), they don't all act that way!
> The idea that all people are equal *and must be made so* leads directly to atrocities too.
People are equal in value or they're not, you can't make them so or not so, it's an axiomatic belief about the world that you hold or don't hold.
And if you don't hold it, basically, you're a bad person, frankly.
> Even if people are equal in some meaningful way (we're not all 1-meter grey blobs so it's not literal), they don't all act that way!
When people talk about "everyone is equal", they mean in _value_ or moral worth. Not in terms of outcomes, ability, height, etc., those are quite obviously trivially untrue.
>Not in terms of outcomes, ability, height, etc., those are quite obviously trivially untrue.
I assume you lived through the last decade. There are a lot of people that do expect everyone to equal in ability and outcome.
I have, and I have not observed that. At all. I suspect if you're honest, you haven't either.
And I've spent more time than is pleasant in spaces that are hotbeds of the worst excesses of so-called "left-wing" idpol (which ofc is not actually left-wing at all, being as it is obsessed with categorizing and measuring humanity).
>I mean, right-wing thought _is_ inherently more authoritarian. The fundamental basis of left-wing thought is the equality of all persons. That is inherently conducive to democracy. The fundamental basis of right-wing thought is that there are natural hierarchies to persons - that is, that all persons are not equal (whether the basis of that inequality is wealth [as in libertarianism or oligarchy], or birth [as in monarchy/aristocracy], or power [as in oligarchy or dictatorship], etc. etc.). That is inherently conducive to monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.
That's only the case if all persons actually are equal. If they aren't, we should expect left-wing thought to consistently trend in the direction of demanding more and more state intervention to try and force everybody to be equal and squash the hierarchies that would naturally emerge if people were left to their own devices.
>This goes back to the very earliest use of left- and right-wing, where the "left wing" were the supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité, and the "right wing" were the supporters of the king and the ancien regime, and continues to be true today.
And where these supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité promptly executed 10,000 of their political opponents.
> That's only the case if all persons actually are equal. ...
What a despicable comment. The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. Get yourself straight.
> And where these supporters of liberté, fraternité, egalité promptly executed 10,000 of their political opponents.
Hardly in a vacuum, which you would know and acknowledge if you were trying to engage constructively. For anyone else reading, the missing context is that all the power structures of the ancien regime and every country in Europe was trying to crush the revolution, an environment that naturally needs paranoia and overreaction. The terror was absolutely horrible, but let's not pretend it happened just for fun with no context.
"The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. "
What about all the communist atrocities?
As for the reign of terror, I don't think it's fair to say that not giving a history lecture is the same as not engaging constructively. In another comment you brought up the holocaust. Would it be fair for another commenter to claim you were not engaging constructively by leaving out the missing context of "all the largest empires in the world were trying to crush Germany, an environment that naturally breeds paranoia and overreaction. The death camps were absolutely horrible, but..."
(I'm not claiming the holocaust and the reign of terror are comparable, I'm using it as an extreme example to demonstrate that the "hardly in a vacuum, missing context"-argument could apply more widely than you probably intended.)
> What about all the communist atrocities?
You will notice, if you have any intellectual honesty or curiousity, that "communist" atrocities have almost invariably been performed by governments that are essentially right-wing and hierarchical. Neither the USSR nor "Communist" China were run on left-wing lines in most important ways - there was a strict hierarchy, and while there was the trappings and outward performance of "socialism" or "communism", in fact you had pretty bog-standard right-wing dictatorships.
So, yes, all those "communist" atrocities were again, the result of hierarchical right-wing power structures. Anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian.
>What a despicable comment. The idea that all people aren't equal is behind pretty much every atrocity. Get yourself straight.
Firstly, that's just straight-up untrue -- around 100 million people were killed by communist regimes, for example.
Secondly, even if it were true, it still wouldn't logically follow that people actually are equal. Someone might be motivated to do a bad thing by a true belief.
>Hardly in a vacuum, which you would know and acknowledge if you were trying to engage constructively. For anyone else reading, the missing context is that all the power structures of the ancien regime and every country in Europe was trying to crush the revolution, an environment that naturally needs paranoia and overreaction. The terror was absolutely horrible, but let's not pretend it happened just for fun with no context.
Lots of regimes have been overthrown or almost overthrown without resorting to mass executions. The French monarchy, for example, was overthrown four times (the French Revolution, the Hundred Days, the July Revolution, and the 1848 Revolution), without holding its own Reign of Terror. Pretty odd, if right-wing thought is so much more conducive to authoritarianism than left-wing thought.
> Firstly, that's just straight-up untrue -- around 100 million people were killed by communist regimes, for example.
You will notice, if you have any intellectual honesty or curiousity, that "communist" atrocities have almost invariably been performed by governments that are essentially right-wing and hierarchical. Neither the USSR nor "Communist" China were run on left-wing lines in most important ways - there was a strict hierarchy, and while there was the trappings and outward performance of "socialism" or "communism", in fact you had pretty bog-standard right-wing dictatorships.
So, yes, all those "communist" atrocities were again, the result of hierarchical right-wing power structures. Anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian. Hanging a poster that says "communism" outside a regular old dictatorship does not make it left-wing.
> Lots of regimes have been overthrown or almost overthrown without resorting to mass executions.
So... the forces of Europe were _not_ arrayed against the Revolution? What an irrelvant point.
> Pretty odd, if right-wing thought is so much more conducive to authoritarianism than left-wing thought.
Left-wing thought is inherently inimical to authoritarianism, more or less by definition. To the extent that something is autocratic, it's right-wing. And to the extent it's democratic and egalitarian, it's left-wing.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
Oh, I see, you're one of those "True communism has never been tried" types. Makes sense, I suppose.
> Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats.
In 2022 Orbán’s party won 54% of the popularity vote (gaining 48 out of 93 seats – instead of 50 – because of “compensation lists” aiding smaller parties), and won all but two of the districts outside the capital Budapest (87 out of 106, in a FPTP system, with 52% of the constituency votes FWIW), which can be hardly ascribed to gerrymandering, especially if you look at the map.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hungarian_parliamentary_election#/media/File:2022_Hungarian_parliamentary_election_-_Tentative_results.png
> won all but two of the districts outside the capital Budapest (87 out of 106, in a FPTP system, with 52% of the constituency votes FWIW), which can be hardly ascribed to gerrymandering, especially if you look at the map.
?? Winning 87 out of 106 constituencies in a FPTP system with 52% of the vote sounds insanely gerrymandered? The actual defense is that the next largest party had only 37% of the vote, since there were a number of smaller parties splitting opposition seats.
No-no-no-no-no. If, hypothetically, you distribute the 52% evenly across the country (meaning every district has 52% voting A and 48% B or anyone else), then in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, A will win all the seats.
So just knowing the numbers alone, or even seeing the district outlines, is not enough to definitively tell whether gerrymandering happened; that you'd only know by knowing the voting density on the borders of the districts – which none of us here do. I'd love to read this Economist article that claims "wild gerrymandering": https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/04/02/a-wild-gerrymander-makes-hungarys-fidesz-party-hard-to-dislodge
Since Fidesz rewrote the districts, they probably skewed them in their favor, but that's backwards reasoning. The district outlines also look often funny (linked in parent), so P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)... All I'm saying is that winning 68% of total seats (or 87/106 constituency seats) does not mean *anything* bad.
> No-no-no-no-no. If, hypothetically, you distribute the 52% evenly across the country (meaning every district has 52% voting A and 48% B or anyone else), then in a first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, A will win all the seats.
Hypothetically, yes. Practically, no. I would absolutely not expect a system which uses some gerrymandering-neutral method to get an extremely thin vote majority (+4) in a two party system to have a huge electoral majority, outside of VERY weird edge cases. The cube rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_rule) would suggest you'd expect a 52-48 result to result in ~56% of the seats going to the winning party.
>All I'm saying is that winning 68% of total seats (or 87/106 constituency seats) does not mean *anything* bad.
The constituency seats are the only ones that are can be gerrymandered! You can't gerrymander a party-list seat!
I'm not convinced at all, and I fail to see how outside of very weird edge cases why a small majority in votes wouldn't turn into a big majority in seats.
And the small majority where gerrymandering matters is not 52-48: the capital was won by the opposition, and Fidesz had approx. 40% there. Meaning outside the capital it was 54% for Fidesz. And the other 46% is split among three parties. The numbers paint a pretty consistent picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hungarian_parliamentary_election_results_by_constituency
The cube rule is an empirical observation, and even according to the article it's like "a broken clock is right twice a day": "The approximation can work well; it matched the 2002 U.S. House elections to within one seat. However, ..."
> You can't gerrymander a party-list seat!
Of course, I never said otherwise, but Scott's article talked about "68%", as if *that* mattered. (Granted, had he said 87/106=82%, I'd have said the same.)
And contrast your arguments with 2026: this year the Tisza party won 93/106 constituency seats with only 54% of constituency votes. Does that imply gerrymandering? Why doesn’t the cube rule apply here, if this *was* a two-party election, unlike 2022?
Orbán is basically a category of his own, the completely non-violent autocrat. Like how most autocrats are basically violent bullies, including Putin, while Orbán is more like the Master Thief, the level20 hobbit thief/rogue, who sneaks into the well-guarded castle and steals democracy from it without any violence or even the threat of it. And I speak the language, I am well informed.
>Why did these people hold elections at all?
Scott, you are making the same category mistake as nearly everyone on the Internet: a dictatorship or autocracy is not a monarchy!
A dictatorship or autocracy should be defined as a distorted democracy, ran by criminals who break their own laws.
For example, Hitler was legally given absolute power by a legally elected Bundestag several times, look up the Enabling Act. The Nazi regime was formally a democracy. The trick was that very illegal, very bad things would have happened to those representatives who do not vote for that act. Of course the Holocaust was 100% illegal and kept in secret too, an SS Judge called Dr. Konrad Morgen tried to prosecute those responsible, because they never ever dared to make law saying killing people is okay. The Gestapo disappearing dissidents was also illegal and so on.
Similarly, the Soviet Constitution under Stalin seemed normal, like freedom of speech, assembly etc. most laws seemed entirely normal. There was no law that you get shot for disagreeing with Stalin. Instead, those people got shot illegally, for example, sentencing them for things like espionage or sabote without evidence. The police was breaking the Soviet law, the courts were breaking Soviet law, that's how it worked.
Remember this: the dictator is defined as the criminal government that breaks its own, mostly quite democratic laws. Not a king.
Now Orbán's genius is that he could do this non-violently, basically just stealing money and bribing everybody to obey him, more or less. Master Thief of democracy.
It was a politcal machine much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
>Remember this: the dictator is defined as the criminal government that breaks its own, mostly quite democratic laws. Not a king.
Indeed, that was the original Greek distinction between a dictatorship (or tyranny, as they called it) and a monarchy.
I humbly submit my own blog post on the resilience of law in the face of "tyranny" and the fact that tyranny is kind of a spectrum. Tyrants work very hard to preserve the veneer of subservience to the rule of law, and in doing so, the law actually rules them: https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/mad-kings-magic-words-the-light-and
Not a regular “Scott post liker” here — I used to read them in full, but they took real time. These days I mostly scan or just ask an LLM for a summary. My inner model keeps seeing fewer and fewer genuinely new ideas, concepts, or facts, and life is getting shorter and shorter.
From my two-minute scan (TL;DR): Scott seems pleased that Orbán lost the election. He’d heard all the usual accusations — unfair, undemocratic, dictator-like behavior — and apparently agrees they were real enough to matter.
I often struggle with the bright line into authoritarianism/dictatorship/autocracy/strongmanhood whatever.
A lot of people who debate with me will use "defying the courts" as some kind of bright line, but I think that happens in a fairly routine fashion all the time if "defying the courts" means "ignoring some court ruling." Basically every criminal case is going to involve the defense arguing that the cops or prosecutors are, in some way, ignoring a court ruling and thus the case should be thrown out...or evidence suppressed...or some other thing should happen that helps the defendant. Very often, they're right!
"defying the courts" in the more flagrant sense of "ignoring court orders" is quite difference, but even in the present state of things in the united states, the administration is obeying quite a lot of court orders that strongly inhibit the things it would most like to do.
Does anyone know Orban's track record here? how often did he "defy" the courts?
I'm not sure I agree with you on his "strategic" approach.
This ties into a point I make on the blog post I mention supra, which is that I'm generally skeptical of the idea that court is "frictionless" for the government. Going to war against a children's toy company on the tarriffs issue cost the administration a ton of time, money, and political goodwill. It wasn't costless and no one in the administration with an ounce of legal acumen would consider it costless. (Source: Am federal lawyer)
How does packing the courts fit into your views here? If someone gets into power and defies the courts a bunch into whatever most-blatant way you'd like, but hangs on in having done so, and 10 years later the courts are filled with cronies who declare the initial court condemnation in error. Are you judging them by the new crony court, the one that existed when they seized power, or by your own standards on what the law should be based on some external values?
"Willing to ignore court orders under any condition" does sound like a clear line, but I also imagine you'd catch some legit governments doing some legit thing, having a court call it out as illegal, but then realizing it should probably be rendered legal given changing standards, requirements, culture, whatever.
This might be just me being weird, but I tend to take a very cynical legal realist approach to "the law." The law is whatever the courts say it is, and that's super important in discussions on "slides into autocracy." Hitler never needed to "defy the courts". I think it's very possible the modal authoritarian dictator doesn't.
What I think gets elided in a lot of court-packing arguments in the US in particular is that to "pack the courts", the hypothetical court packer would need significant buy-in from the legislative branch. Far from some kind of autocratic override, It would be "what the people wanted" if it happened.
Stuff like Scott's recentish post about SEIU abusing democracy initiatives is a good example of the chasm between "sounds good on the surface" and "actually what people want", and sadly legislature is also pretty prone to following surface cues these days.
But nevertheless as far as a useful metric that can be applied across continents and centuries I think you've got a decent point here. It's still a meaningful hard line and it's somewhat telling who does and doesn't cross it - and a deeper dive into the reasons probably has a lot to say about both the leader in question's movement and the underlying culture. Seems like a handy heuristic for compare/contrasting the nature of different strongocracyships if nothing else.
Yeah, it seems like the "classical dictators" that are part of modern mythology: Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mussolini, all come to power in an environment where they don't need to "defy the courts" in a significant way.
That phobia might even be a particular symptom of america due to our very sharp separation of powers.
It seems like "illiberal democracy" is the best term for this spectrum. It states what you're talking about. Liberalism is a set of ideas about how to organize society that is at a certain level agnostic about how the rulers are chosen. Democracy is a method for choosing rulers.
Of course they do come together in practice - liberalism is how you ensure that future elections will still be held, and conversely democracy has traditionally reinforced liberalism because liberal societies are better places to live for most people.
But there's always the temptation to think that you've found a way to get what you want by trampling liberalism. And people have to repeatedly find out why that isn't so. Unless one day, it is. The future is uncertain after all.
Illiberal democracy is a term that is correct but doesn't tell us where the country is relative to the inflection point: can people vote the person/party abusing the rules out of power?
For example, people are reasonably sure that the GOP will lose their trifecta in the upcoming midterms. It's much less likely, but LDP in Japan can lose again if they screw the pooch like they did under Taro Aso. It's not impossible that AfD becomes the ruling party in Germany. Many people thought that Hungary was past the point of no return, drifting towards Turkey, various African countries, Russia and North Korea.
I propose we call the two types of illiberal democracies a "flawed democracy" and a "decorative democracy".
I would just never have put Turkey, Hungary, and to a lesser extent even Russia in the same category as NK. A collapse in public approval world matter a fair amount in every one of those countries, and even in places like China that don't run elections. That's because they are modern states run through impersonal systems that require some type of rule-following.
On the other hand NK and many African countries seem to be operating under feudal rules.
It's a spectrum, just like you've said. Erdogan isn't allowed to run the next election, but he has already had the most popular opposition candidate arrested. We might see him do some constitutional shenanigans again to stay in power.
> A collapse in public approval
Yeltsin famously had an approval rating in the single digits and still won the 1996 election and successfully nominated a successor in the 2000 one.
How much of the ballot stuffing in Russia 2011 election may have been local? How much of the ballot stuffing may have been against Putin or the party most associated with Putin vs. for the opposition? Russia which I visited in the early 2000s was so rotten and corrupt that it was more like a loose confederation of mafia states, and most of these mafia states had much more than zero interest in preventing a strong(er) central government.
Against Putin's party? Close to zero. Electoral fraud is punished swiftly and harshly in Russia.
Putin abolished gubernatorial elections after Beslan in 2004, so by 2011 Russia was no longer a loose confederation, but a very centralized country.
CIA rag called Wikipedia: The 2025 Russian elections were held in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia, in large part, on 14 September 2025, with several regions. There were 21 gubernatorial elections (20 direct and one indirectly elected), 11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_parliaments_of_Russia elections, and many elections on the municipal level.
CIA rag called Wikipedia: "In the wake of Beslan, the government proceeded to toughen laws on terrorism and expand the powers of law-enforcement agencies.[8]
In addition, Putin signed a law that replaced the direct election of the heads of the federal subjects of Russia with a system in which they are proposed by the president of Russia and approved or disapproved by the elected legislative bodies of the federal subjects."
Direct elections were reintroduced in 2012, eight years later. That is, after the political system was "tightened up".
We might be overestimating the strength of the 'guard rails"
The guard rail in 2021 was Mike Pence, Vance said he would've counted the fake electors.
I don't think this is a central example of the argument. Most Democrats and "elites" (1) are not arguing that Trump represents a moderate decline in democracy in America, say moving from a 80% democracy under the old "elections happen, all judges/journalists/bureaucrats are liberal/Democrats" to a 70% democracy under Trump where he destroys old, ill-functioning institutions and replaces them with broken ones or none at all. They're arguing that Trump is Special and, because he's Special, anything can be allowed to fight him.
I don't want to relitigate everything around Trump but an example that will hopefully provide more light than fire is General Mark Miley's actions during the first Trump administration. To quote:
"In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved." (2)
To be as fair to General Milley as possible, this was done in the immediate aftermath of January 6th. Still, this is, to be blunt, the intentional removal of civilian control (the president) from the military and Milley is pretty blunt about it. This is an extremely bad no good super undemocratic thing. The head of the US military, the most powerful military on the planet with enough nuclear weapons to end the world multiple times, unilaterally decided to no longer accept civilian control. Under any other president, this would be grossly unacceptable. This would be horrific. But Trump is Special and because Trump is Special, anything goes.
I'll save the specific litigation of these events for the notes (4) but the hopefully productive note here is that while Scott and a few others might legitimately view "democratic backsliding" as a useful concept and Trump representing a decline from an 80% democratic society to a 70% democratic society, that is not the way it is overwhelmingly used in media or in real life. It is overwhelmingly used as Trump being a Special and unique threat to democracy, which justifies allowing the FBI to spy on him, to ban him off social media, to remove civilian oversight of the military, to prosecute the opposition candidate 4 times in the runup to the election, to throw his closest advisors in jail for crimes half of DC is guilty of, and to riot in the street to prevent a legal agency from executing the laws of the country.
I believe this is what liberals/democrats actually mean about Trump because, A, I expect at least half of them to read this and say "Yeah, that's true, he's an incipient dictator who actually will end democracy in the US" and also because their actions to limit Trump in many cases represent actual risks to democracy. If Trump is "democratic backsliding" then you actually weigh out the costs and benefits to democratic institutions of banning presidential candidates off social media. You recognize there's a cost in democratic norms/legitimacy to that, you weigh it against the likelihood of success and the harm Trump would do, and then you act appropriately. This is not what liberals/Democrats at large have done. They have never, ever, weighed the risks and consequences of their actions to democratic norms; they have always treated Trump as a Special and maximum risk to democracy against whom almost anything is justified.
So I don't think Sailer, Cowen, et al are arguing against Scott's reasonable "democratic backsliding", they're arguing against Trump being Special because that's what's generally being argued. In a similar way, many in Europe have argued that Orban isn't just bad, he's Special and, well, he isn't.
(1) Sorry, I hate the term for multiple reasons, I don't have a better one.
(2) https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/woodward-book-trump-nuclear#:~:text=Two%20days%20after%20the%20January,Washington%20Post%20reporter%20Robert%20Costa. (3)
(3) Sorry for CNN
(4) I don't think any of the January 6th allegations are true. I'm open to being convinced otherwise and the standard of evidence I've set is "can this be proven in a court of law?" And it hasn't...in over 5 years at this point with the alleged traitor reelected to office. I'm not interested in your super special standard that has convinced you, we have clear and longstanding norms regarding who has committed a crime, it's the court system, and Trump hasn't.
To make a perhaps uncharitable but correct summary: Scott found evidence that disproves one of his claims. He doubled down on the claim instead, writing about how his claim is all true anyway.
Evidence against a claim *should* lead you to update in a direction against the claim, not make a big post about how that big piece of evidence doesn't matter.
(And there's also the issue of Democrats doing strongman-like things too. I already brought up them convicting Trump on a process crime. That's third world autocracy stuff right there. You've also got the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, Biden censoring social media behind the scenes, and Russiagate. And remember Trump being banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitch, and Snapchat?)
How about widespread collusion to hide Biden's mental state. I still don't think Scott, or indeed many on the left, have yet properly updated on what that implies about everything else.
If your predictions are consistently wrong in the same direction, that says something important about how you are arriving at those predictions.
>I still don't think Scott, or indeed many on the left
Not unlike COVID-era issues more broadly, there's a sense of "let's just sweep it under the rug and forget now that he's out of the picture." Which, yes, says something important about those predictions and how people respond 'in the moment' with such things.
What, exactly, does it imply about everything else?
It implies that only priests are granted the right to pattern-recognition.
Given that the sources of information that left-leaning people rely on were willing to lie to them about one thing, this should increase your expectations that they are lying to you about other things, and therefore you should update your expectations of a truthful accounting of the state of affairs to be farther to the right / more friendly to the right than you previously believed.
Insofar as you think the Republicans are right-wing and the Democrats are left-wing, at least; I don't think this is remotely correct, or at least it results in a very inconsistent reference for what "left" and "right" actually point to, but that is its own topic. (Short version: The current incarnation of the Republican party is slightly left-leaning, and the current incarnation of the Democratic party is not so slightly right-leaning, relative to historic conceptualizations of left and right.)
>I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
>So although we should always be on our guard and call out bias wherever it appears,
Does the dynamic described in the first section not perhaps represent a Utilitarian argument against the strategy described in the second?
Maybe we shouldn't be 'calling out' things that are better-than-replacement already? Don't attack what you don't wish to see destroyed?
Or maybe we should have a form of constructive criticism that's more complimentary than 'call-outs'? Something that doesn't leave the reader with the impression this is a worse-than-replacement person or movement, which we'd all benefit from annihilating?
I think there's an inherent isolated-demand-for-rigor problem that falls along the lines of what currently exists and what doesn't. Like, yes, there was a liberal orthodoxy among universities, therefore we got to observe every mistake or gaffe or unavoidable compromise a liberal orthodoxy would ever make and call every one of them out. Meanwhile the conservative orthodoxy across universities didn't currently exist, so nothing was written about how much worse it would be, because we didn't have live evidence to look at and write about...
Except, we a little bit did. FIRE explicitly chose to exclude anti-free-speech actions by Christian universities because those schools had *explicit* policies against certain types of speech and speakers. You could look at the policies and actions of the smaller number of right-wing universities and ask if that would be a better way for the entire system to be run. You could read the output of right-wing 'intellectual' foundations like Project 2025, and ask whether replacing the current dominant intellectual framework with that one would be an improvement.
But people are always more angry at the nearby outgroup than the far group. Someone who *did* annoy you at lunch yesterday feels a million times worse than someone who *would*destroy your entire way of life if given the chance, but is currently too far away to do it.
Which is fine, you should care about things that do happen rather than things that don't. But there should be a *huge* impetus to think carefully about what things you're helping to make possible with your actions, that aren't possible today... and in a country where political power usually changes hands several times a decade, you should *always* be aware that the far group could have complete power over you in a few years if you help weaken their opponents.
> Maybe we shouldn't be 'calling out' things that are better-than-replacement already? Don't attack what you don't wish to see destroyed?
But people do wish to see it destroyed. There's no guarantees that the replacement will be better, of course, but if it was worse, then they can be destroyed as well. And we can keep burning it down, over and over, until we end up with a system that works. Or die trying. But then, a better system will come to replace it anyways.
Better-than-replacement by definition means that whatever comes next will be worse by your own values.
If you're saying you don't want to do the boring work of predicting what will come next and just like burning things down like pulling a roulette wheel, then yes, I am against you and everything you stand for.
If you want something better, then build it first, and put it in pace to take over after you burn down the current system. That's what the people in power today did, slowly and carefully and in a unified manner.
If you want change but are unwilling to do that much work, then you don't care enough to be making decisions for everyone else and should just pay attention to sports or something instead.
> If you want something better, then build it first, and put it in pace to take over after you burn down the current system. That's what the people in power today did, slowly and carefully and in a unified manner.
How are you supposed to do that when the existing system is resisting all attempts at change? Methods can't be put into practice until the old order is supplanted. Of course, you can't expect people to simply reason a good system into existence when they're incapably of truly understanding these systems and their consequences. So the only solution is to keep building and keep burning. Again, and again, and again, until you get something viable. Some of them will survive, and that's good enough.
Again: Maga did it. The Tea Party did it. The Federalist Society did it.
The liberal proclivity for hysteria finds its traditional complement in the conservative reflex of glib dismissal. As hysteria ramps up across all political quarters, "pooh pooh" becomes cutting-edge analysis. "Orban wasn't a dictator, just a sparkling authoritarian" is a technically correct take; fortunately so, because there's no thought behind it.
Just want to say I'm glad there are writers who can still take arguments at face value even when they seem objectively ridiculous. I spent my early life priding myself on my ability to do this, and I'm losing it with age and as the world becomes more ridiculous. When I see someone claiming Orban wasn't a strongman, all I can hear is "ooh! I think I can stick it to the libs with this!" And if I'm honest, even though I agree, when I see someone say Orban is a strongman, all I can hear is "oooh! This is another argument we can use to show we're smarter than Trump voters and see through his lies!"
Sometimes I find the insistence on treating these people as though they're speaking in good faith infuriating. Sometimes I even lash out in the comments when you do this. But please try to keep that object-level perspective. Some of us sorely need it.
I don't know why right-wingers defend Orban so vehemently, and claim it's just that people don't like him because he's right-wing. If that were the case, why would the very same people be celebrating the victory of Peter Magyar, a right-wing politician who until 2024 was a member of Fidesz, and who quit because they pardoned people for covering up child molestation?
I hesitate to even make this argument for obvious reasons but here goes:
Elections serve an important legitimating function for the state. Humans are social animals, acutely attuned to group dynamics, swayed by social consensus, and many are willing to go with the flow. Elections create common knowledge that "at least half the people" agree with this guy's plans. Visibly faked elections do not do this - when 99% of the vote goes to Big Brother, or there are a suspicious number of thugs looking over your shoulder at the ballot box, we all know that the result isn't a real representation of popular assent. So even would be authoritarians have to be careful not to spoil the game and keep things in the ambiguous gray zone if they're going to bother holding elections at all.
With all that said, I have to make a pretty undemocratic observation. I have never witnessed what I would consider a "free and fair election" in my 42 years of life, and it's not even clear to me what that would mean. First of all, the information environment is extremely hostile (astroturfing, private and government sponsored botnets, media manipulation), and the actual drivers of government policy are opaque/classified to an extent that renders control of the state by "the people" sort of ridiculous. It's also clearly true that a plurality of the people have no business opining on matters of state because they are poorly informed, they've been parasitized by some terrible ideology, or their brains are just scrambled so badly that their political views are disconnected from reality. If you add in the self-interested climbers and outright sociopaths who reliably end up becoming politicians, we've ended up in a very predictable failure mode.
Maybe it's true that it's the "least bad" system of government, but I hope that we can do better.
Prior innovations in communication technology sparked a wave of democratic revolutions across the world and enabled the rise of bureaucratic states, and I suspect many of us once harbored hope the internet would do something similar. After a disappointing "Empire Strikes Back" period, it feels like it could be getting closer. I just fear that the current version of "democracy" might get way more visibly dysfunctional first.
Was Magyar banned from appearing on Hungarian TV, or only banned from State TV?
From what I can tell, it was State TV, and Magyar was still allowed to appear (and did appear) on private Hungarian TV channels.
The impression I got from Scott and others was that there was no Hungarian-language TV channel available in Hungary that Magyar was allowed to appear on, and that seems to be straight-up false.
Banning the opposition from State TV is bad of course, but I’m not even convinced that this is worse than New York trying to put Trump in jail for minor paperwork errors. It’s pretty far from the total media blackout that the people insisting that, “No! We weren’t crying wolf this time. Orban really is significantly worse than normal political corruption in first world countries,” seemed to be implying.
When you wrote your first post on Orbán, back in 2021/2022, I objected to calling him a dictator and I said that that should be reserved for systems where there is not legitimate criticism existing within the system; thus, Putin's Russia (where all parties support the leader, and in the rare cases where someone who's anti-Putin gets elected to a serious post -- look up Sergey Furgal, Governor of Khabarovsk Krai in the 2010s -- they can get sent to forced labor camps) would count, but something like Erdogan's Turkey (where open opponents of Erdogan are Mayors of many important cities, lead important provinces) really shouldn't.
I feel like since then I've been willing to step back on this a little, especially in reading about the 1990s in Peru -- Alberto Fujimori did a plainly illegal self-coup in 1992, then held totally legitimate elections in 1995 (at which he personally won in a landslide but many of his allies did terribly), then ran for another term in 2000 even though it was against his own Constitution, in which the first round was free-ish but the second was rigged. Fujimori had many classic dictatorship trappings, like a secret police with torturing and widespread propaganda, even though for the vast majority of his time in office Congress was full of his enemies, and he ultimately had to be overthrown in a revolution in 2001! This feels more dictator-y to me; maybe the difference is in how you steer the system (since, in Erdogan's defense, lots of the stuff like arresting journalists over insulting the country's founding fathers is actually cross-party consensus in Turkey, while Fujimori's stuff was very much not), but in that case Orbán was pretty explicit about wanting an "illiberal democracy".
I think he was a bad guy who wanted a dictatorship but never progressed far enough to really be called a dictator. Orbán kept doing elections which were free (if not fair), at which real opponents of his ran and eventually won; patronage networks are bad and gerrymandering is bad and dominant-party systems are bad and court-packing is bad, but all of these things happen in some democracies. (In many ways Orbán looks like a big-city boss to me -- he reminds me of Richard Daley in 1960s Chicago, down to the part where ultimately he controlled one small part of a large system -- in Daley's case the US and in Orbán's the EU -- which checked him enough that he wasn't "really" a dictator).
But I don't think the attacks on Orbán were crying wolf. Sometimes dictatorship does happen gradually, as in Venezuela or Russia, and sometimes you can have a secret-police-style dictatorship and a liberal democracy overlap in the same country controlling different parts of policy, as in 1990s Peru. Orbán openly wanted to entrench himself and sometimes these things evolve in that direction.
Furgal wasn't even against Putin. He was a "tomato can" that unexpectedly defeated the incumbent in a landslide due to protest voting.
> These people aren’t arguing that although Orban was undemocratic, the term “dictator” goes a little far. They seem to be saying that it was a misstep to see any threat to democracy at all in Orban’s actions.
I see them saying that Orban's actions did not prevent democracy. I don't see them saying that he did nothing to undermine the democratic process.
The distortions in arguments over whether or not Orban is "democratic" come from the fact that it's a proxy issue for whether or not it is good for people who are threatened by the invasion of postcolonial moralism in american institutions (and possibly their own wallets) to rely on moral majoritarians to bolster a political defense. (It's bad)
> and it’s obvious that neither party can get away with crazy things like openly shooting opposing senators or shutting down opposing newspapers.
This is really, really not obvious to me.
I think an interesting perspective might be to allow for the sake of argument that Trump and Maga are more significant threats to quality democracy in the US than the relatively competent woke institutions. But to then consider the question of where Trump came from. I'm not American but I'm fairly connected to the milieu of the US conservatives. Trump was a total joke to me, like completely, when he came in. So I definitely thought about why he won for quite some time. My impression is that it was illegal immigration.
The other Republicans were at least nominally opposed to illegal immigration, but there was a palpable sense that Jeb Bush would never really close the border if it meant his kids would be called racist at prep school. Political correctness worked. People no longer have the choice to be both polite and conservative.
A woke stranglehold on institutions, elite universities with 80% liberal professors, etc, means that by definition their opponents will not be elite people. Their opponents will be Trump. The equilibrium is disturbed first by progressives who believe that society is a zero-sum competition between groups and therefore the most powerful groups must be oppressed. These people don't believe in liberal democracy for the same reason they don't believe in liberal markets, seeing both as a playground for the powerful to abuse and exploit others. They violate democratic norms out of principle, rather than avarice, let's say. So they won't stop.
They may run things better, and they may be less of an absolute threat to quality democracy, but they are also the element which produces the less sophisticated, potentially more dangerous counterpart on the right.
>Meanwhile, the right wants to argue that “democratic backsliding” “experts” are biased liberals who accuse any successful right-wing leader of being an incipient dictator.
Do we so quickly forget Joe "Romney's gonna put yall back in Chains" Biden?
You do yourself a disservice. Like with the average person that was concerned about COVID was also concerned about 9 other pandemics that didn't happen, the average backsliding expert has been dead fucking wrong about 99% of other potential right-wing leaders while studiously ignoring any vaguely left-wing authoritarianism.
> I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back.
They're still around, sadly. The racist freaks at Harvard and UPenn that said white people should die of COVID for "health equity" didn't get fired, didn't get washed down a chasm, and had no consequences other than the NYT is not currently asking them for quotes because there's not currently a pandemic.
Jesus, Scott really riled up the Fox News crowd with this one.
How delightfully uncharitable of you.
I've never watched Fox News, I do consider myself conservative but fairly liberal leaning with more than a few socialist and communitarian sympathies.
The article just sucks and is below the standard I've come to expect of Scott. Sad that he set such a high bar for himself over the years!
I've never watched Fox News, and I thought ProfGerm's comment was reasonable. Time to update.
Yeah sure, and I'm an astronaut.
These kinds of lowbrow partisan schlock comments really stick out because they're not the kinds of comments you usually see here. Go back to Breitbart.
> Go back to Breitbart.
0 for 2. How bayesian of you.
Yes yes you can make shit up on the internet to try to portray a sense of independent thought that no one believes. We get it already.
Let's review ProfGerm's comment.
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> 9 other pandemics that didn't happen
Frankly, idk anything about this topic, so I'll concede for the sake of the argument.
> The racist freaks at Harvard and UPenn that said white people should die of COVID for "health equity"
I did find this hyperbolic as well, tbh. Though in ProfGerm's defense, I do think it points to something real, so I'm more willing to give it a pass. Namely, it points to the rhetoric about the privileging of certain groups wrt vaccine distribution.
Concretely, here's a paper [0] which discusses "equity for disadvantaged groups" and triage by zipcode. The first two listed contributors are Harald Schmidt and Rebecca Weintraub. Schmidt hails from UPenn and Weintraub hails from Harvard.
> Do we so quickly forget Joe "Romney's gonna put yall back in Chains" Biden?
Headline [1]: "Biden tells African-American audience GOP ticket would put them 'back in chains' ". This is from CBS btw.
----
You're 1 for 5, Mr Astronaut.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01379-6
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-tells-african-american-audience-gop-ticket-would-put-them-back-in-chains/
I think another parameter to consider is the strength of the country's political/judicial institutions, not merely the behaviour of the political leader. For example, consider some of the things that Orban did (according to Scott):
* Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV.
* Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans.
* Falsely accused opposition party staffers of filming child pornography to get an excuse to search and confiscate their records.
Apparently the Hungarian people finally had enough of this stuff, and good for them. But it's hard to imagine something like that happening in Denmark or Finland. If their Prime Minister tried any of these things, then it's likely that employees of TV stations, police, or the courts, would simply refuse to obey him. If they did obey him and he got caught, the result wouldn't merely be an election loss -- it would be incarceration and likely destruction of his political party.
Thus, paradoxically, such relatively constrained system ends up being more democratic. In a total democracy, the leader can say, "yes I did ban my opponents for appearing on national TV, but it's for the Greater Good, trust me bro" -- and if his approval rating is high enough and people would still vote for him, he can do so with impunity. In a legislative democracy (or whatever you want to call it), this would be much harder to pull off (though admittedly not impossible), regardless of how charismatic the leader is.
Seems like the tension is between "how much can 'the people' exercise their will now?" vs "how much do 'the people' retain the ability to exercise their will in the future?".
A larger-scale analogy to "should a libertarian be free to sell themselves in slavery?".
"are these things bad and undemocratic?"
No, not under a normal definition of democracy. None of the things you listed have anything to do with political systems except the gerrymandering which is fairly common in such systems. It is a fairly standard definition of bad though. That's where I would cash out: bad but not undemocratic. This is also where I cash out about Orban.
The issue is the people using the word dictator are conflating regime type with ideology. That was always the issue and it's convenient because if you make the "liberal" in liberal democracy left wing you can endlessly say that right wingers are a threat to democracy. Democratic backsliding exists but that what is included or excluded is fairly blatantly partisan.
I have no issue holding two things at once: such experts are blatantly biased and invent entire new categories to try to attack their political opponents. And also Trump and Orban have been bad for their countries' institutions in various ways. Where I suspect I will depart from others is the socialists and Democrats have also been very bad in ways left wingers have avoided confronting. (Note: socialists is a self-description of Orban's original opposition.)
Orbán’s biggest constraint was the EU itself, which is why he constantly tried to delegitimize it. If he had clung to power, they would’ve sanctioned and likely expelled Hungary. They did something similar with Austria in the nineties.
There is no mechanism in the EU Treaties to expel a country against its will (it can leave voluntarily, though). The most you can do is take away its vote.
I think part of the problem here is that hyperbole is often lauded on important issues. 'Trump threatens democracy' and 'fascism on the rise' are part of the (not yet-pithily named) phenomenon of 'bad thing is *literally* other bad thing.
That is, there is a whole cohort of people who think that it is better to be hyperbolic than to present the more literal headline of "Trump Weakens Democratic Institutions".
But this is a mistake. The discussion often derails into an argument about whether American is literally on the verge of dictatorship. That question is tertiary. The primary concern is whether it is important to be protecting and expanding democratic intuitions. Assuming yes, the productive thing to do is cooperate: create the largest coalition possible (which in and of itself serves as a protection for democracy.)
I like DCB for Democratically Constrained Brute. It's close to "strongman" but I prefer "brute" better than strongman because strong is too neutral to describe someone who will *brutalize* democracy every chance he gets. It puts the accent of the lack of respect for norms and others, reveals a me-first policy and nothing else matters.
What would have happened if Putin’s party had lost that election?
Most likely, nothing at first. His administration had enough influence over the other three parties that it would be able to secure the majority of the votes. However, if the protests had succeeded in overturning the results and holding a new, freer and fairer election, then it would've established an important precedent.
>Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. If the US is currently 10% of the way along this line, Putin’s Russia at 70%, and North Korea at 100%, then Orban’s Hungary was maybe 35%. What do you call somewhere that’s 35% of the way to being a dictatorship?
Good point! We have a variety of emphasis words, but no clean way to state a numerical scale in ordinary conversation, which is frustrating. A similar problem applies to e.g. probabilities. I estimate P(doom) at 57% (recently updated because of Hassabis's endorsement of a conditional pause (+5%) and a discussion of large numbers of instances of weakly superhuman AIs (+2%)). About the cleanest available way to describe this colloquially is 'more likely than not'. Sigh.
"are these things bad and undemocratic?"
The number of people answering this with a flat-out "no" is wild.
The post is altogether very reasonable, but it overclaims Orban's badness.
"Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on Hungarian TV."
The claim is that his main opponent was not allowed to appear on *state* television, the one channel that is funded by the state. There are other private TV channels, with much higher viewership, where he could appear. And even the state TV channel didn't fully ban him, there was a big debate between the main candidates of the 2024 European Parliament election on state TV which significantly contributed to Magyar's rise.
"Barred people who criticized him from jobs anywhere in the Hungarian state, all the way down to ordinary schoolteachers."
My memory is that there have been a few examples of ordinary schoolteachers got into trouble for criticizing the regime, which is very bad, but this was the rare exception, not the rule.
"Gerrymandered the country so thoroughly that, in the last election, 49% of the votes won him 68% of the parliamentary seats."
This is very weak evidence for gerrymandering. To a first approximation, half the seats in the Hungarian parliament belong to individual candidates elected in their districts in a first-past-the-post way, and the other half gets distributed proportionally among the parties. (Plus there is an extra rule which makes the result a little closer to full proportionality.)
This is in theory more proportional than the US Congress which only has the fist-past-the-post districts. But in practice, there is much less geographical variation in politics in Hungary than in the US or even in Britain, so all the districts often move together, so you can still get 2/3 of the seats with 50% of the vote.
My understanding is that probably the government attempted a bit of gerrymandering, but when some social scientists tried to look, they didn't find it very egregious. This election, Orban's opponent got 52% of the vote, won the vast majority of districts and has 2/3 majority in the parliament.
----
The other examples listed by Scott are largely true, and the government interfered with the political process in various other unfair ways. As I said, I agree with Scott's broader point that some leaders can be a threat to democracy without immediately being dictators.
Still, I think Western commentators have consistently overclaimed Orban's badness, and I think people should somewhat update on the fact that Orban in fact lost and conceded an election once the opposition finally found a real leader.
For example, Scott's last book review about Orban, from 4 years ago claimed that:
"He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts. Left-wing voters were crammed into a few very large districts; likely Fidesz voters were put into many much smaller ones. The big districts and the small districts each elect one MP; as a result, one observer calculates that in terms of power to elect parliamentarians, “1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes = 2.6 Jobbik votes = 3.1 LMP votes”"
I think that the fact that now Orban's opponent got 2/3 majority with 52% of the vote is pretty strong evidence that Scott's source for this was making things up. (This was also knowable at the time - it was easy to check that the districts were similarly sized.)
Later in the book review:
"Lendvai concludes that “the bastion of power constructed since 2010 is, as far as it is humanly possible to tell, impregnable to external assault”"
Turns out, Lendvai was pretty over-confident here.
Later in the comments of that post, Scott said:
"First, if a majority of people voted against Orban, he would still win handily from the gerrymandering, the ethnic-Hungarians-abroad vote, and the possible voter fraud, and the laws favoring his party and causes would still be in the Constitution and require opponents to win by 2/3 to repeal. So I think it would take something like 80 - 90% of Hungarians voting against him to change policy very much."
Turns out, 52% voting for the opposition was enough.
I don't really blame Scott, it's hard to get a good understanding of a foreign country's politics without spending a huge amount of time on it. But I think the supposed experts Scott was relying on were painting a pretty misleading picture, and some of them should probably apologize now that their predictions turned out wrong.
Wikipedia claims that Magyar's party got 54.41% of the vote and Orban's got only 37.77%. That's a big gap - bigger than in any American presidential election since 1984, in which Reagan won every state but one.
Interesting, it looks like English Wikipedia's numbers are a few days outdated. I think the final numbers are 52% and 39.5%. But yes, it's a pretty big gap.
Just wanna note that if you don't consider mail-in votes, the distribution of the popular vote domestically 55.76% for Peter Magyar (TISZA) and only 36.33% for Orban (FIDESZ).
My understanding is that the mail-in votes are mainly from the Hungarian minorities living in Romania & Slovakia, who have voting rights on the popular lists, but do not have corresponding "constituency" seats in the parliament.
Mail-in votes are 84%-14% in favour of Orban.
See: https://vtr.valasztas.hu/ogy2026/orszagos-listak?tab=partlistak&filter=orszagos-eredmenyek
The reason that the gerrymandering failed was a nearly unprecedented defection by FIDESZ voters that turned a very effective and safe gerrymander/proportionality system into a dummymander. If you were to predict the likelihood of this happening, given the political demography of the country, it would have been an extremely low probability outcome, especially given the near complete crowd-out/blackout of actual opposition news sources.
The fact it happened doesn’t retroactively mean that the unbalanced democracy was actually more fair than we thought. It just means the black swan was born and lived.
> The fact it happened doesn’t retroactively mean that the unbalanced democracy was actually more fair than we thought. It just means the black swan was born and lived.
No, I think it means the former.
I think Hungary is “known” in the US because the US left has decided it was part of the evil cabal threatening democracy. I bet less than 5% of the people who know about it would be able to find it on a map. It’s the American left’s Cuba or Venezuela.
Every so often the US likes to believe that it’s not running the world and it’s the Hungarians, or Cubans. Or the Chinese. Or “white supremacy”. Or Islamofascism - unless you need Al Queda in power.
There’s no losing this perspective. This thread is full of sceptical posters from Hungary and Americans full of certainty because they read the Atlantic
You are obviously right. Orban was obviously undemocratic; just too weak to achieve his undemocratic goals - sometimes fortunately happens. The view espoused by people like Cowen makes only sense to me only if they adopt a very broad definition of the democratic mandate: once elected I can do whatever I want (including acting against the law), until I lose the next election. Which incidentally is very close to Orban’s “illiberal democracy”.
Wow so we're sanewashing authoritarians now?
I remember reading Bob Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarianism book back in ~2012 and I feel like it was kind of prescient for what's happened in the 10 years of American politics. I didn't like your dismissal of it in this post.
I agree that fans of the idea probably include a lot of partisans that just want to dunk on the right, but, at least according to Altemeyer's claims, he started out with testing left and right the same, and the title is just him reporting the head line result that right wingers were more authoritarian.
I think this coheres with Tanner Greer's idea that the GOP is a leader-oriented organization, while the Democratic party is more a coalition of different interests, and this changes how the parties operate, with the right deferring more to their leader, and therefore being more authoritarian.
https://scholarstage.substack.com/p/why-republican-party-leaders-matter
I was a very different person in 2012 at age 21 with not nearly all of the epistemic tools that I have today, so I don't claim strongly that it holds up (It's pre-replication crisis psychology research and I don't begrudge someone for disbelieving it just because of that), but I think it deserves consideration.
An authoritarian is who exerts authority in a non-hypocritical manner. Esp a right-winger.
I posted about Bab Altemeyer earlier in the thread, and agree that his work seems quite prescient.
Hungarian economy wasn't booming exactly because Orban wasn't competent and was stealing too much. Incompetence is not a unique feature of autocrats but autocrats tend to be incompetent.
So, saying that he would have won elections if the economy was booming, is to say that he would be elected if he wasn't Orban.
Trump is equally not competent. Asking tech bros to invest would not have worked. Investments take time to show results. Investors are not stupid, would not invest in kleptocracy etc. Trump could do nothing and he was only destined to make it worse for Orban.
The only surprising thing here is that people voted against him. That's unusual. People in current dictatorships like Russia or Cuba or Venezuela while generally suffer and blame the government, actually do not vote against their dictators even if given chance. Usually this is because they have no idea how things can be different. They see corruption and naturally despise it but they have no experience how western style democracy could work for them and fear and distrust it. For example, Russians have impression that westerners are woke and would force them all to become gays and that's worse than their corruption. Cubans are dreaming of supermarkets full of food products but are against any inequality so much that they are afraid that capitalism will create different classes in the society and that's not acceptable to them.
Apparently Hungarians being a small country with open borders in the heart of Europe could better learn and understand how modern developed societies work and could not be convinced by Orban's scare tactics.
That Orban lost in an election proves that he was not an autocrat (which is again a slur leftist use against their opponents).
It proves that his bid to become an autocrat failed *because the people who denounce him as a would-be autocrat worked so damn hard to throw him out and barely managed to do it*.
Did you read the article?
While I had already reached similar conclusions before I read this article, I am glad that Scott has explained this succinctly, much better than I would have been able and he clearly proves that autocrats can lose elections and that does not mean that they are not autocrats or at least very bad leaders with autocratic tendencies.
As for calling Orban an autocrat, I would still call him like that and my thoughts are as follows:
People create labels for their own needs instead of labels controlling people.
This is the same that saying that a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Technically maybe you are right (and not right at the same time because fish is not a taxonomy category) but if some leader creates fishing ministry that includes issues with whales then technicalities are no longer important. Someone prefers to include whales under the banner of fish and it is less confusing than use more wordy descriptions.
The same with Orban. I prefer to refer to him as autocrat, then so be it. There is no single definition what autocrat even is. In my native language autocrat can be a strong ruler who does not like his rule challenged. Even Random House Webster gives several definitions and one of them is 3.a person who behaves in an authoritarian manner; a domineering person.
Orban may or may not have autocratic tendencies but he was certainly not an autocrat.
Again, by the definitions we use, he definitely was.
You imagine some idealized unchanging language which is not how people really use it nowadays.
Something similar happens when people who claim that covid vaccines are not vaccines because they do not conform to the original definition of vaccines. So what? People change definitions and use the words in new meanings.
I can almost imagine Scott writing an article – covid jabs are good, we just don't have good words to describe them as calling them vaccines are hyperbole :) But he doesn't need to write such an article because it doesn't matter, everybody calls covid jabs vaccines and that's it, except for a small group of critical people. The benefits and risks of covid jabs are clearly known and a shortcut or a label is to call them vaccines. That's good enough.
The same thing about Orban, he was an autocrat (according to more loosely current definition) and that's it. Why would you need to defend him?
So it is " I have said it and that settles it"?
Tsars were autocrats and a person that fights free elections, winning some and losing some, is also an autocrat. A = not A is what we must believe.
Historic norms are usually not applicable to modern settings...
> People in current dictatorships like Russia or Cuba or Venezuela
The bad dictators are all enemies of the US. Although you might want to update on Venezuela.
I don't think Cuban (dictators) leaders really is the enemy of the US. They just want to be left in peace. Obviously they are worried that the US may force democracy on them but apart from that they have no illusions that Cuba is too small to fight the US and they would never attempt to do that and would avoid harming the US in any way.
Cuban leaders may verbally criticise the US but the aim is more to keep their own ideological purity than start a fight with the US.
If not for the potential of the EU sanctioning or outright expelling Hungary, Orbán almost certainly would’ve clung to power. Institutions matter.
If you're a selfish corrupt politician with no real ideological aims other than doing well for yourself the Orban play is the better one. A full coup or complete abolition of the Democratic system is a very dangerous thing -- it's very hard to retire without getting killed.
OTOH if you just stack the system in your favor you can enrich yourself and your cronies while leaving in place enough guardrails to allow yourself a peaceful retirement. Once you discard any fig leaf of an orderly legal system your successor has no incentive to let you live.
Are there politicians that are not selfish and corrupt?
Why else become a politician if not to pursue power? And the benefits associated with power?
The "dictator" angle of Orban is mainly a red herring - the vast majority of his abuses of power directly concern corruption, which is not a phenomena solely reserved to dictatorships nor necessarily indicative of them.
As a matter of fact, each individual Hungarian corruption scandal in isolate has happened in some form or another in most EU countries - Italy under Berlusconi would be an eminent example, but as an Austrian what comes to mind for me instantly is that our public broadcast network ORF has long been known to act in the interests of the long-ruling Austrian Conservative Party (ÖVP), going as far as blacklisting people from receiving invitations to appear on state TV and shutting down entire news programs if they veered too critical of the wrong people.
https://www.politico.eu/article/austrias-cosa-nostra-election-ovp-people-party-orf-im-zentrum/
Orban has never killed a political rival, you say? Well the ÖVP very well might have 3 years ago.
https://orf.at/stories/3423587/
Orban enacted a policy by which all state workers, even elementary school teachers, had to prove political loyalty or risk loosing their profession? Austria had EXACTLY that system as a matter of state policy for most of its postwar history - the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives carved up the entire state apparatus between themselves in a policy called "Proporz". For decades, it was essentially impossible for a card carrying member of a third party to get any kind of government job. Especially the education sector was infamous for this - there virtually weren't any school principals in the country that weren't open members of either party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proporz
Orban changed the Constitution to favour large parties over representative distribution and gerrymandered the voting system to the point that 49% of votes gave him 68% of seats? Well, so did Charles de Gaulles when he almost single-handedly engineered the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. That's how Macron's party was able to capture 60% of seats with 49% of the vote in the 2017 Legislative elections.
That's also why France has a "Constitutional Council" that can strike down any law for the vaguely defined reason of going "against the spirit of the Constitution". Who is this Council composed of, you ask? By all former Presidents of France and a rotating body of 9 political allies elected by the Government and its Parliamentary majority.
France's current Constitution also allows the Government to pass a law without holding a vote - an emergency measure that gradually became a standard tool of French politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_French_legislative_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Council_(France)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_49_of_the_French_Constitution#Commitment_of_responsibility_on_a_bill_(49.3)
As to the wiretapping of political opponents - the currently ruling conservative Government in Greece massively wiretapped and surveilled their political opponents as a matter of state policy. The scandal broke in 2022 and they comfortably won reelection the next year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Greek_surveillance_scandal
Orban abused judicial power to harass his political opponents? The French judiciary had the authority and obligation to pursue Marine Le Pen for misappropriation of EU funds all the way back in 2017, but sat on the case for almost a decade and purposefully waited until she was a credible favourite for the next presidential election to try and condemn her, going as far as using an emergency motion complicating her right to appeal the verdict (on the basis that she might "reoffend", a literal impossibility considering the trial concerned her power abuse as an MEP, a position she hasn't held in 9 years) - this condemnation of course bars her from standing in elections for 5 years, just in time to miss next year's presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_assistants_affair
We could go one like this for hours - Belgian political scandals alone, which I haven't even touched on, would fill half a library.
Corruption, delegation of ostensibly neutral government positions to political allies (or "friend economics" as it's called in Austria), putting governmental pressure on state broadcasting institutions, adapting the Constitution to favour the status quo, abusing police power to harass and spy on political opponents, all these phenomena are completely standard excesses of European democracies and happen routinely in all EU states to varying degrees (i.e., a Danish corruption scandal will probably be much more mild than an Italian one) without notable exception.
What makes Orban different is that he was far more brazen in the scale, volume, and tempo of his abuses. The EU establishment enacts "democratic backsliding", "corruption", or whatever one wants to call it by means of a slow ossification process, that eventually becomes political normality and custom. The Fifth French Republic had an authoritarian tinge from the start, but only gradually enabled outright anti-democratic actions (such as the notorious Article 49.3) over the course of decades of normalisation. Orban essentially speedran the process and made no efforts to cover up his intentions.
As an Austrian, who grew up in close vicinity to Hungary, I must also remark that there was a distinct vibe-shift around how European media covered Orban - he transformed almost overnight from "crony Eastern European corrupt showman" to "authoritarian despot who rules over Hungary with an iron fist" during the 2015 Refugee crisis. That was also the exact moment when EU Commission President Jean-Claude Junker made international headlines for greeting Orban with "Hello, Dictator" at an EU conference. The EU Establishment and their vassal power brokers in media really soured on him when he turned against them on mass migration and essentially challenged them to question Hungary's territorial sovereignty.
Orban was certainly a crook, but the nature of the political transformation of Hungary under his tenure is in no way more innately dictatorial or autocratic than France since De Gaulle, Austria under the ÖVP, or Italy under Berlusconi - at the end of the day, democracy does give you the legitimate power and mandate to enact legal changes that are themselves more undemocratic than what they are replacing. All the legal changes, Constitutional amendments, distributions of government loans and positions, etc, were all achieved by parliamentary votes resulting from free elections. If we have an existential problem with that, then we have a problem with parliamentary democracy as it exists in Europe.
If people had a bit more historical knowledge, then they wouldn’t shout fascist at every single ruler (or ideology) they disagree with. If you want a name for an authoritarian democrat who has a cult of personality, media control, judicial interference and populism - but is popular and has won elections - the term that might be appropriate is Peronist. Not that Trump is exactly that either.
Everybody actually agrees with the historians - who say the fascists were definitively only the Nazis, fascist Italy (natch), and Franco’s Spain.
The historians don’t call Portuguese dictator Salazar a fascist, even though he’s actually of the era. Neither does anybody else.
So if somebody says Trump is a fascist, ask them to name actual fascists. They also won’t include Salazar (nor any of the other right wing dictators who were called have receded from memory).
Being critical of EU has nothing to do with democracy, those two things are not even related. Same with taxes, foreign matters and environmental protections - those are normal policy disagreements. Using armed forces internally is much more questionable, but it largely depends on the intended purpose of their use.
What I find annoying about the Orban discourse is that the people who call him bad/dictator/autocrat etc. are no better themselves. Consider what the German regime parties or their cronies have done:
- put numerous citizens in prison or apply monetary fines for criticizing/satirizing/insulting the government
- have control over state media, which rarely mentions the main opposition party (AfD, will call opposition from now on), and when it does, it's negative coverage. Much less likely to mention political violence done against the opposition than other parties.
- use the secret service to spy on dissidents, infiltrate the opposition party, brand it as right-wing extremist
- discuss banning the opposition party
- make it difficult for opposition party members to be in the state service
- reverse the result of a state election where Merkel did not like the result
- use the secret service to find dirt on a local politician, then ban him from running in part because of his opinion on Lord of the Rings (really! It's the first point here: https://api.nius.de/api/assets/office-hr/f9bd16d6-add3-465b-8fde-9c589405a79c/20250729-wahl-ludwigshafen-geschw.pdf?version=0)
- using old majorities after an election to change cutoffs for opposition right just above the voting share that the opposition party got
- discriminate against the opposition party by not allowing them to lead committees, excluding them from defense related committees, giving them small faction halls, not allowing them to have Bundestag and Bundesrat vice presidents
- fund left-wing NGOs who produce fake news about plans of the opposition party to conduct mass deportations, leading to mass protests and voter loss
- flood the countries with millions of "refugees", then turbo naturalize them to gain more voters
If you are going to claim that Germany is as corrupt and undemocratic as Hungary under Orban, I think you should at least back up your claims with some actual sources.
Agreed. Orban was far worse than this list even if it's true. Also "the opposition party" is actually just one party in Germany. Other opposition parties are not treated that way.
It is forbidden for German parties to receive fund from foreign states. So, exactly 0 parties in Germany are being funded by the Russians, government and opposition alike. (Technically, the cap is not 0 EUR but 1000 EUR, but that will not allow a party to get anywhere.)
- no one has been put into jail for satirizing the government. You won't be able to find one single source
- the public media regular report on the AfD, their leaders and their positions
- the Federal Republic of Germany has no laws against opposition party members being in state service.
- no state election was ever reversed by Merkel. Which state are you referring to?
- the AfD is allowed to lead committees, and has actually led committees in the past. It just so happens that the near-totality of the people they nominate fail to find approval in parliament.
The points above show that you either do not know what you are talking about or that you are acting in bad faith.
- for instance, https://www.zdfheute.de/ has 2 articles on AfD on the front page right now.
- Among the people elected to lead a committee was Stephan Brandner https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_Brandner#Abwahl_als_Vorsitzender_des_Rechtsausschusses
"- no one has been put into jail for satirizing the government. You won't be able to find one single source"
Why are you picking out one specific combination of prison/fines X criticizing/satirizing/insulting?
- a woman got sent to prison for insulting a politician of the CSU:
https://www.swp.de/lokales/neu-ulm/prozess-wegen-beleidigung-so-reagiert-landrat-thorsten-freudenberger-auf-das-gerichtsurteil-69339161.html
- David Brendel (right-wing media guy) got 7 months on parole for satirizing the minister of the interior:
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/ag-bamberg-nancy-faeser-meme-verleumdung-oeffentlicher-person-meinungsfreiheit
- Michael Ballweg (rightwing protest organizer) was held for 9 months in custody. The verdict? He didn't pay taxes on ~20€ worth of purchases:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ballweg#Strafprozess
Somehow this always happens to rightwingers. Almost as if this was a punishment for his political activity, rather than anything else.
- Aron Pielka (rightwing Youtuber) was in prison for 9 months, mostly for playing a racially insensitive song (not exactly related to the government itself but nevertheless a ridiculous thing to happen. Should have added it to the list!):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Finkelstein_(Online-Aktivist)#Verurteilung_u._a._wegen_Volksverhetzung
- Fun fact: there are now ~three times as many (~4400 vs. ~1400) lawsuits because of insulting politicians comparing 2024 and 2022:
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-02/amtsgericht-trier-beleidigung-robert-habeck-karl-lauterbach-verurteilung-gxe
"- the public media regular report on the AfD, their leaders and their positions"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377721606_Fehlt_da_was_Perspektivenvielfalt_in_den_offentlich-rechtlichen_Nachrichtenformaten
Consider Table 3 and Figure 4. 3% of the speakers in the state media were from the AfD, much less than their vote share. 81% of the comments about the AfD were negative, much higher than for all other parties.
"- the Federal Republic of Germany has no laws against opposition party members being in state service."
I didn't say there was such a law. But the interior secret service (i.e. the interior ministry) classifying the AfD as right-wing extremist can be a factor in either not hiring them or getting rid of them, i.e. making it harder to be in the state service, as I have said.
"- no state election was ever reversed by Merkel. Which state are you referring to?"
Thuringia, 2020, election of Kemmerich (FDP). He was elected with the help of AfD voters. Merkel publicly said that this would have to be undone. Then it was undone, Kemmerich pulled back due to the resulting political pressure. Even the Bundesverfassungsgericht said that Merkel has violated the AfDs right for equality of opportunity in the political realm:
https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2022/bvg22-053.html
"- the AfD is allowed to lead committees, and has actually led committees in the past. It just so happens that the near-totality of the people they nominate fail to find approval in parliament."
Sure, it's a violation of good democratic procedure, not law. But that's the point, no? To understand practices that erode Democracy that aren't a full-blown dictatorship. This certainly goes against the spirit of these positions. Historically, the opposition always got to lead several committees in order to be able to control the government. I suppose you won't have a problem if the AfD achieves a total majority and then gives the other parties nothing?
- you can be fined for insults (Beleidigung) in Germany, you can be fined for libel/slander (Verleumdung). You cannot be fined for satire
- police also do raids on leftwingers on phoney grounds https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Grote#Umstrittene_Reaktion_auf_Beleidigung_im_Internethttps://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_Holm#Ermittlungsverfahren_und_%C3%9Cberwachungsma%C3%9Fnahmen. Note that I do agree that police should not do these things.
- Merkel did not reverse the state election. All members of parliament kept their seats. The elected minister president (who was not even from Merkel's party) resigned.
- It regularly happens to the Left party, but also to the green and socialist party, that their nominees do not find approval. Most recent is the case where the SPD nominee for the constitutional court was not supported by the CDU/CSU. Typically, they switch to another candidate afterwards. The AfD typically fielded candidates which would clearly be unacceptable to the other parties, and predictably failed to win support. Over time, the other parties somehow switched to "auto-reject" for AfD nominees. I think that this is bad practice, and if the AfD presented a moderate candidate, that candidate should be allowed to chair. It is conceivable, however, that indeed all AfD nominees are crackpots.
You can be fined for insults but not satire lololololololololololololololololololololololol
Less lololol, more citations?
How do you explain the David Bendels case then? He put up a picture on which Nancy Faeser holds up a paper saying "I hate freedom of speech". Obviously satire to any reasonable observer but the court clearly didn't see it that way (luckily it was overturned later, but the initial ruling is still insane).
What is moderate? For example, I don't think it's moderate to mass import foreigners and then mass naturalize them. I suppose whoever is in power decides what moderate is. I'm just saying don't complain afterwards if the AfD is in power and then has a different idea of what moderate is than you do.
Do you call canceling the Romanian elections democratic backsliding? To me very few actually care about democracy.
My frustration is that in the comments here everyone is taking for granted that “dictator” is the term normally chosen for Orban’s critics to describe him. This doesn’t seem correct to me.
I’ve been reading about Orban for years. Lots of investigative journalism of the kind that casts him as a threat to *the right of citizens to choose their government by majority vote*. My impression is that they do not normally refer to him as a “dictator” per se, because they have much more accurate terms to describe his “badness”. In other words, I feel that commenters here are attacking a strawman (or at least a weakman - since there probably are some twitter shitposts hastily calling him a dictator).
For a quick and dirty check of my impressions, I went and picked the first link from google news circa 2020 about Orban’s notorious power-consolidation attempts. It’s an investigative journalism piece that also seems like it was written by activists and is patently critical towards Orbán; if anyone is likely to call him a dictator it’s people like this. The article is “Orban: The Art of Eroding a Democracy”. Civil Rights Defenders, Nov. 16 2020. https://crd.org/vorban/
Results: the article says a lot about Orban, but as I suspected, never calls him a *dictator*.
What it does say: “he and his party, Fidesz, have systematically undermined the country’s legal system and changed its electoral system to ensure future electoral victories”; “it is becoming harder and harder to criticize the government”, “restrictions by the government on freedoms for media and civil society”; “rigged election system”; “vote buying”; “tampering of votes”; “abusing power”; “xenophobic rhetoric”, “discrediting of free media”, “not much room for open democratic debate”; “oppressive machinery”; “power to withdraw media licenses and fine journalists without providing good reasons, which means that independent media often censor their content”; “ownership of the media increasingly shifting to oligarchs allied with” him; “human rights organizations and human rights defenders under constant attack”, “stigmatizing rhetoric” portraying human rights defenders as “traitors and mercenaries”; “dismantling of democracy”.
These things are true, and widely considered bad, especially when you do all of them, not just once but chronically.
Now, I realize this isn’t a truly scientific test; maybe my randomly selected sample isn’t representative, and it actually is widespread practice to call him a dictator (in actual serious media, not just twitter shitposts). But I would need to be convinced, because it’s not just the one sample I checked, but my whole memory of following this topic for years that suggests to me that this is how it is. He is not generally called a dictator. He is generally referred to as someone taking measures to actively undermine the ability of citizens to remove him from power by majority vote (which is true, even though his measures turned out to not be quite enough *when the people calling him undemocratic worked really hard to overcome them*.
Three pieces which refer to Orban as a dictator in the headline but use more nuanced language in the piece, two which argue that the fact that Orban lost shows he’s not a dictator, and one where a college professor refers to Orban as a dictator in a radio interview.
When the same professor wrote a piece about Orban for Politico, she did not refer to him as a dictator: https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-unfair-election-viktor-orban/
A Google news search for with the query terms "Orban" and "dictator" reports about 1,960 results. Eliminating "dictator" from the query gives about 3,730,000 results.
The prime minister of Hungary probably is not the only person named "Orban", so I repeated the searches replacing "Orban" with "Viktor Orban" (in double quotes). The numbers were 1,100 and 1,700,000, respectively. I also tried adding "Hungary" to the searches. The numbers were 1,030 and 84,900, respectively.
So I think that Jim Palatano has identified a weakman; it’s rare for Orban critics to refer to him as a dictator, and when they do the word may be a shorthand (e.g. to save space in a headline, or a professor trying to make a point in a limited amount of time on the radio).
I have a general sense that the "dictator" measure is too biased to be useful.
Mossadegh is pretty universally reported as "democratically elected," but Orban is "authoritarian" or a "dictator."
I agree that shouldn't affect my factual assessment that both of them were quite bad.
Orban was bad because of bad policies and corruption. Lee Kuan Yew was similarly anti-democratic, or at a minimum, a practitioner of managed democracy and is lauded as a great statesman. The value of a system of government is purely instrumental. No one really believes that democratic governance somehow channels the general will of the people into power and this is intrinsically good. If I live in New York City, certain powers that govern me reside at each of the city, state, and federal levels. In various respects, I am governed by the preferences of the populations of these jurisdictions but the distribution of powers among them and their borders are fairly arbitrary. If I were governed by the democratic will of the people of my apartment building, the outcomes would be completely different.
The only reason an election in a country with a population smaller than LA is getting international reactions and attention is because it was a small reprieve amidst the real-time decline of the EU's own managed "democracy." I think your framing is mostly correct. Political scientists, legal experts, wonks, libertarians, and nerds care about the straining of checks and balances and the functioning of institutions. What 90% of people participating in this debate care about is trying to claim the moral legitimacy generated by those institutions as their own to use as instrumental means of imposing their ideology.
"Whataboutism" has its flaws, but accusations of being "undemocratic" for 1980's-style shady politician behavior ring hollow when the strategy of all of his opponents is pretty openly to just import a bunch of people who will vote for them no matter what.
If Orban were a U.S. Senator fifty years ago, the accusations listed off in the article would make him kind of questionable. Today, none of it stacks up viscerally against Rotherham, or procedurally against Romania outright annulling its elections when a result they didn't like took place.
One of the common themes of enquires into Rotherham etc. is that police officers and local politicians would form ethnic mafias covering up, or often actively abetting, the crimes of their co-ethnics. That sort of thing strikes me as far more corrupt and societally corrosive than anything Orban is accused of doing, and I would be shocked if similar things weren't happening in other Western countries, but for some reason pro-immigration politicians don't get accused of destroying civil society.
you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
“Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
No Country for Old Men
It’s a good one, isn’t it?
My mother smoked her entire life and developed COPD. But when she quit the COPD got better, so maybe smoking isn't so bad after all. She claimed this repeatedly. (Actually, she later developed dementia from a series of strokes, which I suspect was related to a lifetime of smoking, but no one knew that while she was in remission).
Hungary ousted their leader, so everything is fine. Not only that, it was always fine. There can't possibly be any further problems, now or in the future, because they replaced their leader, so everything is fine.
The United States is in great shape, democratically, because the Republicans seem set to lose big in the midterms. Everything is fine.
I would apologize to my mother for ever doubting her, but she's passed.
Scott, where's the pt. 2 of the book club on Modi? (i. e post 2014 analysis)
As a Hungarian, I agree with your estimation of Orbán's Hungary being 35% dictature in relation to the other points of reference you gave on that spectrum.
Hungarian perspective here. Orbán had no workable violent option after alienating the police, the armed forces and likely the secret services too. But it seems to me that this depended on congingent factors such as individual personalities that caused Orbán, an intellectual with little connection to uniformed services, to make these mistakes.
Police: His interior/police minister Pintér is a J Edgar Hoover-type careful survivor from the chaotic 1990s, likely with leverage over Orbán and not wanting to spoil his legacy. Rank and file police were alienated by low pay and an Orbán ally's tabloid recently driving a popular district police chief to suicide.
Armed Forces: The opposite, his minister was considered a clown by the troops. They tried multiple purges which ended up driving a very popular ex-general to opposition politics. Rank and file soldiers kept being more attracted by the professionalism they saw from NATO allies rather than the official pro-Russia line. There was a high-profile soldier turned whistleblower in the last week too.
Bad things are bad.
Good things are good.
Orban trying to stack the deck is bad.
Orban stepping down is good.
The people who claimed that Orban would rule Hungary as king-in-fact no matter what were disproved.
They will learn nothing from this, because they don't care whether they are correct.
Here's a fun exercise:
Here are some of the ways ______ is accused of tilting the playing field for this (or previous) elections:
Effectively banned his opponents from appearing on social media.
Tapped his opponents’ phones to learn their plans.
Falsely accused opposition party staffers of collaborating with Russia to get an excuse to search and confiscate their records.
Barred people who criticized the medical intervention from jobs anywhere in the country, all the way down to ordinary soldiers.
Gerrymandered the state so thoroughly that, in the last election, 60% of the votes won him 88% of the parliamentary seats.
Had ~80-90% of legacy media under the control of political allies.
Supposedly, this is still an unproven rumor, got someone to date his opponent, record a pee tape, and try to blackmail them with it.
I think that people should not do these things. Do you?
It's interesting how (in my view) the reddit comments for this are totally normal while the Substack comments are akin to an insane asylum.
You all know Scott has always been a pro-democracy liberal who likes trans people, immigration, immigrants, institutions, the rule of law, freedom, etc., right? If you oppose such things you're just gonna get angry if you keep reading and replying to every blog post. He very vocally endorsed Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Harris in 2024. You're barking up the wrong tree.
I imagine a lot of the cultist right mistook him as an ally since he's never shyed away from criticizing silly factions/aspects of the American left. Add that seeking upsetting content is a hobby for many online normies, and most comments stop being surprising. As consensus reality breaks down, I'm gaining appreciation for the glimpses into other worlds/truths they provide.
It seems to me to be under-emphasized how democratic-ness is "sticky" on both the upside and the downside. Orban ultimately was done in by causing the public to be unhappy with the economy and enough people were wedded to democracy that the vote stuck. OTOH, there have been many places where democratic systems have been installed (imposed?) on cultures with no history of democracy, and almost always they rapidly turn into autocracies of various sorts. It seems to me that this hearkens back to the sociologists' concept of "legitimacy" -- the populace has a certain ideal of how power is attained and if someone gains power in a practical way but doesn't satisfy the peoples' sense of legitimacy, their power will be very fragile. But that cuts both ways -- if the populace thinks legitimate power is due to the divine right of kings, they won't mind a new king declaring his divine right.
Orban actually built a fence around his country's borders to keep mass third world immigration out during the migrant waves of ~2015. Therefore, regardless of how democratic he was or wasn't, I propose he was a good thing for the people of Hungary. It doesn't matter how you get or stay in power, it matters what you do with it, and he did provably good things for his country.
This all seems very basic to someone who has been tuned into world politics and not inside the right-wing bubble, but I really appreciate the good work you are doing in getting this message to the members of your audience who are not in that category.
the lack of a perfect word is actually the point isnt it. 'soft authoritarianism' sounds too gentle, 'fascism' sounds too dramatic, so people just shrug. the vocabulary failure is doing real political work