Former Obama administration deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes clearly had this sentiment in mind last week when he tweeted, “If you want to know where Trump wants to take America in a second term, look at Russia, Hungary and Poland.” While comparing the United States’ potential future to Russia’s mafia-state was a stretch, Rhodes’s references to Hungary and Poland were not. [...]
Freedom House removed Hungary from its list of democracies last week, calling the country’s decline “the most precipitous ever tracked” by one of its flagship reports. Freedom House now labels the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban a “hybrid regime,” meaning that it marries some elements of democracy with those of an autocracy.
Under Orban, Hungary maintains some democratic traits; for example, it holds elections, albeit ones in which Orban’s government provides his party significant advantages. Yet Orban and his ruling coterie have neutered a once-vibrant media, politicized the administration of justice and promoted the interests of regime insiders such as the prime minister’s son-in-law, all while scapegoating migrants and asylum seekers. Orban recently dropped any semblance of adherence to democratic rule and used the fight against covid-19 to have Hungary’s parliament grant him indefinite rule by decree. [...]
There’s a reason all this may sound familiar. As multiple political scientists, intelligence officials and historians have documented, governments that turn away from democracy and the rule of law increasingly follow a consistent pattern. Summarized as a slow roll of subversion, elected autocrats chip away at democracy’s foundations in the courts, media and civil service with the grudging (or sometimes energetic) support of their political allies. As Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.” Yet that erosion is real, and the United States is experiencing it, too.
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