Key Takeaways
- Democracies are now dismantled internally by elected leaders using legal and constitutional manipulations.
- U.S. checks and balances weaken as loyalty shifts from institutions to political parties, mirroring historical declines.
- Autocratic legal tactics, like judiciary manipulation, are being borrowed and adapted globally, including in the U.S.
- Litigation is increasingly weaponized to financially pressure and silence political opponents and legal challenges.
Deep Dive
- Professor Kim Scheppele's research, focused on Hungary and Russia, reveals a new method of democratic collapse.
- She initially studied democratic optimism in Hungary in the early 1990s but documented decline instead.
- Elected leaders now use legal and constitutional maneuvers to dismantle democratic structures from within.
- This pattern, first observed in Hungary, is now evident in other countries, including the United States.
- Concerns arise over eroding American democratic checks and balances, driven by a shift from institutional to party loyalty.
- This mirrors historical patterns abroad and echoes warnings from figures like Justice Robert Jackson.
- Jackson's views evolved from advocating executive power under Roosevelt to cautioning against it in his Youngstown concurrence after prosecuting Nazis.
- The Weimar Constitution's collapse, due to party loyalty overriding checks, serves as a historical parallel.
- Autocrats, after democratic elections, dismantle executive power checks by borrowing tactics from other nations.
- These 'migration of unconstitutional ideas' combine seemingly constitutional elements to undermine democratic principles.
- Hungary's Viktor Orbán lowered the judicial retirement age from 70 to 62, effective immediately, to quickly replace judges.
- This method, implemented in Hungary in 2012, was later adopted by Egypt under Mohamed Morsi and Poland.
- The U.S., historically an exporter of democratic ideas, now imports strategies for dismantling democracy legally.
- Project 2025 is cited as exhibiting similarities to methods used by Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
- Tactics like cutting opposition funding and mass civil servant firings, employed by Orbán, are compared to actions in the U.S.
- Donald Trump's first term leveraged outsourced judicial appointments, with the Supreme Court amenable to expanding executive power.
- This enabled a 'break things first and ask permission later' approach, challenging existing statutes and interpretations.
- Some unitary executive cases are actively being pursued in the Supreme Court.
- Lawsuits against news media and opponents are used as a financial burden to undermine and remove political challenges, as seen in Hungary.
- Donald Trump employed such litigation tactics prior to his presidency.
- In Hungary, opposition-linked companies face disproportionately more tax audits and criminal investigations.
- US executive orders against law firms in politically charged cases may aim to dissuade clients from legal challenges.