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Opinion|Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/opinion/trump-democracy-autocracy.html
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Guest Essay
Jan. 15, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Kim Lane Scheppele and Norman Eisen
Professor Scheppele teaches sociology and international affairs at Princeton and lived and worked in Hungary for many years as a researcher at the Hungarian Constitutional Court. Mr. Eisen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and served as the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014.
Since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have witnessed striking accommodations to his narrow win and mandate, what has been called “anticipatory obedience.”
Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and would be glad if the threat does not materialize. But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and under-discussed possibility. We know well other nations, including Hungary and Poland, where leaders have steered policies that lead to a backsliding of democracy. We see eerie similarities between what transpired in those countries and what Mr. Trump and his transition team have already done and promise to do.
Fortunately, we also have examples of countries that have pushed back on threats to democracy, and we can learn from them.
The Trump transition has featured the rapid-fire appointments of several cabinet officials who are both unqualified and potentially dangerous to the security and health of the American people. The transition has also included a flurry of actual and threatened libel actions against critics, followed by several media executives and owners caving in.
Business leaders with economic interests dependent on the federal government have also made nice with the president-elect, who has threatened to use his regulatory power to pick favorites.
In a second term, Mr. Trump’s actions may be even more dangerous because he is now following the playbook created by Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, who after losing and then regaining office moved his country from a democracy into an “illiberal state,” as he put it. It was one of the faster collapses of a robust democracy on record.
