A Modern Model Trumpian Government

Donald Trump is hardly the only Western leader who finds constitutional restrictions a barrier to governing. He’s hardly the only leader of a developed country who believes principled democracy is a negative force to his or her vision of growth, prosperity and changing traditional values. Indeed, holding Donald Trump up as an example of how a democracy can elevate a populist demagogue to the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth with the planet’s biggest economy, the People’s Republic of China is telling its people how their “communism with Chinese characteristics” – where leaders are groomed and tested through decades of work through the Party – is an obviously vastly superior system of governance. A climate change denier, a power mogul with an unbridled mouth, they say, could never rise above the first tier of the Communist Party, they say, and likely would have long-since been expelled.

Even the notion of democratic capitalism that underlies the American political system is being called into question these days. Adam Smith’s 18th century notion of the invisible hand of free market forces has been the underlying theory behind our US economy for centuries. But the rest of the world watched as a very visible hand under centrally-directed economy grew from the ashes to lift over a billion people out of poverty in about three decades: China. All this while the United States faced mounting deficits and severe economic polarization where the middle and lower classes lost out big time to the one percenters.

The world sees the United States slip-sliding away, particularly under the leadership of Donald Trump, and that the short term burst in our now mercurial stock market will soon hit the stone wall of an over-borrowed society forced to inflate its currency to survive. That relatively new kid on the block, China, is the successor, stepping in where America either withdraws or simply cedes influence under a highly destructive populist isolationist view of the world. And with that shift in power comes an undermining of the notion of representative democracy as the best form of modern government. China’s system is working; America’s is not.

Add the fact that job displacement from the implementation of artificial intelligence-driven automation has no viable solution under existing democratic political systems, and China’s model becomes even more interesting to a number of third world countries looking for a path to success. For a more detailed discussion of these trends, please look back at my December 13th blog, The Biggest Political Question on Earth.

Donald Trump, anxious to drain the swamp of its checks and balances, has to look on in envy at one Western nation that seems to have done just that: Hungary. In the short span of eight years, Hungary’s right wing Prime Minister, Viktor Orban (pictured above with Vladimir Putin), has taken a liberal democracy and turned it into an ultraconservative one-party state (his Fidesz Party) that caters very heavily to insiders and the mega-rich. In classic Trumpian style, “Through legislative fiat and force of will, Mr. Orban has transformed the country into a political greenhouse for an odd kind of soft autocracy, combining crony capitalism and far-right rhetoric with a single-party political culture. He has done this even as Hungary remains a member of the European Union and receives billions of dollars in funding from the bloc. European Union officials did little as Mr. Orban transformed Hungary into what he calls an ‘illiberal democracy.’

“Now Mr. Orban is directly challenging the countries that have long dominated the European bloc, predicting that 2018 will be ‘a year of great battles.’ At home, he is pushing new legislation, this time to place financial penalties on civil society groups that help migrants. His domestic political standing is largely unchallenged, partly because of changes he has made to the electoral system; he is almost certain to win another term in April elections.” New York Times, February 10th.

Hungary was a communist bloc country, a one-party state for decades, that catered to the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet invasion in 1956 that ended a nascent liberal movement rather violently). Apparently, accelerated by the threat of “people of color” migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Orban has equally accelerated his political agenda. Not that migrants particularly favored Hungary; learning a difficult language with little benefit anywhere else has been a pretty stiff deterrent to migrants seeking a new start. But it seems that a one party, strongman-directed system, is now inherent in Hungary’s DNA, and we are seeing parallel movements elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Particularly in Poland.

Orban’s campaign of killing the last vestiges of communism and keeping migrants out of Hungary – sound familiar? – was his calling card, his message to get elected. Then, in Trumpian style, he set about attacking any elements in society that opposed his vision. “To understand how Mr. Orban has reshaped Hungary, start with the private meetings in 2010. Fidesz had just won national elections by a margin that qualified the party for more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, even though it had only won a slim majority of votes. Party leaders had a mandate. But to what extent could they legitimately wield it?

“Weeks later, Mr. Orban and his lieutenants began a legislative assault on the Hungarian Constitution, curbing civil society and, to less fanfare, diverting billions of euros in European Union and federal money toward loyal allies.

“First, he moved simultaneously to curb the Hungarian media and the judiciary. Next came the erosion of the country’s checks and balances, which has helped Mr. Orban share the spoils of power with close friends and important businessmen.

“And then, came the electoral process. The restructuring of Hungary’s election system, including a redrawing the electoral map, has helped him remain in power, even as his party has won fewer votes… ‘The election law does not correspond to democratic features,’ said Imre Voros, a founding member of the Hungarian constitutional court, ‘and Hungary is therefore not a democratic country.’…

“Sworn into office on May 29, 2010, Mr. Orban re-engineered Hungary’s institutional framework so swiftly that even Fidesz lawmakers were stunned. During the next five years, Fidesz used its two-thirds majority in Parliament to pass more than 1,000 laws, many of them enacted after a few hours of debate — and often presented by low-ranking lawmakers who had neither written nor read them.” NY Times. See any parallels with Donald Trump’s stated goals?

While this philosophy resonates in Eastern Europe, finding serious traction, wholesale shifts to the right in the Western European world is unlikely, despite some nascent gains of ultra-right wing of political parties even there. What is clear is that traditional democracies are no longer presumed to be the choice of rising developing countries and that even within what once appeared to be the staunchest democracies on earth, we are beginning to see serious erosion. Like in the United States? Unfortunately.

I’m Peter Dekom, and history is rife with lessons where democracies crumbled and were replaced with autocratic substitutes… where personal freedom was a severe casualty.