The role model at Mar-a-Lago
Plus, multipartyism in a multiracial democracy & constraining war powers
Today the most effective autocrat in the western world is at Mar-a-Lago.
No, not Donald Trump — Viktor Orban. The Hungarian prime minister was ousted by voters after one term way back in 2002. But he returned to office with a vengeance in 2010 and has held a lock on power ever since. Today, his control over Hungary’s rapidly deteriorating democracy is almost absolute.
So it’s no surprise that Trump and his allies are rolling out the red carpet for their role model.
Earlier this week my colleague Amanda Carpenter explained the situation:
As former president Donald Trump steamrolls his way to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he and his MAGA allies are, once again, rolling out the red carpet for their favorite authoritarian, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He’ll be welcomed at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday and at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.
Why?
For the MAGA movement, Orban is a model for retaking the executive office and then consolidating power to maximum effect. Like Trump, Orban was ousted by voters and then spent time out of office making plans to win the next election, get control of the levers of power and abolish democratic checks in the system so he would never lose again. He envisioned building a “central political force field” that would rule for the next 15 to 20 years.
Which is exactly what happened.
Orban has now held power for 14 years and counting in a corrupt system of his own making that the European Parliament condemned as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy.”
When Orban returned to office in 2010 he knew what to do. He systematically tore down his country’s democracy with a strategy straight out of the Authoritarian Playbook.
Read Amanda’s full piece on Orban’s ruthless effectiveness and how Trump aims to emulate his strategies here.
Top takeaway: we already know what a second Trump term would look like. They’re not hiding the model. It’s at Mar-a-Lago today.
Out of the two-party doom loop, towards multiparty democracy
For many of us, this election may feel like groundhog day. Another existential crossroads for American democracy, the same candidates, the same two choices.
This is not an accident. It’s an inevitable consequence of the way our elections are designed. Our winner-take-all electoral system polarizes us into two warring camps, advantaging extremists and leaving no room for new options.
But we can change the system. It’s not going to happen this year. It may take a decade. But we know the path out of the trap we’re in. Watch this new video from Journalist Adam Freelander of Vox (featuring Farbod Faraji) that explains how:
This week was the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
Deborah Apau takes the occasion to dig into the history of third parties and the Civil Rights Movement, and finds an important, often forgotten, aspiration for multipartyism:
In the 1960s, several state-based Black political parties emerged, including: The Party of Christian Democracy in Georgia; the Black Freedom Party in North Carolina; the Afro-American Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Mississippi; and perhaps the most conspicuous (though not ballot-qualified) Black Panther Party in California.
Despite struggling to influence policy and legislation, thanks in part to the two party duopoly’s efforts to quash their reach, they did succeed in raising concerns regarding the social, political, and economic circumstances of Black Americans that both major parties had long comfortably ignored or insufficiently addressed. It was pressure from these ambitious organizations — working in tandem with other civil rights strategies, including the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery — that ultimately led to the passage of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Still, the question of how much influence these parties could have had on policy had they been permitted legitimate entry into the mainstream political arena lingers. How much potential progress was lost then, and continues to be lost now? In 1972, with Black Americans still struggling to find representation under the two-party system, Reverend Jesse Jackson stated: “I don’t want to be the gray shadow of a white elephant or the gray shadow of a white donkey . . . I am a Black man, and I want a Black party.” This major Black party never came to fruition, and Jackson himself later became active in the Democratic Party. Years later, the question of how much could have been achieved by a Black party, or one specifically sensitive to the needs of the Black electorate, remains.
Read her whole incisive piece: Multipartyism in a multiracial democracy.
More on proportional representation here.
Why we need to constrain presidential war powers
This week, Protect Democracy filed a FOIA request demanding the Biden administration release its legal justification for ongoing military action in Yemen. This mirrors a nearly identical request we made of the Trump Administration in 2017, when it launched missile strikes in Syria (plus similar ones in 2020 and 2021).
We are deeply concerned about the bipartisan drift towards ever more unconstrained warmaking by the president. And you know who shared this concern as far back as the 1980s? Then-Senator Joe Biden. As my colleagues Ian Bassin & Aisha Woodward wrote in Lawfare this week, while President Biden was serving in the Senate, he penned an article in the Syracuse Law Review explaining how Congress could claw back oversight of the executive branch following the destabilizing 1983 Supreme Court decision in INS v. Chadha, which struck down the so-called “legislative veto” that had allowed Congress to override executive action through a resolution passed by either or both chambers.
Thankfully, as they point out, there are bipartisan, bicameral reform proposals on the table and ready to go:
Congress has begun to wake up to the need for reform. A cross-ideological group of members have come together to introduce legislation to enact stronger guardrails on the warmaking power. The National Security Powers Act, backed by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would close some of the interpretive loopholes that executives have opened in the War Powers Resolution and address the post-Chadha challenges that Biden himself had identified. Similar bipartisan legislation, the National Security Reform and Accountability Act, has been introduced in the House by Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC).
These bills have a serendipitous connection to the thinking of then-Senator Joe Biden, who offered that one solution for Congress to reclaim its authorities in the post-Chadha era would be to provide that certain executive branch powers should automatically sunset absent affirmative congressional authorization within a short period of time. Then-Senator Biden actually proposed a reform that would have sunset certain authorities in an arms export reform bill in 1986. That’s the precise approach contained in these bipartisan bills in both the Senate and House. President Biden should endorse these approaches and call on Congress to send legislation to his desk for signature.
As they write, the reason we’re pressing the White House to do better is precisely because of the danger on our doorstep this year:
President Biden has spoken compellingly about the historic moment in which we find ourselves, with the threat of authoritarianism being the defining danger of our time. It is precisely in such a moment that the danger of expanded executive authority is most concerning. And with candidate Trump seeking to return to the Oval Office with the idea of, among other things, launching military strikes on Mexico, restoring the Founders’ balanced vision for warmaking could not be more important. As part of his commitment to protect democracy, President Biden should lead us back to that balance.
What else we’re tracking:
In case you missed it, heartening news earlier this week in Florida, where an appeals court upheld the injunction against the Stop WOKE Act — a win for the First Amendment and a loss for authoritarian attempts to bully the private sector into submission. Shalini Agarwal: “Speech codes have no place in American society.” More here.
Dozens of groups (us included) are pushing President Biden to prioritize the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act if he wins re-election.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced this week she would not seek re-election. “Compromise is a dirty word," she described. While that diagnosis isn’t wrong per se, the underlying reason for dysfunction is our electoral system. Farbod Faraji explains.
Another of the three global indices of democracy, V-Dem, released their 2023 numbers yesterday. Same story — mostly bad news. “Almost all components of democracy are getting worse in more countries than they are getting better, compared to ten years ago.”
Argentina’s president Javier Millei is looking to make his country’s elections more like ours in the United States, proposing a switch from proportional representation to winner-take-all. (Viktor Orban, the guy above, previously did the same in Hungary.) That should make the United States question our electoral system choices, write Grant Tudor and Oscar Pocasangre in Foreign Policy.
“Defending Democracy by Expanding the Agenda” — The Horizons Project’s Sivahn Sapirstein and Jarvis Williams argue “the authoritarian threat confronting the nation requires that pro-democracy organizations embrace a more expansive display of democratic agency.”
Nikki Haley may have suspended her campaign this week, but it doesn’t need to be the end of the road for her supporters. “[I]f they embrace the ‘fusion’ strategy suggested by Senators Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin, they could move us past the dangerous two-party politics that has pushed our democracy to the brink,” write Amanda Carpenter & Beau Tremitiere in Time.
The Arizona Supreme Court allowed Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s defamation case against Kari Lake to proceed, leaving in place the Superior Court’s decision rejecting Lake’s motion to dismiss. Case will move forward to discovery. More on this soon.