Hope After Trump

Is President Trump irrecoverably damaging America?

I’ve been pondering that lately, partly because several of my friends have been so traumatized by Trump that they are wondering whether to give up on America and move to Canada to rebuild their lives there. I’ve tried to reassure them that this is not 1938 Germany.

They shrug and note that 1935 Germany wasn’t 1938 Germany, either — but that’s what it became.

Yet in the post-Cold War era, the typical authoritarian model isn’t the police state conjured by Hitlerian nightmares. Rather, it’s more nuanced. It’s one in which a charismatic leader is elected and then uses a democratic mandate to rig democratic institutions.

In such states, there are elections that aren’t entirely fair, news organizations that aren’t free but also aren’t Pravda, a repressive apparatus that may not torture dissidents but does audit and impoverish them. The rough model is Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or the Law and Justice party’s Poland, or President Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India. You can call this competitive authoritarianism or a rigged democracy or something else, but a key feature is that elections still matter even if the playing field is tilted — and most important, such authoritarians are periodically ousted.

These 21st-century authoritarians have gained ground in many countries, partly in reaction to surging migration. But the longer trend runs against autocrats, I think.

That’s partly structural. Authoritarians surround themselves with sycophants, so that no one warns them when they proclaim dumb policies that tank the economy. Free from oversight, they yield to dissolution and corruption.

I’ve been covering authoritarians around the world my entire career, and so often they seemed unassailable as they banned me “for life.” But it usually turned out to be the dictator’s life, not mine.