Democracy's Revival in Hungary

And the complexities it teaches us.

I want to think a little about the reaction to the defeat of Victor Orban from folks such as Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen, and others, the gist of which was that if Orban lost then Hungary (and by implication Trump’s USA) must have been a democracy after all.

So…this is bunk. But perhaps interesting bunk.

First of all, it’s not at all clear how sincere these people are. As Brian Beutler points out, the same people claiming vindication here surely would not happily accept Orban’s version of “democracy” if it was implemented by Democrats in the US. Indeed, Douthat once denounced Barack Obama for “Caesarism” because he used the presidency aggressively, but surely not as aggressively as Trump regularly attempts.

Let’s suppose, or at least pretend, that they are sincere in the claim that Orban’s defeat shows that Hungary was a democracy the whole time.

The obvious and correct rejoinder to that claim is an important concept: Democracy, it turns out, is not an all-or-nothing deal. Instead, a state is always going to be more or less of a republic.¹ And on the other side, states can be more or less autocracies, an idea that should be straightforward to those who remember the Cold War distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” regimes.²

Indeed, the people who study this particular thing have a name for a system that has real elections, but stacks them by rules and practices so that one party has a large but not insurmountable advantage: Competitive authoritarianism.

Now, there are plenty of arguments about just where “democracy” ends and where “competitive authoritarianism” begins and where the US right now fits into that discussion. Not to mention even more arguments about how easy it is to move from one to the other.

But the basic concept that polities can be more or less democratic and that it really matters where one is on that spectrum, is pretty straightforward, and I think more or less obviously true. Anyone who has participated in any kind of collective decision-making, for anything from where to go to dinner to running, say, a small volunteer organization, surely is familiar with the sense that a process may be more or less democratic. Questions about whether everyone “really” had an equal say or whether a vote was “really” fair make sense to us, even if we know that we’ll disagree about the answers to those questions or even how to go about answering them.

That is to say there is no single bright line that separates sort-of republics from kind-of autocracies. There are instead lots and lots of moving parts, and they all need to be assessed to make a full judgement.

None of that to this point is very complicated in the abstract, and anyone who really thinks about this stuff (and is trying to make a sincere argument) shouldn’t have much trouble, therefore, accepting that “democratic backsliding” can be real, and a true danger to a republic, and can even fall over the line into authoritarian territory. Even if the incumbent party responsible still manages to lose a subsequent election.

It gets a lot more complicated after that, however, and I don’t think we really have a great vocabulary for discussing it.

For example: Many of us who study US politics will say that the nation wasn’t really a democracy (or perhaps a “true” democracy) from the founding until 1965 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the end, over the previous decade, of Jim Crow. And that’s absolutely true…from one, very important, perspective. But no one really thinks that there was no difference at all between, say, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the segregated US.

Moreover, the regime (if we want to call it that) that protected slavery and then established apartheid in the US also contained key elements – what I think we have to call democratic elements – that eventually turned that not-republic into a “real” republic. That included the civil liberties that, even if only imperfectly observed, allowed an organized civil rights movement to march and protest and petition. And voting rights for Black citizens who migrated north and west and made civil rights a winning position in many areas, especially key presidential swing states in the middle of the twentieth century. But it still seems wrong to say that overall, everything considered, the US was a democracy given the Jim Crow extreme violation of any reasonable definition of collective self-government. And it’s not as if everything else was in great shape, either.

Even more complicated? The mechanisms that helped turn the US into a more-real republic in the 1950s and 1960s, including Electoral College biases and the Supreme Court, are busy right now being used to take apart that democracy, including the likely de facto repeal of the Voting Rights Act. Does that mean that the 1965-??? era was less of a democracy than we thought?

And then there’s the further complexity that there are multiple dimensions to collective self-government that are seemingly unrelated. There are arguments that some the participatory, party-centric aspects of 19th century US were especially democratic…at the same time that only a minority of the population could vote and most of the rest had at best very limited rights. Even if the latter point is more important, we can’t simply ignore the former. Probably.

What it comes down to is that we can’t always find one simple “democracy” formula. At a basic level, the tensions between rule of all the people and rule by majority decision is real, and in some ways cannot be fully reconciled. Another example: Bureaucracy. There are real reasons to believe that excessive reliance on the neutral expertise of bureaucracies is a serious threat to rule of the people, in all their non-neutral, non-expert interests and opinions and idiosyncratic selves. At the same time, however, modern republics probably need at least some neutral expertise to thrive – and bureaucracies can also be a check against rule by the whim of elected officials who become detached from the voters who elected them.

Then there are political parties. E. E. Schattschneider was correct: Parties are essential to democracy. They organize mass publics. They create important pathways for political participation. And they are absolutely essential to the process of representation in large polities.

But Douthat isn’t way off about one thing; political parties are after all (at least in one way of seeing them) organized conspiracies to seize power, and therefore they are apt to bend rules (or worse) to secure office and remain in office. Not all parties are alike. One can and must distinguish between the attack-on-democracy GOP and the pro-democracy Democrats. But political parties are open-ended by nature in their goals; we can only try to give them incentives to choose democracy as one of their goals and to therefore constrain themselves.

So Douthat and Cowen and the rest are way wrong about the threat to democracy. They are wrong in the way that partisans are apt to be wrong: Generous to their friends, and strict with their opponents. And alas that too is part of democracy. We would hope that we hold our political allies to high standards – we probably should hold our allies to high standards – but it’s damn hard to do so. That’s no excuse! The threat to the republic from Trump and the current GOP is very real and everyone who supports democracy should see that and act accordingly. But it’s a lot easier for people who support the regular policy agenda that Democrats would enact than it is for those who don’t.

Which is only to say again that the concept of collective self-rule is a lot more complicated than many believe it to be.

1. As usual, I use “democracy” and “republic” as synonyms.

2. The authoritarian/totalitarian distinction was associated with conservative politics in the US. Critics complained that it was simply a justification for Cold War policies of allying with brutal regimes; supporters basically agreed but argued that was smart policy. Regardless of what is to be done about it, however, it certainly is true that there are degrees of repression in various regimes.