This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The questions we talk about a lot among ourselves on the show right now is: What timeline are we in, and how will we know? Are we watching the fundamental erosion of American democracy, its liberties, its safeguards? Are we on a path that is quickly becoming irreversible?
Or are we in the timeline where the Trump administration is doing a lot, where it is trying to arrogate new powers to itself — but to the extent it has a fundamental plan to reformat the way the American political system works, it is simply running into too much opposition and has too little power to succeed?
Two articles recently came out that I thought created an interesting tension and ways to look at this.
In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote this piece called “Trump Is Losing.” Beauchamp is an expert on competitive authoritarianism, the slide away from democracy and into something very different. His book, “The Reactionary Spirit,” looks at how this has been happening worldwide.
And his recent piece says: Eh, it doesn’t look like it’s happening. Trump is losing. If you think that what he is trying to do is consolidate a certain kind of power to fundamentally change the nature of how America works, he’s facing the kind of opposition that does not look surmountable.
In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz wrote a similar piece, but from a very different place — from Hungary where it already did happen. I’ve read a thousand pieces on Hungary at this point, but this one gave me this felt sense of the way in which, when this kind of authoritarian breakthrough succeeds, it may not feel in the moment like it is succeeding, even after it has.
It may not feel the way you think. You can still be there in the opposition, saying the things you want to say in a nice fancy cafe, drinking your Negroni. But the nature of your system is gone.
This conversation is not an attempt to answer these questions. We are not going to know what we are living through until long after it’s over. But it is an effort to check in on the moment. Because what moment people think they’re living through, even in the time they’re living through it, matters for the decisions they make and for what ultimately happens.
Ezra Klein: Zack Beauchamp, Andrew Marantz, welcome to the show.
Andrew Marantz: Thanks for having me.
Zack Beauchamp: Thanks.
Zack, you wrote this piece arguing that, at least from a certain perspective, Trump is losing, and that he is not on track to achieve at least one version of his goals. Lay out that case for me.
Beauchamp: The argument is that Trump’s central goal of his administration — he wouldn’t put it in these terms, but I think that it’s pretty fair to say that this is what its policies indicate toward — is changing the American regime. It is turning what was — and has long been — a democratic government into some species of nondemocratic government in which power is wielded primarily through the executive with basically few checks and, potentially even down the line, the fairness of elections is compromised.
That part’s speculative, but we can say that there’s an attempt to reconfigure the constitutional order without having to amend the Constitution. That means not just Trump saying that he is doing things to consolidate power but actually doing it.
You can use a series of benchmarks. It’s a brief checklist. First, I looked quantitatively into the court rulings against Trump. And I found that not only did he lose vastly more than he won whenever there was an actual decision, but in most situations, the administration has complied with the something like four-to-one ratio of court orders they’ve lost.
Look at the cases of the students who have been targeted. Courts have been consistently ruling in their favor. They’ve issued statements publicly saying: We will never back off from defending what is right. And it looks most likely, I think, based on the current legal trajectory, that they’re going to be released. In fact, courts have ordered a significant number of student visas that have been taken away to be restored, and the State Department has complied with that. So that’s one thing: failing to consolidate institutional power.
A second thing is failing to neutralize sources of opposition. I think the press is a really good example. One of the first things that any of these guys does when they want to try to move toward an authoritarian state is to suborn the press in some way, to silence it and make sure there isn’t an effective criticism coming out of the media.
There are instances of self-censorship by the media and of Trump putting pressure on media organizations, but on the whole, if you look at the media landscape in the United States, there’s no shortage of Trump criticism. We aren’t having the entire country turning into Fox News.
The third thing is civil society. Here the thing that really changed my mind is universities. At first Columbia was basically doing whatever Trump wanted to try to get the threat of federal funding cuts off their back. Then it looked like Harvard might be about to do the same thing. But all of a sudden, it became the leader of the resistance — it’s organizing this thing.
There’s a compact among Big Ten schools that has been ratified by faculty senates in which they pledge — they call it a NATO for mutual legal defense: If Trump comes after one of them, they’ll all defend each other with resources. There’s a strategy group, privately, for Ivy League and other top-tier elite schools where they’re planning collective resistance against the Trump administration.
This is not what happens when you effectively consolidate power, and you can see this in a number of different spheres ranging from business to law.
Let me ask one other question about what you said at the beginning. Another interpretation is that we are being unfair to Donald Trump. And that he doesn’t want authoritarianism, he wants the literal things he’s going after: He wants these concessions from universities because he or the people who work for him or advise him think they became antisemitic and woke. He wanted to push the press on certain things, but he actually does not want to destroy the free press.
And one reason it’s not going the way you fear is that the model in your head — Viktor Orban in Hungary or Narendra Modi in India — is actually not the right model. It is a hysterical “resistance lib” fear casting onto Donald Trump, and it is unfair to him.
Beauchamp: I thought about this objection a lot while I was working on the piece. Trump has never said: I’m going to be an authoritarian or —
He said he was going to be a dictator on Day 1 — but only on Day 1.
Beauchamp: Just on Day 1, just on Day 1.
Marantz: And terminate the Constitution.
Beauchamp: But Viktor Orban doesn’t say: I want to seize control of the Hungarian government and make myself dictator. It’s in the structure of modern authoritarianism when you’re dealing with backsliding from democracy that they want to claim democratic bona fides.
They want to be able to say: I’m still ruling on behalf of the people, elections are still legitimate. In fact, my legitimacy flows from my popularity.
The way that you assess whether or not backsliding is happening is you look at the cumulative intent of the different policies put together. What would the output be if these policies all succeeded and Trump actually got what he wanted in these cases?
And we can see what that would look like: It would look like a series of deals, like the ones that Columbia and Paul Weiss made. It would look like the courts declining to challenge him for fear that they wouldn’t be obeyed. It would look like the media self-censoring. I mean, we’re on this podcast saying that Trump is an authoritarian, and none of us are afraid that Donald Trump is going to shut us down because we were on this podcast.
That, to me, is a significant marker of failure.
Marantz: I have a few issues with the “Are they losing?” thing. One, I disagree with some of the particulars of the way we’re accounting for the checklist. The fact that they’re losing court cases four-to-one — it depends on what the strategy is. If the strategy is to win every court case, then that’s not a winning strategy.
But I don’t think their strategy is to win every court case. I think there’s a little bit of a “Heads, I win, tails, you lose” strategy. Trump has lost a lot of court cases in his life. He doesn’t really seem to mind it that much. If he loses, maybe he loses partially — maybe it’s a “splitting the baby” partial victory — and then he wins a few court cases, and he can take that as a victory.
I think if you lose sight of the felt experience of being an American right now and you just go to the checklist and the norms and institutions, you’re missing a key part of it.
I can tell you the chilling of speech is working. It is working. Whether they lose every court case or not, people’s speech is chilled.
Whose speech?
Marantz: Students that I’ve spoken to.
Students, I would agree with. Do you think the media has chilled?
Marantz: Yes. Well, I mean —
I don’t. Is The New Yorker being chilled?
Beauchamp: [Chuckles.]
Marantz: Well, The New Yorker —
Blink twice, Andrew.
Beauchamp: [Laughs.]
Marantz: The New Yorker, so far, is not. This is another thing: Where are we on the timeline?
Yes, where are we on the timeline?
Marantz: If we’re 100 days in — I mean, you totally could have gone to Orban’s Hungary 100 days in and said he hasn’t taken control of the media.
It took him seven or eight years to get control of the media. So if you had The Washington Post killing editorial cartoons and changing its editorial mission ahead of a new regime coming into office — I wouldn’t say the media is totally cooked, but I would say: That doesn’t look great.
So Andrew, I think it’s always important to actually be clear on what is the operative metaphor happening in analysts’ minds. I think, in this era, it has been Hungary.
You wrote this piece that I think exists in an interesting tension with Zack’s, where you went to Hungary and you spent a lot of time with the opposition — opposition media, opposition figures. You went to universities that had been shut down — but they exist in this strange liminal space.
What emerged out of that piece for me was a felt sense that losing may not feel or look like what you think it feels or looks like. Tell me about that trip.
Marantz: The felt sense was really, as you say, this liminal — another term people use is “hybrid regime.” The hybridity, the ambiguity, the plausible deniability — it’s all around you.
Take the example of the universities. One thing that one reads about Hungary is that Viktor Orban didn’t like C.E.U. — Central European University — because he was waging a propaganda war against George Soros — or the figure of George Soros — who was funding that university. So he got rid of it. He kicked it out.
Then you go there, and a building that says C.E.U. on the front of it has a big plaque that says George Soros funded this university. You walk in, and you’re in the university that you were told was kicked out of Budapest.
So I thought: What’s going on exactly? I was talking to dissidents in the middle of Budapest criticizing the regime and calling it autocratic, and they weren’t fearing that they were going to get stuffed into a van.
I found this really confusing, but also instructive, because I didn’t then leave thinking Orban had lost, that he had failed to consolidate control. I thought: Oh, what that means is maybe different than the notion I had in my head.
It doesn’t mean that in order to get rid of C.E.U., you have to raid the building, put a padlock on the door and sell it to become a barracks or something. It means that C.E.U. is no longer a degree-granting institution in Budapest. I call it a kind of Potemkin university — it’s hollowed out from within.
Then I come back to the U.S. Trump is inaugurated, and he starts going after Columbia University saying: There are all these foreigners here, they have these strange foreign ideas, we don’t like it, it’s too woke, it’s too antisemitic. Interestingly, the way they use the trope of the “International Jew” is different in Hungary and in the U.S., but, you know, same-same.
Then Trump starts levying these informal attacks on Columbia University, but they don’t take the form of an executive order that says: Columbia University no longer exists. He doesn’t send in the army to raid Columbia University. He says: Because you’re too woke and antisemitic, we are going to freeze these funds from you.
I think if I had seen that through the lens of Iran in 1979 or Germany in the 1930s, I would have said: It’s not happening here.
But seeing it through the lens of competitive authoritarianism, I thought: OK, he’s not going to get everything he wants. He’s not going to wipe Columbia University off the map, if that’s even something he desires. But will he weaken it? Will he chill people’s speech? I think he already has succeeded at doing that.
What it really felt like reporting from Columbia University a few weeks ago was just this pervasive sense of fear and confusion about where the lines actually were, and where formal and informal power were. That really reminded me of what it was like to be in Budapest. There are these invisible lines that are being made up as you go along.
If someone had told me on March 6: I’m afraid to leave my apartment because I think jackbooted thugs are going to show up in an unmarked van and stuff me in the van. When my wife asks them where I’m going, they say: We’re taking him somewhere because we didn’t like his political speech. See you later. I would have said: You’re insane. This is the United States of America. What are you talking about? There’s no law anywhere that says they can do that.
If you told me that on March 9, after they did that to Mahmoud Khalil, I would have said: Yes, you’re right, you shouldn’t go outside.
This is something you also say in the piece, that some of what is happening here is worse than what is happening there. There are places where you can say they’ve not figured out how to consolidate control in the way Viktor Orban has. There are also places where they’re going much further with the power of the state than Viktor Orban seems to have dared.
Marantz: Well, I think that’s one of them. I think the disappearing of political prisoners for squarely protected political speech — that’s more out of the Bukele or Duterte or Pinochet playbook than out of the Orban playbook.
So it’s a patchwork — it’s not all of one or all of the other. I mean, the Hungarians I spoke to were like: Whoa, what is that? We are not familiar with that.
Which was pretty shocking to me. But also, as Zack says, in other pillars like the media, we’re faring way better than they are.
Let me talk to you about that felt sense, because I think it’s really important. And let me lay out my own position: I don’t think we know what timeline we’re in, because it has not cohered into a timeline yet.
Marantz: It’s too early.
We’re in quantum superposition. A lot of things might happen. We’ll see who opens the box.
One reason I take Zack’s argument on this seriously is that the felt sense of it has changed a little bit for me from where we were three months ago.
One of the things that I’ve been watching for myself is: Does it feel like opposition is weakening or strengthening? Are people losing backbone or are they gaining it?
My impression — and I’m not saying my impression is right — is that they’re gaining it, not losing it. That the view is that the law firms that folded are embarrassments, that they’ll go down in history with a black mark, and the ones who stood up are looking better.
There was a story the other day — we don’t really know what’s behind it, but it is notable — about Microsoft moving some core work from one of the law firms that folded to one of the law firms that was fighting. That struck people as an interesting sign.
Then Harvard was looking a lot better than Columbia in creating more backbone among other universities. And then the Trump administration coming out and saying: This was a mistake, maybe we could just go back to the table together.
And when I looked at the media, I was quite concerned. When we saw the settling of the defamation cases, when you saw what Bezos was doing when he came out and said: Well, we’re going to have this free markets and individual liberties opinion page. That could mean a lot of things depending on how you define it. But you’ve not seen a purge of the liberal writers from the Washington Post Opinions page.
I’m not saying there’s not a lot to worry about here. But the thing that feels to me like it’s happening is there is more cohering of coordination among the administration’s targets rather than less. The students are a completely different category.
Marantz: Yes. And some of the —
But I’m asking you: Do you think as a felt sense, when you try to feel the zeitgeist of the moment, does it feel to you like the opposition is breaking or it’s cohering?
Marantz: I’m with you that this week, as compared to a couple of weeks ago, the wind seems to be shifting in that direction. But I think in terms of assessing which timeline we’re on, I’m not sure it’s that material where the winds are shifting this week or last week or last month. I think it’s just too early to know.
If we’re on a timeline that is anything like competitive authoritarianism, the first year or two or three might be the period we should look at rather than the first 100 days.
Just so we have it on the table, when we talk about competitive authoritarianism, how do you define that?
Marantz: The competitive part means you still have elections. They may be free but not fair elections or heavily gerrymandered elections, but it’s not the totalitarian thing where the tanks roll in and it’s emergency law forever and you rip up the Constitution. It’s a more subtle thing that political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way tell you is happening before you realize it’s happening.
Orban is looked at as the model for the most successful consolidation of power. He didn’t get what he wanted right away. He doesn’t even get everything he wants now. He could lose the next election.
Beauchamp: Maybe.
Marantz: Maybe. I mean, he could. Even on a microscale — there was a radio station that he wanted to get rid of when he first came into office. It was tied up in the courts until 2021, and then he finally shut it down.
Sure, the fact that the wind seems to be at the back of some of the resistance stuff this week is notable and hopeful.
To be clear about my position, I don’t think we’re cooked and it’s over. But, to use a great George Orwell aphorism — it’s overused, but I think for a good reason: Seeing what’s in front of one’s nose needs a daily struggle.
And I think to see things clearly, you need to not be writing backward from the end of the story.
I want to pick up on the way antisemitism popped up here for a minute. Zack, you’ve covered a lot of the ways antisemitism works in illiberal movements. The way it is working in this one is very strange.
Beauchamp: It’s so weird.
On the one hand, it has become the excuse for a lot of what they’re doing. They need to break Columbia and break Harvard because of all the antisemitism.
On the other hand, there is this: Throw open the doors of X to neo-Nazis — and a movement that includes many antisemitic or antisemitic-adjacent people. I mean, Donald Trump at one point had dinner with Nick Fuentes.
You track this pretty closely. How do you understand both the usage of antisemitism as rationale and the rise of antisemitic figures in that movement at the same time?
Beauchamp: Antisemitism has, since the existence of Christianity, been a conspiracy theory. It started with the idea that the Jews collectively killed Jesus and has become an explanatory framework for everything bad that has happened since.
In that way, it’s protean, because antisemitism can be adapted as an explanation for whatever bad thing you want to happen — you can blame it on the Jews.
But what you can also do is reconstruct the figure of who the Jew is and what they are doing in ways that are useful for your political project.
It also centers on an old idea — one that Trump has explicitly appropriated — of there being “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” The good Jews are the ones who fit the dominant and acceptable political characteristics of the era. You see this in Hungary actually. There’s an Orthodox community led by Chabad that’s aligned in many ways with the regime.
Marantz: And they get paraded out at events.
Beauchamp: Yes, yes: See, we’re so tolerant. We’ve made the country safe for Jews.
And that figure of Jewish allies is really useful because antisemitism after World War II — explicit racial antisemitism — is a real no-no in a lot of places because of the legacy of Nazism.
Sounding like a Nazi is politically very bad for you. It fractures your coalition. It makes you look harmful. And yet, there are lots of Nazis — or people who at least have Nazi-aligned beliefs about race science and Jews — who are in the Trump coalition.
So they’re playing a game, and the game goes something like this: We can use our opposition to the pro-Palestine movement and to the elements of that movement that are themselves antisemitism — as antisemitism exists in all different political movements at different degrees — and we can use it as proof that though we’re associated with those people, you can’t tar us with the Nazi slur that is so often directed at right-wing political movements. In fact, we can appropriate the power of anti-antisemitism as a justification for a power grab.
And then the flip side of this, of course, is that these power grabs target institutions, and even arguably this entire liberal ideology that has been the cornerstone of American Jewish flourishing.
Andrew, what’s your take on that?
Marantz: Yes, I think that basically sounds right. It explains how the figure of Soros or the “International Jew” is used in different ways. You don’t have to look much further than Elon Musk doing what looked a lot like something that sort of seemed like a Roman salute.
And then Steve Bannon doing it. And Elon Musk, at a different point, when somebody was just offering extremely vile, antisemitic conspiracy theories on Twitter said —
Marantz: “You have said the actual truth.”
— “You have said the actual truth” — you can be a friend of Israel and be antisemitic.
Marantz: Yes, breaking that news here!
But I do think that it’s important to have that framework. It gets to this point of ambiguity, hybridity, plausible deniability. Are you anti the Jews? Or are you for the Jews? It cuts against this idea of a clean, quantifiable checklist.
It also cuts against the idea of: Did Columbia fully exceed and did Harvard fully join the resistance? Before Harvard became the hero of the resistance, it adopted the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism, they kicked out the head of their Middle Eastern Studies Center. All of this is what Tim Snyder would call anticipatory obedience. And then the administration pushed them too far, maybe by accident — and then they joined the resistance. So it’s always hybridity all the way down, I would say.
Your first book was about the rise of what now is the MAGA right. And you have these great scenes of being on these neo-Nazi podcasts. There are much more mainstream figures now, like Joe Rogan having these World War II revisionist historians on. There’s a strangeness in the degree to which that has broken through. I’d be curious to hear how you’ve absorbed it.
I’ve seen arguments — Matt Yglesias made this point — that there is a generalized sense on the right that you need to question what they see as the foundational myth or rationale of modern liberalism — which is that the Nazis are bad and the worst thing that can happen is Hitler. And in this effort to be completely uncensored, the thinking is this is the last taboo, and it needs to be broken. What do you think is going on there?
Marantz: Look, we used to call it the alt-right. Now it’s called the right. And they are playing with taboos in ways that I think are multiple things at once. Some of it is just the old-fashioned troll: Can’t you take a joke? This isn’t actually what you think it is.
Or: Can’t you take a conversation?
Marantz: Yes: Are you too scared to talk about taboo things? Can’t we just push the boundaries?
Those things all redound to the political benefit of the movement — that is, transgression and the thrill of forbidden knowledge. It’s one of the most appealing things in the rhetorical playbook.
The first time I did a reporting trip to Hungary was in 2022, when they announced that CPAC was going to be held in Hungary — the first European CPAC And I first heard that and said: That must be a troll. That’s too on the nose. You wouldn’t have CPAC in the only authoritarian country in Europe if it’s 2022 and you’re trying to win re-election.
But they did, and I went. There was this whole saga about whether they would let me in. And — again, with the gaslighting and the hybridity — they said: We love independent media. You can surely come in.
Then in the end, they didn’t let me in, and I had to sneak in. It was a whole thing. But while I was there, Orban had just been re-elected. The resistance — the popular front against him — thought they had a chance to beat him, and it turned out they really did not.
For one of his first speeches in parliament, Orban did a whole thing about the great replacement theory, which used to be this fringe alt-right idea that the “International Jew,” among others, is trying to engineer this whole conspiracy to let in these scary brown hordes and overwhelm majority white nations with invaders.
That used to be crazy, crazy fringe 4chan stuff. Over the time that I had been covering it, it went from the fringe discredited theory known as the great replacement theory to the thing Tucker Carlson is saying every night on his show to the thing Viktor Orban is saying in Parliament, to now: the things that members of Congress are saying in the U.S.
Yes, the righteous beliefs.
Marantz: Right.
I want to go back to those disappearances because this is a thing I thought about when I read your piece, too, Zack.
You know the old William Gibson line: The future is here — it’s just unevenly distributed? I think one way to look at the moment is: Authoritarianism is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
On the one hand, you can be you and me and Andrew sitting here on a podcast in The New York Times citadel, talking about authoritarianism. Or you could be one of these kids at Columbia doing a pro-Palestinian protest, marched into a detention center.
And there is this effort on the part of the administration — they want to gear up for mass deportations, but before they have the capacity to do that, they’re trying to create a regime of fear. And they’re doing so with tactics that are much more authoritarian — even totalitarian — than I would have seen coming.
I mean, the photo of Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, at the Salvadoran prison with all these prisoners stacked behind her for the photo op, the usage of foreign disappearance as a tool of domestic fear, Trump having that meeting with Bukele saying that he would want to send Americans to Bukele’s prisons — it sits in uneasy tension with the idea that this is failing. Because in some cases it’s going further than you could have imagined — further than I thought they would have been able to or even would have wanted to.
Beauchamp: So I think that’s exact evidence that they’re failing. In fact, that’s the reason why they’re failing.
What they’re trying to do is to make a show of exacting costs on dissidents. And what that’s supposed to do is to chill dissent.
Only it’s not working. The people who they are targeting are coming out, they’re winning in court, and then they’re able to publicly say: We are not going to be quiet about this, we are not going to stop.
That is what it looks like when these kinds of tactics fail, when they’re checked. They exist inside a system where there is still a meaningful degree of rule of law.
Had they done just what Viktor Orban did in Hungary — all through very subtle, sophisticated legal machinations — that would have been a more effective tactic. But what happened is they made a big show out of it: They send Kristi Noem to do these really disturbing photo ops. They publicly abduct people on the street with masked men.
When you do those things, you send a signal that what you’re doing is authoritarianism. What you’re doing is terrifying. And if you haven’t consolidated control at that point — and you have a country that has really strong democratic institutions and a large section of the public that cares about those — you invite resistance.
I wrote a piece that basically said there are two strategies in Trump’s authoritarianism: There’s the Orban sophisticated subtle strategy and then there’s Trump’s own desires, which is to be someone like Nayib Bukele, who rules openly, does whatever-he-wants iron-fist ruling. Trump has openly proclaimed his interest in ruling like a dictator, not just on Day 1, but also admiration for things like the Tiananmen Square crackdown — or at least he did a long time ago.
These strategies contradict each other. The Orban strategy depends on stealth and subtlety, and the Bukele strategy depends on massive, rapid, aggressive shows of force backed by the armed forces of your country.
The thing about Bukele — and I think this is important for something that you touched on a second ago, Andrew — is Bukele is popular. He is overwhelmingly popular. Viktor Orban has been popular. You mentioned a second ago his winning re-election at a time when the opposition thought it was massing an effective case against him.
Marantz: Modi is hugely popular.
Modi is hugely popular. The thing about Trump is that he is not, as best we can tell, conserving popularity or building on it.
Trump came in more popular in his second term than he was in his first. He came in with allies he didn’t have in his first term, and they are spending that popularity very quickly. Some of it is on overreach, like the Abrego Garcia case, but more of it is on a betrayal of this central promise of the Trump campaign — which is that things are going to be cheaper.
And Trump has lost public opinion altitude very quickly. Now he’s not up for re-election, but —
Marantz: As far as we know. [Laughs.]
Not in the next election anyway. The next one is the midterms. Republicans I know think they’re going to lose the midterms. They are not operating on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to save them.
People around Trump that I know have told me explicitly: We got to do this fast because we’re probably going to lose the midterms, and then we’re not going to be able to do as much after that.
Some of their blitzkrieg strategy has to do with a view that they’re not going to consolidate power.
If you asked me what is strengthening the opposition to Trump, I would say it’s the tariffs. It’s not the court cases. It’s not some invisible change in the winds. It is a fact that Trump is alienating many of his supporters and the business community by lashing himself to the mast of an incredibly dumb economic theory and then seeming to double down and double down on it, coming out and saying: American kids have too many dolls. You might have too many pencils. My toilet is made of gold, but you have 30 pencils, and you only need five.
Marantz: To be clear, I would agree with Zack’s broad point that Trump is not doing it the Orban way and that Trump is impulsive and that the tariffs hurt him. I think we all broadly agree that the laws of political gravity have not been suspended.
One of the important points that people made to me over and over again while I was reporting this piece is that even if you call it authoritarianism — and many of the political scientists I spoke to did. In fact, we spoke to some of the same political scientists, and they told me flat out that America is currently not a democracy. And yet in the next breath —
They said America is not a democracy?
Marantz: Yes.
Beauchamp: Yes, they did. But I have a lot of issues with the way that definition —
Marantz: We should talk about that.
Let’s hold there for a second. When they say America is not a democracy at this moment, what do they mean?
Marantz: So it was interesting. Steven Levitsky was one of the co-authors of “How Democracies Die.” He also was a co-author, with Lucan Way, of this really seminal paper, in which they invented the term “competitive authoritarianism.”
I spoke to him and Lucan Way. And when I talked to both of them, and asked: Where are we on the map of history right now? They said: We have crossed the line. We are no longer a democracy.
They had written this piece called “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” and they said: We are on that path, and we are in fact past the line.
They didn’t say we’re past the point of no return, because the definition —
But what is the line?
Marantz: It’s a little squishy what the line is.
To back up, I was thinking about metaphors, and we were talking about where in the Schrödinger’s cat of democracy we are. One thing that I think is a real flaw in the metaphor is — you know, we’re writers, we think about metaphors — I think the death metaphor is really misleading because death is the only thing I can think of that is permanent. Nothing else is permanent, especially in politics.
So I was musing about this to Levitsky, and I was surprised at how quickly he threw his title under the bus. He was like: Yes, actually death is a terrible metaphor. I shouldn’t have called the book that. Democracies don’t die — they can always be rebuilt.
He doesn’t really believe he shouldn’t have called the book that. Everybody knows that title worked.
Marantz: [Laughs.]
Beauchamp: It was a pretty successful book!
I mean, on your “bright line” question, Ezra: Steve and Lucan and Dan Ziblatt wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times where they laid out more formally what the criteria were. And the argument is you have crossed the line from a democratic state when opposition has costs.
Marantz: When you have to think twice before you speak up.
Beauchamp: Right, and that’s the bright line.
Now, of course, that bright line is pretty fuzzy, right? If you’re a conservative, you would argue that, in the “woke era,” opposition to the reigning moral ideology had costs.
Marantz: And on that point, we were talking about how we’re sitting here in the citadel and we’re not afraid to call it out — that’s true.
I will say, and again, these are very early signs because we’re not far enough into the timeline to know: No, The New Yorker has not been compromised, and no, free speech is not dead, and yes, it does matter that we have a First Amendment.
But when I was reporting up at Columbia, people were giving me anonymous information, and they were saying: We’re actually scared to give this to you because we don’t know what all the harboring laws are. We could be making you an accessory to someone who’s on the run from ICE or something.
And I gave the spiel that journalists always give, which is: If you’re an anonymous source, I will go to the mat to protect you. We are willing to go to jail to protect our sources.
And when those words came out of my mouth, I said: How willing to go to jail am I actually? That was the first time I’d had to think about that.
I don’t think I’m going to jail anytime soon. But the fact that I had to think twice about it?
I agree with this. I’ve had the same experience. I think about things I didn’t used to think about, but it hasn’t changed my behavior yet.
Now different people — I think this is the “It’s here, but unevenly distributed” argument — different people are in different positions with this.
I know people who are writers — well-known writers — for whom there are things they will not write because they’re on a green card. If you are on a green card right now, you are living in a different world than if you were born here. It’s just true. If you’re here on a work visa or a student visa, you’re living in a different world than if you were born here.
And there are ways that they are going after people who have power in American society, too. They have had these executive orders going after people like Miles Taylor and John Bolton, who were members of the Trump administration in the first term who they feel were disloyal. They are going after Letitia James, the New York attorney general, because she prosecuted Donald Trump. So there are ways in which they are trying to make examples of people, make life hard for them, use what money or control they have, use the machinery of the federal government — and it’s early.
Maybe that stiffens the spine of the opposition. Maybe that infuriates people, and it backfires on them. But they are trying to make the opposition think twice.
Beauchamp: Those are the examples I wish I had brought up earlier when you asked me how we know this is what they’re trying to do. It’s exactly things like that. That is evidence of authoritarian intent.
The question, though — and the reason why I don’t like the framing that we’ve already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism — is that that implies that those efforts are having the intended effect.
And Andrew, I take the caution that you’re describing, that we don’t know how things are going to go in a year or two or something like that — I can’t claim to know that. What I’m trying to do is make a judgment about where we’re at and what we can extrapolate from the current trajectory of things.
And it’s not just a couple of days or weeks where we’ve been seeing this momentum build against Trump. It’s over the course of months — and certainly since the tariffs started. To your point earlier, the tariffs have supercharged opposition to Trump because it has generated this level of public backlash.
Marantz: So I think we can agree that the tariffs were a bad idea and that they will have a political cost and that generally people don’t like it when you tank the economy, and that might cause them to lose the midterms. And by the way, generally speaking, you always lose the midterms when you’re in the White House.
Beauchamp: By more, by more.
Marantz: By more. But then the question is really: What do we mean by losing? If they lose the midterms and if Trump doesn’t get everything he wants — if he doesn’t get to be king for life and he doesn’t get to hand the scepter and crown to Don Junior and he doesn’t get his face on Mount Rushmore — is that losing?
Because I would argue that they’ve already not lost in the sense that, OK, a couple of the students that they tried to put in jail have been freed. Mahmoud Khalil is still, last I checked, in prison. And I don’t mean “last I checked” glibly. I mean, I checked yesterday, and I don’t know what happened today.
I don’t think, on the flip side, that one should see as much alarm and hair on fire, either, everywhere you look. But there’s a little bit of goal-post shifting that I worry about where we’ll say: Well, what if something really scary happens, like defying the Supreme Court?
And then we all watch on live TV as they sit in the Oval Office and defy the Supreme Court, and we go: Maybe in the future something scary will happen.
Like, I don’t know how much more —
I think that’s right, but I think there are many things we can be talking about and losing and winning.
And I guess to define the topic that we’re talking about here, what you are writing about in “Is It Happening Here?” — the “it” — is competitive authoritarianism.
Marantz: Right.
If you told me that what they’re doing is they’re in a mad rush to get as much of their agenda done as they possibly can before they lose the power to get it done in the future, and that American institutions will be affected by them — they decapitated U.S.A.I.D., they decapitated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — but in ways that a Democratic president could simply rebuild it immediately the moment they got into office, that is different from them structurally changing the flows of power, money, safety that allow for a fair election in the future.
But — and this goes back to my piece “Don’t Believe Him” — the question of what people think is happening actually does affect what happens. If they can roll through American society with Americans coming to the view that they cannot be stopped, then they will not be stopped.
Whereas if people notice when Harvard stood up, they backed up and were like: I wish we had not made you stand up against us. Maybe we could go back to where we were a week ago and keep having that same conversation — that’s notable. That’s where it’s meaningful, the question of: Is what is happening in front of our face the consolidation of power? Or is it a flat-out rush to get done what they can get done before they lose power?
What people think is happening will affect what is happening.
Marantz: I agree. I think “Don’t obey in advance” includes: Don’t treat him like a dictator before he’s a dictator. I think that’s very important. It is also what I worry about when we talk about having crossed a bright line.
That’s why I push back on the permanence of the death metaphor. If we’re talking about erosion or rebuilding, then it starts to be a little more clear. If you talk about if they lose the midterms or if the next president is a Democrat, you say they can instantly rebuild.
It’s hard for me to see how we just go back to normal from here. Part of what I worry about and why I worry that we’re not plainly saying what’s in front of us is the way in which the Trumpist regime has already gotten some of what it wants in informal ways, precisely because it’s not agreeing to the consensus of — you know, it feels very vaporous to talk about norms and institutions. And I am very much not into: The norms will save us, the courts will save us. I get all the critiques of that, and I share many of them.
But to say that Trump doesn’t have the formal power to do X, Y or Z ignores the ways in which he’s already done those things. Can he disappear people? Yes, he can. He already has. Can he freeze and impound funds? Yes, he has. And you’ve written when he did those things —
But the fact that he’s been turned back on a bunch of this — they’re not sending a bunch more people to the Salvadoran prison. That authority got blocked for the moment —
Marantz: They’re not sending them back, either.
They’re not sending them back. But there are policies you can achieve, and then the policy is done, and there are powers you are claiming. It does matter whether or not those authorities get entrenched.
Marantz: Sure. I guess what I’m saying —
Like, how you use disappearance as a tactic is different than whether or not you’ve — and I’m as [expletive] hair on fire about the disappearances as anybody.
Marantz: I get it. But what I’m saying is that whether they’re entrenched to me is not merely a measure of whether they’re written down on paper in a judicial order. It also has to do with when you do them, what happens informally to you?
All I’m saying is: I don’t think we’re all going to end up in a gulag, but I don’t necessarily think that that power is unentrenched because it is informal.
So let me back up. There’s this idea of political orders. I know you’re a Gary Gerstle-head, as am I. Gary Gerstle has this whole notion of what a political order is. It’s this big, hegemonic — so he has this notion that there was the New Deal political order, which was succeeded by the Reagan neoliberal political order. It’s not just the idea that people used to like Democrats and now they like Republicans.
It’s the Reagan-Clinton neoliberal order. And if everybody wants to get Gerstle pilled, you can search in the archives of the show for our Gary Gerstle conversation from before the election.
Marantz: Great episode. What I see that political order thing doing is trying to get on a much bigger timeline.
I don’t know if Gerstle would cosign this — I might be out on a limb here — but I see it as “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” of politics.
“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is where we get paradigm shift from —
This is the book by Thomas Kuhn that coins the term “paradigm shift.”
Marantz: The philosopher of science who, when he’s talking about a paradigm shift, he’s not talking about: Oh, we didn’t have microscopes, and now we do. What a paradigm shift! That’s really useful.
He’s talking about ideas that are inconceivable, unthinkable. You don’t even form them in your mind, because they’re unthinkable.
So if you take that into the structure of political orders and how they shift, things that were unthinkable as an Eisenhower Republican or a Nixon Republican: You don’t just attack and defund the welfare state. That’s not how politics works.
Then after the Reagan revolution, all you do is different degrees of attacking the welfare state.
So in that sense, if we want to talk about the timeline of what it would mean for Trump to be winning and reshifting the Constitutional order, part of what I think about is: If the neoliberal order is cracked, as Gerstle says it is, then the question is: What will succeed it?
It could just be that we muddle through with nothing to replace it, and it’s what Antonio Gramsci would call “the time of monsters” indefinitely. Or it could be —
Abundance? [Laughs.]
Marantz: [Laughs.] It could be abundance. You need a vision for what will replace it — as you know.
The whole conclusion of the book is about political orders.
Marantz: Right. So if abundance liberalism is what succeeds neoliberalism, that’s an answer. If Trumpist competitive authoritarianism is what succeeds it, that is an answer.
And in a way — this is sort of weird to think about, but it may be the case that it has already happened and we just don’t know it yet. This is kind of the Schrödinger’s cat thing.
When “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order” came out, the book’s introduction said: The New Deal order is over, but we don’t yet know what will replace it.
That book came out in 1989. So we might be sitting here in a timeline where Trumpism replaced neoliberalism in 2016 and we just don’t know it.
Well, here’s a way in which it has happened: Zack, you wrote a whole book about the rise of an international reactionary right.
To go to Andrew’s nice line from earlier — that we used to call it the alt-right, now we just call it the right — one thing that seems completely clear is that there’s no snapback to an old Republican Party.
If you look at 25-year-olds on the right, they have completely bought into a very extreme version of this. For the rising generation of MAGA, the guardrails are completely off.
So in that way, it seems like the competition now is between some form of liberalism and some form of illiberalism. And that’s definitely not going away. Maybe you survive this term, but then — you know.
How do you see that?
Beauchamp: Well, I agree that the former parameters of American politics were blown apart in the beginning of this administration.
The question is: Are they doing something to effectively consolidate a new vision for the political order, as you suggested? If you look at the way of going after the media, even within that first year, Orban had developed a new state-created conglomerate for different media organizations that effectively allowed him to begin exercising power over the media in a structural way.
There’s no version of that in the United States. There isn’t even a concept of a plan here. There’s not a tool for power consolidation.
But to the immediate question about: What is the future of the right? I think it’s true that among incredible cadres of young people, there’s an obsession with figures like Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin — people who have views that are explicitly anti-democratic and bigoted.
There’s a notion that it is interesting and even fun among these cadres to say things that are offensive. And irony has quickly bled into sincerity — where there’s a deep faith and a sense that these things that they were saying to get a rise out of people are now true.
The question is: How much influence does that wield over the future Republican Party? And I don’t actually know the answer to that question. Because we don’t know. The story of the Trump era hasn’t been written yet.
Let’s assume things continue to not go very well. We get to the midterms, they lose dramatically. Then the administration starts flailing around in the next two years, and a Democrat wins the White House, and Democrats control Congress by an overwhelming margin.
Well, what does the Republican Party do with defeat? And what does it do after Trump? Because we all act like Donald Trump is immortal. And maybe he is. I don’t know. The man certainly has survived a lot.
But when Donald Trump dies, the glue that holds the Republican coalition together is gone. This is a very common problem in authoritarian states — the succession problem. If you look at the details of a Republican coalition, a lot of disagreements are being papered over by the overwhelming charismatic force of one man. And when he’s off the scene, what happens to the right at that point?
That’s just a very open question, especially in a world where his political project looks like it’s a failing one — which may or may not be true in four years.
Marantz: I don’t disagree that there are fissures and tensions within the Republican coalition. One thing about B.A.P. and Yarvin and all this stuff is that it’s not only that the cadres are interested in reading them, but the chief ideologists in the White House are retweeting them.
The vice president.
Marantz: And not only is the vice president reading them, but he’s saying things like: When the Supreme Court gives us an order we don’t like, we should say: The justice has made his order, now let him enforce it.
So I think you could put together some worrisome signs. I also think the strength or weakness of the opposition matters enormously in this, too. In every place — in India, in Hungary, in Israel — the reactionary right is able to rampage to victory precisely because of the weakness and division within the opposition.
So none of this — I agree — is foretold. One of the things I worry about is a kind of overly rigid reliance on the playbook stuff, like: This isn’t how it’s supposed to be done.
Because I agree he’s doing different things than what Orban has been doing. He’s doing some Bukele stuff. He’s doing some improvisation: I just woke up today and thought of something weird and put it on Truth Social.
It’s a hodgepodge of stuff. Kim Lane Scheppele has this term “the Frankenstate,” where you can kind of Frankenstein a bunch of legitimate-seeming things and make your own new form of an illegitimate state.
Now, I don’t think anyone would disagree that Trump is not as patient and diligent and well read as Viktor Orban. But Jair Bolsonaro did a version of this in Brazil. And yes, he ended up getting defeated in the next election, but he came very close to rigging it in his own favor. And Bolsonaro was not a disciplined, well-read guy, either.
So there are different playbooks, and you can invent new ones as you go.
Well, let me turn this question around. Zack, what would make you write a piece that’s like: Oh [expletive], maybe the timeline is changing again.
You had said a minute ago: They don’t have a theory of co-opting media.
There was a moment where it seemed like MSNBC was potentially going to get spun off in some kind of future sale of assets. And you began to hear talk of: Would Elon Musk buy it and just hollow it out?
That’s something you’ve seen in other countries. The oligarchic allies of the president purchase media outlets and then turn them toward the regime’s goals.
Marantz: He already bought Twitter.
He already bought Twitter and did exactly that with it. Although I have a very strong view that Twitter is a net negative for the Trump administration. But that’s my endless thing that political movements suffer for being too brain rotted by that place, not for not having enough power on it.
Marantz: That’s your eternally hot take?
Beauchamp: We’ve all been on those sites. We know what the brain rot is.
That’s my endless take — that the Democrats suffered in 2024 for having been so strong on Twitter in 2020. They convinced themselves of a bunch of very politically dangerous things, and they paid a price for it.
And this world in which Elon Musk and everybody are talking themselves into great replacement theory on Twitter is a bad way to win over the median voter in America.
Marantz: Well, you could make a version of the fighting the last war argument in precisely this context — that the Democrats are learning that maybe they should have waited Trump out more the first time and not done such a big, visibly cringe resistance. And so now they’re trying to play dead more than they should.
I don’t think they’re trying to play dead. I don’t think that’s a fair description of where Democrats are these days.
Beauchamp: I agree.
But let me put that to the side. What would frighten you? What would be a signal?
Beauchamp: To me, the big thing to watch is where the Supreme Court weighs in on a variety of these different cases. Because for all Trump is losing in the lower courts, the Supreme Court has the ultimate say in a variety of these things, and there is a 6-to-3 conservative majority.
Now it has indicated that it’s willing to challenge the administration in certain ways, which is a positive sign. But if the Supreme Court starts basically laying out the welcome mat for a variety of different Trump policies, or clearing out the legal barriers that are in place, I think that could be the single biggest warning sign.
Because then a number of these other things that seem like they’re less likely to happen, or have significant barriers in their place, all of a sudden become thinkable as actual, real, enforceable things over the course of time.
Seeing more compliance from media organizations — not just Elon Musk buying MSNBC, which would be the end stage of this, but rather earlier stages: More places seeing more self-censorship from different people.
One thing that was true about Trump’s re-election campaign is he built, for the first time, a MAGA coalition.
In 2016, he took over the Republican Party. In 2024, he built his own thing that includes MAHA, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and, very potently, the tech right.
And my sense from knowing some of these people is that coalition is under strain. Musk is still very allied, but he seems to be stepping back from government because he might light his Tesla empire on fire if he doesn’t.
I’m hearing a little bit less from people like Marc Andreessen. They’ve gotten a little bit quieter — is my sense of them.
Marantz: They’re on the group chats.
They’re on the group chats. But also, in Ben Smith’s great Semafor story about the group chats, you had this amazing ending where on one of these big group chats that had been what I would call a key point of influence for the tech right to convert others, the tech right got really mad at how people were getting mad at Donald Trump. And you had David Sacks and Tucker Carlson and them leaving the group chat.
And again, I know some of these people who got very Trump curious. And my sense of them is they think this is going badly — not necessarily for the reasons we do. But they think DOGE was a failure. It didn’t save that much money and just did things at random with a buzz saw. They hate the tariffs. They think the tariffs are really dumb.
I’m not saying that the tech right becomes a tech left. I don’t think that’s where any of this goes. But from that moment where you had the entire billionaire class assembled before Donald Trump at the inauguration to now — something seems like it is under strain and contested again, as opposed to he was able to consolidate it and make the alliance permanent.
Marantz: This is where, again, I would argue for a wider frame. I think that the timeline can be broad enough that it can contain something like Trump losing some or all of the tech right without his being done for, for example.
I’m not saying he’s done for.
Marantz: No, no. But even if we’re just thinking about where this ends up, let’s say he loses parts of his coalition. Let’s say he loses Musk. That would be a big blow to him.
But Zack, you’ve written about Lajos Simicska in Hungary. Hungarian words are famously hard to say, so I’m sure I’m butchering that. But he’s the Musk-before-Musk oligarch who was one of Orban’s biggest allies. And then Orban lost him, and he became an opponent. And that was a blow to Orban, but it was not at all fatal to him.
So I could totally see a story where the coalition is big enough and durable enough that it can withstand things like losing the midterms.
Talking about the Supreme Court — we’re already in a timeline where they wouldn’t give Merrick Garland a hearing. Again, if you heard about this happening in another country, you’d say: It doesn’t sound super, 100 percent democratic to me to not seat your opponent and then seat one of your own people on the Supreme Court.
One thing we know about John Roberts is he really wants to seem evenhanded. So if you take a bunch of things to the Supreme Court that are just facially unconstitutional, they’re not going to smack down 9-0 decisions every time.
OK, but let me make the other side’s argument on this — that actually, that’s just politics and the way it works.
Curtis Yarvin loves to bring up F.D.R. I don’t think F.D.R. actually makes any of Curtis Yarvin’s points for him, but one thing that I think is interesting about the way liberals remember F.D.R. from this perspective is that the Supreme Court is standing foursquare against the New Deal. F.D.R. threatens court packing. He loses that fight but seems to convince some key members of the court that they don’t really want this confrontation. And the court begins to turn around on some issues.
We look back on that, and liberals are like: Damn, good work F.D.R.! We ended the Lochner Court.
So I expect that the Supreme Court is going to give them some of what they want. But a world in which they basically accept a negotiated bid for 20 percent of the powers they’ve attempted to take without really changing any of the institutional structures of American life — I don’t know, isn’t that what goes on all the time?
Marantz: Well, I would say it kind of is changing the structures of American life, in the sense that it’s how you get a new paradigm. Part of what F.D.R. was doing there was not just politics as usual. It was battering his way to a new political order.
I agree that the biggest challenge to all this — and a conservative legal scholar said this to me while reporting the piece — is: If someone were doing this on behalf of policies you like, how much would it bother you?
I think that is the hardest question to answer. And we can sit here and say we would be perfectly consistent and nonhypocritical. But who knows if that’s true?
One key point, though, is that: Yes, you work things out in the courts, you challenge the courts. The fact that is an option that’s available to you doesn’t put it outside the realm of competitive authoritarianism.
If Trump is able to break through to a new political paradigm and get competitive authoritarianism, I think that is part of how he will do it. He’ll throw a bunch of stuff to the courts that says: The 14th Amendment doesn’t say what it says. And: I know you said discrimination against trans people was illegal, but I’m going to do it. And on and on and on and on and on.
And if they let him get one out of those 10 things, that is actually how you get competitive authoritarianism. You throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
And I agree that he’s doing it in this flagrant, blatant way. It could be incompetence and impulsiveness. It could be actually that that’s part of the strategy. But either way, I don’t think he’s going to get it by amending the Constitution. I don’t think he’s going to get it by indefinite martial law. I think if he gets it, it will be through stuff like this.
Beauchamp: I don’t agree, actually. I don’t think that is how you get competitive authoritarianism. How you get competitive authoritarianism, if you look at any case where it has happened, is through not just doing a bunch of random stuff but through taking a systematic and deliberate effort to restructure the fundamentals of a society and getting key building blocks in place in a strategic way that allows you to wield power effectively.
You brought up Lajos Simicska a second ago. That’s a really instructive example.
The Hungarian oligarch — for those of us who are not superfamiliar. [Laughs.]
Beauchamp: Yes, that’s right. For those of us not who have not spent a lot of time in Hungary like Andrew and I have. [Laughs.]
Simicska was Orban’s friend from their days prior to power. This isn’t a man like Elon Musk who developed his wealth independently. His entire business empire owed itself to government patronage. He had a media empire that was funded in large part through government advertising dollars.
So when he had this break with Orban, Simicska calls him a bunch of nasty names. And what happens is Orban destroys him. Because Orban was pulling his strings the entire time.
He had control over all of these things. He had control over the money. He had the control over the flow of the resources, all of which had been developed through years of systematic building and power consolidation, laid on the groundwork of a supermajority in the legislature that they got in 2010 and have not relinquished since, allowing them to do whatever they want to the Constitution, based on Hungarian constitutional rules.
None of those things exist in the U.S. And I don’t want to peg this too carefully to the Hungarian example. My book is about the U.S., Hungary, Israel and India. And if you look at each of those cases, there’s a very deliberate effort, when it’s successful, using the reins of power in careful, studied practical ways to get what you want.
And the problem with Trump is I see no evidence that that’s happening. Which is not to say that American society couldn’t buckle. It’s just that he’s doing it really badly.
Marantz: Look, I think what we can agree on is that every case is different. We’re not the Hungarian case. We can’t use a two-thirds majority to rewrite the Constitution.
But again, this is what I mean about writing to the end of the story instead of seeing what’s in front of our nose. Netanyahu didn’t win the fight over the judicial reform. Orban loses fights all the time. We tell the story in retrospect as Orban, the great genius who got what he wanted. But we know that he loses fights all the time. This is what’s competitive in part about competitive authoritarianism. It’s still politics. It’s still a fight.
So I grant that every case is different. But Bukele did it a different way. Duterte did it a different way. Bolsonaro did it a different way. And ultimately when the history of this is written, it won’t be: Oh, he didn’t do it the right way.
It will be: Did it work?
Beauchamp: Well, I would note that both Duterte and Bolsonaro are currently arrested and facing charges. They didn’t really do a great job at building a competitive authoritarian regime.
Marantz: Right. Well, I think they did in the sense that — look, I agree with you that Trump won’t reign forever. The question is: What’s the wreckage you leave behind?
And we were talking before about: How easy would it be to rebuild?
I don’t think if you come to Brazil or Poland, you just rebuild right away, and everything’s cool. I think it takes many, many years to rebuild.
Beauchamp: Agree.
Marantz: So if what we’re talking about is whether you can do four years of constitutional damage and then leave — I wouldn’t consider that losing.
If you do accept the premise — and I do — that we are in an interregnum between orders — we are in a very messy and deranging fight because there is no settled set of answers in American politics. No settled set of questions that both sides take and have agreed upon the boundaries.
So when you think about the Democratic opposition right now, it is still processing, in its own ways, 2024. And I think it has learned certain lessons that are relatively consensus at this moment among its leadership: Democrats had, in fits and starts, gone too far left. They really screwed up, both politically and substantively, on the border. They got crosswise on trans edge-case issues that they never should have allowed to define them — like trans swimmers in N.C.A.A. sports.
There are a set of things that I think they all believe, but they don’t know what comes next.
One thing that I have heard many people on the right say is: Look, it’s you guys who expanded the federal government’s control of all these institutions. It’s you guys who made it so all these universities are so dependent on federal grants. Who built this gigantic nonprofit complex that was living off money from U.S.A.I.D. and N.I.H. and so on. And now you have leverage over all these different parts of society.
What Chris Rufo believes himself to be doing is basically retracing what the liberals did and seeing how that is leverage for what he wants to do now. To him, he is like a counterrevolutionary following the revolutionaries.
Is there something about that?
Or I see the other side in liberalism right now, where liberals want their own Elon Musk. They want their own strong central leader. Not a strongman in the way that Trump wants to be a strongman. But there’s a sense of: Oh, I need somebody who can come and break my own china.
As the opposition tries to define itself — not just reconstitute itself — are there lessons for it to learn?
Beauchamp: Before the show, you and I were talking about liberalism. So my political lodestar is John Rawls and his book “Political Liberalism.” Rawls has this idea of an overlapping consensus. People don’t agree on everything important. They don’t even agree on everything. That’s an important moral thing.
In fact, his basic position is there are certain disagreements that cannot be resolved through politics that no one can resolve. What makes a liberal democratic polity function is that we agree at least on how to resolve those disagreements. And on the bounds in which those disagreements take place — for instance, that it’s wrong to coerce people, to force them to act contrary to their own beliefs or to impose a vision of the good life onto certain people.
And I think a lot of the conflict in politics right now is the result of the American overlapping consensus breaking down. And a lot of the disagreements between different factions right now are over who broke it and why. And whether or not it can be repaired.
I’ve interviewed Chris, and when you talk to him, his view is: The liberals aren’t really liberals. They’re leftist authoritarians in liberal clothing. They are basically the ideological heirs of Maoists. And they went about trying to impose their Maoist left-wing cultural agenda on the United States. And I’m just trying to fix that.
In that light, Chris’s project sounds almost Rawlsian. [Laughs.]
Rufo understands himself, strangely, as a moderate.
Beauchamp: Yes, that’s right. Right.
That is his self-conception.
Beauchamp: It’s not true, right? It doesn’t stand the test of what he has actually done. In part because his diagnosis is really unfair. If you look at the history of American liberalism or the American left, the new left of the 1960s, the Maoist radicals he’s talking about did not win the war of ideas on the left as he assumes that they did.
But I think that if we’re talking about what can happen next, it is possible that what happens next is years of chaos.
One interesting parallel I heard when I was talking to Lucan Way, actually, was Nepal, where you had a bunch of different factions who had totally divergent ideas about the constitutional order, that would win elections, and there would be radical policy shifts for years. So it was years of chaos.
That happening in the U.S. is really a distinct possibility. It’s also possible that we get a consolidated competitive authoritarian regime. Again, this whole conversation I have not been ruling it out. I’m just saying I think it’s less likely.
But I think if we were to get onto the good path, we need to consider what it would take to rebuild a Rawlsian overlapping consensus on liberal democratic positions in the 21st century.
I don’t have the answer here. I’m not sitting here like: I can tell you how to save liberalism. But I think the task should be stated clearly in this opportunity, this interregnum, as you describe it. If Trumpism is failing — because I think it is, that creates a possibility for a liberal revival.
Andrew, when you are working through the question of which direction this is going, you said you don’t love the check mark approach. But we all need our markers along the path.
What are you watching? What would leave you somewhat more comforted that the system at a core level is holding, even as Trump is scoring victories? And what would make you think that the system is breaking?
Marantz: One thing that a lot of people in Hungary were saying to me during the piece, and then after the piece came out, is that one downside of talking about autocracy and strongmen and all this stuff is that people often use it as an excuse to turn their brains off and stop thinking creatively and stop trying to have a viable and vital opposition.
So one is just: How strong is the civil resistance? How strong is the private sector or public sector resistance?
Is the emergency slow-rolling and gradual enough that we start to just say: Oh, well, he disappeared 10 people, and eight of them were sent back, so the system is working, the system is holding? He merely got the universities to preemptively agree to some of his demands, not all of them. Therefore the institutions are holding.
I would worry about a shifting of goal posts in that sense. An analogy I make in the piece is to climate change, where you would think that, at some point, when enough of Canada was on fire and enough of the smoke in Midtown Manhattan had reached the point where you couldn’t go outside, everyone would look up and lock arms and say: The emergency is happening now.
But in fact that doesn’t happen. So the main thing I worry about in terms of if we’re in a slow-rolling democratic emergency is that we never have a chance to all get on the same page about it. And it continues being fractured and hybrid and weird.
People I spoke to in Hungary all had different timelines for when they came to emotionally accept that they no longer lived in a democracy. For some people it was very early, but for a lot it was 2015, 2016, 2020 — 10 years in.
When I talked to Steven Levitsky about Venezuela, he said opinion polls showed that most Venezuelans thought they lived in a democracy 10 years into the Chávez regime. So one thing I worry about is the collective felt experience that the emergency could be here — and we never really get it.
I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are some books you’d recommend to the audience?
Zack, why don’t we begin with you.
Beauchamp: I cheated a little bit because I started with “Political Liberalism,” and I think that if there is any way to get out of the crisis, we need to begin in part by starting with foundational principles. And “Political Liberalism” is, I think, a really important text here.
Another book, which I just started rereading, is Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Not because it answers these big-picture questions about what political systems are like but because it’s a character portrait of one man’s role in a vast machinery of horrifying political outcomes.
Seeing what Eichmann was like and seeing the parallels between him and contemporary functionaries in competitive authoritarian regimes, on a personal level, I found very revealing, even if these governments are vastly different from Nazi Germany.
For a third book: Matthew Rose’s “A World After Liberalism” to give you a sense of what the capacity for a postliberal imaginary is like — what a world looks like when liberalism no longer is functioning, has been replaced. Or what it could be, what people want it to be in the future, what our order might be —
What I love about that book — and I do love that book — is that in a way I think liberalism never looks as inspiring as when viewed through the eyes of its critics. Look at what they think liberalism is. Not the dry, technocratic, exhausted thing it began to feel like. But what they understood it to be and its power to be is really interesting. Liberalism in its photo negative is fascinating.
Andrew?
Marantz: I am going to break norms a little bit because this is a book that I just picked up, and I’ve not actually finished reading yet. But we’re in a kind of postnorm reality now.
It’s called “Melting Point.” It’s all primary sources, and it just sets you down in the middle of history. In this case, it’s the history of the early days of Zionism. The reason I bring it up in this context is there’s one line that one of the characters says, which is: It’s never inevitable at the time.
And in terms of seeing what is in front of one’s nose — I think that’s something we know intellectually. We don’t know how the end of the story is written, but it’s something we need to remind ourselves what it feels like.
Another one, also in that vein, is actually a film: “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian film. They are six or seven years into a military regime, a military junta at the point that the film starts, and yet their life feels very hybrid. It feels very liminal. They’re going to the beach and playing volleyball. Their life is actually kind of beautiful. And then comes the knock on the door.
Again, I’m not saying we are going to have a military coup in America. I’m just saying that the felt sense of it is very unpredictable at the time that you’re living it. You kind of want to shout at the screen: Don’t you know you’re six years into a military dictatorship? But they don’t know what the informal rules of that dictatorship are, even though they’re in the middle of it.
And then last I would bring up “The Constitutional Bind” by Aziz Rana, which is a really big and challenging book. I’m not sure I even understand or agree with all of its arguments, but I bring it up because one of the great book titles on this stuff is Astra Taylor’s “Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone,” which is —
Another great book and worth reading.
Marantz: Another great book and a really clever idea of this paradox of: We’ve never really had a perfect democracy, and yet there are parts of liberal democracy worth holding on to nonetheless.
And I think Rana tries to do this with the Constitution. It’s a book that’s very critical of excessive veneration and worship of the Constitution, and yet he’s able to hold on to why it’s important to hold on to the parts of the Constitution that can still protect the vulnerable. So rather than worshiping the status quo ante and saying it was all perfect before, we can hold on to what we want to preserve while also not fighting the last war.
Zack Beauchamp, Andrew Marantz, thank you very much.
Beauchamp: Thank you.
Marantz: Thanks. This was great.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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