The Scariest Thing About a Trump Presidency? How It Could End (Part II)

Part II: President Trump and the 2020 Election

How has America managed to stave off authoritarianism while other republics--from ancient Rome to modern-day Venezuela--have succumbed to it?  Is it because its constitutional checks and balances render it immune?  Or, rather, is it because the country has been blessed with a long line of presidents who possess the requisite restraint and commitment to liberal democratic ideals to put the republic above their egos and ambitions?

The 2020 election will shed light on these questions because it will feature a candidate with neither restraint nor a commitment to liberal democratic ideals, a man untethered by facts or evidence, unafraid to test legal checks and balances and flaunt political norms.  Of course, in those respects, 2020 will be no different than 2016.  In a little less than four years, Trump's astronomical ego will cause another total eclipse of civil discussion in America.  But 2020 promises to be an even darker year.  In 2016 Trump was an obnoxious backseat passenger on the world's biggest airplane, bragging that he could fly the plane upside-down and renegotiate the federal debt if he were in charge.  In 2020, Trump will be the pilot, and we will all be hoping he doesn't take the plane off autopilot.  

The 2020 election will therefore be American democracy's first major stress test of the 21st century.  It will test whether America can hold free and fair elections when governed by a man whose only idea of a free and fair election is one that he wins.  If Trump loses and launches another attack on the integrity of the electoral process, the country may find out how much it can withstand before its legitimacy erodes.

Elections are not an absolute cures to authoritarianism.  In fact, they are the modern-day authoritarian's favorite tool of propaganda.  North Korea, a country that makes 1984 look like Leave It To Beaver, holds elections.  In 2014, it had a spectacular 100% voter turnout.  Voters were asked to cast a vote for or against Kim Jong Un (no other name was on the ballot) in an open booth for everyone to see.  The vote--probably because voters didn't feel like having their entire families thrown into labor camps--was unanimous.  

Cuba, too, has elections; it boasts that they are the world's most democratic.  To run for one of the government's 12,589 municipal assembly seats, one only needs a nomination from a neighbor. But campaigning is not allowed: voters decide whom to elect based only on a publicly-displayed photo and biography that the government reserves the right to edit. One dissident was surprised to see that government officials had altered his biography to describe him as a "counter-revolutionary," which, in Cuba, is comparable to an American politician describing himself as a "terrorist."  Not surprisingly, no one has challenged the Castro regime's hold on power for five decades.

In Cuba and North Korea, of course, elections are not a check on authoritarian regimes because the processes themselves are total shams.  But even countries that have relatively open elections can devolve.  In 2007, a CBS News report described how Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had used elections to attain near-absolute control of his country:

Since first elected in 1998, Chávez has perfected the playbook of "democratic authoritarianism" - using a popular majority and relatively (although certainly contested) open democratic elections to consolidate his control.  Unlike a violent revolution, democratic authoritarianism is by definition a more gradual process. One only has to look to Putin's Russia to see another crafty ruler using swollen state revenues and the ostensible legitimacy of the ballot box to gradually but radically institutionalize his personal grip on power. If Fidel Castro was a hare during his sudden and total revolution in Cuba in 1959, Hugo Chávez is taking the tortoise approach in Venezuela in the 21st century. Different animals, perhaps, but the goal of absolute rule remains the same.

Chavez knew that the best way to boil a frog is by raising the water temperature bit by bit--paralyzing its reflexes--until it no longer has the ability to jump out of the pot.

This is not to say that Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela are fair comparisons to 2016 America. Trump didn't use brute force and intimidation to come to power and, unless a wave of 9/11-esque nationalism sweeps the country it is hard to imagine that he will get the kind of popular support that Chavez used to mold the political system to his liking.  But Venezuela is nevertheless a cautionary tale.  A political system's place on the freedom spectrum is not fixed; democracy can wither if voters entrust power to a leader who has no regard for the principles of liberalism.

Americans can take some comfort in the checks and balances that prevent a sitting president from hijacking an election process.  Unlike Viktor Orban in Hungary, Trump probably won't be able to silence the press by loosening libel laws, nor will he be able to keep his 2020 opponents from advertising.  Unlike Vladimir Putin in Russia, he probably won't be so brash as to order the killing of journalists, even if he would like to.  

But to tilt the odds of winning the next election in his favor, Trump won't have to.  

Modern presidential races will almost always be close, thanks to the fact that party-affiliated voters will vote along their party's lines almost ninety-percent of the time, even when their candidate bucks the party's traditional platform.  When margins are so close, it only takes a sinister little nudge to gain the advantage.  2016 might be the case in point.  Although there is no way of knowing for sure, Russia may have tipped the balance in Trump's favor by leaking Democratic Party emails and helping to spread fake news on the internet.  In an age when misinformation can go viral, it doesn't take brownshirts or storm troopers to manipulate an election.

In 2020, Trump won't need Russian hackers to dig up dirt on his rivals because he will have the world's most sophisticated spy apparatus at his fingertips.  The expansion of federal surveillance capabilities has been a point of bipartisan apathy.  Over the past two decades, Congress, in a rare show of bipartisan apathy, has entrusted the executive branch with a National Security Agency with spy capabilities that would make a dictator salivate.    

Of course, there are supposed to be safeguards to prevent the executive from misusing the tools against American citizens, but they appear to be highly inadequate.  The FISA Court, for example, which is responsible for determining when the government can deploy spy tools against U.S. citizens, appears to be highly deferential to the executive.  Over 33 years the court was asked for a warrant about 34,000 times and said no only 11; either the court is a rubber stamp, or agencies have been laudably constrained.  It is difficult to assess how far-reaching the government's spy programs are because they are almost entirely opaque.  Voters must trust that their elected representatives to be on guard for abuse, but they have been lackadaisical watchdogs at best.  If something was amiss, they may be unwilling or unable to blow the whistle lest they disclose information that the executive branch has classified.  Indeed, what little the public knows about NSA spy activity came through improper channels:  Edward Snowden revealed that NSA employees had been intercepting the emails and phone calls of spouses and ex-lovers,  A more disturbing, but just as quickly forgotten revelation came a year ago when the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA had been monitoring conversations between congressional leaders and Israeli government officials.  

And that's just what we know about.  

Now imagine what a wholly unscrupulous president could do.  If Richard Nixon had these spy tools, there would have been no burglars to nab at the Watergate Complex.  America has allowed the Bush and Obama Administrations to broadly interpret their authority to use spy tools without a warrant under the assumption that both could be trusted to use them against its enemies.  But Trump, like many dictators, does not seem willing or capable of drawing a distinction between enemies of the American people and his own personal and political rivals; thus far he has welcomed Russian cyber-espionage and reserved some of his deepest vitriol for American journalists.  

Of course, if Trump didn't want to get his hands dirty by reaching into the NSA cookie jar, he could just sit on them and let Russia do what it does best.  Whether it is a supporter sucker-punching a protester at one of his rallies or a foreign government hacking a major political party, Trump never seems to mind foul play so long as the perpetrators are working on his behalf.  During the 2016 campaign, he openly joked about something that no political candidate should ever joke about: inviting Russia to hack and release Hillary Clinton's emails. Although all seventeen U.S. spy agencies agree that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 election, Trump continues to dismiss their conclusions as politically motivated.  A president has an obligation to protect elections from improper foreign influence, but Trump is pretending that the danger of such influence does not exist.

Unless he has a drastic change of attitude, running against Donald Trump in 2020 could be an embarrassing proposition.  Trump will have the ability to track down and intimidate journalists' private sources or bully protesters.  There could be another excess of transparency if pro-Trump hackers or spies are allowed to find embarrasing private information and publish it to the world. Transparency is generally a good thing, but when there are gross disparities in transparency between political candidates, voters must decide the fate of their country based on a slanted universe of facts. The 2020 election could be a contest between an incumbent president who will not publicly release his tax returns and a challenger whose private secrets will have been exposed for all the world to see.

Trump will play fair in 2020, but it will be "fair" according to his own subjective standard of fairness, a standard that looked pretty low in 2016.  There was no card too unconscionable for him to play during the election.  When he threatened to jail his political opponent (even after the Attorney General, the FBI Director, and the overwhelming consensus of legal experts said that he wouldn't have a legal basis for doing so), there was more than a whiff of Stalinist Russia in the air.  But in 2016 he was a child brandishing a toy gun.  In 2020 he will be fully armed.

Trump has yet to demonstrate that he will confine himself to the boundaries of legality while in office.  Before his presidency has even begun, Trump has adopted a the-law-doesn't-apply-to-me demeanor toward constitutional checks and balances.  Speaking from Trump's inner circle, Newt Gingrich recently shrugged off the conflicts of interest looming over Trump's billionaire-laden cabinet by pointing out that if they did something illegal, Trump could simply pardon them.  When questioned about how he will resolve his own conflicts of interests before becoming president, as the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution requires, Trump said: "The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely."  

These are echoes of a former president who famously said, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." That former president's name was Richard Nixon.

The lever of power Trump is most certain to misuse--and the one for which there is no legal defense--is the power of the pulpit.  Whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt used eloquence and charisma to comfort and convert the American people to his cause, Trump's fireside chats will be erratically re-Tweeted fake news and conspiracy theories to rile and delude his supporters.  It would be comical if it were not so effective.  When it comes to persuading the American people, one can only wonder whether the power of truth is any longer a match for the power of celebrity. 

The disinformation campaign of 2020 will be far more effective than 2016's for no other reason than the unfortunate fact that people will be more inclined to believe Trump when he is president. In 2016, fact-checkers could easily debunk Trump's claims.  But fact-checkers can't debunk factual claims when classified evidence renders them unverifiable, so Trump's fountain of ignorance will flow more freely.  The president-elect has already mastered the art of clothing a lie in secret evidence that doesn't actually exist.  When he set out to discredit Obama's birthplace, he cited his own private investigators who "cannot believe what they are finding." An insinuation of illegality such as the one he made against Hillary Clinton, however unfounded, will carry more weight when it bears the presidential seal.  

As frightening as the 2020 campaign might be, what will happen if Trump loses is even more frightening.  When Trump refused to commit himself to accepting the results of the 2016 election, there was widespread angst from observers who wondered how much damage Trump could do to the legitimacy of the electoral process.  But the unrest that would have ensued had Trump lost in 2016 pales in comparison to what chaos awaits if the sitting president loses his bid for reelection in 2020 then refuses to concede.  In 2016 America asked whether there would be lawsuits or small riots if Trump lost. In 2020 the question could become whether the military will take orders from the old president or the new. 

Trump will not go away quietly if he loses in 2020.  His ego simply won't allow it.  Finding a pretext for ignoring unfavorable election results will come easily to a man who treats the truth like a piece of wet clay.  He might simply declare his opponent ineligible to take the office, a tactic that has already been through several dry runs.  Although every political candidate professes to be more qualified than his or her opponent, Trump's smear tactics go so far as to claim that his opponents are legally disqualified.  He claimed that Clinton could not be president because she belonged in jail.  Had he run against Barack Obama in 2012, he would have claimed that Obama could not be president because he was born outside the United States (an outright lie).  He threatened to file a lawsuit to disqualify Ted Cruz from the Republican Primary because Cruz was born in Canada. (Cruz was born a U.S. citizen by virtue of his parents, who were both U.S. citizens.)  What fabricated basis Trump will find for disqualifying his next political opponent is anyone's guess.

If Trump can't find an excuse to disqualify his opponent and declare himself the winner by default, he may simply treat the election itself as a sham.  Before his surprising win in 2016, Trump poised himself to do just that.  He called the election rigged when it looked like Clinton would win.  Even after he won the electoral college, he could not help but try to discredit Clinton's win of the popular vote by claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that millions of votes had been cast for her illegally. 

How much chaos would ensue if Trump denied the legitimacy of the outcome in 2020 might depend on how far Trump will be willing to press the issue.  He could acquiesce after a little bluster or he could take the fight to the courts.  He could take a passive aggressive approach and refuse to help the new president-elect prepare for the transition, making it more difficult for them to take over the reigns of government.  He could simply refuse to leave until someone literally evicted him from the White House.  

Whatever he does, there are limited mechanisms to deal with it.  David Drabkin, a former GSA senior procurement executive speaking about the conflict of interest posed by Trump's private lease of a federally-owned D.C. hotel, recently lamented, "This is a horrible outcome that can only be resolved by the president doing the right thing, and I don't know how you force him to do the right thing if he doesn't choose to do it."  The same might be said about Trump in 2020 if he loses the election.  America will be like a parent with a defiant five hundred-pound baby: ostensibly the person in charge, but in fact helpless to make the baby do anything that it doesn't want to do.

If these scenarios seem far-fetched, it is only because they lack the proper context.  One must remember that in any closely contested election, about half of the population is not satisfied with the result.  2016 is far from an exception in that respect: if Barack Obama were to declare Hillary Clinton the victor because she won the popular vote, or because the vote was tainted by Russian interference, then a sizable portion of the population would have been perfectly content to abandon a constitutional outcome for the outcome that they wanted all along.  Even without a presidential nudge, seven of the 2016 electors--the most since 1808--went rogue by casting their vote against the will of their constituents.  No one has yet had to figure out what to do when those "faithless electors" hold the deciding votes.

If Trump loses in 2020 and uses his enigmatic power of persuasion to convince a sizable number of his supporters to pretend he didn't, then trouble will ensue.  A republic can withstand the disappointment of half its population after a close election, but bad things happen when voters stop acquiescing to outcomes that they don't like.  The last time that happened was in 1860.  That year, eleven states refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The bloodiest war in American history soon followed.

There has been so much wolf-crying about authoritarianism over the past four years that one can't blame Americans for not heeding the warning bells sounding against Donald Trump.  The far left called Bush a dictator, then the far right compared Obama to Hitler.  It was hyperbole of the laziest sort.  In the end, Bush and Obama proved the alarmists wrong by submitting to fair and free elections and abiding by the outcomes as their predecessors have done for centuries, even when the outcome meant handing power over to a rival political faction.  

Preserving the legitimacy of the American republic begins with a recognition that it is in danger, then remembering that the bedrock of our republic is not a person, a party, or a political agenda but a general consensus that the constitution supersedes them all.  This will require a return to religion for liberals as well a conservatives.  For the better part of a century, the Supreme Court--which has the constitutional task of law-interpreting, not lawmaking--has fashioned itself into a legislature of social issues and in so doing breached a time-honored separation of powers that separates the judicial and legislative branches.  Liberals have been willing to look past, even cheer, the judicial coup because it gave them a new road to advance their socially progressive agenda.

Now Trump is threatening to do to the executive branch what liberals did to the judicial. Republicans have long professed a holier-than-thou loyalty to the constitution when criticizing Democrats, but they can only truly prove their devotion if they refuse to use unconstitutional means to reach their party's ends.  In 2016, Republicans who got behind trump failed this test.  In 2020, a more consequential test awaits, and America will see whether the people who have a vested interest in Trump's success have the constitutional backbones to resist him.

For a different perspective: 

I was unable to find any good commentaries that argued Trump will not at least try to exercise the powers of presidency to the utmost extent, though other commentators are more optimistic that the other branches of government will be suitable checks.  An article in the National Review predicts that a Republican-controlled Congress will not be inclined to follow Trump's agenda.  Originalist legal scholars like John McGinnis are eager to have a Supreme Court pick who will have a commitment to interpreting the law over any political agenda or party.

Further Reading:

I would highly recommend that people brush up on spy tools and the checks and balances that prevent their abuse by following the links to the sources I cited above.

The Washington Post published an article listing some clues that might indicate that Trump is using secret surveillance tools.

Another weapon in Trump's arsenal, and one that prior presidents have used, is the power to revoke contracts from companies that don't follow his political agenda, something discussed in an article from Politico.

The Brookings Institution published an explanation of the Emoluments Clause and its applicability to President-elect Trump.

Historian Jeffrey Rosen published an article in the Wall Street Journal that traces the growth of executive power and attempts to restrain it.  Rosen is not optimistic that the trend will change with Trump.

The Scariest Thing About a Trump Presidency? How It Could End

 

If you are suffering from Trump-induced anxiety, then you should not read my next two posts because they may interfere with your sleep.  Not that I am out to scare people. In fact, I'll begin by putting your mind somewhat at ease: Trump's term will probably not be nearly as scary as he made it sound during his campaign. Within just a few weeks of his victory he backpedaled on his promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, build a 2,000-mile long wall, deport eleven million people, and put Hillary Clinton behind bars. Whether you interpret Trump’s post-election reversals as a magnanimous display of ideological flexibility or proof that he is an opportunistic and dishonest demagogue probably depends on your political persuasion; either way, the Apocalypse is not coming on January 20, 2017.  

Your real cause for concern should be what will happen in 2020 when Trump is up for reelection.

Trump opponents were never able to convince Americans that Trump was a threat to liberal democracy, perhaps because the possibility of a Trump presidency was too remote to be menacing. Perhaps more importantly, Americans have lived in a liberal democratic political system (that is a democracy that protects individual rights and freedoms) so long that they cannot imagine any scenario in which it would cease to exist.  They assume that checks, balances, and elections will always prevent the country from slipping toward authoritarianism.

The 2020 election will be the ultimate test of those assumptions.

The 2016 election was hair-raising, but in an entertaining way.  Trump's authoritarian-strong-man campaign message was so out of place in the ring of American politics that he looked like an oafish, amateur boxer throwing wild, off-balanced punches at a succession of poised and well-trained professionals.  The campaign was like a good horror movie:  real enough to make you consider how you would survive a zombie outbreak but not so real that you started stockpiling food and ammunition in your basement. Trump was the caricature of a dictator in a World War II-era comic strip—a furious imp taking swings at a much larger political apparatus that yawningly held him at bay with a single outstretched arm.

But then he won. And when the next election comes around, he will be the larger political apparatus.

This two-part post will draw insights into the 2016 presidential race by comparing it to the rise of Hungary's so-called "illiberal democracy."  Part II will look forward to the 2020 presidential election and consider why America should be much more concerned about President Trump in the next campaign than it was about the billionaire candidate of 2016.

Part I: Donald Trump and the Rise of Illiberal Democracy

If there is one country that can tell America what it will be like to have Donald Trump as president, it is Hungary. In 2010, Hungary elected a president who very well may become Donald Trump's bosom buddy. The similarities between the two are uncanny.  Like Trump, Orban disdains mainstream media, and "liberal elites."  He became famous for taking a hard line on immigration. While other European countries were allowing Syrian refugees to cross into the European Union, he erected one hundred miles of razor-wire fencing to keep them out, dismissing pressure from Germany to be more welcoming as "moral imperialism." Orban is fiercely nationalistic and never shies away from accusing his opponents of serving foreign interests. His personality is brash and unapologetic.

After winning the 2010 Hungarian elections, Orban and his Fidesz party used ingenuous methods to strengthen its influence.  It managed to send ten percent of the country's judges packing with one fell swoop by lowering the mandatory retirement age, then filled the vacancies with party-friendly jurists. 

Orban's regime has also found controversial but mostly legal ways to control the media.  It subjected the country's press to a hail-storm of regulations, including one that forbade newscasters from including "opinions" within their reports. (One station was sanctioned for describing a political party as "far right.")  It loosened defamation laws.  Journalists had to begin disclosing their sources. A law required television and radio stations that broadcast campaign advertisements to give all national parties equal airtime--and to do it free of charge. Ostensibly, the measure was meant to guarantee that voters got a fair look at each political parties.  In practice, it had the effect of snuffing out campaign ads; broadcasters understandably were not eager to give away their advertising time. Perhaps the government's most striking blow to media pluralism was its informal policy of using only pro-government media outlets for its advertisements.  Because the Hungarian government accounts for a huge share of the media's advertising revenue, the result has been that pro-Orban news sources now dominate the market while dissenting competitors are struggling.

The chilling impact that these measures have had on free speech and media pluralism led one watchdog organization to lament that the 2014 Hungarian elections were free, but not fair. The 2014 election was an absolute rout.  Orban stayed in power and his party won 67% of the parliamentary seats thanks, in part, to meticulous gerrymandering (Orban's party took a mere 45% of the popular vote). 

Orban began his political career as a fiery anti-communist democrat and progressive. But after the 2014 electoral rout, he openly and unapologetically called for a move away from liberal democracy.  Soon after his party routed the opposition in Hungary's 2014 elections, he gave a speech that could have been titled "Make Hungary Great Again." Orban described his country as being in "a race to invent a state that is most capable of making a nation successful." The best models, he argued, were Signapore, China, India, Turkey, and Russia, not western democracies. Free democracy, he reasoned, was an impediment to, not a necessary element of, the ideal state. "A trending topic in thinking," he proclaimed, "is understanding systems that are not Western, not liberal, not liberal democracies, maybe not even democracies, and yet [are] making nations successful. . . . [W]e have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society, as well as the liberal way to look at the world." To Orban, Liberalism's uncompromising commitment to personal freedoms had been getting in the way of the Hungarian government's ability to serve the "national interest"--that is, protecting its citizens from foreign exploitation and a descent into welfare-state status. The race to the perfect form of government would not be won by a liberal state, but by what he termed an "illiberal state" that was willing to put national success ahead of individual freedoms.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump exhibited an eerie proclivity for Orban-style authoritarianism. Constitutional obstacles never seemed to get in the way of his plans to make America great again. Never shy of hypocrisy, the main proponent of the "birther movement" advocated loosening libel laws so that he would have an easier time suing journalists that spoke against him. (But don't worry, Trump assured, nobody believes in freedom of the press more than him.) He called for a ban on Muslims entering the country. (But don't worry, it will only last as long as it takes for our leaders to "figure out what the hell is going on.") Despite his persona as the pro-Second Amendment option, he supported a law that would unconstitutionally prevent citizens from purchasing guns if they were on a "no fly list"--a list that the government creates without the least semblance of due process.  As if to confirm his preference for mandated nationalism over the First Amendment, he recently proposed that anyone who burns the American flag should lose their citizenship.

Perhaps the most startling moment of his campaign--and that is really saying something--came when Trump showcased the psychological talent that so many authoritarians possess: the ability to justify the unholiest means to reach his ends.  On a morning talk show, Joe Scarborough asked Trump to defend his praise for Vladimir Putin in light of allegations that the Russian President had ordered the killing of high-profile dissenting journalists.  Even the most Putin-sympathetic politician would have simply skirted the question by doubting the veracity of the allegations. Trump, however, talked about the extra-legal killings as if they are part-and-parcel of sound, strong leadership: "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, you know unlike what we have in this country." Scarborough pressed the point. "Well," Trump went on, "I think our country does a lot of killing." Eventually Trump recognized from Scarborough's dumb-struck response that he needed to backtrack, but not before the window to his authoritarian personality had been opened.

Whereas conservative politicians generally preach a return to constitutional religion as the remedy for America's inadequacies, Trump ran a campaign that advertised his own over-sized personality as America's only hope.  Trump devotees did little to dispel his authoritarian image. They became something like a personality cult, supporting Trump not for the strength of his ideas--which were always too illusory to believe in anyway--but for the perceived strength of his personality. One pollster found that a person's authoritarian inclinations was a better determinant of their likelihood to support Trump than income, gender, age, race, or religion. In what may have been a Freudian slip, Maine's governor made news when he said America needed an "authoritarian" leader like Trump to prevent the country from slipping into anarchy (he apparently meant to say "authoritative").

And now Viktor Orban is on his way to Washington. Donald Trump extended the invitation himself, telling Orban in a phone conversation that he thinks highly of Hungary. The two shared a laugh about how both politicians had been treated as "black sheep."

For Americans who remain committed to the ideal of a liberal democracy, the camaraderie between Trump and Orban is troubling. Their meeting will probably begin with a discussion of walls, razor-wire fences, and other ways to keep those pesky immigrants from waltzing over their borders.  Orban will have suggestions for how American can deal with its own immigration problem.  But then the two "black sheep" will probably commiserate over their unfair treatment at the hands of what they each perceive as slanted, liberal journalists. Orban will surely have some suggestions for how Trump can deal with them, too.

Orban has something that Trump needs: a way to rationalize the authoritarian and illiberal ideas that the two men have in common. During the 2016 election, Trump flailed like he was wearing ice skates for the very first time as he tried incorporate his off-the-cuff tweets into a consistent ideology. By the end of the campaign "Trumpism" was still a brainstorm pieced together from semi-coherent tirades against the biased media, his fear of foreign influence, and his opinion that American had become impotent thanks to the incompetence and corruption of the political establishment.

Even Trump's tight circle of apologists couldn't keep up.  Every Sunday morning they squirmed in their chairs, trying to spin last week's controversy-makers into something the American public could digest.  Their problem was that they were serving illiberal meat to a country that has been on a strict diet of liberal democracy.

In Viktor Orban, Trump will meet a man who has already crafted xenophobic, authoritarian, an nationalistic attitudes into a more coherent ideology.  It is an ideology that equates political restraint to weakness. In Trump, Orban may find a receptive pupil for a lesson on the virtues of the illiberal state.

Viktor Orban must have watched the presidential election with glee. In his 2014 speech, he predicted that the west would soon realize the error of its democratic liberal ways and follow Hungary's lead to an illiberal system. Trump's election may have been the ultimate vindication.


________________________________________________________________________


For another perspective:

A pair of political scientist's dispute the correlation between authoritarian inclinations and a person's tendency to support Donald Trump. They concluded that populist tendencies tend to play a bigger role. You can find an article summarizing their findings at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/09/trumps-voters-arent-authoritarians-new-research-says-so-what-are-they/?utm_term=.64f4065c2b4a. 

Further Reading: 

Politico published a well-written biopic of Viktor Orban, available at http://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28/viktor-orban/, but I highly recommend that you take the time to read the 2014 speech that I referenced, available at http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/full-text-of-viktor-orbans-speech-at-baile-tusnad-tusnadfurdo-of-26-july-2014/10592. 

For an article drawing parallels between Trump and Benito Mussolini, read http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/.

I found that it was not easy to find good online sources for researching Hungarian politics. Much of my information came from the extensive report of a watch dog organization, which can be found at https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/hungary_democracy_under_threat.pdf.

For a somewhat scholarly take on the rise of authoritarianism, you can read “Europe’s Other Democratic Deficit: National Authoritarianism in a Democratic Union.” http://fas-polisci.rutgers.edu/dkelemen/research/Kelemendemocraticdeficit.pdf.

What seemed like a reliable blog had some interesting stories about how Orban's political opponents are being subjected to humiliating news reports (http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/01/27/akos-gergely-balogh-of-mothers-and-daughters-and-the-villainy-of-anonymity/; and http://hungarianfreepress.com/2016/11/11/hungarian-far-right-leader-gabor-vona-accused-of-homosexual-orgies/) but I was not able to verify the information to my satisfaction. If anyone can, please let me know.

Thanksgiving Dinner with Adam Smith

Thanksgiving Dinner with Adam Smith

Men can create wealth from nothing. That was the revelation that Adam Smith made in 1776 when he published one of history's most influential books: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. His book was the stake through the heart of mercantilism, an economic theory that saw the world as having a finite and limited amount of natural resources and therefore a limited amount of wealth. Trade was good for an economy only if one's country was on the winning side of a transaction. Smith proved those assumptions were false. Not only was wealth expandable, but people can create wealth by doing something that they have always done: trade.

But mercantilism and the false assumptions that underlie the theory is making a comeback. In 2015, Bernie Sanders developed a cult following by claiming that every free trade agreement that the United States has ever entered was bad for the country. That is not the first insult that Smith ever took from a socialist, but he must have cried "et tu, Republicans?" when Donald Trump launched history's least articulate assault on free trade agreements. The 2016 presidential campaign was thus a warning that Americans need to blow the dust off The Wealth of Nations and upload it onto their e-readers.

The red flag of 2016 is not that a couple outspoken public figures oppose free trade but that their messages had such broad appeal. Bernie Sanders made a surprisingly strong run at the Democratic nomination because many of his followers shared his view that free trade agreements only benefit fat cat corporations at the proletariat's expense. Donald Trump had essentially the same argument but with a characteristically xenophobic angle: Trump's villains were not the wealthy but foreigners. Launching history's least articulate assault on free trade, he convinced an army of dissatisfied rust belters that China has exploited America's commitment to free trade to siphon away its prosperity. The election results proved that a large segment of the American population have come to think that the only things standing between them and a manufacturing boom are NAFTA and the TPP.

It could be that American voters are onto something. It could also be that they just don't get it. Perhaps Adam Smith is taking a beating not because his argument is weaker than Trump's but because The Wealth of Nations is slumber-inducing. So before we discard centuries of economic convention, let's set aside The Wealth of Nations and illustrate the magic of free trade with something that is a little easier to digest: Thanksgiving dinner.

When you and your family sat down Thanksgiving afternoon to test the integrity of your waistbands, you probably heaped your plate with at least a little of everything: turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, yams and the like. Even if you preferred turkey over all of the other menu items, you didn't eat turkey exclusively because you also like variety.

But imagine if, instead of a carefully personalized custom plate of food, your host has served you a heaping plate of cranberry sauce and nothing else. Meanwhile your disappointed fellow diners have found themselves staring at plates with only one item each: Grandma has nothing but yams, Cousin Eddie has only mashed potatoes, Aunt Wilma is hogging your precious turkey, and Uncle Frank is frowning over the gravy boat.

Something isn't right. No one is as satisfied as they could be. You all could go into the kitchen and cook yourselves what you are missing, but that would seem like a waste of energy since there is enough food for everyone. An economist at the table would call this a arrangement inefficient because resources are not being employed where they are most valued.

Enter the magic of trade.

Without even consulting The Wealth of Nations, you would quickly discern that everyone at your dinner table would be better off if you traded food between yourselves: a little bit of turkey for a few spoonfuls of cranberry sauce, a few drips of gravy for mashed potatoes, etc. Your trades would leave everyone better off because you all will have achieved the variety that your plates were lacking. In a way, you created wealth from nothing, because everyone ended up valuing their respective plates of food more highly than before trading took place. Indeed, you and your fellow diners created wealth with every individual transaction: both Cousin Eddie and Aunt Wilma were wealthier after they traded mashed potatoes and turkey.

The same wealth-creating principal that allowed you to better expand your waistline at Thanksgiving dinner applies to international trade. Countries invariably have what economists call "comparative advantages" over one another. The United States can produce corn abundantly and cheaply while Saudi Arabia can do the same for oil. Germany has a strong supply of highly-skilled laborers while China has a strong supply of low-skilled workers. As your family did with their imbalanced Thanksgiving portions, countries can benefit from their respective comparative advantages and create wealth for their citizens by allowing free trade. Free trade allows countries to produce what they are best at. Any trade that does not happen because of artificial trade barriers is a missed opportunity to create wealth.

Yet countries have a frustrating propensity for adopting wealth-killing trade barriers based on some form of an us-versus-them mentality. Adam Smith himself wrote The Wealth of Nations in response to mercantilism, an economic philosophy that viewed international trade as a zero-sum game. Mercantilists viewed the world as having a finite amount of wealth. A country's prosperity, therefore, depended on its ability to jealously guard its wealth from leaking to others. Eighteenth-century England feared trading with France—and vice versa—because buying French products would entail sending precious gold into the French economy. England tried to keep its wealth within the jurisdiction of the crown by, among other things, forbidding its colonies from trading with anyone else, a strategy that backfired spectacularly when Americans decided that they did not appreciate their place in England's captive economy and started the American Revolution.

Adam Smith proved that international trade was not a zero-sum game and history has proven him correct, although it took a long, slow, fight to cure the world of its protectionist tendencies. Interestingly, in the United States it was labor, not industry, activists who led the charge against high tariffs in the early twentieth century. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party platform called for the prohibition of child labor, safe working conditions, and a federal minimum wage. It also called for a reduction in tariffs because progressives of the day—unlike Bernie Sanders—recognized that high tariffs benefited big businesses at the expense of the working class; they enabled large trusts to charge inflated prices by insulating them from foreign competition. Modern progressives' distaste for free trade, therefore, represents a strange reversal.

Pro-labor progressives were not the only ones to see the benefits of free trade; peace advocates saw it too. American cowboy turned British parliamentarian Norman Angell published a small book in 1909 in which he opposed a British arms race with Germany. History had reached a point, he argued, at which warfare was futile because countries were too economically interdependent. Times had changed since the age of the Romans, when an empire became great by conquering and pillaging its neighbors. Robbery between modern industrialized nations was not profitable because they were simply too interdependent. If a modern industrial state attacked a trade partner it would effectively be waging a war against its own economy. Germany would commit economic suicide if it tried to destroy England, Angell reasoned, because the Germans needed to buy and sell from the English. Of course, Germany paid little heed to Angell and largely proved his point by committing economic suicide not once but twice in World War I and World War II.

The hard efforts of free trade proponents like Roosevelt and Angell paid off. The increase of free trade in the twentieth century coincided with a worldwide economic explosion. In those one hundred years, the world population nearly quadrupled, but the world economy increased about nineteen-fold. People became about five times more productive even as they tended to work shorter hours. Mankind became staggeringly productive; we produced more goods and services in the twentieth century than we had over the entire course of previous recorded history.  Although Angell's dream of a world where countries are too economically-interdependent to fight has not been totally realized, free trade seems to have helped otherwise antagonistic countries—like the United States and China—put aside their differences for the sake of mutual prosperity. Thomas Friedman famously pointed out in a 1999 book that no two countries with a McDonald's had ever gone to war with one another.

Of course, not everyone is a winner when trade is free and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were quick to capitalize on the frustrations of those who saw themselves as losers. The great challenge of selling free trade is that its benefits are sizable but subtle while its costs are narrow but dramatic. The closure of an American factory grabs one's attention more than the broad poverty-easing impact of lower food prices.

Free trade proponents suffer from another handicap: free trade has been the norm for long enough that the world takes its benefits for granted. That could be about to change. Donald Trump's election could mark the end of free trade's golden age. What lies on the other side of that golden age is worrisome. International trade is already in decline. For the first time since World War II, the United States' economy grew in 2015 but its trade with other countries decreased, leading one New York Times journalist to declare the end of "the Walmart Era."  And if one believes Norman Angell's hypothesis that economic interdependence renders war futile, then this trend is concerning. Ali Wyne, writing for the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, observed that the economic ties between China and the United States are weakening as China begins to consume more of what it produces and depend less on the United States for high-skilled labor. The world could became a scarier place if the ideologically-opposed superpowers no longer need one another. As Wyne put it: "[A]s China's economic dependence on the United States declines, both its aversion to a military confrontation and its concern about posing more systemic challenges to liberal world order are likely to diminish."

All is not lost, but if the world is going to resist the rising tide of protectionist impulses, people cannot let the Trumps and Sanders of the world convince them international trade is a zero-sum game. Mercantilism's proper place is in our history books. Blue collar workers might have reason to complain about inequality, but trade policy is not the proper battlefield for a fight between the working class and corporate executives.

Trade is a means of creating wealth from nothing. Let's not hoard the mashed potatoes.

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For a different perspective read an article from The Nation: "Why Do White Working-Class People Vote Against Their Interests? They Don't" available at https://www.thenation.com/article/why-do-white-working-class-people-vote-against-their-interests-they-dont/. Thanks to Jonathan Erde for sharing on Facebook.  


Further reading:

You can read Politifact's summary of Donald Trump's campaign position on tariffs
and economists' reaction to it, at http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jun/21/donald-trump-has-floated-big-tariffs-what-could-im/.

Ali Wyne's article, “The Strategic Importance of U.S.-China Trade Ties" is available at http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/ethics_online/0106.

Norman Angell's 1909 pamphlet, Europe’s Optical Illusion is available at https://archive.org/details/europesopticalil00ange. His more lengthy and famous work, The Great Illusion was published on year later.

The Progressive Party's 1912 platform is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/tr-progressive/. In fairness to the source, I will point out that the Progressives were only proponents of free trade to a point. In principle, they favored tariffs that would "equalize" competition between the United States and other countries. They simply felt that the tariffs in 1912 were too high.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is in the public domain and available at http://www.bartleby.com/10/, but it is not easy reading.

Binyamin Appelbaum's New York Times article, "A Little-Noticed Fact About Trade: It's No Longer Rising," sheds light on the downward trend of international trade.

Some of the astounding statistics on the economic explosion that took place in the twentieth century is taken from a chapter of a report published by the International Monetary Fund, which can be found at https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2000/01/pdf/chapter5.pdf.