From Orban to Trump, Part II

Finishing my conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele

Almost three weeks ago I had a conversation with my old friend and colleague Kim Lane Scheppele, who — as a constitutional expert who also spoke Hungarian and focused on central Europe — was one of the first people to sound the alarm about how democracies can slide into autocracy. Unfortunately we had technical problems starting just about as we reached the point where we could talk about the situation in the US, and its similarities and possible differences with Hungary.

So we took time a couple of days ago to finish the conversation. This time I’ll include a transcript at the end.

You can watch and/or read for yourself. But I found it alarming. Those of us following the day to day stumbles of the Musk/Trump administration sometimes feel encouraged by just how incompetent they sometimes seem — quite different from the cool, sinister competence of Orban’s takeover in Hungary. But Kim warns that Trump is nonetheless achieving most of the ingredients for autocracy.

Kim Scheppele 030525 transcript

Paul Krugman

Hi, I'm Paul Krugman. Some of you may recall that I did an interview with Kim Lane Scheppele, who I've known forever and was one of the very first people to warn about how an elected government could destroy a democracy from Hungary. And we got most of the way through before technical difficulties.

So this is part two, which will pick up where we left off. And where we left off last time, we were talking about how for a while Poland seemed to be going down the same route as Hungary. That has been pushed back at least for a while by the victory of pro-democracy forces, although, as you were saying, Kim, they're pretty limited.

Let's talk about America. Let's talk about what's been happening here and how it compares with what you saw in Hungary really 15 years ago. So here we are. What would be your first, you know, first couple of paragraphs of the state of affairs in America?

Kim Lane Scheppele

Yeah, well, there's a few things about what's been happening in the last, I guess, six weeks into the Trump administration, as we're speaking. A couple of things that look exactly like what Orban did and a couple of things that are quite new, as I've looked at other countries. So what Orban did at the beginning, there were three things that enabled him to capture his government really fast. So one was that he moved very quickly to capture the Constitutional Court which was the referee of the whole process. And if you capture the refs and you can do all kinds of unconstitutional things and there's no one around to tell you. So now that was something Trump did in his first term. He's basically captured the refs. I'm talking to you Paul on the day after Trump's session, his joint session of Congress speech last night. And I don't know if you saw on the way out the door, the Supreme court only sent four judges this time, fewer than usual, but John Roberts was there and on the way out the door, Trump shakes his hand and says, “Thank you. Thank you again. I won't forget.” Okay? So that is, I mean, if it weren't evident already by the decisions of this court, particularly the immunity decision, which was outrageous, unprecedented, lawless, and just stunning, jaw-droppingly supportive of a lawless executive.

Paul Krugman

Okay. Wow, I missed that.

Kim Scheppele

If you didn't know that already, the constitutional court's been captured, the referee's captured. So Orban had to wait till he got into office to do that. So that wasn't as quick. But the two other things that Orban did right at the start, and actually, I didn't write about these in real time because by the time you and I got together when I started writing on your blog, it was a year in.

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

And all this stuff had already happened. So here were the two things Orban did right at the beginning. The first thing he did, remember Hungary was under an IMF austerity program, old fashioned IMF austerity program. They're just saying, ‘cut government bloat, cut social welfare spending, cut all that stuff.’ So what Orban did with the blessing of the IMF was to suspend the civil service law and gut the bureaucracy. You know, mass firings in those first few months. And the IMF said, ‘Great. You're downsizing the state. This is exactly what we expect you to do.’ Now, of course, in the US, we don't have that cover, but this idea that first you just purge the bureaucracy of all the people who you cannot count on.

Paul Krugman

Okay.

Kim Scheppele

And then the second step is to replace them with all your cronies so that the state is completely responsive to what you order from the top. So that was crucial. And along with that came a massive centralization of the executive branch. So instead of working through cabinet government, which was the dominant form in Hungary, you know, the prime minister had a portfolio, but so did everybody else. There was this massive centralization of all the reporting lines into, in Hungary, what was called the Office of the Prime Minister, what we might call here the White House office or the Office of the President. And what you're seeing Trump doing is exactly what Orban did, which is to put all the most powerful people directly under him in his office. And that's going to marginalize the cabinet, right?

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

If you're capturing all these agencies and making them directly report into the centralized office of the prime minister or in this case, the president, then what you've got is a kind of setup for dictatorship because you're running everything from a kind of central dashboard. So Orban did that right at the beginning. And then the second thing he did was he realized that the biggest weapon that he could wield was the state budget. And so Orban was a little more…mean. Orban's in general smarter about this stuff. It didn't look chaotic when Orban did it because he'd been in government. He knew. He'd been prime minister before and he was paying attention and he had smarter people around him. So it wasn't the kind of smash and burn, but it was much more targeted. He took the state budget and looked at every single place where the state budget was supporting the people who might oppose him. And he just cut their funding. So, one of the first dramatic things was that, you know, Budapest had 12 daily newspapers, which the market could not sustain. So the question was, how do they all get financed? And the answer was state advertising held them up across the board. So Orban comes in, immediately cuts state advertising to all the opposition papers. They cut all the funding for civil sector organizations. They cut universities back by 40 % in the first three years.

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

They just found all the places where the opposition might organize and just selectively cut their budgets. Now here, they're just cutting a lot. But I don't know if you saw, there was a really lovely report written by somebody. There'd been a survey apparently in the US in 2018 of the political orientation of agencies.

Paul Krugman

Yes.

Kim Scheppele

As seen by Washington insiders. And then you look at where the reports are that all the cuts are coming from. And it's all the agencies quoted as liberal, right? The Consumer Protection Board, USAID, et cetera. That was also what Orban did. It was just to kind of go after all the quote unquote liberal things that the state budget supported. And once you smashed the civil service and once you defunded your opponents, it meant that they were just flattened and couldn't organize a mobilized response. So in that sense, what we've just seen in these early days of Trump looks really similar to Orban.

Paul Krugman

I was going to bring up that study because I saw it as well. It really is that the perceived liberalness of an organization is by far the best predictor of the DOGE cuts.

Kim Scheppele

Yeah. Exactly. And that's exactly what Orban did, too. So that's all familiar. That was not at all surprising to me. But the one thing that's different is that every new generation of autocrats has new technology to play with. And what did not happen in Orban's government was this tech bro takeover, right? Where essentially the way that the government is being smashed and burned, but taken over at the same time in the US is that Musk's people are going into all these agencies. And I think, you know, it's true that they're probably exfiltrating data, they're compromising data, they're deleting a lot, and they're doing all that stuff so far as we can see. What I'm worried about is something else that I don't think we're focused enough on, which is if the goal is to create what I think of as a centralized dashboard, you know, where from one office, from the president's office, you can see how the whole government's working. Because Orban worked out how to do that, but without the technology.

So if you think of that as their goal, then it makes a lot of sense about where their people are going in first. So they went in first to the Office of Personnel Management which has the entire database for the workforce, the payment system, and GSA, which controls all the IT for the government. They went into those centralized databases first. What some Treasury people reported after the Musk people went in, and ransacked their way through the treasury databases, was that a number of treasury department officials noticed on their computers that somebody had installed a keystroke logger. Now, keystroke loggers are monitoring devices that can be installed on computers, and what they record is every single keystroke you make on the keyboard, which means they can see what you're typing even through encrypted channels.

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

So, it's like putting Pegasus on your phone. A keystroke logger kind of does that for your computer. And some people in Treasury reported that they were already seeing those kinds of things installed. I hope all the other agencies where they've gone in and the Musk people have gone in and done something to the computer systems, that people check for this. And just as an alert, public service announcement, the way to check is: you go into the list of all of your execute programs and you sort them by date and you see what the most recent ones are that are installed on your machine and that's one way to check. So everyone should just do that good hygiene on your computer.

Paul Krugman

I have a project for as soon as we're done talking.

Kim Scheppele

Yeah. So what I'm worried about is that what's new about this is that the technology the Musk people are installing is simultaneously way more powerful than anything Orban had, or for that matter, any other oligarch that I've been kind of tracking. And so they can do a lot more centralization. But the problem is that the Musk people don't believe in security. So already the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) email lists where they're giving people that “Tell us five things you've done every week,” it's hackable.

They can do a “reply to all,” you can spam the entire federal workforce. It's also, by the way, going to judges. So anyway, the point is that it's making the country and the system massively less secure, which is its own risk completely apart from the smashing and destroying that they're doing. You know, this is the same kind of pattern we've seen in other autocratic takeovers, but boosted with the technology that we haven't seen before.

Paul Krugman

Okay, so that's more downbeat than I feared. I mean, because the overwhelming impression you get from the outside is that there's a lot of chaos, which isn't necessarily a contradiction. Both things can be true, but that on the one hand, we're still fighting about terms, the Muskin-Eugens, or I've been calling them the the Dunning-Kruger kids.

Kim Scheppele

I've called them Muskovites because we don't actually know their political orientation.

Paul Krugman

There is that, too, yeah. But on the one hand, what they can do is incredibly dangerous. On the other hand, it's clear that they really don't know a thing about the agencies that they're infiltrating. But I guess the point is that even if they are you know, laying off the people who secure our nuclear weapons or disabling the air traffic control system, maybe down a little ways, down the pike. At the same time, they may be providing the framework for a lot of centralized control and oppression.

Kim Scheppele

Or messing up efforts to stop Ebola in Africa. Right. Because the whole point about autocratic capture, I mean, there's a lot of things that happen during an autocratic capture. There's a lot of corruption that goes on. We’re certainly seeing that. There is chaos because you have to really reorient a big complex government. Hungary was much less big and much less complex than the US is. So there'll be some chaos, but chaos is also a cover, right? I mean, one of the things that happened at the very beginning—Orban is the master of distraction. We're seeing ‘master of distraction’ stuff is going on here, too. So I don't know if the tariffs are gonna be real, but if they're not real, it certainly is a great distraction. I mean, it could then just be chaotic, but Orban didn't do that kind of stuff. But what the chaos disguises is this centralized control, which I haven't seen people really talk about.

What Orban did at the very beginning was he said, we've entered this new ideological moment of what he calls “the spirit of national cooperation.” And they had this declaration of this nationalist tract that they made every state office post in their offices and they would come around and check. So everybody's objecting to that, right? And in the meantime, all the budgets are being cut, all the civil service people are being fired. People didn't focus as much on the autocratic centralization as they focused on the ideological messaging, which Orban never believed in and never meant to follow through with.

I don't think Trump believes anything about the ideology he's promoting either, except maybe racism, which seems to be a red thread through everything he's ever done. But in terms of, you know: is he a free marketeer or is he protectionist? I mean, duh. One day he's one and one day he's the other. Is he a raving nationalist or is he more sort of cosmopolitan? You wouldn't want to build his hotels on the sea in Gaza if you weren't thinking that building an empire outside the US is worth having, right? So there's a lot of contradictions in what Trump is actually personally after. So I wouldn't pay attention to what he's saying so much as I would pay attention to, you know, are we moving toward a situation in which the checks on executive power are disappearing? That's the autocratic thing to focus on, you know, or that's the thing to focus on if you're worried about autocracy.

Paul Krugman

Well, yeah, which is very scary. You have the strong impression with Trump that there's just a lot of the people involved, because Musk is so central to it and because it's all these kids, that they really actually do not know what they're doing and are liable to sort of disable critical government functions one way or another. I don't know if that was the same. I think Fidesz had been in preparation for longer, right?

Kim Scheppele

Yeah. First of all, Hungary is a smaller, simpler country. It's not a federal bureaucracy. It's a parliamentary system. So the prime minister is assured of a majority in parliament. And in Orban's case, he got a super majority in the parliament. So he could amend the constitution at will. So he could do it through ordinary legislation. So things looked a lot more normal on the surface. Here with Trump's small minorities in Congress, and I'm not sure that all of his party's completely on board with a kingship yet. But also just given how complicated the US government is and all the checks and balances, all the oversight mechanisms, the inspectors general, the independence of the justice department, the independence of agencies. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff they have to cut through before a president can rule it all as king, right? So the Project 2025 program, that looks like Orban.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

Kim Scheppele

And in fact, Orban's people, as we discussed, Orban's people were involved in drafting it. You know, there is this formal memorandum of understanding between Orban's English language think tank and the Heritage Foundation. And a great deal of that looks like they got in there, they figured out how government works. And if you remember, the Heritage Foundation had put through this unprecedented number of freedom of information requests trying to figure out how government works, what do different offices do. If they were following the Project 2025 blueprint, this thing would look less chaotic because they really did have a plan for who should go into which offices and exactly how to disable things. So that was an organized plan. So what we're seeing is that—overlaid over this Project 2025 blueprint that actually looked pretty orderly and that they knew what they were doing—you've got this Musk chaos because...

Musk talked to Trump over dinner and Trump thought, ‘Gee, it would be great if the wealthiest man in the world with all of his tech magic could come in and fix things.’ So I think what you're seeing is a competition between the well-organized heritage plan, which wouldn't have broken everything. Well, it might have broken some things, all the liberal agencies, right? But it wouldn't have been as chaotic. And the Musk plan for giving Trump, you know, like a Bloomberg News computer screen where he can see the whole government. He would love that kind of thing, right? And so these are two plans in competition, right?

And then there's also the Steve Bannon plan, which we haven't seen very much of, but Bannon was out there in the years before Trump came back, training all these people to be the foot soldiers who go into the government once the Heritage Foundation cleans out all the people that they can't trust. And Bannon's been totally sidelined by Musk. So the good news is that we're seeing checks and balances in the sense that you've got competition for which plan Trump accepts.

There's this old joke. I used to work in Moscow at the Constitutional Court and there was this big ugly hotel right next to Red Square. And from one angle, the hotel looked like a kind of brutalist architecture thing. And from another angle, it looked like a modernist building. And it was obviously a hybrid, you know? And people said, “How come this building got built like that?” And somebody said, “Well, somebody showed Stalin two blueprints, two different blueprints for how this building would be constructed. And he agreed to both.”

Paul Krugman

Yeah, that's a great metaphor.

Kim Scheppele

And so the building turned out to be this monstrosity. And so I think that's what we're seeing. There's this model of ‘Musk-tech-bro will give you a console from which you can see all of government and control it all like it's a video game’ and the much more well worked out heritage plan, which did work from this presumption of understanding how government worked.

And then you've got the Bannon raiders who have not yet come on board, but they're waiting in the wings for these agencies to be cleared out so that Bannon's people can go in. And Bannon hates Musk so much. So this is good, right? So you've got competition. You've got, like, Stalin's two blueprints and what you're gonna get is this monstrosity of a building. So it may be less effective than it might've been if it was just Heritage following Orbán's lead.

Paul Krugman

Okay. There have been two kinds of things that I hope didn't happen with Orban that are happening now that might in a way help. One is the the bloopers, mean, there's just the amount of bad publicity of DOGE coming out with, well, “Here's our list of great savings,” and it turns out that they misread $8 million, so it's $8 billion. And they counted the same contract three times. There's a certain level of ridicule. I'm not sure if that was happening in Hungary.

Kim Scheppele

Yeah, no. So first of all, remember Orbán also controlled a lot more of the media space even when he was first elected. Hungary, like most European countries, has a very big public broadcaster that is the main source of news for most people. And the first place where he fired all the workers was at the public broadcaster. And so basically he took over the propaganda. I mean, it was very hard for people to find out what was happening even in those early days. So A) he was more organized and controlled the message, but B) he was just more deliberate and he had a lot of very talented people and he himself is a micromanager. If you read our colleague Steve Kotkin's biography of Stalin, I mean, it's amazing how much of a micromanager Stalin was, you know? Just every single thing except with two blueprints for the building. But, you can see that that might not have been the most important thing on his desk. Orban was really in control of things so that if there was a conflict somewhere in his team, he would sort it out. So it didn't have this chaotic feel about it and the bloopers.

But there's a couple of other things about the U.S. that give us more hope.

Paul Krugman

All right.

Kim Scheppele

So, one is federalism, which is, not all the states are captured and the blue state attorneys general have been filing a lot of terrific lawsuits and pushing back. And so there's a kind of resilience in federalism that, you know, sane government has a place to hide for a while before we get rid of this chaos. The other thing is that, because Trump doesn't have the thing Orban had, which is the ability to amend the constitution overnight, what he's doing is illegal at the moment..

Paul Krugman

Yeah.

Kim Scheppele

It may become legal as everything filters up to his packed Supreme Court. And so the packed Supreme Court seems to be all in for unlimited executive power, which is the dangerous part. But they'll probably turn back birthright citizenship and a few other initiatives so that people don't believe the court's fully captured. But you know, again, we keep our eye on the ball. At the moment, what Trump is doing is governing by executive order and, as law works in this country, there's the Constitution, then there's statutes, then there's regulations, then there's executive orders. And the point about this is that a lower-level legal command cannot undo a higher-level one. And so right now, all Trump has done is to just issue a bunch of executive orders, many of which are in violation of acts of Congress and the Constitution as we've known it. That's why there's more than 100 lawsuits now. There's a very good litigation tracker up at the website called Just Security for people who want to follow along. But there's a little more than 100 lawsuits. Almost all of them have resulted in temporary restraining orders or injunctions, which is to say: stop the presses and/or roll things back.

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

And that's the temporary situation. Now, whether the government's complying is another story. But the courts are very active in saying, ‘You can't do this formal thing you're doing, which is trying to override higher level law with lower level law.’ Orban didn't have that problem, right? In his first year, he amended the constitution 12 times, changing 60 provisions of the constitution he inherited, which gave him time to draft a completely new constitution, which changed everything, right?

That's when you and I started working together on this stuff, when the new Constitution was coming into effect.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, so there's a lot more, at least potentially (I think in reality) sand in the gears in this thing now. The other thing that I'm noticing a lot, particularly as we're holding this conversation the day after the North American tariffs went into effect, is that, I don't recall there being a lot of immediate public pain and backlash to the pain. Hungary was already in lot of pain because of the austerity policies, but it wasn't clear that Orbán was a very different starting situation. But where we are right now is that as of a week ago, the U.S. economy was in a pretty good place— relatively low inflation, low unemployment—and then all of a sudden people are seeing, immediately price increases, tariffs…

Kim Scheppele

Yeah, plane crashes. Yeah, so that's true. So the government before Orban had run the country into bankruptcy. That's why the IMF had come in. The IMF was still doing old fashioned, “pain is the only way through this.” So Orban came in and immediately, it looked like he's complying with the pain. But then what he does is he steals all the money from private pensions and uses it to pay off the IMF.

And then what he immediately does is he brings back a lot of the social programs that the IMF insisted they cut. So he's hiring his people into the civil service. He's also playing with the statistics. So it looks like the unemployment rate is coming down. He restores the so-called 13 month pension, which is: at the end of the year, you get an extra month of pension, like for all the old people who vote for him, right? So he looked like he was bringing back the social state. There was never chaos. And so he looks like he's fixing the economy.

Now, Trump looks like he's breaking the economy because, as you said, I mean, yes, there was pain individuals were feeling or else they wouldn't have voted for Trump. On the other hand, the macro indicators were all fine. Now things are going kablooie. And so it will look like Trump's fault, even though it's a little too soon to have huge economic effects. Although, markets are anticipating more chaos, that's kind of clear. Yeah, Orban didn't create that kind of pain. And again, that gave him a lot of breathing room to do this kind of autocratic consolidation while he's giving speeches. And also Orban's other specialty was putting up statues to raving anti-Semites so as to take the entire liberal opposition and have them go over and protest at the statue while the statutes were going through the parliament consolidating Orban's power. So he did a lot of, you know, distraction stuff.

With Trump, the other metaphor I keep using, and I forget if I said this in our first conversation, but if you think of the government as being like a fish tank. And all these different fish are swimming around and, you know, maybe it's a little chaotic looking, but sometimes they swim in patterns, but it was a fish tank. And Trump comes in and he's just very visibly sticking a blender into the fish tank, right? And he's making fish soup. And so the problem is that, first of all, everyone can see it. So there is much more pushback, there's much more alarm, including from Republicans and so on. But the second problem is: it's much harder to recover the aquarium when you've made the fish soup, you know? So Orban never broke the state while he was doing all this stuff.

Paul Krugman

One of questions that's always been a puzzle for the United States is: why the Trumpist right isn't more sort of populist? Or, as some people say, why isn't it for a Herrenvolk welfare state? Like, social programs but only for the right people, which would seem to be an obvious political winner. And they're not doing that.

Kim Scheppele

Yeah.

Paul Krugman

They’re rushing right ahead with plans for savage cuts in Medicaid. Trump is not doing anything really to disguise the fact that his ultimate agenda is still very much regressive, upward redistribution of income.

Kim Scheppele

Right. And he doesn't even have trickle down rhetoric. Remember there was an alleged theory about why benefiting the rich was supposed to work at one point, right? So I guess they've given up on that. So it's just kind of naked. I think what they've realized is that they are relying on low information voters.

Paul Krugman

That's right.

Kim Scheppele

So they don't even have to come up with a cover story, you know? I must say, I was just on the phone this morning with a lovely woman who works with the people who fix our appliances in our house. And I don't know how we got onto this, but she said, “Things have gotten so much better since January 20th.” She said, “I feel safe.” I said, “What do you mean you feel safe?” Like, I'm thinking everyone I'm talking to is alarmed. And she said, “Well, now we don't have to be afraid of what we say.”

Paul Krugman

Okay.

Kim Scheppele

Yeah, right. So then of course I have to interview her, right? So she said, well, she used to be in the Tea Party, but you know, then it got a little crazy and she dropped out. Now she's on no social media, but she doesn't pay any attention to the news.

Paul Krugman

That's interesting. There's occasionally frank remarks from business executives who feel relieved that they can say sexist and racist things. I'm surprised to hear that from ordinary people as well.

Kim Scheppele

Exactly. Yeah. And this woman was so nice, you know? Then again, I'm a white woman living out in Trump country. I'm not in Princeton itself. So, yes.

Paul Krugman

There is Trump country in New Jersey, by the way, for listeners. You might be surprised, but it does exist.

Kim Scheppele

My dad is about to turn 100 years old and is still playing golf and healthy. And I just went down to visit him a couple of weeks ago, actually speaking at the Princeton club at Sarasota, Florida—red territory. And I met lots of Trump supporters and was talking to them. And there's this one friend of my dad's who said, “I'm so glad that Musk is in there cutting everything because we don't need this much government.”

And they're living in a gated community in which their mailboxes are regulated. Like, what kind of mailbox and whether you have a gold ball on the top or not. I mean, these are people who actually don't mind governing themselves at that micro level where you actually have to get approval to change the paint color on your house in this gated community. But they just don't want government of any kind that’s… You know, I don't know what they think it is. But this guy was delighted it was being destroyed. The thing is, the redistributive effects of Trump's policies are not what these people are talking about.

Paul Krugman

The one place where I am simultaneously worried and kind of hopeful about the DOGE kids disrupting stuff is the Social Security Administration, where we have all this stuff, there are all these dead people on Social Security, which is not saying anything about Social Security, it's saying that these are legacy systems, ancient computers, and even more ancient software, and these 19-year-olds from SpaceX don't know how to read the code. We do have some warnings now from Social Security Administration veterans that some people may actually find that their checks aren't arriving in the fairly near future. And that, I think, will get people's attention.

Kim Scheppele

Right. I mean, unfortunately, I think it's going to take those kinds of screw-ups, you know, where people didn't realize how government was actually functioning. In fact, remember back to the “hands-off my Medicare” argument. I mean, it's not even so clear that many people know what government even does.

Paul Krugman

Yeah.

Yeah, there's actually been large numbers of people who are on Social Security and Medicare who insist they do not benefit from any government program.

Kim Scheppele

Or that they're just getting out what they paid in. They think there was some bank account somewhere keeping track of what they paid into the system that's now giving them back their money.

Paul Krugman (34:34)

Actually, Musk seems to think Social Security is a Ponzi scheme because he imagines that it actually is an actual pension fund, which it is not. Okay, don't want this to go on too long. Let me ask, and I know that obviously we don't know: What do you think is going to happen? Are we going to get Orban-ized or what are the odds that we manage to steer away from this particular cliff?

Kim Scheppele

So, I'm writing a book on this and there are three kinds of countries. There's Autocracy Fast, which is like the Orban takeover capture. It all happens very quickly. For instance Venezuela, it almost happened in Ecuador, Turkey…I'll put Turkey in the second box. That was fast. Then there was what I call Autocracy Slow, where autocrats start to look like good guys. Remember Turkey wanted to join the EU and Putin actually looked like he was just organizing things at the beginning. And then they make a pivot and people don't realize they've made the pivot. But then there's a group of countries in which I put India, Brazil, and the US that I call Autocracy on the Fence. And what happens in these countries is you get these aspirational autocrats who come to power. They capture some pieces of the system, but these are big, complicated, large federal systems, India, Brazil, and the US.

Paul Krugman

Okay.

Kim Scheppele

And the autocrats are eventually voted out of office because they can't capture everything. They don't fully capture the election system. But they captured some things. And those some things prevent the pro-democrats who come back to power from being able to actually really restore things. And then because the pro-democrats can't fully govern, they lose popularity because they look ineffective. And then the autocrats come back and they capture more things.

And then this cycle continues. So essentially what you've got is, you don't fully go into autocratic capture, but you're going up and down around a declining line. So that, you know, each time you get this autocratic episode, it means that you've lost some ability of the next pro-democratic government to come in and actually fully restore a functioning democratic government.

And so that's kind of a halfway house between autocracy and democracy. And you already saw it because Trump captured the Supreme Court in his first term. I mean, the reason why Biden looked ineffective was that the Supreme Court basically vetoed all of the Biden policies that would have had tangible effects while Biden was in office. So student loans, for example,

or the child tax credit, right? So there were Biden policies that were supposed to just have immediate effect. All those got canceled by the court. The ones that were going to have effects in the next term, like the infrastructure bill, or even the CHIPS Act or sort of the long-term stuff, Supreme Court had no trouble with it.

Paul Krugman

Right.

Kim Scheppele

And you could read their legal arguments or you could say they're preventing Biden from looking effective. It's that dynamic that we're seeing now in Poland and we're seeing it in India a bit. It's that kind of thing. You capture an institution and if all they're doing is playing politics like a court like this, they're just going to gum up the works on immediate benefits to the leader that you're not supporting.

Paul Krugman

Wow.

Kim Scheppele

And then they'll go back to approving whatever Trump does. If I'm right about the Supreme Court. I hope I'm wrong, but there were just so many signals that this is just a captured court. So Biden couldn't be effective. He gets voted out after one term because, I mean, duh, the price of eggs, but there were just a lot of things that he could not show he was being effective with. And those of us who look at macro indicators on the long term were saying, “What a great presidency,” and anyone who's living in the moment is saying, “Gee, not so much.”

Paul Krugman

And that's your optimistic scenario.

Kim Scheppele

That's my realistic scenario. I mean, you know, there's an optimistic version, just because we need hope, right? One thing you're starting to see now, and especially the more government just screws up on stuff everybody took for granted and/or didn't attribute to government, the more you're gonna start getting pushback from red state areas. Because I mean, as you know, better than anyone, the United States is a giant redistributive project in which the blue states are subsidizing the red states. And as government starts to fall apart, the places that are going to feel it the worst are actually going to be the red states long-term. And so the question is, Which is first? The red states suffer and then they have a political awakening. They're not going to become blue state liberals, but they're at least going to become anti-Trump Republicans. And that's an optimistic scenario. Until the United States gets a conservative party that believes in constitutional government, we are in trouble.

Paul Krugman

So America's not yet lost. I think that's the variant on the Polish anthem.

And thank you so much. That was great.

Kim Scheppele

Well, yeah, we gotta keep after this. We're only a few weeks in and we got four long years of this, you know?