“Those Who Cannot Remember The Past . . .”

From Joyce Vance’s interview with Princeton Professor Kim Scheppele:

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After the end of the communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Hungary was the star pupil in the class of new democracies, quickly installing a stable multiparty democracy checked by a powerful constitutional court. Fast forward to 2010, and Viktor Orban was elected at a time when Hungary was reeling, like many countries at the time, from the global financial crisis.

As soon as he took office with a parliamentary majority big enough to allow him to amend the constitution with the votes of only his own party, Orban rewrote the entire constitution, weaponized the national budget against his opponents to destroy their ability to fight him, mass-fired many civil servants to replace them with loyalists, captured the constitutional court, brought most of the media under his control, attacked universities to eliminate academic freedom, used unlawful measures to fight immigration and eventually sidelined the parliament to govern by emergency decree. While it took the world nearly a decade to realize just how bad things were in Hungary, Orban had actually managed to capture virtually all independent institutions and destroy democracy within the first three years of his now 15-year rule.

No one who knew Hungary in the 1990s would have expected it to fall so far so fast. Hungary is now classified by virtually all observers as a “competitive authoritarian” regime, no longer a democracy.

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Ring any bells?

And isn’t it odd that America’s Conservative Political Action Conference — CPAC — has convened each year since 2022 in . . . Hungary?  

Professor Scheppele continues:

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The U.S. is on the same path as Hungary and Venezuela, whose autocratic leaders moved very quickly to destroy their previous constitutional orders and substitute personalistic rule. In Hungary and Venezuela, wholly new constitutions were written in the first year, and now the Trump administration is trying to swiftly and radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution in the only practical way available – through channeling a whole set of constitution-remaking cases to the Supreme Court that has already been packed in an irregular fashion with Trump-supporting justices.

. . .

Don’t think it can’t happen here. We are far along a path familiar from international examples that runs from democracy to dictatorship. A solid democratic history cannot save a country from autocratic capture once the key institutions that hold the executive in check are severely damaged. And we are witnessing the destruction of those key checking institutions with alarming speed.

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“Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned To Repeat It” — George Santayana, 1905