Trump and Netanyahu Have The Same Orban Roadmap For Forever Rule

But the barriers to getting there are both different and difficult

I’m in Israel visiting friends and family. When I got off the plane last night I went straight to dinner with some friends. On the plane, I read an excellent article in Foreign Affairs, The Path to American Authoritarianism by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (the pay wall can be dodged by providing an email account), which examined Trump’s plan to achieve competitive authoritarianism. Like Orban and Erdogan, Trump and the GOP want to maintain the illusion of democracy by tilting the playing field to make it impossible for the opposition to win.

My friends said Netanyahu and his minions have the same aim for Israel and are using the same approach as Trump and the GOP. Like Trump and the GOP, they are elites who attack their fellow elites in order to get and maintain power, pretend to be for the common man, and assume correctly that many in the working class are easily conned.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have been successful at seriously corrupting their judicial branches with like minded elites. Both Trump and Netanyahu are trying to corrupt future elections. Trump and the GOP are trying to make it even more difficult for the poor to vote and Trump is now trying to attack the Democrats’ funding arm, ActBlue. Netanyahu is trying to limit Arab participation in Israel’s parliament.

Levitsky and Way point out that while Trump has made significant progress in his effort to tear down American democracy, he also has significant hurdles to achieve Orban-like control. First, Trump isn’t at all popular and Levitsky and Way note that authoritarian rule usually requires an initial wave of somewhere around 4/5 approval. Trump is, in contrast, under water in terms of favorability. Second, authoritarian rule often happens in immature democracies that are easily dismantled. The US, in contrast, has a well established democracy and it’s going to take considerable effort to tear it down.

Israel, in contrast, is a young country with a young democracy and it doesn’t have a constitution. All of that does make it susceptible to authoritarianism. But like Trump, Netanyahu is highly unpopular. Also the “balagan” of Israeli politics, its inherent chaos and unruliness, makes it hard to tame. Similarly, the balagan of the US election process where every state is individually in charge of voting makes it hard for Trump and the GOP to significantly corrupt voting in blue and most swing states.

One of my friends said, “I have to continually remind myself that the idea of what Israel and the US are in my head no longer applies. They are vastly different countries than they once were.” I have to agree. Both countries have been greatly harmed by the rise of charismatic and anti-democratic leaders. But whether either of those leaders fully achieves their common goal of tearing down all of their country’s democratic structures remains very much up in the air.