Zack Beauchamp
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean... Antisemitism has since, I mean, honestly, since the existence of Christianity, been a conspiracy theory. It started with the idea that the Jews collectively killed Jesus and has become an explanatory framework for everything bad that has happened since.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And in that way, it's protean because antisemitism can be adapted as an explanation for whatever bad thing you want to happen, you can blame it on the Jews. But what you can also do is reconstruct the figure of who the Jew is and what they are doing in ways that are useful for your political project.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So, it also centers on an old idea, but one that Trump has explicitly appropriated, the idea of there being good Jews and bad Jews. And the good Jews are one that fit the dominant political characteristics and acceptable political characteristics at the time, right, of this area. You see this in Hungary, actually, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
There's an Orthodox community led by Chabad that's aligned in many ways with the regime.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, yeah. See, we're so tolerant. We've made the country safe for Jews. And that, you know, that figure of Jewish allies is really useful because anti-Semitism now, after World War II, explicit racial anti-Semitism is a real no-no in a lot of places because of the legacy of Nazism. Sounding like a Nazi is politically very bad for you. It fractures your coalition. It makes you look harmful.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And yet there are lots of Nazis who or people who at least have Nazi aligned beliefs about race science, about Jews who are in the Trump coalition. So they're playing a game. And the game goes something like this. It's we can use our opposition to the pro-Palestine movement and to the elements of those movements that are themselves anti-Semitism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Anti-Semitism exists in all different political movements in different degrees. And we can use it as proof that though we're associated with those people, you can't tar us with the Nazi slur that is so often directed at right-wing political movements. Right. In fact, we can appropriate the power of anti-Semitism as a justification for power grab.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And then the flip side of this, of course, is that these power grabs target institutions and even arguably the sort of entire liberal ideology that has been the cornerstone of American Jewish flourishing. Andrew, what's your take on that?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, so I think that's exact evidence that they're failing. In fact, that's the reason why they're failing. So what they're trying to do is to make a show of exacting costs on dissidents. And what that's supposed to do is to chill dissents. Only it's not working.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
The people that they are targeting, they're winning in court, and then they're able to publicly say, we're not going to be quiet about this. We're not going to stop. That is what it looks like when these kinds of tactics fail, when they're checked. They exist inside a system where there is still a meaningful degree of rule of law.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Had they done just what Viktor Orban did in Hungary, right, done this all through very subtle, sophisticated legal machinations, that would have been a more effective strategy. But what happened is they make a big show out of it. They send Kristi Noem to do these really disturbing photo ops. They publicly abduct people on the street with, you know, masked men.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And when you do those things, you send a signal that what you're doing is authoritarianism. What you're doing is terrifying. And if you haven't consolidated control at that point, and you have a country that has really strong democratic institutions and a large section of the public that cares about those, you invite resistance.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I wrote a piece that basically said there are two strategies in Trump's authoritarianism. There's the Orban's sophisticated, subtle strategy. And then there's Trump's own desires, which is to be someone like Nayib Bukele, who rules openly, does whatever he wants, iron fist kind of ruling.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Trump has openly proclaimed his interest in ruling like a dictator, not just on day one, but also admiration for things like the Tiananmen Square crackdown, already said a long time ago. And that these strategies contradict each other. So the Orban strategy depends on self and subtlety.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And the Bukele strategy depends on massive, rapid, aggressive shows of force backed by the armed forces of your country.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
They said America is not a democracy? Yeah, they did. But I have a lot of issues with the way that that definition is right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
So the argument is that Trump's central goal of his administration, he wouldn't put it in these terms, but I think that it's sort of pretty fair to say that this is what their policies indicate towards, is changing the American regime.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Everybody knows that title worked. Pretty successful book. Now, I mean, on your bright line question, Ezra, they, Steve and Luke and Dan Ziblatt wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where they laid it out, I think more formally, what the criteria were, right? And the argument is you have crossed the line from a democratic state when opposition has costs.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Right, right. And that's the bright line. Now, of course, that bright line is pretty fuzzy, right? Like, if you're a conservative, you would argue that in the quote-unquote woke era, opposition to the reigning moral ideology had cost.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Turning what was a democratic government and has long been a democratic government into some species of non-democratic government in which power is wielded primarily through the executive with basically few checks. And potentially, even down the line, the fairness of elections is compromised. That part's speculative.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, those are the examples I wish I'd brought up earlier when you were asking me about, you know, how do we know that this is what they're trying to do? Well, it's exactly things like that. That is evidence of authoritarian intents.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
The question, though, and the reason why I don't like the framing of we've already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism is that that implies that those efforts are having the intended effect. And I do, Andrew, I take the caution that you're describing that we don't know how things are going to go. in, you know, a year or two or something like that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I don't, I can't claim to know that. What I'm trying to do is make a judgment about where we're at and what we can extrapolate from sort of the current trajectory of things. And it's not just, I think, a couple of days or weeks where we've been seeing this momentum build against Trump. It's over the course of months, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But we can say that there's an attempt to reconfigure the constitutional order without having to amend the Constitution. And that means not just Trump saying that he is doing things to consolidate power. but actually doing it. And so I think that you can use a series of benchmarks. It's a brief checklist, right? First is that I looked into sort of quantitatively the court rulings against Trump.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I found that not only did he lose vastly more than he won whenever there was an actual decision, but in most situations, the administration has complied with the something like four to one ratio of court orders where they've lost. Look at the cases of the students that have been targeted, right? Courts have been consistently ruling in their favor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
They've issued statements publicly saying, we will never back off from defending what is right. And it looks most likely, based on the current legal trajectory, that they're going to be released. In fact, courts have ordered a significant number of student visas that have been taken away, restored. And the State Department has complied with that. So that's one thing, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I agree that the former parameters of American politics have been blown apart in the beginning of this administration. The question is, are they doing something to effectively consolidate a new vision for the political order, as you suggested?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, if you look at the way of going after the media, even within that first year, Orban had developed a new state-created conglomerate for different media organizations that effectively allowed him to begin exercising power over the media in a structural way, that there's no... of that in the United States. There isn't even a concept of a plan here. There's not a tool for power consolidation.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But to the immediate question about, like, what is the future of the right, I think it's true that these young, like, among incredible cadres of young people, there's an obsession with figures like Bronze Age pervert, Curtis Yarvin, people who have views that are explicitly anti-democratic, bigoted. You know, there's a notion that it is interesting and fun, you know,
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
even among these cadres to say things that are offensive. And that irony has quickly bled into sincerity, right? Where there's a deep faith and a sense that these things that they were saying to get a rise out of people are now true. The question is, how much influence does that wield over the future Republican Party?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I don't actually know the answer to that question because we don't know the story of the Trump era hasn't been written yet, right? When I say things aren't going very well, let's assume they continue to not go very well. We get to the midterms, they lose dramatically.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Then the administration starts flailing around in the next two years and a Democrat wins the White House and Democrats control Congress by an overwhelming margin. Well, what does the Republican Party do with defeat? And what does it do after Trump? Because like we all act like Donald Trump is immortal. He can't die. And maybe he is. I don't know. The man certainly has survived a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Failing to consolidate institutional power. A second thing is failing to neutralize sources of opposition. And so I think the press is a really good example. Like, one of the first things that any of these guys does when they want to try to move towards an authoritarian state— is suborn the press in some way, silence it, make sure there isn't effective criticism coming out of the media.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And when Donald Trump dies, the glue that holds the Republican coalition together is gone. This is a very common problem in authoritarian states, the succession problem. When so much is glued together, and I think really, if you look at the details of the Republican coalition, a lot of disagreements are being papered over by the overwhelming charismatic force of one man.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And when he's off the scene, What happens to the right at that point? And that's a very open question, especially in a world where this political project looks like it's a failing one, which may or may not be true in four years.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And clearly, there are instances of self-censorship by the media, of Trump putting pressure on media organizations. But on the whole, if you look at the media landscape in the United States, there's no shortage of Trump criticism. We aren't having the entire country turning into Fox News. And the third thing is civil society. And here, the thing that really changed my mind is universities.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
To me, the big thing to watch is where the Supreme Court weighs in on a variety of these different cases, right? Because for all Trump is losing in the lower courts, the Supreme Court has the ultimate say in a variety of these things, and there's a 6-3 conservative majority. Now, it's indicated that it's willing to challenge the administration in certain ways, which is a positive sign.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But if the Supreme Court starts Basically laying out the welcome mat for a variety of different Trump policies or clearing out the legal barriers that are in place.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I think that could be the single biggest warning sign because then a number of these other things that seem like they're less likely to happen or there are significant barriers in their place all of a sudden become thinkable as actual real enforceable things over the course of time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Seeing more compliance from media organizations, not just Elon Musk buying MSNBC, which would be like the end stage of this, but rather, you know, earlier stages, more places, seeing more self-censorship from different people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Where you had at first Columbia basically doing whatever Trump wanted to try to get the threat of funding cuts, federal funding dollars being shut off off their back. But then it looked like Harvard might be about to do the same thing. And then all of a sudden Harvard becomes the leader of the resistance, right? They're organizing this thing. There's a compact among big 10 schools.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
That's been ratified by faculty senates in which they pledge. Basically, they call it a NATO for mutual legal defense. If Trump comes after one of them, they'll all defend each other with resources. There's a strategy group privately for Ivy League and other like top tier elite schools where they're planning collective resistance against the Trump administration.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I don't agree, actually. I don't think that is how you get competitive authoritarianism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
How you get competitive authoritarianism, if you look at any case where it happened, is through not just doing a bunch of random stuff, but through taking a systematic and deliberate effort to restructure the fundamentals of a society and getting key building blocks in place in a strategic way that allows you to wield power effectively. You brought up Lagos Simica a second ago, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, that's right. For those of us who have not spent a lot of time in Hungary, like Andrew and I have. So he was like Orban's friend, right, from their days prior to power, right? This isn't a man like Elon Musk who developed his wealth independently. His entire business empire owed itself to government patronage, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
He had a media empire that was funded in large part through government advertising dollars. So when he decided he had this break with Orban, Zamiska calls him a bunch of nasty names. And what happens is Orban destroys him because Orban was pulling his strings the entire time. He had control over all of these things. He had control over the money.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
He had the control over the flow of the resources, all of which had been developed through years of systematic building and power consolidation laid on a groundwork. of a supermajority in the legislature, right, that they got in 2010 and have not relinquished since, allowing them to do whatever they want to the Constitution based on Hungarian constitutional rules.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
None of those things exist in the U.S. And I don't want to peg this too carefully to the Hungarian example, because you can say the same thing. I mean, my book is about the U.S., Hungary, Israel, and India. And if you look at each of those cases... There's a very, very deliberate effort when it's successful using the reins of power in careful, studied, practical ways to get what you want.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
This is not what happens when you effectively consolidate power. And you can see this in a number of different spheres ranging from business to law.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And the problem with Trump is I just see no evidence that that's happening, which is not to say that American society couldn't buckle. It's just that he's doing it badly. Yeah. And he's doing it really badly.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, I would note that both Duterte and Bolsonaro are currently arrested.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
They didn't really do a great job at building a competitive authoritarian regime.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Yeah, I mean, before the show, you and I were talking about liberalism. So my political lodestar is John Rawls in his book, Political Liberalism. And Rawls has this idea of an overlapping consensus. People don't agree on everything important. They don't even agree on everything that's an important moral thing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
In fact, his basic position is there are certain disagreements that cannot be resolved through politics that no one can resolve. Right. What makes a liberal democratic polity function is that we agree at least on how to resolve those disagreements, right, and the bounds in which those disagreements take place.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
For instance, that it's wrong to coerce people, to force them to act contrary to their own beliefs or to impose a vision of the good life onto certain people. And I think a lot of the conflict in politics right now is the result of the American overlapping consensus breaking down.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And a lot of the disagreements between different factions right now are over who broke it and why and whether or not it can be repaired. So the Chris Ruffo position, right, I've interviewed Chris. And when you talk to him, his view is the liberals aren't really liberals. They're leftist authoritarians in liberal clothing. They are basically the ideological heirs of Maoists.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And they went about trying to impose their sort of Maoist left-wing cultural agenda on the United States. And I'm just trying to fix that. In that light, Chris's project sounds almost Rawlsian.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
It's not true, right? It doesn't stand the test of, you know, what he's actually done, and in part because his diagnosis is really unfair. If you look at the history of American liberalism or the American left, the new left of the 1960s, the Maoist radicals he's talking about, did not win. They did not win the war of ideas on the left, as he assumes that they did.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But I think that if we're talking about what can happen next, it is possible that what happens next is years of chaos. One interesting parallel I heard when I was talking to Luke and Wei, actually, was Nepal, where you had a bunch of different factions who had totally, totally divergent ideas about the constitutional order, who would win elections and there'd be radical policy shifts for years.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And so it was years of chaos. That happening in the U.S., I think, is really a distinct possibility. It's also possible that we get a consolidated competitive authoritarian regime. Again, this whole conversation, I've not been ruling it out, just saying I think it's less likely.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But I think if we're to get onto the good path, right, we need to consider what it would take to rebuild a Rawlsian overlap and consensus on liberal democratic positions in the 21st century. And I don't have the answer here. I'm not sitting here like, I can tell you how to save liberalism. But I think the task should be stated clearly in this opportunity, this interregnum, as you describe it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
If Trumpism is failing, as I think it is, that creates a possibility for a liberal revival.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
Well, I cheated a little bit because I started with political liberalism. And I think that if there is any way to get out of the crisis, we need to begin in part by starting with foundational principles, right? And political liberalism is, I think, a really important text here.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I think another book, which I just started rereading, is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, not because it sort of answers these big picture questions about what political systems are like, but because it's a character portrait of one man's role in a vast machinery of horrifying political outcomes.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
No, I thought about this objection a lot while I was working on the piece. Because, you know, Trump has never said, I'm going to be an authoritarian. He said he'd be dictator on day one, but only on day one. Just on day one.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And seeing what Eichmann was like and seeing the parallels between him and contemporary functionaries in competitive authoritarian regimes on a personal level, I found very revealing, even if these governments are vastly different from Nazi Germany.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
And I think for a third book, Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism, to give you a sense of what the capacity for a post-liberal imaginary is like, what a world looks like when liberalism no longer is functioning, has been replaced for what it could be, what people want it to be in the future, what our order might be.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
But Victor Orban doesn't say that. I want to seize control of the Hungarian government and make myself dictator, right? It's in the structure of modern authoritarianism when you're dealing with backsliding from democracy that they want to claim democratic bona fides. They want to be able to say, I'm still ruling on behalf of the people. Elections are still legitimate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
In fact, my legitimacy flows from my popularity. So the way that you assess whether or not backsliding is happening is you look at the cumulative intent of the different policies put together. What would the output be if these policies all succeeded, if Trump actually got what he wanted in these cases. And we can see what that would look like, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
It would look like a series of deals like the ones that Columbia and Paul Weiss made. It would look like the courts declining to challenge him for fear that he wouldn't be obeyed, or sorry, that they wouldn't be obeyed in this case. It would look like the media self-censoring.
The Ezra Klein Show
Is Trump Losing? A Debate
I mean, we're on this podcast saying that Trump is an authoritarian and none of us are afraid that Donald Trump is going to shut us down because we were on this podcast. That to me is a significant marker of failure.