What America Can Learn From Hungary's Backsliding Democracy - Paul R. Pillar - The Atlantic
Democratization and liberalization are not necessarily one-way processes. To realize this goes against the tendency to think of them as a one-way process. Perhaps some of this tendency comes from interpretations of Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history idea. Perhaps we should remember the ideas of an earlier big-think political philosopher, Plato, about how different forms of government degenerate into other forms. Democracy, as Plato saw it, was not the end state of this process. It was the penultimate state, degenerating into tyranny. Plato’s progression of political forms has not matched subsequent history very well, but it provides some food for thought about different possible types of political transformation. […]
What is going on in Hungary suggests that we should not be so smug. Some of what is involved in Hungary’s creeping authoritarianism has echoes in American politics. There is the use of brute legislative force or outright coercion to get one’s way, even if this in effect means a compromise of democratic values. And there is a hubristic belief that it is so important for one’s own party or movement to be in power that this takes precedence over all other interpretations of the national interest. Viktor Orban has a soulmate of sorts in Mitch McConnell when the latter says his top priority is to defeat the president of the opposing party.
January 22, 2012, 11:49am
