Andrew Marantz: The way it was described to me was like, if Fox News was basically every TV channel and the New York Post was like every newspaper.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. On this week's show, we're trying to answer the question: where is the US right now on the backsliding democracy scale?

Oana Filip: We were wondering, "Is it fair to call US an illiberal regime?" Then we were talking and we were thinking like, "Oh, but they are deporting people for no reason."

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, an old academic study about what works to push back on autocratic regimes is a hot new meme on the resistance Internet.

Maria J. Stephan: If 1% of the population participates at the peak of the movement, then the regime has a 50% chance of getting way. It gets better from there up to 3.5%. No regime has survived a 3.5% population resistance.

[applause]

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. A few months ago, I received an email with an interview request that stopped me in my tracks.

Oana Filip: What did it feel like for you to see your country turn into an illiberal regime? How do you manage to continue doing your job with integrity and courage?

Micah Loewinger: This is Oana Filip.

Oana Filip: I am a Romanian journalist.

Micah Loewinger: What was so weird about this is that we were in the middle of putting together an episode about the erosion of democracy in other countries around the world, and I had just interviewed a Hungarian journalist to ask him for advice on how to approach our own backsliding in the US. Then all of a sudden, here was a Romanian journalist asking me for the very same advice.

For context, this was in May when Romania was on the eve of an election in which a Trump-loving nationalist was maybe going to win the presidency. In the end, he lost out to the pro-democracy, pro-EU candidate. Wow. I mean, we here at OTM were a little bit rattled by the irony. What was your thinking about reaching out to an American journalist?

Oana Filip: Because for a lot of time, there was this narrative of US press as being a very high standard and the US democracy being the democracy we have to follow. When this started to crumble, it was very weird for us.

Micah Loewinger: I think maybe the reason that your email caught me off guard is that I have this kind of ingrained American exceptionalism. I don't know if that's the right word. Then I guess just to hear from an unbiased outsider say, "Yes, you now live in an illiberal regime," honestly, it was just a little bit shocking. It just felt like you were jumping to a conclusion that I wasn't ready to confront.

Oana Filip: It's very funny in a way that you say that because we actually had a discussion in the newsroom when we were writing the questions, because we were wondering, "Is it fair to call US an illiberal regime?" Then we were talking and we were thinking like, "Oh, but they are deporting people for no reason. They are threatening media in a way that is truly undemocratic. If it would be other country, would we still have this discussion?"

Micah Loewinger: Where is the US right now on the democracy to autocracy spectrum? Christina Pagel, a professor and mathematician at University College London, made a handy checklist and posted it to her Substack. She categorized over 800 things Donald Trump and his administration have done since returning to the White House and sorted them all into five, at times overlapping, categories of ways in which he is undermining democracy. Category 1: Undermining institutions and the rule of law.

Christina Pagel: The president is looking to deny automatic citizenship to the US-born children of undocumented immigrants.

Micah Loewinger: Category 2: Corruption.

Newscaster 1: Donald Trump's media company wants to buy billions in Bitcoin. His efforts to profit off crypto wall overseeing regulations in that industry are drawing ethical concerns.

Christina Pagel: Category 3: Attacking data.

Newscaster 2: President Trump directed the termination of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after a weak jobs report shows--

Micah Loewinger: Category 4: Aggressive foreign policy and global destabilization.

Newscaster 3: President Trump again forcefully defended his conclusion that the bombing he ordered of Iranian nuclear facilities "obliterated them."

Micah Loewinger: Category 5: Suppressing dissent.

Newscaster 4: Columbia University has reached a deal with the Trump administration.

Christopher Rufo: You want to focus on elite universities because elite universities establish the cultural signals that then flow downward to the university sector as a whole.

Micah Loewinger: That last voice is conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who's led the charge against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at universities. He took inspiration for some of his views from a visit to Hungary in 2023. Actually, a lot of American conservatives have made a similar pilgrimage to learn the ways in which the democratically elected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reordered Hungarian society to suit his right-wing populist agenda.

The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz also spent time in Budapest. After Trump's inauguration and the raft of anti-democratic moves that followed, it became clear to him that the new administration had taken more than a few lessons from Orbán's playbook.

Andrew Marantz: When you dig into how democratic backsliding often works, it's very rare that it's just an edict that goes out from the government that says, "Starting tomorrow, there will be no more democracy."

Micah Loewinger: I spoke to Andrew Marantz in June.

Andrew Marantz: I think a lot of times when someone like Christopher Rufo, who, I think, you could argue is the most influential activist of the last few years, goes to Hungary, a lot of what they see is a way of hollowing out democratic institutions from within without setting off people's alarm bells prematurely or without setting off people's alarm bells even maturely.

Micah Loewinger: You actually quote a Hungarian social scientist named Péter Krekó, who told you, "The way they do it here and the way they're starting to do it in your country as well, they don't need to use too much open violence against us. The new way is cheaper, easier, looks nice on TV." [laughs] Oh, God. When I read that, I was like--

Andrew Marantz: [laughs] That's the first section of the piece. Yes, it's not great news because you can get away with a lot if you do it subtly without turning the heat up so fast that the proverbial frog jumps out of the water. Viktor Orbán was prime minister first from 1998 to 2002. At that time, he was a center-right conservative who governed democratically. Then he gets kicked out, and he gives this famous speech where he says the homeland can never be in opposition, meaning we've just lost an election, but in some sense we haven't really lost because we are the people, and the people can never actually be in opposition.

Then he comes back in 2010, and he's not into liberal democracy anymore. At that point, he starts referring to himself as an illiberal democrat. I think what Orbán actually means by illiberal democracy is, "We'll just keep the parts of democracy that I like because they keep me in power."

Micah Loewinger: "The parts of democracy that allow me to be elected, the parts of democracy that allow me to change the constitution." That's all good stuff.

Andrew Marantz: Yes. Another word for this is competitive authoritarianism. You do still have elections. That's what the competitive part means.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Let's dig into what you think Americans can learn from what's taken place in Hungary. You visited the Budapest campus of Central European University, which opened in 1991 and was funded by George Soros, of all people, the final boss of right-wing conspiracy theories. It was also widely respected and accredited in the United States. CEU initially had the support of Orbán and then quickly lost favor when he took his nationalist turn. What did you see when you visited there in January?

Andrew Marantz: CEU was founded right after the Soviet regime fell. George Soros, at the time, was one of the big funders and founders of the pro-democracy movements that were growing up in the ashes of the post Soviet regime. Actually, one of the big pro-democracy student activists who George Soros was supporting at the time was Viktor Orbán. CEU was seen as one of these pillars of a new open society that you would need in order to rebuild after all the repression that had gone on.

Then, after Orbán took this hyper-nationalist, illiberal turn, he started to say, "Okay, well, we don't want all these free-thinking urban intellectuals. That's really inconvenient for the regime." Eventually, he passed a law that didn't mention CEU or George Soros in the law, but the effect of the law was that any country that had dual accreditation in Hungary and outside of Hungary had to jump through a bunch of new regulatory hoops that he created. The overall effect was, CEU can no longer give out degrees in Hungary. What you have now is there's a building called CEU Budapest, but it's kind of a hollowed-out shell of its former self. I called it a Potemkin University.

Micah Loewinger: You described this laminated sign dated months prior that was taped to a locked door that read, "The PhD labs at the Budapest site will be closed." You encountered a young guy on a computer who turned out to be working for a video editing startup, and he was just renting an office in the building for a month. It's literally there, but by any honest description, it's dead.

Andrew Marantz: If you asked me, is there a CEU Budapest? It would be hard for me to know how to answer that question, which is itself a mind-bending thing.

Micah Loewinger: You spoke with Istvan Kiss, who is the director of a right-wing think tank funded by the Orbán government called the Danube Institute. How did he receive a progressive New Yorker writer from the United States?

Andrew Marantz: What a lot of people will say on the right is, "I'm not anti-liberal. I have classical liberal values. I enjoy talking to people who disagree with me, and I don't like woke strictures on freedom of speech." I think there's enough of a performance of those values that they enjoy talking to people they disagree with. I enjoy talking with them, too. We had a perfectly pleasant conversation. When I would say, "Come on, it's pretty clear that the Orbán government is using its power in these ways that seem to be pushing the boundaries of legality," usually, what the defenders of the government would say is, "I don't even know what you're talking about." We had these basically incommensurate views of reality.

Micah Loewinger: What was something where you felt like you were speaking two different languages?

Andrew Marantz: Well, part of it is that a lot of these people have convinced themselves that they're just rectifying an imbalance that was perpetuated by the left. Often in Hungary, people will say that, but they'll say it with regard to communism. We're not trying to stuff the courts full of our loyalists. We're just trying to get rid of all those old communist judges that couldn't be trusted. We're not trying to put the media under our thumb. We're just trying to get rid of the old media that was left over from the communist regime, that sort of thing.

Micah Loewinger: You're a journalist, so how do you know he's not just trying to manipulate you and spread party messaging versus he actually lives within this reality, and something outside of it is inconceivable?

Andrew Marantz: Oh, I think it could be both. I do think that it's possible to have a worldview that is not pure incoherent parroting of state propaganda that says, "Look, this is what the Hungarian people wanted. This is where we get to the paradox of illiberal democracy," which is, Orbán does win democratic elections, and Trump did win at least one popular vote in a democratic election, this most recent one. You can make a very simple pro-illiberal democracy argument, and it goes like this. "The people voted for this, so shut up."

Now, I don't find that argument persuasive, but I don't think it's incoherent. You look at people like Viktor Orbán, people like Bukele in El Salvador, people like Modi in India, they're very, very popular. I think they've become popular by doing things that I would consider anti-democratic. Some of that has to do with two different definitions of democracy that are embedded in the same word. There's one version of democracy that is just, did you win the election or not?

According to that definition of democracy, it's like, why are we even having this conversation? According to the definition of democracy that has to do with things like the rule of law, things like the republican with a small r balance of powers, things like you have to do what courts say when they tell you to do stuff, things like you can't just fill the whole government with your loyalists if the rules say you can't do that. Doing those anti-democratic things, I think, is an abrogation of the rules. It's not clear, actually, what the remedy is when the two versions of democracy are in conflict with each other.

Micah Loewinger: At least in the first 100 days, Trump is historically highly unpopular currently, and yet similar behavior that we've seen in the Orbán regime in Hungary is met with a different kind of popularity. Why do you think it's worked well for him there?

Andrew Marantz: Well, because he's a really good politician, and he's actually, in many ways, very responsive to what people want. He's always running polls, he's always running these kind of informal plebiscites. We have this view of, if you're a non-democratic leader, you just don't give a [bleep] about public opinion and you don't take it into account. In the 21st century, at least, a lot of these leaders are very tapped into public opinion. This is actually another problem with democracy that is sometimes called the tyranny of the majority.

In the Jim Crow South, Southern states were anti-democratic terror regimes that were run by white supremacists that were democratically popular if you only counted white people. Often, if you give people enough of what they want, either materially or spiritually or in terms of a patriotic narrative, they'll overlook a lot of things. This is true of Trump also. If you give people something to believe in, like MAGA, and you give them a certain benefit of some kind, and then you say, as an implicit part of the deal, "I'm also going to do a little cronyism on the side and let Jared Kushner go do some real estate deals," that can kind of work as a tacit democratic bargain.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, more of my interview with Andrew Marantz in which he describes the hollowed-out media in Hungary as if every TV channel was Fox News. This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - The Bad Plus: (Theme From) Chariots Of Fire]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. You're listening to a show we originally aired in June in which I sat down for an extended conversation with The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz. When it comes to the media, what Andrew learned when he was examining Hungary's diminishing democracy is that the press doesn't keel over and die on a given day. It's extinguished slowly. Andrew spoke to Gábor Miklósi, a veteran investigative journalist who witnessed the gradual death of the Hungarian media firsthand.

Andrew Marantz: He worked at Index, which was one of the top news sites in the country. Independent paper of record. It was bought by a company that I think was controlled by a kind of Orbán loyalist. Ownership changed hands, and he was worried about editorial interference. Then at first, the editorial interference didn't really show up, or he thought maybe it showed up. There was a headline that got changed at the last minute, and no one would really tell him why. There was no real bright line for a long, long, long time. Then eventually, when the bright lines piled up and piled up, he left.

The way it was described to me was like, if Fox News was basically every TV channel and the New York Post was like every newspaper. He now works at Partizán, which is really the most important independent media outlet in the country. It's mostly a YouTube channel. I spent some time at the studios of Partizán. Again, there's all this ambiguity, right? It's sort of like the CEU thing. People would tell me, "Oh, the Hungarian media is cooked. It's done for." Then I show up in Budapest, and Partizán is this really popular YouTube channel. It's operating openly. The government knows about it. Everyone knows about it.

I thought, "Oh, this is some dissident, scrappy media enterprise. I'll have to go in secret to some person who can connect me over signal to someone who's in exile in Portugal somewhere." No. The head of Partizán, the founder of it, Márton Gulyás, just met me in the parking lot and said, "Hey, welcome to Partizán." Then we walked upstairs into the control room, and I watched them film an interview with Ben Rhodes.

Again, it's like all this kind of ambiguity and plausible deniability all the way down. When I would ask someone like Márton Gulyás, "Okay, you run this popular YouTube channel that is dissident media that is giving a platform to enemies of the regime. Why doesn't the regime just shut you down?" He was like, "Well, I don't know. How would they do that?"

Micah Loewinger: He's a really interesting character. He seems like somebody who kind of crab walked into a political dissident pundit role. How did he get into this line of work?

Andrew Marantz: Márton started as a kind of avant-garde theater director, and then started getting worried because of the cuts to arts programs that the state was doing at the time. From there, he got more and more involved in activism. When they went after CEU, he led some protests. When they went after other universities, at one point, he went over to the presidential palace and tried to throw a bucket of paint on the palace, and completely failed, and got arrested before he could even throw the paint.

Márton Gulyás: I was arrested for 72 hours.

Micah Loewinger: This is Márton Gulyás, founder of Partizán.

Márton Gulyás: I was sentenced to 300 hours community work, which was one of the best things which happened to me by the state because I spent the 300 hours helping people who are living on the streets, providing them blankets, cup of tea, or some kind words. I met with so many incredible lives, who are right now forced to live on the street. It reinforced my belief that that type of journalism, that type of activism is absolutely necessary in this country.

Micah Loewinger: I was trying to learn more about your arrest and the trial. The first thing that came up on Google was this English-language press release on a website called About Hungary, which seems to be run by the Orbán regime. It said, "Critics noted that Gulyash is notorious for trying to promote his own image and failing YouTube show, arranging outrageous public stunts to attract press attention." I see you smiling. I'm assuming you've gotten pretty used to these types of attacks.

Márton Gulyás: Absolutely. I love these type of attacks. It's a kind of badge of honor, which we are proud to wear.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, your YouTube channel is not failing. It's been quite successful, and it's evolved a lot over the years. Give me some examples of the most important stories that you've covered or reported.

Márton Gulyás: The leader of the opposition right now, who is Péter Magyar and who is right now running the most successful opposition party in the country. This is the first time since 2010 when a single party showing a significant lead against Orbán. This guy appeared on our channel for the first time in Hungary. When he accepted the interview request from me, he was absolutely unknown for the wider public. The publication of the show, it was a live stream.

It was at the same time when Beyoncé just published her latest video clip, and we were head-to-head in the first 24 hours. Of course, after 24 hours, Beyoncé surpassed us, unfortunately. Maybe an interview with her would surpass that. I would be open to that. If anyone can, please let her know that I would love, I would really love to talk to her. She's the greatest.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Well, I'll let her know.

Márton Gulyás: Okay. Please, please, please text her.

Micah Loewinger: What we've heard in the United States is that the independent press in Hungary has been slowly eroded. Can you describe for me how did that happen? What do American journalists need to watch out for?

Márton Gulyás: One thing we didn't make, and I think that's a failure of the entire Hungarian journalistic community. When they started to kick out journalists, for example, from the Parliament or ban certain type of journalists from the Parliament, the entire community should have stood up and should have demonstrate or somehow say that no, all of us should be accepted or none of us should be there.

Micah Loewinger: What you're describing is already happening. We see the White House press corps being slowly replaced by right-wing influencers whose entire currency with their audience and with the Donald Trump presidency is repeating misinformation and government-approved talking points. We've seen attempts to kick out the Associated Press for not capitulating on using certain kinds of language that the government wants, like calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. This was grounds for cutting out one of America's oldest news organizations.

The erosion that you're describing is well underway. I'm curious if there are other pieces of advice, things that you believe Hungarian journalists took too long to put a name to before it was too late.

Márton Gulyás: Maybe it will sound strange, but I think it's very important even in the most hostile times to be as fair as possible to Trump administration.

Micah Loewinger: Be as fair as possible?

Márton Gulyás: Yes, absolutely. Try to regulate your anger, try to regulate all of your bad emotions and feelings. If you lose your temper, if you lose your coolness, if you lose your professionality, there will be a lot of bad mouthing against you and against other journalists. You have to focus on the rational part of the policymaking of the Trump administration. I think in the longer term, it grants you a certain type of respect, even if they don't show it. I say this from experience, because we are absolutely openly critical of the government, but we are critical of the opposition as well.

Don't imprison your audience into any type of bubble, because that's extremely dangerous. Even if you think that their bubble is the threat on democracy, if you are creating another bubble and you're forcing your audience to live within the limits of that bubble, you are not providing an alternative. You are just copy-pasting the problem.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you about the current political and imminent legal threats to the work that you do. On the night of May 13th, a new law was introduced to the Hungarian Parliament called On Transparency in the Public Sphere. What would this law do if it's passed? How would it affect Partizán?

Márton Gulyás: The law which was submitted to the Parliament grants the Hungarian government sweeping powers to designate NGOs and media organizations as threats to the national sovereignty, with virtually no legal or objective criteria. Once an organization is listed, receiving any foreign support, whether direct or indirect, will require a prior approval from the Hungarian Anti-Money Laundering Authority.

Without this approval, any such funding will be subject to a punitive financial penalty amounting to 25 times its value. For example, $100 grant can cause you $2,500 penalty. In practice, this mechanism serves as a de facto ban on foreign funding. Not just from the US but from any other European Union country. For example, there are Hungarian minorities living in Romania or in Slovakia. If you would like to send any type of funding or support to any type of journalism or to any NGO, it would also be taken as a kind of unwanted foreign support, which is insane.

Micah Loewinger: If this law passes, how will it affect your journalism and the future of an opposition movement in Hungary?

Márton Gulyás: It would mean that receiving this type of donations would be absolutely impossible. Without receiving these type of donations, we cannot operate on the level we are operating right now.

Micah Loewinger: What's the mood around the office? How are you feeling?

Márton Gulyás: We are inspired because till this new legislation will be passed, we have time. Right now, we are running our biggest fundraising campaign. Our goal is to raise as much money as possible till the legislation will be passed, because by that, we can absolutely provide our budget for 2026. I'm very positive that they cannot harm us in the short term. Of course, long-term is a different case, but we are fighting back every possible meanings in order to defend ourselves and sustain our operation.

Micah Loewinger: There's an awful analogy that we've been talking about a lot: the boiling frog. The idea that the frog doesn't realize it's in hot water until it's already too late, and it's been cooked alive. It's the slow creep of authoritarianism that Orbán has been so successful in implementing. We in the United States are living through something that you've already lived through. What should American journalists be looking out for?

Márton Gulyás: First of all, Orbán is a chef. That type of recipe, boiling the frog. He's a Michelin star of international politics. I really have to emphasize, I think your situation is drastically different than the Hungarian ones. Orbán is very strategic, very focused, and patient. Donald Trump is nothing like that. He's way more impulsive. He doesn't have this kind of a strategic capacity and patience for that.

Micah Loewinger: You really believe that the United States and Hungary are so different that our future may not look so much like your present? I'm still slightly confused by in what ways you see our countries as being so distinct.

Márton Gulyás: Look, you are rich enough to have different type of elites and you are rich enough to have white movements, unions, other non-governmental organizations, so you have this counterpower capacity against the tyranny, not like Hungary. We don't have strong unions, we don't have a strong presence of the civil society, and we don't have that type of a strong and rich field of journalism, which you have. Not just on the national level, but on the local level as well.

I think these type of things are extremely important when we are talking about how the civil society can defend itself, not just from the tyranny coming from Donald Trump, but also the tyranny coming from big tech companies, the democratic parties, and those who are financing them.

Micah Loewinger: Márton, thank you very much.

Márton Gulyás: Thank you, Micah. Thank you very much for your time and also for your attention. I really enjoyed it.

Micah Loewinger: Márton Gulyás is the founder and lead anchor of Partizán. Now for the final part of my conversation with Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker, in which we deal with the role of denial in the erosion of democracy. There are a number of people in his story who don't support the Orbán regime, but still live pretty good lives, at least when they don't think too hard about the government. One of them put it this way to him, "If I admit that I live in an autocracy, this raises a lot of inconvenient questions." Andrew, what are those inconvenient questions?

Andrew Marantz: Should I vote? Does it matter if I protest? Does it matter if I pay taxes? The basic civic norms kind of tacitly depend on living in a basically legitimate regime.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think that there are inconvenient questions that Americans are avoiding right now?

Andrew Marantz: When a political scientist told me over the phone, and this happened multiple times, "The United States is not currently a democracy," I could kind of feel myself not wanting to hear those words because I don't know what that implies exactly. Like, if you're on the subway and it says, "We're being held for train traffic in front of us, but don't worry, we'll get going again in 10 minutes." Then you just sit there for 10 minutes and wait.

If you get the announcement over the subway, that just says, "We are no longer a subway, and we will not be functioning as a subway in the future. Goodbye." What do you do at that point? Do you break out of the train? Do you form a coalition with the other passenger? What do you do? There's no roadmap for that. I don't know, is the answer. I don't know what questions I'm avoiding asking. Should I stay in this country, or collectively, what is the future of the country if it is not a fully democratic one? I don't know.

I'm on On the Media. Just taking the media example, when I was reporting at Columbia, people were telling me sensitive information, and some of them were speaking to me anonymously, and they were very scared because political prisoners were being disappeared all around them. They would say to me, "I don't know if I can tell you this. If I tell you, how will you protect my anonymity?" I said what journalists say when a source says that to them, which is the same spiel I always say, "We are willing to do anything, including going to jail, to protect our sources." Those are words I've said a hundred times.

This time, when I said those words, I went, "How much do I really mean it?" Because this time, it feels much more real. I decided, "Okay, I really, actually am willing to go to jail to protect these sources." It was a much more real thought process. If that's happening for me, where I'm situated in society, there's probably a different version of that that applies to almost everyone, or at least everyone who's seeing things the way I'm seeing them.

Micah Loewinger: You spoke to a lot of experts, historians, political scientists. Not everyone felt that this moment was so exceptional. Michael McConnell, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford, put it this way, "Some of what Trump's attempting to do is unlawful, and he exaggerates it to make it sound even scarier than it is. The likely end result is that he will be checked by the courts."

He went on to tell you that Andrew Jackson had authoritarian instincts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt fired civil servants for ideological reasons. He attempted to pack the Supreme Court. He violated precedent, though not necessarily the Constitution. He won a third term and then a fourth term. Is there something to that?

Andrew Marantz: Yes, I definitely think there's something to that, for sure. I think the most challenging objection that I've heard and thought about is one that McConnell also raised, which is, "Okay, how worried about this would you be if the boundaries were being pushed by someone whose policies you actually like? How much can we separate 'this is something that I think is terrible' from 'this is something that I think is unconstitutional'?" I think that's a real legitimate challenge. I don't think we've ever lived in a perfect democracy, certainly at no time before 1965 and even after that.

I think the Patriot Act was a real blow to our democracy. I think droning American civilians was a real blow to our democracy. The last thing I want to do is glorify the status quo ante and say, "If we could just get back to that, everything would be perfect." I think it's important to be clear about that. It's also important to be clear that the underlying structures, being deeply problematic, laid the groundwork for the crisis, but it's not the same as the crisis. You can say that weird norm-shifting behavior or troubling behavior has happened before without letting anyone off the hook for the stuff they're doing now.

Micah Loewinger: Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who was a co-author of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die, was quoted in your piece. You spoke to him about the concept of competitive authoritarianism. He's helped popularize that term and that idea, but he pushed back on the idea that our democracy is definitely dying. He said, "We're not El Salvador and we're not Hungary. We spent centuries as a society building up democratic muscle, and we still have a lot of that muscle left. I'm just waiting for someone to use it."

Andrew Marantz: Levitsky, Lucan Way, all these other people I spoke to said, right now, we have crossed the line into authoritarianism. Then they said it's not the worst form of authoritarianism either in history or on the globe right now. We can get back from here. There are examples of this. Brazil, Poland, and, in fact, I even put it to Levitsky that How Democracies Die is kind of the wrong metaphor, because death is permanent, and what you're talking about here is not permanent. He said, "Yes, you're right, dying is a bad metaphor. I guess I shouldn't have used it."

Micah Loewinger: "Shouldn't have named my book that."

Andrew Marantz: [laughs] Exactly. I was surprised how fast he threw his own title under the bus. I think something can be really, really, really bad without necessarily being irreversible.

Micah Loewinger: The Law and Justice Party in Poland, which had entrenched its power up till 2023, as you write, pushed too far, notably with a series of unpopular anti-abortion measures, and a couple of years ago lost its majority in Brazil. Bolsonaro tried to rig his own reelection, but he failed, and he's soon going to stand trial for conspiracy to overthrow the government. They survived. With all the caveats of comparisons and analogies, are there lessons that we can draw?

Andrew Marantz: I think the comparison is it's never over. What's the civic muscle, what's the democratic muscle that Levitsky is referring to? It's a lot of things. It's popular movements. It's having an opposition that is not feckless and that's actually willing to offer something that people want to vote for. It's institutions like the one Levitsky works at, which is Harvard University. I don't want to be out here saying Harvard University is the heart and soul of the resistance.

The way that Harvard responded to the onslaught from Trump was substantively different than the way Columbia did. The way that Paul Weiss, the big law firm, caved to the Trump administration was very different than law firms like Jenner & Block and WilmerHale that decided to fight him in court.

From where I sit, the saviors of democracy are not going to be white shoe law firms and Ivy League schools and the Supreme Court and norms and institutions. That's not my model of how democracy works. It comes from all corners. I don't think you can count any part of it out. When someone like Levitsky talks about civic muscle, that's the kind of thing he's talking about. We have a long, uninterrupted tradition of having presidential elections every four years. We've never not had one. We've never had a military coup. We had January 6th. That was the closest we've come since the Civil War. That kind of stuff matters. Those habits matter a lot. I don't think we're totally cooked yet. I just think we're in a lot of trouble.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew, thank you very much.

Andrew Marantz: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: I don't want to thank you for saying that, actually, but I have to. It's the tradition.

Andrew Marantz: [laughs] We're not totally cooked. Isn't that good news?

Micah Loewinger: It is good news, but it was half-assed good news at the end of a lot of bad news.

Andrew Marantz: [laughs] Yes. That's all I can deliver right now.

Micah Loewinger: Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the article Is It Happening Here? Coming up, the mythical 3.5% rule of resistance movements. This is On the Media.

[MUSIC - Meridian String Quartet: Life On Mars?]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. I was mulling over my interview with Andrew Marantz when I began watching Andor Season 2, the Star Wars spinoff show on Disney+. I know that resistance to authoritarianism is pretty much the main theme of Andor and Star Wars broadly, but I was particularly impressed by one allegory from the latest season. Some moderate spoilers ahead.

Season 2 kicks off with a cartoonishly evil boardroom meeting featuring the Galactic Empire's most cunning fascists as they hatch a covert plan to further consolidate power. Their target? Ghorman. A peaceful planet, home to Kalkite, a rare mineral needed to advance the Emperor's secret agenda.

News clip: Deep, substrate, foliated Kalkite.

News clip: Now we will have to control Ghorman with a hand firm enough to silence any resistance.

Micah Loewinger: How to extract Kalkite from Ghorman's core, rendering the planet unstable and unlivable without a revolt from the locals. Our villain, Dedra Meero, an Empire intelligence officer, has a plan.

Dedra Meero: Propaganda will only get you so far. You need a radical insurgency you can count on. You need Ghorman rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing.

Micah Loewinger: Under Meero's leadership, the Empire quietly encourages the growth of the Ghorman resistance, letting it recruit and hold meetings and arm itself with stolen Imperial weapons, culminating in a packed protest outside the Empire's Ghorman headquarters.

The peaceful Ghor protesters have no idea that they've been lured into a trap. Things start to turn ugly when Imperial security forces are sent into the crowd of protesters to provoke them. A rooftop sniper is then ordered to deliberately shoot one of his own men: an Empire grunt working his way through the mob. The troops think that they've been attacked by the Ghor and open fire. Then a small group of armed rebels fire back. Meanwhile, journalists approved by the Empire are on the scene to film the bloodbath, piping the regime's narrative into TV sets across the galaxy. A justification for even more repression and cover for the Kalkite mining mission.

News clip: Questions are being asked about how an insurrection of this scale could be mounted without the aid and support of outside rebel assembly assistance. We're sure to learn a great deal more about what happened here today and the price we'll pay for our own safety.

Micah Loewinger: The show invites us to wonder whether a strictly non-violent stance would have worked better for the Ghorman rebels, or whether their puny, isolated movement ever stood a chance at all. Back on Earth, scholars have applied similar questions to real-world resistance movements, both successes and failures, producing a snappy statistic that's gone viral on social media in recent months.

News clip: Everybody's heard this 3.5% figure that's going around.

News clip: 3.5% is needed in this country to enact real social change.

News clip: Standing up to authoritarianism. It takes about 3.5% of the population.

Micah Loewinger: For reference, it's estimated somewhere between 1.2% and 1.8% of the country turned out for those big No Kings protests in June.

Maria J. Stephan: The 3.5% rule is based on the research that Erica Chenoweth and I conducted back in 2010.

Micah Loewinger: Maria J. Stephan is a political scientist and the co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works. In a conversation we aired earlier this year, she told me that her and Erica's study examined all known resistance campaigns over the last century to see whether violent or non-violent tactics were more effective. The major finding was that non-violent campaigns, which relied on protests, boycotts, strikes, succeeded twice as often as violent ones due to something known as mass diverse participation, which is where that 3.5% comes in.

Maria J. Stephan: Exactly. No government has been able to stay in power when 3.5% of the population has engaged in active protest.

Micah Loewinger: You published an article this week in Just Security called Big Tents and Collective Action Can Defeat Authoritarianism. You cite some more recent successful pro-democracy campaigns, like the one in Brazil.

Speaker 19: The former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been banned from running for public office until 2030.

Micah Loewinger: In South Korea.

News clip: South Korea's Constitutional Court ruled unanimously to uphold the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Micah Loewinger: In Serbia.

News clip: Serbian Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned following weeks of massive anti-corruption protests.

Micah Loewinger: When you say that a broad, diverse coalition is essential to chipping away at regime power, can you give some examples of key pillars of society that have gotten involved in resistance movements that ultimately succeeded?

Maria J. Stephan: Most recently, you look at the key roles played by different pillars in Brazil, for example. You had a broad front that brought together business leaders, Catholic and evangelical faith leaders who publicly condemned the totalitarianism of the Bolsonaro regime and eventually called for his impeachment. Then, when Bolsonaro attempted to overturn the results of the election and launch a coup in early 2023, important pillars like the Episcopal Conference, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, vehemently denounced the attack on democracy and the rule of law.

Similarly, you look at the case of South Korea, where late last year, President Yoon declared martial law. He accused the opposition of being infiltrated by North Korean spies, tried to prevent the members of Parliament from meeting and convening. You had a mass mobilization in South Korea, not only the general public, youth, civic organizations, but another powerful pillar, the South Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, announced that they were going to launch an indefinite general strike until martial law was lifted. The President was impeached, and the country is on the pathway to turning things around.

These are just a few examples of critical pillars like faith, like unions, like the business sector, that have played a key role in helping to reverse democratic backsliding.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, it was also trade unions and shipyard workers who played an important role in the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s. Also, in the 1980s, the People Power movement in the Philippines.

News clip: Tonight, as Mr. Marcos steels himself for a life in exile, People Power has taken over his beloved Malacanang.

Micah Loewinger: This one's really interesting because the resistance movement successfully targeted security forces. Tell us a little bit about that.

Maria J. Stephan: The research shows that when members of the security forces refuse to obey orders to shoot at protesters or to engage in repression, that that tends to signify the end of autocratic regimes. You mentioned the case of the Philippines, where there was mass mobilization by all segments of the Filipino society in response to the repression and corruption of the Marcos regime. You had Catholic leaders using the national radio to encourage people to follow their consciences and work for human rights and freedoms. You had Catholic nuns who were out on the streets, kneeling and saying the rosary.

When they confronted the security for in the streets and the security forces saw who they were being asked to repress, they refused to go along with orders to shoot at the protesters. Not only that, in the Philippines, entire units of the security forces defected to the side of the pro-democracy opposition, which was vital to the success of the pro-democracy movement. The security pillar is really very important.

Micah Loewinger: On one hand, protests, civil resistance feed into themselves. They help attract new people to the movement. Often, these movements require some kind of righteous narrative to bring people in. On the other hand, we saw, I mean, just using the campaign to boycott Tesla, which was, I think it's fair to say, highly successful. It helped push Elon Musk out of an active role in DOGE. It also provided firepower to our current administration, which wanted to cast this largely peaceful protest movement as being violent, pointing to the vandals who are firebombing Tesla dealerships and attacking cars and the like. This led to nonstop coverage from Fox News and other right-wing outlets.

News clip: We just found out another dealership in Oregon was just shot.

News clip: Police report that this Tesla dealership was hit by multiple gunshot rounds overnight.

News clip: They just charged an Albuquerque man in connection with firebombing a Tesla dealership, so the DOJ means it.

Maria J. Stephan: This is a tried and true tactic of autocrats around the world, is to take any form of violence, vandalism, even if it's in the tiny minority of actions, and use it to discredit the protesters. One thing I would say is that the Tesla takedown organizers have been explicit in their commitment to non-violence. They've denounced acts of vandalism. Those engaging in acts of vandalism are not endorsed by the movement itself.

Micah Loewinger: Your 3.5% rule has caught on as a kind of shorthand rule of thumb for communicating the idea that non-violent civil resistance can and has worked throughout history. Of course, more modern regimes are also studying this history. They also understand these tactics. In fact, you've found that violent and non-violent resistance are less successful than they used to be.

Maria J. Stephan: Yes, that's right. It's in part due to the fact that authoritarian regimes are adapting their repressive technologies. They're not just relying on brutal force; they're using surveillance. That is making it more difficult for these campaigns to gain ground, gain support. On the other hand, we've observed that movements themselves have exhibited weaknesses. The average size of non-violent campaigns has shrunk considerably, and that has meant that fewer people have been willing to join. At the same time, these are iterative campaigns. These authoritarian regimes learn adaptation, and so, too, do activists and movements. They learn how to organize around repression.

Micah Loewinger: What would you say to listeners who are frightened about the current direction of the United States but feel powerless, feel that, as an individual, they have no agency?

Maria J. Stephan: I understand why many people across this country are feeling the fear, the disorientation, because that's the goal of this regime, that's the goal of autocrats, is to overwhelm us, to make us feel like we are powerless to bring about change. I would just say that when you look around the world, even in the face of some of the most brutal forms of tyranny that have been successfully challenged by people who organize and avail themselves of a wide range of tactics and exert their power, often in joyful, humorous ways, to go against the fear and the darkness of these regimes. Their ability to prevail time and time again is, I think, what offers hope in what is otherwise some dark times.

Micah Loewinger: Maria, thank you very much.

Maria J. Stephan: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Maria J. Stephan is the co-lead of the Horizons Project and co-author of the book Why Civil Resistance Works.

[MUSIC - Starr Parodi: When Doves Cry]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Micah Lowinger.

 

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