Nonprofit organizations around New York (and around the country) are preparing to go to the legal mat over threats that the Trump administration will attempt to revoke their tax-exempt status or otherwise mire them in official actions like investigations into their services and offerings. That’s especially so if these offerings run counter to Trump’s extraordinarily broad war on “DEI,” which can encompass everything from LGBT+ rights to the environment.
Elon Musk’s DOGE team reportedly tried to put political commissars at the independent Vera Institute for Justice, for example, and the administration has broadly gone to war against lawyers, universities, and civil society groups that could oppose its agenda. Particularly notable was its assault on Harvard, which has involved efforts to freeze federal funds and potentially strip the university of its tax exempt status while blocking the enrollment of international students. International student visas as a whole have been targeted, with the administration canceling what could be thousands of visas over speech or, in many cases, no stated reason at all.
A lot of observers might read these developments as the work of an erratic government wantonly asserting power without any particular rhyme or reason, and there’s certainly an element of that, but this can best be understood as creating the conditions for a certain kind of authoritarianism that is less obvious than the image most people have of an antidemocratic system.
I made this point to some consternation on Bluesky the other day, but competitive authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily look that much different than liberal democracy. Through popular media and warped historical understandings, we have a pretty extremist vision of authoritarianism that looks more like totalitarianism: soldiers marching through streets, a populace living in the grip of complete fear and squalor, a fully state-owned or operated media that exclusively repeats the government line, and so on.
Yet if you walk today through the streets of Ankara or Budapest, things might look substantively as they do here: people will be sitting at cafés, having conversations about politics as readily as the weather. They’ll have office jobs in marketing, health, and education. They’ll plan vacations. Opposition parties still exist, as do independent news publishers. There are arts organizations of various types allowed to show art towards various tastes and intents. There’s a judiciary that holds trials, and you won’t really see many troops on the streets.
It’s only digging a little below the surface that it will become apparent that things don’t quite work as we’d expect in a democratic system. Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is headed for fifteen years in that role next month and has never stopped having elections or dismantled the trappings of a free society, but has managed to pretty successfully hollow out these institutions until they’re more of a façade of what once existed in their place.
Independent news has been hit with all manner of procedural obstacles and often bought up by Orbán’s friendly oligarchs. Civil liberties and legal groups have been hit with official action and baseless investigations that aren’t always literally shutting them down but make it impossible to act forcefully and independently. Universities have been brought to heel, and parts of the machinery of voting itself have been broadly captured.
It’s worth noting that all of this isn’t necessarily acutely unpopular. While Orbán’s Fidesz party’s supermajority has changed aspects of the Hungarian law and constitution to give themselves an edge up in elections, it’s still broadly accepted that they are continuously winning these elections with real public support. Yes, there are protests and discontent, but Orbán isn’t maintaining an iron grip on Hungarian society through force alone: his message of isolationism, anti-”wokeness,” anti-Europeanism, traditional values, and so on has been a winning message in part because he’s able to create a reality where all the institutions are geared towards spreading it.
This is a self-reinforcing cycle: a collapse of real opposition and counter-messaging leaves the party’s vision as the default one, and most people just aren’t politically plugged in enough to realize that they’re being presented a highly tailored version of reality that the government has been able to manufacture out of its own liberal use of authority and control of civil society. People are perfectly free to talk politics and express dissatisfaction amongst themselves, but anyone who tries to systematically and widely present an alternate vision immediately runs into some steep structural impediments.
If this is all sounding a bit familiar, it should. I don’t want to say this is a roadmap exactly, but Trump is known to be a big Orbán fan. At a Mar-a-Lago dinner last year, Trump said “there’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic”–a point that’s been echoed by others in his administration.
I worry sometimes that a chunk of the U.S. population is waiting for tanks to be rolling down Fifth Avenue to say “OK, this is authoritarianism.” Regardless of what happens, I think that outcome is quite unlikely, and it’s a mistake to think that everything right up until that point is on the right side of some magical authoritarianism line. This week, in a tearful address to staff, CBS News’ 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens announced his resignation, telling the assembled journalists, editors, and others that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes.’”
The company had been the target of a ridiculous lawsuit brought by Trump over its editorial decisions in airing an October interview with then-vice president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. The controlling shareholder of parent company Paramount, heiress Shari Redstone, also seems eager to get administration sign-off for a sale of her company and has reportedly kept tabs on the program’s coverage of Trump. She’s just one of several media and tech executives that have cozied up to the president, including Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, respectively, as well as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and, obviously, Elon Musk.
The upshot here is that all these things will continue to exist. There will still be 60 Minutes, Columbia University, the Kennedy Center, and myriad other nonprofits, news sources, civic groups and so on. Government departments like the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services will still be there, with the same offices and ostensible functions they had before. Most of the stuff that you do on a day-to-day basis will outwardly look more or less the same, even as things get more expensive and services break down.
But the universities might simply stop offering certain kinds of courses and doing certain types of research, some outlets will stay away from critical coverage of the government, some museums and artistic institutions just won’t produce “objectionable” content. The enhanced risk here is this doesn’t inflame the population as much as it makes it harder for people to understand what’s happening. I already called the 2024 election our first “post-truth election,” but that’s child’s play in comparison to a situation when a lot more institutions are drafted into spreading the administration’s version of reality, or at least stopped from providing an alternate one.
The only real way around this is all these institutions and their supporters standing together against it. Harvard saw the fiasco of Columbia’s capitulation and fought back hard, getting the Trump administration to admit it sent its demand letter “in error” and then using that as a springboard to file a federal lawsuit. Those of us who care about our institutions have to make it known that we won’t accept their mere existence, but insist on their independence and rights.
