Orbánism 2.0
How do you adapt a model for an autocracy of 10 million to a country the size of the U.S.? With an Extortion Racket model for undermining democracy.
September 19, 2025
Mediated by Project 2025, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Danube Institute, the Trump Administration has been faithfully instituting the Orbánist playbook. One hopeful thought I have from time to time is that the strategies that overcame democracy in a nation of ten million would fail in one 33 times larger, with a complex federal system and a large, diverse and well-funded civil society.
I’m reasonably sure that is true, and I’m also coming to suspect it doesn’t matter. Orbánism is adapting to the American ecosystem, evolving before our eyes to evade our defenses.
Orbán packed the court and changed the constitution to cement his party’s grip on power. These key moves allowed further tinkering with laws and regulations with little likelihood of rebuke from the bench or the polls.
Attacks on civil society commenced. The government passed a law, dubbed “Lex CEU,” that eventually forced Central European University, perhaps the most prestigious university in Eastern Central Europe, to leave Hungary for a more hospitable host nation. Orbán associates took over the board of trustees at the next-ranked Hungarian university. The government passed a law banning gender studies; departments were gutted and academics dismissed. The takeover of higher education was not total, but it was close enough.
Meanwhile, Orbán cronies were steadily purchasing media outlets critical of the government. As they did so, editorial policies were changed. Eventually, most of these newspapers, broadcast stations and websites were donated to a nonprofit with ties to the government. A de facto state media was created.
Attacks on nonprofits were somewhat less successful. The government twice enacted “foreign agent laws,” and on two occasions conducted police raids for the purposes of auditing opposition NGOs. But groups like the Hungarian Helsinki Committee continue to operate openly and defiantly today. But, I have argued elsewhere, control of the media and an electoral playing board tilted towards Fidesz makes toleration of dissent relatively easy.
Elections, the judiciary, universities, the nonprofit sector, and the media. Control those and you have an autocratic lock on an erstwhile democracy.
All of these are considerably more difficult here.
Because elections are locally managed in the United States, there are limits on how much an autocratic president can rig the rules in his favor. The move to mid-decade gerrymandering shows that there are steps that can be taken, and potentially effective ones, as cracking and packing to ensconce Republicans has already tilted the playing field significantly to the right of national public opinion. But it seems likely that, if Republican states go through with extreme, off-season gerrymandering, Democratic states will follow suit. The result is terrible for democracy, but perhaps unavoidable.
There are good reasons to worry that the Supreme Court will rule favorably for Trump too often, and that the Senate will continue to stack the lower courts with cynics and ideologues. But state courts are unaffected, and the left is moving away from its historical reliance on the federal system.
There are hundreds of thousands of nonprofits in the United States, and nonprofit workers make up ten percent of the workforce. The economic contribution of the sector is enormous, contributing $1.4 trillion to the 2023 GDP. It is also highly decentralized. While a large number of nonprofits take federal money, the reductions and politicization of those funds has left many former grantees seeking other sources of support, reducing the leverage the White House has on the sector. Individual donors, tens of millions of them, make up the bulk of charitable giving, though the number has fallen in recent years, to 66% of the total last year. Corporations, the most potentially pliant source of funding, is only 7% of all giving, and few if any nonprofits are seriously dependent on it.
The American higher education system is vast, though the business model has already been weakened, and Trump Administration actions are kicking all three legs of the stool: federal grants which support research, high overhead rates on those grants enacted to make up for the loss of state-level funding decades ago, and international students, who typically pay full tuition, subsidizing schools and crucially, American students. At the same time, mass deportation efforts are affecting not only international students, but the thousands of foreign academics working in the United States. As Europe was wracked by war three quarters of a century ago, the U.S. benefited enormously from a brain drain of scientists and researchers who came to find the culture of American academia hospitable, and built arguably the greatest system of higher education in human history. Now, the brain drain is going in reverse.
Nonetheless, the higher education system is fully decentralized, and there is little constitutional room for laws that exert control over universities en masse.
The media, likewise, is a mixed bag: it is a period of great flux and uncertainty, and the business model for supporting journalism is uncertain. But while broadcast media is increasingly monopolized and vulnerable to exploitation, there are far too many independent outlets to control.
In short, control of the institutions necessary to ensure an Orbán-style autocracy is highly unlikely in the United States. But what if control isn’t necessary? What if the institutions of civil society can be coaxed into turning themselves over to the autocratic state?
In a complex, decentralized society with overlapping legal and regulatory systems that are independently controlled, the “invade and occupy” model of controlling the opposition, common both to classical fascism and in a metaphorical sense at least of Hungarian Orbánism, won’t work. But an “extortion racket” model might.
There were signs of things to come early on, when the Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about Max Eden, whose thoughts on higher education have mirrored what the Trump Administration has done:
In December, Max Eden of the conservative American Enterprise Institute published a plan titled “A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education.” Eden, a Yale University graduate, works as a kind of roving culture warrior. … What Stephen Miller is to immigration, Eden is to education.
The second item in Eden’s scheme is “destroy Columbia University,” as an example to “scare universities straight.”
Rather than find ways to actually control civil society institutions, in fact, the Trump Administration has gone with a head-on-a-stake approach, attacking specific, high profile institutions in order to scare the others. Columbia survived after capitulating, and the Department of Education turned its sights to Harvard in a long and ongoing campaign of harassment. Getting CBS and ABC to bow down and cancel Colbert and Kimmel sends a signal to media corporations and media figures alike. Forcing law firms perceived as enemies of the Administration into pro bono agreements does the same. And soon, it seems, we will likely see attacks on philanthropy that aim to send a chill through nonprofits and those who fund them.
A relative lack of fear is something that distinguishes Orbánism (which I think of as the Platonic form of New Authoritarianism) from older authoritarian models of governance. Nobody in Hungary seems particularly worried about running afoul of the state. But Trump is reintroducing fear in Orbánism 2.0, with the crucial difference that the fear in question isn’t of torture and death. It is fear of economic pain. In that sense, one might say that the fear is commingled with greed; for ABC, the leverage took the form of both the stick of FCC punishment and the carrot of approval for a merger.
Will it work? Not likely, not completely enough to stack the deck in favor of Republican autocratic rule. Some will continue to give in; there I have seen indications that one private foundation has begun to reconsider grants that could be interpreted through a DEI lens. Law firms remain divided between those who value the business opportunities continued access to the feds offers and those who see themselves as the staunch defenders of the rule of law. ABC caved, and faces a backlash that apparently has executives once again worried. Meanwhile, as I write, Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times has been dismissed, the judge calling the filing “vituperation and invective”and “decidedly improper and impermissible.”
But maybe the economic pressure points are not specific to the institutions being squeezed. Tariffs, attacks on higher education and other sectors, the firing of multitudes of civil servants, and many other actions of the Trump Administration seem poised to cause both short-term and long-term economic pain. Some economists say we are experiencing “early-onset stagflation,” where prices rise and employment, wages and productivity fall, as a result. In this context, the pressure on companies includes the moral quandary of keeping their employees employed as joblessness claims rise. Some philanthropies and service providers may rationalize capitulation in terms of the help that their beneficiaries urgently require. In short, if the economic outlook is sufficiently grim, there may be less appetite across the board for standing up to an autocrat, when the ability to put dinner on the table is urgently on the line.
It’s a nice country you got there. Be a shame if sometin’ happened to it.