Why fixing America is much harder than fixing Hungary
Cleaning up Trump's wreckage will prove especially tricky.
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When Peter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in Hungary last month, many hailed it as a sign that leaders of competitive autocracies can be defeated and cast out of office.
Magyar immediately began demanding the resignations of Fidesz-aligned judges, top officials, and media oligarchs aligned with the former autocrat. He also pledged to overhaul Hungary’s electoral law, aiming to dismantle the Fidesz-led “illiberal” framework and restore democratic checks and balances. He promised to create a new constitution, enforce a two-term limit for prime ministers, and restore media and academic freedom. Importantly, the new government also vowed to pursue justice against those who “plundered” the country for their own enrichment.
Some observers took Orbán’s defeat as a hopeful indication that the United States can also be repaired once a Democrat returns to the White House in 2029. In an interview that ran here in Public Notice, professor Kim Lane Scheppele highlighted how Magyar’s campaign could serve as a model for making corruption a major electoral issue in the US, as well as provide guidance for Democrats in terms of how they can engage with right-leaning voters in purple and red parts of the country.
It’s true that there are important lessons to be learned from how Maygar defeated Orbán at the ballot box. But the fact of the matter is that fixing Hungary is much easier than fixing the United States.
To the surprise of some, Orbán left office quietly, and his oligarch allies are already moving themselves and their ill-gotten assets out of the country. But in the United States, Trump his party are telegraphing they will use every means at their disposal to keep a Republican in office, regardless of how people vote. And as Public Notice has detailed, the regime has a frightening number of options with which to cling to power.
Even assuming a Democrat does retake the White House in 2029, the new president will find it far more difficult to restore democracy in America. There are a whole host of structural reasons for this, structures that are very difficult to circumvent without being willing to shatter norms. A Democrat who fails to do so will likely meet the same fate as Joe Biden: a hobbled president with a few modest accomplishments that are promptly erased by the next Republican in office.
The key factors that make rescuing American democracy extremely difficult are the Supreme Court, the Senate, gerrymandering, and the Constitution itself.
The uphill battle
Magyar’s Tisza Party won two-thirds of the seats in their unicameral parliament. This gives him and his party the ability to change the constitution, fire judges, and remove Fidesz loyalists embedded in the government. He has already told the Hungarian supreme court (known as the Curia) to resign before they are fired.
The United States, on the other hand, is stuck with justices appointed for life. The six GOP-aligned justices on the US Supreme Court have repeatedly demonstrated they are willing to grant extraordinary power to Republican presidents like Trump, while sharply curtailing the powers of Democratic ones. This includes overriding executive orders by a Democratic president, laws passed by a Democratic Congress, or neutering them over time like was just done to the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court will also likely prevent reforms within government. One of Magyar’s tasks in Hungary is to remove Fidesz loyalists from governmental positions. With complete control of the government, judiciary, and constitution, he has a path to do so.
The Trump administration has been reshaping the federal bureaucracy by firing old hands and requiring new hires to pass political litmus tests. The next Democratic administration probably won’t want a government staffed with people who think Trump won in 2020 and that January 6 rioters are patriots, but it’s doubtful a Republican-aligned Supreme Court would allow a Democratic administration to remove them, or strip them of their clearances, based on their political beliefs. Thus, Democrats face the intractable problem of fighting opposition by significant elements of the internal federal apparatus, with limited options to address it.
Democrats also have no plausible path to remove justices. Impeaching and removing them requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate and has never been done successfully.
Which brings us to the Senate itself. Because the Constitution allocates two Senate seats per state, Republicans have an outsized share of power in that chamber. To have a 50-50 shot of controlling the Senate, Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by about 6.6 percentage points. To get past the 60-vote filibuster, the margin would have to be something closer to 15 percent, which is clearly unrealistic in a hyper-polarized country, and getting to 67 percent goes even further into the realm of “never going to happen.”
Since there is not a plausible path for Democrats to reach 60 votes, they are at the mercy of the filibuster, and as a result are sharply limited in what sorts of laws they can pass to address the county’s descent toward competitive autocracy.
Democrats’ mission is complicated by the fact that a substantial number of them are still voting for Trump loyalists dedicated to keeping Republicans in power regardless of the letter or the spirit of the law. One of the great impediments to Democrats protecting democracy is that they keep bringing knives to gunfights by assuming they are playing the same game as Republicans.
There’s also the matter of the House of Representatives, where the end of the VRA and the race to gerrymander elections into meaninglessness is in full swing across the South. It is difficult, if not impossible, to vote for change when political actors have rigged the system to ensure that the incumbent party cannot be voted out of power. Democrats may struggle to control the House even in wave years as a result of the dozen seats Republicans will likely pick up due to the death of the VRA and the resulting disenfranchisement of Black people in the former Confederacy.
But where there’s political will, there’s a way
While all of this paints a dim picture of the United States’ ability to recover from the ongoing autocratic attempt, there are a few things Democrats can do should they win control of Congress and manage to have their candidate sworn in as president in January 2029.
The first is to fully investigate and prosecute anyone within the Trump administration or the broader federal government who committed crimes or helped cover them up. I warned in 2020 that it would be dangerous to let Trump go out like Nixon, and the Biden administration’s subsequent decision to pursue healing instead of accountability turned out to be disastrous. If there is no risk of significant prison time for corruption, graft, and self-dealing as a government official, then it will continue happening in the future.
Magyar’s campaign successfully ran on dismantling the “Orbán system” by strengthening anti-corruption measures, prosecuting those guilty of crimes, and pivoting Hungary toward a pro-EU, NATO-committed foreign policy. Despite all of the advantages Orbán built into the system for himself, Magyar’s vision didn’t scare away moderates. He’s no liberal, but he did not shy away from embracing bold structural changes to foreclose the rise of a future Orbán.
Another imperative for Democrats in 2029 is to expand the Supreme Court, perhaps to 13 justices — one for each circuit court district, as it used to be. This would require a measure of political will they could not muster after Biden won in 2020. It would violate norms, but the United States is in a crisis of democracy and the current make-up of the Supreme Court basically guarantees there’s no path to recovery.
If there is to be any chance of recovering from this autocratic attempt and restoring democracy in the United States, the Court must be expanded. Without dramatic Court reform, very little will be accomplished by any Democratic administration, and each successive Republican administration will plunge the country further into Russian-style autocracy.
Finally, Democrats must end the filibuster to pass meaningful legislation through the Senate. Currently, the filibuster prevents almost everything unrelated to the budget from passing. Reforming it will allow Democrats to address some of the most egregious judicial rulings and pass desperately needed legislation that has been all but impossible for generations due to the 60-vote threshold.
These are only partial solutions, but each is a necessary step toward restoring American democracy. Given how dire the situation is, the constraints of the Constitution, and the polarization of the United States, they are some of the only plausible steps that can be taken. They each represent a departure from the norms of governance, but Democratic leadership must muster the courage to recognize the realities of the situation, and embrace a bolder vision for what must be done.
Brynn Tannehill is a graduate of the Naval Academy, military aviator, and former Senior Analyst at the RAND Corporation. She is the author of “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.” She currently lives in British Columbia with her wife and three children.
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As to the seemingly insurmountable problem with SCOTUS … there is also shame. I don’t think casual acceptance of racism - or rape - is as acceptable today as it was in the Fifties (when I was a child). Already the Roberts Court is scrambling to defend its indefensible actions.
But not just the restoration of democracy … but of civility itself. Trump has introduced a milieu of deception, violence, and inhumanity that will take generations to overcome. If overcome at all.