The Trump Administrations War on the Government Is an Autocratic Attempt – The New Yorker

On Friday morning, when I logged on to the Times Web site, two headlines were stacked on the left of the home page. The top one reported that the Justice Department had launched a criminal probe into its own investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The headline directly below announced that the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, had been found in contempt of court for continuingin direct contravention of judicial decisionsto collect student-loan payments from former students of defunct for-profit colleges. Those headlines were a tiny snapshot of the war between the Trump Administration and the American government as it used to be constituted.

In other news last week: the acting Ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor, Jr., testified about waging a losing battle against Donald Trump and his people to pursue a foreign agenda consistent with government policy and practice. House Republicans stormed a closed impeachment-inquiry hearing in a bizarre direct action of Congress members against congressional practice. And Trumps personal attorney William Consovoy argued in court that his client is immune from any prosecutionincluding, hypothetically, for murdering someone in the middle of Fifth Avenueas long as he is President. These events provided a slightly larger snapshot of Trumps continued war on the government.

Trumpian news has a way of being shocking without being surprising. Most of what we have learned in the course of the last week, or in the month since the impeachment probe in Congress began, or in the more than thousand days since Trump was inaugurated, is consistent with his campaign rhetoricor, rather, his campaign rages against the government, the courts, and Washington. Every one of the events of last week is, in itself, staggering: an assault on the senses and the mental faculties. Together, they are more of the same.

The difficulty with absorbing the news lies, in part, in the words we use, which have a way of rendering the outrageous ordinary. The judge in the Department of Education case, Sallie Kim, a magistrate judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, for example, said, Im astounded, really; the Times prefaced this quotation with the statement, Magistrate Judge Kim made it clear this month that she believed the department had acted badly. The Washington Post story on DeVos omitted the more emotional aspects of the hearing, rendering it with the neutral, both-sides tone that a paper would use for a standard court hearingnot one in which a federal agency had blatantly disregarded judicial decisions sixteen thousand times, as Kim pointed out, citing the number of former students and parents affected by the Departments practices. Politico called the ruling an exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary, still falling short of doing justice to the drama of a federal agency seizing the assets of people whom it had been ordered by the courts to leave in peace.

Even if we could find the words to describe the exceptional, almost barely imaginable nature of the weeks stories, that approach would not scale. How do we talk about a series of nearly inconceivable events that have become routine? How do we describe the confrontation of existing government institutions with a Presidential apparatus that wants to destroy them?

In the past few weeks, Ive had the good fortune of listening to a lecture by one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, Blint Magyar, and reading a draft of his latest book. Magyar is a Hungarian sociologist who was once a member of the post-Communist Hungarian government. As his country transformed into an autocracy, he became both a dissident and a student of the transformation. Magyar pioneered the term mafia state, which he has argued is a distinct approach to government. A lot of Magyars argument has to do with terminology. Quite simply, he says, if we use the wrong language, we cannot describe what we are seeing. If you use the language developed for describing fish, you cannot very well describe an elephant: words like gills, scales, and fins will not get you very far.

Magyar has noted that, after 1989, weacademics, journalists, and laypeopleapplied the language of liberal democracy to the societies emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. This happened both because we expected that they would become liberal democracies and because we had no other language. As a result, when some of these societies developed in unexpected ways, language impaired our ability to understand the process. We talked about, for example, whether they had a free press, or free and fair elections. But saying that they did not, as Magyar told me in an interview, is akin to saying that the elephant cannot swim or fly: it doesnt tell us much about what the elephant is. The same thing happens when we use the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that breaks out of the system that such terminology was invented to describe. When we talk about shadow foreign policy when discussing Ukraine, for example, we misuse the term: a President, who is the chief foreign-policy official in the United States, cannot run a shadow foreign policy, by definition. What he can do, though, is destroy the institutions and traditions of foreign policy in the course of his war on government.

In his upcoming book, Magyar introduces the term autocratic attempt. It is the first of three stages of establishing autocracythe stage where it may still be reversible. (The next stage is autocratic breakthrough.) It is a useful term to borrow. In the past week, what we observed was a desperate battle between the autocratic attempt and the institutions defensive fight to reverse it. Magyar has analyzed the signs and circumstances of this process in post-Communist countries and has proposed a detailed taxonomy. How it happens here is uncharted territory. We have to invent a way of thinking and writing about it in real time.