Hungarian scholar Balint Magyar offers a theory that explains why the US is holding out against the same tactics that caused other countries to collapse into autocracy. His theory also explains why comparisons across nations don’t always work.
While writing about post-communists mafia states, he talked about the “big bang” theory: He says that the “conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system.”
Here’s how I understand the theory (to use Russia as an example). At the time of the Russian Big Bang (early 1990s, when a Democracy struggled to be born) the Communist Party had a monopoly on power and resources.
All industries were centralized and in the hands of the government. The citizens had come out of decades of totalitarianism. Masha Gessen explains this well.
In fact, I discovered Magyar from her work. So this is sort of the default.
At the time of the American Big Bang, we lived in a hierarchy with white men at the top. We had operating democratic institutions (local governments, courts that applied common law, juries) but the institutions protected the freedom of white men only. So that’s our default.
When anti-democratic forces in the United States try to undo democracy, what they’re trying to take us back to is the time when democratic institutions protected the interests of white men. Trump is also trying to create a Russian-style mafia state.
But if the anti-democratic forces succeed in the US, we’re more likely to return to the kind of oligarchy that historian Heather Cox Richardson explains we’ve had in our past.
Reactionaries loop us back to what used to be.
