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Good evening, my name is Jim Miller. I am a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and I have organized, and will be moderating tonight’s panel with the ungainly title, on bureaucracy and its discontents.
To discuss the tensions created by professing democracy as an ideal while empowering unelected experts in a vast and complex administrative state, I have convened a group who can speak to this question, both in theory and in practice, by sharing empirical information on what has actually happened in regimes, present and past, where there have been serious assaults on an administrative state.
We have three experts here tonight.
Kim Lane Scheppele, who will speak first, is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional governments. She is the author of countless scholarly papers and articles in the mainstream press, and she is one of our country’s preeminent experts on contemporary Hungary.
Julia Sonnevend, who will speak second, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at the New School for Social Research, and the author, most recently, of the book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics. Because Julia is a friend as well as a colleague, I can assure you that this native-born Hungarian is not just brilliant, but also charming and magnetic.
Mark Frazier, another friend who is also a colleague, is Professor of Politics at The New School, where he also serves as Co-Director of the India China Institute; he is also an associate at Columbia University’s China Center for Social Policy. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently, The Power of Place: Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay.
Our format tonight is a bit unusual: Rather than presenting formal scholarly papers, I’ve asked everyone to prepare brief preliminary comments, in hopes of provoking a public conversation that starts among the panelists, and then opens up to questions and comments from you in the audience.
We have put the case of Hungary under Orbán at the center of our conversation, in part because it has served as an important model for Trump and his far-right allies. But we will also be discussing China, for two different reasons: First, because Mao during the Cultural Revolution launched a left-wing attack on bureaucracy that was widely admired by folks on the global left at the time; and, second, because China under Xi has evolved a quite different approach to bureaucracy, by fortifying a traditionally Confucian, meritocratic, hierarchical civil service, one that is absolutely critical for meeting the economic, technological, and military ambitions of his regime—even as he demands loyalty from all of his civil servants (as Trump now demands).
Since this panel was my idea originally, let me add that I personally want to stress that revolutionary attempts to destroy an administrative state are at the very heart of the classical radical democratic project of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right, first published in 1820, formulated what is arguably the most powerful modern justification of bureaucracy, as a means for a modern state to forge a “universal class” of disinterested experts and civil servants, who would represent the common good of civil society by regulating the problems inevitably generated by the division of labor in a market society otherwise governed only by what Adam Smith had called “an invisible hand.”
A quarter century later, Karl Marx, in a manuscript criticizing Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, proposed replacing the bureaucracy with what Marx called “true democracy.” In 1917, on the eve of a Russian Revolution, Lenin, in The State and Revolution, similarly presented the insurrectionary Paris Commune of 1871 as if it were a truly democratic answer to the question “What is to be done?”—only to preside over the Soviet experiment, which led, as a figment of rhetoric, to “democratic centralism” and, in practice, not to new political forms devolving power to the people but rather to the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin erected in the name of the proletariat.
Hence the clumsy draft title for our conversation tonight: “The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective—Or, Why Should Ordinary Citizens Trust Unelected Experts Anymore?”
One final comment, given the setting of this conversation: Paradoxically, but understandably, most left-leaning colleagues I know treat the bureaucracy of our own universities as a kind of “deep state” as parasitic and loathsome as the federal government that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are busily trying to “smash,” or deconstruct, even as we speak.
In other words: What scholars like us think about bureaucracy, and what we consider its strengths and its limits, matters—perhaps now more than ever—as American universities, like America’s administrative state, are facing an existential threat.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Hungary is a small country at the edge of Europe. When Viktor Orbán first came to power, he started rapidly consolidating power—and I mean really rapidly. What’s happening in America now was what it felt like for people living in Hungary in 2010. Orbán did three things right off the bat.
First, Orbán set about trying to capture his nation’s high court. Trump hasn’t needed to do this, since he had already accomplished this in his first term. But Orbán entered office with still-independent courts, so he attacked them immediately by changing the way that judges were appointed and expanding the number of judges on the highest court.
The other two things Orbán did are being done by Trump now: a) radically slashing public sector employment and b) weaponizing the national budget to defund all those who could push back against his autocratic capture. In Orbán’s case, both of these moves were disguised by a crisis that Hungary was in. In the US, these same two things are being done out in the open, without cover.
So what was Orbán’s crisis? When Orbán first came to power in 2010, Hungary was under an austerity program because the prior government had run the country into bankruptcy. The International Monetary Fund at that time was insistent that the only way that a state could get out from under crushing debt was to slash the bureaucracy and state services—basically, to downsize the administrative state.
This IMF pressure turned out to be an immense help for Viktor Orbán. As an aspiring autocrat, he wanted to capture the bureaucracy. So he suspended the civil service law and then began firing public employees with wild abandon, particularly those working at the public television, radio station, and newswire services. Because the European Union and the European Central Bank were worried about Hungarian debt, they and the IMF cheered the fact that there had been a massive purge of the country’s bureaucracy.
Then Orbán weaponized the national budget against his enemies. If you had been in Hungary in the 1990s or 2000s, you might have been impressed by the tremendous proliferation of media outlets and civil sector organizations. At the time, there were 12 daily newspapers of every political persuasion. Hungary was also the place where almost every international civic organization wanted to put down roots, because it had such a lively civil society. But even though I thought I knew how the Hungarian state worked, what I hadn’t realized was how much of both the proliferation of independent media and the proliferation of voluntary associations were facilitated by the national budget. As it turned out, this vibrant civil society and pluralistic media were subsidized by the state.
So overnight, Orbán cut many of those state subsidies. For example, government advertising propped up many of those diverse media outlets, but Orbán cut state advertising to all of the media who were critical of him. And when newspapers started to fail, he pointed out that media fail all over the world! All these newspapers, all these old-fashioned media, are having trouble adjusting to the digital age. That argument disguised what was really happening. Pluralistic media appeared to die a natural death when in fact they had been murdered. But here too, the IMF and the EU cheered because this was a cost-saving measure.
Orbán defunded the part of the civil sector that was critical of him, preserving state support for the civil sector organizations that supported him. At the time, even the EU noted that in most European countries, civil society isn’t subsidized as it has been in Hungary. If civil sector groups went bankrupt when state subsidies were cut, then these groups would have to learn how to raise money for themselves. That was the neoliberal orthodoxy at the time. Almost immediately, a number of independent groups started failing when Orbán’s budget cuts hit.
The cuts were so massive and hit so broadly across civil society that most people retreated into their own groups to try to save their little piece of the public pie. There was no social solidarity around these cuts because too many people were in too much pain to look beyond their own experience. That’s how Orbán demobilized civil society and broke up the potential opposition to him.
All of this will probably sound familiar because, in broad outlines, it sounds like the opening salvo of what Trump and Musk are doing in the US.
Now let me get to democratic theory.
Is democratic theory in an age of autocracy up to the challenges posed by autocrats like Orbán and Trump? This challenge to bureaucracy and to expertise requires us to justify why unelected bureaucrats should have such major responsibilities in the middle of a democracy. Why should important decisions about how we are to be governed be made by those whom we have not elected?
To answer that question, we need to ask, How granular should democratic consent be? If a government is trying to decide how to allocate scarce funds—for example, to mitigate climate change or bolster military capacity—how much input, if any, should ordinary citizens have in making that decision? Should they only have input into the big question of whether governments should invest more in one thing rather than the other in general? Or should they have input that gets more into the weeds, for example, determining whether climate change policy should lean into advancing solar power or investing in carbon capture technologies? In short, should citizens provide only general guidance or should they be asked for consent at a more detailed level? In any policy area, there will often be tough choices, or complicated kinds of trade-offs. So how much input, if any, should ordinary citizens have in making such choices, and how much should be made by elected representatives instead? Once these major decisions have been made, how much should be delegated to the specialists and experts of the administrative state?
In some places—for example, in Switzerland or in California—very detailed policy proposals are on the ballot all the time for voters to select directly. In most other places that have some form of representative democracy, voters elect representatives who run on quite general platforms, who then make choices and decide about trade-offs on their constituents’ behalf. Once big choices are made, the specific trade-offs, particularly on specialized subjects, are often delegated to experts within the administrative state, who are steeped in the details of policy. This is all completely consistent with a theory of representative democracy. But as we can see, there is not just one set of standard answers to the question of how granular consent has to be before particular decisions run out of democratic legitimation. Having expert bureaucrats make crucial decisions can be thus both consistent with some versions of democratic legitimacy and inconsistent with other versions.
This flexibility in the precise institutional arrangements of the administrative state that are mandated by democratic theory gives the new autocrats tools for consolidating power while appearing to still be democrats. Indeed, Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, Erdoğan in Turkey, and Putin in Russia all started by being elected fair and square, and coming to power legally. And they used their lawful election to say: I am speaking for the people, so therefore I have democratic legitimation and can use that democratic mandate to carry out what I claim the people want. Most of the time, the international community will give deference to what democratically elected leaders choose. Such deference enables these autocrats to launch their various assaults on the bureaucracy and the administrative state that they’ve inherited, claiming that both are undemocratic because unelected. When Orbán started by firing large parts of his country’s civil service and defunding the independent groups controlled by his opponents, he could say, This is what I had a democratic mandate to do. And he may have been right.
We’re now hearing very similar sorts of arguments from Trump, and it leaves a lot of people wondering how to make the case that democracy is in danger. What are you supposed to say if he was lawfully elected and claiming to rule in the name of the people? Maybe what he is doing is what the majority of the people wanted. But often you can’t tell what a majority wants.
After all, every time you vote, you vote for a package deal. Any particular party or president or representative has positions on lots of different issues, some of which you will agree with, and some of which you will not, when you cast your vote for that candidate. What content, then, does your vote convey? Everything in the package that the candidate put forward or only those things that poll well after the election? How do we know that what leaders are doing is what most of the people actually wanted? And if they fire large swaths of the bureaucracy to govern with a smaller circle of advisors, how is that inconsistent with democratic theory as we know it?
So what exactly is democracy in this context? How much do elections legitimate? How closely should citizens be able to scrutinize the decisions that leaders delegate to the specialized expertise of the bureaucrats carrying out the new regime’s policies? And how much should citizens be able to scrutinize the decisions of leaders to fire all the bureaucrats?
That raises a second democratic theory question. Liberal democracy is supposed to ensure the pluralism of what we might call different knowledge production systems. Different sciences have different methods for producing knowledge; law has a unique way of ascertaining facts and applying the law to those facts; different media have different standards for ensuring the information they present is reliable. In the meantime, what some people (including Trump) call “common sense” works according to its own, sometimes unsettled, rules of thumb.
The expertise we find in the administrative state often comes from sharply different modes of knowledge production than the highly variable understanding of the voters who elect their leaders. Ordinary citizens can choose whom to elect based on an elaborate assessment of policy positions—or on the basis of “vibes.” They can engage in detailed disciplinary analysis, trust only media with strict verification methods, or simply use common sense.
But once an election produces results, then the rules of the game of that particular government tend to trigger specific modes of knowledge production within government. Most modern democracies tend to defer at this point to modes of knowledge production with high levels of verification, like facts tested against the law of evidence in court or data collection according to the norms of the relevant scientific field.
In complex modern societies, many avowed democrats routinely, and willingly, defer to specially trained experts: If you want to accomplish certain goals, there may be people who understand how to do that better than you, or the average citizen, does. The view is that if you vote to express a direction for government and experts understand how to carry that out, then one of the reasons why you rely on expertise is precisely to make government effective.
Unfortunately, the various forms of scientific knowledge aren’t self-evident to non-scientists, nor are legally verifiable facts transparent outside courtrooms.
Mainstream media may operate according to more rigid rules than social media. But these modes of knowledge production are not always easily explainable to a general public.
And one of the first things that autocrats attack these days are institutions that rely on weighing and evaluating the results of scientific inquiry, or investigative journalism, or facts sifted through standards of evidentiary production in court. Any of these can result in a picture of the world that contradicts what the autocrats are trying to present as the simple truth of a situation.
So autocrats go after universities, they go after the media, they go after science, and they go after law, because all of these institutions contain the potential to contradict the autocrat’s skewed picture of the world.
For example, in the first two years of the Orbán government, just after 2010, Hungarian universities experienced a 40 percent budget cut. At the same time, they suddenly started charging tuition for the first time. There was one point when some economists estimated that the amount of tuition charged in Hungary was the highest rate of tuition compared to local salaries of any government in the world. At the same time, Orbán announced he would award tuition-free fellowships; but these were awarded not on merit but only to his own supporters.
There was a rapid decline in the ability of Hungarian universities to function. Then Orbán came back later with another proposal: What we really need to do is to privatize the universities, and then they can start raising private money. So the government created a series of private foundations. The parliament generously transferred the real estate, the staff, and faculty of the existing universities to these foundations. The foundations were run by political hacks who had no background in higher education. And when the faculty were privatized in this way, they lost their civil service protections: Everyone lost tenure at once.
The EU raised questions: It all looked a little suspicious, perhaps even an attack on academic freedom. But Orbán argued that Hungary copied what had been done with universities in Finland. And it turns out that Finland had created private foundations, donated universities to the new foundations, and then all these tech companies came in and started supporting the Finnish universities, which offered the EU a new model of successful public-private partnerships. The Hungarian government studied the Finnish model, and they made their laws privatizing the nation’s universities look as close to Finnish laws as possible. Once again, the EU was stumped: They hadn’t criticized Finland, so how could they criticize Hungary?
Orbán has so far gotten away with his attacks on universities and on the pluralism of knowledge production more generally. Trump also started attacking universities from his first days in office. An aspirational autocrat—even one paying lip service to “true democracy”—cannot stand to be second-guessed by facts he cannot control. This is the autocratic playbook: to destroy the administrative state and then destroy independent sources of knowledge.
Trump was at first met with compliance, and only now with some resistance.
What we’ve learned from Hungary is that defying autocrats works best if there is unity across sectors, because it’s much easier for autocrats to pick off institutions one by one than to address a united front. And, I might add, it gets worse once an autocracy becomes entrenched. That means that the time to act is now.
Julia Sonnevend: After Kim has talked about Hungary in her beautiful American English, I have the charming task of talking about the United States with my significant Hungarian accent. Welcome to The New School—this is what we specialize in.
Still, I do want to say that Professor Scheppele, by this point, is an honorary Hungarian. She does better work on Hungary than most of us Hungarian social scientists combined. So, thank you.
I’m going to focus today on the relationship between the power of interpretation and the administrative state, but I will start with Hungary.
I was born in 1979, in Budapest, and that means that I spent the first ten years of my life under communism. And in the 1980s, when it comes to color, I wouldn’t call the regime red anymore. I would call it gray. And when it comes to its daily operations, it was authoritarian in many respects, but it was its all-encompassing stupidity that really characterized it. I actually think that stupidity is a perfectly fine academic category: If anything, we should use it more often.
To get anything done in Communist Hungary, you had to enter an endless bureaucratic labyrinth. You might recall the “Hotel California” song from the Eagles: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Well, the Communist bureaucratic mazes were such that you could neither check out nor leave.
Then came 1989. And even as a 10-year-old kid, I remember it as an explosion of color, personality, and action. There were protests, debates, slogans, and political candidates. There was confusion, it was anxiety-ridden, but it was also the most uplifting political event I have ever experienced. And that uplifting event involved the collapse of bureaucracy as we knew it.
One of my first memories is, by the way, of young, handsome, progressive leftist Viktor Orbán giving a speech demanding that Russian troops leave Hungary immediately.
So fast forward: I studied for some time in Berlin, at Humboldt University, which used to be in East Berlin. As I walked into the university’s lobby every morning, I was greeted by a huge quote from Marx, in golden letters, no less. It’s one of Marx’s famous “Theses on Feuerbach,” the same quote as on Marx’s grave in London: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it.”
Now, I was 21, and I disliked this sentence so much. The philosophers have only interpreted the world? Seriously? You put this in the grand entrance to a great university? I couldn’t believe it, and I sometimes imagined sneaking into the building at night to create a new motto chiseled in stone with gilded letters: “It’s not enough to change societies. You also have to interpret them.”
And this gets us truly to the topic of administration and bureaucratic practice. As the administrators in the audience very well know, high-quality administration is ultimately about interpretation. Administrators interpret texts, but they also interpret individual and group interaction. Bureaucracy, when it functions well, provides us with stability, reliability, the rule of law, zero arrogance, institutional neutrality, and the revolutionary power of interpretation.
This is why every illiberal regime attacks first and foremost interpretation. That’s why journalists, judges, professors, and administrators are the first targets, those who are specially trained to understand and interpret the social world.
These illiberal regimes flood the zone with information, action, and outrage, and they want you to be in nonstop reactive mode. They create battlefields for you: Writing and signing performative statements, changing profile pictures on social media, retweeting outrage, becoming a lib warrior—these are all things that Donald Trump, like Viktor Orbán before him, invites us all to do.
All these acts switch off our critical, deliberative cognitive function, and put us into tribal thinking, with diminished ability for self-reflection. If you feel under attack, if you speak of “existential threat,” you will stop thinking. You will stop interpreting.
At the same time, there are specific interpretive questions that illiberal regimes want us not to ask. One: Where am I? Am I residing in a battlefield created for me or have I designed my own battlefield? This is an old rule of combat, but with media landscapes that are fragmented and overlapping, it is sometimes hard to know where you are. Two: What am I doing? If I take a certain action, what is the outcome? Three: If I am taking this action, who will see what I am doing? In other words, who is the audience?
Answering these questions requires understanding and interpreting our social situation.
In a book I recently published on the power of personality in global politics, I argued that we live in an era when our politics is increasingly focused on individuals with outsized personas, in contrast to facts, values, and institutions. Our political environment, which is strongly influenced by contemporary media, prefers images of individuals over anything else.
This is a particularly difficult environment for administrators. The bureaucrat who puts on a business suit, packs his lunch, and makes sure we have institutions we can rely on is not a rock star. He rarely appears in iconic photographs and other viral content. With a few exceptions, he is neither sexy nor charming. But the bureaucrat, more often than not, is a master of interpretation and therefore a key target of illiberal regimes.
So if we want to rise to the defense of our teachers, lawyers, journalists, and expert administrators, what is to be done?
Let me give you two examples of effective action.
The first one is from Hungary. A few weeks ago, the leading political opponent of Viktor Orbán, Peter Magyar, suddenly posted something surprising on his popular Facebook account. He announced that Viktor Orbán has a private zoo on his luxury estate in Hungary, built from stolen, corrupt money. The opposition leader also asserted that Orbán has zebras in that zoo for his grandkids.
I teach propaganda this term at The New School, and I teach my students that once people imagine something, once people have a mental, visual image of a scene, you can’t delete it from their minds. So at this point, it does not matter whether Viktor Orbán in fact has zebras. The whole public sphere is covered by images of zebras, Orbán riding a zebra, petting a zebra, and so on. The opposition leader drew a new battlefield, one that Orbán doesn’t control, around the topic of corruption. The opposition introduced a vocabulary, a powerful, iconic image, and a resonant narrative.
My second example is from higher education, a bastion of interpretation. The last thing an illiberal regime wants is highly educated, thoughtful students capable of critical thinking, self-reflection, empathy, and careful and strategic action. Training such students, teaching them to fiercely debate ideas without crossing the line to harassment, providing them with a wide variety of viewpoints in classrooms, helping a vulnerable academic institution like The New School survive—these are no small tasks. What we ultimately protect as educators when we teach and mentor is “interpretation.” We should, of course, feel free to criticize and imagine transforming the administrative institutions that we exist within, but we should never attack with a sledgehammer.
I am fortunately not 21 anymore, but I still believe that it is not enough for us to change societies; we must also learn in depth how to understand and interpret them. And we must do everything in our power to protect those—both individuals and institutions—who will provide us with a high-quality understanding and reliable interpretation of our social and political world.
Mark Frazier: I am going to be talking about China, and you may wonder why. After all, China, since the Communist Party came to power, in 1949, hasn’t enjoyed a vigorous civil society, or a free media, let alone the sorts of academic freedom under threat today in the United States.
But on March 23 and 24, China held a development forum, and a number of English-language business columnists and political pundits converged on Beijing to cover the event. And afterwards, writers like Tom Friedman of The New York Times and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times reported that everyone in China asked them: Is America having a cultural revolution?
Knowing how Chinese party cells work, I began to wonder if party members had been told, When you talk to foreigners this week, ask them if America is having a cultural revolution.
Now, one might say that some of the things going on in America right now have echoes of the cultural revolution. But as far as I’m concerned, until we see events like the insurrection of January 6, 2021, taking place on a weekly or daily basis at state capitals and administrative agencies all over the country for two or three years, with levels of violence that go way past January 6—until that happens, I’m not going to say that America is having a cultural revolution.
Still, when it comes to a historical comparison of administrative states, China would probably win the prize for the oldest large bureaucracy in recorded history. The recruitment in China of a professionalized civil service through highly competitive exams goes back 1,400 years.
China has also had an equally long history of heated, often deadly, debates over how to cope with two inevitable results of large bureaucracies over time: One, the tendency for officials to become corrupt, enriching themselves at the expense of the state and society, and two—the opposite problem, in a way—the tendency for officials to act on the basis of their expertise rather than the political positions of the central government, undermining or outright disobeying the orders of the supreme political authority, be it the Emperor or the General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Mao Zedong, as a revolutionary who suddenly pivoted in the fifties to organizing a socialist planned economy, was obsessed with the pernicious effects of bureaucracy. He struggled constantly with the tension of how to maintain the charisma and revolutionary elan of the party as an organization, while drawing on the scientific, technical, and bureaucratic authority necessary to build a modern economy.
In the early 1930s, when the Chinese Communist Party was still a loosely organized insurgent movement seeking to govern its own territories or “soviet bases” in a remote region of south-central China, Mao had concerns about bureaucratic behavior seeping into the ranks of party officials. He said, “We must not be bureaucratic in our methods of mobilizing the masses. Bureaucratic leadership cannot be tolerated in economic construction any more than in any other branch of our revolutionary work. The ugly evil of bureaucracy, which no comrade likes, must be thrown into the cesspit.” And he had a point: Mao once lamented that a county Communist Party Committee in Shandong province had, within 70 days, held 184 meetings, 56 telephone conferences, and issued 1,074 documents, and 599 reports.
In early 1957, operating in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s secret speech condemning Stalin in the Soviet Union and what was widely known in China as the “Hungarian incident,” that country’s rebellion against Soviet domination in late 1956, Mao gave his own shocking speech to the CCP leadership, in which he called on the masses to come forward with criticisms of the bureaucracy, in what became known as the Hundred Flowers movement. This greatly troubled the Leninist party officials in the audience, who refused to publish his speech until many months later, in a watered-down version.
In his speech, Mao essentially called for popular protest as a way to bring bureaucracy to heel. “In a large country like ours, there is nothing to get alarmed about if small numbers of people create disturbances; on the contrary, such disturbances will help us get rid of bureaucracy.”
The Hundred Flowers movement released a torrent of written criticisms and street protests from intellectuals, students, and workers against the bureaucracy. But it ended abruptly when anyone who had criticized Communist Party officials for their incompetence was relabeled by Mao’s government as “Rightists” and packed off—some 800,000 of them—to labor camps.
But Mao remained vexed with the bureaucracy, and in 1966, in another significant speech, Mao urged high school and university students to spontaneously organize and find those within the party and bureaucracy who were taking the capitalist road. Thus began what we know as the Cultural Revolution that led to public struggle sessions in which officials at all levels, including Mao’s chosen successor, were openly humiliated, and often beaten, in many cases fatally.
One such victim of the mob violence—he was jailed but not killed—was a high-ranking official named Xi Zhongxun, whose teenage son, Xi Jinping, was kicked out of Beijing and sent to work in a village in northwest China, where he spent the next seven years.
This brings us to Xi Jinping, the present General Secretary of the Communist Party, whom Western media sometimes wrongly label as a neo-Maoist. They’re wrong, because Xi would never let loose the tides of angry mobs against corrupt or disloyal officials. But like Mao, Xi has had to contend with a vast bureaucracy that he has tried to control through a relentless campaign of investigation and punishment that has resulted in over four million officials being expelled from their posts and imprisoned, in a bureaucracy whose size is something like 30 to 40 million people, depending on how one counts.
Xi’s anti-corruption program in some ways resembles Mao’s emphasis on continuous “ideological work,” in which bureaucrats take time to study Xi’s latest speeches and political concepts contained therein. But instead of young Red Guards leading these purges, special investigation teams sent from Beijing quietly operate in secret, detaining the accused without formal charges, and disappearing them for an unspecified duration, until they turn up in court for public trial, leading to their inevitable guilty verdict. In the most serious cases, death sentences are issued but commuted to life in prison.
Thirteen years into Xi’s “anti-corruption campaign,” the process has become institutionalized. A new National Supervision Commission runs these investigations as an organ of the party, not of the state. All of its work is therefore extralegal and extrajudicial—even though this is wrapped up in a concept that Xi calls the “socialist rule of law.”
The anti-corruption drive has proved immensely popular with the public, as those who watched as local officials enriched themselves as they built cities and high-speed rail lines in the 2000s are happy to see them get their comeuppance and lose all their assets.
But the public is also acutely aware of what happens when you have a bureaucracy in fear for its life under this kind of system.
As happened throughout imperial China, local officials are now incentivized to hide bad news, as happened in Wuhan when the local hospital that first discovered the new coronavirus refused to use the hotline to report the virus directly to the national Center for Disease Control and instead reported it to the local government, which then tried its best to keep the bad news from getting out.
It wasn’t until late January 2020 that central officials got confirmation that the virus was transmissible from human to human. And as the world learned, dysfunction in the Chinese bureaucracy can bring about disasters outside of China, on a global scale. That was also magnified by bureaucratic dysfunctions in many other countries, most notably the US.
On this note, I will close with some reflections on China’s role in the global autocratization wave, which is perhaps most vividly demonstrated by the regime’s policies in the education sector.
Since 1989, China has promoted a “patriotic education”—a term that Trump has borrowed without properly crediting the CCP. After Xi’s ascension in 2013, he had investigation teams sent to all the country’s top-tier universities under the guise of conducting financial audits; but these investigations also included collecting reports from students and staff about what faculty had said or done that reflected disrespect for the country or disloyalty to the Party. Soon all faculty passports were collected and retained to prevent them from going abroad for professional or personal reasons without first obtaining permission from the university’s Party officials.
Individual faculty who spoke out against Xi’s policies immediately lost their jobs. In 2018, in the wake of student activism in support of factory workers, the Ministry of State Security was appointed to replace the president of Peking University and organize new layers of surveillance of faculty by students. These days, at all Chinese universities, cameras record all classroom lectures and discussions.
The government has invoked massive cuts to budgets for humanities and social science departments, while pouring investment into the creation of world-class departments in science and engineering. In the education sector at least, Xi seems to have resolved Mao’s dilemma by creating, in this fashion, a highly professionalized, world-leading science and technology intelligentsia that remains, to date, highly apolitical and loyal to the CCP leadership. China’s leading scientists and engineers have resources showered on them in exchange for their political neutrality. In this respect, China, like India, Turkey, and Hungary, was part of a first wave of authoritarian attacks on higher education in the 2010s.
A new wave of autocratic attacks on higher education—now in the United States—is obviously underway as we gather here tonight.
Miller: Thanks, Mark. I’d like to ask the panelists if any of you have comments or questions for each other?
Scheppele: I thought Julia’s point about interpretation was really brilliant, and I think it’s a way of capturing this idea about what happens in these funhouse mirrors that these autocratic regimes create, where it becomes, how to put it, where the very act of actually creating original ideas becomes very dangerous.
Julia and Mark, we’ve all been talking about these attacks on universities and knowledge institutions, and I guess I’m wondering why there isn’t more resistance if we’re all trained as critical thinkers? How come we’re talking about the collapse of major expert institutions in a matter of years? I can understand why some institutional leaders may feel forced to comply, but why do so many faculty and students comply? Why don’t they resist more?
I mean, states have overwhelming force, okay, we know that—but experts in understanding and interpretation can be ironic. There are lots of ways to protest without appearing to protest.
Before this panel began, we were talking about the Soviet Union, and about how people used to stand on street corners with quotations from the Soviet constitution. The regime didn’t know what to do with that; people were publicizing all the rights they didn’t actually have, but it was hard to punish them, since they were just quoting the constitution.
The residents of one city in the first Putin crackdown were famous for staging a protest with stuffed animals. This was a city with six universities. One day, when the sun rose, there were all these stuffed animals holding signs against Putin in the city center. And the police didn’t know what to do. So they arrested the stuffed animals. And then they didn’t know what to do with the stuffed animals.
Look, there are all sorts of ways to resist, even in really locked-down societies.
Frazier: You mentioned the word “lockdown,” and I immediately thought about one recent case of successful resistance in China. So you all remember in 2022, when Shanghai and then many other cities are in these dystopian settings in which people are locked in their apartments because of COVID. And then a fire breaks out and kills dozens of people in Xinjiang. This in turn provokes the white paper protests, where people in public brandish a blank piece of paper, meaning: I’m silenced, but I’m angry. This was a tactic that students in Hong Kong had used in 2019.
In any case, on December 7, 2022, Xi Jinping lifts the COVID lockdown, and suddenly everybody is on their own. There’s no more testing, there are no more lockdowns. There’s no more nothing. And a million or maybe 1.4 million people die of COVID in the next six months in China.
The COVID lockdown and its sudden lifting understandably led a lot of typical middle-class people to lose faith in what the government and its experts are urging people to do.
It’s true that there are still some ways in which students and faculty in China can quietly protest. But in terms of having a faculty meeting and discussing a strategy of resistance: In China, that’s punishable by loss of one’s job, or even worse.
Sonnevend: That’s such a hard question, Kim, because I always feel bad about judging my friends and colleagues in Hungary from the comfort of the West Village, drinking my oat milk latte, telling them how they should resist and show some anger. I think they did resist at the beginning. But you wear out. I think they’re tired. There’s a certain fatalism.
There is also a deep financial anxiety, which is also relevant to understanding why Orbán came to power.
In the nineties, I lived with my two librarian parents in a small flat in Budapest, with two siblings and a dog. One day, my father came home with an oversized fridge, and we were like, Why? There wasn’t really space for it. He said, Whoknows whether my degree will be worth anything. I have three children, and I have to feed you, and I’m really worried whether I will be able to do that.
A political and economic reality with that level of financial anxiety helps set the stage for a “caring authoritarian” who promises a dramatic change and a supportive state. But in terms of Hungary’s academics, I think they did what they could. But ultimately, as in China, it’s a public university system, and if you lose your job, that’s the end of your academic career.
Miller: Well, fear is a very powerful motivator in politics and never to be underestimated.
Before turning to the audience for questions, I want to make one comment about democratic theory, going back to something Kim said. In large societies, when political institutions are scaled up in an attempt to become democratic by trying to follow Montesquieu or a British model of checks and balances, you ironically end up creating only one person in the system who everyone votes for, and that’s the president or chief executive.
A president is therefore in a position to claim, through the magic transference of the vote, which is sort of like the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, that they are the one person who really embodies the will of the people. At the start of the twentieth century in America, you end up with Woodrow Wilson, a sophisticated theoretician of the modern state and democracy. Wilson understood the president as a kind of avatar, and he wanted to create a muscular executive at the same time that he created an administrative state, so he put a growing bureaucracy under executive control, and staffed it with specially trained civil servants. In this way, Wilson founds a technocratic regime with a vast bureaucracy at the executive’s beck and call, while an individual—the president—becomes ostensibly the most important democratic embodiment of the popular will—this is the sort of regime FDR inherited and greatly expanded—while Congress introduces laws to protect the independence of key bureaucracies, such as the Federal Reserve System. Meanwhile, legitimacy comes not just through periodic voting but through the rise of public opinion as a measurable factor in modern politics.
So I think that there’s a kind of tropism towards one supreme leader in modern democracies, certainly in the United States, often paradoxically tied to the rise of unelected, meritocratic bureaucracies filled with credentialed experts. And that represents an opportunity for an autocratic executive, especially if he wins the popular vote, to declare himself the most democratic representative in the regime, with a mandate to rule at will.
There are currently scholars who are working on alternatives to technocratic representative democracies, like Hélène Landemore at Yale, who’s written an interesting book called Open Democracy; there are participatory budgeting experiments, even in New York City today.
But these alternatives and experiments in more participatory forms of democracy implicitly beg the question of expertise and the proper role to be played in public policy by those with specialized knowledge.
Scheppele: So let me just complicate that picture even more. One of the things that you haven’t mentioned is that all of this happens, and especially as you get deepening democracy, you also get deepening constitutionalism, which is to say a legal framework within which executives are supposed to be held in check by law. And a bureaucracy becomes part of that constitutionalist creation.
And what keeps the bureaucracy from simply either going off the rails in the name of its own interests or toppling the king is that it also is operating in a very defined legal framework. So as long as those legal frameworks stay in place, then the whole system, in theory, shouldn’t lend itself toward the ever-increasing aggrandizement of executive power.
But one of the things we’re seeing now with this autocratic transformation, and particularly since so many of these autocrats—and again Orbán, but also Putin—are lawyers. And so they try to engineer the law and revise their constitutions to make a consolidation of executive power appear more legitimate.
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, shortly after coming to power, drafted a new constitution through a legislative process that appeared to have something like the will of the people behind it. And what a constitution like that of Orbán’s Hungary enables is flipping constitutionalism on its head, so that the rule of law will facilitate an ever-increasing aggrandizement of executive power.
In the United States, the only thing that’s changed so far since Trump’s inauguration on January 20 is the issuing of countless executive orders. It’s unclear if they can legally override regulations, or override statutes—they certainly cannot override the current Constitution.
And yet if you get a leader who is issuing these decrees, and all of his minions are acting like that’s the only law there is, one of the things you discover is that constitutionalism and the rule of law is, in part, a mental construct, which is to say it’s only real as long as people believe it’s real.
And what’s really kind of interesting about some of these really rapid transformations, like in Hungary, Venezuela, or Ecuador (Russia and Turkey were more gradual), is that you get people and institutions like law firms and universities acting like the commands of the leader are the constitution itself.
This is the real danger when autocrats assume executive power in constitutional democracies legally, because their power seems wrapped in legality. So people think they’re safe—but they are not, if all the laws and norms that constrained executive power in the constitution are jettisoned, or interpreted by a supreme court as legitimate, constitutionally warranted expansions of executive power.
Miller: Well, that’s a frightening thought: that the rule of law is, in part, a mental construct—it’s only real as long as people believe it’s real.
Sonnevend: I’d like to make a few final points.
In Hungary, a company with links to Orbán bought the leading oppositional newspaper; the newspaper was then suddenly closed. When the European Union asked if Orbán was interfering with independent media, he asked if the EU really wanted him to interfere with the free market. He was able to use the market as a justification for closing an opposition newspaper.
This is also an example of how Orbán deploys propaganda: He tries to reinforce existing beliefs very gently, regularly conducting public opinion polls, carefully calibrating messages throughout.
But what is equally important—and as Mark described happening in Xi’s China—is the weaponization of patriotism. In Hungary under Orbán, patriotic symbols have become Orbán’s symbols, and the Left ceded this territory completely to him—a fatal mistake.
We have some questions from the audience.
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb: First, a note of thanks. I thought that these comparisons were really illuminating, and I thank you all for helping me understand the world a little bit better. One question I’d like to ask Kim, and everyone else, is: To what extent does the Hungarian or the Chinese experience speak to the American experience today? The other question I have is: Why aren’t Americans using the power that we obviously have? Why are so many of us in American universities acting as if we are in China or Hungary?
T. Alexander Aleinikoff: Well, I just want to disagree with Jeff on this, and with Kim too. Here in America, I think you’ve seen significant pushback from the courts to the President. In terms of the Constitution, the President proposed to annul birthright citizenship by executive order. That’s clearly going to fail. Every court’s also going to find unconstitutional the deportation of people without due process under the enemies act. Look at the Hands Off protests—the American people really are screaming “Due process!” here. The constitutional norms here have actually, I think, been rather strong, and people have made the case for them. So I don’t think that America’s president will have the power to define the Constitution. So far, most of the courts have been upholding fundamental values here. Now, who knows what will happen when the appeals get to our Supreme Court. But so far, I actually have been pleased with the response of our courts.
Goldfarb: I spoke as a sociologist, not as a lawyer.
Jack Jin Gary Lee: I’m a sociologist, and I also study the law. The rule of law is a tradition, and Kim highlights precisely how in an autocratic country like Orbán’s Hungary, the regime is adept at manipulating the law. What does it mean to be a good interpreter of your own laws?
Kim Lane Scheppele: Alright, a couple of those were directed at me, so let me try to take them up. Let me start with Alex’s question about pushback. So yes, there’s pushback. The old autocrats just locked everything down and threw away the key, whereas the new autocrats are way more clever. Even the constitutional court in Orbán’s Hungary occasionally rules against the government, usually on matters of individual rights. So what you’re seeing is that a captured court isn’t something that rules every single time for the autocrat. It rules just enough, and especially on civil liberties cases, individual rights cases. An autocratic government can handle those.
What you are to look at are the cases about executive power.
For the United States, the question is: What’s left when you have a unitary executive theory, when you have a Court that’s immunized the president from criminal consequences for his actions, and a President that’s using the pardon power in such a way that it’s just become commonplace, that you just know that anyone acting in the President’s interest will get a pardon? Already there are big chunks of the legal system that are breaking down, but under contemporary autocracies, the whole system of law doesn’t disappear, just parts.
I agree that birthright citizenship and following due process are going to hold. I agree that some lawyers have been incredibly brave. As of last night, there were almost 200 lawsuits challenging various aspects of what Trump is up to. All that’s really valuable, if only because lawsuits and judges can throw sand in the gears, and slow things down.
But I fear in the end, we’re going to wind up with a handful of civil liberties and massive executive power. The administration’s move against big law firms has also been alarming. Another thing that happens during autocratic regimes is a collapse of the boundary between public and private.
So what happens when these law firms feel forced to make agreements with the Trump administration? Are they legally binding? They don’t even seem to be written down. And Trump can certainly change the terms and conditions.
Another thing that happens is that every law firm has a conflicts committee. So if you have a lawsuit of A versus B, and the firm decides to represent A, it will mean it can’t represent B. So what happens if Trump is on every side of what the major law firms are doing because they’ve agreed to do this work for him? A lot of us are worried that it will mean that anyone opposed to Trump can’t be represented by any of those law firms. So he’s taking off the market a lot of talent concentrated in the big law firms with deep pockets and resources. And there’s a risk that some of the current pushback is going to start to evaporate as the lawyers bringing all these cases start to get exhausted.
So what about us? Why aren’t professors doing more to resist the Trump administration?
Here’s one of the dilemmas I am facing as a teacher. After all, there is a constitutional argument for a unitary executive. There’s all these new arguments and theories that are appearing, and a lot of this stuff is scholarship invented for the purpose of consolidating a dictatorship. But it has appeared in scholarly journals: Are we obligated to teach our students that? And if we do, what happens if the students say, This is really convincing?
I’m teaching a course on rule of law at the moment, and every year there’s always a subset of my class that thinks Singapore is great, it’s got a great constitution, and it’s orderly, it’s very stable. Why should the United States have to endure a needlessly chaotic and inefficient form of democracy?
What do I do with my students who love Singapore? What’s the case for more robust forms of self-government?
One of the things that seems hardwired into a lot of us is this view that we shouldn’t be dictating conclusions to our students. We shouldn’t even nudge them towards the kind of understanding and interpretations of the law that we favor. Every day I teach, I find myself wrestling with this question. This means that I am not going to be leading a demonstration for my students. They need to be able to think for themselves. Remember Robert Frost’s quip about a liberal: a man who is too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel? It’s a little bit like that, right?
If we’re doing our job as academics, it becomes hard to lead a parade. That’s why my own activism has been outside the context of my teaching.
Sonnevend: Like Kim, I actually like discussing alternative points of view in the classroom. Every class I teach at The New School, I begin by saying that you will hear a variety of viewpoints, and I will not agree with—and you will not agree with—all of them. That’s what college is. Students can debate the different viewpoints and figure out whether they want to live in Singapore or not.
The other thing I would say on the line between private and public life is that I think it’s very important to leave some space for people when they don’t want to resist—space for art, love, creativity. Even in Communist Hungary, people had sex and tended their own gardens. And I think that’s very important, because you cannot continuously be in this mindset of outrage and resistance, partly because you risk losing your perspective, your capacity for critical thinking. You lose those cognitive deliberative functions, which are exactly the ones that you need to protect. It’s too easy to imagine you are perfect when you are under attack.
Frazier: Reading the letter that the Trump administration sent to Harvard on April 11, 2025, it looked to me very much like the beginning of something we could imagine as a turn towards the types of political regulation of academic content that goes on in Chinese universities. But I was also struck by a recent column by Masha Gessen that appeared in The New York Times, where Gessen suggested professors might go teach for free, in prisons and institutions and other places where an ivory tower doesn’t exist.
Miller: I can see it now. Masha Gessen Live at San Quentin. Maybe we should end on that note.
Scheppele: Not in prison! Let me say something more optimistic. We’re all here because we care. We’re a core of people who can do something, and so you should do something. This is The New School, and this university was founded precisely because life became impossible for some scholars at other universities during the Great War. And I think that’s important to remember.
Out of repression and chaos come some very good things. And I hope this university and all of our universities that will survive become places where we can take in the refugees who are going to have to leave their homelands because of some of the horrible things that are happening.
Because The New School is a testament right to a light that can shine even in very dark times.
“Masha Gessen Live at San Quentin” Who’s the backup band?