Zack Beauchamp
speaker
75 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Zack Beauchamp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, yeah. See, we're so tolerant. We've made the country safe for Jews. And that, you know, that figure of Jewish allies is really useful because anti-Semitism now, after World War II, explicit racial anti-Semitism is a real no-no in a lot of places because of the legacy of Nazism. Sounding like a Nazi is politically very bad for you. It fractures your coalition. It makes you look harmful.
And yet there are lots of Nazis who or people who at least have Nazi aligned beliefs about race science, about Jews who are in the Trump coalition. So they're playing a game. And the game goes something like this. It's we can use our opposition to the pro-Palestine movement and to the elements of those movements that are themselves anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism exists in all different political movements in different degrees. And we can use it as proof that though we're associated with those people, you can't tar us with the Nazi slur that is so often directed at right-wing political movements. Right. In fact, we can appropriate the power of anti-Semitism as a justification for power grab.
And then the flip side of this, of course, is that these power grabs target institutions and even arguably the sort of entire liberal ideology that has been the cornerstone of American Jewish flourishing. Andrew, what's your take on that?
Yeah.
Yeah, so I think that's exact evidence that they're failing. In fact, that's the reason why they're failing. So what they're trying to do is to make a show of exacting costs on dissidents. And what that's supposed to do is to chill dissents. Only it's not working.
The people that they are targeting, they're winning in court, and then they're able to publicly say, we're not going to be quiet about this. We're not going to stop. That is what it looks like when these kinds of tactics fail, when they're checked. They exist inside a system where there is still a meaningful degree of rule of law.
Had they done just what Viktor Orban did in Hungary, right, done this all through very subtle, sophisticated legal machinations, that would have been a more effective strategy. But what happened is they make a big show out of it. They send Kristi Noem to do these really disturbing photo ops. They publicly abduct people on the street with, you know, masked men.
And when you do those things, you send a signal that what you're doing is authoritarianism. What you're doing is terrifying. And if you haven't consolidated control at that point, and you have a country that has really strong democratic institutions and a large section of the public that cares about those, you invite resistance.
I wrote a piece that basically said there are two strategies in Trump's authoritarianism. There's the Orban's sophisticated, subtle strategy. And then there's Trump's own desires, which is to be someone like Nayib Bukele, who rules openly, does whatever he wants, iron fist kind of ruling.
Trump has openly proclaimed his interest in ruling like a dictator, not just on day one, but also admiration for things like the Tiananmen Square crackdown, already said a long time ago. And that these strategies contradict each other. So the Orban strategy depends on self and subtlety.
And the Bukele strategy depends on massive, rapid, aggressive shows of force backed by the armed forces of your country.
They said America is not a democracy? Yeah, they did. But I have a lot of issues with the way that that definition is right.
Everybody knows that title worked. Pretty successful book. Now, I mean, on your bright line question, Ezra, they, Steve and Luke and Dan Ziblatt wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where they laid it out, I think more formally, what the criteria were, right? And the argument is you have crossed the line from a democratic state when opposition has costs.
Right, right. And that's the bright line. Now, of course, that bright line is pretty fuzzy, right? Like, if you're a conservative, you would argue that in the quote-unquote woke era, opposition to the reigning moral ideology had cost.
Yeah, those are the examples I wish I'd brought up earlier when you were asking me about, you know, how do we know that this is what they're trying to do? Well, it's exactly things like that. That is evidence of authoritarian intents.
The question, though, and the reason why I don't like the framing of we've already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism is that that implies that those efforts are having the intended effect. And I do, Andrew, I take the caution that you're describing that we don't know how things are going to go. in, you know, a year or two or something like that.
I don't, I can't claim to know that. What I'm trying to do is make a judgment about where we're at and what we can extrapolate from sort of the current trajectory of things. And it's not just, I think, a couple of days or weeks where we've been seeing this momentum build against Trump. It's over the course of months, right?
I agree that the former parameters of American politics have been blown apart in the beginning of this administration. The question is, are they doing something to effectively consolidate a new vision for the political order, as you suggested?
I mean, if you look at the way of going after the media, even within that first year, Orban had developed a new state-created conglomerate for different media organizations that effectively allowed him to begin exercising power over the media in a structural way, that there's no... of that in the United States. There isn't even a concept of a plan here. There's not a tool for power consolidation.
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