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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But to the immediate question about, like, what is the future of the right, I think it's true that these young, like, among incredible cadres of young people, there's an obsession with figures like Bronze Age pervert, Curtis Yarvin, people who have views that are explicitly anti-democratic, bigoted. You know, there's a notion that it is interesting and fun, you know,
even among these cadres to say things that are offensive. And that irony has quickly bled into sincerity, right? Where there's a deep faith and a sense that these things that they were saying to get a rise out of people are now true. The question is, how much influence does that wield over the future Republican Party?
And I don't actually know the answer to that question because we don't know the story of the Trump era hasn't been written yet, right? When I say things aren't going very well, let's assume they continue to not go very well. We get to the midterms, they lose dramatically.
Then the administration starts flailing around in the next two years and a Democrat wins the White House and Democrats control Congress by an overwhelming margin. Well, what does the Republican Party do with defeat? And what does it do after Trump? Because like we all act like Donald Trump is immortal. He can't die. And maybe he is. I don't know. The man certainly has survived a lot.
And when Donald Trump dies, the glue that holds the Republican coalition together is gone. This is a very common problem in authoritarian states, the succession problem. When so much is glued together, and I think really, if you look at the details of the Republican coalition, a lot of disagreements are being papered over by the overwhelming charismatic force of one man.
And when he's off the scene, What happens to the right at that point? And that's a very open question, especially in a world where this political project looks like it's a failing one, which may or may not be true in four years.
To me, the big thing to watch is where the Supreme Court weighs in on a variety of these different cases, right? Because for all Trump is losing in the lower courts, the Supreme Court has the ultimate say in a variety of these things, and there's a 6-3 conservative majority. Now, it's indicated that it's willing to challenge the administration in certain ways, which is a positive sign.
But if the Supreme Court starts Basically laying out the welcome mat for a variety of different Trump policies or clearing out the legal barriers that are in place.
I think that could be the single biggest warning sign because then a number of these other things that seem like they're less likely to happen or there are significant barriers in their place all of a sudden become thinkable as actual real enforceable things over the course of time.
Seeing more compliance from media organizations, not just Elon Musk buying MSNBC, which would be like the end stage of this, but rather, you know, earlier stages, more places, seeing more self-censorship from different people.
I don't agree, actually. I don't think that is how you get competitive authoritarianism.
How you get competitive authoritarianism, if you look at any case where it happened, is through not just doing a bunch of random stuff, but through taking a systematic and deliberate effort to restructure the fundamentals of a society and getting key building blocks in place in a strategic way that allows you to wield power effectively. You brought up Lagos Simica a second ago, right?
That's a really instructive example.
Yeah, that's right. For those of us who have not spent a lot of time in Hungary, like Andrew and I have. So he was like Orban's friend, right, from their days prior to power, right? This isn't a man like Elon Musk who developed his wealth independently. His entire business empire owed itself to government patronage, right?
He had a media empire that was funded in large part through government advertising dollars. So when he decided he had this break with Orban, Zamiska calls him a bunch of nasty names. And what happens is Orban destroys him because Orban was pulling his strings the entire time. He had control over all of these things. He had control over the money.
He had the control over the flow of the resources, all of which had been developed through years of systematic building and power consolidation laid on a groundwork. of a supermajority in the legislature, right, that they got in 2010 and have not relinquished since, allowing them to do whatever they want to the Constitution based on Hungarian constitutional rules.
None of those things exist in the U.S. And I don't want to peg this too carefully to the Hungarian example, because you can say the same thing. I mean, my book is about the U.S., Hungary, Israel, and India. And if you look at each of those cases... There's a very, very deliberate effort when it's successful using the reins of power in careful, studied, practical ways to get what you want.
And the problem with Trump is I just see no evidence that that's happening, which is not to say that American society couldn't buckle. It's just that he's doing it badly. Yeah. And he's doing it really badly.
Well, I would note that both Duterte and Bolsonaro are currently arrested.
They didn't really do a great job at building a competitive authoritarian regime.
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