President Donald Trump's administration just made a huge gamble — and opened the door for a golden opportunity for the opposition, a Democracy expert wrote Wednesday in The New York Times.
Henry J. Farrell, a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a guest essay in which he warned that Trump is attempting a power grab that breaks the law, and is targeting businesses, nonprofits and the "rest of civil society" to avoid failing in remaking the country's politics.
"This is one part of Mr. Trump’s bigger agenda to remake American politics so that everyone wants to be his friend and no one dares to be his enemy," warned Farrell. "If the administration can reshape politics in such a way, it can create an enduring advantage for itself, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey have done."
He pointed to the administration's move last week to offer a dubious deal to nine universities, promising to prioritize them for government funding if they agree to a litany of terms, including capping the number of foreign admissions and cracking down on supposed targeting of conservatives.
The move to break universities was a "risky gamble," he said.
"As political theorists like Russell Hardin have explained, power is a 'coordination game,' in which everything depends on what the public believes and does together. Even the most brutal tyrant does not have enough soldiers and police officers to compel everyone to obey at gunpoint," said Farrell.
Authoritarian regimes need people and organizations outside government control to "acquiesce to their rule," he said, noting that East Germany’s dictatorship collapsed amid mass protests.
The administration, he later added, "bet its chips" on public pressure for the nine universities.
"That is enormously risky, because it provides a big opportunity for the opposing coalition and encourages the public to get involved on the other side," he noted. That includes students, faculty and alumni organizing against the deal.
The ordeal holds a larger lesson for combating Trump, he said.
"The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability. If everyone believes that Mr. Trump will succeed in reshaping America, he will.
"The best defense against this weapon is solidarity among groups who disagree ferociously on many questions, but who agree on the need to keep America democratic and rebuild institutions and social connections to make democracy more robust. As the political scientist Adam Przeworski points out, Polish pro-democracy forces won only when they agreed to leave aside their bitter divisions over abortion until after they had succeeded," Farrell said.
