Opinion | This Is the Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trumps Return

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation.“Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist.

He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will.Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge.

What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves.Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”Trump’s first term, and his actions in the four years since, tracked the early record of Putin and Orban in important ways.

Looking closely at their trajectories, through the lens of Magyar’s theories, gives a chillingly clear sense of where Trump’s second term may lead.I called Magyar to ask about this pattern in the late winter of 2021, when it became clear to me that Trump would run for re-election.Magyar is Hungarian, and has extensively studied the autocracy of Orban.

Like Trump, Orban had been cast out of office (in 2002, in a vote his supporters said had been fraudulent); he didn’t regain power until eight years later.In the interim, he consolidated his movement, positioning himself and his party as the only true representatives of the Hungarian people.

It followed that the sitting government was illegitimate and that anyone who supported it w...