A transatlantic far-right?

Aro Velmet: You’ve talked about a variety of intellectual challenges to the liberal tradition in the United States. Who are these people in the Trump coalition?

Jan-Werner Müller: The Trump coalition is, of course, very heterogeneous. There are all kinds of groups, very often with very different agendas. I think it would be wrong to overplay the importance of the post-liberals. Some are certainly important in the circles around Vice President J.D. Vance, who has been most invested in shaping an intellectually more ambitious agenda. He’s clearly somebody who wants to be seen as intellectually respectable, who will drop names, show up at big conferences and try to have theoretical reference points – unlike, for instance, the Silicon Valley world and more direct MAGA leaders.

As heterogeneous as the Trump coalition is, all of them can agree on one point: their dislike of universities as they are, even though the reasons for why they want to change them – and I think it’s fair to say destroy them – are very different.

Aro Velmet: So what about areas of disagreement? Where do the post-liberals disagree with the America First people or the tech bros?

Jan-Werner Müller: I think some of the post-liberals can still be classified as relatively traditional communitarians, with sometimes a bit more of a hard edge in terms of their willingness to use state power to enforce what they see as correct forms of morality. That’s one reason why, for so many of them, Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary was such an important reference point.

At the other extreme are people who really are fine saying that democracy isn’t the only game in town. That if there are systems that better promote, let’s say, their understanding of Catholic natural law, then it’s also okay to do away with democracy. But even within that camp there’s a variety of positions.

Aro Velmet: To what extent has the US administration been borrowing from the Orbán playbook? The attacks on universities seem like one clear example – but what else have they learned from the Hungarian experience?

Jan-Werner Müller: There’s a pretty long list. At the level of strategy and procedure, they’ve emulated what some nowadays call autocratic legalism. In other words, you are careful to be seen to be following the law, going by procedures, and so on – even though you’re clearly violating the spirit of the law, reconstructing a system with a view to entrenching rule and getting an autocratic outcome.

It’s clear in retrospect that Trump supporters spent the four years between 2021 and 2025 looking for sometimes extremely obscure laws – laws going back to the 18th century that nobody had paid much attention to – with a view to gaining maximum power for the executive. That is pretty much the Orbán playbook. Orbán always defended himself against the European Commission by saying: look, everything we do is legal.

Of course, Trump has also done plenty of things which everybody knows are very illegal, where there’s no pretence. This is a bit like his conduct as a businessman: you do something that’s outrageous and obviously illegal, but you’ve created facts on the ground. You force other people to react: maybe they’ll settle out of court, maybe they’ll let it go.

It can be a very effective strategy, alas. But it’s very different from the autocratic legalism model. The likes of Orbán, but also figures like Erdoğan, had to pay some attention to international context, to international institutions, and – idealistic as it might sound – to international public opinion. There are no such constraints on the US, even if many people are horrified by the destruction of international law that the US is now so clearly complicit in.

Some of the rhetoric is very similar, too: wanting to save ‘Western civilization’, restoring traditional morality, and of course sharing the same enemies, the same clichéd talk of liberal elites, singling out George Soros, and so on. All these things are not difficult to copy; they have been copied. Whether they’re truly successful, none of us can be quite sure. But there is no doubt a certain kind of knowledge about how to entrench far-right populist rule has travelled across the Atlantic.

Aro Velmet: Another difference is also the speed. Orbán was in power since for sixteen years, Erdoğan for even longer, and it took them a while to get to where Trump is after a year and a half.

Jan-Werner Müller: Yes and no. On the one hand, you’re right that many people have been completely taken aback by how quickly things were done, how brutally, without attention to legal niceties. At the same time, it’s not surprising that an aspiring autocrat who comes to power the second time around acts differently. In the European context this is the story of Orbán and Kaczyński: the second time they came to power, they were better prepared, they had different personnel, and they had a game plan. They knew that they had to hijack certain institutions right away. Once they had done that, they could still do culture war – go after journalists, universities, and so on. But they had to go after the courts first.

In that sense the Trump story is somewhat similar, but with an interesting wrinkle. It is debatable whether we can talk about a captured apex court in the United States in the way we could about the Constitutional Tribunal in Poland, for example. The second time Trump came into power, he already had a court that in many ways was to his liking.

Overall, however, we’re seeing a pattern that is pretty similar. If anything, what might be different is that the US still seems to lack personnel for doing things in a systematic way. In 2010–2011, Orbán was saying he was going to create a new national system. Not that he completely succeeded, but he had a lot of resources to draw on in terms of experienced administrators and people with their own ambitions. Even then, it still took a while before they figured out, for instance, how to transform universities into foundations with a view to capturing and subordinating them.

Aro Velmet: Up until Trump’s re-election, it would have been easy to explain the political shifts in the US in terms of the interests of capital. Trump won the first time with lots of ideologically charged talk, but when it came to actual policies he ran the standard Republican playbook: lower taxes, less regulation, preferential deals for large business interests. But Trump’s second term seems to be different. His actual policies have frustrated many in the big business community. How much does this second administration complicate a crude Marxist story of the political turns in the US?

Jan-Werner Müller: Trump didn’t really have a big agenda to begin with. What did he want? He wanted retribution, he wanted revenge, and he’s now doing everything to make that a reality. There were some pet ideas – tariffs, especially – that came into the picture. But plenty of actors simply saw this as an opportunity to get what they want. He opened up space for extractive industries, for the fossil fuel industry, which is having a field day with a vice president enormously committed to furthering their interests. Trump also obviously benefited those with a strong cryptocurrency agenda; he benefited those who wanted to push unregulated AI.

So there are enough people who like what’s going on. With others, the intimidation has worked. People feel that Trump has the levers of the federal government, and if they stick their heads out, he’s going to come after them. That has been the story with law firms and, unfortunately, with plenty of universities.

There’s probably still enough to like in terms of tax cuts, if you think about the billions that large corporations are saving because of last year’s legislation, the broad commitment to deregulation. It’s hard to see that big business is going to be at the forefront of resistance, even if on one level it knows that the destruction of the rule of law is ultimately not good.

Aro Velmet: One of the interesting things that has come out of the Trump administration has been the new national security strategy, which very openly talks about US interference in the politics of other countries to support its own vision of a post-liberal order. The strategy talks about the EU as being ideologically opposed to the Trumpist project. To what degree can we think of Trump’s foreign policy as an internationalization of the domestic fight against wokeism?

Jan-Werner Müller: There certainly is an attempt to globalize MAGA ideologically. We’ve been talking about a sort of international of nationalists for many decades. What’s often left out is that this nationalist international has a greater chance of actually happening when there are clear material interests at stake. It was one thing for Trump to say that the current Brazilian government and justices are treating his ally Bolsonaro unfairly. It was another thing when Brazil got serious about regulating Twitter. I think something similar is true of the European far right, where exactly the same logic applies.

Aro Velmet: Also with regards to Twitter.

Jan-Werner Müller: Yes. The constant stream of claims that Europeans are abandoning Western civilization because they no longer believe in free speech is partly a pushback against the real regulatory power of the European Union, and what it can do to companies even of this size. That’s not the only explanation, but it has to feature in the picture.

I hasten to add that all of us remain free to criticize the EU or specific governments – to say that maybe it isn’t right that police can show up on your doorstep in Germany because you criticized a minister online. But given what the likes of Vance are doing in the US – the incredible, unprecedented crackdown on academic freedom, for instance – the MAGA rhetoric on these topics can be safely ignored, because it’s so obviously bad-faith, so obviously hypocritical, and so obviously serving a particular power agenda.

Aro Velmet: One problem with the internationalist MAGA alliance is that Trump’s foreign policy doesn’t play well with his would-be allies. In Canada, the conservatives’ proximity to Trump clearly alienated their voter base; the same seems to have been true for Denmark. To what degree can that become a point of fracture within the European far right, or even the more moderate right?

Jan-Werner Müller: We’ve known since early 2017 that Trump himself is not exactly popular in Europe. In the wake of his win in 2016 and Brexit, there were predictions about an unstoppable wave of populism. But when Trump actually supported the likes of Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen, it backfired. People learned that getting his endorsement is not a winner in Europe. That’s been true ever since, though not everybody has learnt this lesson. Not too long, the AfD ago made a big deal out of saying: elect us, we’re going to join the Board of Peace, and we’re going to use a lot of German taxpayers’ money in doing so. I don’t think those are popular moves.

We need to distinguish that from a different kind of game that someone like Georgia Meloni has playing: look, I’m close to him, I can serve as a transatlantic mediator, I’m a real European stateswoman. That’s not quite the same as saying: I’m Trump’s ally and I’m going to implement whatever he wants. Politically speaking, never mind morally, anything that moves in that direction is clearly a mistake in the European context. I think some have learned it. The Rassemblement National is nowadays very careful about how it presents its relationship to Trump’s US. But the German far right still tries to ally with Trump and thinks it might be a vote-winner.

Aro Velmet: How does the European far right differ from the Trumpist project ideologically – where are the major cleavages?

Jan-Werner Müller: I really think it’s important that we keep certain concepts distinct. Post-liberal is not the same as populist, and populist is not the same as far-right. You can be far-right without being a populist – there are plenty of very elitist far-right actors who don’t claim to speak in the name of a homogeneous people. They’re not all doing the same thing; their rhetoric isn’t always exactly the same.

National context really does matter. Different political cultures present different opportunities for populists to present themselves as spokespeople for a supposedly real people, to whom the others don’t really belong. That’s easier in countries where you already have something that might be described as a culture war going on, but that’s not true everywhere in the same way.

Granted, a lot of these actors can learn from each other. But despite a lot of similarities, the individual figures are different, the ideologies aren’t always the same, and they only converge on one or two substantive similarities. Virtually all of them are going to say certain things about Islam, certain things about Muslim refugees – this has become something that almost anybody feels they can activate very easily.

That’s not really answering your question, but it’s a call to resist the temptation of simply saying it’s a populist wave that is now everywhere and unstoppable, and then asking after every election whether the tide is advancing or receding. I think that’s a profoundly unhelpful way of looking at today’s political landscape.

Aro Velmet: I’d like to ask about what some have called ‘reactionary centrism’: the idea that a meaningful opposition to Trump would have to move to the centre – to adopt, or at least move closer to, some of the positions of MAGA supporters. This is particularly when it comes to cultural issues, on immigration, trans rights and so on, in order to win over swing voters.

Jan-Werner Müller: The term ‘reactionary centrism’ refers to a phenomenon where intellectuals, journalists, sometimes politicians self-consciously locate themselves in a centre – between two extremes – and where those two extremes are presented as equivalent or similarly dangerous. Those who push back against this positions will say: sure, you can criticize certain things that happened at universities, but Trump on the one hand, and what’s sometimes called cancel culture on the other are really not the same, and to believe they are is a profound failure of political judgement.

The more sophisticated reactionary centrists have a way out of this counterargument: maybe they’re not the same, but the one caused the other. With the Left’s endless ideas about diversity and genders, the other side had no choice but to go further right and vote for Trump. This position implies that only the Left has agency – only they make a move, and then everybody else reacts, and everybody else gets excused because backlash is natural and inevitable. Empirically, I think it’s pretty hard to make these arguments plausible.

Aro Velmet: Another other proposal on how to counter MAGA has been a broad anti-corruption, pro-democracy popular front, such as in Poland and now Hungary. How would you evaluate the potential of something like that in the US context?

Jan-Werner Müller: Let me make two points. On the one hand, you’re completely right that an opposition party must take up the issue of unprecedented corruption and make the most of it. Not simply as a matter of electoral strategy, because a moral wrong is being committed that needs to be opposed.

Point number two, though: there is a commonsense assumption that far-right populists who get into power with the promise of fighting corruption but then turn out to be far more corrupt than the people they initially criticized will be punished politically. That assumption has often turned out to be false. Think of what Jörg Haider did in Austria for many years, and where the FPÖ is today.

So I think it’s naive to think that an anti-corruption stance alone will do the trick. If you think about both Poland and Hungary, it was also that economic growth had flatlined, that the cost-of-living crisis was very noticeable for people.

Aro Velmet: To what degree can we address this populist moment without addressing social media, which has structurally polarized public opinion and created the conditions for this kind of us-versus-them, or elites-versus-the-people, framing of politics?

Jan-Werner Müller: I would be very careful with a certain type of technological determinism, which has become quite pervasive. It’s not new. People have always tried to tell stories along the lines of: the printing press gets invented, and boom, you have wars of religion; radio gets invented, and what follows? Fascism; TV gets invented, and what follows? McCarthyism. Not totally wrong of course, but also not quite right. Every technology creates different affordances and there’s never a single political outcome which is predetermined. It’s far too simplistic to think this way.

That’s point number one, which I know is not very productive. Let me try to make a positive one. Some of the extreme things that have happened in the US were not inevitable. The cliché that whatever happens in the US is going to come to Europe sooner or later, that this is our global fate – that is nonsense. Every new media infrastructure sits on top of the pre-existing media infrastructure. A lot of what has been happening or going wrong in the US can only be explained by what had already been happening with talk radio and cable TV in the 1980s and 1990s. These things in turn can only be explained by certain regulatory decisions, basically under the Reagan administration. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to have crazy stuff in other countries too – but it’s also no reason to be completely alarmist.

Concretely, that means that while there are very good reasons to criticize public television and radio in many European countries, if you do have them, it’s extremely important to preserve them. It’s not an accident that all kinds of populists are campaigning against them: think of the recent referendum in Switzerland, or the big campaign by the German AfD, saying all this taxpayers’ money is going to leftwing journalists to spout random opinions.

So I think we have to descend from this very general level of ‘oh, social media’ and look at existing media infrastructures. There are spaces where we can preserve things and even make them better. To finish on a truly positive note, which you’re entitled to when you talk to people in the US: we hope for the best.