Bezos is a precursor

What the US can learn from an already autocratized Turkey

When Americans hear warnings about impending dictatorship and fascism, many likely get images of Hitler’s mass rallies or armies marching down the boulevards of European capitals. That probably seems far off and far-fetched. Rightly so. The fact is that today’s autocracies are very different from the dictatorships of the 1930s, and if Americans want to prevent their country from becoming a modern-day autocracy, they need to understand what such a thing looks like.

Countries like Hungary or Turkey are probably better models for what the United States under a second Trump administration would move towards than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Leading Republicans like J.D. Vance have openly expressed their admiration for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which Freedom House today classifies as “partly free” and Varieties of Democracy as an “electoral autocracy.” Repression in such regimes is real, but it is quite often subtle. There are generally free elections and they are at times competitive, but they are not fair.

Hungary of course only threw off the yoke of Communist dictatorship in 1989 and thus does not have the US’s long legacy of democracy. Another comparison might therefore be Turkey, which has had a serious problem with repeated military coups but on the whole was a flawed but functioning multiparty democracy since its first free elections in 1950 and until recently. Now, however, Turkey has been downgraded to “not free,” a step worse than Hungary. Neither country is of course a perfect comparison, but the way that autocracy developed there, through elections and both gradually and fitfully, could hold important lessons for the USA.

I thought of this with the recent decision by the Washington Post to change its long-standing policy and not endorse a candidate this election, which upset many. At first, I saw this as I suspect many “regular” Americans see it: as a bit of a storm in a tea cup, with mainly intellectual elites outraged over a mostly non-consequential decision. But then I realized that I was thinking about it wrong and that a better metaphor is of the Washington Post as the canary in the coal mine and a precursor to what may be coming. We can say that it is a precursor because Turkey has already been there and done that.

When western media reports on the state of journalism in Turkey under Erdogan, it is often about Turkey’s sad record as the number one jailer of journalists in the world. That is a meaningful figure, no doubt, but it is not key to understanding how freedom of speech in Turkey has been curtailed. There are not more jailed journalists in Turkey than in North Korea because the latter is more democratic but because there is still a more vibrant media climate in Turkey, with journalists who dare to challenge the government, and also due to the conflict with the PKK, where journalists who report sympathetically on the terrorist-branded organization often find themselves jailed. A better way to think about media repression in Turkey is about the media ownership structure and the politicization of the various tools of the state.

When Erdogan came to power, he faced a number of established media organizations in the country, often fiercely critical of him and his party. Many of them were owned by large family conglomerates with ties to and sympathies with the old elite. At some point, Erdogan set out to transform the entire media landscape and he did so less by the use of overt repression and more by using incentives and the extraordinary economic power vested in the state. For example, in 2005, a media company that owned a TV station and a popular newspaper—Sabah—was purchased by a holding company (Calik) run by Erdogan’s son-in-law. After the purchase, their editorial lines were reliably friendly to Erdogan. In 2012, the company was in financial trouble, and to ensure that it stayed in friendly hands Erdogan used informal channels to let the owners of a number of large industrial conglomerates—let us call them Oligarchs—know that they would be able to secure enormously lucrative contracts in building additions to Istanbul’s second airport, a high-speed railway system, and a huge tunnel project in Istanbul. But the potential deals came with a catch. In return for the contracts, the oligarchs would have to pool their resources and buy the media company. They did so, and the owner became Kalyon Group, a company active in construction, energy, and infrastructure. The editorial line of Sabah is to this day fiercely loyal to Erdogan.

So, when Jeff Bezos—a transportation/online retail/tech tycoon and the third richest man in the world—having bought the Washington Post in 2013, changes its decades-old editorial practice by stopping it from endorsing Kamala Harris shortly before this year’s momentous election, we are not just witnessing the result of one rich man’s whims. What we are seeing may be a pattern similar to what we saw in countries like Turkey as they were de-democratizing. Oligarchs who own media companies are interested in the bottom line and with significant business interests in other sectors they often enforce self-censorship not to antagonize the autocrat in charge. Or, as in this case, the autocrat who soon might be in charge.

It is of course not only the third richest man who may be following the pattern by appeasing a future President Trump. When Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, with business interests in transportation, space technology, and AI, bought Twitter, he promised to bring freedom of speech to the platform and to make sure that it was “political neutral.” Today, he is openly campaigning for Donald Trump, supporting his campaign financially to the tune of at least $132 million, and has so radically transformed the social media platform, which he renamed “X,” that many older users have abandoned it for alternatives. Some of us persist, but X today has become something more akin to an unregulated right-wing echo chamber than the moderated global public space which it was once at least aspiring to be.

Why do media owners fear Trump? Because he has let it be known that he is vengeful and respects neither the rule of law nor the freedom of the press. His attacks on independent media are legion. He has called on NBC to be investigated for treason and for ABC and CBS to have their licenses revoked. He has joked that journalists, editors, and CEOs who refused to give up their sources would change their tune when faced with the prospects of prison rape, and vowed to put the Federal Communications Commission “back under presidential authority.”

In other words, a president Trump would have both the power and the inclination to use his authority much like Orbán and Erdogan to pressure critical media organizations to bow to him. In this way, Bezos is just a precursor to what might come under a second Trump presidency. It will in all likelihood not just be the Washington Post and Twitter who bow before him. Some, like Bezos, will self-censor out of a sense of precaution and self-preservation. Others, like Musk, will jump fully on board to gain access to the inner circle and the power and wealth that comes with it, as long as you remain loyal to the Leader.

It is true that there are great differences between the United States and Turkey or Hungary, but they are perhaps not quite as great as many Americans would like to believe. Yes, there are more powerful media organizations in the US with a long tradition of independence that even Trump would find it difficult to break. But not even they are invulnerable. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment, whose largest income streams are from distribution and advertisement. If, for example, federal regulators target those sources of income or its theme parks or theaters, how long will it take before the news network’s editor-in-chief begins to avoid needlessly antagonizing the irritable president? And modern-day hybrid autocracies like Turkey do not require complete obedience from all. Turkey is neither North Korea nor Russia. There are still news outlets who are critical of the government. It is just that the few surviving critical networks and publications reach a small number of voters, and that the larger mainstream outlets that remain independent generally know where the limits of what can be said are and rarely cross them.

It is also true that the United States pioneered the separation of powers as an institutional means to prevent the emergence of an all-powerful king, but Arthur M. Schlesinger warned of an imperial presidency already half a century ago and things have gotten worse since then. Consecutive Republican and Democratic administrations have expanded the presidential use of executive orders. The Trump impeachment fiascos revealed that partisanship reigns supreme today in ways it did not do at the time of the Watergate scandal and that Congress can no longer be relied upon to be the check on the executive. The third branch of government is already packed with a supermajority of Trump loyalists and has been busy breaking one long-standing judicial norm after another. The latest one to be abandoned may come to be the one we miss the most. On the Supreme Court’s new interpretation of the Constitution, a U.S. president is immune from criminal prosecution for any crime committed in his official capacity. Among the examples explicitly mentioned during the trial was the hypothetical assassination of a political rival (for which Trump apparently would be immune as long as it was ordered as part of his official duties). In short, Trump would preside over a supercharged imperial presidency, not entirely dissimilar to the hyperpresidential system that Erdogan installed in Turkey in 2018.

There are other counterarguments and profound differences between the U.S. case and Turkey or Hungary of course, but a naïve “it cannot happen here” is the result of not properly contending with what has already happened in the USA: from multiple assassination attempts to burning ballot boxes and, lest we forget, an insurrection that should probably be described as a failed coup attempt. It most certainly can happen there, and it may already have started.

A dose of rare American humility is thus warranted, along with a realization that lessons can be learned from other countries that have already gone through a similar process. One final lesson from Turkey should be mentioned before I conclude. President Erdogan pursued his agenda via legal and informal means until people resisted. When that happened—as during the massive 2013 Gezi protests—he used the street protests, which sometimes turned rowdy, as a pretext to ratchet up repression. When a power struggle with a former ally—Fetullah Gülen, the recently deceased leader of a powerful religious movement—resulted in a violent coup attempt likely instigated by members of Gülen’s religious sect as a last-ditch attempt to unseat president Erdogan, the President called it “a gift from God” because it revealed who his enemies were. He then proceeded to purge government, media, and the educational system from all suspected Gülenists along with many others who were just political opponents or mistakenly got caught up in the massive purges.

Violent protests, something which Americans have a penchant for, is likely to be used as a pretext for fast-tracking authoritarianization, through states of emergency or invoking the insurrection act or similar measures. That is why I particularly fear Trump’s promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Attempts to round up so many family members, co-workers, and friends are likely to chock communities and engender massive protests. Such protests, especially if they turn into riots, would be perfect pretexts for Trump to make good on his threats to sick the National Guard or the military on his “internal enemies,” and to ratchet up repression. He will also need something particularly dramatic if he is to be able to fudge one of America’s hitherto unquestioned political norms: The two-term limit of the presidency. Erdogan has repeatedly come up with loopholes to do the same in Turkey.

Nothing is written in stone and there are multiple paths along which things may progress in the United States after the elections. But Bezo’s decision to not have his newspaper endorse Kamala Harris in the final weeks of an election that many rightly view as the most important one in modern American history, and Musk’s takeover and makeover of Twitter/X, suggest that there is a lot that could be learned about what may lie in store for America by looking at modern-day autocracies like Hungary or Turkey.

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