2025 is a warning on illiberalism

Today marks the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States. His re-emergence on the international stage will unsettle many in Europe, not just in issues of trade and international relations, but in what he symbolises for an unmatched growth in corporate power, the new and highly unusual American interference in EU internal affairs and the final breath of an economic orthodoxy.

For Donald Trump and his supporters, this marks a day of fervent triumph, winning a free and fair election on margins not seen for the Republican Party since George W. Bush, surviving multiple assassination attempts and escaping numerous ongoing criminal cases. His new cabinet is the most remarkable in American history for its unorthodoxy and controversy among his own ranks.

For the new ascendent illiberalism, as seen in Hungary, it is a call to arms, proving that the reactionary triumphs in the second decade of the 21st century were not mere moments of revolt, but a test-case for a world moving in a drastically different direction to that of 1945-2016.

Money, power and policy

President Biden delivered his final address to the American people from the Oval Office last Wednesday, warning of the development of an oligarchy in the United States. The expansion of corporate power is a defining characteristic of the new illiberalism which has crept into both national and international institutions across the West.

The conditions responsible for the existence of a reactionary illiberalism are not uniquely Republican nor American in their genesis, the Democrats have also embraced the expansion of corporate power and the use of money as a form of speech. The Vice-President Harris and President Trump campaigns combined directly spent over $3.5 billion dollars in their quest for the Oval Office.

Although, it can't be ignored that Trump's new Administration is far more blatant in quite literally allowing corporate influence a seat at the table. When considering outside groups and party committees, this figure rises to almost $4.2bn. The bulk of this 2024 money went to media and advertising.

It is difficult to put into perspective the true financial scale of an American election cycle. A separate estimated $16 billion was injected into the campaign through political action committees and obscure 'dark money' sources for 2024, a majority of this from corporations and murky special interests.

For a sense of scope and the potential power of this money, throughout 20 years of George W. Bush's PEPFAR programme, just over $100 billion was spent in the poorest regions of the world to combat HIV and AIDS, saving an estimated 25 million human lives. Similar figures to 2024 were spent on the 2020 election cycle.

What does this mean?

The point of this is not really to make a like-for-like comparison on the tragic loss of a potential humanitarian good or perhaps lost opportunities for a prudent, productive reinvestment in a private business; civic advocacy and political outreach is also an important part of democracy and can easily be practiced ethically without largescale donations. It is important to highlight the way in which money is spent for marginal, if not invisible outcomes.

Enormous, opaque corporate cash donations and PAC contributions represent nothing more than a quid pro quo for 'access' and an unnecessary waste of society's productive goods, rather than an expression of honest free speech or an act of constructive democracy.

Recent cash scandals in the European Parliament involving foreign powers underline this reality. We are lucky in Ireland that we have a relatively transparent lobbying system, a strong limitations of cash donations and many legitimate, accessible pathways to effective advocacy which strengthens rather than undermines our democracy.

The European Parliament and the other institutions, on the other hand, likely need a revolution of sorts in making the transparency register more robust in monitoring its members' financial interests.

Non-transparent free-flowing sums of money corrupt politicians and institutions and derail political incentives in an unmatched manner, whilst also frequently critically undermining the national interest and international partnerships.

One to keep an eye on is how critical Elon Musk will be of China, given his manufacturing presence in Shanghai through Tesla, and the default dependency being a major player in the EV market places on access to China's Critical Raw Materials.

A brave new world of illiberal tech?

In the European context, it is natural to be highly sceptical of efforts by social media CEO's to paint the European Union as some sort of institution of censorship - to any past or current students or employees of the European Institutions, this is an allegation which the vast majority will feel is equally ignorant and absurd.

There is an obvious vested interest in attacking the world's regulatory superpower for Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the Digital Services Act (DSA) is a financial burden and potential profit inhibitor, by default, an expansive regulatory affairs and moderation team is required to ensure that content adheres to both national European and European Union laws, if it is to operate in this region.

One might ask what is so bad about a private enterprise being asked to obey the laws of the lands in which they operate? You could fairly conclude that a competitive, vibrant European democracy is also more important than an American CEO's bottom line, or ideological vision for that matter.

Zuckerberg has recently attempted to make the regulation of social media a free speech issue, but in reality it has issues such as clamping down on the distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Images in mind, alongside the prevention of real-world violence incited through these platforms.

You can expect that any ongoing talk of banning social media for children in Europe will be met with similar cynical free-speech oriented arguments, despite the overwhelming and constantly emerging evidence that it is destructive to their overall health and wellbeing.

The horrendous case of Facebook as a platform contributing to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is a textbook case of how unregulated platforms can lend tremendous power to statements of violence and encourage authoritarian regimes to conduct crimes against humanity.

Most pertinently for social media giants, the DSA limits targeted advertising, including a ban on targeted advertising to under 18s and those based on categories of personal data, such as ethnicity; political views; sexual orientation; religion, or genetic or biometric data.

Anybody who has ever launched an ad-campaign on these platforms understands how lucrative yet potentially damaging this level of personalisation is.

It is not difficult to see how hyper-targeted advertising can benefit extremist forces and foreign meddlers - the data is so specialised and psychology driven that an exploitation of it fundamentally tilts a race in the data holders favour. Preying on fears and insecurities rather than using balanced arguments as a tool of honest persuasion, is by definition corrosive to liberal-democracy.

Ultimately, big tech understands that Musk's current position in the White House is a unique opportunity for the industry to undermine the DSA and similar legislation abroad - they know that Trump will threaten trade tariffs over a variety of national and international policy initiatives - they know they have a unique level corporate power never before witnessed in American public life.

This unprecedented raw concentration of power has much to do with a falling relative standard of living for many in the West and pandemic-era policy choices.

The 'O' word

By 2022 it became apparent that the Covid-19 pandemic represented one of the largest upwards transfers of wealth in human history, the US experienced this in a particularly acute manner, its concentration into the hands of a relatively small circle is utterly remarkable.

Many will point to data showing decreasing global inequality, but as John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times points out, "If the middle class looks upwards, the rich are pulling further away. A top-tier life feels further out of reach than ever. But look down, and the floor is coming up fast."

It would seem the drastic combination of reduced economic mobility, crushing inflation and housing shortages, when combined with a communicatively ineffective leadership in the midst of an undercurrent of reactionary revolt is a significant part of the reality which leads to Donald Trump 2.0. Particularly when much of the Democratic Party's message revolves around issues that appeal to an educated, upper-middle class, which is shrinking in America.

There is a unique resentment inherent to the current American political order. Legitimate economic grievance has been diverted towards a phony cultural onslaught which is tearing the country apart from both ends, but there is bipartisan agreement among voters that things are not working as they should, whatever that means to each individual.

Very few people in America, or the West you may suspect, believe that Washington serves its people well. Trump is the only successful figure to have come along and offered a drastically different vision for his country in 21st century Presidential politics - whether you love it or hate it.

The emergence of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Primary, and credible challenge in 2020, followed by the defeat of Secretary Clinton, should have been the red alert which reoriented liberal American politics towards a grassroots, future focused, people-based political movement. Rather, the Harris campaign was plagued by perceptions of inauthenticity, with talking points drawn up by consultants which frankly did not get to the heart of most American's worries.

Joe Biden as a figure did seem to absorb those lessons in the 2020 election cycle and co-opt many elements of the Sanders platform, offering temporary reprieve. However, in 2024, the party impeded by Biden's own ego utterly failed to put forward a vision that wasn't just reactive, but visionary and broad. It scarcely had any message at all, although, the campaign length was admittedly the shortest in living memory.

Who wins the 2028 American election will broadly depend upon who can offer a new vision for America and capture its attention, regardless of its appeal to darker or better angels.

Not just Trump, not just America

The post-Cold War establishment is dead and buried, there is an emerging desire for radical yet rational economic reform across the Western world which puts access to housing, addressing inequality, clamping down on the overreaches of big tech and promoting upward mobility at the core of its agenda, it is just waiting for a messenger. Ideally, of course, alongside a more coherent social discourse.

Just as how the tides of Western culture now cast scepticism on traditional media outlets, journalism and certain cohorts of experts, people will become sceptical of the concentration and control of information by a select number of mega tech corporations. The reactionary cycle will repeat as people begin to distrust agenda-driven online media personalities, they will tire of a world where policy direction is solely governed by emotions stimulated by an overly conflict-driven new media.

The terms 'corporate media' and 'new-media' are almost comically beneficial to social media companies. It implies that the bulk of the world's information is now disseminated by the hip new kids on the block, rather than say, less than five multi-billion dollar mega-corporations, with rather authoritarian executive structures centred around the often majority-owning CEO.

The people who are proactive in engaging with this idea and driving the reactionary cycle before it fully develops will dominate the West electorally by the end of the decade.

The attention economy

Ironically, it is the very much establishment Ezra Klein of the New York Times and MSNBC's Chris Hayes who have recently had the most productive conversation around messaging in American Democratic politics since the Obama years, laying out some of these ideas - correctly identifying the fact that liberal-democratic political actors refuse to engage with the current high conflict, new-media driven discourse which dominates America and the West, rendering themselves attention deprived and effectively invisible to casual voters.

You do not have to like Trump or the MAGA movement to appreciate his relative genius in this specific area, the fact that he has utterly captured the world's media attention for a decade, in ways which even the most skilled of politicians and communicators are only beginning to figure out.

These ideas also apply to most of the West, especially Europe, and adequately describe why illiberal parties are growing and look set to dominate North Atlantic politics for the remainder of the decade.

European illiberalism and the future

Fidesz in Hungary has launched a blatant campaign of illiberal state capture over the past decade, the formalised corruption of the System of National Co-operation bolsters Viktor Orbán's political allies who then coincidentally win the bulk of state contracts, most businesses that grow significantly and show promise in Hungary are also acquired by Orbán allies; often against the protest of their owners.

The Prime Minister has imposed confiscatory taxes on key sectors of the economy, ensuring they were divvied up among his oligarchic friends, the court system has also been stacked beyond recognition with Fidesz loyalists to make life easy for loyalists, and incredibly difficult for the lives of the regimes opponents. Hungary is the quintessential EU oligarchy, and a model inspiring illiberal elites from Bucharest to Berlin, it is a what a country looks like, a decade after a warning like that of Joe Biden.

Why is Hungary so important?

1) The Hungarian regime consistently undermines European laws which also have primacy over the Irish legal system; the less rights afforded to Hungarian citizens, the less tangible our own legal rights are here in Ireland as citizens on the other side of Europe. The law needs to be applied equally across the Union - otherwise our rights are mere suggestions temporarily upheld by the goodwill of our temporarily liberal-democratic government, until an illiberal actor comes along.

This highlights the important role that Michael McGrath can play as Justice Commissioner in the coming years.

The CJEU judgement on the budget conditionality mechanism, which withheld EU monies from Hungary and previously Poland under PIS, did offer some tangible repercussions for rule of law breaches, but I would argue the response of the Union has not gone far enough in addressing Article 2 violations.

Electoral autocracies are almost as frightening as dictatorships which seize power through force, their stealth and slow burn of norms in institutions is deeply difficult to reverse, as shown currently in Tusk's Poland, particularly once the media is captured by friendly oligarchs. It also relies upon an exhausted opposition incapable of rallying civil society to the defence of institutions.

Few elect an illiberal movement with the hope of seeing the formation of an entrenched autocracy, it is only when it is too late that popular regrets become tragically apparent. When a political movement like Fidesz tells you of their intentions to capture democratic institutions, you should believe them.

2) Secondly, Orbán's Administration has been made a darling of the new right in America, Germany, Poland, Czechia and Slovakia; among others. President Trump himself offered a statement of reverence for Orbán in his sole debate with Vice-President Harris.

Yet, very little attention is paid in these circles to the actual outcome of Orbán's policies, inflation hit 24.5% in 2023, largely due to price controls instituted by Budapest. He has also conducted a foreign policy based upon an 'Eastern opening' to China and Moscow which runs contrary to the objectives of the Trump Administration.

The European Parliament, including the conservative EPP of which Fidesz was once a member, assesses that Hungary has become a "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy", yet Fidesz is a source of inspiration for many across Europe.

The model

Ultimately Hungary is the model for an autocratic illiberalism which will proliferate, and it has widespread support not just from fringe and soon to be majority right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, but also from figures within the Trump Administration who attempt to give it an ideological structure; Steve Bannon has referred to Hungary as the new ‘bridge between the US and Europe’. It was only this month that the American Government sanctioned Orbán's cabinet office minister for acts of corruption.

Emmanuel Macron was correct when he recently stated that Elon Musk and his Republican allies were backing a new international reactionary movement, almost an inverse of the Third Way which dominated the early post-Cold War world.

It is always important to note that reactionary movements do not exist in a vacuum, they emerge when establishment political thought has failed to deliver for ordinary people. If you look at Europe's stagnancy and America's increasing inequality, it is hard to come to any other rational conclusion. The incredible power of big tech over our daily lives is also a testament to this.

The idea that liberal-democracy, faith in institutions and a basic respect for plurality are Western defaults is a folly, just as the liberal-democratic order raised Europe from the ashes of total war, it was shortly before this miracle that a Western born reactionary fascism and communism swept the continent, with tens of millions perishing in war, others subject to genocide and a life in chains.

The future of power

We are entering a new, dangerous era of polarised power politics, unduly influenced more heavily than ever by private interests, with the potential to become even more divorced from the realities ordinary people face in their day to day lives. If the current system does not work to satisfaction for many in the West, it would be a mistake to believe that it cannot possibly get worse.

History shows us that it not only can get worse; it more often does. 2025 is a crossroads in liberal democracy, how do we reenergise economic mobility, innovation and growth in the West while also ensuring a strong middle class which is lifted by a rising tide?

How do we tame the influence of the emerging tech oligarchy and its malign influence on our politics whilst also unlocking the enormous potential of AI, advances in hardware and digital platforms to build more prosperous, stronger democracies?

How can liberal-democratic policymakers, establishment right and left, better compete for the attention that drives successful electoral campaigns?

How do we ensure that rule of law violations globally, and more specifically violations of European law do not infringe upon the rights of the rest of democracy's citizens and are punished to the letter of the law?

These are the key issues, in desperate need of solutions, that will drive the debate of the coming decade and ultimately dictate whether we end up reflecting more closely European Union values, or those of an illiberal electoral-autocracy.