Europe's Descent into Tyranny

It's not Donald Trump's America that freedom-lovers should worry about

America, we are repeatedly warned, teeters on the edge of tyranny under Donald Trump. Commentators point to the 47th president’s populist rhetoric, plans to purge the civil service, reliance on executive orders, and supposed defiance of judicial authority as existential threats to the American Republic.

Scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, argue that US democracy is sliding into authoritarianism. Academic David Driesen recently told The Guardianthat Trump is attempting to turn the US into a dictatorship.

The Left would like us to believe that Trump’s attacks on“fake news”, and his particular disdain for the progressive media, signal the unravelling of free speech. The truth is that the American system is functioning well and as the Founders intended.

Federal judges have challenged Trump at every turn, issuing countless rulings to block executive actions on immigration, federal funding, and workforce reductions. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed, subjecting his policies to unprecedented scrutiny. Only recently has the Supreme Court, after careful deliberation, limited the use of universal injunctions. Far from presiding over a dictatorship, it’s unlikely that any other US president has faced such a relentless judicial onslaught.

Yes, Trump is using the executive powers of the presidency to push through change, but the separation of powers is also proving remarkably effective. Trump may have secured his “Big Beautiful Bill” through Congress, delivering extended tax cuts, increased defence spending, and immigration reforms. But these victories came at a cost: compromises on Social Security and healthcare funding. This is not tyranny – it’s the messy process of American democracy at work.

It is particularly galling to hear hysterical warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy from Europeans. Many of them like to believe that their societies are uniquely civilised, champions of universal values in a world lurching towards authoritarianism. Have they not noticed what is happening within their own borders?

Almost forty years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, it was a victory for the free world. America and western Europe – the West – had prevailed against the Soviet system. What is “the West” today?

It increasingly looks as if the freedoms that Europeans enjoyed since the end of the Second World War were really an aberration, a consequence of the victory of Anglo-American arms in 1945. Europe has begun to revert to a much more authoritarian tradition.

Over the past decade, restrictive laws have tightened their grip on free expression. Germany’s NetzDG has turned social media companies into an internet police force, adding to an existing culture of intolerance towards free expression. One journalist recently received a seven-month suspended sentence for a satirical meme. In France, platforms must remove “hate speech” within 24 hours or face severe fines.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) leans on online platforms to remove “disinformation” – a term so vague it risks abuse. Claims about Covid-19’s origins, once dismissed as misinformation, are now widely accepted. Yet the DSA empowers regulators to police speech with little real accountability.

Having started to proscribe dissident opinions online, Europe may soon begin to take action against dissenting political parties. In Germany, there have been calls to ban the opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), making perverse use of a law designed to defend democracy.

But it is in Britain – which produced the original Bill of Rights – where the clamp down of free speech has perhaps been most alarming. The British police arrested an estimated 12,183 people in 2023 under laws that, among other things, target “grossly offensive” messages. That is about 33 arrests each day in the land of Magna Carta.

Perhaps the most infamous case of someone being locked up for what they said online is Lucy Connolly, an ordinary mother, sentenced to more than two years in prison for one horrible social media post. Nobody can credibly claim that she poses any threat to the public.

Connolly presumably pled guilty on the understanding that she would be treated more leniently. Leniency is the last thing she received. Instead, the authorities seem to have made an example of her, to quell rising anti-immigration sentiment amid fears of public unrest. This is not justice – it’s punishment for dissent. A society that tolerates such verdicts cannot call itself free.

Progressives like to decry Donald Trump’s supposed threat to judicial independence, yet US federal judges have repeatedly checked his decisions. In Britain, however, the judiciary increasingly appears to be an arm of the state, not a restraint upon it.

For years, defenders of judicial oversight in Britain argued that courts reviewing executive actions would protect individual rights. Incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law was hailed as a bulwark for liberty. Yet these safeguards have failed to prevent citizens like Lucy Connolly from being imprisoned for an inflammatory online post. Far from defending freedom, Britain’s courts seem complicit in eroding it.

If progressives really want to stop a free society that is descending into tyranny, forget about Donald Trump. The Supreme Court, Congress and the Constitution have him covered. No, the real story of emerging tyranny is happening on the other side of the Atlantic.