John Yoo, a South Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official, currently serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He recently attended the conference Rule of Law as Lawfare, co-organized by the Danube Institute, the Center for Fundamental Rights, and The European Conservative in Budapest. During the event, he was interviewed by Hungarian Conservative. The discussion touched on several important and timely issues, including the similarities and differences between the rule of law proceedings against Hungary and the prosecution of Donald Trump, an outsider’s perspective on the European Union, and why progressive ideology is considered fundamentally undemocratic.
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For years, the progressive left has unabashedly used its power to oppress its political opponents. This is evident in the ‘rule of law’ procedure against Hungary as well as in the prosecution of Donald Trump. What are the similarities and differences between these two cases?
Coming to the conference, I’ve learned a lot about the position of Hungary and the European Union, and the campaign against Hungary by European officials under the guise of rule of law, which is not really defined, to force Hungary and other countries to accept a kind of pan-European ideology, which is designed
to eliminate national sovereignty, to reduce national differences
and force a kind of morality, that I don’t think is in the European Union’s foundational agreements. It’s probably not what nations like Hungary thought they were signing up for when they joined the EU. At that level of generality, what’s happening to Trump has some similarities. The people who are prosecuting him think they’re doing it for the rule of law, even though what they are doing is beyond what the law allows. But they would say Donald Trump is such a threat to American democracy and the rule of law that forcing him out of the presidential race justifies these extraordinary prosecutions: breaking our tradition of never prosecuting a former president, conjuring up these kinds of charges which would never be brought against any normal defendant. So there, I think you see a lot of similarities. Obviously the difference is Trump is on trial in criminal courts for very specific crimes of conduct, whereas countries like Hungary are being pursued not because of any individual, but because of their government and their people’s views about how they want to order their own democratic politics.
As an outsider, what image does it paint of the European Union that Brussels can attack member states at will on purely political and ideological grounds?
The most obvious problem in the European Union is that it is not truly run according to democratic principles. The European Commission and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are imposing norms on democratic countries. That’s one. The second thing is you also see that the foundational agreements are being interpreted in a way through various abstract language here and there. The European agreements are being interpreted beyond what the original understanding was of the countries when they joined the agreements, to create this kind of political or moral ideology that is very intrusive into the sovereignty of the countries. The European Union works best as an economic union. The foundational principle was that you would have mobility of capital, labour, goods and services throughout the union. That’s being used now to try to create uniform political systems and political ideologies throughout the union, actually far beyond the mandate of the original agreements. I think is not going to yield the kind of benefits that the economic union produced.
What guarantee is there that right-wing forces, once in power, would not engage in similar political witch hunts?
The two ideologies are based on very different social and cultural foundations from the start.
Progressive ideology itself is sort of fundamentally anti-democratic.
It’s this idea that you should be ruled by experts who are insulated from democratic politics, who are not really responsible or accountable to the people. They promote values that the majority of the peoples in all these countries, including the United States, are opposed to it.
I think you see an extreme form of it right now in the United States and some European capitals, where there is this excessive opposition to Israel and the Hamas war. I think that the vast majority of Americans are pro-Israel. The polls I’ve seen say that over 70 per cent of Americans support Israel’s war against Hamas. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched elite institutions like our American universities, our downtowns, city councils or even the Biden administration’s State Department, where you see very sharp attacks bordering, if not actually crossing the line into antisemitism. I think it’s a really good example of how progressive ideology and elites are really at odds with most Americans and citizens of other countries are in favour of.
Why do they impose their own position when the majority holds a completely different view on the issue?
Our progressivism has always been built on this idea that there’s some bright future, some greater good that progressives know where they have to drag along the majority of the people kicking and screaming because they don’t know what’s good for them. That is something that European elites, especially the European Union officials, and elites in the United States both share that common attitude, that the vast majority of the people are kind of retrograded or unenlightened, and they have to be brought forward by sort of progressive elites.
Allow me to quote a part of your speech that the audience particularly liked: ‘Being a conservative at American universities is like being Hungary in the European Union.’ What do you mean by that?
Being a conservative in Berkeley is like you’re surrounded by Marxists. I think sometimes Hungary feels the same, surrounded by these European progressive elites. They’re unalterably opposed to what it wants to do, being a more conservative country.
In recent years, universities, intellectual institutions, and even EU bodies have been dominated by progressive liberals. Can this process be reversed, and if so, how?
That’s why we have elections. You can see in different countries that conservative parties are doing really well. You have, of course, Orbán and Hungary. You have Meloni in Italy. You might have Le Pen, as her party seems to be ahead in France. Conservatives are doing really well electorally, and they are going to be even more successful as long as they keep their principles: minimal government, low taxes, leaving to people the choice of what to do with their own lives.
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