Currently, the U.S. is suffering from the type of system-wide autocratic capture that the EU is structured to prevent.
That structure has been tested. Hungary and Poland both spent the last decade testing what a member state could get away with on rule-of-law erosion, judicial capture, and the suppression of opposition. The EU built its toolkit in response to them, and the toolkit is both operational and proven. We do not have to invent any of it. We can read what they did and understand what we are looking at when we look at our own structural future.
Here are five tools the EU uses to contain and reverse autocratic capture.
Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union is the procedure that can suspend a member state’s voting rights in EU institutions when it persistently breaches the Union’s founding values, including the rule of law and democracy. In the EU, when a member state's government rigs its courts and elections, the other member states have a formal procedure to take away that state's vote in the Union's decisions until the rigging is undone.
The third tool consists of two courts. The European Court of Justice handles EU law itself, and the European Court of Human Rights, technically a Council of Europe institution rather than an EU one but operating in tandem, handles human rights. Both provide judicial oversight that no single member state government can capture, because each state seats one judge among dozens it did not choose, through processes no single country controls. A Hungarian or Polish government can pack its own supreme court. It cannot pack the Strasbourg court. Citizens, NGOs, and other member states can bring cases there, and the rulings carry legal weight inside the offending country.
The fourth tool is the Copenhagen criteria, which are the standards a country must meet to join the EU and to remain in good standing: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities. The other tools on this list measure a member against these standards. Imagine if American states had to meet standards like these to remain in good standing, and lost their “good standing” status when they gerrymandered their maps or corrupted their courts.
The broader Union budget itself is the fifth EU tool, the one that ties the others together. Structural funds, cohesion funds, agricultural support, research and exchange programs like Horizon and Erasmus, all of it moves through compliance conditions that make authoritarian capture genuinely expensive for the regime building it. The mechanism is quieter than what the American imagination reaches for when it thinks about confronting authoritarianism. No troops, no conventional sanctions, no dramatic confrontation. Just conditions on the money that flows through the Union, calibrated so the cost of authoritarianism climbs above the cost of staying democratic. The financial gravity of belonging to a wealthy bloc does the rest.
The EU model runs on pooled financial and judicial mechanisms shared by countries that keep their own governments, their own laws, and their own constitutional authority, while binding themselves to standards no single member can dismantle alone. That model binds member states to shared democratic standards on the things that matter most. That meansstrong states with a lean center, and robust shared mechanisms for protecting voting rights, judicial independence, and human rights.
That is a different destination than the one the Federalist Society talks about, and it is the destination this publication has in mind when illustrating a future where America looks structurally more like the European Union than the regressive and perpetually worsening mess we have now.
Some folks might ask: if states get more independent authority, isn’t that what the bad guys want? To tear us apart so the oligarchs can more easily exploit us?
The European Union is the counterexample. Its member states currently retain more independent authority than American states, but take a look at the parts that make up the member states of the EU and ask yourself if we aren't already halfway there: their own constitutions, their own court systems, their own legislatures. Most of them even share a currency, the way American states do. Their Union has not torn apart, because states with autonomy can still bind each other to democratic standards through structured cooperation, and that cooperation can be powerful.
America already is that federation in its bones: states holding their own authority, a central layer built for coordination and common defense. What we can add is the part the EU proved works, shared democratic standards, voting rights, fair courts, human rights, protection of minorities, enforced through pooled financial and judicial mechanisms that are less easily captured.
There is hope in this too. The most dangerous narrative running through American political life right now is the idea that authoritarian regimes consolidate and stay consolidated, that once the GOP wins, they win forever. That captured courts and agencies and the security services leave no room for recourse or reformation. Regimes far more entrenched have been removed and replaced, under far worse circumstances.
The United States has fifty states with independent constitutional authority and the legal capacity, when they choose to use it, to act more independently. That is what soft secession and the broader architecture of state-led opposition are about. That is what the rest of the Existentialist Republic’s American Reformation series has been mapping. The EU shows us the destination is real, the tools are real, and a regime built on what looked like permanent capture can fall in a single election if the soft-power apparatus around it has been doing its quiet work for long enough.
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Today’s call to action compounds on yesterday’s. Find another way to make the demand. Ask someone else on the contact list and/or ask the same person but in a different way. Maybe you contacted your governor last time, so you can try your mayor. Maybe your mayor sent back a form letter response to your email so this time call, mail a letter, or comment on their most recent social media post to ask why they won’t send a response on this subject.
Here is the action. Email or call your governor’s office and tell them, in your own words, to direct state police to enforce state criminal law against anyone who assaults, abducts, or unlawfully detains a resident, federal badge or not, and to sign an executive order requiring every armed agent in the state to show a face, a name, and legal authority. An agent acting outside the Constitution is not acting in pursuance of it. If you have feelings on those horrific shock gloves, tell them the same. If they aren’t willing to plainly state that nobody is above the law, then are they really who you want as a representative? Do as many of the following as you can handle:
Your governor, the office that can sign the order this week.
Your state attorney general, to commit publicly to prosecuting assault, kidnapping, and unlawful detention committed under color of a badge, as Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty already has.
Your state legislators, to write both into statute so the next governor can’t undo them.
Post the ask publicly and tag the governor, the attorney general, and your state party, so the ask and any non-answer are both public.
Your own words are what works; identical messages get counted once and filed. A form letter back is a lack of courage, and you can say so in a response to them.
It’s inspiring for others to see a screenshot, photo, or copied text of your activism. Showing others that you are persistently advocating for change is an effective method for building the public activation necessary for a successful social movement.
The Existentialist Republic drafts model state legislation, and one of our state bills addresses this exact conduct: the Epstein Survivors Justice Act.
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Appreciate this information. Admittedly, I was unaware of all of this with regard to the EU.
One point that I think we Americans need to finally acknowledge, and far more importantly act on, is that WE already have immense power to collectively, as individuals, force our oligarchs to their knees. We just have to use it.
It requires zero violence, zero bloodshed, zero active protest, and almost zero personal exposure. We simply have to STOP FEEDING THEM. Will it have adverse effects on the market and employment in the short term? Unfortunately, yes. Are those short-term adverse effects even remotely as bad as what we'll suffer if we fail to stop this active coup? Hell no.
In other words, in every instance possible, we will need to join together and cancel our Amazon, Paramount, Disney, Walmart, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, X, Facebook, Instagram, accounts and memberships. Stop handing them our money. Not for 1 day but rather, for as long as needed. Pull our money out of the major banks and switch to credit unions. Banking accounts, credit accounts, etc..
Stop shopping at every major corporate retailer possible and switch to small businesses and local farmers markets where possible. Even though we can't necessarily directly impact the government welfare corporations tied to the military industrial complex, the "trickle up" effect that starving all of the other corporations will introduce will impact them as well. Remember, our country is run by a small handful of mega corporations and banks that own everything else.
I've been ready to do this for more than a year. I'm just waiting for a big enough contingent of us to finally agree to commit and make it happen. Why do you think NSPM 7 included wording about "eco terrorism" and "anticapitalist" ideology? It's because they KNOW that we could cripple the whole system if we want to...
The problem is it appears our Democratic governors refuse to use the tools at our disposal. We could have stopped this madness already with a blue state coalition. Blue states by and large support the machine. We pay more and get less than our red counterparts
Appreciate this information. Admittedly, I was unaware of all of this with regard to the EU.
One point that I think we Americans need to finally acknowledge, and far more importantly act on, is that WE already have immense power to collectively, as individuals, force our oligarchs to their knees. We just have to use it.
It requires zero violence, zero bloodshed, zero active protest, and almost zero personal exposure. We simply have to STOP FEEDING THEM. Will it have adverse effects on the market and employment in the short term? Unfortunately, yes. Are those short-term adverse effects even remotely as bad as what we'll suffer if we fail to stop this active coup? Hell no.
In other words, in every instance possible, we will need to join together and cancel our Amazon, Paramount, Disney, Walmart, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, X, Facebook, Instagram, accounts and memberships. Stop handing them our money. Not for 1 day but rather, for as long as needed. Pull our money out of the major banks and switch to credit unions. Banking accounts, credit accounts, etc..
Stop shopping at every major corporate retailer possible and switch to small businesses and local farmers markets where possible. Even though we can't necessarily directly impact the government welfare corporations tied to the military industrial complex, the "trickle up" effect that starving all of the other corporations will introduce will impact them as well. Remember, our country is run by a small handful of mega corporations and banks that own everything else.
I've been ready to do this for more than a year. I'm just waiting for a big enough contingent of us to finally agree to commit and make it happen. Why do you think NSPM 7 included wording about "eco terrorism" and "anticapitalist" ideology? It's because they KNOW that we could cripple the whole system if we want to...
The problem is it appears our Democratic governors refuse to use the tools at our disposal. We could have stopped this madness already with a blue state coalition. Blue states by and large support the machine. We pay more and get less than our red counterparts