Why Constitutional Scholars Are Panicking: 34 of 35 Experts Agree
Thirty-four of thirty-five constitutional law experts consulted reportedly agreed the current trajectory threatens transformation into “autocratic kleptocracy.” Hundreds of former DOJ officials signed an open letter. A Reagan-appointed judge resigned, saying continued silence was intolerable.
This article is not primarily about who signed what. It is about why specialists converge on alarm at the same time: because convergence is a pattern that experts are trained to recognize.
Where this sits in the convergence map
Convergence is, by definition, a multi-vector process: legal, institutional, informational, and coercive elements reinforce each other.
Experts—constitutional scholars, former prosecutors, judges—are among the few actors who can see the cross-domain structure early because their work is the interaction of domains:
- Courts + executive compliance
- Statutory limits + bureaucratic practice
- Oversight architecture + remedies
- Legal theory + operational enforcement
In other words, expert alarm is often the first public-facing indicator that “isolated incidents” have become systemic transformation.
The Survey Logic: Why “34 of 35” Matters
A single professor can be dismissed as partisan. A single op-ed can be ignored. But scholarly near-unanimity across ideological lines is unusual.
The relevance is not that experts are infallible. The relevance is that constitutional breakdown is a specialized empirical domain. Scholars of democratic erosion have spent decades assembling cross-national case knowledge: how legalistic consolidation works, how autocratic projects maintain formal legality, how courts and bureaucracies are captured, how elections remain while competitiveness dies.
That knowledge base produces what looks like “panic” but is better described as comparative inference.
The Scholarly Framework: From “Executive Aggrandizement” to “Constitutional Retrogression”
Backsliding scholarship gives names to the mechanisms experts are reacting to:
- Nancy Bermeo’s executive aggrandizement: elected executives weaken checks step-by-step while maintaining democratic forms.
- Levitsky & Ziblatt’s guardrails: when mutual toleration and institutional forbearance collapse, formal rules are insufficient.
- Ginsburg & Huq’s constitutional retrogression: incremental, multi-dimensional decline in electoral competitiveness, rights, and rule of law.
Experts do not need to predict a single dramatic “coup day.” They watch whether these mechanisms are operating simultaneously. Convergence is what makes the timeline compress.
Why Experts React Faster Than Citizens
Most citizens interpret politics as episodic—today’s scandal, tomorrow’s correction. That creates normalcy bias: “institutions will hold; courts will stop it; it can’t happen here.”
Experts have read these sentences before—in the histories of Weimar, in case studies of Hungary and Turkey, in the literature on how incumbents convert temporary advantage into structural dominance.
They know what citizens often don’t: the legalistic pathway is the modern pathway. Democracies increasingly die through paperwork, appointments, procedural changes, prosecutorial discretion, regulatory capture, and selective enforcement—not tanks.
The DOJ Letter: Institutional Ethos as a Warning Signal
When former DOJ officials warn that professional obligations are being displaced by personal loyalty demands, they are describing the erosion of a core democratic safeguard: the separation between law enforcement and executive retaliation.
In convergence terms, this matters because the legal system is not just one institution among many. It is the enforcement mechanism for the entire constitutional order. If legal enforcement becomes leader-centered, every other constraint becomes symbolic.
The Judge’s Resignation: The “Forbearance” Collapse in Real Time
A Reagan-appointed judge resigning in protest is not interesting because of his party label; it is interesting because it reflects perceived collapse of forbearance norms.
Levitsky & Ziblatt emphasize that democracies are not held together only by written rules; they are held together by self-restraint. When insiders—especially those steeped in institutional culture—conclude that restraint has failed, resignation and public alarm become rational acts.
Why Mainstream Coverage Often Misses It
Media coverage tends to treat each event as a discrete controversy: a firing, a ruling, a memo, a protest, a policy change. Convergence is harder to cover because it is a structure, not a single headline.
Experts are effectively saying: the story is the structure. The story is the simultaneous weakening of multiple constraints.
The Practical Meaning of Expert Consensus
Expert consensus does not automatically produce public resistance. In a propaganda-saturated environment, expertise itself can be delegitimized as “enemy-controlled.” That is part of the convergence thesis: information warfare reduces the capacity of expert warning to mobilize action.
But expert consensus matters as a diagnostic tool. It signals that, by professional standards, the system is no longer behaving like a normal contested democracy. It is behaving like a system entering the consolidation phase of backsliding.
This is the eighteenth article in a series examining democratic decline. The next article examines the Orbán template—how democratic forms can remain while institutions are captured—and why comparative research suggests the United States is following an accelerated version of that model.