The Prisoner's Dilemma: How Capitulation Feeds Autocracy and Collective Action Starves It

As Trump attacks law firms, universities and media organizations one by one, the need for joint action by a broad, pro-democracy movement grows more urgent

By Ian Bassin Protect Democracy

The first play in the autocratic playbook is not to attack everyone at once.

Rather, it’s to go after one.

One law firm. One judge. One university. One journalist. The strategy isn’t just to silence the immediate target — it’s to make others watch and learn. To convince them that resistance is dangerous, costly, and futile. To make them believe that if they just keep their head down, it’ll happen to someone else instead.

The strategy works.

It’s why Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were able to consolidate power in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey without needing to bulldoze the entire system at once.

They didn’t need to.

It was enough to pick off a few key targets, watch everyone else retreat into fear and complicity, and let the structure collapse under its own weight.

But the strategy fails — and it has failed — when societies recognize the game early enough and refuse to play along.

When institutions that would normally compete or stay in their lane realize that they rise and fall together. That’s what collective action is. And that’s why it’s so dangerous to autocrats.

Right now, we are at the tipping point.

Major law firms, universities, and media outlets are under pressure in the United States in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago — even six months ago.

And so far, the response has been chillingly familiar: silence, retreat, and passivity. Or worse: capitulation. If that doesn’t change — and quickly — the next phase will be easy to predict. We’ve seen it before.

The good news is that we also know how this story can end differently.

History teaches us how collective action works, why it works, and why it’s the only defense that has ever stopped the rise of autocracy. The question is whether we are willing to learn the lesson in time.

The anatomy of collective action. There’s a reason collective action is so difficult — and why it tends to emerge only under extreme duress.

Game theory explains part of it: institutions often face a classic prisoner’s dilemma when they are under attack.

If a law firm comes under political or legal attack, other firms might have a temporary advantage in standing back and doing nothing. If Perkins Coie is attacked over perceptions about its past work, Kirkland & Ellis or Cravath might reason that they are better off distancing themselves — protecting their reputation, avoiding scrutiny, and even picking up the clients that Perkins Coie might lose.

This is precisely why autocrats attack institutions one at a time.

It exploits this self-interest calculation, encouraging institutions to defect from each other rather than defend each other.

But history shows that this calculation is shortsighted — and ultimately self-destructive. Because once the first institution falls, the next one becomes more vulnerable.

The cost of resistance rises after the first defeat because the autocrat now knows that the strategy works. The incentives shift, and what seemed like a rational choice to stay quiet quickly becomes a trap.

The Hungarian media collapse. Orbán’s consolidation of the Hungarian media was a textbook case. When Népszabadság was targeted, other outlets refused to come to its defense — hoping to avoid similar treatment.

Orbán’s government learned that it could silence critical media without consequences.

Within five years, the entire Hungarian media landscape was either directly controlled by the state or dominated by Orbán-friendly private owners. What seemed like rational self-interest turned out to be suicidal.

Polish judges’ resistance. By contrast, when Poland’s government tried to purge the judiciary in 2017, the response was collective and immediate.

Judges within Poland and across Europe mobilized in defense of their Polish colleagues. Public protests reinforced this solidarity, and the European Court of Justice raised the diplomatic and political costs of continuing the purge.

The Polish government backed down, still weakening judicial independence but pulling back from its most aggressive assaults — not because it was persuaded by moral arguments, but because the cost of continuing the attack had become politically unsustainable.

The logic of collective action worked.

The path to Orbanism. So which path has the American legal industry taken?

One by one, each successively targeted firm has had to fend for themselves. In patriotic and inspiring fashion, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block each decided to fight the unconstitutional attacks on them (notably, as this was going to press, all three have now won restraining orders against these Executive Orders).

Whereas Paul Weiss and Skadden negotiated one-off deals with the administration.

The industry has thus far failed to come together in collective defense. By allowing firms to be shaken down one-by-one, the sector has virtually assured that the hostage-taking will continue.

We are seeing the same failures within higher education.

The administration singled out Columbia for its first line of attack. What did America’s universities come together to say in Columbia’s defense? Nothing. Crickets.

It fell to several courageous associations to put out strong statements (and a lawsuit we filed earlier this week), but the universities themselves crawled back into their turtle shells hoping not to be next.

And so the administration continued its advance, moving on from Columbia to the University of Pennsylvania. Unless the universities join together to push back, the attacks will continue.

Collective action raises political costs. Autocrats rely on a fundamental asymmetry:

They have a centralized source of authority and a powerful platform. The institutions they attack — media, universities, law firms — are fragmented. That gives the autocrat a structural advantage in the contest for public opinion.

But collective action changes the balance of power by raising political costs in three key ways:

1. It creates social proof. Public opinion is not formed by facts alone — it’s shaped by social cues. When a single institution speaks out, it can be ignored or written off. But when dozens of institutions deliver the same message, it signals to the public that there’s a consensus — that the attack is illegitimate, dangerous, and unacceptable.

   This is how social movements work. It’s how public opinion on civil rights, marriage equality, and even environmental issues shifted over time. When enough voices say the same thing, it becomes harder for the public to dismiss the message — and harder for the autocrat to claim they are merely facing isolated critics.

2. It creates a defensive shield. When law firms, universities, or media organizations defend each other, they create a collective shield that raises the cost of targeting any one institution.

   If attacking Perkins Coie means provoking a coordinated defense from the entire legal community, it’s no longer an easy win — it’s a complicated, high-cost fight.

3. It forces public officials to pick sides. Politicians are risk-averse. When one institution is attacked, most political figures will avoid taking a stand. But when an entire sector mobilizes — when law firms, universities, and media outlets issue coordinated statements and legal challenges — it raises the political stakes.

   Staying silent becomes politically costly. Politicians are forced to either back the autocrat or defend the institutions — and that polarization strengthens the resistance.

How GOP collapsed. It’s not just law firms or universities that have failed to heed these lessons.

Republican elected officials are a canonical case study in this failure. During the 2016 primary, Donald Trump’s opponents failed to join together in collective opposition and thereby allowed him to win the presidential nomination — despite his having only plurality support within the party.

And then repeatedly in the years since, it has been left up to individual members — from Jeff Flake to Mitt Romney to Adam Kinzinger to Liz Cheney — to take turns as the voice of opposition.

But that approach, while noble on their personal parts, doesn’t work as a strategy — the failure of their colleagues to act with them just made the heroic ones easier individual targets.

At no point has there been any meaningful effort for those forces within the GOP who don’t agree with the autocratic actions we’ve seen to engage in collective action.

I have heard Republican electeds make many arguments for why this is so, with one simply being that taking such a position would put them at odds with the majority of their voters.

But as the first point about collective action makes clear, the only way to begin to change that public opinion is to create social proof in favor of democracy and the rule of law and against autocratic approaches. But that’s only possible if a critical mass who privately believe those things — and make no mistake, most elected Republican officials do — take collective action to make that case.

The critical dividing line. This is where the lesson from history becomes clear. The real goal of collective action isn’t just to protect individual institutions — it’s to protect democracy itself.

The societies that survived authoritarian threats didn’t just rely on internal solidarity within the press, the courts, or academia. They succeeded because those institutions linked arms across sectors — forming a broad, popular front that transcended professional and even political boundaries.

• During the rise of fascism in Europe, the countries that resisted early — like Belgium and Finland — saw labor unions, political parties, and the press form coalitions to resist authoritarianism.

• During the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, independent press, labor unions, and the church supported each other — even when they disagreed on broader social issues.

• In South Korea’s 2016 “Candlelight Revolution,” the media, labor unions, and student groups worked together to force the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.

Indeed, if there’s one clear dividing line between democracies that have survived recent illiberal populist autocratic movements (Poland, Brazil, Czech Republic) and those that have not (Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela), it’s whether a broad pro-democracy coalition came together across pre-existing divides to stand together for the most foundational elements of democracy.

In the first set of countries, people of different policy preferences and institutional affiliations and backgrounds formed functional coalitions that worked together to shift the broader public away from illiberalism and back towards liberal democratic systems; in the latter set of countries, opposition to autocracy fragmented and fell into infighting, allowing the autocratic movement to consolidate power and entrench itself.

That’s why the next step required here is clear:

After institutions learn to defend themselves within their own sector, they need to defend each other across sectors and form a broad coalition on the side of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. That’s how democratic resilience is built.

An attack on a law firm must provoke a response from universities and media outlets. An attack on a journalist must be met with legal action from the bar and peaceful protests from students. Labor unions – consistently a key piece of each of the successful anti-authoritarian movements noted above — must be protected and strengthened by others.

This is how you raise the cost of autocracy — not by waiting for the next attack, but by forcing the autocrat to fight on every front at once.

What is to be done. So that is what is needed: a broad, cross-ideological and cross-sectoral, popular front coalition in opposition to autocratic governance and in support of democracy.

An effective coalition would: (1) align on what issues and fights to prioritize; (2) coordinate its strategy for advancing democratic values and practices; (3) elevate key leaders; and (4) advance a clear narrative about democracy’s importance and autocracy’s failures.

This is how you bend public opinion. This is how you make democracy’s immune system fight back.

Autocrats succeed when their targets stay isolated. They fail when people and institutions unite.

The choice is stark. Stay silent and watch the system collapse — or stand together and survive.

History shows which one works.

The only way out is together.

Ian Bassin is co-founder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel, where he counseled President Obama and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law. Subscribe to the group’s newsletters on Substack here.