8. The Grey Areas of Democracy: Indifference and the Erosion of Democratic Principles from Within

The focus of this chapter lies in the foggy area of states that are not democratic enough to be counted as best examples of full democracies, but at the same time are not authoritarian enough to be considered hybrid regimes or full dictatorships. In the article, we contrast the rule of law to the rule of man, to distinguish power and attempts to restrict or limit it. Our cases, or rather examples, come from recent developments in the United States and Hungary, countries not usually juxtaposed, but in which political actors have recently found more and more common denominators. The cases are linked to political cultures and contextualized with two notable global indices, namely Democracy Index and the Rule of Law Index. Thus, the approach is dealing with a phenomenon, which we call ‘politics of indifference’, in which one does whatever is possible to do in order to advance one’s own ambitions and obstructing the opposing groups. This phenomenon can be seen as a by-product of strong enough political power, and ultimately authoritarianism is not the only rival of liberal democracy, but democracy itself.