Republicans: Make America Great, Make America Like Hungary

 A new trend has developed for those who would become dictators: get elected by traditional means and keep the trappings of democracy, but then so change the system that you can no longer possibly lose an election.  Putin in Russia is the prime example of this process, with copycats emerging in Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, and perhaps India.  It has become clear that the Republican Party in the United States wishes to follow that same path.  Andrew Marantz provides the necessary background in a New Yorker article Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?.  He begins with the observation that the Republicans have gone six years without producing a party platform that would list any policies that they might be pursuing.  This is an interesting strategy that can be best explained as trying to hide their true intent.  Apparently, America will be made great again by becoming Russia or Hungary.  Admitting admiration for Russia is a step too far at present, but viewing Hungary as a guide seems perfectly acceptable.

Marantz points out that the best way to find out what Republicans are up to is to attend meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), one of which was recently held in Hungary. He begins with this lede. 

“American conservatives recently hosted their flagship conference in Hungary, a country that experts call an autocracy. Its leader, Viktor Orbán, provides a potential model of what a Trump after Trump might look like.” 

The Republican interest in Orbán and his methods has grown over the years.

“In recent years, Orbán or institutions affiliated with his government have hosted, among others, Mike Pence, the former Vice-President; new-media agitators including Steve Bannon, Dennis Prager, and Milo Yiannopoulos; and Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General, who told a Hungarian newspaper that, in the struggle to ‘return to our Christian roots based on reason and law, which have made Western civilization great . . . the Hungarians have a solid stand’.”

Tucker Carlson of Fox News took his show to Hungary to demonstrate his admiration for the autocrat.  What has Orbán accomplished that generates so much admiration?  He has gained control of news media, the judiciary, the education system, has taken gerrymandering to a new height, and promotes white nationalism.  What Orbán has accomplished in Hungary has been described as a “constitutional coup.”

“In April, Fidesz [Orbán’s party] got fifty-four per cent of the vote but won eighty-three per cent of the districts.”

“’Orbán has managed to preserve the appearance of formal democracy, as long as you don’t look too closely,’ Anna Grzymala-Busse, the director of the Europe Center at Stanford, told me. Since 2010, most of Hungary’s civic institutions—the courts, the universities, the systems for administering elections—have come to occupy a gray area. They haven’t been eradicated; instead, they’ve been patiently debilitated, delegitimatized, hollowed out. There are still judges who wear robes, but if Orbán finds their decisions too onerous he can appeal to friendlier courts. There are still a few independent universities, but the most prestigious one—Central European University, which was founded by Soros—has been pushed out of the country, and many of the public universities have been put under the control of oligarchs and other loyalists. There are still elections, yet international observers consider them ‘free but not fair’: radically gerrymandered, flush with undisclosed infusions of dark money. The system that Orbán has built during the past twelve years, a combination of freedom and subjugation not exactly like that of any other government in the world, could be called Goulash Authoritarianism.”

Republicans love autocrats who claim they have taken control of their country to save Christianity from its oppressors.   Orbán plays that card well.

“On the day I arrived, Orbán delivered a forty-five-minute speech in a gilded neo-Gothic chamber of the Hungarian Parliament Building, warning that Europe was entering ‘an age of danger,’ and that Hungary, ‘the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world,’ was one of the only nations prepared to weather it. He predicted that, given the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and an incipient energy crisis, ‘migration toward rich countries will intensify with tectonic force.’ If other Western nations continued to implement ‘waves of suicidal policy,’ such as lax border control, the result would be ‘the great European population-replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations’—a clear reference to the racist talking point known as the great replacement theory. A few years ago, this idea was propounded most visibly by white-power extremists such as the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik (or, more recently, the shooter in Buffalo). It’s now routinely parroted by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, many leading Republican politicians, and, in Hungary, the head of state.” 

Hungarian boosters will occasionally refer to “Jewish-Christian heritage” when not in Hungary, but at home Jews neither exist nor are they worth mentioning.  Anti-Semitism seems to be inherent in autocratic circles.

Embracing “the great replacement theory” is not the only indication of Republicans marching in lockstep with Orbán.

“During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country. Relative to other European nations, Hungary hadn’t experienced a big influx of migrants. (Out-migration is actually more common.) But the refugees, most of them from Syria or other parts of the Middle East, were an effective political scapegoat—one that Orbán continues to flog, along with academics, ‘globalists,’ the Roma, and, more recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law, reportedly said, ‘We were watching the Hungarians’.”

Biden has on several occasions referred to the struggle between democracies and autocracies.  This has usually been in the context of foreign affairs.  Hopefully, he realizes that the same battle is being waged within his own country.  Republicans nearly pulled off a constitutional coup after the 2020 election.  They are preparing for success in 2024 if necessary.  Marantz found a perfect summation of Republican goals from the Trumpist Sebastian Gorka (also a Hungarian).

“’It’s no longer about policies,’ Gorka said, paraphrasing something another conservative leader had told him at CPAC. ‘Now, as a movement, we have to take back the Republic, and we have to take back our civilization’.”

The critical attribute of a democracy is the ability of the citizens to regularly vote out of office leaders they find unsatisfactory.  Russia and Hungary have lost that right.  Don’t let Republicans emulate Russia and Hungary.