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The Illiberal Order -- Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/does-hungary-offer-a-glimpse-of-our-authoritarian-futureThe headline here is from both the published title and the digital online title.
Even now I get pissed off at the question, Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?
Because that question unwittingly assumes a 'politics of inevitability' -- explained by Timothy Snyder as Putin's politics. We can see it even as 2,000 year-old China's Xi Xinping tells Joe Biden, "good luck with your saving democracy." As if it's in our future.
Anyway, the article's a ten-page read, and these excerpts present its clearest political points about the alleged "trumpworld" we've been up against.
The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve ... you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump ... You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis ...
A more efficient way ... is to spend a weekend at ... CPAC... [where] American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home...
...Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union ... Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. 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... 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.”...
...“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock...
...Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else...Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”...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.” ...
...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. ... “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” [Rod] Dreher told me. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” By the time Orbán ran for reëlection earlier this year, Dreher had completed his transition from aspiring ascetic to partisan booster. “Mood here at Fidesz HQ is increasingly cheerful,” he tweeted on Election Night. “ ‘Lights out, libs!’ say Hungarian voters.”
...unlike Putin-style autocrats, Orbán is often keen to maintain plausible deniability. “He’ll use such obscure methods that it might take months to figure out what he’s done,” Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. In 2010, Orbán established a relatively small antiterror police unit.
Bit by bit, in disparate clauses buried in unrelated laws, he increased its budget and removed checks on its power. “I was reading Article 61 of a bill on public waterworks, literally, and I came across a line that said, Oh, by the way, the antiterror unit now gets to collect personal information on all water-utility customers, which basically means everyone in the country, without notifying them,” Scheppele went on. She contends that the unit now functions, essentially, as Orbán’s secret police. “His claim is always ‘Everything I’m doing is legal’—well, of course it is, because you made it legal,” she said. The goal, as the scholar John Keane puts it in his book The New Despotism, is a kind of bureaucratic gaslighting: the ability to insist that what everyone knows is happening is not in fact happening...
There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. ... Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too ... it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today...
In 2018, Steve Bannon, after he was fired from the Trump Administration, went on a kind of European tour, giving paid talks and meeting with nationalist allies across the Continent. In May, he stopped in Budapest. One of his hosts there was the XXI Century Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Orbán administration. “I can tell, Viktor Orbán triggers ’em like Trump,” Bannon said onstage, flashing a rare smile. “He was Trump before Trump.” ...Oh, my God, Soros!” Bannon said. “You guys beat him up badly here.” Szánthó accepted the praise with a stoic grin. Bannon went on, “We love to take lessons from you guys in the U.S.”
In 2018, “Trump before Trump” was the highest compliment that Bannon could think to pay Orbán. In 2022, many on the American right are trying to anticipate what a Trump after Trump might look like. Orbán provides one potential answer...What would happen if the Republican Party were led by an American Orbán, someone with the patience to envision a semi-authoritarian future and the diligence and the ruthlessness to achieve it?..In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed was admired by David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.”
J. D. Vance has voiced admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism, against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”
In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs (civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself) ...
Trump may run in 2024, and he may win, fairly or unfairly. What worried me most ... was not the person of Donald Trump but a Republican Party that resembled Orbán’s party, Fidesz, ... comfortable with naked power grabs, with treating all political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, with assuming that any checks on its dominance were mere inconveniences to be bypassed by any quasi-legalistic means. “There are many things that the Americans here want to learn from the Hungarians,” Balázs Orbán had told me. “We’re going to keep our heritage for ourselves, our Christian heritage, our ethnic heritage . . . that’s what I think they want to say but they can’t say, and so they point to someone who can say it. If they want us to play that role, we are fine with that.” After I got back to the U.S., I spoke to [Rod] Dreher, who mentioned that he was thinking about moving from Louisiana to Budapest, where he had been offered a job with the Danube Institute. “I really like the Hungarian people, and I think it could be useful to build a network of Christians and intellectuals who are thinking about the future,” he said. “We in the West still have so much to learn.”
A more efficient way ... is to spend a weekend at ... CPAC... [where] American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home...
...Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union ... Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. 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... 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.”...
...“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock...
...Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else...Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”...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.” ...
...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. ... “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” [Rod] Dreher told me. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” By the time Orbán ran for reëlection earlier this year, Dreher had completed his transition from aspiring ascetic to partisan booster. “Mood here at Fidesz HQ is increasingly cheerful,” he tweeted on Election Night. “ ‘Lights out, libs!’ say Hungarian voters.”
...unlike Putin-style autocrats, Orbán is often keen to maintain plausible deniability. “He’ll use such obscure methods that it might take months to figure out what he’s done,” Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. In 2010, Orbán established a relatively small antiterror police unit.
Bit by bit, in disparate clauses buried in unrelated laws, he increased its budget and removed checks on its power. “I was reading Article 61 of a bill on public waterworks, literally, and I came across a line that said, Oh, by the way, the antiterror unit now gets to collect personal information on all water-utility customers, which basically means everyone in the country, without notifying them,” Scheppele went on. She contends that the unit now functions, essentially, as Orbán’s secret police. “His claim is always ‘Everything I’m doing is legal’—well, of course it is, because you made it legal,” she said. The goal, as the scholar John Keane puts it in his book The New Despotism, is a kind of bureaucratic gaslighting: the ability to insist that what everyone knows is happening is not in fact happening...
There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. ... Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too ... it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today...
In 2018, Steve Bannon, after he was fired from the Trump Administration, went on a kind of European tour, giving paid talks and meeting with nationalist allies across the Continent. In May, he stopped in Budapest. One of his hosts there was the XXI Century Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Orbán administration. “I can tell, Viktor Orbán triggers ’em like Trump,” Bannon said onstage, flashing a rare smile. “He was Trump before Trump.” ...Oh, my God, Soros!” Bannon said. “You guys beat him up badly here.” Szánthó accepted the praise with a stoic grin. Bannon went on, “We love to take lessons from you guys in the U.S.”
In 2018, “Trump before Trump” was the highest compliment that Bannon could think to pay Orbán. In 2022, many on the American right are trying to anticipate what a Trump after Trump might look like. Orbán provides one potential answer...What would happen if the Republican Party were led by an American Orbán, someone with the patience to envision a semi-authoritarian future and the diligence and the ruthlessness to achieve it?..In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed was admired by David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.”
J. D. Vance has voiced admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism, against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”
In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs (civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself) ...
Trump may run in 2024, and he may win, fairly or unfairly. What worried me most ... was not the person of Donald Trump but a Republican Party that resembled Orbán’s party, Fidesz, ... comfortable with naked power grabs, with treating all political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, with assuming that any checks on its dominance were mere inconveniences to be bypassed by any quasi-legalistic means. “There are many things that the Americans here want to learn from the Hungarians,” Balázs Orbán had told me. “We’re going to keep our heritage for ourselves, our Christian heritage, our ethnic heritage . . . that’s what I think they want to say but they can’t say, and so they point to someone who can say it. If they want us to play that role, we are fine with that.” After I got back to the U.S., I spoke to [Rod] Dreher, who mentioned that he was thinking about moving from Louisiana to Budapest, where he had been offered a job with the Danube Institute. “I really like the Hungarian people, and I think it could be useful to build a network of Christians and intellectuals who are thinking about the future,” he said. “We in the West still have so much to learn.”
But it's that question about our presumed "authoritarian future" that has made me wonder what world it points to beyond "trumpworld," that really isn't trumpworld at all.
Trumpworld is the puppet stage next to the human world of the Jan 6 committee, and hopefully the DOJ, who are now bringing that world to justice. It's the Biden world where 7 million more want to "save the soul of America" and do the greatest good for the greatest number.
IMHO, in this human world are also the oiligarch world with its minigarchs and their puppet nations and their political puppets theater.
Someone has said, "Look not at the puppets, look at the puppeteers." Puppet states are a thing now.
Articles like this hint at the intellectualizers of movements who serve the interests of puppeteers whose power is beyond nation states. Even those states' Big Fossil oiligarchs wire transfer money to those who write and produce political scripts and war drama -- not just Steve Bannon, Viktor Orbán, Putin, Trump or DeSantis, but their minigarch owners.
We watch their machinations, busy to know how the set is structured (Sheldon Whithouse's "The Scheme" series
has helped us see all that (watch the video or don't, I just couldn't successfully hyperlink it) through the capture of SCOTUS, and who is running this show as we feel we're drowning in a polluted ocean of all the loss, harm and damage; listening to the incoherence of mass media studying the causes of random mass murder, stochastic chaos and disaster capitalism. Sure, there is plenty of intellectual activity around nation state politics, as this article explains.
What it doesn't explain for me is this: Why they've groomed us with the climate story that we can survive Hothouse Earth.
The longevity of "life for me, death for thee" Big Fossil puppeteers -- who work by stealth -- will be the literal death of us.
We can find them. But the closer we get, the more puppeteers hide behind domestic terrorism and international mayhem. How Biden acts to save us from their drama in the human world is one of my guides.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I thought I remembered oil & gas being the biggest coalition at COP26. 
Any place not being flooded by torrential rain or tsunamis is parched & on fire, but hey, we wouldn't want to give anyone like the EPA any authority to hold the energy companies accountable. The only explanation I have is that the rich think that their money will insulate them from climate change. I think they lack the imagination to visualize how drastically we're changing our planet.
I watched a Sheldon Whitehouse video this morning on dark money behind the SCOTUS picks.
