At the Capitol yesterday, to mark the Jan. 6 anniversary, President Biden ripped the fascist-in-exile whose lies about 2020 are a mere precursor for what he’s plotting next. Indeed, Biden warned: “We’re engaged anew in a struggle between democracy and autocracy, between the aspirations of the many and the greed of the few. Between the people’s right of self-determination and self-seeking autocrat. From China to Russia and beyond, they’re betting the democracies’ days are numbered.”
Case in point (which Biden neglected to mention): Donald Trump’s endorsement, earlier this week, of long-serving Hungarian “strongman” Viktor Orban. If we truly want to understand the abiding MAGA threat – if we truly have the capacity to wake the hell up at this last date – we need only look at what Orban has done, since 2010, to dismantle Hungary’s democracy. What Orban has already wrought is a veritable blueprint for what America’s most notoriously untreated mental patient would do if he engineers a restoration.
Some of these developments may ring a bell:
Orban and his Fidesz Party believe that only they have the right to rule, and they’ve spent years systematically rigging the system – by rewriting election laws and redrawing voting districts so that only they will prevail. They were rewarded in 2018 when Orban won a third term with less than half the popular vote.
They’ve packed the courts with right-wing judges who protect the Fidesz Party’s cronies.
They’ve sowed distrust of international institutions and “elites,” while courting Vladimir Putin.
They’ve whitewashed Hungary’s past abuses (including Holocaust complicity), rewriting textbooks and school curricula to emphasize old right-wing glories.
They’ve whipped up grievances against immigrants and a revolving cast of Others – most notably, the Hungarian-born philanthropist George Soros.
And most importantly, they’ve relentlessly assailed the independent free press, often bullying it into submission, but mostly outflanking it with multi-platform propaganda (TV, radio, social media). The result is a quasi-state disinformation machine, like Fox News on steroids. The result is a victorious war on objective reality. As one beaten-down Hungarian journalist told The Atlantic in 2020, demoralized citizens are now led to believe that “there’s no facts, it’s just opinion, everything is ‘partisan.'” It’s one big “psy-op.”
One Hungarian anti-corruption activist told The Atlantic that Orban and Trump instinctively flood the zone whenever they’re in trouble: “You just simply create a bigger scandal, or a bigger ‘story’ to prevent people from talking about the real issues in the country, so you have a completely irrelevant fake debate about symbolically important things, but never about a sense of how you run a country.”
In Biden’s speech yesterday, he highlighted the slow and steady erosion of our democratic values – the stuff that Orban has been doing for years: “Right now in state after state, new laws are being written. Not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it…The former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote and subvert our elections. It’s wrong. It’s undemocratic, and frankly, it’s un-American.”
Right. It’s Hungarian.
No wonder Trump has endorsed Orban for another term in the impending “elections.” (Trump hails Orban as “a strong leader…powerful and wonderful.”) No wonder Tucker Carlson anchored his show from Hungary for a week last fall, extolling the nation as a place “with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.” And unless Americans who love democracy stop tuning out and resolve to turn out in massive numbers starting in the ’22 midterms, we stand a damn good chance of becoming similarly powerful and wonderful.
Biden said yesterday that autocrats abroad are “betting America will become more like them and less like like us. They’re betting that America is a place for the autocrat, the dictator, the strongman. I do not believe that. That is not who we are.” We’ll find out soon enough.