Forgive me for harping so much on the metastasizing plot to destroy American democracy, but it does seem to be a tad more important than some of our narratives du jour, like whether Amber Heard did or did not deposit poop in Johnny Depp’s bed.
Consider, for instance, the locale of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC has been around for decades – I covered a few of the confabs – and they were typically staged within a stone’s throw of the American seat of government. Back in the day if any CPAC planner had said, “I got a bright idea, let’s meet next time in a foreign hotbed of fascism!,” he would’ve been kicked to the curb because the party that prided itself on patriotism was no place for treasonous idiocy.
But today’s CPAC is a MAGA subsidiary – as evidenced by its decision to hold its latest meeting in Hungary, a nation where a once-fledgling democracy has been crushed under the heel of long-serving “strongman” Viktor Orban. Care to guess who spoke this past weekend to the CPAC attendees? Viktor Orban, the guy in the photo. He bonded with everyone by standing tall for white supremacy – mostly notably by endorsing the crackpot “replace theory” that animated the racist terrorist in Buffalo. In Orban’s words, “I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations.”
Are we Americans so deaf and numb that we can’t hear or see what’s happening in plain sight? If we truly have the capacity to wake the hell up at this last date, we need only look at what Orban has done to wreak havoc in Hungary. It’s a veritable blueprint for what Trump will surely do if he and his cult followers rig the ’24 balloting and engineer a restoration.
Trump spoke to the CPACers via video, extolling Orban as “a great leader, a great gentleman.” He was seconded by ex-Trump chief of staffer Mark Meadows. They were joined by Tucker Carlson (natch), who’s known for his Orban orgasms. And the final day of the meeting featured a Hungarian pundit named Zsolt Bayer, who’s on record referring to Jews as “stinking excrement.”
Granted, we don’t need to invoke Hungary to grasp what’s happening in our own country; there’s ample evidence of democratic erosion at the grassroots, if we care to look. But it’s easy to see what the MAGA conservatives love so much about Orban. An American think tank, Freedom House, has charted his power moves – most notably, his “constitutional and legal changes that have allowed (him) to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions, including the judiciary.”
Some of his moves might ring a bell:
He and his Fidesz Party believe that only they have the right to rule, and they’ve spent the past decade systematically rigging the voting process – by rewriting election laws and redrawing voting districts so that only they will prevail. 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 mass murderer Vladimir Putin. They’ve whitewashed Hungary’s past abuses (including Holocaust complicity), rewriting textbooks and school curricula. And 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. 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.'”
So it was no surprise this past weekend that the Hungarian CPAC barred all members of the American press. Orban’s advice to the attendees was simple: “Have your own media…My friend Tucker Carlson puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or as you say 24/7.”
Fortunately, we’re still free to assess Hungarian CPAC from a distance. Princeton sociologist Kim Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian politics, told National Public Radio the other day that MAGA conservatives are bonding with Orban over so-called culture issues like immigration, gender identity and abortion: “All the culture war campaigns have been used to disguise the fact that, by law, Orban has been limiting the democratic space. And he’s done that particularly by rigging the election laws and then capturing all of the independent agencies that could tell him no…What (Orban) tells us about the Republican party is that it realizes it’s not alone, that there are international models that they can learn from.”
The big question, for the rest of us, is whether we’re cognizant of history and have managed to learn anything.