Due to the (still) disproportionate influence of the US in the world, the 2020 elections mean a lot to non-Americans, too, who can't vote and can only talk to Americans. I'm particularly invested in this fight in no small part due to the many parallels I see between the current US situation and the recent past of my home country, Hungary. I thought this could be of some relevance for American Kossacks: the current situation of my home country could serve as a warning of a potential dystopian future which you still have a chance to avoid.
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I first found dKos during the run-up to the Iraq War, but initially remained a lurker. Shortly after, I became frontpager at European Tribune, a site modelled on (but never achieving the reach of) dKos set up by Jerome a Paris, whom old-timers on dKos might also remember as a popular diarist here back in the day. I eventually followed him to become an active Kossack, but remained mostly a lurker (the animosity around the 2008 primary battle put me off in particular). But those were the good old days. Then my country was transformed into a Putin-style autocracy under the leadership of prime minister Viktor Orbán, and then Trump came in the US.
There are a couple of obvious parallels between Orbán and Trump: both are autocrats with a gift for demagoguery, both hate the free press, both cemented right-wing power with judicial appointments, both got votes with the vilification & mistreatment of refugees and promising border fences, both resorted to spreading semi-anti-Semitic paranoia about George Soros, and both are lucky to have avoided a major economic downturn. But American Kossacks have lived under Trump for 4 years while I have lived under Orbán for 4+10 years, so, depending on the scenario, my current situation is 8 or 18 years in your future. To underline how bad and hopeless that is, let me attempt to describe it in terms of potential US parallels which aren’t already a reality :
- First, imagine that Trump is replaced by someone just as gifted at demagoguery but with actual brains and much younger — say, Ben Shapiro.
- Imagine that in a future election, the GOP achieves two-thirds majority in both Congress and Senate and captures three-fifths of the states, and promptly proceeds to re-write the constitution with several Amendments, and puts judicial appointments on overdrive.
- Imagine that against this is a divided opposition, consisting of two split and shrunken successors to the Democratic Party led by John Kerry and Bill DeBlasio, Indivisible as a movement turned party, Jill Stein’s Greens, and a Tea Party that split off the GOP; all of which constantly backstab each other instead of fighting the GOP, with several elected representatives more interested in collecting their paychecks than doing anything.
- Imagine that the New York Times has been bought up by a Russian oligarch and immediately dissolved, while the WaPo, LA Times, MSNBC, CNN and ABC News have all been bought up by the Mercers and turned into propaganda outlets.
- Imagine further that the last major government-critical news sources had been Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, after a fall-out between Rupert Murdoch and President Shapiro; but, following an advertiser boycott, Murdoch handed over his empire to the Mercers who promptly fired all the journalists.
- Imagine that President Shapiro and his goons forced all Democratic mega-donors to hand over ownership of their companies to GOP mega-donors, and also began to blackmail even family-size government contractors to hand over the ownership of their companies or else they won’t get any more contracts.
- If that’s not obvious enough in terms of an economic power grab, successful vote-suppressors and friends like Chris Kobach and Dave Rubin have been made proud owners of all the top NFL teams, and the federal government spends billions to build 300,000-seat arenas for all the teams which then remain mostly empty.
- Imagine that Putin has multiple Pee Tapes about President Shapiro and his minions, leading to a one-way relationship, for example, President Shapiro forbids wind and solar power construction while contracting Russian companies to build several nuclear plants.
The situation is not entirely doom and gloom: at the local elections a few months ago, the opposition parties could finally be corralled to line up behind unity candidates, and Orbán-aligned majors and city council majorities lost both in the capital Budapest and my current hometown by an unexpectedly wide margin. Still, Orbán retains near-unanimous support in the villages and I don’t see how the opposition could win in a general election.
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How did we get this far?
The collapse of the popular support of Hungary’s centre-left can be tied to a single event: after their re-election in 2006, at a closed-door meeting, the then prime minister, a former businessman, pressed his fellow party members to approve a “reform” programme that was the opposite of their campaign promises on social spending — a curbing of public expenses, tax cuts, part-privatisation of hospitals (the standard austerity stuff) — but some naive soul leaked it. They never re-gained public trust, especially after they doubled down by setting up a caretaker government to conduct another austerity programme, led by another man from the finance industry.
Such a centre-left collapse is not unique to Hungary: it happened even more radically in Poland, Greece & France; and sister parties in Germany & Italy are a shadow of their former selves, too. All of these parties saw themselves as sane pragmatists and warned against populism, and had a long history of electoral success behind them, but the old recipes stopped working and they bled support left and right. Ignoring those examples, there is this ridiculous notion now in the US that Britain’s Labour lost the recent elections (still achieving 32%) because its leader Jeremy Corbyn was too far left, when in fact the true cause was that Labour never managed to bridge the gap between its pro- and anti-Brexit wings and the Tories ensured focus on Brexit with several promises on social and environmental spending (which they promptly forgot about after victory); further, there was an actual centrist alternative in that election, the Liberal Democrats, who hoped to overtake Labour but suffered a catastrophic collapse instead (with all of the members of parliament they poached from the Tories & Labour as well as the then leader of the LibDems losing their seat).
Returning to Hungary, what doomed the centre-left wasn’t just the loss of voters’ trust, but their conceptual inability to fight back against the barrage from the right-wing opposition. You see, 2010 wasn’t Orbán’s first victory, he was previously prime minister for one term from 1998 to 2002, during which time he already showed all his tendencies for demagoguery and power grab. Before losing narrowly in 2002, he installed his minions in important positions who then tried to sabotage the centre-left at every turn. He also ensured that his first crop of oligarchs (including the one who would later turn on him, the Rupert Murdoch equivalent in my parallels above) gained business empires which then kept Orbán’s party awash with money to stage propaganda campaigns and mass rallies. But the centre-left was too obsessed with civility and non-partisan cooperation to attempt to dismantle these means of power, to fight back with the same passion. (Worse, some aligned businessmen thought that Orbán’s campaigns are just noise and everyone will be happy if they just divide up the market between themselves and Orbán’s oligarchs.) In addition, that prime minister who brought the centre-left’s downfall, the former businessman, was brought in mid-term as a desperation move because his reckless ambition was seen as the mark of a winner (he did win in 2006).
I see obvious parallels for all of this in the US. Above all, the false hope for GOP readiness for patriotic bipartisanship after the Bush years that marked the Obama presidency, Joe Biden’s similar hopes for post-Trump bipartisanship, and the general notion that the problem is Trump rather than the entire GOP. (One and a half years ago, I wrote a rather poorly received diary on the latter subject, I wonder if post-impeachment, it is finally closer to a majority view here.) Also, the short-sightedness of the anyone-but-Trump (and earlier anyone-but-Bush) approach that would even tolerate someone like right-wing billionaire Michael Bloomberg, but doesn’t consider the consequences of a failed Presidency that betrays the hopes of core voters and/or fails to confront the GOP head-on (which would be a GOP return in 2024 with someone worse than Trump).
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Now I come to the biggest thing that’s different between the past (& present) situation in Hungary and the present situation in the US: mass progressive activism.
All the resistance movements that sprang up after 2016, the Women’s March, the Parkland kids, the mass mobilisation behind the 2018 Blue Wave, the meteoritic rise of AOC, the Sunrise Movement, the massive grass-roots campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are inspiring. Especially against the backdrop of my experience: I have been to dozens of anti-government protests, but had to see how fellow participants’ enthusiasm faltered, and there were too many among them who didn’t want to march along with hippies or whatnot or had a passive consumer’s viewpoint on politics. (There are grass-roots movements here, but the biggest ones have been middle-class liberal, with a strong concentration in the capital, so their reach was not wide enough and they were too civil and tame to seriously challenge the powers-that-be. A true progressive/left party or party wing was never a real factor here.) All this activist energy in the US gives me hope, hope that they will carry leaders into office with a stomach to dismantle the Right’s power infrastructure, hope that the US might reverse the rightward shift sweeping so much of the world, hope that they might even seriously address the overriding issue of our time, climate change, before it’s too late.