The U.S. and Viktor Orban's Hungary: Avoiding A Dystopian Future
'Notes From Your Dystopian Future,' Daneel, Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.) Daily Kos, March 02, 2020. EXCERPTS:
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. ...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 border fences, both resorted to spreading semi-anti-Semitic paranoia about George Soros, and both are lucky to have avoided a major economic downturn.
- Mike Pompeo & Viktor Orban in Budapest in 2019. Viktor Orban, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Orb%C3%A1n
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-fifth 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.
- 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...
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