Call Their Bluff
If conservatives really think Orbanism and Trumpism exist within the rules of democracy, then let's hold them to it! (Spoiler: they don't)
If Viktor Orban’s willingness to acknowledge defeat helps underscore Donald Trump’s aberrance, it also provides refuge to right-wing authoritarians in America. They can now unctuously cite Orban’s concession and (so far) peaceful hand-off of power as proof that their political project is harmless. Normal. All in the game.
Rod Dreher, the American wingnut who moved to Budapest to become one of Orban’s yes-men, shrugged off the abrupt reversal of fortune for the global-nationalist movement. “Orban won four free elections in a row. He lost this one because the economy has been lousy for three years, [and people] wanted change,” Dreher wrote. “Fair play. It’s hard for globalists to understand, but it’s still democracy when [people] vote in ways you don’t like.”
“Strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy,” explained the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who frequently defends Trump and is personally close with JD Vance. “[I]f your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”
See? Those of you bemoaning the crimes of Viktor Orban simply don’t know democracy when you see it!
Perhaps Douthat thinks the word “strong” serves as a kind of escape hatch. If Trump attempts another coup in six months or two-and-a-half years, Douthat can split the difference. 'Orban's Fidesz was a strong institutional party that bent rules but ultimately respected democracy. The GOP is just a weak party that got hijacked by one tyrannical man. Totally different!'
But there’s no real distinction here. True, Orban has not declared the election stolen, but he stayed in power for 16 years the same way Republicans are trying to stay in power now—in ways no liberal-democratic party in the western world has attempted. Through capture. Orban supported gerrymanders in one partisan direction, just like Republicans. Orban extorted, then commandeered, the country’s media, education, corporate, and judicial institutions—the same consolidation the Trump regime is attempting right now.
“Both sides” emphatically do not do it. The implicit equivalence between authoritarian parties and broadly liberal ones rests entirely on insipid or dishonest right-wing tropes. An American conservative might complain that redistribution of income from rich to poor amounts to buying votes; Trump-aligned Republicans skip the highbrow plaint and cut straight to the racist lie that Democrats only win by importing illegal voters.
In reality, the Democratic Party’s approach to power-building in the U.S. bears no resemblance to the Republican modus operandi of claiming office, crushing rival power centers, and arrogating the residuals.
There is no Democratic equivalent of 2010-style Republican gerrymandering. There is (now, finally) a reciprocal counter-gerrymandering strategy—but Democrats alone support nationwide nonpartisan gerrymandering and other means of ensuring proportional representation. Republicans remain committed to an unprincipled system in which the rules are determined by whatever maximizes their power in the moment.
There is no Democratic equivalent to the Republican war on unions, progressive nonprofits, and opposition fundraising platforms. Democrats have in the past supported generally applicable campaign-finance and disclosure laws. But they do not single out Republican activists for harassment.
As if to prove the point, they would surely respond in one voice to what I’ve written above by citing what they call the “IRS targeting scandal,” when federal officials in the Obama administration scrutinized political non-profits that appeared to be engaged in unprotected electioneering activity. That controversy first came to light when newly formed Tea Party organizations began complaining about the scrutiny. It was thus investigated as a potential case of partisan abuse: a Democratic administration harassing conservative activists.
But the early depiction was so useful to American rightists that they simply embraced it as canon and stopped following the story. In the end it proved mundane: The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United flooded the system with politically slanted “social welfare” organizations, and the IRS—underfunded and out of its depth—developed ad hoc methods to scrutinize right-wing and left-wing nonprofits alike. No partisan targeting, no scandal.
What would the left-wing equivalent of eradicating unions even look like? Maybe a progressive war against the church? Something like this surely exists in the right-wing imagination. Conservatives claim to believe popular culture is both a degenerate enemy force, and overwhelmingly aligned with Democrats. They also can’t help but notice that organized religion is dying in America. Ergo, they must be under partisan siege, and losing. Never do they look inward to ask whether right-wing culture—with its easy toggle between hedonism, puritanism, and bigotry—has made organized religion unattractive to potential converts. Or to all the adolescent parishioners who gain independence in adulthood and promptly leave their churches.
Democrats don’t entrench themselves at all like Republicans do. Indeed, they’d never so much as propose applying normal tax law to religious institutions.
There’s a reason this post-Orban revisionism comes off a bit desperate, like a lawyer pleading for a guilty client, or a reckless driver making a hasty case for leniency: it’s hard to distinguish what I did from ordinary speeding, and…you know… everyone speeds sometimes.
The Orban apologists prove too much in the formal sense. After all, if losing power in an election refutes all accusations of authoritarian control, then (to take one example) Augusto Pinochet, who left power after losing a plebiscite, was also not a dictator.
But the point isn’t to be logically rigorous. It’s to gain absolution, and pre-empt any future efforts to fascism-proof backsliding democracies like Hungary and the U.S.
I say this with some confidence, because I can remember past yesterday: Indeed, I can remember all the way back to when Barack Obama was president, trying to govern through the normal channels of America’s byzantine policymaking apparatus. Did commentators like Dreher and Douthat believe they were living through ordinary times as opposition intellectuals in a “fair play” democracy? Let’s run the tape: