He’s their role model
This piece by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points memo is a must read if you hope to understand where the right is going — with or without Trump:
The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds. Hungarian officials appear at GOP events; CPAC has a Budapest event. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán met with Donald Trump last month, and earned a dilatory shoutout from the Republican candidate at the RNC, where Trump called Hungary a “strong country, run by very powerful, tough leaders — a tough guy.”
But if the strength is the draw, then how did Orbán become a strongman? What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary?
TPM spoke with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian MP who recently wrote a book, Tainted Democracy, about Orbán’s rise to power and the crackdown that followed. Szelényi was once a member of Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, in the early 1990s, before leaving as the party grew more conservative, and eventually founding her own opposition party in 2012. She knew Orban during his entry into politics in the early 1990s, and has followed his ascent as a political actor in Hungary.
Szelényi told TPM that Orbán, during his rise, shared a key focus with the modern American right: significant, structural changes to politics and the functioning of government to accrue, and retain, power. In her telling of the rise of Orbánism, that manifests as a focus on “money, ideology, and votes” — changing the judiciary, press laws, and campaign laws in order to stay in power.
It’s an example of illiberalism that’s drawn American conservatives to Hungary — especially in the years after Trump won the 2016 election. And though both the American right and Orban’s Hungary have an interest in ostentatious culture warring, the focus on trying to realign the constitutional and legal systems to stay in power while remaining flexible on policy that is the deeper parallel.
If all that sounds familiar to you, you aren’t alone.
There are big differences between Hungary and America, obviously, not the least of which is the fact that Hungary is a very small country which makes such things far easier to manage. But the main difference is that the U.S. is a mature democracy while Hungary is fairly new having just emerged in the 1990s after the Soviet collapse. They had a much easier playing field.
The article goes on to show how they managed over a period of years to define for themselves their “illiberal democracy” as Orban calls it. Perhaps most interesting is that while the right wing legal and political establishment may be studying Orban’s model today, when he was first coming up he studied right wing think tank policy ideas. It’s a mutual admiration society.
Read the whole thing if you have time. Trump is sui generis but the establishment that supports him is not. They are part of a well-financed, global right wing movement that seeks to corrupt democratic institutions to ensure they can stay in power despite their lack of any popular mandate.