From Hungary to the Pope, the Right’s Very Bad Week

0:00Michelle Cottle:Chicago has been America's railroad capital for more than 150 years. Join lifelong train enthusiast Jeffrey Baer as he hops aboard to tell the story of how railroads shaped the city. Along the way, he uncovers clues to railroads of the past, recalls the unsung workers who toiled on them, and reveals why our current system remains vital to Chicago's existence today. Riding the Rails with Jeffrey Baer, now streaming on the PBS app and WTTW.com slash rails. This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:46David French:I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times opinion. And this week, I'm here with two of my fantastic colleagues, columnist David French and the other Michelle, Michelle Gobark. Guys, thanks for being here.

1:01Michelle Cottle:Michelle, Michelle, great to be with y 'all.

1:04David French:Yeah, thanks for having me. We're going to test David's ability to pivot between the Michelles today. Today, we're going to talk about the defeat of a MAGA favorite, Viktor Orban in Hungary. And we got to talk about the Pope. So there's a lot to cover. Let's get into it. First up, the Hungarian election where Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his FedEx party got absolutely creamed. Michelle, you've been over there. You've been reporting from Hungary. You were there until like just the last couple of days or so. What is Orban's connection to Trump and MAGA and why does this loss matter? Sure. Well, Orban was prime minister in the early 2000s.

1:46Then he was defeated when he came back. he really set about creating what he called an illiberal democracy. And it was the template for a lot of modern authoritarians all over the world, I think very much including Trump. And, you know, Vance himself has said that some of what Orban does should be a model for conservatives. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, has said that Orban State isn't a model, but the model for conservative statecraft. And so what Orban did was, well, he had a two-thirds majority, which is what you need to rewrite the Constitution. So he rewrote the Constitution.

2:24One of the things he did was create these like wildly gerrymandered districts that made it very, very difficult for the opposition. He created a network of foundations. He both was able to shut down the preeminent kind of liberal university in Budapest and then set up his own parallel right-wing educational institutions. He forced the sale of media outlets to regime-aligned oligarchs, which maybe will sound familiar to people in the United States. I got to say, I'm having shades of Trump panic here. Well, yeah, I mean, and it's really, I mean, I think one of the things that's striking about being there is that this was a process of 16 years.

3:08And if you look at kind of how much Donald Trump has done over less than two years, it's kind of alarming. On the other hand, Hungary shows that even when this is very, very entrenched with enough sort of popular will, you can overcome it. But Orman really held himself out as the model for a new sort of regime at a time when people felt like liberal democracy was exhausted. And he invested a lot of state money, a lot of Hungarian money into building out this network in other places. I mean, there's a whole subculture in Budapest of these American expats working at state-subsidized think tanks, writing about how heavenly it is to live in the Orban regime.

3:53And I was actually at an event at the Danube Institute, which is one of these think tanks, earlier in the week. And they were all kind of glum because they could sort of see where things were going. And one of the speakers actually said, you know, without the Hungarian taxpayer, we wouldn't have this right-wing infrastructure in Europe, which I thought was kind of a stunning admission. And I don't know that the Hungarian taxpayer realized that they were subsidizing this new intellectual infrastructure.

4:23David French:David, what are your thoughts? What hit you?

4:25Michelle Cottle:You know, it is difficult to understate how much for part of the Trump right, Hungary was the model. This was the wave of the future. You know, look, I would not ascribe that to Trump. I mean, from the beginning, I think of Trumpism as just the will to power of one man, Donald Trump. It's not a coherent ideology. But a lot of people who want to have a coherent ideology of illiberalism and authoritarianism have attached themselves to Trump. And I would say Orbanism was what you might call intellectual Trumpism. In other words, how do you create a political philosophy around this concept of the strongman in a Western democracy?

5:06Michelle Cottle:And Orban was kind of the model. He was kind of the guy. Now, to me, you know, I found all of this deeply confusing. I mean, I remember in the 80s and 90s having all these arguments with my liberal friends who were, you know, holding out Norway as like the model of social democracy. And I'm like, guys, small Scandinavian countries are not one-to-one comparisons with the U.S. I was completely right. I just, I didn't know which region of Europe with a small country was gonna be the model for the U.S. Apparently it's Central Europe and a small Central European country is the model. And it was important enough for the sort of intellectual Trump right for J.D.

5:47Michelle Cottle:Vance to go there to actually essentially appear in a campaign rally to interfere blatantly, grotesquely in the election. And then after Orban loses, it was like, oh, but the right one anyway, because Magyar is conservative and is more conservative than the rest of the EU. So no, we really didn't lose this. And look, he is a conservative politician by European definitions, a right-wing politician by European definitions, but very fundamentally different in the approach to liberal democracy. And that was always the beef with Orban. It wasn't so much that he was a right-leaning politician. It was the illiberal authoritarianism.

6:27Michelle Cottle:That's why Trumpists here at home found him compelling. It wasn't his right-leaning ideology. It was his illiberal authoritarianism. And it's the defeat of that illiberal authoritarianism that is really the big development out of Europe. I just want to say one quick thing about the comparison between Norway and Hungary. So I take your point that maybe you can't kind of base a model for American governance on these relatively small European countries. But I think the big difference is that Norway at least works on its own terms, right? Like Norway is a thriving, happy, rich, successful country.

7:02Whereas even on the right's own terms, Hungary has become one of the worst countries in the EU, right? It is the most corrupt on many measures. You know, one of Orban's big policies was that he was going to raise the birth rate. I mean, he hasn't. The birth rate is really, really low. I think it's 1.31 or something like that. And so the model doesn't even work on its own terms, which is another reason why I think that this has been such a blow. Because, I mean, think about, this is not on the same scale, but think about kind of American leftists grappling with the failure of communism and what it means when your God has failed.

7:42This is a much lesser God. But the failure is still, I think, going to create a sort of intellectual crisis.

7:49David French:So somebody talked to me about J.D. Vance's role over there. It seems to me that it was extremely risky to send him. I mean, I get his fanboy tendencies with Hungary, especially he himself is a very enthusiastic natalist. I can see some of the appeal. But to send the vice president over there to wrap his arms around Orban on the eve of these elections and then have such a spectacular belly flop. What do you make of this little adventure and what happens now in terms of where it takes the post-liberal right in the U.S. and what it does for that movement? David, go first.

8:33Michelle Cottle:You know, can I call this the straight-of-whore moves of electoral interventions? Please do. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that has happened is that you have seen MAGA sort of take this view where they don't believe bad news. Now, or bad polls or negative reports. It's all fake.

8:54David French:It's all fake.

8:54Michelle Cottle:It's all fake. And so now look, I mean, there's a good reason why, for example, there's some skepticism towards polls, you know, and all three of Trump's presidential elections, he outperformed his polling. But this would have been outperforming by orders of magnitude greater. But what we have seen is a consistent pattern with the administration just overreaches and overreaches and overreaches. There's this underlying hubris that they can bend the world to their will. And it's interesting, Michelle, I honestly think that what was the political project of urbanism, if you were going to hear the right, it really wasn't to turn Hungary into a thriving democracy.

9:37Michelle Cottle:The political project was the authoritarianism, was sustainable authoritarianism. That was the political project because for years, you know, when I was writing against this Hungarian experiment in conservative media and I was comparing Hungary to all kinds of other countries on exactly those metrics, Michelle, birth rate, economic prosperity. I mean, the contrast between Poland and Hungary is just extreme here. It's a large contrast. But that was not what was motivating them here. It was not really, I've gone to Hungary because Hungary has shown how to make its citizens happier, healthier, and more prosperous.

10:16Michelle Cottle:It was, I've gone to Hungary because Orban has shown how to deal with the wokesters. And it's the failure of that particular political enterprise, which was not really rooted in human flourishing and mutual and shared prosperity. It's the failure of that particular enterprise and what they thought of as sort of sustainable authoritarianism. That's the real blow there. And can I say something that has been driving me crazy since the election? I think you're hearing this over and over again. The new line is, well, the fact that he lost and there looks like there's going to be a peaceful transition of power proves that he was never an authoritarian to begin with.

10:53You know, I mean, I would point out that there was a peaceful transition after the fall of communism in 1989. And nobody says that that proves that communism was never authoritarian. But also just, you know, I went to one of the last Peter Magyar rallies in this town a few hours from Budapest in the Northeast, kind of a Fidesz stronghold. And a town of like 16 ,000, pretty run down, a lot of Soviet-style architecture still around. And there were well over a thousand people turned out in this square. And Peter Magyar kept saying, you know, don't be afraid, don't be afraid. and the people were chanting, we are not afraid.

11:34And so I asked a woman, you know, what does he mean? Like, what have you been afraid of? And she was an elementary school teacher. And she told me that in the past, she would have been afraid to show her support for the opposition because she would have feared that she would lose her job and her ability to support her family. And, you know, and it was only kind of seeing this tidal wave of people that made her think that, you know, there was a sort of preference cascade. But you hear that kind of thing all the time. And what's so frustrating is that on the one hand, it's this kind of strong hand, to put it lightly, that the MAGA right admires.

12:15And now that it's been rebuked, they want to pretend that it was never there to begin with.

12:20David French:Right. Right. Well, that's part of the whole admit no defeat, right? That's just kind of baked into that movement that, you know, nothing is truly a defeat. But you mentioned Poland, Michelle, and you've reported from there where the far-right Law and Justice Party undermined democratic norms for nearly a decade before it was kind of booted in 2023. So what have they done to rebuild that democracy? And is there a lesson or lessons for Hungary to pull from that? Well, in some ways, it was a sort of similar election in that it was the center pro-European right versus the far populist right. It's actually, I think, much more difficult in Poland, even though the Law and Justice Party hadn't become quite as entrenched because of the size of the victory in Hungary.

13:15So when I was in Poland, it was just a few months after the election. And what the government was dealing with is, I think, what we're going to end up dealing with here too, which is that when you have all of these regime cronies kind of infiltrated into all of these institutions, it becomes very hard to remove them without introducing democratic norms yourself, right? And so it's this sort of paradox of reform. You know, in Poland, they had created these new judicial roles. They had done sort of, you know, complicated things to shore up the judiciary, how do you undo that without exerting sort of extrajudicial powers yourself?

13:57The difference in Hungary, and again, we don't know how this is going to play out, but because Peter Magyar won what they call their constitutional majority, he won two-thirds, his party is going to be able to revise the Hungarian constitution. And so they have a much freer hand to undo what Orban has done.

14:18David French:David, what does Peter Magyar, what kind of challenge is he facing with this and ridding the country, you know, kind of like cleansing it of this authoritarian bent that has been, you know, they took us 16 years to get this project rolling.

14:33Michelle Cottle:I think Michelle identified the problem very well, and it's a version of the problem that we're going to face the next time there is a non-Trumpist or a Democratic administration. And that is, if one of the violations of norms was purging the bureaucracy and replacing it with your own loyalists, is the correction to that purging the bureaucracy again? And have you essentially created a pattern where in the desire to avoid something like the corrupt ideological spoil system, you then push it to another level because you have to try to cleanse the products of the corrupt ideological spoil system, which then the other side codes and understands is just a purge of my allies.

15:21Michelle Cottle:And you realize how much one person who is breaking both legal and sort of traditional moral norms around democracy, how much they can do a generation-long amount of damage.

15:36David French:Okay, so I want to be a little bit of a worrywart on this. You're talking about what happens when we have moved beyond the Trump era and how we get back to some sort of democratic norms. You're saying that may be wildly optimistic. We still have a few years. And so what lessons do we think that this administration and this president will take from what happened to Orban? And what could we be looking at? So I'm not sure that Trump is capable of learning these kind of lessons. I mean, you know, you could argue that they would say, well, this requires that, you know, a sort of even greater level of repression.

16:25That's what keeps me up. I hate to be Pollyanna-ish about this country because God knows I feel a tremendous sense of despair and horror. But at the end of the day, you know, the reason that I think Orban didn't try to steal the election, even though there was weird, dirty tricks kind of stuff in the run-up to it, There was this accusation of Ukrainian sabotage. And there were things that Orban was doing that it looked like he might be tiptoeing up to some sort of state of emergency. And, you know, we'll never know how real that danger was. But I think part of the reason that they didn't attempt anything like that was because the opposition was just so overwhelming.

17:15You know, you could see it everywhere. everywhere. They just couldn't have, I don't think, gotten away with it. And I would say similarly, Donald Trump's coalition, although he still has his hardcore base, you already see it sort of falling apart. And a lot of the people who would have been, I think, in the past cheerleaders for some of the most radical action that Donald Trump could take, you know, who would have been out there excusing or encouraging a January 6th type thing, those people have fallen off the wagon. You know, Alex Jones is gone. Candace Owens is gone. You know, Tucker Carlson is wondering if Donald Trump is the Antichrist, which is maybe a conversation for another episode of this podcast.

18:04David French:Yeah, a whole episode on the religious overtones. And so I don't want to underestimate how much power Donald Trump still has. He has the military. But I think that the loss of a lot of his most powerful propagandists would just make it much, much harder. Yeah. David?

18:23Michelle Cottle:You know, I think you're already seeing sort of the smarter folks in MAGA looking at Hungary, looking at the collapse in support, looking at the Iran war. I mean, the Iran war was a breakpoint beyond the Epstein files, especially in sort of the most hardcore elements of the MAGA right. Because, you know, if you were on the other side of them in the 2024 election, all they ever would say to you, warmonger, you want to go to war with Iran. So for a segment of these people, it has been a bridge too far, but here's where I want to introduce a thought to people's minds. this part of MAGA that has broken with him, not necessarily because this is an unconstitutional war, because they're furious at him because his foreign policy is distracting them from the real mission, which is the enemy within.

19:15Michelle Cottle:And so, you know, part of the frustration with MAGA is that Trump hasn't concentrated enough on the left in suppressing the left in this country. You know, it could be even if Trump loses and let's just say Trump midterms, Democrats sweep the next presidential election, Democrats win and return to power. Then the question is really going to be, is this populist reaction that is now drifting increasingly anti-Semitic? Is this just what the opposition party is going to be in America? Or would the defeat of that form of the opposition party result in a change in the opposition party? And that's what we don't know.

19:52Michelle Cottle:So, you know, I'm sitting here hoping that a defeat of the populist version of the Republican Party could mean at least a ghost of a chance you have a revival of a classical liberal version of a Republican Party. But I could see it going the other way. And, you know, I feel like in Hungary, we're getting a small European version of a dilemma we're going to be facing. And Poland, it was interesting. One last, one quick thing on Poland. I did this really fun and interesting interview with a Polish law professor. And she and a number of judges and other law professors had done a massive program on civic education in Poland, where they had done things like go to local communities, judges and law professors, and teach people what is the rule of law?

20:39Michelle Cottle:What is constitutional law? It wasn't vote for this person and not this person. It was a massive civic education program. And that has stuck with me ever since. One thing we absolutely need in this country is a massive civic education program so that people understand what it is that we're about to lose here in this country if the present trends continue towards Trumpist authoritarianism. Can I say two quick things? When you talked about the judges, and I know what you mean about the judges in Poland, something not quite analogous, but something that I thought was really interesting in Hungary was what they called these Tica circles.

21:17You know, Tica, again, forgive my pronunciation. It's the name of Magyar's party. It's named after this Hungarian river. And there would be these circles in small towns of just people who would meet and organize and kind of shore each other up, show people that they weren't alone in their opposition. And I think that that was very important, that kind of local infrastructure. The other thing I just want to say about the future of the Republican Party, I mean, my guess is that the future of the Republican Party is more nakedly anti-Semitic. And I say this as someone, I think it's always important to say this when you talk about criticism of Israel.

21:59I mean, I would like to see the United States foreign policy break with Israel. I would like to see Benjamin Netanyahu in The Hague. This is not about thinking that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. However, I do think that there is now a lot of naked anti-Semitism in the Republican Party. And what I think you'll see after World War I in Germany, there was the stab in the back theory, the Dolch legend, the idea that it was the Jews that had caused them to be defeated. I think you'll see something similar with MAGA, you know, especially because this war in Iran was so inexplicable and nobody could quite understand why Trump just kind of turned on a dime.