What We Have to Fear

BUDAPEST, Hungary — The technology conference held here last week could have taken place in almost any other big city in Europe or the United States. It featured executives from Google, Slack, LinkedIn, Airbnb and more. I came to talk about The New York Times’ digital strategy, and I stayed for three days to explore Budapest and interview people here.

Like many other first-time visitors, I was charmed. The city is full of 19th-century architectural triumphs that loom over the Danube River and sparkle at night. In the old Jewish Quarter, bars and cafes bustle. There is a growing tech industry, with companies like Prezi, which makes a non-boring version of PowerPoint.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Budapest is also home to one of the world’s newly autocratic governments, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his far-right Hungarian nationalist party, Fidesz. These days, Hungary is often mentioned alongside Russia and China.

And yet life in Budapest doesn’t feel authoritarian. It feels Western. It feels familiar.

Which, as I reflected on my trip — and on the midterm campaign that I returned home to — left me deeply unnerved.

Orbán is no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. He doesn’t put opponents in jail or brutalize them. “There aren’t secret police listening to us,” one Orbán critic told me over dinner. Zselyke Csaky of Freedom House, the democracy watchdog, told me, “There is no violence, not any kind of political violence.”

What Orbán has done is to squash political competition. He has gerrymandered and changed election rules, so that he doesn’t need a majority of votes to control the government. He has rushed bills through Parliament with little debate. He has relied on friendly media to echo his message and smear opponents. He has stocked the courts with allies. He has overseen rampant corruption. He has cozied up to Putin. To justify his rule, Orbán has cited external threats — especially Muslim immigrants and George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian-born investor — and said that his party is the only one that represents the real people.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I cannot imagine the United States or a Western European country turning into Russia or China. But I can see how a major democracy could slide toward Hungarian autocracy. Orbán clearly has such ambitions, and the far right across much of Europe views him as its model. Steve Bannon has praised him as the world’s most significant politician.

Most alarming, the Republican Party has shown multiple signs of early Orbánism. No, the party is not as bad as Fidesz, and, yes, American democracy remains much healthier than the Hungarian version. But the parallels are there for anyone willing to see them: Like Orbán, Republican leaders have repeatedly been willing to change the rules and customs of democracy for the sake of raw power.

The list includes: rushing unpopular bills through Congress with little debate; telling bald lies about those bills; stealing a Supreme Court seat to maintain a Republican majority; trying to keep U.S. citizens from voting; gerrymandering; campaigning on racism and xenophobia; refusing to investigate President Donald Trump’s corruption and Russian ties.

Usually, Trump is not even the main force behind these tactics. Other Republicans are. In North Carolina, after Republicans lost the governorship in 2016, they went so far as to strip the office of some of its authority. Of course it’s true that Democrats sometimes play rough, too, but there is no list remotely like the one above for them.

That’s why the midterms are so important. The Republicans will almost certainly lose the nationwide popular vote in the House elections. Yet if they still hold on to their majority — thanks partly to voter suppression — party leaders will take it as an endorsement of their strategy. They will have paid no political price for their power grab. They will be tempted to go further — to suppress more votes, use more racism, cover up more scandals and violate more democratic rules and customs.

The United States won’t suddenly become Hungary. We start from a much stronger place. But our democracy will suffer. And democracies can deteriorate more quickly than people often realize.

Not so long ago, Hungary was a shining example of post-Soviet success. Power alternated between the center-right and center-left. Orbán — a pro-democracy activist during the end of Soviet rule in Hungary, who co-founded Fidesz as a center-right party — originally became prime minister in 1998. After only one term, and to his shock, he lost the job.

He responded with a plan to recapture power for “15 to 20 years,” as he said at the time. “We have only to win once, but then properly,” he explained. Fidesz did win in 2010, with help from a bungling socialist government and widespread income stagnation. Orbán went to work.

His strategy has had three main pillars. One, he sought to control the media. Two, he launched a Christian-themed culture war that discredits his opponents. Three, he changed the rules of democracy. In each of these ways — just as Bannon understands — Fidesz is a turbocharged version of the Republican Party.

Orbán has made sure his allies run most major media companies. If you imagine that Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and conservative talk radio controlled most of American media, you’d have a good sense for today’s Hungarian media. (And many Americans indeed get much of their information from Murdoch, Sinclair or talk radio.)

Just like Fox News, the Hungarian media ignores inconvenient stories, like anti-Orbán protests. Instead, it pumps conspiracies, especially anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and anti-Semitic ones, as the writer Paul Lendvai has noted. During my stay, newspapers ran Soros-related stories for little apparent reason, and there was talk of “the Soros caravan” — the same made-up story making the rounds on the American right.

I found it chilling to return home to a Republican closing message in the midterms that echoed Orbán’s so closely. In both, fictitious invading hordes — and those who supposedly support them — are the enemy of the people.

Orbán’s culture war also involves a lot of machismo. He has tried to eliminate gender studies from Hungary’s universities. In the senior leadership of Fidesz, not a single minister is a woman. The role of women, the speaker of the National Assembly has said, is “to give birth to as many grandchildren as possible for us.”

As I kept seeing photos of male politicians in Hungary, I was reminded of the all-male group of Republicans who tried to rewrite health care law in the United States. Or the all-male group of Republicans who designed Trump’s tax cut. Or the all-male group of Republicans who handle Supreme Court nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But no parallel is stronger or more worrisome than the subverting of public opinion, through changes to election laws and other steps. István Bibó, a 20th-century Hungarian politician and writer, once wrote that democracy was threatened when the cause of the nation became separated from the cause of liberty. That has already happened in Hungary, and there are alarming signs — signs that I never expected to see — in the United States.

Conservative parties, wherever they are, should by all means push for the political changes they favor, be it less immigration, more public religion, lower taxes on the rich or almost anything else. But win or lose, those conservative parties also need to accept the basic rules of democracy.

When they instead subvert those rules, I hope that citizens — including conservatives — have the courage to resist. In Hungary, it is no longer easy to do so. In the United States, this week will help determine the health of our democracy.