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Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3
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Required intro rate first 3 months only,
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then full price plan options available, taxes
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and fees, extra fee full terms@mintmobile.com this is why the crisis of the relations with the United States, not the crisis of European interest, but European identity if America is not what we believe that it was for.
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And now the good fight with Jascha Monk. You know, one of the wonderful things about doing this podcast is that I get some nice compliments on it and I get a lot of people saying, that guest was amazing. This guest was super interesting. Whenever I publish an episode with Ivan Khrushchtev, I get so many emails. I get so many people telling me I love Ivan. Or some people saying, I've never heard of this guy. This is incredible. And it's always just a special treat to speak to Ivan because he has the capacity to make sense of the world, to illuminate things, and also to complicate things. A lot of people are able to say surprising things, but normally when they say surprising things, you don't believe them. Even as one of the few who just consistently says surprising things about the world and you think about it for a moment and say, oh yes, that allows me to see something about the world that I really had not understood until that moment. And so it's a special pleasure to have Ivan back on the podcast for, I think, our fourth solo conversation. We are talking about the big news of the last 48 hours. The defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary, the victory of Peter Magia. We try to understand what led Orban to lose control over this country, despite the ways in which he had made life very difficult for the opposition over the course of the last 16 years. We try and draw out some of the implications for democracies struggling with their own authoritarian populace, including in the United States. And we think about what this means for people who want to beat authoritarian populace. We also talk more broadly about the situation in the world. We discuss the start of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, how America ended up in this rather remarkable war in the Middle east and what is happening to the world order, whether we are seeing the old world order crumble and whether something new can already be put into place. In the last part of the conversation, which is behind the paywall, we also talk about whether time is starting to run out for Donald Trump. Is this finally the beginning of the end for him? And how should Europe position itself in a world in which it can no longer fully rely on the United States to listen to that part of the conversation? To support us in having these kinds of podcast episodes to make it possible for us to do what we do, please go to writing.yashamonk.com and because I think that nobody should miss a word of what Ivan has to say about the world, I'm throwing in a special discount today. 30% off for your first year of subscription. Go to writing.yashamunk.com2026 for 30% off your first year of subscription. That basically means it's about the cost of a dollar a week. Ivan Krastef, welcome back to the podcast.
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Thank you.
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Well, Ivan, it's always a special pleasure to have you on the podcast. But today is also a joyous occasion, which is the defeat of viktor Orban after 16 years of leading Hungary. It's striking that he had such a total control of Hungarian politics for a long time and now clearly lost control in the last months, was defeated very roundly. The opposition Tischer party is going to have a two thirds majority in Parliament. It's also striking. But he conceded to the election something that not everybody expected. How are we to understand this moment in Hungarian politics and what's its relevance beyond Hungary?
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Listen, this is interesting because this is this irony of history, because if you're looking at people on the streets of Budapest, it was really very much like 1989. And if you see the profile of the constituencies voting for Mr. Orban, the he very much looked like the constituency of the old Communist Party. He was in power for too long. And by the way, this is also one of the reasons that he lost. In democratic politics, there is a certain type of a limit. Democracy cannot tolerate government staying for too long. And I do believe this is the real problem and this is going to be more and more problem for the leaders that believe that can live long and being in a good health. Because you remember this old gladiator game where you have $100 and you should offer to the other side some money. But if they're not going to accept, both sides are getting nothing. And scholars had discovered that if you're going to offer the other person less than $20, they're never going to agree. While if it's a rational choice, normally even $1 is a gain.
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So the idea here is I think I get $1,000 and my task is to distribute it between the two of us and then you can accept or decline. And rationally, if I give you 10 cents, you should accept, because 10 cents is better than nothing. But it turns out that people actually have pride and they don't want to feel cheated. And so below a certain threshold they say screw you, even if it means they themselves lose money.
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In my view, there is something like this with democratic politics. There's certain terms of limits over which you start to believe that it's too much. That in a certain way this is the idea of a change which is very important. And I do believe this is part of the problem of rotation. And the most interesting from point of view of Maggie is that he said that one of the things that he's going to propose is a constitutional change is that nobody can be a prime minister for more than two terms, which normally you do with a president. This rotation of power, the dynamics in my is quite interesting. And I'm saying this because this circle and irony is so funny because everything came back to Orban. And this is funny story, but revolutionaries rarely aged well in power. And something happened like him. As you know, he started his political career in 1989 on the reburial of Imran Nat, the leader of the 1956 revolution. And before this reburial, all the leaders of the opposition met together and they decided not to raise the issue of the Soviet troops in Hungary because they were afraid that this can provoke on the Soviet side some reactionary forces that can make the transition more difficult. And there was this young 25 year old guy, Viktor Orban, who break the taboo and he went and said, Russians go home. I'm saying this because on these elections it was the 45 year old Peter Magyar, after the leaks of at least the elite Russian interference in the Hungarian elections, use the same phrase, Russians go home. So you have this kind of a cycle in which 1989 comes back. But it's also a certain element which is going to come as a surprise for many because in 1989, when communists left power, when it comes to economic issues and others, many of the communists in places like Hungary has adopted a much more liberal policies. In the same way, Mr. Maher is not so different in many of his policies than Mr. Orban is. So in a certain way, Orban left, but it does not mean that you're going to have a totally new foreign policy consensus or totally new economic policies. Very much is about cleaning the system, dismantling the model, basically changing the personnel. So it's interesting how it's going to work, because Unlike in Poland, Mr. Magyar has a constitutional majority, so he really can undertake measures which are much more radical than anything post populist governments had been doing.
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I have a couple of questions. So one is I remember you explaining the evolution of Hungarian politics and politics in a number of Central European states by saying that we sort of misunderstood the 1989 revolutions. So, so one easy narrative about someone like Viktor Orban is that he became a traitor of the 1989 revolution, that all the things he stood for in 1989 he ultimately turned his back on. And that's why he's against undermining democracy, why he's against Brussels, against internationalism and all of those things, saying no. Actually, the way to understand 1989 is as having three different strands. There's a kind of liberal, universalist, democratic strand. There's a kind of nationalist, anti imperial strand, and there's kind of religious conservative strand. And so we should understand Central European politics not as people betraying the revolution, but as a civil war between the different strands of the revolution. And Orban, as it turned out later, really was more of a religious, conservative and imperial strand. But how do we square that with this strange embrace of Russia in the last years? Is this simply a kind of convenience of power? But that is kind of striking because, as you're saying, his entry into politics was to say, I'm going to be the one to tell the Russian troops to go home. And then by the end of his rule, he is aligning Hungary in many ways more closely with the Kremlin than with Brussels. That really does seem like he's kind of betrayed the key sort of promise of his entry into politics.
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This is true, and you're totally right that you have all these trends in 1989. And from this point of view, of course, what is interesting about Orban, that he was dancing with all these different wings of 1989. He entered as a liberal, but liberal from the countryside. He was not a Budapest liberal. He's somebody who does not come from political family. He does not come from a strong dissident tradition. And the major story and answer to your question is how he redefined what it means to be sovereign. So sovereignty for him in 1989 basically means getting out of the Soviet bloc, joining NATO, joining European Union. So he was staying there. And then the problem is what it means for him to be sovereign within the European Union. And then he came step by step, particularly after 2010, but particularly after the migration crisis, that it is Brussels who is the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty. And for him then he redefined sovereignty, means to have a geopolitical options. And then he start to invest relations, particularly with Russia and China. To be honest, even China more than Russia. And he starts, by the way, doing something which is absolutely amazing because he starts simply selling his veto in the European Union to the Chinese, to the Russians. So his importance for them was very much due to the fact that he's member of the European Union. He can veto the sanctions against Russia, he can veto economic policies against China. So suddenly, a small country, which no, for geographical or other reasons, should be so central to European politics, became a bit. But his model was based on three things which were very kind of in a contradiction with each other. To be successful, Orban had to be anti Brussels and anti eu. But on the other side, he should have the money of the European Union, because the money that he was getting from the European Union were up to 4% of the Hungarian GDP. And then basically, he should try to stay in the European politics and be important in it in order to be able to sell to the Chinese, to the Russians, the influence that he has. And with the passing of time. In the beginning, he was playing. He himself is calling this a peacock, a dance in which you're making a step in one direction, step in different directions. But with the passing of time, he basically radicalized and radicalized and he lost the European money on these elections. And economic issues were very important for him losing the elections. And secondly, he was moving closer and closer to the Russians to the extent that some of the leaked memos that came were really a kind of a humiliating for somebody who believes that he was the rebel who are speaking truth to power, nevertheless, where power is. So this same kind of orphan who tries his voters, but also the world, to see him as a rebel, was talking about Putin saying, you are the lion and I'm the mouse who wants to help you. He destroyed this idea of a rebel. And the relations with Trump, of course, didn't help at all. So this is the paradox of it. If you see the elections, he was the sovereignist who was fighting the globalism. This was his major kind of a platform. He was as a globalist. He was the globalist. Basically, on his rallies, Vice President of the United States, coming foreign countries like Russia, trying to help you win the elections. And against you was one of your former supporters who almost is not giving interviews to the Western media, who does not want to talk about any big international issues, who said to the Hungarians, I care about you, I care about your salaries, I care about what is important in your life. So suddenly, basically at the end of his career, Orban ended against everything that he was fighting in the beginning. Basically the authoritarianism at the end, also globalism.
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It's amazing how complicated it still is to shop for things online. You find the product you want, you add it to your shopping cart and then it just takes putting in all of your credit card info, all of your shipping info, all of your billing address, and by that time you've half given up. That's why I'm always really elated when I see the purple button by Shopify at the top of the payment options because it just makes everything easier. You don't need to get your wallet out and look for that credit card and put in all of your address information. You can simply complete your checkout with a tap of one button. It's truly one of the best features in the chaotic world of online shopping. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Allbirds and Momofuku to brands just getting started. Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a business beautiful online store that matches your own brand's style. See, less cards go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and the shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com Good Fight. Go to shopify.com Good Fight. That's shopify.com Good Fight. That's fascinating. And to add to the irony, he changed the electoral system to benefit himself by giving a huge bonus of parliamentary seats under normal circumstances to the party that gets the most votes. Assuming that the opposition would always be divided and that while he might not win majorities, he would always have the single biggest party. And of course, it's because of that electoral system that the opposition is now going to have a two thirds majority in parliament, be able to unravel some of the sort of safeguards he put in place to keep himself in a position of influence, even if he should lose the election. So there's one more irony there.
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B
Listen, this is very what you're saying is extremely important. Institutionally because all of this kind of populist leaders, they hated liberal democracy, because in liberal democracy, when you're winning, you're not winning enough. So they try to radicalize. They come with this majoritarian system, but as a result of it, every election starts to look like a regime change. And this is attractive when you're in the opposition, but suddenly you understand that you created a system in which when you're losing, you're losing a lot. And this was interesting. I do believe it was very important that he conceded so early elections. Of course, the difference was so big. And Orban is a strong politician, so the fact that he lost elections is not changing my view on this. He understand that he simply cannot contest the results. Plus, keeping in mind that 2/3 of the voters of the opposition were people younger than 30. So they cannot be a protest on the street. On his side, he cannot rely. And this is very important, because when I was talking to colleagues, listen, I had met both Orban and Magyar, so I had the feeling that Orban to some extent is expecting what is happening. But what was interesting is that many of the colleagues and pollsters who knew the data, they knew that the opposition was doing much better, but they were afraid to predict what the results are going to be, because they were not sure anymore that Hungary was a democracy. And only in a democracy, government can lose elections, and those who lose elections, basically a peacefully living power. So you have this incredible schizophrenia in which people predicting 15, 20 points advantage for the opposition, and then when you're asking them who is going to win the election, they said, I cannot be sure.
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So what do you think the lessons are of the election beyond Hungary? I mean, one set of questions is about what this tells us about the resilience of democratic institutions. Hungary was in many ways the key example of why an older consensus in political science seemed shaky. There was an idea in the 1990s and early 2000s that once your country reaches a standard of living of about $15,000, $16,000 of GDP per capita in today's terms, once it had changed government through free and fair elections, a couple of times, it would basically be safe. And Hungary seemed to disprove that because it fulfilled those conditions. And yet Viktor Orban clearly made it a liberal democracy, which is his own term that he embraced, really undermined the freedom of the press, marginalized the opposition through all kinds of institutional tricks, pushed out institutions like Central European University that were in Budapest. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we now must say that it wasn't an authoritarian regime. It was a kind of competitive authoritarian regime, or a semidemocracy or flawed democracy or dirty democracy. I mean, the terms proliferate, but somewhere where the playing field may have been uneven, but the opposition did retain an ability to win elections, to displace the government at the ballot box, and that's what they did. So should that make us more optimistic about the United States, more optimistic about other countries where we see strong forms of democratic backsliding? Does it turn out that really capturing a system so much that elections become meaningless is a very hard thing to do in an affluent place with a long democratic history? Or do you think that Hungary is too sui generous to jump to those kinds of conclusions?
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B
We cannot make a conclusion just based on Hungary for many reasons. But there are certain things that we can see. One is that if you allow people to vote, you cannot ignore the possibility that nevertheless, how much you have media control, and nevertheless how much you control basically the economic power. If you are not going for clear political repressions, people can decide to speak. And from this point of view, the agency of the voter was very much reconfirmed. Secondly, being in the European Union, of course, is putting certain constraints on Hungary, because it is also a small country. I'm not going to make, for example, United States and Hungary when people are saying, oh, Trump is trying to adopt the Hungarian model, yes, you can borrow policies, but it's so different institutionally. The size of the country, the culture. For example, Hungary is extremely ethnically homogeneous place. People are moving nevertheless, how much you're controlling, basically media, you cannot control everything. Secondly, what was very important is that we like to talk about ideas and programs, but political leadership matters. Probably Orban could have lost also in 2022, if there was a strong political leader who managed to do what Peter Madger did. In political science, we try to always go for some institutional explanations, and we tried to ignore the talent of a politician, the risk of a politician. Funnily enough, if you see the biography, it's Peter Magyar. You are never going to see this. He was a cuddler, Fidesz. There was nothing dramatic. Basically, the most heroic thing that he did was divorcing his wife, who was a minister of Orban, and making public some of the recording that he did about the government corruption. But obviously he resonated with the people. And he also resonated with the people exactly, because he was part of of the urban system. So I don't believe a classical liberal candidate could have done this. And this is the interesting story that I do believe some of the central right party are trying to understand and try to see when they're dealing with what they're doing with the new right. But on the other side, I do believe it's going to be totally wrong to believe that because of what we saw in Hungary, we see the total crash of European right wing populism that they cannot win elections for very specific reasons. Populism in Europe was very much rooted in a very strong anti establishment sentiment. And this was this anti establishment sentiment that disturbed Orben. So from this point of view, there are not many parties which are in power. So then of the establishment in the way the Orban was. And this is interesting and this is why when we trying to make a conclusions, obviously the symbolism and the psychological impact was incredible. By the way, also Orban was the intellectual, the financial, the institutional hub of European far right. So this is going to have also very practical implications for how they cooperate. One of the impact in my view is going to be that far right parties in Europe will much more go on their own. This type of a far right solidarity uncertainly can backfire. And this is also true to the Trumpian effect. Because I'm interested also in your view. But one of the interesting question is not why Orban lost or what happened. The interesting question is why Gene Vance, vice President of the United States, the middle of a war, and by the way, a war in which he's going to be the negotiator, decided to go to Hungary, spend three days going on a rally knowing the opinion polls that were not very much kind of telling that his candidate is winning, why he's doing this. And in my view there are different explanations. I'm really very much interested on your take. In my view there are two things. One is that basically they were treating him not as an ally of the state, but as the ally of the Trumpian revolution. Because Mahar is not anti Trump, Macher is not anti American. Why you so much care? But if you see about yourself and your government as a revolutionary government, you support Orban, who is the same way basically the Soviets were supporting revolutionary leaders in other places in the world. And secondly, because you believe that he's very important for your European policy, because you want the kind of East European leader who is not simply pro Trump, but also pro Putin. And this is not easy to have such an explicitly pro Putin leader because you cannot rely on the Poles. And Ivan Babi is kind of not particularly keen on this.
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Yeah, I'm trying to think through it. I agree with you that they see Hungary as a revolutionary ally. I would add the wrinkle that for the most part, the Soviet Union was the first nation with a communist revolution. And so they cared about the revolution in Vietnam, they cared about the revolution in Albania, but they were children. And when you have a lot of children, perhaps you can split your attention and each one matters a little bit less. I do think that for the people who are trying to give some intellectual coherence to Trump, which is an impossible task, Orban was the father. Right. It's not just that he was a revolutionary relative, it's that he is an antecedent with all of the reverence that that deserves.
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B
And so Trump did not have a father because, as you know, he's born himself. But it was the uncle. You're totally right, that this kind of the heroic uncle, that.
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A
And I don't think that Trump cares. I mean, I have no insight into his psyche. I don't think that Trump was sad when he heard that Orban is out, whereas I think that J.D. vance and a lot of the kind of MAGA intellectuals probably did care because Trump is fundamentally not an intellectual. A lot of people around him.
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B
Yeah. What you're saying is very important because out of all these leaders, Orban was the only kind of intellectual among them. Melanie is a very good politician, but she's not going to spend her time talking to the influencers and talking to the conservative professors. He was still very much coming from the culture of the 1980s, when ideas matters and where you need certain constituencies. Because if you are thinking in tweets, consistency doesn't matter. What matter is intensity. Everything should be in capital letters. While in the case of Orban, he wanted to have a classical ideology, and probably this attracted some of these people. This is an interesting story because for me, one of the big question is, what is going to be the impact of these elections on the choices that the new right parties in Europe are going to make? Because they have been really kind of admiring him. He was the model, by the way, in the way, for him, in my view, the model was Ben Netanyahu. He was never Putin. Putin cannot be your model. If you don't have the oil and the nuclear power, you cannot be Putin. But in a way, all the nationalists in Eastern Europe, for them, Israel was the most successful East European country. It was ethnic, but it was a democracy, and it was ethnic democracy. Secondly, it was economically very successful with very high technology. It was with nuclear weapon of its own, extremely influential, totally beyond its size. And most of this kind with the Israelis. They used to be former East Europeans towards three generations ago. So from this point of view, I do believe this is quite interesting and probably somebody should try to compare. And by the end, Orban, not in this election, but in previous elections, he was using Israeli consultants. Orban was using Netanyahu's consultants. So this story of small countries that have big dreams about their rolling history on this, I do believe Orban is in Europe in a kind of a leak of his own, because of course for the French far right and so on, it's different, it's a big country. I don't know. But he was somebody who was not just interested to run Hungary, he wanted to run Europe. And paradoxically, this didn't help him on the elections.
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A
I have one more question before I want to hear your views about the broader conflicts in the world at the moment and the war in the Middle East. But. But what lessons do you think we should draw from Hungary for electoral politics? You already said that you don't think this is going to mean that somehow right wing populism in honest last legs, because what it's driven by is anti establishment sentiment. And when you're in Hungary after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orban, anti establishment sentiment means you want Orban out. But when you're in France, anti establishment sentiment may well mean that you want to vote for Jordan Bardela or Marine Le Pen if she is allowed to run. What about people who are running against populist incumbents? Do you think that, as some have argued, the lesson of Hungary is that you need to distinguish yourself on rule of law, on corruption, on actually delivering for people. But you need to embrace some of the political stances, because as he pointed out, what's striking about Magyar is not. Not that he is the kind of left, liberal, progressive alternative to Orban, it's that he is able to eat into Orban's core electorate by saying, I'm a conservative, I disagree with Brussels on many things. I'm going to protect Hungary from immigration more than Orban did. And by the way, I'm not corrupt and I don't have all these scandals to my name.
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B
Listen, the most important is he did the most simple thing that a politician of 50 years ago is going to do. He went to the people physically. When you have a long time in power, even when you go to see people, you're not seeing them anymore. And this is extremely funny because what he did, he simply went to these villages to which normally the opposition politicians never go because they believe that these villages are controlled anyway by Orban. Why I should go there? And he was listening to people. And even on corruption, this is interesting. Normally when you talk about corruption, people are just going to talk about big companies, they're going to talk about billions. But you know what? Normal ordinary voters outside of the big cities, they don't think in terms of billions. Billions do not exist. But he was very strong on corruption in the health system, corruption in kind of things that people can understand. So on this level, he was a very traditional politician and he was trying just to tell to the people, I am doing what you asked me to do. But he knew very well where the consensus is existing. For example, the classical story was Orban all the time tried to make out of him a traditional liberal candidate, because he knows how to basically defeat liberal candidates. So the government came with extremely outrageous anti LGBT legislation, expecting that Peter Magyar is going to jump and start to protest and what normally every candidate of the opposition before was doing. And he could have done this because 500,000 Hungarians protested this. But Magyar didn't say anything. Magyar said, this is not my priority. And this is why it was so difficult for Orban, because he was going just to the core issues. But it is important because in my view, the problem with the political leadership, who is trying to get the atmosphere of the country because voters are very moody. And also what I do believe he tried to understand very well was that it's not easy for people that have been voting for Orban for all these years to tell them, I'm also blaming you for the system. You also contributed to Hungary being what it is now. He basically managed to make of them victims like himself. He said, I was one of you. He cheated us. We believe that we're doing something good. So in a certain way, he was the honest, fittest guy who said he cheated all of us. We didn't subscribe for this. And this worked well because suddenly people were innocent. Suddenly they were the victims of the regimes. They were not part of the regimes. Suddenly they were not electing him for 16 years, many of them. And as a result of it, basically 500,000 people less voted Corbin on these elections. So he lost out of his core voters. It's not simply that. Basically, Magyar managed to mobilize much more oppositional vote. And on the other side, on the generational politics, almost two thirds of the people under 30 voted for Magyard because he knows how to talk to this generation. And for me, this is an interesting story. I Don't know. Probably you have seen more interesting studies than me on this. But there is something generational about the charisma of the political leaders. It's going to be very difficult to be charismatic over different generation for a longer period of time. And this is something like this. Basically, the urban charisma totally did not work on the younger people, because he's a good speaker. He basically had been working well with the crowds. But a new generation came, and this generation didn't find his jokes funny, didn't find his kind of references mobilizing. And I do believe this kind of a generational dimension is also important.
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A
That's very interesting. A lot of the time, I think previous political moments price different things. So in the 90s and early 2000s, the medium priced the sound bite. There was news cycles. You needed to dominate each news cycle. The way to dominate each news cycle was to have a right 15 second clip in the evening news. And people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were masters of that. This moment prizes authenticity. I think it matters much less than it used to whether you say what people agree with, as long as they feel that you're honest, that you're being yourself. And so that means that a lot of young people who've grown up in this find it easier to adapt to this than older people who were raised in the age of a sound bite, who've been in office for a very long time. But of course, there are some people who play very well in this age of authenticity, even though they're very old. I mean, Bernie Sanders is an obvious example of that. Now, Viktor Orban is an interesting case in this because. Because say what you will about him, he clearly was willing to be honest about his beliefs, in many ways go against the mainstream and challenge people. And all of that could have given him an appeal to young people. But I wonder whether, in the end the hypocrisy got too much. What's the opposite of authenticity? It's hypocrisy. And when you're claiming that you're standing up for the Hungarian nation that is threatened from outside, but you're cutting deals with Putin and so on. At some point, even if you're a good speaker, the tension between what you claim to be doing and what you're doing gets too big. To preserve authenticity, People start to think you're talking out of both corners of your mouth. And you may be charismatic, but that doesn't save you. Trump says whatever he thinks, he's deeply corrupt, but he never talks out of both corners. Of his mouth. That's not the right description of what he does.
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B
You're right. And this is very important, what you're saying. The problem with Orban is that he stayed in power for so long that here he became a king. You know, he moved the government to the old palace. And you can see that he so much became the symbol of the power himself that people stopped to see the person. And of course, he put some extra weight, everything that comes with agent, to some extent, to his power. So suddenly they cannot see the person anymore. Secondly, his rebel story was working when he was seen as one against everybody. But when Trump came, you are the ally of the strongest kind of a dog in the game. And to pretend to be victim all the time, young people didn't buy this. And also, part of his conservatism is quite authentic. So he's conservative in the way an old man is conservative. And the old man being conservatives, they never have much tolerance for the next generations, how they look like they are quite often being like an old uncle, you can say how they can say this, how they can believe it. And this appeared in him, I don't know. For me, it's very interesting what he's going to do now, because if this rule, which allows a prime minister to stay only 4, 2 terms in their career as a prime minister, it means that Orban cannot become a prime minister anymore. And this is going to have a strong support, because if you see Peter Maher is young and obviously he's going very much to constrain himself. So people, this is going to appeal to the people. How Orban is going to position himself, Is he going simply to become a bitter person, somebody like Berezia and Albania, which is just going to spend all his life that remains, fighting the people who got him out of power, or is he going to try to look for himself for some role as the intellectual leader of the European New Right? And how, by the way, the relations with Trump and Vance are going to be, Are they going to see what they did as their mistake? Are they going to forgive him for losing elections? Because the problem of Trump is he's not famous for having tolerance for losers. And unfortunately, this is how basically Orban looks like now for Trump.
- [39:07]
A
Perhaps Orban can become a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute on the west coast and enjoy some Californian sun. But I want to make sure that we talk about the broader world. We're recording this on Monday, April 13, as the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is beginning. It's Too early for us to know how that blockade is going to play out in military terms. Help us think through this extraordinary war that has now been going on for months. What sense can we make of how America got into this war and whether it's going to be able to get out of this war? How is this change changing the world?
- [39:50]
B
Listen, I'm not a specialist on the Middle east, and I do believe that modesty is quite important because these days we try to pretend that we understand everything. But there's three or four things exactly. As a non expert on this. One is that to a great extent, part of the problem with this war was the previous special operation in Venezuela. It worked too easily, too well in the way. Nobody's going to understand what was in Putin's mind in 2022, not knowing how he experienced the annexation of Crimea and how easy it was and how glorious it was. Slightly the same was with Trump. And there are many other factors. Of course, there was the Israeli factor. Of course there was his personal interest in Iran. Because when you go back to the biography of Trump, you're going to see that his politicization very much coincided with the hostage crisis in 1980. And so for him, Iran was always important. And also his obsession with nuclear weapons. He wanted to show that I'm the one not doing this. But then you have this war, which was the war in which it was not very clear what is success, what is failure, and which for political scientists, of course, was going to be very important. He does not have an understanding of a regime. For him, the regime is simply the leader and his friends, because this is how he understand also the American system. So when basically the Israeli intelligence told him that in one day we can kill the ayatollah and some of the key commanders, he believes that this is the regime change. And I'm saying this because one of the things that are going to stay with me and which is less discussed, 21 is how the decision of the Americans, but also the Israelis, to kill the leader, and particularly religious leader, is going to affect the behavior of others. What I follow in the discussion on the Russian side is many people now say to Putin why we're not doing this, why we're not trying basically also to target some of the key Ukrainian commanders. So we're creating a totally different idea of what is the allowed conduct of war. And the second is what you're doing when you don't know what to do. And here I do believe that Trump is doing something that was beautifully described. Stephen Holmes was Describing this to me as the major idea of Nicholas Wuhmann, the famous German sociologist, who said what it means to be powerful, the power is capacity to overthrow your problems on others. Because what is the blockade? You don't want to risk to go there. You don't want to go with military operation. You're not ready to lose people. So then I'm going to make the problem much bigger and my problem is going to become Chinese problem, Indian problem, European problem, because their oil is not going to move. So the oil prices will go so much up that others should solve my problem. And this is a totally different understanding of what power is. I have always the power to make the problem bigger and make my power my problem problem for others. I do believe this is interesting, and this is interesting about this blockade, because the blockade is really going to hurt others much more than it's going to hurt the United States. Lowe's has the brand's pros trust to get the job done. You can now shop new Catalyst fencing solutions and save big when you do, 10% off when you buy in bulk. Plus save $180 on a Dewalt 12 inch dual bevel sliding compound miter saw. Now just $449. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's, valid through 5, 6. Wall supplies. Last selection varies by location.
- [43:46]
A
Yeah, the blockade is a fascinating piece of tactical thinking. I think Trump is often capable of tactical brilliance and sadly, he often completely lacks strategic vision. But they went into this war assuming, first of all, that their real goal, which was to topple the regime, would be relatively easy to achieve, and that obviously turned out to be wrong. And assuming secondly that there's an easy exit plan, we're starting this war, we can stop this war. We're going to throw a bunch of bombs, we'll destroy a lot of the Iranian military capacity, we'll degrade the nuclear program. Hopefully the regime will topple. That would be indeed an incredible outcome. And if not, well, we can stop bombarding Iran and come to countries, some kind of ceasefire and get out of it when we choose. The first thing didn't happen, and the second thing didn't happen either because Iran was able to impose costs on its neighbors, both through sustained bombardments, not just of Israel, but of the uae, of Gulf states, of Saudi Arabia, but mostly because they blocked the Strait of Hormuz. And so the administration really was in a very serious pickle. And what he's saying is, you think you have leverage because you're blocking our ships from getting through the Strait of Hormuz, we're going to get leverage over you by blocking all the ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz. And part of this is that you need to be ruthless and perhaps crazy enough to not care about the consequences that much. Why does the schoolyard bully and Trump is many things, including a schoolyard bully, something that he has been since he was a very small child, as you know from reports. Part of what gives the schoolyard bully his power is that he's impervious to consequences. If you know that the boy threatening you at recess cares about being reprimanded by the teachers or his parents or cares about being thrown out of school, you have a kind of protection. You're not going to beat me up, I'm not going to give you my lunch, because if you beat me up, you might get thrown out of school. So a lot of the power of a schoolyard bully always comes from, I'm crazy enough, I don't care what the consequences are if I get thrown out of school, so be it. And so I think there's a kind of, you know, Trump can project that he doesn't care that much about the consequences of his blockade. And part, as you're pointing out, because the US Is now basically energy independent. And so the impact on the US for real is much more, more limited than that of other countries, but in part because he doesn't care about the American alliances with Europe and East Asia and other places where the blockade is going to have the biggest economic impact. And so that's a consequence that previous American presidents would have been worried about. Trump is a lot less worried about that consequence. And so that gives him a lot.
- [46:44]
B
But this is very, very interesting, what you're saying, because in my view, there are also three other elements which are very important. One is he believes that to be powerful means that you can do what you want. And normally we know that this is not the case, that units, anyway, power very much is based on the constraints that you have. But secondly, this is the time frame in which he works. People like to compare, basically, Putin and Trump, but when it comes to the time frames, this is the two most different people you can imagine. Putin is totally in centuries, he's consulting the dead Russian tsars what to do In Crimea, reading 19th century books and manuscripts to decide what to do. And then you have Trump, which there's
- [47:29]
A
a famous Tucker Carlson interview where Carlson asks him one question, and Putin starts in the 12th century and goes for 40, totally.
- [47:36]
B
Because for him, 12th century is as Irrelevant to the conversation as what happened yesterday. Trump, on the other side, cannot imagine anything which is longer than four weeks. If you see basically every time when he's using the time frames, it's either he's going to do something in one day or two weeks or four weeks. So he thinks in weeks, for example, he's never going to say something in two years, we're going to do it, and so on, particularly for conflicts. So as a result of it, he cannot imagine something going for a long time. And this is a very interesting. And this kind of a time framing and how you're managing time is critically important. But the third is that he became also the victim of not understanding the power of words. He was so good with words, and he managed to mobilize this idea of a civilization of destruction. This change as an Iranian regime is unpopular. Iranian regime is really awful. Many Iranians wanted to get out of it. But the moment somebody start talking, destroying your civilization, you do not have any more a language on which to defend what the Americans are doing. If you are Iranian, and this is very different than the Cold War. In the Cold War, the American governments were trying to get the tradition of the others. You talk about the Soviets and you claim that basically Pushkin is your ally, Tolstoy is your ally. You are taking all the culture of the other side to be your ally. And for Trump, this does not exist. And in my view, this creates this very strange situation, is that he's doing things and why Europeans are not joining. First, of course, technically what it means, it's not easy for them. But secondly, they understand that everybody facing Trump also is facing the world. And it's about identity building. Who are we? And you have the Brits, which are, by the way, very much hurt by what is happening. You have the French. Now everybody is using Trump just to tell others who she or he is. There is no relations with Trump anymore. And this theatrical nature of power that exists on the Trumpian side, in my view, this is going to be very difficult because for any next American president, regardless Republican or Democrats, how to basically get a meaning to the words that are powerful in politics is going to be really very, very difficult.
- [50:10]
A
I think that relates to a broader question I've been asking myself. When Trump won re election and when he was moving very fast in the first couple of months of his administration, it felt as though the old order had collapsed and any hope of restoring it seemed deeply naive. Trump is clearly making big changes in the world, including this reckless war in the Middle East. But his ability to impose his vision on the United States and in many ways on the world is being revealed as being very limited. He has not transformed American culture. He has degraded it now in various ways. But he doesn't enjoy nearly the dominance over American culture that Viktor Orban enjoyed in Hungary for a good number of years. A lot of his institutional initiatives are running aground. They wanted to either transform or destroy the sector of higher education in the United States. I know from conversations with university leaders that certainly life is not easy for the top American universities at the moment, and there's some genuine damage that is being, being done. But I don't feel the difference day to day at Johns Hopkins, where I teach, and for all of the protestations and so on, I don't think professors at Columbia or Harvard do either. You're not worried about criticizing Donald Trump if you're a faculty member at one of these universities? On the contrary. And so what does that do to the old order? I mean, it feels as though there are clearly parts of the old order that are going to be impossible to reestablish. There may be others that kind of go back relatively to how they were before. Or perhaps we have to wait for the truly world historical figure who is able to leave the old order behind and put something new in place. And we're still in what Gramsci would call this strange long moment of interregnum where the old has died and the new cannot yet be born. But I'm sort of confused at this juncture of Trump's presidency, in thinking through it. I think anybody who thinks we can just turn back the clock and we'll go back to the years of Obama, and that just seems completely wrong. But the birth pangs of a new order, the impossibility of actually putting something different in place, rooted in part just in the incompetence and anti intellectualism of Trump, but in part in the strength that the old order also retains in certain ways, even though it's clearly on its last legs and dysfunctional in a bunch of ways, is also an important factor. So how does this movie play out?
- [52:47]
B
Listen, I was very much impressed. One year after Trump was in power, European Council on Foreign Relations is doing this. Opinion polls in 11 European states and 10 Big Brazil, U.S. but Turkey, but India, but South Korea. And all this one year everybody was talking about Trump. And of course the view of Trump has changed. He has lost support here and there. This thing that really impressed me was the biggest change was not about Trump. Suddenly, after one year of Trump, in every Single country, majority or plurality of people declared that they expect in the next decade the influence of China to increase. But what is even more important, suddenly China stopped to be perceived as threatening to them. And I do believe one of the things that happened with Trump was that traditionally the old order was based on distinctions, were not distinctions of power. So we know that China is powerful and economically very doing things which are really kind of impressive and admirable, but we keep this difference that there is something wrong with their political system. We don't want to live there. What Trump managed to do is to create the world in which power is the only thing of identity. When I was thinking about if there is something that you can call Trump's doctrine not about certain place, but about the world as a whole, it is not that he see it as a clash of great powers. I do believe he sees the world like Greek mythology. So there is one most important tsar, Agamemnon, and there are other tsars. I mean, the Chinese, the Russians, they're there, they're important. And there are others who basically don't matter. And this kind of superiority, this hierarchy without order, this is very interesting because he all the time expects others just to demonstrate to him that others know how powerful he is. But then he deprived America of everything which is not identity based on power. For example, he's not even a conservative leader, to be honest. Can you imagine that in his world, migration is the most important thing? Yeah, you're fighting migration, and you're my friend. And who are his major allies? The Gulf countries where the migrants, 80% of the population. So this kind of a lack of any political conviction where everything is, I'm powerful because I'm powerful, and you should treat me because I am powerful. This creates very much, in my view, also the vulnerability, because all others are trying to do only one thing to tell him that he is not as powerful as he believes. And this is what the Iranians did, because he was right. The destruction of Iran is incredible. But they said, okay, you destroyed us, but you cannot change us. You are not as powerful as you believe. And he comes even to Europeans, and Europeans are telling him, okay, you're important, but you're not as powerful as you believe. And this is what I do believe is a real problem, because America needs identity, any identity which cannot be just based on power.
- [56:16]
A
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, Ivan and I speculate about whether the Iran war will turn out to be the beginning of the end for Donald Trump? Is he finally about to become a lame duck? Is his support about to crater in the United States? And we also talk about what lessens Europe should take from Trump's presidency. Should Europe rethink its basic alliance structure in the world? And should it take a more dispassionate view of who to partner with and how, moving beyond the special relationships that defined the post war period to listen to that part of the conversation, to support what we do here, to not miss a word of what Ivan has to say, go to writing.deashamonk.com I'm throwing in a special 30% discount this week, so this just means you pay about a dollar a week for access to everything we do. Go to writing.yashenmonk.com 2020.
- [57:32]
B
Sa.