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The Opinions
Hungary Shows Us How a Second Trump Term Might Play Out
00:09:36
Donald Trump has referred to Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, as “a great man, a great leader.” In this episode, the columnist M. Gessen, who is in exile from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, draws parallels between Trump, Orban and Putin. Gessen explores what life might look like in Trump’s next term and describes their fear that, this time, “people are going to retreat into their private lives and try to shut out the political world.”
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I'm EM Gessen. I'm an opinion columnist with the New York Times. In 2016, when Trump was first elected, right after the election results started coming in, friends and acquaintances started texting me after asking, what do we do now? Partly, I think because I had been convinced that Trump would win, and partly because I have spent most of my life living in Russia and so they thought I had some wisdom to share on living in an autocracy. And my first response was, well, obviously I'm living in exile. I don't know how to deal with this. But my second response was, actually, you're right, I do know a few things. So I ended up writing an essay called Autocracy Rules for Survival, which I think has held up pretty well and established me as an autocracy expert. For years I have been heavily relying and thirstily following the work of Baland Magyar, who is a Hungarian sociologist. He was a dissident academic during the Soviet period, and then once Viktor Orban became the autocrat in Hungary, became a scholar of post communist autocracy. And every time I need someone to cut through, I call Baland Magyar and his never let me down. In 2021, when it became clear to me two months after the insurrection that Trump was preparing for a reelection campaign, I called Montier to ask about Orban. He was voted out of office in 2002 and didn't return until eight years later. And during that period he did something extraordinary. He broadened his movement and he established himself and his movement as the only legitimate representatives of the Hungarian people. He had the saying that the nation cannot be in the opposition, meaning they were the Hungarian people and the democratically elected government was illegitimate. And so by the time he swept back into office with the parliamentary supermajority, so very much the way that Trump has come back now with the trifecta of power. He was poised to stage what Magyar calls an autocratic breakthrough, which is basically when an autocrat makes legal procedural changes that solidify power and make it impossible to dislodge him again. Trump, like Orban, claimed that the election that cost him the office was illegitimate. And Trump, like Orban, consistently referred to the democratically elected Biden administration as illegitimate, as not representing the American people. What seems to motivate Trump above all is vanity and the desire for power, but very close to that is greed. He is very clearly motivated by the desire to accumulate wealth, and he thinks that power and wealth are inseparable. I had an interesting part of a conversation with Magyar because he was really annoyed with Harris's insistence on calling Trump a fascist. He thinks Trump is not a fascist because Trump is not ideologically driven and ideologues are not greedy. He also said, you know, look at the Nazis. When they took property away from the Jews, they didn't put the money in their own pockets. They put it in the state budget. And if you look at autocrats like Orban, like Putin, they're definitely motivated largely by money. Magyar calls it going from the rule of law to the law of rule. And basically what he's saying is that you go from the legislative process, from the deliberative process, to rule by decree. I'm really struck by what seems to me like the mood that accompanies these changes. And we all remember this from Trump's first term. We all remember the sense of just constantly being overwhelmed, not being able to distinguish what's important from what's trivial, and that's actually structural. The way that these autocrats change laws is in batches, late at night, with legislation that has been half digested, with legislation that's proposed by outside parties. And the other thing that I think is really important to understand is, again, how much Trump and autocrats like him are opposed to deliberation as such. Mager talks about the set of deliberative institutions, and he argues that in a liberal democracy, these institutions determine our obligations to one another. And he says that liberal Democrats propose moral constraints without problem solving, and autocrats propose problem solving without moral constraints. So, on the one hand, you have rules and not a lot of change, and on the other hand, you have the promise of change and not a lot of rules. Now, Trump is not actually going to be able to deliver on that promise of returning you to the imaginary past when men were men and you weren't economically anxious and all the other wonderful things that his constituency imagines the past to have been, but what they can deliver on is the promise that you will no longer have to care about other people. What I fear, actually, is that the second Trump term will feel very different in and among the public than the first term did. The first term mobilized people in a lot of ways. Mobilized people to protest, mobilized people to follow politics. In the media, we had what we call the Trump bump. When people subscribed to important political publications and read them avidly to follow the changes in the country, I have a feeling that that's not going to repeat. I have a feeling that people are going to retreat into their private lives and try to shut out the political world. That's a pretty classic approach. We saw that in Putin's Russia, and in fact, scholars of autocracy call this authoritarianism as opposed to totalitarianism. Authoritarianism is when politics disappears. People are engaged in their private lives and they're not paying attention to the way the authoritarian and his clan are running the country. And that is often the bargain that the authoritarian strikes with the public is you're going to have enough money to retreat into your private life, and I'm just going to do what I'm going to do. Totalitarianism is the opposite. Totalitarianism is when the autocrat wants people in the public square and when everything becomes political and private life disappears. So my fear is that we're going to enter an authoritarian stage when people are just not paying attention because they feel helpless or because they remember that their lives are actually pretty nice and they just want to spend time with friends and not with the toxic politics of the country. That's not a great policy because from there we may go on to totalitarianism and private life will disappear. So I hope people can pace themselves and still pay attention.
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If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vishaka Derba, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brusek and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.