"The Hungarians" don't claim Hunnic descent; the relatively small pre-Orbán far-right claims that. (Orbán's own far-right is more of an import of the US alt-right, with not much focus on ethnic origins.) It was a popular claim in the middle ages, in line with how other countries tried to bolster their pedigrees at the time. Today, the theory popular on the wider right (but unpopular in academia) partially originates Hungarians from Pannonian Avars, who lived in the area some two hundred years after the Huns.
Because while in Western democracies nobody has, as yet, tried the full panoply of Orban's tricks, one or the other of them has been used. As has been pointed out - giving spoils to your college chums? Cronyism? Jobs for the boys? This is not a uniquely Hungarian problem.
Control of the press? In the heyday of the Tories, it was Rupert Murdoch (an opportunist who changes citizenship and support to a particular political party as he changes his shirts) who used one of his tabloid newspapers, "The Sun", to push an anti-Labour and pro-Tory agenda, in the end boasting after the 1992 general election, "It's The Sun Wot Won It":
The same here in Ireland during the 90s when one national newspaper was very pro-one of our parties and used its influence to do down the opposition party.
Gerrymandering? Allegations of voter suppression/vote fraud? Again, not uniquely Hungarian.
Changing the Constitution to suit your own special interests? We've had several referenda in my country, since you can only change the constitution by that means, where activist groups pushed and pushed for change and got it.
Then there's ruling by the courts to extract from the Constitution what some might question was never in it - emanations of penumbras, so to speak.
Orban may be going the full nine yards, but it's not as if "perfectly democratic" countries haven't gone down at least part of the same path, for the same reasons, via the same means.
But I think it makes sense to take a diagnostic view of what constitutes a dictatorship. There's a reason psychologists don't diagnose people with mental disorders just for having 1-2 symptoms from the diagnostic checklist; if they did, literally *everyone* would be considered mentally ill in some way. But if someone has 7-8 symptoms from a 10 symptom checklist, then it's probably safe to say they have the disorder in question.
Likewise, if you count any nation-state with 1-2 "symptoms" of autocracy to be a dictatorship, then yes, you won't find a single government on Earth that *isn't* dictatorial. But what makes the regime in Hungary different from the U.S. or Ireland or Germany is that it doesn't just have 1-2 autocratic elements, it has a whole slew of them.
Yeah, I'm not saying Orban is a democrat. I am saying that the rest of us may not have perfectly pure, unsullied, clean hands democracies either. If we're going to condemn Orban for blatant "making my pals rich", there's a ton of politicians in all the Western countries as well who should be nervously shuffling their feet and looking down.
Orban is shaping the country to keep himself in power. But other countries have a lot of things they're kicking under the bed, as well.
I think you're basically arguing the Nirvana fallacy at this point. I've skipped out on feeding the meter and engaged in other petty crimes in my life, but that doesn't mean I lose the right to pass moral judgement on Richard Ramirez- for that matter, neither does a purse-snatcher.
The comments on this post seem to have attracted some very right wing folks, even more than the normal collection of fringe views. I wonder if its been shared elsewhere
Perhaps you could demonstrate your claim with some positive spin on Hungary's richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros, who had little money 15 years ago. Don't forget to explain that his old friend Viktor Orban wasn't involved.
this was quite overblown - Fidesz made a rule which affected foreign operated universities (and was admittedly aimed at CEU). That said, George Soros is quite unpopular around central Europe and he did so through democratic means, so it can be hardly called dictatorial.
Certainly not the *most* dictatorial thing. E.g. half a year ago, he "privatized" two-thirds of Hungarian universities - and by privatized I mean, gave them away for free, to his loyal henchmen, in a legal construct that would require a two-thirds majority to undo.
> half a year ago, he "privatized" two-thirds of Hungarian universities - and by privatized I mean, gave them away for free, to his loyal henchmen, in a legal construct that would require a two-thirds majority to undo.
That sounds like a terrible scandal, can you provide a source in English or Hungarian?
It would probably be a terrible scandal, had the Hungarian public still any endurance to pay attention amidst what had been a multi-year sequence of non-stop scandals. (E.g. this week's news is the government setting a gasoline price cap that's slightly below the market price for gasoline, so gas station owners now lose about $0.1 on every litre of gas, having to sell it for that much less than they are buying it. They are required by law to continue selling it; if gas is unavailable at your has station continuously for more then two days, the government takes the station away from you and gives it to someone else to operate.)
I meant vaccination. I am not 100% caught up on US politics at the moment, is it already at the point where the company gets fined if they employ people without vaccination?
I would say (if I remember right) giving himself the power to amend the constitution freely, giving himself the right to fire any public servant, and making education workers public servants so they can’t protest against him is worse.
We could ask 100 teachers, nurses, cops, etc whether they would prefer a forced vaccine or the president having the ability to fire them (or their boss, so same thing) for speaking against them. I would guess the majority would be against the latter more.
But would the majority of anti-vaccine be against the latter? I’m unsure.
Yeah, kind of? Supreme Court declared mandatory vaccination constitutional in 1905, which is well before I think it can be accused of becoming an apologist for dictatorship.
The essence of dictatorship is not whether the government's own courts sign off on something, otherwise there'd be no dictatorships at all. It's about governments dictating to people what they can and cannot do to a degree well beyond what is considered reasonable, necessary or appropriate. Forced vaccinations are absolutely none of those things, therefore, they are a dictatorial thing to do.
No, the essence of dictatorship is the completely dominant power of the dictator's personal will. The original "dictatorship" was a Roman institution where an individual was given vast and sweeping emergency powers with absolutely no checks and balances (intentionally).
The fact that you don't like some policy that the government does, doesn't make it a dictatorship.
I don't see how your definition is any different to mine? What "checks and balances" exist in the USA against vaccine mandates, exactly? As far as I'm aware it wasn't voted on by Congress, has been reviewed by no courts, is unjustifiable via any sort of logic, was not an announced policy during the election campaign (or was it?), and is being implemented entirely via executive order. Which makes it an expression of the completely dominant power of the President's personal will.
Note that dictators don't have to be dictators-for-life and often aren't. Dictatorships are defined by the ability of the leader to force the population to do whatever they want, not longevity of individuals.
It turns out, all civil societies are dictatorships!
We live in the blasted lands, where I can't even shoot heroin while driving the wrong way down the street firing my M32 into the nearest McDonalds for taking the beef fat out of their fry oil!
Basically, the 1905 ruling only permitted very narrow means of enforcement - a fine for noncompliance - in emergency situations. The current state of the law of public health mandates rests not primarily on Jacobson, but a series of other decisions, including one endorsing forcible sterilizations ("three generations of idiots is enough", if you recognize that iconic phrase).
So the history of U.S. law around mandatory vaccination is probably more closely tied to human rights abuses than you think. (I say all this as someone who thinks people should get the vaccine.)
I would push back on that characterization. The early 20th Century isn't exactly a high water mark for liberalism on the Supreme Court. Jacobson is... problematic, to say the least, and the only reason why it still exists as precedent at all is that it provides a convenient fig leaf judges can hide behind while refusing to hold state and local governments accountable to the Constitution.
Government-funded propaganda, for example. Forced vaccination isn't used to create an uneven playing field for subsequent elections. Regardless of etymology, dictatorship is normally used as an antonym of democracy, and democracy is normally used to include representative democracy.
How does that create an uneven playing field? The punishment for not getting vaccinated doesn't include losing the right to vote, does it? (If anything, forcing those Republicans to get vaccinated means fewer of them will die before the next election, but that's likely too small an effect to matter.)
I don't really see how Orban qualifies as a dictator. Even with the absurdly gerrymandered electoral system and the corrupt influence buying, Hungary is still a democracy and Orban is still a democratically elected head of state. To my mind, the line separating democracies from dictatorships is whether or not a majority of the people can vote out the party/leader in power, and whether or not people can openly campaign against the party/leader in power without being arrested or murdered. Both things are still pretty clearly true in Hungary. If Orban were to rig an election or violently repress his opposition, he would hop right over that line, but I don't think even his harshest critics have claimed that he's done that yet.
All democracies exist on a spectrum from more-or-less gerrymandered and more or less corrupt, but even the ones at the extreme end of the spectrum are still in fact a democracy.
I know nothing about Orban, but am amused by Modi being called a dictator. Did these people know nothing of India in the past 70 years?!
It was also interesting that the book on Modi reviewed here had decided apriori that Modi was a genocidal murderer and that if the Supreme Court said there was no evidence, it could only be because the court made "a controversial decision"!
This in a time when the all-powerful actual dictator Sonia Gandhi, who saw in him a future political opponent, had hounded him for 12 years with no evidence. And in 1984, her party actually led a pogrom against Sikhs. With tons of evidence.
Yeah, if anything Modi has done a lot more than the opposition at keeping Democracy intact.
The Press is still free. Hell, they are overwhelmingly negative towards Modi. Now he counters that using social media platforms, but that's just good politics.
The Courts are still free. They have routinely given judgements that go against Modi, and many times strengthened aspects of the constitution that they felt was under threat.
The elections are the freest they have been in India. Gone are the days of Booth capture and even the most remote towns have accessible voting. Hell, India has a more robust set of parties at the state level than were tolerated by the Congress.
While Modi does use majoritarian rhetoric, but his policies have continued to benefit minorities either directly [1] or indirectly [2] via economic handouts. The most-muslim state of India gets 10x the funding per capita of any other state [3]
Modi is also held accountable within his own party organization. The organization is brutally meritocratic, where underperforming leaders are quickly reshuffled and if his popularity drops, then Modi will be replaced just as quickly. (Yogi is already clawing at his heels). Modi also doesn't have any Children, so nepotism is out of the picture.
Many young and highly educated politicians have been joining the BJP (Scindia Harvard/Stanford grad), and leaving the Congress because the structure of that party is far more dictatorial. (More monarchical, but whatever). Similarly, many Congress veterans are similarly abandoning the party due to disillusionment from the high command. (See Punjab CM : Amrinder Singh. Best friend of Rajiv Gandhi leaving due to disillusionment from his son Rahul). This is not what squashing your opposition looks like.
Modi has many real issues as a leader of a democratic nation. His IAS aides are often incompetent and he still has an expert sourcing problem because of the image issues. Economics in particular has been lackluster and the biggest moves have led to bigger disasters. 2020-2021 has actually been amazing policy wise. So, I have my fingers crossed for some positive growth. Afterall, in a nation as poor as India, that is all that matters.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata basically threw out the communist party there that was in power for over 3 decades, but used the same strategies - preventing voters from the other side (say, certain caste Hindus) from voting. Actually what they'd do is create a riot in certain Hindu neighborhoods. And provide safe passage to her voters : typically Muslim voters and certain caste Hindu voters.
If you wonder why there's so much violence in West Bengal on election day, this is it ..
Over 25 years ago, the Congress party (and really all parties) would do "booth-capturing" en masse, particularly in the state of Bihar. Their thugs would capture booths and stamp ballot papers as they wished.
T.N. Seshan (election commissioner) and electronic voting machines put an end to it. He had the right to bring in the army and was incredibly bold.
Mamata has been running a military style totalitarian govt. She basically created her own street armies.
Election violence in India happens only in the state of West Bengal now.
Communists pioneered these techniques and they believe so much in what they do that they justify their violence. So, this used to be bad in Kerala too, the other communist run state in India.
After T.N.Seshan shone a light on and cleaned up all of Indian elections, they have been real. Except West Bengal - police there works as thugs for Mamata.
The way BJP has been making inroads in to WB is to bring in their own thugs and say we will watch this street, so no riots can be started here.
Former election commissioner T.N. Seshan has to be one of the greatest Indians of all time. The EVM has been a huge success too.
2020-21 has been amazing policy-wise? Do you mean the policies that put us at the lowest growth in almost the entire world? Presumably not. So what's the policy that's been so amazing as to counter the truly monumental mess ups they made with respect to lock down?
You already had this debate in the comment section of that post - are you going to come to every post in the series to complain about Modi being called a dictator in a previous entry?
It's not relevant to the subject of this blogpost, though, is my point. You're just piggy-backing on someone else who is actually talking about the subject of this blogpost ("to what extent is Orban a dictator?") in order to continue complaining about something you didn't like about the previous post.
I'd like to take a moment to applaud your willingness to do that -- dropping a topic you feel strongly about is pretty hard to do, and is not something I see very often in discussion threads here or elsewhere.
It is possible for an underdog enemy of one dictator to come to power and establish their own. Which is not to say that's what I think happened with Modi, as far as I'm aware I think him losing power in an election is still possible.
> It was also interesting that the book on Modi reviewed here had decided apriori that Modi was a genocidal murderer and that if the Supreme Court said there was no evidence, it could only be because the court made "a controversial decision"!
Am I parsing your comment wrong? The book on Modi reviewed here was extremely favorable to Modi
You make a good point, and a lot of political scientists have been groping for some way to describe Orban's regime - "illiberal democracy" and "mafia state" have both been mooted.
But a few points. First, if a majority of people voted against Orban, he would still win handily from the gerrymandering, the ethnic-Hungarians-abroad vote, and the possible voter fraud, and the laws favoring his party and causes would still be in the Constitution and require opponents to win by 2/3 to repeal. So I think it would take something like 80 - 90% of Hungarians voting against him to change policy very much.
Second, yes, you can campaign against him, but the media will just ignore you and nobody will know you exist - the books gave some good examples of this. You can campaign against Putin in Russia - you can campaign against Erdogan in Turkey. I think one of the big stories of the late 20th early 21st century is that traditional "dictatorship" is less stable and valuable for leaders than some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy, and there's a spectrum from perfectly functional democracy to total sham democracy which might as well be a dictatorship. Orban goes pretty hard to the sham side, and he's better at it than other leaders (ie he maintains the same low chance of ever getting voted out while having fewer bright line violations of the rituals of democracy).
Without wanting to claim I can draw a bright line here, I think he's a valuable target for this book club in the sense of learning about things that I don't want to have happen to democratic countries.
First off, you're right, I forgot that the the current gerrymandering means that some possible majorities wouldn't be able to vote him out. But some majorities still could, which I think keeps Hungary over the line, albeit barely.
And I don't think the media ignoring you really matters here. It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate, it's more like background entertainment while the real action happens on social media. I don't see how a corrupt media is any more or less important than a corrupt civil service or a corrupt industrial ownership class.
As for the comparison with Putin/Erdogan, and their electoral management, I don't think the comparison holds water. Putin has killed, attempted to kill, and jailed multiple electoral opponents. Erdogan has multiple political frenemies who've decided that it would probably be best if they didn't live in Turkey anymore for their own safety, and just a few years ago there were tanks rolling in the streets of Istanbul while jets flew overhead as some kind of real/fake "coup" was staged. Orban hasn't done anything close to that.
Overall though, I do agree that Orban is a worthy inclusion in this series for the reasons you laid out. I just still object to him being referred to as a dictator.
If the US is any guide, the regular media provides the raw materials for social media. Someone writes an article somewhere, be it CNN or Townhall, and that gets posted on social media to "prove" one side or the other. The right went nuts about a NY Post article being censored.
There definitely are still independent newspapers in Hungary, ie 24.hu now that index.hu was bought by an Orban friend, and explicitly leftist papers, ie 444.hu
Can you not get news from foreign networks there, like Der Speigel or Reuters or something? I mean, sure, it might be a bad situation overall to have consolidated control of dead tree newspapers in the hands of one not so scrupulous political faction, but Hungary is a small country floating in a see of independent media companies in Europe.
A 100% majority would be an infeasibly high bar. I suppose US presidential elections where no party gets to gerrymander electoral votes seems better in comparison.
They certainly *have* gerrymandered electoral votes, back when states were still being admitted to the Union, this is one reasonable perspective on the Missouri Compromise et sequens.
I think you underestimate the power of traditional mass media when there isn't much opposition. I am not ready to defend any claims about younger people (I would expect them to be somewhat affected on average) but elderly people often tend to watch TV a lot and be affected by it a lot.
>And I don't think the media ignoring you really matters here. It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate, it's more like background entertainment while the real action happens on social media.
I doubt that.
In the political context I know best - Germany - media play a huge role for the political debate and for elections.
I looked up some figures (all for Germany) for the general dimensions: sinking number of printed daily newspapers: from roughly 20 million printed copies daily to 12 million in 2021. At the same time 13 + x million reading newspapers online daily. The association of newspaper publishers claims that newspapers daily reach ¾ of the german-speaking population. The two main TV evening news in public television got an average of 12 million viewers (first programme) and 4 million (second programme) daily in 2020. 35 million listen to the radio daily – though this need not be related to news. Overall population in Germany over 14 years: 72 million.
Compared to social media: Regarding Twitter in Germany, I found the following information: 3,6 million use Twitter at least once a week – other sources mention 5 million active Twitter users/ month or 12 million registered accounts. 14 million use Instagram and 19 million use FB at least once a week. Note, that while the figures above were ‘daily’ the social media figures refer to ‘at least once a week’, and more importantly, this is for all kind of topics, with news & politics probably less prominent than other fields of interest. Btw. 5% of Germans > 14 years say they read a blog at least once a week.
No ambition to be precise, rather to show general dimensions.
I'm even a bit surprised by the high numbers of traditional media use. However, their overall importance seems evident.
I guess this is different in different countries, but I doubt that ‘social media is so important, forget about media’ is a realistic description in most.
"It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate" That may have been correct 5 years ago in the US, but then the media made itself relevant again by leaning on big tech to suppress all political dissent that the media dislike. Looks like democracies will continue to be largely ruled by media and tech elites until the centralized corporate social media platforms are replaced with decentralized free and open source software.
I'm not at all sure if such a proposal makes us a "mafia state", sometimes given the way our governments in whatever combination behave, it's very tempting to think that.
If you're going to allow people to vote because they *might* live in your country someday, and particularly if their living-in-your-countriness is contingent on your government's actions today then, Population of Germany, 1914: "Some of us might decide we want to live in Extreme West Germany, er, France, in 1918 if things go well, so we vote for defunding the French army and immediate unconditional surrender".
Voting is for people with skin actually in the game, not just theoretically.
This section of the wiki page seems to say that never-resident citizens have NOT been included under these proposals; only citizens who have lived in the country for some period of time and recently expatriated (regardless of whether they are citizens by remote ancestry or not).
Here in italy, expats can vote from abroad since 2001. Alas, as much as italy may or may not be a mafia state, it's not because of this. Their impact on the parliament is marginal at best, with a grand total of 12 representatives and 6 senators
There is a huge difference between expats being able to vote and ethnic minorities abroad being able to vote.
The difference is that Hungary allows anyone who is ethnically Hungarian (not sure how they define that) to vote if they live within the boundaries of pre-1918 Hungary. There are three whole modern countries (Slovakia, Croatia and Bosnia) plus sections of two others (Transylvania in Romania and Vojvodina in Serbia) that were part of the "Crown of St Stephen". Hungary's policy basically doesn't entirely admit this terrority isn't Hungarian. If you're a Hungarian in Transylvania, you can vote by post and you retain your citizenship through an number of generations. If you're a Hungarian in the rest of Romania, you have to go to a consulate, and your grandchildren are not Hungarian citizens.
Most countries in Europe have a citizenship rule that has two types of citizens: ones that have lived in the country and ones that haven't - children born outside the country to a citizen that has lived in the country are citizens, but those children are now citizens that haven't lived in the country, so if they have children then those children aren't citizens.
The weird thing Hungary is doing is that they say that Hungarian citizens living in these lands (the ones they lost at Trianon) are treated as being Hungarians who live in Hungary, so any number of generations later, their children are still citizens.
I've attempted to speak Magyar myself, and from that traumatic experience I have to say that the ability to do so fluently would be proof enough for me that a person must have Hungarian (not to say eldritch) blood.
I think the Irish proposal is totally different. It’s just for people born in Ireland who have recently emigrated. Ireland can’t afford to give everybody who can get an Irish passport the vote - the locals could be overwhelmed.
Yeah, the article says Ireland has 4.8m residents, 2m never-resident diaspora members who have claimed Irish citizenship, and 1m diaspora members who have lived in Ireland for some period of time (all numbers including children) - the proposals here would only enfranchise that last group.
Also, as a never-resident citizen-via-ancestry of Ireland myself, I half suspect the whole project is just a way to extract money out of nostalgic Americans via fees. Getting an Irish citizenship + passport was *extremely* easy, but did cost several hundred dollars in fees...
I can remember driving down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago in the spring of 1989 past the Polish consulate and seeing a huge line of Polish expatriates queued up to vote and thinking to myself, "Holy cow, things must be changing behind the Berlin Wall if all these Polish expatriates are bothering to vote!"
I guess I can see a few problems with this argument. Let me play the devil's advocate.
Firstly, there are lots of places where the media doesn't enthusiastically cover opposition parties or goals. UKIP notably managed to bring about Brexit despite both receiving a mix of (at first) zero coverage and then later almost entirely negative coverage, mostly the former, and they achieved this through the basic hard work of doorstep campaigning until their vote share rose high enough that the government couldn't ignore them anymore. In the USA there actually are parties beyond the big two but you never, ever hear about them in the media. Yet the USA is still democratic. Media coverage of other parties and policies doesn't seem to be a genuine requirement of being a democracy.
Secondly, people who are abroad being able to vote is also very common in western democracies. It took me 15 years to lose my UK right to vote after moving abroad. Is the UK not a democracy as a consequence? The difference here seems to be a quantitative one - Hungary has way more Hungarians abroad as a consequence of losing WW1. I think there's a fairly good argument that people who move abroad should lose the right to vote in a country after some time period, and I wasn't upset at losing my own voting rights, as it seems unfair to be able to influence policies that almost exclusively affect other people. But I was surprised to discover that none of my friends still in the UK agreed with that! I figured they would agree even more strongly but no, they didn't like the fact it worked that way. Also there seems to be an implicit assumption in this argument that "of course" Hungarians outside of Hungary are all wildly pro-Fidesz because ... umm ... well ... go Hungary! .... but that feels like a weak part of the thesis. Why are they like that? Expats routinely vote for left wing parties in other countries. Perhaps they are not actually very different to the Hungarians at home, where, it seems, Orban has no difficulty picking up genuine votes?
Thirdly, although you say Hungary is a dictatorship due to gerrymandering, again, the USA has some very oddly shaped districts and the UK has had problems for years with unfair boundaries that - ironically - actually penalize the party in power. They're only now fixing it. Of course they were going to be accused of gerrymandering so they've layered the whole process in 'independent' reviews and so on, but ultimately it's still the government redrawing boundaries in ways that will benefit its own vote and you could paint that badly if you wanted to. Yet the UK and USA are democracies.
Finally, it sounds like even when he had the power to change the constitution in any way he saw fit, he retained the 2/3rds majority rule. That's a pretty common threshold for amending constitutions, isn't it. Is there some specific problem with this threshold in Hungary?
I guess my over-arching point is that if a book author sets out to make an elected leader look like a dictator, it seems to be pretty easy to do so. Governments do change constitutions, reform voting boundaries and change the franchise, especially in the years following communist rule. And as you admit, Fidesz is genuinely popular. He's not literally a dictator. He wins elections by adopting popular policies. That's .... kind of what we want politicians to do.
To me it seems a qualitative difference if you are an expat who was born in Hungary and moved abroad, or if your grandparents or great-grandparents were Hungarian and get the right to vote without ever having lived in the country.
Yes. That was clear to me. Scott did say irredentist so he is talking about ethnic Hungarians across the border. These kind of people are always nationalist.
> Also there seems to be an implicit assumption in this argument that "of course" Hungarians outside of Hungary are all wildly pro-Fidesz because ... umm ... well ... go Hungary!
It's not an assumption, it's a fact. In 2018, 96% of the Hungarians abroad without a Hungarian address (the ones that can vote by mail) voted for Fidesz, while 45% of the entire electorate did.
FWIW, I personally am quite happy to call America undemocratic; I believe the technical term is something like "flawed democracy". FPTP + gerrymandering is the main structural issue, but there are cultural ones as well.
As for overseas citizens, the distinction between expats and people who've never lived in the country is significant. I am a UK citizen, but can't vote in their elections because I have never been resident there; France, I assume due to it's colonial legacy of random tiny islands all over the place, does allow overseas citizens to vote but the numbers are small enough that the main consequence is a bit of pork-barrelling. It sounds like Orban's policy allows ethnic Hungarians 100 years removed from living within the borders of Hungary to vote, and that there are a large number of these....
"is less stable and valuable for leaders than some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy, and there's a spectrum from perfectly functional democracy to total sham democracy which might as well be a dictatorship."
I suspect that the grand finale of this book series will be Putin. The main problem is that there are very few dispassionate dispassionate writers on the topic in the West, most of them are jilted journalists and emigre oligarch-funded activist types. On the chance you're interested in books that are not anti-Putin jeremiads but strive for some degree of objectivity, my recommendations, in this order, would be:
* Richard Sakwa - The Crisis of Russian Democracy, possibly still the single best characterization of Putinism as a "dual state" (though anything by Sakwa will be good)
* Daniel Treisman - The Return
* Hutchins & Korobko - Putin
* The English translation of Mikhail Zygar's All the Kremlin's Men
Incidentally, only one of them are pro-Putin apart from Hutchins/Korobko, the others are neutral to skeptical, but they at least have the advantage of not being driven by ideological animus like the Masha Gessens and Lucases and Pomerantsevs.
On that graph, where would Western (semi-)democratic leaders of the early 20th century be placed? Say, Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle? The graph might just be picking up an atmosphere change towards pacifism across the world.
But yes, I agree that authoritarians have learnt quite a few tricks since the 1990s, starting with the "leave your borders open on the inside so the troublemakers can go to America" one that the Soviets had to be stuffed down their throats so violently. (Which is why I was so surprised about the Australian lockdowns...)
I'm curious about your book recommendations. When you say "in this order", do you mean "from most to least important"?
I think using the term "gerrymandering" may soft-peddle what Orban has done. We normally think of gerrymandering as drawing funny-shaped districts precisely because of the need to manipulating a district's partisan makeup while keeping the total population in each district the same.
But it sounds like Orban is using the "rotten borough" strategy in which unpopulated areas get the same vote as more populated areas. That does violate the basic "one man, one vote" principle.
OTOH, in fairness, that was a common and legal practice for drawing state legislative districts until the Baker v. Carr decision in 1962. And of course unequal geographical representation is also a feature of the U.S. Senate. Moreover, I just did a quickie Google search and learned that Germany has an upper house in which the delegates are not directly elected but appointed by state legislatures (like pre-1913 US Senators). And in that chamber: "The number of votes a state is allocated is based on a form of degressive proportionality according to its population. This way, smaller states have more votes than a distribution proportional to the population would grant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Bundesrat#Composition
I guess this is why it's hard to pin an anti-democratic label on Orban. Each individual thing he does to consolidate his power has precedent in other democracies. But the sum total starts to look a little dictator-ish.
I do not think this is true. Hungarian election laws what were implemented by Orban, have their roots in 2005 Supreme Court decision(when Orban was in opposition). Basically court said that due to demographic changes districts do not represent "one man, one vote" principle. Old way was more like "rotten borough" strategy.
When Orban implemented the law, I guess he used it to manipulate partisan makeup, but at the same time moved away from "rotten borough". Today population disparity between different districts is much smaller.
Well, not entirel I think. Probably the main purpose of the Senate, cf. the Grand Compromise, was to prevent bigger states from dominating a collection of smaller states, a very real concern when New York and Pennsylvania had 75% (or whatever) of the population of the United States, not to mention all the money.* The Senate made each state co-equal, so Delaware and Maine had equal weight with New York and Pennsylvania. That feature remains notwithstanding the Seventeenth Amendment.
It was a bit different pre baker v carr. You couldn’t actually draw new districts unequally - you could only let very old district lines stay for approximately forever.
The gerrymendering situation is not actually that bad and the current electoral system generally favors the winner getting diproportianally many seats, so the opposition can probably get 2/3 majority in the parliament by getting 55% or 60% of the vote.
So I wouldn't call Orban a dictator, and although the situation is very bad, and is not nearly as bad as some parts of the review suggests. In a comment above, I try to explain how I see things from Hungary.
No. They do not live in Hungary and are not impacted by the policies the government makes. Just because they speak the same language as most people in Hungary does not entitle the to suferrage. If they want to vote they should go through the immigration process like everyone else.
Actually, AFAIK, descendants of Hungarian citizens could get expedited citizenship if they moved to Hungary even before the new rules. The main change is that they can get citizenship and vote even without moving to Hungary. Fidesz talked about the "symbolic unity of Hungarians", but it was entirely about giving Fidesz votes.
Non-resident Hungarians can only vote for party lists, not for candidates in districts. This reduces their impact. (Hungary has a mixed electoral system with both single-member constituencies and party lists.)
The Hungarian system is more majoritarian than the German one. In Germany, party list seats are assigned in a way that more-or-less completely compensates for the FPTP seats, and produces a result proportional to the party list votes. In Hungary, party list votes have much less weight. Party list seats are assigned partly based on party list votes, and partly for compensation for the FPTP seats, but the latter is based on the FPTP votes, not the party list votes.
I always got the impression, that 'illiberal democracy' was what Orban liked to call his government style, hinting that this was just another kind of democracy. But I'm not up-to-date with political science literature on this.
Looked it up, there are poli-science papers using the term 'illiberal democracy'. Not sure how common this is in the literature, but certainly common enough for the statement: '"illiberal democracy" and "mafia state" have both been mooted.'
Unfortunately (il)liberal democracy is something of an ambiguous term, open to equivocation fallacy/motte and bailey. As far as I understand, it's often used to refer to values such as a free press, due process and not suppressing the opposition: values that were originally considered liberal, but which nowadays every mainstream party upholds in a well-functioning democracy, and without which a country can't really be considered democratic at all. But it could also be used to literally refer to a country where the governing party is liberal in a modern sense.
So when a party tries to control all the media or harasses opposition, and gets accused of dismantling liberal democracy, it can retort "we soundly defeated liberals in the elections, so why should we be expected to uphold liberal democracy?" Conversely, modern liberals can accuse non-liberal politicians of dismantling "liberal democracy" simply for not being liberal in the modern sense, which (to some people) has worse connotations than what is actually happening.
In the election of 2010, before Orban got the chance to change any of the rules or before he gave voting rights to Hungarians abroad, it was still possible for him to get 68% of the seats in the parliament with just 52% of the popular vote.
So I was mistaken in my comment above, the Hungarian system was not "more or less proportional" even before Orban's reforms, the remorms just made it even more majoritarian, although still less so than the British system. Thanks for 10240 for pointing this out.
In 2014, with all the changes, he got 67% of the seats by getting 42% of the domestic popular vote and in 2018 he got 67% of the seats by getting 46% of the domestic vote. This is a significant change from 2010, but not super-significant, and I wouldn't call it "rigging the elections".
Also, these results are mostly the consequence that Hungarian politics in 2014 and 2018 didn't yet adapt to the fact that the system became more similar to first-past-the-post. Political theory tells us that first-past-the-post elections favor a two-party system, but Hungary had many parties before, and it took them time to coordinate (partially because of the selfishness and incompetence of certain opposition figures). So in 2014 and 2018 Orban could win almost all districts, because opposition votes wre fractured among more parties.
Now the opposition parties learned from their mistakes and formed a single coalition against Orban, they even held primary elections and in 2022 there will be only one Opposition candidate facing one Fidesz candidate in each district. A lots of things can happen until April 2022, but I give it a 40% chance that Orban will lose this election.
What happens after the Opposition wins, with many key positions still filled with Orban's loyal supporters who can't be removed without 2/3 majority is a very good question.
Still, I wouldn't call the Orban-regime ditatorical, because there is an actual cahnce for democratic change in power. It is just an extremely corrupt democratic governmet that shows many warning signs of becoming an actual sham-democracy (like Russia) one day.
If you want to talk about a regime where voting procedures and requirements are manipulated to encourage favorable demographics to vote and ambiguously enable fraud among those ballots, where super-legislative constitutional law is used to systematically advance the regime's priorities and frustrate attempts to reverse them through the ordinary political system, where the press is dominated by the regime and ignores or slanders real opposition... aren't you just describing the current US?
Orban has probably gone further and been more blatant about it than the amorphous and non-personalized US system has, but it looks to me very much like the same kind of "manipulating procedural outcomes", without any major categorical difference.
It's interesting that my impression from these posts is that what you don't want to happen to democratic countries does not begin and end with "what the people in those countries want to happen." If a sufficient number of people in a *democratic* country vote for X (and whether the technical definition of "sufficient" is 50% + 1 vote or 80-90% or any number short of 100% is irrelevant to the point) -- then if you believe in democracy per se, that should be good enough. If enough people vote for Orban or Modi, then whether or not you like his policies, or person, that should be good enough in terms of "what's good for Hungary" or "what's good for India."
Unless, of course, you *don't* believe in democracy, or perhaps if there are some other values that trump democracy. That certainly not at all unreasonable -- I can think of dozens of ethical values that trump democracy, myself, in part because my view on democracy aligns with Churchill's ascerbicism -- but one should be clear about this.
A democratically made decision to abolish democracy would arguably still count as undemocratic. And these aren't national referendums in these countries either determining the policies which affect how "democratic" it is.
> what you don't want to happen to democratic countries does not begin and end with "what the people in those countries want to happen.
Indeed, domocracy does not begin and end with 'what the majority of people in those countries want to happen' at a given moment. Democracy enables people to vote people in power and out of power; it also allows the different majorities to decide on and implement concrete policies. It does not allow the majority of a given moment to strip minorities of their basic rights, and it does not allow the majority to change the rules of the game in a way that wouldn't give future potential majorities the same chance to vote for their goverment in the same way and have the same chance at implementing their policies. It is embeded in a set of rules, and safeguard mechanisms that should ensure that nobody gains total control - not even if this would be the wish of the majority.
The distinction between policies and rules of the game is important.
Majorities can vote for and implement their own policies. They mustn't touch the rules of the game that ensure that the system remains democratic (which doesn't mean they can never change, but not in a way that cripple the functioning of democracy).
Housing policy, foreign policy or migration policies are examples of a policy. The system of checks and balances is one very basic part of the rules of the game.
Orban can decide not to take in any migrants - that's maybe not nice, not showing solidarity or even inhumane, but it's still a democratic decision. If Orban decides to take over the media, making sure that it gets difficult to publish other opinions, this is changing the rules of the game, and its undemocratic. It will make it harder for other opinions to be heard and for other majorities to vote their people in power - it's applying the axe to the foundations of democracy.
>then if you believe in democracy per se, that should be good enough
This holds true, if you believe 'democracy' is 'rule of the majority'. The confusion is solved though, if you define democracy as a system that enables the souvereign to choose its government - not only now but also in future, a specific system of goverment that is charicterized by regular elections, rule of law, a system of checks and balances, and the protection of minorities. Characterized also in current conditions by a media landscape and civil society that support the expression of a pluralism of opinions. Once you assume this understanding of democracy, being 'very much pro-democracy' and saying 'Orban mustn't do this and that' even if he has a majority, are only two different expressions of the same.
"It does not allow the majority of a given moment to strip minorities of their basic rights"
That sounds like liberalism, not democracy. When Friedrich Hayek was defending the Pinochet regime he said he would rather have a dictatorship that preserved some liberalism than an illiberal democracy. The founders of the US distrusted democracy and set rights in a Constitution that would be very difficult to amend (the section guaranteeing equal representation of the states is even separated out as impossible to amend).
"a specific system of goverment that is charicterized by regular elections, rule of law, a system of checks and balances, and the protection of minorities"
Only the bit about elections is a matter of democracy.
Thin ice here. My grandparents´generation in Germany was much too fond of Hitler at least for some time. Democracy doesn't have to be badly flawed to lead to catastrophy. There doesn't seem to be a sustainable alternative though.
Free trade should prevent collective madness but it depends heavily on law, which in turn has to be agreed upon somehow.
"Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin. The Roman Senate was the governing body in the Republican period, but it continued to exist all the way through the entire Western Empire and for another century-plus after the Western Empire fell; and, in the East there was still a Roman Senate for another 600 years after that, though not quite until the final fall of Constantinople.
So, rather than saying that this is "one of the big stories of the late 20th/early 21st century," I would say that this is one of the big stories of the first century BCE to the 12th century CE. This is precisely how the Roman Republic was destroyed. And it's far from novel even in modern times.
The USSR retained the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy (that's what the "soviets" were) even while the Party took over real control.
Here in Argentina, our Congress has served unbroken since 01854, 167 years, despite coups installing dictators in 01930, 01943, 01955, 01962, 01966, 01971, and 01976, plus Perón taking Orban-style measures to consolidate his power to such a frightening degree during his first period of rule (01946-01958, during which he changed the constitution to permit his re-election) that in the 38 years since the restoration of democracy in 01983, the party Perón founded has ruled for 27 years, and other parties only 11 years.
In Venezuela, Maduro is clearly a dictator, which results from Hugo Chavez gradually clearing out all the obstacles to dictatorship. But Chavez himself was never a dictator, and he always preserved the forms of democracy, in fact greatly strengthening them in appearances. But at the same time, he weakened them to the point that his successor would face no significant opposition.
It's the same in most recent dictatorships. Hosni Mubarak held multi-party elections which he won, and the Egyptian Parliament was never dissolved during his brutal reign. Pervez Musharraf held elections to, in theory, decide whether he would continue in power, but nobody else was allowed to run. Hungary itself, though Communist, was theoretically a parliamentary republic from 01946 to 01949 and still had a multiparty legislature until 01953; even after opposition parties were prohibited from running candidates, the Hungarian Parliament continued to hold regular elections, and many independent (that is, non-Communist) candidates continued to gain seats.
This is exactly the trick. If you are a wannabe-dictator, but you don't want the US or UN making noises at you (or sending drones to blow up your cities), then you must be careful to:
(1) Do not directly threaten US interests. If you make the right noises and play nicely, you can oppress and suppress at home all you like (ask Saudi Arabia for guidance on this).
(2) Keep the trappings of democracy: elections are a fun day out for all the army! have as many elections as you like! get plenty of people to vote! what counts is who does the counting, and you've got your people doing that. Fix it right, and you can be returned to power on 98% of the vote for the next thirty years as Perpetual President, and nobody will say boo to you!
Or the sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh (including at least one that was a fake accusation and admitted as such, for partisan purposes) versus the Tara Reade accusation against Biden. The Kavanaugh accusations (remember, the high school drug rape gang one?) got plenty of play and were treated as seriously as the Christine Blasey Ford accusation, which at least could have happened, but the Tara Reade soon fell under "we never said 'believe *all* women'" and "she's crazy" because it was inconvenient.
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh had to defend himself against the fake accusation as well as the rest of them, nobody was saying "well plainly this one is crazy":
Here's our old friend the New York Times and how they treated Kavanaugh versus Biden allegations:
(1) "Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.
Deborah Ramirez’s Yale experience says much about the college’s efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s." (That one was the "we all got drunk at a frat party and maybe he stuck his dick in my face, I don't remember, I had to talk to my friends for a week before I decided" one).
(2) "Ms. Reade, a former Senate aide, has accused Mr. Biden of assaulting her in 1993 and says she told others about it. A Biden spokeswoman said the allegation is false, and former Senate office staff members do not recall such an incident."
This is a criticism that could also be leveled against Erdogan and Modi's inclusion in the list. Methinks `Dictator book club' needs a different name. Possibly `elected strongman book club' or something.
I always learned that for a democratic state, you need: regular, free, equal and confidential elections, rule of law, division of powers and protection of minorities.
I would add, that you need a minumum of free and diverse media and of diversity in civil society.
I don't claim this is the only possible definition, but 'there are elections' is certainly not enough.
You are quoting a definition for a LIBERAL democracy. If you don't care about the liberal modifier, then regular, free, equal and confidential elections are sufficient. Indeed, you could argue that each of Modi, Erdogan, and Orban has moved his country along the spectrum from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy, but the `dictator' claim seems hard to support.
Thanks. I use wikipedia, but I'm far from being convinced that it adequately reflects whatever scientific or political philosphy consensus - if there is one.
If you wanted to go with wikipedia, the first paragraph on 'democracy' includes a sentence like this: "Cornerstones of democracy include freedom of assembly, association and speech, inclusiveness and equality, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
Ultimately, it's a matter of wording / definition. One question could be: what is more common/better argued for in political science? The other could be: what is more useful in a given context?
I wasn't aware this was a discussion in political science. Insisting on narrow academic definitions is like CNN insisting that CRT ISN"T TAUGHT in Virginia schools. The `illiberal democracy' label seems in pretty common mainstream use.
Okay, I had a quick look at the source and also a very quick look at google.scholar - my impression is, that this is used to describe and discuss specific phenomena in the past 20 years, rather than being at the core of more general definitions/descriptions of modern democracy. So I still get the impression, that if you want to convey the basic functioning of a democratic state, you go with the broad definition as above. The other is maybe more something for a specialized debate?
Ultimately, as in my comment to the wikipedia source, a matter of definition. As long as we agree that the thing we want is the one with rule of law, division of powers and protection of minorities ... Do we?
Interestingly, a lot of German political science paper seem to use 'flawed democracy' (or 'faulty' / 'damaged' democracy - defekte Demokratie) or put 'illiberal democracy' in " " where papers published in english might talk about illiberal democracy.
The problem with using a single term to encompass a system that has `each of a long list of characteristics' is what do you do if you have all but one? Calling it `dictatorship' doesn't seem appropriate because that describes a system with none of the characteristics. An intermediate term for a system with some but not all of the desiderate is useful. Perhaps the German language press has converged on `faulty democracy' while the English language press has on `illiberal democracy.'
Also, it makes semantic sense (to me at least) to use `democracy' to simply mean `you can get rid of your leaders via the ballot box' (something pretty rare historically!), with modifiers `liberal' or `illiberal' (or `faulty' if you prefer) to indicate whether it has the other desirable characteristics. But also, the `ballot box' bit is a fairly clear cut, bright line thing, whereas the other aspects are more of a continuum.
If every political leader can just leave some infinitesimal mechanism by which they might theoretically be voted out and thus opt out of being called a 'dictator' then the term is fairly useless. It is also pretty clear that many of these leaders would change the rules in a moment if their grasp appeared to be slipping. It sounds like dictatorship to me.
`Infinitesimal mechanism' is not right. I don't know the situation in Hungary or Turkey that well, but Modi for instance could absolutely lose power via the ballot box. And his party *has* lost state elections, without engaging in extra-constitutional shenanigans to hold on to power. Hell, he's a Prime Minister not a President, he could lose power even without losing a federal election, if his party turns against him. This doesn't sound much like a `dictator' to me. I don't know enough about Hungary to know if the same is true there, but I suspect it might be.
Yes and no? I agree that he could lose. But I also feel like there's a clear pattern of 'extra constitutional shenanigans' which put him pretty far along the illiberal line. Yes he is pretty far away from being a dictator, but he tries to make it so that he can come as close as he can.
"There are elections" is definitely not enough. Rotten boroughs participated in elections, but nobody would say those were free and fair and representative. Landlords directing their tenants as to whom they would vote for (or else be evicted) were not free and fair elections - this is why Daniel O'Connell's movement to get the mass of people into an association was so successful, and so threatening:
"To broaden and intensify the campaign for emancipation, in 1823, O'Connell established Catholic Association. For a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), this, for the first time, drew the labouring poor into a national movement. Their investment enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
The government moved to suppress the Association by a series of prosecutions, but with limited success. Already in 1822 O'Connell had manoeuvred his principal foe, the Attorney General, William Saurin, into actions sufficiently intemperate to ensure his removal by the Lord Lieutenant. His confrontation with Dublin Corporation, equally unbending in its defence of the "Protestant Constitution", took a more tragic turn.
Outraged at O'Connell's refusal to retract his description of the corporation as "beggarly", one of their number, John D'Esterre, challenged O'Connell to a duel. As an experienced duellist, there was some hope that D'Esterre, would dispose of a man considered "worse than a public nuisance". In the event it was O'Connell who mortally wounded D'Esterre. Distressed by the killing, O'Connell offered to share his income with D'Esterre's widow. She consented to a small allowance for her daughter, which O'Connell regularly paid for more than thirty years until his death.
In 1828 O'Connell defeated a member of the British cabinet in a parliamentary by-election in County Clare. His triumph, as the first Catholic to be returned in a parliamentary election since 1688, made a clear issue of the Oath of Supremacy—the requirement that MPs acknowledge the King as "Supreme Governor" of the Church and thus forswear the Roman communion. Fearful of the widespread disturbances that might follow from continuing to insist on the letter of the oath, the government finally relented. With the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, invoking the spectre of civil war, the Catholic Relief Act became law in 1829. The act was not made retroactive so that O'Connell had to stand again for election. He was returned unopposed in July 1829.
...Entry to parliament had not come without a price. Bringing the Irish franchise into line with England's, the 1829 Act raised the property threshold for voting in county seats five-fold, eliminating the middling tenantry (the Irish "forty-shilling freeholders") who had risked much in defying their landlords on O'Connell's behalf in the Clare election. The measure reduced the Irish Catholic electorate from 216,000 voters to just 37,000."
All true, but the point I've repeatedly been trying to make is that `free and fair elections to determine who is in charge' and `the suite of civil liberties taken for granted in modern Western societies' are two conceptually different things, and you can have societies that have (either) one but not the other. Graphically, you can put `free and fair elections' on the x axis and `liberal society' on the y, and while most societies cluster close to the diagonal there is no hard rule that says it has to be so, and you can imagine (and there exist) significant outliers in either direction.
> 'free and fair elections to determine who is in charge
Free elections are mostly meaningless,
- if different options can't effectively compete to win the electorates favour (for this you need freedom of assembly, pluralism in the press and rule of law that makes sure you don't land in jail and are free from discrimination if you hold another view),
- if you can't publicly discuss different points of view (which despite the growing importance of social media still highly depends on the traditional media)
- if you get only the goverment's PR view on what they are doing, without additional insights, opposing views and critical analysis (effective opposition, diverse media)
- if nobody makes sure that the given majority does not do things that encompass their power (like changing the election rules in way that give them 99% advantage, use their 60% majority in one chamber to change basic law that can be changed only with 2/3 majority in two chambers and so on - here you need rule of law again and division of powers/ checks and balances)
From our discussion above it seems you like clearcut definitions. I challenge you to find an example of a modern state which has regular elections but: no rule of law, no devision of powers or checks and balances, no free and/or diverse press, no freedom of assembly, no pluralism in civil society and which we still call a democracy.
I don't think I can find en example where all these values are set to zero but we call the state a democracy but (a) these values are continua, not binaries. For instance, `freedom of the press' can be abridged to greater or lesser extend by libel law, hate speech legislation etc. and (b) some of these values are easier to separate from free and fair elections than others. For instance, (i) minority rights (on your original list but not your latest): Examples of states generally considered democracies but without minority right abound. Jim Crow era USA for one (de facto at least). (ii) rule of law (as opposed to substantial discretionary powers vested in individuals): It is debatable to what extent the Republic of India has had rule of law (including before Modi). (iii) checks and balances: all Westminster model parliamentary democracies (such as the UK and its `children') have practically speaking no checks or balances on the power of the legislature.
Now, freedom of assembly, speech and press seem harder to separate from the regular exercise of free and fair elections (for reasons that you articulate in another post), but here too, I will note that over the past two years large swathes of the West have suspended freedom of assembly and curtailed freedom of speech, and yet I have not heard it seriously argued (except on DSL) that e.g. Australia is no longer a democracy.
I agree with most of what you say. I don't think it speaks much for the 'elections are sufficient' - definition.
a) continua not binaries for many of those 'values': definitely.
(I had a long text related to this in one of my former comments - just saying in case it got overlooked, quite easy to happen I guess.)
b) no country I know is 100% maximum on all of those aspects. They also don't need to be. Also, each democracy evolves in a certain context, and the country-specific solutions differ a lot.
So what you would do is: you'd look at all the relevant elements (free media, checks and balances, ...) in a specific country, try to understand how they work in practice, and check to which extend they 'function well'. Then you put your results on all those elements together to get a picture that leaves you with an image of 'clearly democratic' 'clearly not democratic' or eg. 'mostly democratic, but worrysome with regard to x and z'. To make things more fun, often those elements interact, and you only understand the functioning of one if you understand the whole system pretty well.
Once you have a category with several elements that are continua, it makes no sense to say: look, in country x there are problems with this one criterion z and we still call the thing a democracy, so criterion z can't be relevant. It's the specific value of each criterion and the combination of all those together that counts.
Therefore I don't want to go too much into detail with the examples you mention, as 'this one criterion in country x has value y' is not very relevant. Still, '*no* checks and balances' in UK is an overstatement.
I don't know Australia very well. I can certainly think of western countries where we might say 'clearly a democracy, but looking quite worrysome with regard to criterion x and z'. Whether this fits the Australian case, no idea. I'm not in the mood to start the next part of the discussion, so I refrain from mentioning any names.
Excuse the long extract, but it sums up why "nominal democracy" and "effective dictatorship" may have a considerable overlap:
"Orbán is the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator. Twentieth-century dictatorships were about ideology and repression: physical repression with this detestable ideology. Twenty-first-century authoritarianism works through economic means rather than physical means. So economic coercion is everywhere in Hungary. But, if you went there on vacation, you would never guess that it’s a dictatorship. And that’s because the way that Orbán exercises control is through money. Orbán has eliminated the system of welfare and unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test. With the media, his oligarchs have bought out all the media that were critical of him. They’ve consolidated the banking sector in their hands.
"And so this is the new form of oppression. It doesn’t look like oppression if you’re on the streets of Budapest. But if you live there and you have no money and you can’t get an income because no one will hire you, then what happens? You have to leave. So, it’s a combination of regulatory adjustments, but mostly it’s economic measures, and those are not very visible. Human-rights groups are not really attuned to tracking those the way that they would track journalists in jail."
From "Why Conservatives Around the World Have Embraced Hungary’s Viktor Orbán
A sociologist explains why the country’s Prime Minister is “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.”"
My partner is Hungarian, so I've been there a lot over the past 20 years. It's true that, to an "outsider", like me, it seems essentially "normal", like other European countries of my experience. (Fwiw I also visited East Germany, when it still existed, and that felt very different, even to a visitor.)
But the normality is just "surface". What matters, in the long term, is how the various mechanisms, de jure and de facto, of checks-and-balances and accountability are being dismantled and subverted. (Cf. what the current Tory govt in the UK is doing or trying to do.)
Hungary is no longer a democracy by most rankings. It's perhaps a little better than Russia - the opposition doesn't routinely end up murdered - but not by too much.
China technically has elections, its just that coincidentally the only people who ever win are CCP members. I guess that makes China a democracy? You're giving too much focus to symbolic structures not outcomes
> Even with the absurdly gerrymandered electoral system [...] Hungary is still a democracy. To my mind, the line separating democracies from dictatorships is whether or not a majority of the people can vote out the party/leader in power
Gerrymandered electoral systems often (usually) mean that a majority of people can vote against a leader and that leader still be re-elected. E.g. in the UK election in 2019, the Tories won 56.2% of the seats despite only getting 43.6% of the votes. Consequently, countries that use FPTP, such as the UK and many of its former colonies (India, USA, Canada, etc) aren't full democracies.
The winner in FPTP usually has a plurality of the vote, if not a majority. Claiming that in a multiparty system every vote not for a given party is a vote against them is disingenuous. Even under proportional representation with multiple parties the person who ends up in charge of the executive is normally not from a party that commanded a majority of the vote. This line of argument leads to the conclusion that no multiparty system can ever be a democracy. (Unless perhaps it implements a strictly two party runoff, French Presidential election style). But if we are making isolated and ridiculous demands for rigor, why stop there? Why not go the whole `no representative system can ever be a democracy, Switzerland is the only democracy to ever exist.'
> Claiming that in a multiparty system every vote not for a given party is a vote against them is disingenuous.
It certainly isn't a vote *for* them! Under PR, the largest party would have to do deals with smaller parties if it didn't get a majority of the votes, if it wanted to control a majority of the seats.
Furthermore, under FPTP many voters end up voting for one of the 2 biggest parties, even though they don't like either of them, because otherwise their vote may be wasted. That's why the last 4 times their was a UK-wide election under a semi-proportional system, the Conservatives and Labour between them got less than half the vote. Both these parties know full well the voters don't like them, which is why they keep FPTP, in order to thwart democracy.
> Even under proportional representation with multiple parties the person who ends up in charge of the executive is normally not from a party that commanded a majority of the vote.
Under PR, there is usually no party that got a majority of the vote. E.g. in the 2021 Scottish election no party got a majority of the votes or seats, and the result was a coalition between the SNP and Greens.
> This line of argument leads to the conclusion that no multiparty system can ever be a democracy.
It's a nonsense argument. Under a pure PR system, a group of parties that have a majority of seats will have a majority of votes, so most voters will have voted for one of the parties in it.
> (Unless perhaps it implements a strictly two party runoff, French Presidential election style)
Presidential elections -- and elections for 1 place generally -- are different because they can't be proportional, since one candidate must get 100% of the seats and everyone else get 0%. They can avoid the wasted vote phenomenon e.g. by having run-off elections as they do in France.
> But if we are making isolated and ridiculous demands for rigor
I fail to see where I have done any such thing.
> Why not go the whole `no representative system can ever be a democracy, Switzerland is the only democracy to ever exist.
They also have referendums, as do several places. I do think referendums are part of making a country a democracy, particularly when the people want one thing and the politicians something else.
But really, it's not a binary thing. Democracy is instead a continuum, with Norway near one end and North Korea towards the other end.
The New York Times is currently very excited about the prospect of Orban being voted out of office, if only his rivals can unite:
"In Hungary’s Heartland, Orban Faces a Unified Challenge to His Rule
"The country’s normally fractious opposition has rallied around a conservative mayor who just might be able to oust the authoritarian prime minister after more than a decade.
"By Andrew Higgins and Benjamin Novak
"Oct. 18, 2021"
Some dictator ...
Orban has been in power for 11 years, but Bibi Netanyahu spent 15 years as Israel's supremo and finally got pushed out by a guy to his right, Naftali Bennett. The notion that Orban is a dictator rather than a talented politician appears to be largely a concoction of another talented politician who used to be Orban's mentor, George Soros.
"The notion that Orban is a dictator rather than a talented politician appears to be largely a concoction of another talented politician who used to be Orban's mentor, George Soros."
It's irrelevant whether Soros "concocted" the notion that Orbán is a dictator (in some sense or other of the word) — you just have to look at what Orbán has done to come to a conclusion about whether he is some sort of 'effective dictator' or not.
Mind you, given Orbán's vendetta against Soros and the CEU, it'd be hard to blame Soros for thinking like that.
In any case,, plenty of other people regard Orbán in a very similar way.
Even in old age, George Soros is a brilliant, vastly wealthy, and highly effectual man who has been organizing political operations all over the world for decades to attain his goals (such as, among much else, electing anti-law & order prosecutors like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco: https://www.thesfnews.com/george-soros-backs-district-attorney-campaigns-nationwide/66204).
It's an insult to Soros to assert that he couldn't possibly help organize all the movements -- because that would be a conspiracy theory -- that he has famously helped organize.
Using language like 'anti-law & order prosecutors' and relying on the highly partisan Daily Caller News Foundation as the primary source for your exemplar story shifts my needle, at least, in the direction of 'yeah, I guess we're doing Soros conspiracies here now'.
Since you speak admiringly of the dark arts of political manipulation, I don't feel too uncharitable in pointing this out as a shortcoming.
Sadly every Hungarian I have met were extremely nationalistic and somehow believed it to be the best country in the world and Hungarians to be the best at everything. Never mind reality.
That's a gross misrepresentation of the population – not to say that that couldn't have been your experience, but sounds like your sample is quite small.
I don't think any of the people in the so-called "Dictator's Book Club" have actually been dictators. I really dislike the hyperbolic use of dictator for anybody who has any kind of "authoritarian" tendencies, it really cheapens the label and makes the word meaningless.
Betting markets are not particularly liquid but one bookie is offering odds which imply a 60-70% chance that Fidesz will not win a majority at the next election.
All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries. In fact, if he ever rigged an election it could be called "fortifying" it (see NYT on February 4, 2021).
"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."
Having read that before many of the things were reasonably termed as 'fortifying' but the one thing that truly shocks me is that Zuckerberg ran about 300 million through swing state governments with around $20 to $1 spent in get out the vote advertising in liberal vs conservative areas. 95% of turnout funding targeted at the preferred voters of a billionaire
67% majority thanks to extreme gerrymandering. It's like if the US Senate were the only parliamentary body and 80% of the states had the population of Wyoming.
And nice moving of the goalposts from "all these things are routine on the left" to "in a theoretical universe where western leftists routinely get 67% majorities."
Orban's 67% majority came when he was in opposition so gerrymandering is not an explanation, and also I don't know how you can imagine a scenario where leftists get a supermajority and not completely insert their agenda into the constitution. If dictatorship is winning a big majority and doing what your base wants, then dictatorship is not that bad.
I'm sorry, what did you say? I believe it was "All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries."
So far we have at least one thing they don't do; and I have sneaking suspicion that if you looked hard enough; you'd see that number climb a little higher.
You are moving the goalposts. The claim in the GP comment was
“All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries.”
Which was rightly challenged by the parent comment as hyperbole. “If they got 67% majority” is a hypothetical that is irrelevant to the concrete claim about the actual Left in actual Western countries.
So, if Democrats today, packed the Supreme Court, eliminated the filibuster, changed the voting laws to ensure Republicans needed 80% of the vote to win, eliminated (and made illegal) Fox News and all other Right wing media, you would not consider that dictatorial?
Those are the kinds of things that Orban is doing. Modifying the system through the system to make it impossible for the opposition to win. He was saying Orban is not a dictatorship. I was asking if he would feel the same if it was by the other tribe in his own country. He said he would feel the same.
I think we have all established(in this lengthy comments section) that the line between illiberal democracy and dictatorship is not entirely clear. Accordingly, I took him at his word. Assuming it isn't your position that Orban is a hero, then we probably largely agree and the issue is semantic. If you claim that you _do_ think he's a hero, that's on you.
I don't know about the BBC, but NPR is known to be widely trusted by Democrats and distrusted by Republicans. That doesn't suggest political independence when your source of funding is the government.
Yes, but since NPR's bias is pro-"Government has all the answers" that does seem to imply they are not terribly independent. They are simply more dependent on the bureaucratic state as a whole instead of who is sitting in an elected seat.
It's interesting that Orban seems to be, by your description, a tyrant in the original Greek sense of the word: an illegitimate popular ruler. With the caveat that the illegitimacy here is by liberal procedural standards.
That said, given that we have illegitimate unpopular rulers in the States today I'm not sure it's such a bad trade. Orban writes blank checks to his supporters of taxpayer money; likewise with Biden (see Build Back Better). Orban transparently rigged the election via insecure mail-in voting, expanding the franchise with foreign nationals, and his party's near-total control of the media; likewise with Biden (see Fortifying the Election). Orban is a pathological liar; likewise with Biden (see his bizarre Amtrak story and history of similarly weird and insistent lies). Honestly, following polling and implementing popular measures rather than Davos-favored ones seems like a plus.
I don't expect Orban to solve Hungary's problems, whether their poor fertility or poor economic prospects, but again I've seen no movement on that front by any equivalent liberal politician in the West. So if they're not going to have their problems solved either way, in the end it comes down to whether you prefer ineffectual corrupt populism or ineffectual corrupt elitism. Just by the numbers the former seems preferable.
I would be enjoying this series so much more if it were the Demagogue Book Club. Erdogan, Modi, and Orban all definitely belong to a type of world leader who has become more common in the 21st century -- right-wing populist who wins a majority large enough to change the Constitution of the state in a manner conducive to their own remaining in power -- but they're not dictators. Opposition parties in all of these states have real power (to give an interesting example, the mayors/premiers of all three capital cities are from important oppositionist parties -- the Republican People's Party in Ankara, the Dialogue Party in Budapest, and the Common Man Party in Delhi), even if they've been curtailed in a way that makes seizing power unlikely (though this is less true in India than Hungary or especially Turkey, I think). Note that polls currently have Orban losing the popular vote in the next Hungarian election (though he may still be reelected given gerrymandering) and Erdogan losing the next Turkish presidential election (though Turkish elections are more questionable than Hungarian or Indian ones, I think).
Nothing of the sort would ever be conceivable in Russia! (Much less more oppressive dictatorships like Belarus or China or many Arab states...). I think a series exploring just where the line between democracy and dictatorship lies would be interesting and important, as would analyzing *why* leaders like this have been coming to power so often in the modern world. (Duterte is a really obvious one for Scott to analyze, as would examples where a leader like this comes to power but then fails to consolidate -- this seems to be happening to Bolsonaro).
An actual 21st-century example of a formerly democratic country truly ceasing to be democratic would be something like Nicaragua, or Venezuela, or Egypt. Ortega, Chavez, and Sissi would all be fascinating case studies. But they seem categorically different from Erdogan/Modi/Orban.
I could believe it, after all I'm not a classics scholar by any means, but the Encyclopedia Britannica seems to back me up that it's about illegitimacy (they say "unconstitutional") rather than specifically violence. Violence is one illegitimate means of establishing tyranny but I was under the impression that the term applied more broadly.
You points could be valid, but your basic premise is wrong.
The Democratic party won a majority of votes for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and yet the Republican party STILL has 50% of the legislature.
It's kinda weird you can look at a country where the minority right wing party routinely controls all branches of government while losing the popular vote in all branches of government, and decide that it's languishing under leftist tyranny.
As someone looking in from, well, slightly less outside than before, I cannot emphasize how insane people who are complaining about Democrats rigging elections sound to me. You're telling me someone became president when more than half the people voted against him?
America's presidential election does not operate on the popular vote, period. I wish people would stop making this argument; or else perhaps try to get together the political wherewithal to amend the Constitution so that it is, if they believe it's so outrageous
I know perfectly what is the case. I am arguing what is the case is dumb. Perhaps that misunderstanding is at the heart of your disagreement with "people".
I debated whether to respond to this, because it's going to be unproductive, but ultimately since I was the one to bring up the comparison there's no way around it.
The problem with this narrative of the US system being stacked against the Democrats is in my view twofold:
1. The first issue is that we don't actually have any sense of how many of those votes were cast by the people alleged to have voted. The Democrats are centered in cities, to the point that even solidly blue states like New York are oases of blue urban areas in a sea of red counties, and city political machines are notorious for stuffing ballot-boxes. As a result of the 2020 audits and investigations, we know that *at least* tens of thousands of voters who are deceased or are not residents of their counties were listed as having voted in the presidential elections in Wayne county, Maricopa county, and a dozen other democratic strongholds. Given how few safeguards there are to detect fraud even prior to the sweeping unconstitutional changes introduced last year, it's safe to assume that the cases of careless election fraud we do manage to find are only a drop in the bucket.
2. The second issue is that the Democratic party has bypassed the legal immigration process to import tens of millions of voters both in the form of illegal immigrants who themselves vote (via corrupt laws such as the motor voter act which bypass citizenship requirements) or who give birth to children who cannot be legally prevented from voting in US elections. The latter is a substantial shift in demographics in favor of the Democratic party: in 2015 alone, births by illegal immigrants were an estimated 7.5% of the entire US total (https://cis.org/Report/Births-Legal-and-Illegal-Immigrants-US).
Both of the above are tactics deliberately and systematically undermine the majority vote, both by adding voters who only exist on paper in the short term and by manufacturing favorable ethnic voting blocks, in ways which would make Tammany Hall proud.
(Here I'm ignoring wonky procedural issues like gerrymandering required by the Civil Rights Act to maintain black majority districts which hurt democrats in national elections, because frankly that sort of thing isn't very important to me.)
You're right, it's going to be unproductive. It usually is unproductive when you put forward a bunch of thoroughly disproven falsehoods in front of a well informed (and reasoned) group of people.
“He passed a new law saying he could fire any civil servant at will, then fired people in key positions and replaced them with his cronies and college buddies.”
Smart. Trust people you have known all your life, and no one else. I’m at that point myself. It's good practice, in any line of work.
“But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?”
Sanity? Not being guilt-ridden suicidal leftists? Not being willing to your country be invaded and destroyed? The Swedes, to pick one example, are living the wreckage of their own stupidity. Everyone else is finally waking up in Europe. Orban gets no credit for seeing what a fucking catastrophe this was going to be, and preventing it? Really, Scott?
“And in fall 2015, he constructed a Trump-style wall along the eastern border. Immigration numbers dropped from tens of thousands a month to a trickle.”
Orban should get The Defender of Civilization Lifetime Achievement Medal. Bring on the Trump style walls. They are one of the few public policies with a proven track record of actually working.
“Still, it’s not really obvious what positive lessons one could learn from the policies of Orban’s Hungary.”
See above. It's plenty obvious.
Funny, Orban is described as a guy who makes a mockery of democracy and is unaccountable. Yet he keeps getting elected. Democracy and elections, there is some connection there, what was it again? How weird is it that a guy figures out what voters want, does what they want, and when it works, they like it, and he keeps getting elected. How undemocratic can you get???
And his main enemy is the totally undemocratic and totally unaccountable EU. Not a word about that.
Orban looks to me like the kind of guy Yarvin writes about, a guy who uses executive power to benefit his people. We are used to elected governments being totally ineffectual and doing what their experts want, often the college cronies of the people in office, and smirking at the voters, stupid chumps, who never get what they want. So when we see a democracy that works, doing what it was elected to do, and executive power that is achieving critical goals, like national survival, it looks ... weird. That is because we are no longer democracies, not because Hungary is not.
As a Hungarian, absolutely fucking nope to this post. Orbán has always consistently worked towards a) securing his own position b) maximizing the amount of wealth extracted both from the EU and the home country. There is not an ounce of consideration of his going into any remotely idealistic or moralistic or ideological concern, "national survival" or "protection of the country from immigrants".
Hungary has never been a serious target of immigration; it has always been at best a transit country for those who aim for the more generous and affluent states to the west and north. The posturing about migrants is manufactured cynically, laser focused on domestic political goals. There is even a recent state-sponsored (but un-advertised) immigration program from eastern (and middle eastern) countries as part of diplomatic cozying to like-minded illiberal countries.
Fidesz won the election last time, getting two-thirds majority in parliament, by receiving 2,6 million votes in a country of 9.8 million. It's simply the result they achieved after taking over almost all popular media outlets (with the exception of the internet at large) and engineering the system, as described in the OP.
Orbán has no ideology and no concern for any fuzzy notion of "popular will". He is, in essence, a purely selfish min-maxing agent that opportunistically hijacked the governance of a small country. To think that Orbán has performed anywhere near "well" in terms of developing the country and improving its geopolitical position, is pure retardation.
Scott wrote: "And in fall 2015, he constructed a Trump-style wall along the eastern border. Immigration numbers dropped from tens of thousands a month to a trickle.” To say that tens of thousands a month of unwanted transients passing through, even if they do not plan to stay there, is not a problem, is pure retardation. And to say that stopping this problem with a simple solution, a fence, performing a fundamental function of government, securing the border, is also pure retardation. The USA is incapable of employing equally simple means to perform equally critical, basic functions. That is because the political class that runs the USA is in the grip of pure retardation.
I am not very much concerned about US affairs in the context of this post. I reacted to the sentiment in your previous post which sounded like praising Orbán both for performance and for ideals. I stress again that emulating Orbán will simply not lead to furthering the well-being of humans anywhere; he's an amoral wealth-extracting agent.
Not a mind-reader, so I don't know if he has any ideals. I don't care if he does. As an American, I care about Orban mainly as showing that basic functions of government can be made to work if the government exerts itself, including securing the border and requiring that entering the country must comply with that country's laws. The only emulation of Orban I recommend is border security, which he has accomplished. The voters in Hungary apparently wanted that, and he delivered it. That does not look anti-democratic from over here.
And Mussolini made the trains run. That doesn’t particularly make me want to emulate fascist Italy, if I have to take the rest of the system along with it.
We all know that mentioning Hitler means you just lost. Same thing goes for mentioning Mussolini, to be fair. A more general, unrelated-mid-20th-century-fascists rule means you have passed into Godwin's Law territory. And, no having border security does not mean you have to "take the rest of the system with it." It means you have to use the necessary means to secure the border, even if your own bureaucrats, the EU, the American government, and the international news media, says you can't.
There are far better places to look for examples of exercising government function for good. If not for the party propaganda campaign, the topic of migrants would have remained domestically obscure and politically irrelevant.
Perhaps there are more appealing political leaders. Maybe. I don't much like any of them. But there are precious few who have promised to secure their borders, then won an election on that promise, then actually done it.
If unelected officials in government can be hired at will, why can they not be fired at will?
The US just went through 4-years of a shadow government usurping the will of the people at the hands of unelected ideologues. These people, these unelected people, should be easily replaceable.
People with real power should be electable, and hence fireable by the people, but a sub-class of unelected bureaucrats are the responsibility of those who are elected.
No, it's because the political elite that runs the US do not have the interests of the US at heart. Most of them are reasonably intelligent people, but their values are horrible.
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
1. Take a quick look at a map. If you build a wall and people can go around it, the wall works fine. Refugees can go through Croatia instead of Hungary. It's like if Texas was split into two states, one which accepted refugees and one that didn't. Which one would you go to?
2. As Vampyricon says, in another reply, even a perfect wall does not decrease illegal immigration because most of the illegal immigrants came legally then their visas expired. In fact, when we made it harder to get in, illegal immigration increased, because the people in the US didn't want to go home, because then it would be harder to get in again. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/
Wasting huge amounts of money on a wall when we could fund visas is what liberals think of as "pure retardation". Just don't make the workers legally in your country illegal and watch that problem dissapear.
But what if we as a country decide we like the visa time limits we have, and we don't want people to stay after their visas have expired? A wall isn't the best way to solve this problem, but extending the visas doesn't solve it either (and actually makes it worse).
>performing a fundamental function of government, securing the border
I have never seen this as a fundamental function of government, but then, I *am* a dirty lefty and an Australian whose only National borders are the sea. The point remains though that you probably have a different conception of fundamental government functions than those to whom you are addressing your posts.
>Bring on the Trump style walls. They are one of the few public policies with a proven track record of actually working.
Yeah, it'd work real well when the majority of illegal immigrants are there by overstaying their visas.
>Funny, Orban is described as a guy who makes a mockery of democracy and is unaccountable. Yet he keeps getting elected. Democracy and elections, there is some connection there, what was it again?
They're related when each person gets equal voting power. Evidently, whatever Orbán is doing, it is not democracy.
I know, my point is I wonder whether he is equally quick to label "whatever the EU, Trudeau and France is doing is not democracy". It generally seems to be a partisan critique.
And even countries with "proportional representation" aren't really proportional if they have a minimum threshold for representation, since many votes are effectively worthless then.
"There are also countries such as Portugal, South Africa, Finland, the Netherlands and North Macedonia that have proportional representation systems without a legal threshold, although the Netherlands has a rule that the first seat can never be a remainder seat, which means that there is an effective threshold of..."
I guess those are some of the only democracies that exist by this definition.
I mean, it is a spectrum. Iran is a democracy, and the EU is a democracy, and America is a democracy, and I guess Hungary is a democracy, but some of those are "more a democracy" and some less. For instance, I'll readily agree that Germany's threshold rule creates a problem for its democratic legitimacy. And "unelected bureaucrats in Brussels" is not just something I agree with, but a widespread talking point. My point is that, although these arguments are often used in a partisan or confused way, they are part of the Overton window.
>The Swedes, to pick one example, are living the wreckage of their own stupidity.
What are you talking about? Can you state some evidence of this alleged Swedish "wreckage"? From my stand point in a country close to Sweden, they seem to do just fine. For example, the Swedish economy is showing no signs of trouble, compared to other countries in Europe.
> Everyone else is finally waking up in Europe.
Again, what do you mean? We are doing just fine in Europe, nobody I know is "waking up" about anything.
Swede here. The immigration has caused some *very* significant problems, including rampant gun violence and a high unemployment. Not exactly a complete wreckage, but it has put Sweden significantly behind the curve compared to our Nordic neighbours. 2015 is now widely - even on much of the left - regarded as a policy fiasco.
On the refugees then main reason they dropped is the crisis abated. Numbers dropped to The rest of Europe as well. Check out numbers for arrivals in Germany as an example.
The EU is democratic. The law making body is the elected parliament and the council of ministers, which consists of the leaders of each country (I.e. elected leaders) holds the rest of the power. If Hungary wants to leave the EU they can - so how is it a main enemy?
The whole criticism of Orban in the post is that he does not use executive power to benefit his people but to benefit himself!
It’s interesting to here from someone with a different viewpoint but your post became an illogical rant
"But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?"
Well, maybe I'm an idiot, but if we combine (1) national foundation mythology you have already mentioned, historical "we were stomped by the Ottoman Empire like most of Eastern Europe and who cared about us then?" and that these were Muslim refugees with (2) using an emotive issue to build your party's support, then we can get "No to letting Muslims back into our country because we remember what happened the last time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Hungary".
(No, I am not saying AOC is the same as Orban, or that Orban is okay, or whatever. I'm saying part of the natural political animal instinct is to glom onto an opportunity that appeals to the gut, not the head).
"There’s an urban legend about a test for psychopaths. Usually the test is some kind of riddle that can only be solved by killing a person for some completely stupid reason - the one I remember hearing involved how to meet with one of your father’s friends, without your father knowing, when you don’t have their contact info".
Hmm. My solution to that would be "Ask your mother" since it's usually the women of the family who keep up with contact details like that.
They were trying to be Diverse And Inclusive, so these things happen 😀 To quote Dorothy Sayers from "Murder Must Advertise":
“I like to be agreeable with everybody,” said Mr. Smayle, “but reelly, when it comes to shoving your way past a person into the lift as if one wasn't there and then telling you to keep your hands off as if a person was dirt, a man may be excused for taking offence. I suppose Tallboy thinks I'm not worth speaking to, just because he's been to a public school and I haven't.”
“Public school,” said Mr. Bredon, “first I've heard of it. What public school?”
“He was at Dumbleton,” said Mr. Smayle, “but what I say is, I went to a Council School and I'm not ashamed of it.”
“Where's Dumbleton?” demanded Ingleby. “I shouldn't worry, Smayle. Dumbleton isn't a public school, within the meaning of the act.”
“Isn't it?” said Mr. Smayle, hopefully. “Well, you and Mr. Bredon have had college educations, so you know all about it. What schools do you call public schools?”
“Eton,” said Mr. Bredon, promptly, “—and Harrow,” he added, magnanimously, for he was an Eton man.
“Rugby,” suggested Mr. Ingleby.
“No, no,” protested Bredon, “that's a railway junction.”
Ingleby delivered a brisk left-hander to Bredon's jaw, which the latter parried neatly.
“And I've heard,” Bredon went on, “that there's a decentish sort of place at Winchester, if you're not too particular.”
“I once met a man who'd been to Marlborough,” suggested Ingleby.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Bredon. “They get a terrible set of hearty roughs down there. You can't be too careful of your associates, Ingleby.”
“Well,” said Mr. Smayle, “Tallboy always says that Dumbleton is a public school.”
“I daresay it is—in the sense that it has a Board of Governors,” said Ingleby, “but it's nothing to be snobbish about.”
“What is, if you come to that?” said Bredon. “Look here, Smayle, if only you people could get it out of your heads that these things matter a damn, you'd be a darn sight happier. You probably got a fifty times better education than I ever did.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said, “I'm not deceiving myself about that, and I'd give anything to have had the same opportunities as you. There's a difference, and I know there's a difference, and I don't mind admitting it. But what I mean is, some people make you feel it and others don't. I don't feel it when I'm talking to either of you, or to Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Hankin, though you've been to Oxford and Cambridge and all that. Perhaps it's just because you've been to Oxford and Cambridge.”
He struggled with the problem, embarrassing the other two men by his wistful eyes.
“Look here,” said Miss Meteyard, “I know what you mean. But it's just that these two here never think twice about it. They don't have to. And you don't have to, either. But the minute anybody begins to worry about whether he's as good as the next man, then he starts a sort of uneasy snobbish feeling and makes himself offensive.”
“I see,” said Mr. Smayle. “Well, of course, Mr. Hankin doesn't have to try and prove that he's better than me, because he is and we both know it.”
“Better isn't the right word, Smayle.”
“Well, better educated. You know what I mean.”
“Don't worry about it,” said Ingleby. “If I were half as good at my job as you are at yours, I should feel superior to everybody in this tom-fool office.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head, but appeared comforted.
“I do wish they wouldn't start that kind of thing,” said Ingleby when he had gone, “I don't know what to say to them.”
“I thought you were a Socialist, Ingleby,” said Bredon, “it oughtn't to embarrass you.”
“So I am a Socialist,” said Ingleby, “but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen.”
I think a simpler explanation is that "the West" was never keen to accept refugees; only the people who run those countries were.
Mass lower-class immigration is one of those things that tends to be incredibly popular among the elite (who benefit from cheap labour and don't live anywhere that lower class people go anyway) and incredibly unpopular among everyone else (who get all the downsides).
Agree about the court packing thing. Any route to a dictatorial America pretty much has to go down that road. Amending the constitution not only requires 2/3 of both houses of congress, it must also be ratified by a simple majority in 75% of state legislatures. Basically impossible in 2021. Or you appoint 10 of your buddies to the supreme court and they make it so the constitution has always said whatever you want it to.
But dictatorship isn't the only threat to democracy. A system where, based on arbitrary timing of judges dying and retiring, the party in power at one point can lock in their political preferences for a generation with no further democratic checks is absurdly antidemocratic. Court packing serves as an important part in the US system of checks and balances and if you wanted to remove it you'd have to make other changes to limit the power of the courts relative to the other branches.
Indeed, changes that shift effective power from the judiciary and executive back to the legislature would be highly desirable. Any idea what these changes would look like?
I like the proposal to appoint justices to fixed 18 year terms as a not especially radical change that would still reduce a lot of the absurdities in the current system.
Seems like a clear improvement. But doesn't do all that much to shift power from the judiciary back to the legislature. Something better than nothing I suppose.
I propose that, with a 2/3 majority in both legislative houses, Congress can declare any particular federal court decision null and void.
I further propose that, immediately after this is adopted, revisiting old decisions that de facto are not followed anymore but de jure are technically still valid and voiding them. Some nice feel-good votes to immediately void Korematsu, etc., just to make it clear why this is necessary when terrible decisions like that have stood for 80 years.
I strongly like the idea but it seems essentially equivalent to eliminating the requirement for the states to vote in order to amend the Constitution. It seems less risky to work on the Supreme Court itself.
Incidentally, why specifically 18 years? 20 appeals to me more by virtue of being a round number, but of course there is no particular reason to privilege round numbers. We could also make it 17. Like cicadas.
It's specifically to avoid partisan advantage. Every president is guaranteed 2 appointments per term, and it takes at least three consecutive presidential terms for any particular party to create a majority, providing the public two separate opportunities to throw a party out of power (not counting mid term elections) before the Court can be fully captured
I notice that the Modi book review expressly noted that the book being reviewed was biased, and gave a perspective slanted in favor of Modi (I believe the term "hagiography" was used). In both the Erdogan review and this one, the book's claims seem to be taken much more at face value.
Scott, was it the tone of the Modi book that stood out to you, or were you just aware of other sources that dramatically contradicted that book's claims, whereas you're not aware of counter-evidence against the Orban book's claims? The contrast between reading the Modi review, which pauses repeatedly to discuss the reliability of the narrative we're getting, and reading this review is striking.
(To be clear, I'm not arguing that you were wrong to question the Modi narrative; biased hagiographies are absolutely to be guarded against when talking about polarizing dictators.)
I didn't make as much of a deal about it this time because I read two Orban books biased in slightly different directions, and because the Modi book really was directly from Modi's own lips which seemed especially bad.
"The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways."
To be fair, the etymology of Attila is debated, and half the people are saying it is of German origin :D
Seeing as Genghis' grandson Batu almost destroyed Hungary as a country in the 1200-s (killing 40-50% of the population), that would be somewhat of a self-own.
You and I call it Hungary; the Hungarians call themselves Magyars, and the country Magyarorszag. Their self-identification with the Huns is the historic equivalent of fanfiction.
But weren't Magyars direct descendants of Huns anyway? And in any case, they speak the language too. Denying a people their history based on their supposed genetic ancestry is not done to first world nations, people are what they are.
My takeaway from that article is that they *are* culturally descended from the steppe.
Steppe Magyar invade and become the elite. Their subjects assimilate into Magyar culture. Then the elites die out in a series of wars, leaving their culture in the hands of the subjects.
The Huns settled in the area of modern Hungary, so there is a level of connection which they don't share with the Mongols. Maybe an analogy would be English people naming their kids Arthur.
This Sunday there will be a presidential election in Nicaragua. President Ortega is expected to win easily his fifth presidential term (his third consecutive term). The reason for that expectation is quite simple: this time the other main candidates are in jail.
The select few candidates in question violated the law, so of course they were arrested. Ortega will win again for the same reason he has won every other election, he is immensely popular because of his economic successes.
Many of them are more 'accused of breaking the law' at this point than actually breaking the law, as far as I can tell.
He has arrested most of the opposition candidates. You really think all of them are actually criminal? Or is it more likely that he had the justice system accuse them of such for the purpose of removing any remotely popular opposition figure from participating in the election?
I think the answer is extremely obvious, but apparently not to everyone.
As far as I can tell, no. They have been arrested under an intentionally vague law, law 1055 that prosecutes things like "treason", "attacking the rights of the people", and "threatening national sovereignty" without defining any of those terms. So basically Ortega has had them arrested for whatever he wants. And they are in jail or under house arrest. And he increased the time you can detain without charges from 2 days to 90 days, which is quite suspicious as well.
5 major candidates were all polling better than Ortega earlier this year. All 5 have been arrested, as well as another challenger. 2 others have fled the country, afraid of being arrested as well. If this isn't obvious corruption I don't know what is.
I'm curious who this "Chris Allen" guy could be who is defending Ortega. You really just have to ignore all common sense to think this is anything but a dictator manipulating the institutions of government to cling to power.
There certainly is evidence for that. Most of the important oppositional candidates have either been arrested or went into exile on threat of being arrested. This is so uncontestable I don't even feel the need to source it. Google it for 2 seconds if you disagree. I guess you could argue there are many small and insignificant oppositional candidates still running, but that's a pretty technical objection. The major players have been removed.
I have not delved deeply into each of their specific charges, no. I have read of them on a high level, but as only a casual observer I'm not going to devote hours of my time to parsing the evidence of each individual case. It's not my country. A lot of them, though, seem to be charges of "treason" or "violating national sovereignty" under the intentionally vague law he had passed, which does not even specify what those terms have to mean. This is textbook authoritarian.
To me, and I think this is a fair assumption though I can already tell you disagree, if a strong man leader who has cracked down hard on political dissent, as Ortega has in response to the riots of the last few years, suddenly has the good fortune of all his most promising political oppenents simultaneously committing crimes barring them from running, that is likely not an accident. He is probably behind it, wielding the influence he holds in the country to manipulate the criminal justice system and strangle the opposition, and keep his hold on power.
If you look at any dictatorship in history this is the classic playbook. Putin does the same thing in Russia every election. Lukashenko has done the same thing in Belarus. Maduro has done it in Venezuela. If they don't just out and out jail the opposition like Ortega, they ban their parties from running.
If you run a country and everyone against you is claimed to be a criminal, you are the criminal.
If you can't bother to spend 3 minutes searching the internet to confirm a very obvious fact, that the major opposition candidates have all been jailed or fled into exile, then there's not much conversation to be had.
When I read your first comment, I thought you were joking and I laughed at your comment. Now it's clear you were not joking so you should agree that Che Guevara violated Bolivian law and he deserved to be punished and that all Cubans that voted with their feet violating Fidel's laws should be deported back to Cuba and punished there. I can tell you about the many rebellions and revolutions in Latin America in the past 70 years and how old and new leaders often violated their countries' laws to grab and keep power. In 1951, before the electoral campaign in which Perón expected to be reelected (he managed to change Argentina's 1853 Constitution so he could be reelected), his main rival Ricardo Balbín was incarcerated for a short time (I used to go with an uncle, his main adviser, to deliver him some meals). Now I live in Chile where a Constitutional Assembly has been set to write a new Constitution. The funny thing is how some Assembly members don't doubt breaking the law claiming it doesn't apply to them because they represent the People. Also, we can talk about what is going on today in the U.S. where a senile President is breaking the law to appease the radicals he needed to win the election.
If the law is a good one I'm OK with criminals being prosecuted. Being corrupt and calling for foreign intervention are rightfully crimes by all standards, including yours.
Here's a list, for the reference of others because I suspect you are only playing at not knowing this, here are the names of jailed or exiled oppositional candidates:
This source claerlay states that the only candidates left are Daniel Ortega and George Enriquez. Fomr the other 10, one is exiled, onw resigned, one suspended and the other seven have been arrested
Hungary is such a beautiful place with a dour populus, many folksongs tell of famous defeats and battles lost. That being said Orban is doing his best to lead them to a glorious future. EU has paid for vast infrastructure upgrades and expected compliance for these bribes.
Instead the EU have aroused the great unwoke. Now Orban and his little coalition of like-minded states ( Poland et Al) will catalyse the downfall of the EU experiment. Not Bad for a Hick from Hicksville.
The Hicksville in Orban's case is Hungary's ninth city. Hicks from Hickvilles just as hickish or more have been at the helm of their respective countries during various "interesting times"; Churchill, Franco, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Mugabe, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin, Tito, Washington, the list *really* goes on.
In other words, the hickishness is hardly the defining aspect of the case at hand. A more defining aspect is precisely that facile, disdainful and self-congratulatory dismissal of hickishness. Which is at work in this article as well as in the world at large.
The part of the article that most puzzled me is that the border-enforcing stance is presented as a *pivot*. The "liberal democrat to right-wing nationalist" is a pivot, all right. But "right-wing nationalist to border-enforcer", a pivot? Nope. It might be a middle finger extended to the globalists by an Orban looking them in the eye while telling them "pivot on this", but it is not a case of Orban himself pivoting. (unless I had missed that part where Orban had been cheering for the settling of such immigrants just moments ago?)
Oh yes, it was actually "beyond the pale of conventional opinion" - or at least this is the defining aspect that I speak of. What does "conventional" even mean in that sentence? The implied point /was/ that the "opportunistic pivoter" took the stance that the majority of the citizens wanted. (which is often called "democracy", although I know that "democracy" has many definitions). Does "conventional" opinion then mean the opinion held by most people? Obviously not. Does it mean the opinion held by the people who are disdainful of all those hicks? Seems a stronger match.
P.S. I don't think anything Orban does will cause the unraveling of the EU. On the contrary, my feeling is that if UK had applied Orban-like stances to immigration in the past decade, Brexit itself would never have been voted and UK would still be in EU today.
I’d just like to note that Winston Churchill was by birth a member of one of the most aristocratic families in Britain, and as such Europe. Makes me reconsider the trustworthiness of the rest of your argument.
Aah, a hardboiled reactionary, I see, with the *proper* amount of disdain for the concept that all men are created equal?
Churchill was created an aristocrat, true. But unlike the typical ruling elites of today, Churchill was decidedly not of the Eton/Oxbridge cloth. That he didn't "excel academically" is an understatement, he barely made it into a military school on the third attempt. His formative environment was the army. The credentialists of today would basically sneer at him.
Aristocrat or not, Eton/Oxbridge or not, he *has* read quite a few books. (As have all of the 12 people that I'd named, except perhaps Stalin and Mugabe). And he sure could write. "The Dream" from 1947, in which he meets his father (deceased 1895) and brings him up to speed on the world's events in the past fifty years, is *exquisite*, and whoever hasn't read it, should. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/winston-churchills-dream-1947/
I don't think that the word "trustworthiness" means what you think it means. But if that word helps you disregard my argument, sure, suit yourself.
I only read the first part, but I found a factual error and two things that misrepresent what Orban faced during his youth.
First, he didn't speak against the church at Imre Nagy's reburial. He just didn't, and why would he do that anyway: the regime he was speaking against was anti-clerical, systematically so, you might say. 1989 anti-communists in CEE didn't have anti-clerical rhetoric, tropes, sentiments. The cosmopolitan, liberal part of that group had those later, after 1990, as a response against pre-WW2 and conservative-clerical nostalgia.
You mention how poor he was as a child: the hot-water tap and so. I checked what his parents' jobs were and that indicates that his family was okay. He wasn't excessively poor compared to his peers in Hungary in the 1970s.
Finally, you mention that he had to drop his accent. Don't envision a British Isle-like cast system based on accents in Hungary. First, Hungarian regional variations had almost all gone by the 1970s, and where he is from doesn't have a distinguishable one anyway. The most he probably had to do was to get his enunciation more articulated to make it standard. Second, whatever social linguistic stigma he might have had (his parents were sufficiently educated not to hand over a very stigmatised version) was rooted out in primary school, I'm sure.
So after the above startled me, I didn't read it on. I'd like to read about the topic, and I have been thinking about democracy, kleptocracy, Orban, Russian and Chinese influence in Hungary and in Europe, but I want to trust the writer; I welcome outside views, so even if they aren't impeccably knowledgeable about the context (Orban talking anti-church re: Imre Nagy???), I want them to be humble about their gaps and focus on what they grasp firmly about the topic.
The book states that he was born poor, but that his parents rose through the ranks later in his childhood. Lendvai: "The circumstances in which he grew up were certainly orderly, but he was without doubt very poor...there was no running water...Orban recalled how unbelievably hard he had to work in the fields as a young child...pulling beets, sorting potatoes, collecting corncobs". Later, "His parents' social rise was closely associated with the political and economic consolidation of the Kadar regime...hard work combined with ceaseless learning were the keys to the family escaping its poverty. Orban's father was 30 years old when he resumed his previously interrupted studies by means of a correspondence course and he completed university as a mechanical engineer."
Lendvai, page 14: "In an interview, Orban later mentioned that it took him half a year to successfully overcome his rural accent and behavior".
I'm possibly confusing later anti-clerical statements with statements during the Nagy reburial; I'll double check that and edit out if so.
Oh shit, I was poor! Never felt like it. I'm a compatriot and contemporary of Orban's. I grew up in the Hungarian countryside and my single-mother (!) rose through the ranks in the Kadar era, she finished college when I was already a toddler in the day-care. She nfetched water from the well and coal for heating from a shed at the house that the village provided for her as the teacher in the village school. We moved from there when I was five. The next teacher who moved in still had to do that as far as I know for until the late 80s or early 90s. I worked hard on my grandparents small farm (the size that was still allowed) and I was actually working in the sun in the vineyard with my grandparents and my mother when Orban gave his speech in June 1989. We were listening to it on the radio.
Such an upbringing means nothing really. Hungary and countries like that had a shift in those years; I'm not quite sure if I refer to the right framework, but I think what was going on is that Hungary was becoming an income level 4 country out of an income level 3 (Rosling) in the 1970s. Orban's experience was pretty standard. The accent thing is nothing either. Orban has plenty of complexes, accent never stuck me as one. It hardly ever is in Hungary. There was a lot going on with him at the turn of those decades. I would dig into Soviet/Russian intelligence measures. The poor boy and the accent thing might pique Anglo-Saxon people's interest. It isn't an issue with his contemporaries in Hungary.
Oh, I meant to write 'struck,' of course. So one of the complexes I attribute to him is the rich peasant mentality: you acquire land and then more land, and you have to get richer than your parents were: yeah, you have to have more land. The other is what the author here was getting at: Orban was probably frustrated when Budapest elites patronised him. I can well imagine that that happened when he was rising in power but he was still clumsy among cosmopolitan intellectuals despite his liberal credentials (remember that he used to have some). But I'm no expert on Orban. I just wanted to point that he didn't bash the church in any way in the Imre Nagy speech, and I felt that Orban's upbringing is misinterpreted. Plus, the accent is not an issue.
Well, I grew up in Soviet union and here it was compulsory for school children to go and help in collective farms: pulling beets, sorting potatoes. And during summer vacations, lots of children did it voluntarily because collective farms paid very well. Once painted some barrels in collective farm during my summer vacation (I was maybe 10 years old) and for two days work I was paid 40 roubles what was my mothers (she was teacher) 10 days salary.
Point being: communist regimes were weird, absurd. Maybe Hungary was different, but In Soviet Union, pulling beets or he had no running water said very little about ones economic or social status.
""In an interview, Orban later mentioned that it took him half a year to successfully overcome his rural accent and behavior"."
If it had taken half a year only, it couldn't have been a serious issue to start with. A real accent one can't shed, c.f.: Fiona Hill. It was probably just watching himself to make better formed sentences and slicing the smoked paprika sausage in the dorm room, instead of biting it as it was. There were plenty of other countryside boys in Budapest dorm rooms to make him feel comfortable, and if he took offence at being looked down by some jerks, it tells about an insecurity that is individual, not something inevitable due to his background. The accent must have been undetectable with Hungarian as unified as it is inside the borders.
Point of fact - to freely amend the US constitution requires the control of three quarters of state legislatures, which is probably - though not certainly, maybe getting a tiny majority in a lot of different states is easier than getting a supermajority in the federal congress - the higher bar to clear. In any case it's significant, because controlling lots of less-powerful legislatures, all of whom have relatively little to do with each other and answer to different electorates, is a very different task from controlling one really thoroughly.
(Possibly, amending the US constitution *only* requires those three quarters of state legislatures. While it's never been used, the amendment process as written can be started by two thirds of state legislatures - a strictly lower bar than three quarters - with not a single vote in the federal congress, but in traditional fashion, no details are given, and the congress still needs to call a convention that noone has any idea what it would look like, it's a whole mess.)
> But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
You mentioned some ideas. In my opinion (as Eastern European), it's simply the fact that most of the countries in this region are much more ethnostatey than e.g. Western European countries. These countries have often very similar history: Being oppressed by Germany, Russia, Ottomans and each other for the past 200 years since the notion of national state came into this region. They often have only really young democratic regimes (most of them ~30 years) and they don't yet really match the level of democratic society that the Western countries have. Additionally, they are feeling economically left behind with not clear path forward and depressive demographic trends. This mix creates a very defensive countries. They finally get the chance to have a truly independent national states, but the future looks bleak and they will probably never catch Western Europe. They are worried about their fragile countries that are just started to get on their feet, and they are not willing to change their national identity by incorporating completely foreign elements
Also remember that these countries have very little history of accepting migrants from outside of Europe (you mentioned no colonial history). But on top of that, these nations are still mentally processing conflicts from the first part of the 20th century, where literally millions of people were forced to move between these countries to make them ethnically homogeneous. These people really like their pure ethnostates and they are not yet ready to accept different people.
“Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee. But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant.”
i) On the level of individual reps, there are different positions on how an elected official ought to act with respect to their constituents, much like there are different views on what corporate governance . Wikipedia has a page on "Representation" that roughly tracks what I remember from AP Civics
ii) I think on a more philosophical level, there's a commonplace (but not universal) expectation that a politician is putting forward views that they themselves believe, independent of the electorate. I can't think of a particular example off the top of my head, but it seems like anecdotally there is distaste for things that come off as too manufactured, focus grouped, etc.
politicians doing what people want is dangerous for our democracy. Also I think Scott wrong re Trotskyism - politicians might avoid destructive policies even if they are popular. good example here Putin, similar authoritarian populist who governs in the country where recently nostalgia for Soviets hit all time high (around 70%) and people think negatively of market economy, yet Russia is not turning communist.
I don't think that is the whole idea of democracy. Generally, people want to elect people who truly share their values, not someone who just goes where the wind blows. So, if people wanted Orban's policies and values, in the ideal democracy they'd elect someone who had those things "honestly".
I do not know, but I don't think the answer is relevant to your root comment.
The part you quoted says that Orban is basically saying that Orban goes where the wind blows, and you seem to be saying that's the point of democracy.
Whether Hungarians have been duped or not is not relevant to whether politicians changing their apparent core values to gain power is the point of democracy.
Maybe, or maybe that’s just how we think of democracy in the IS because of our cultural aversion toward “inauthenticity”. That is, I think the relevance of the question, because if the people of Hungary know he is not a true believer, but just gives them what they want, and vote for him anyway, then I would be hard pressed to think that this was not democracy at work….
This leaves aside, of course, the obvious in democratic ways Orban stacks the deck in favor of himself. I’m just kind of struggling with the idea that, “Do stuff that is popular, and then people will like you and vote for you,” isn’t where the incentives of democracy isn’t supposed to end you up.
I think Scott Smith has a good point there. If you imagine a whole range of politicians that hold different ideological beliefs, and when the public changes their minds on various issues they elect different politicians that match their new preferences, that is a well functioning republic (nobody has a democracy). Now, if all those politicians happen to be named "Orban", that doesn't mean the system is no longer functioning.
The mistake is thinking that "democratic" or "republican" is the same as "properly functioning."
It’s a good point… but I suspect that most people want to vote for a “true believer” in their ideology, not someone that is just in it for the votes who will flip-flop as soon as the winds change.
There seems to be a very strong political cost to changing your mind on any subject, because voters are not ideologically flexible and this don’t want their representatives to be.
Given all this I’m very perplexed about how someone can make such a 180 and be taken seriously. But maybe it’s just a matter of the public having a fairly short memory; after all Trump used to be a Democrat and no Republican holds that against him now.
Maybe some time is elided in the retelling but It does sound like Orban’s political shift happened fairly abruptly.
Well, representative democracy and direct democracy are two different things.
In a direct democracy, depending on how you designed it, yes, policy could change on a dime like this to follow popular preference. However, in a direct democracy, you wouldn't be electing people like this in the first place, you'd just be voting on policy.
In a representative democracy, which is what we're talking about here, the way it generally works is that you assume politicians have actual beliefs and convictions, and then you elect the politician that matches your own beliefs and convictions best. There are two main reasons this is better than just electing someone who will change with public opinion instantly: 1. Because you can trust someone with beliefs and convictions to actually work to uphold them, more than someone who is just doing a job they don't believe in, and 2. The representative is supposed to use their judgement in cases where the average voted doesn't have enough expertise or information to vote directly in a coherent way on a niche or complicated issue, which someone who is only echoing the public will can't really do effectively.
1.) Your bafflement that so many of Orban's key players are his college roommates is... strange. Orban's political movement came out of reformist anti-Communist student movements. Of course they're a bunch of people who knew each other in college. That's what a student political movement is! You get to it eventually but this change is not even vaguely surprising. There's a long history of reformist but kind of conservative, kind of liberal rural movements in Eastern Europe. They were called Agrarian Parties or Peasants Parties and were usually distinct from the socialists but seen as a kind of popular power movement. That is the direction Orban moved in. It's not particularly unusual for conservatives in the region. The more unusual thing is that usually they end up the junior partners of Christian Democrats. In Hungary, the Christian Democrats are their junior partners.
2.) The Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads to at least the extent that Americans are descendants of the English. You can equally say most Americans have very little English blood and have it be true but a weird take. Now, Magyarism as a nationalist ideology is full of weird false facts. The idea they're the Huns that invaded Rome is just plain false. But there's significant linguistic and cultural continuity between Hungarians and their ancestors in addition to a distinct ethnic gene cluster. The article you cited itself even says this. Now, do they have large amounts of Germanic (and even more Slavic) blood? Yes, absolutely.
3.) You've misjudged Orban's background. Orban grew up in Communist Hungary and went to university. Yes, he was from a peasant background and probably emphasized that fact because it was advantageous in the Communist regime. And his parents weren't particularly powerful. But they were solidly middle class. I think one was an agricultural scientist and the other a doctor(?). He had a good education, got to study abroad even in the west, and if he had an accent it was no bar to him taking fairly prominent positions. Do you think the Communists let random nobodies give speeches at key events?
4.) The idea that Orban doesn't have core beliefs is a bit of a smear. He clearly does and his brand of conservatism has its unique traits. Notably, it's one of the more intellectual brands of conservatism. Fidesz sponsors colleges, holds scholarly symposia, etc. It also tends to promote expertise far more than populist revolts though its funding of schools means it actually has sympathetic intellectuals. Compare the Hungarian EMP from the Danube Institute (iirc) vs the Poles sending an actual monarchist reactionary troll.
5.) My understanding of the conservative Hungarian mood following their 2002 government was that it was basically just something they had to wait out. They considered the socialist policies bad and corrupt and thought the country had a natural disgust for socialism after Communism. More objectively, they spent their eight years out of power winning European Parliament, consolidating right wing parties and voters under their banner, winning local races and building party infrastructure.
6.) I haven't read these books but the fact it skips right over the mismanagement, economic issues, failed attempts to fix or strengthen the economy, the corruption, and the various scandals and lies makes me suspicious. It's "Orban pounces." It's not that the Socialists actually DID anything. It's that Orban reacted. The part that attributes the view of the Socialists as liars to Orban gives him more power than he had. The Socialists had been caught lying several times and denied it. Now, Gyurcsany was committing to change this in the speech. But it confirmed what the right had been saying for years: that the Socialists were lying and knew they were lying. Imagine if a tape leaked where Biden said something like, "Look, we need to run a better, more clean Democratic Party. We can't keep stealing elections like we did in 2020 or burying stories like my son's laptop or sabotaging investigations like we did with Benghazi!"
7.) Also, this is a small detail, but it wasn't leaked to Orban. It was leaked to the Hungarian equivalent of NPR and other journalistic establishments. The fact this is all attributed as Orban's doing rather than something he took advantage of, again, makes me suspicious of this source.
8.) Most of the description of Orban's tactics are pretty accurate. Though I will note that Orban does not use violence or actually interfere with the votes as far as anyone's been able to prove. Both sides accuse the other of election fraud when they lose but there's been no outside confirmation as far as I know. Orban's power continues because the left is fractured into multiple warring factions and because he's built a strong political machine. Which is definitely not good for democracy but is also short of an actual dictatorship. Orban took some pretty heavy losses the last election and the opposition has finally united heading into 2022. If Orban starts rigging things to defeat the United Opposition then that will be a transition to an Erdogan or Putin-like figure. If he doesn't then he was just a party boss in an imperfect democracy.
9.) Another way Orban resists the EU is a strategic alliance with Poland which allows them to protect each other in Parliament.
10.) Yeah, Fidesz's control of the country, at least for now, is not impregnable. The left could win. But it'd need to unite and make a concerted push. And getting a supermajority would be hard due to gerrymandering. And if it didn't win a supermajority the various constitutional provisions and stacked bureaucracy would make things lean continually towards Fidesz's policy preferences. But this is also the case in, say, Texas or Illinois. Which is not to say this isn't bad! But, again, I think there's a qualitative difference betwen that and (say) Russia. And there's definitely a difference between that and North Korea.
11.) Jobbik is a third way party, arguably semi-fascist in the "nationalist, moderate economically, conservative culturally" sense. Their big issues are things like the mistreatment of Hungarians in surrounding countries or Orthodox persecution of Catholics. (These are not made up issues, by the way. But they do tend to exaggerate.) They were never the farthest right party, that was various forms of openly Fascist irrendetist militias, but they were the most socially acceptable form of that politics. They dislike the European Union because they're nationalists. But they like many of the European Union's economic policies, see it as a path to prosperity, and like when it intervenes to protect Hungarian minorities (as it does with minorities generally). The big reversal was not some huge shift in policy but moving away from ties to those openly Fascist militias and cooperating with the left on the economic issues they always agreed on. It helps the Hungarian left isn't exactly happy about those Hungarian minority populations being mistreated either.
12.) The right likes Orban because he's the only right wing leader who's successfully established a right wing intellectual elite. Plus the various technocrats necessary to run a competent administration. Also, those right wing intellectuals invites academics over to Hungary to give talks or do various kinds of academic work in a welcoming environment. That's basically the only academic culture in the world where being openly right wing gets you a pat on the back. This attracts a lot of favorable commentary from intellectual right wingers who spend a few months teaching there or whatever.
13.) The fact you dislike most the one who hasn't done actual violence or led ethnic pogroms or used the military is strange to me. Partly, I think it's because you read a book that seems like it was written by the opposition. Partly, I think it's that the source apaprently didn't give you any idea of the underlying political issues in Hungary. You don't mention anything about Hungary's economic policies or the various political issues aside from refugees. Contrast the Modi and Erdogan reviews where various political coalitions and their motivations were touched on. This let you put Modi/Erdogan in their political contexts. Something you haven't really done with Orban. You know Jobbik exists but you don't know why they'd cooperate with the left. You don't even mention the other right wing parties Orban went into coalition with. You don't talk about how the left failed to form a unified opposition. Etc. Everyone is more sympathetic in context. Even corrupt party boss types.
14.) The equivalent in the US would require getting a 2/3rds majority in Congress and a 2/3rds majority of governorships and state houses and then several court cases because we're not a unitary state. The people who wrote the Constitution were specifically aware of people grabbing large temporary majorities and doing things like this. For good or ill, we've been increasingly tearing down these barriers for a century and a half because some people see these limits as intolerable. You can have a debate about those trade offs, of course. Maybe goverments that do more and swing more radically between parties are better than stable but rigid ones. But it is a trade off.
Gerrymandered into more districts being one party than would be normal, sure. Gerrymandered to send more reps of one party or another to the federal level, definitely. Gerrymandered into one party rule?
2014 Cornyn got 61% statewide. 2018 Cruz got (barely) over 50% statewide. 2018 Abbot got 55% statewide. 2020 Trump 52%. Gerrymandering doesn't affect those elections and it's still one party.
It doesn't take a supermajority to change the governor of Texas. Unless PMs in Hungary are elected differently than in other parliamentary systems, that's a completely different situation.
So we're working with slippery language here. A supermajority is just a percentage that is significantly larger than 50%+1. Is 55% a supermajority? Probably not, but 60% seems to be definitely yes. Based on the OP, the districts in Hungary have different sizes (and by that and other context I assume that means different numbers of people). Then there is the bit about with today's margins one vote for Orban equals 2-3 for other parties. That difference narrows I'm sure if previously Orban districts flip before being re-gerrymandered. But even at a 1:1.5 ratio that's pretty harsh.
The lowest definition of supermajority is 60% and the most common one is two thirds. I admittedly can't find good numbers but most of what I've seen of Hungary's map is pretty standard packing and cracking such that a lower absolute vote total could win.
The real issue is that Orban basically gave himself a bunch of powers, changed a bunch of stuff, then abolished those powers. That means someone would have to take a vote similar to his more than two thirds to change things again. And if Fidesz/conservatives can maintain even a third of the vote in a map gerrymandered in their favor then they can block a lot. Though on the other hand that is a gamble since it means if the United Opposition gets more than a third they get a real seat at the table on anything new Fidesz wants to do. Or at least an opportunity at obstruction.
In 2018 Orban's party won 133 of the 199 seats with between 47 and 49% of the popular vote. In other words he had a supermajority of electoral power without even a majority of voters. It doesn't seem like a far claim that it would take a supermajority of votes against him to take away his majority of electoral power.
Saying that's the same thing as Texas where a bare majority can replace the governor seems pretty incorrect.
What sort of clarification do you want? My claim is that we regard systems as democracies where simple majorities cannot win legislative power, a practice known as gerrymandering. (Orban is not the President of Hungary who is directly elected.)
In Hungary's current system, there is 5% cut off for party (and 10% for 2-coallition / 15 for 3-coallition) - this may play huge role in such results - for example here in Czechia there were elections couple weeks ago - we have similar rule and percentage of biggest parties bellow cut off were: 4.68%, 4.65%, 3.6%, 2.76%, 1.33%, 0.99% - if they were together, they would be third biggest formation in our parliament.
Currently it seems that opposition will be successful in forming big coalition in Hungary and that they have pretty good chance to win.
actually, according to wikipedia, districts have roughly same sizes and are far more similar in size than before:
"In the old system, the population of the smallest constituency was 33077, while the population of the largest one was 98167, which meant that the constituency vote of people living in larger constituencies was worth 3 times less than of those living in smaller constituencies. In the new system the difference between the population of the largest and smallest constituencies is lower than 30% (79208 and 109955) and the standard deviation of the population of the constituencies has also reduced from 20% to 8%"
There seems to be a terminology issue in play here. Orbán did change the voting system a lot, but not by gerrymandering. There was a very good post upstairs which detailed these changes.
Americans are genetically closer to the English than Hungarians are to the old Magyars. We're a relatively young country, and the indigenous population was mostly wiped out with the arrival of the settlers.
Last I'd heard, the pure British percentage of America has fallen from something like 80-85% at independence to something like .5% today. So perhaps more so but not very much at any rate. What's common with those older and modern Americans, and what is common between the Magyars and modern Hungarians, are a lineal dissent of institutions, traditions, a language, a culture, etc.
Well, perhaps we are genetically closer than I thought. The point remains many Americans without British ancestry are American because of cultural survival and there was cultural survival in Hungary. The point about the Hungarians being the same people who sacked half of Europe, as I said from the start, is silly nationalism.
I'm sure the Hungarians aren't "pure" German either; the point is that most of their genetic ancestry is similar to that of Germans. The gene pool of Americans is still largely English - or at least, some combination of English and Celtic that's hard to pull apart.
Unless you're referring to a specific group of White Americans, "Americans" aren't of any particular genetic makeup at all. We're defined by nationality, not ethnicity.
5) and 12): Hungarians may have a disgust for socialism when it's called socialism, but they have remaining socialist impulses. Fidesz has often had anti-capital, especially anti-foreign-capital rhetoric and policies (except when the capitalists are their cronies). Their rule is absolutely not about rule of law, strict respect for property rights, and economic freedom, as needed for a well-functioning capitalist economy.
Orbán has always been skilled (whether in power or in opposition) at focusing public discourse around issues where he is popular, forcing his opponents on the defensive. Since 2015, the main such issue was immigration, as discussed in the post. Between 2006 and 2010, it was bashing the socialists' austerity at the same time as bashing them for their "fuckup" (which referred to the preceding, unsustainable deficit spending). Either Orbán would have also implemented austerity (in which case he is no less of a liar) or not (in which case he would have been even more irresponsible fiscally). Between 2010 and 2014, it was retroactively overruling foreign currency mortgage contracts allowing debtors to repay them at more favorable exchange rates at the banks' expense (the Hugnarian currency weakened during the financial crisis), and imposing price controls on utilities. At the same time, they de facto confiscated private pension funds (~9% of the yearly GDP), and spent them in two years.
I wouldn't think this is a competent right-wing economic policy in the Western sense, and I don't think it's something Western right-wingers should support or try to emulate IMO.
11) "They were never the farthest right party, that was various forms of openly Fascist irrendetist militias" Those weren't political parties, and IIRC around 2008–2010 most were affiliated with Jobbik. Around those times IMO Jobbik was among the most disgusting far-right parties in Europe.
6) IMO the more interesting question isn't "was Orbán wrong to exploit the left's weaknesses?" (no, any politician would have done it), it's "did the fact that he succeeded so much lead to a bad outcome?" (Yes, as a result Fidesz could get away with stealing an order of magnitude or two more than the socialists ever hoped to. Seriously, the biggest corruption scandals under the socialist government involved sums equivalent to ~$1M, while Orbán's friend Mészáros has made ~$1B from nothing mostly through government contracts and the like.)
> Hungarians may have a disgust for socialism when it's called socialism, but they have remaining socialist impulses.
> I wouldn't think this is a competent right-wing economic policy in the Western sense, and I don't think it's something Western right-wingers should support or try to emulate IMO.
That kind of economic interventionism is not unusual for right wing populists. But I agree with your broader point. Fidesz is not some kind of middle class, bourgeois, business class conservative party like the Tories, Republicans, etc. And some of the move of those groups away from those more standard values are due to Fidesz's influence on the wider conservative world. As much as Americans like to gripe about the religious right, I'd take the Christian Democrats or Religious Republicans over Fidesz and their fellow travelers any day of the week.
> Those weren't political parties, and IIRC around 2008–2010 most were affiliated with Jobbik. Around those times IMO Jobbik was among the most disgusting far-right parties in Europe.
Many of them did have minor political wings. Sometimes not in Hungary itself but the surrounding countries. At least if what I heard was right. You're right that Jobbik was highly affiliated with them and there wasn't any kind of strong barriers between them. But it was more than just the political wing of these militias who often had their own political wings.
Jobbik was riding an extremist wave and was pretty noxious, though it wasn't atypical for its context. I don't say that as a compliment: Fascist parties in the 1920s weren't atypical for their context either.
Again, to refer to history, things like the Agricultural Union fought with more Fascist elements even as they opposed moderate socialism and Communism. So this isn't unusual for the region. (Yes, I know those aren't from Hungary.)
> IMO the more interesting question isn't "was Orbán wrong to exploit the left's weaknesses?" (no, any politician would have done it), it's "did the fact that he succeeded so much lead to a bad outcome?
Agreed, though I think you're underplaying Socialist corruption. You're definitely right it got much worse under Fidesz.
One thing I've learned from history is that there's a lot of wisdom in supporting the more democratic, less radical side even if they're directly opposed to your personal preferences/interests. Dictatorial regimes of the right and left have a way of eating their supposed allies and looting the state in a way that hurts you more than whatever deals they've made with you. They often keep the deals but you've lost more than you've gained. Fidesz isn't nearly as bad as various dictators. But it's still a step away from democratic, anti-corruption norms. Keep in mind when I say "he's better than Putin and infinitely better than Kim Jong Un" that's a very low bar.
I wouldn't oversell the disgust for socialism, anyway. The Socialist Party (that's the same Socialist Party that ran the communist dictatorship) won the second free elections in 1994 with two-thirds of the vote, and won again in 2002 and 2006.
Yes. A minor correction: the Socialists only had a 2/3 majority in 1994 in coalition with the liberals, but they did get a plurality of the votes on their own, and a majority of the seats.
Someone else made that point. I think the point that Hungarians have a continuous culture still stands but apparently the specific genetics are different. It was my mistake.
Re: what is going on in Austria. Fertility there is about as low as it has been in the past 20, 30 odd years: the recent spike is in those areas that have seen a large influx of largely Muslim migrants. In quite a number of areas in Vienna children of recent migrants are the absolute majority in public primary schools. Out in the countryside, much less so: but there, fertility rates are about the same as they have been those past few decades.
Having this sort of scenario playing out at his doorstep is something Orbán exploits for his nationalistic propaganda. Not openly, but indirectly - "you don't want to end up like the Austrians or the Germans, now do you?"
It does seem like the more relevant data for Orban's argument is to look at the fertility rate of ethnic Hungarians / Austrians / Czechs / ... , rather than the fertility rate of everyone in the country.
That is exactly what I am saying: the fertility rate is quite different for the ethnic groups in Austria. Any uptick in numbers of children per couple is not due to the locals at the moment.
Regarding Austria: Scott Alexander should really use TFR, not birth rates, which are dependent on the population age structure and as such much less useful for international comparisons.
After this adjustment Austria becomes rather meh, staying within the 1.44-1.49 range throughout the 2010s. (The actual reason is that Austria had an early transition to very low fertility, in the 1970s like Germany, so there were already much fewer women to give birth even by 2010, whereas in Eastern Europe, this transition only happened during the early 1990s, i.e. there were still a lot of women in childbearing age in 2010, but far fewer by 2020, hence the sharp declines in annual births).
What we see is that Hungary has been modestly successful at raising TFR, going from 1.26 in 2010 to 1.62 in 2020.
> Fertility there is about as low as it has been in the past 20, 30 odd years: the recent spike is in those areas that have seen a large influx of largely Muslim migrants.
"The fertility rate is very low, if you ignore the high fertility rate in a portion of the population I choose to ignore." That argument is only meaningful if you consider citizenship in purely ethnonationalist terms. Maybe you could save time by just listing what types of people you think count as "real" Austrians, at least then you'd be explicit
If you interpret the european data as: "Hungary's fertility policies can't explain much of the TFR increase given that TFR has moved in similar directions elsewhere" --
If we chalk up the other countries fertility trajectories either to policies similar to Hungary's or ethnically replacement (one or the other) -- and it turns out that hungary has not had much of the latter, then it does seem like evidence in favor of the fertility boost not being coincidental.
There's a difference between saying "Hungary's policies had no effect" on the one hand and "Hungary could have solved its fertility problem simply by importing muslims, which is ethically at least as good as boosting the fertility of people already living there"
I thought the same thing regarding scale. Some quick Googling gives the Hungarian fence's length as 523 kilometres, or 325 miles. For comparison, just the Rio Grande chunk of the US-Mexico border is about three times that.
And hence is the actual target of migrants. Nobody actually wants to go to Hungary, they just want to get through it. We could definitely do better regarding the border, but I’m not sure it’s actually cost effective to build a wall, especially when many people just claim refugee status and never show up to court anyway.
Right, but my point was only that the USA is much bigger than Hungary economically, so could afford to build and maintain a much longer wall. I pass no judgement on how effective it'd be for the USA.
It worked for Hungary, not in general - most of refugees want to go to Germany or other country with generous social system - if path through Hungary is closed, they go via other routes more.
If you wonder why Hungarians won't let them just go through, the reason is that countries further along the way would have excuse to send them back to Hungary.
My favorite bit about Orbán is that when he was 20, he played in a movie (the movie version of a famous Hungarian children's book), where he played a robber turned into a football player. Make of that what you will :D
"seized control of an old Soviet tank that had been wheeled out as an exhibit for the commemorations, and for a *shot* time drove it around the center of Budapest".
This is one of the great typos, but it should probably be corrected anyway.
Well, some of the political developments in Hungary since 1992 may have to do with Hungarian national culture. Orban might to some extent be an example of the "there goes my people - I am their leader - I must follow them" leadership strategy.
This is admittedly political gossip (since I have not bothered consulting serious historical research to back it up), but Hungarians have a long-standing reputation in neighbouring countries as rather nationalistic and big-brotherish.
Some claim that this is a result of losing 2/3 of their territory after World War 1, which still gnaws on the collective memory.
While others claim that this loss only amplified feelings that were already there. It is said (yes, I have not checked the sources) that in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the Hungarians were the nasty ones. They pressed for forced Magyarization of smaller (mainly rural) ethnic/national minorities living in the large Hungarian borderlands. Unlike the German-speaking Austrians, who took a liberal/multicultural view. Good old grandfather-of-the-nation, Kaiser Franz (and Vienna with him), had the classic-paternalistic "you are all my children" attitude.
It was Hungary, not Austria, that were the nationalists. (Although both were - and to some extent still are - crabby about the Czechs, who were the ones that made it abundantly clear they wanted out in 1918, and got the Slovaks with them.) The distant past still casts long shadows in Europe. At least for some of us.
Perhaps ACT readers in those parts of Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere that formerly were part of the Hungarian part of the Empire have more, or different, historical reflections.
Yes, but this wasn't due to a liberal or nice guy sentiment. The Magyar noblility that ran the Crown of St. Stephen had all the minorities they wanted and generally didn't have an interest in more empire building (in particular, they didn't want to have the crown tax them to pay for it). It was Vienna that had to deal with the South Slavic issues and Belgrade's efforts to replace them as overlord of the Croats and Bosnians and hence were much more keen on a Balkan showdown to assert that they were a great power and Serbia was poor, tiny state with outsized pretensions of grandeur.
I am Slovak and I can confirm that you described the prevailing reputation of Hungary in the eyes of Slovak/Czech/Ukrainian/etc peoples very accurately.
I cannot judge on the historical accuracy of these claims, but e.g. forced Magyarization during the 19. century is a big topic in our history, and a huge pain point. The consequences are present to this day - while the relationships between countries in the region have been generally really good in the past decades, Hungary stands out, having strained relationships with several neighboring countries due to Orban's imperialistic rhetoric and actions (e.g. granting voting rights for Hungarian minorities in neighboring states)
>But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
The West wasn't eager to accept them. The few countries that were are the exception that requires an explanation, not the hundreds of countries that did not. E.g. judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_civil_war, Sweden took in about one Syrian per 90 inhabitants, whereas the US took in one per 39k and Hungary took in one per 10k. Hungary is not the outlier here.
The UK also wasn't keen on that and didn't do so. It's still the West.
The reality is that lots of people in western Europe actually didn't want to accept loads of refugees, but those countries are run by people who are very experienced with making unpopular decisions at the EU level, where they become invulnerable to any kind of genuinely democratic oversight for a mix of legal and ideological reasons (in particular the heavily pushed narrative that opposition to anything EU=nazi-ism etc). Even in Germany the decision tanked Merkel's popularity in a major way, and in France Macron is regularly opposed in the final round by openly anti-immigrant, anti-refugee candidates. It just wasn't a popular move anywhere but, ironically, only supposedly un-democratic Hungary had a leader who actually acted on it. Note: other leaders are catching up. See Priti Patel flailing around trying to stop the boat crossings as an example after decades of more or less blindly pro-immigration governments.
Merkel's party/coalition just had its worst results ever. Her personal popularity was in the 70s in 2015, when she made that decision, it then started falling significantly and continued falling for years. It now hovers around 50% despite her basically reversing her stance on unlimited refugee/migrant acceptance.
For Macron, I only said that his primary challenger is now always running on an anti-Muslim-immigration platform, not that he did poorly in his election.
Ah, when did that happen? Last I read (and currently still according to Wikipedia) they were still trying to form a new coalition, hence why Mutti is turning up to COP in Glasgow despite theoretically not being in charge anymore.
At any rate the process of government formation in places like PR often leads to more or less incoherent coalitions. Green+FDP wouldn't make any sense for instance and certainly couldn't be said to represent a coherent set of policies that anyone "wants".
Presumably e.g. Sweden voted for splitting because they were eager not to get so many refugees. If other countries had been eager to accept them, no splitting would have been necessary; those countries could have just done what Sweden and to a lesser extent Germany did and accepted them anyway. I don't think that if the US had been eager to accept them, geography would have been an issue.
"a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's"
To be fair, those are just a normal 's' sound and a normal 'zh' sound (as in the sound in the middle of 'measure') - they just have a confusing spelling system where an 's' that *isn't* followed by a 'z' is what we would normally write as 'sh' (or, I guess, think of it as the 's' in 'sugar').
What really gets you are the 'gy' and 'ty' sounds - try saying the 'g' in 'good' and the 'j' in 'judge' at the same time, and you'd not be far off - the middle of your tongue comes up to meet the roof of your mouth...
... which means that the Hungarians have provided us with a neat resolution, if we are brave enough to accept it, of the perennial squabble over how to pronounce 'gif'.
Normally I am all for the proliferation of Hungarian language quirks (no grammatical gender would be a blessing), but whoever succeeds in getting people to pronounce it gyif will become my eternal enemy :D
"I don’t see any of that with Orban. Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee."
Wait. So he's giving the people what they want and trying to be popular? The bastard!
He's basically running a Tammany Hall on the Danube. But I think that's still democracy.
On the subject of appointing friends ... Henry Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR — and a neighbor and friend of FDR. I can't think of other examples, but I suspect the pattern is common.
The Institutional Revolution by Douglas Allen is an interesting book about premodern institutions, why they existed and why they changed. An important part of that was the patronage system, where someone got appointed to a job not because there was evidence he was competent at it but because he was someone the person in charge could trust. I discuss it in some detail in a draft chapter I have webbed: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Economics/History.pdf
Here is Wikipedia on the political beginnings of James Baker, who became Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and later George H.W. Bush's secretary of state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker):
>Baker's first wife, the former Mary Stuart McHenry, was active in the Republican Party, working on the Congressional campaigns of George H. W. Bush. Originally, Baker had been a Democrat but too busy trying to succeed in a competitive law firm to worry about politics, and considered himself apolitical. His wife's influence led Baker to politics and the Republican Party. He was a regular tennis partner of George H. W. Bush at the Houston Country Club in the late 1950s. When Bush Sr. decided to vacate his Congressional seat and run for the U.S. Senate in 1970, he supported Baker's decision to run for the Congressional seat he was vacating. However, Baker changed his mind about running for Congress when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer; she died in February 1970. Bush Sr. then encouraged Baker to become active in politics to help deal with the grief of his wife's death, something that Bush Sr. himself had done when his daughter, Pauline Robinson Bush (1949–1953), died of leukemia. Baker became chairman of Bush's Senate campaign in Harris County, Texas.
Information on Wikipedia is probably the tip of the iceberg in tracing politicians' sponsorship of their friends' careers.
I'm just slightly too young to have met Orban, but I was involved in European Liberal youth politics (an organisation called LYMEC, which still exists) in the mid 1990s when Fidesz was still officially liberal - they switched from the liberal* group to the main right-wing group in 2000. While the Fidesz people I did meet were obviously on the right of liberals, they were mostly liberals and you would get them quietly complaining about how far right and how conservative Orban was getting. Especially the gay ones.
I know that Fidesz had a split in 1993 and some of the liberals left for SZDSZ, but there was another one around 2000 when they formally left liberalism, and I think all the people I knew left back then. At the time, we all thought that Orban was going to vanish entirely... which shows how arrogant a bunch of mid-twenties liberals could be.
*Liberals in Europe comprise two wings, one which is similar to American liberals; we call that group left-liberals or social liberals, the other is what we call right-liberals or economic liberals and you'd probably call something like "moderate libertarians". They tend to be liberal on social issues, though rarely radically so (they were generally a little ahead of the average party on gay marriage, but not as early as the greens or the left-liberals), pro-business but tend to prefer small and medium-sized businesses to corporates, in favour of low taxes, hostile to unions and also usually calling for a smaller welfare state (though smaller than Germany or Sweden is still much bigger than the US). All European liberal parties are members of the liberal group (it was ELDR back then, later ALDE, now Renew Europe), but the individual parties are sometimes just one strand and sometimes both. So the British Liberal Democrats are both, the Dutch have D66 (left) and VVD (right), the Germans have the FDP (used to be both, kicked the left out in 1982 and has been right since). Fidesz was a right-liberal party until they switched to joining the main "centre-right" group (PPE). This is the same group that Merkel is in, to give you an idea of what a typical PPE party is like.
As a member, that's true, but there are people and groups within the party that do. The main reason for the incoherence is that there's an ongoing battle within the party between different ideologies, so one will win on one issue and another on another.
Your above overview of the Liberal Democrats' factions is interesting. If the UK, or at least England, were to shift to a two-party system, what share of Liberal Democrat MPs would you expect to go Conservative instead Labour (or whatever more inclusive new name the left might adopt)?
The problem with this is that there are literally 12 MPs and the answer would be about personal assessments that have little to do with the underlying forces within the party. That is, it's about who happened to win the primary in the particular seats that we won; it would be more useful to consider across the 50 or so seats we could win.
The other problem is that the sort of Conservative that the right-wing of the Lib Dems would choose to join is exactly the sort that Johnson expelled from the party in the purge he conducted in 2019; those people would be completely homeless. But if the Cameronites magically regained control of the Tories, then I'd guess that, of that 50 or so: 50% to Labour, 25% to the Conservatives and 25% to quit politics entirely in preference to choosing.
as an addition: Fidesz is no longer part of the EPP conservative party group in the European Parliament. The group was preparing to throw them out, and Orban pre-empted that by leaving himself.
Yes, I considered whether to include that - Scott had alluded to this in the article as well - but it didn't seem relevant to my personal experiences of Fidesz from when they were still liberal.
My German brother in law voted for the FDP and Die Linke - the latter for the candidate because he liked him.
That’s supposedly a much greater political distance than republican and Democrat in the US, but there’s far less hostility in Germany between the multitude of parties than the two supposed centrist parties in the US.
This is all fine, but I would just point out that this is the year of our lord 2021 and it's been a good decade at least since newspaper coverage was any sort of key to political success. I'm not sure a crooked politician buying friendly media coverage is quite the trump card it once was, in the age of social media (are there Hungarian substacks out there, like Matt Taibbi, only of Magyar lineage?). To this cynic, it sounds more like Hillary Clinton supporters blaming fake news pages on Facebook for why she lost to Trump in 2016. Didn't help, but it was probably wasn't higher than 455th on the list of reasons she took the L in that election.
Hungarians (especially in more rural regions) still put a lot of stock in newspapers, so it helps a lot if you control all of the county-level newspapers completely.
“I don’t see any of that with Orban. Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee. But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant.”
Tongue firmly in cheek, but this sounds like a remarkable new flavour of democracy-by-proxy.
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
I assume that this is a joke and Scott is fully aware that the US-Mexico border is extremely dissimilar to Hungary's borders. Just to be explicit, illegal immigration in America is driven primarily by visa overstays, which is why a wall would mostly not work.
I wonder if the Straussian reading of this, that Scott is pandering to the MAGA crowd, is correct.
Then why do I keep hearing about "crisis at the border!" and "family separations at the border!" and "border patrol does racist-looking thing at the border!" and so on?
I think the main difference is that there isn't a 3rd country at the USA-Mexico border and USA is the target country for immigrants anyway. Hungary is just one of a several countries on a route from Middle East to Western Europe, so if they make their wall slighly more inconvenient than the neighboring countries that's enough to sway the torrent of immigrants another way.
To extend the analogy - Hungary is more like Mexico than the US. And Mexico actually *really doesn't like* being a pass-through to the US, which is why they've been happy to comply with and support more restrictionist policies like "remain-in-Mexico" which discouraged caravans and crossings over the past 4 years.
Remain in Mexico, btw, is now being reimplemented by the Biden administration in what qualifies as a stunning reversal, given that he previously called it "inhumane."
Ah, my information is outdated, the administration is now bringing more challenges against it. Here's a link with a timeline of events up to the current date. https://cis.org/Arthur/State-Play-Remain-Mexico
Yes, it has stopped for the time being - although a court has ruled that they need to restart a while ago, and the Supreme Court agreed, and the administration appears to be slow-walking it while bringing another challenge against it. (That slow-walking is the subject of yet more lawsuits.)
The crisis generally comes when capacities get exceeded. So, Obama wanted more people detained (as an intentionally punitive deterrent measure, if you can believe it), Trump expanded the policy and made it increasingly heartless, and the product was more detainees than places to put them.
Now under Biden, there's still the detainee bottleneck, and people are actually still being detained - policy moves slowly - but there's also just a huge, huge surge of immigrants coming. (The timing makes it pretty obvious that Biden's the reason, although not because of any particular policy. It seems like optics really are that powerful when people are deciding whether to come.) That more thoroughly overwhelmed border control's capacity to manage the influx - they're unable to process people's applications in a timely manner or keep any semblance of order, leading occasionally to sensational moments like the one you may have seen in the news with the Haitian tent city under border bridges. It's a genuine crisis, even if we see the most sensational parts of it.
If you click through to the link in the original comment, it's about 2016 numbers specifically, and illegal crossings are still a significant component. Since Biden came into office, there's been a massive spike, and facilities have been overwhelmed.
I think the true answer is that the US is the intended destination, whereas Hungary would simply be a stopping point of convenience - there are a lot of wealthy alternatives available.
> Just to be explicit, illegal immigration in America is driven primarily by visa overstays, which is why a wall would mostly not work.
Any actual stats on this? What fraction of illegal aliens entered with a visa?
Of course a failure to enforce visas is another huge problem. The US is the only country I can recall going to which doesn't check who you are on the way out of the country, so the US has no way of even knowing whether someone has overstayed their visa or not!
I'm tempted to say this is a very simple change which could be made, although arguably it requires a massive redesign of every international airport in the country to have a post-emigration departures area. Still, it's fair to say that the complete lack of interest in this change exhibited by the government shows how uninterested both major parties are in the rule of law when it comes to immigration.
> The US is the only country I can recall going to which doesn't check who you are on the way out of the country
Which countries are you thinking of that check who you are on the way out of the country! I've visited Canada, Mexico, and India, and I only recall passing through US Customs checks on the way home, while the countries I was visiting only checked me on the way in.
The link doesn't actually support your point. Overstays were higher in 2016, but illegal crossings have been higher historically. The numbers are consistently within a factor of 2 of one another. On any reading of the numbers in the article, border crossings are still a primary driver of illegal immigration. And this year, with the massive spike in crossings we've seen so far, I would give at least 2-to-1 odds that crossings will outnumber overstays (perhaps narrowly).
Also, it's reasonable to be more concerned about border crossings than overstays. People who entered legally once and were vetted to do so are less of a security risk. The process of their coming the U.S. doesn't involve and fund human trafficking, or the violations and deaths that are a direct product of illegal crossings. A wall still might not be the most effective way, but reasonable people can be and should be more concerned about the state of the border than about F-1 and TN overstays.
In the paragraph where the writer (Scott?) writes about how Hungary’s history with communism, and how not being a colonial power, shaped its modern day political beliefs a fairly significant historical part was missed out: Hungary was colonised by the Ottomans, and it wasn’t pretty. A country with that history is going to be less sympathetic to the ideology of white guilt.
(And actually the distribution of “white guilt”, even the use of the term whiteness, across Europe isn’t related to imperialism but to US influence).
In the paragraph about the fertility increases in Hungary I don’t really see a regression to mean at all - not that that’s a guaranteed statistical certainty anyway - the rate recovers after 2010 more than it falls before it.
"Hungary was colonised by the Ottomans, and it wasn’t pretty. A country with that history is going to be less sympathetic to the ideology of white guilt."
Maybe people in Europe take a different view, but from a U.S. perspective, Turkish people are largely considered White, at least as much as Southeast Europeans, Central Asians, etc., so the oppression of the Ottoman Empire would simply confirm the narrative of White colonialism's evils rather than refuting it. Generally Japan and China are considered the only major non-White colonial powers of the modern era.
Granted, there are some people with a narrower definition of Whiteness who might say that Turks aren't truly White, but those people almost certainly wouldn't consider Hungarians to be "White" either. Granted, the fact that Hungary is predominantly Christian makes them a closer cultural match to Western Europe than Islamic Turkey, but White is a racial classification, it doesn't merely equate to "culturally Christian."
What the US thinks about what and what isn't whiteness is not really all the important in Europe, or rather it shouldn't be, unfortunately your woke ideology here is not too distinct from Nordicism. I mean, do you really think that the people who don't see Turks as white would not see Hungarians as white? Scott thinks they are Germans.
I probably however should have said " less sympathetic to the ideology of European guilt". That said the "at least as much as Southeast Europeans" is fairly telling, as very few Europeans don't see southern or south eastern Europeans as anything other than European. Clue, I suppose, is in the name.
In the US, there are basically three different views on what counts as White. There's the official legal definition used by the US government, in which "White" refers to anyone who isn't Sub-Saharan African, East Asian, or an Indigenous American/Australian/Pacific Islander, i.e. anyone with a Caucasoid skull shape. By that classification, Turks would be White, but so would Arabs and Persians, and even Indians, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc. despite the fact that some of them are very dark-skinned.
There's also the colloquial definition of White, but that's constantly changing over time. (In the past, Irish and Italians and Poles weren't considered White, but they are now.) Even now, different individuals and different regions of the country define Whiteness in different ways, and there are various other inconsistencies that pop up: For instance, Arabs and Persians are generally considered "brown," but Ralph Nader and Tony Shaloub and Nassim Taleb are widely considered White despite being Arabs. People from the Balkan region and the Slavic countries and Central Asia are sort of a grey area, where they're sometimes seen as White and sometimes seen as "brown." But you'd be hard-pressed to find people who'd argue "this one Christianized group of Steppe nomads from the southern Eurasian border is White, but this other Islamicized group of Steppe nomads from the southern Eurasian border isn't."
The third definition of White is the one that hardline White supremacists and ethno-nationalists use, which pretty much only includes people from Northern or Western Europe. Very occasionally, some people on the left use this framing too, as a way of arguing that some oppressed minority group from Southeast Europe or Central Asia doesn't really have "White privilege" like Anglo-Saxons and Germans and Nordics do, or at least not to the same degree.
In everyday life, race is all about how you look. I think if you showed a typical American a picture of typical Hungarians and asked if they were white, the answer would be "yes, obviously". Ralph Nader is white for the same reason, though he might be able to turn non-white if he changed his clothes.
As for Scott's claim that Hungarians are " mostly Germans" and "completely normal white people," he's probably just incorrect about that, as others in this thread have pointed out. Even if he is right, that's certainly not how Hungarians perceive themselves, nor is it how they're generally perceived in the US. (In fact, most Americans probably don't think about Hungary at all, and if they do, they're likely to conflate Hungarians with "gypsies", Slavics, or even Central Asians - "Borat people" - than with modernized and industrious Germans. People in this country don't have a very good grasp of the outside world, unfortunately.)
As an American white, I’ve never once heard or read anything that would suggest Hungarians or northern Slavs wouldn’t count as white - actually, I’ve never seen any such thing for Balkan people either, who look less like Northern Europeans than do Hungarians. How could we claim that sweet cultural cachet from ancient Greece otherwise? The ‘white’ ethnicity does become very vague and somewhat arbitrary as you move east and/or south (North Africans, Anatolian Turks, Siberians, Armenians, Caucasians, Persians, the less East-Asian looking central Asian Turks, etc.), but it doesn’t start at Hungary.
Its astonishing that you can't seem to think of any other reason people might want to give refuge to people who are fleeing war and deprivation than "the ideology of white guilt."
I didn’t say anything about the refugee crisis. In my country and in gelebt, where I’ve lived, i worked with refugees. I don’t believe in white guilt though. Certainly not in countries that were never colonisers.
That said it’s pretty astonishing that people from the country who have destabilised the region by killing millions of people lecture any country on how they handle the refugees, the number of which can be destabilising for smaller countries. The Belarusian president is using refugees as a political tool against the EU.
I do believe in the ideology of American guilt though, it’s just a pity there weren’t more of it.
You forgot vaccines, Hungary under Orban performed far above replacement politician on getting vaccines to the population, and then turning off unnecessary restrictions.
Do you mean compared to the average right-wing authoritarian, who seem to have no have no problem throwing people's lives away to a rampaging infectious disease in favour of scoring points in the culture war? Or compared to normal politicians?
That's a matter of the population bit wanting vaccination. But due to using sputnik and sinopharm people here were able to get vaccinated around a month faster than elsewhere. And then the level of restrictions were quickly reduced once it became clear that the people who wanted to get vaccinated had their shots.
"But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant."
There's something that he'll never have to pivot on.
But that is his sin, isn't it? He isn't a urban intellectual, he isn't an EU yes man. He actually has the nerve to defend his nation's borders, he has the nerve to fire civil servants at will, he is not a globalist/one-world/davos pig at the trough.
Imagine living in a nation that was behind the iron curtain, gaining freedom, and then having the socialists again force austerity measures upon you - of course you do not want what the liberal effete are selling when they are really doing is serving you stale bread.
"How do we prevent it from happening here?" End judicial filibusters? Import millions of illegals? How about colluding with big tech to quash your opponents' messaging? How about completely overreact to a bad situation and scuttle the economy? Make everyone get a covid ID, but end the filibuster process in the Senate and assure no one ever needs a voter ID?
Interesting how parts I and II, I'm thinking Trump Trump Trump, then it all changed to the dem playbook (but doing nationalist things instead of anti-American things).
Good stuff, well written (should go without saying). Budapest is a wonderful city...if I was 25 again and have a bit of cash, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Perhaps it would do well to treat cultural lineage at least as, if not more, seriously than genetic lineage. If "The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.", then the Portuguese are, realistically, a completely normal Gaelic people who get up to silly cultural projects like speaking a Latin language and showing up at Roman churches; or the Ashkenazim to be, realistically, completely normal white people who give their kids names like "Schlomo" and play Klezmer music to celebrate the ancient ways. Though the Hungarian identification might not have as consistent an arc over the millennia or two that stands behind the Portuguese or the Ashkenazim, I don't see why it deserves a little gaff of derision.
This is very well put, thank you. That paragraph was making me a bit uncomfortable as well, and part if it is what you have described. But another part is that most Hungarians do not, in fact, build yurts and celebrate the ancient ways. (Attila is a fairly common name though.) It's like equating Americans in general to Mormons or the Amish.
Well, with Ashkenazim there's a genetic lineage as well. (I can't speak to the Portuguese.) I take your overall point about cultural heritage -- even in an alternate world where the Khazar theory was supported by evidence I wouldn't appreciate a section like that directed at Jews -- but Ashkenazim are a poor example to support it.
Yeh, I thought that weird too but didn’t know enough about the Magyars to comment. Sometimes invaders lend you their language, other times they take yours. It depends on many things but the main factor would probably be the number of invaders. Also if the existing language was obscure and isolated it would have a better chance of disappearing.
Scott says the Magyars died out, and German isn’t obscure or isolated. So that doesn’t work.
I also think we should consider taking the importance of place seriously. They might not be related to Attila genetically, but Attila is among the most important things to happen where they live. Does Pontiac, MI have to change its name because the residents are all descended from Africans and Europeans rather than Algonquin-speaking Native Americans? Or Detroit, MI because there aren't many French people? Surely not.
I'm not sure how serious you were with your fence comment, but there were two main arguments I saw.
1) Unlawful entry only accounts for a small portion of illegal immigration in the US, with most immigrants entering legally and overstaying their visas. [This article](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/) was the first Trump-era hit on the subject I found on Google. As far as I can tell, the current numbers are similar, with there being about double the number of visa overstays annually as unlawful entries. Obviously a wall would only affect unlawful entry.
2) The wall would not necessarily be effective at preventing unlawful entry in the long term for practical reasons. America's southern border is almost 2000 miles long and crosses several different types of terrain. The barrier would not only need to be built, but manned and maintained across this huge distance. This task is much cheaper and easier for a country like Hungary, whose barrier is only 325 miles.
Argument 1 is hard to dispute. If your overall goal is to reduce illegal immigration, it's not very cost-effective to spend billions to maybe reduce it 30%. Argument 2 is weaker in my opinion; I think it's probably true, but impossible to really prove without actually building a wall and finding out.
> If your overall goal is to reduce illegal immigration, it's not very cost-effective to spend billions to maybe reduce it 30%.
Honestly that sounds pretty darn cost-effective to me. It's hard to think of any other major social problems that can be reduced by 30% for a cost of single-digit billions.
Each Ford-class aircraft carrier costs $13 billion, and I don't think it decreases anything by 30%.
Well, the "maybe" is doing a lot of work. Perhaps it would have been better phrased as "in the absolute best case scenario" since the point is that even a magic wall that stopped every unlawful entry forever would still leave 2/3 of the problem unaddressed.
Also I have no idea where you're getting single-digit billions. The most recent number I can find is that $15 billion in funding was set aside for Trump's partial barrier. Actually sealing the border and maintaining the barrier over time would cost much more.
More cost effective to spend the same amount of money on fixing the problems that are causing refugees to turn up on the border, like drug wars in latin america
I wrote something to the same effect elsewhere, but I'll restate... first, overstays outnumbering crossings is only a recent phenomenon, not likely to continue in 2021 given the numbers we've already seen; and if you look at the numbers, crossings are still super significant. But most importantly, they're not comparable problems.
If someone got a visa to enter the U.S., they were vetted for security risks and judged to have a valid reason to enter the U.S. They had a connection, or could make a contribution, or were Canadian. (Canadians get far easier entry due to treaties.) They came via a standard port of entry. They're required to be either vaccinated or tested for COVID. (Just vaccinated, starting 11/8.)
Contrast that with illegal crossings. People who cross aren't vetted or vaxed. The majority are victims not perpetrators, but some are previous deportees with criminal records. They fund human trafficking and organized crime in order to have a better chance of crossing. Many of them tragically perish.
It makes sense to worry more about one of these things than the other. A wall might not be the best way, but of *course* CBP and USCIS are more worried about crossings than overstays, as they damn well should be.
After reading through some of this thread, I'm going to add that I agree with a third point made elsewhere.
3) Putting a lock on your door won't keep determined trespassers out. It will only make them try another house first. Hungary is next door to many other countries with comparable or better living conditions and easier entry. The USA is a big mansion with no other houses anywhere close. It's very plausible that the US would have really determined immigrants whereas Hungary's just look elsewhere.
I'm not sure I get your point... the southern border is the only significant source of illegal crossings (not overstays). The Canadian border is secure, in large part thanks to the Canadians, who look after *their* southern border very carefully; and we have oceans all around us elsewhere. (Desperate souls sometimes raft over from Cuba, but not in significant numbers. Seas are very good walls.)
Our house is surrounded by impending, towering walls, but one has massive, gaping holes in it. Of course plugging the hole would decrease illegal crossings, there's no other easy illegal way in! (A wall isn't the best way to plug the hole, but I'm responding to point 3 here, not point 2.)
This was more about explaining the apparent effectiveness of Orban's wall -- I'm suggesting that crossings stopped not because walls are incredibly effective, but because in Europe it's easier to go around them than through them. If we tried a wall here, I'm sure crossings would decrease to some degree, but we might also find that walls aren't so great at keeping out people with no other options.
Ah, gotcha. I think stemming the southern border influx would have a bigger impact than you seem disposed to believe. But you're definitely right that this could have been a big reason Orban's wall was effective.
Biden created a commission to look into Supreme Court reform. They haven’t released their final report yet, but they released a preliminary version (link in article below). I was pleased to see the report was very negative on the idea of court packing, and warm-ish on the idea of term limits (with some details to be worked out, including whether or not it would require a constitutional amendment). FWIW the Orban post makes me the most uncomfortable out of all these because if one of these paths were to be taken in the US, I think it would look a lot more like Orban than like Modi or Erdogan.
"There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority."
Ending the filibuster with only a 50 vote majority seems like exactly the same sort of thing.
This is an occasion where a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one. If you have a 51% majority, it's easy to imagine being a 49% minority in a couple years so you preserve the rule that will protect you in the latter case; if you have a 67% majority, it's hard to imagine being a 33% minority anytime soon, so have at it.
>A rule that mandates X% for something should also require at least X% to change.
The unspoken assumption is that the rule was first established with >=X% support. That's often not the case, and when true I don't see any particular reason changing said rule should require more support than establishing it in the first place.
On the object level, I have a hard time picking what number the general principle ought to apply in the case of the filibuster, if at all: the 1806 nigh-unlimited version can only really be said to have been created by procedural accident, and while the developments in cloture has always been forced to meet that threshold the resulting compromise votes can't really be said to be reflective of what the rule would have been intentionally set at in the first place.
Yes, the 1806 rule change that accidentally created an almost unlimited filibuster is not the best foundation for a rule. Luckily, this rule has been put on a much stronger footing since then.
The cloture rule in the US Senate dates to 1917, when it was adopted with a 76-3 vote. This was modified in 1949 (62-23), 1959 (77-22), 1975 (56-27), 1976 (2 amendments: 72-22 & 78-17), 1979 (76-18), and 1986 (67-21). This was established with a large supermajority and there is a tradition of not changing it without at least the (stricter) requirements of the rule. Exactly what the threshold should be was intentionally changed multiple times: either 2/3 or 3/5 of either the Senators present or all the Senators.
> Luckily, this rule has been put on a much stronger footing since then.
This is exactly what I was referencing when I said "[because] developments in cloture [have] always been forced to meet that threshold the resulting compromise votes can't really be said to be reflective of what the rule would have been intentionally set at in the first place." You can't treat the cloture thresholds as foundational because they themselves were quite literally built on an unsound foundation - the general principle isn't quite enough to establish a true ratchet effect, but it does create an asymmetry that gets badly exacerbated when an initial unprincipled X% is set too high.
Alright, toy example time. Say you have a newly-minted legislature considering creating an absolute minimum for the support required to alter a rule, including this one. The "no lower than" levels and their support are as follows:
50% threshold -> 99% support
60% threshold -> 65% support
70% threshold -> 52% support
80% threshold -> 38% support
90% threshold -> 3% support
Given this set of preferences, the filibuster gets set at 60% and everyone breaks for lunch early.
Except, there was an error in the drafting process and it turns out you're working with a preexisting 90% threshold that only those 3% actually approve of. Oops. Now you don't have any way to reach that justifiable 60% threshold, because 35% would object to lowering it that far. You can't even get to 70%!
You actually need a separate set of "no higher than" preference data to figure out how far you *can* lower the threshold, but for the sake of argument let's say it works out to around 80% for a reflectively consistent case. The equilibrium settles at a threshold that doesn't have the ability to slide further in either direction, but that initial drafting error means it can't be said to be a principled result of the legislators' preferences.
I'm not sure that these numbers make sense from the opposite direction. If we start at a 90% threshold that only 3% of the group supports, then wouldn't 97% of the group prefer an 80% threshold over the current system? Everyone who supports lowering the threshold from 90% to 60% should also prefer lowering the threshold from 90% to 80%.
Of course, this might be difficult to make this vote work in practice. Compromising is sometimes bad optics.
I have often thought this precise thing when the subject of abolishing the filibuster comes up (which is often, of late). What baffles me is why, with all the hand-wringing about 'if we don't, what if they do', this idea is never raised in practice? If legislators wish to preserve the filibuster, but don't trust their colleagues across the aisle to respect that precedent when they are in power, why not get together to formalize a rule that works as you describe?
One thing needs to be added to the article : Hungary is a very strange country, independently from Orban. I have been there twice, the last time was 3 weeks ago. I have traveled in most of European countries, I speak 5 European languages, but I have never felt so disconnected from the people living there; communication is very difficult, simply because most people only speak Hungarian (even younger ones). And foreigners are simply not welcome. Oh, and just ask my son about his football teammates who happened to be black...
This is very different from, say, Poland, Croatia or the Czech Republic. Poland may be super-conservative, yes, maybe more than Hungary; but I never felt rejected there...
True. For me, the biggest thing is the Hungarian nationalism, though Poles are also not that far off in this regard.
I live in Czechia, so I am biased, but one of the things I love is the lack of nationalism. My favorite example of this: https://cdn-vsh.prague.eu/object/1867/170328-pct-stredni-00048-curajici.jpg - a sculpture of two figures pissing on a map of Czech Republic, placed in the capital. Good fun. You won't find this in Budapest.
I am quite surprised about the review. I am no expert of Hungary, but my understanding has been a bit different.
My impression (even reading opponents of Orban) has been:
1) Fidesz rise to power was caused by Socialists, their corruption and mismanagement of Hungarys economy.
2) "We lied" tape was leaked in 2006, Fidesz won elections in 2010. The review gives an impression that these two events were closely related. They were not.
3) Reading opposition newslets of Hungary, I would say that up until 2013-2014, their main narrative was: socialist were bad, Fidesz promised change and won, thats the reason, not leaked tapes or tricks by Orban. And (grudgingly) Orban has delivered change and improved economic situation of Hungary, that boosted his status even more. From 2013-2014 stories about corruption, anti-democratic measures etc have became more prominent.
4) For most of his political career Orban was described (even by his opponents) as quite ordinary right of center free marketeer. Just recently reread some stuff from Anne Applebaum, typical liberal cosmopolitan, what she said about Orban: "For 20 years we were on the same side".
5) I am not hungarian, but I am from Eastern-European country. I do not think that hick vs urban elite applies here. If talking about social status and background, communism (and fall of communism) changed so much, that everything else is irrelevant. I am coming from a small Baltic country and most of our political parties have their historical roots in different underground movements of 1980-s. 30 years late you can still see lot of friends, schoolmates, roommates in politics. So, I am not surprised that smth similar can be seen in Hungary.
6) I am not sure what to make about gerrymandering. It seems that Orban has used it to benefit himself, but I have read some credible people who say that these accusations and effects of gerrymandering have been overblown.
Overall, I am on the fence. Having watched situation in Hungary for years, it seems to me that critics of Orban (especially from the outside) are a bit biased, they simplify, exaggerate and misinterpret sometimes. At the same time, I also cannot agree with defenders of Orban, who say that nothing is wrong and they attack him only because he is conservative. This does not seem true either.
"2) "We lied" tape was leaked in 2006, Fidesz won elections in 2010. The review gives an impression that these two events were closely related. They were not."
The tape was leaked after the general election, but before the local elections (for mayor and such), the latter was won by Fidesz pretty decisively. Also, the events are related in my opinion by the fact that Orbán and Fidesz derive their legitimacy in large part still based on the events of 2006.
This. The socialists' popularity immediately plummeted (partly due to the leak, partly due to the austerity measures that started around the same time), and never recovered.
4) Center-right (rather than far-right), yes. Free marketer, everything but. Since at least the 2000s the left has been less hostile to free market liberalism in Hungary. (On economic matters, their left-ness manifested in supporting somewhat more redistribution.)
I am from Hungary and follow politics quite closely. Your points are all correct. I don't think fears around Orbán are overexaggerated, but the specific ways in which he has been authoritarian and bad to the country are indeed misunderstood / misconstrued a lot. And indeed until the early 2010s he has been a fairly average, if somewhat populist, right-wing politician.
I'm mostly curious why you seem so certain that Orban's political opinions are insincerely held.
"Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee"
Isn't it more parsimonious to assume that actually he's just a fan of right-wing nationalism, and that everything else is downstream of his genuine beliefs?
Mostly because he converted very quickly as soon as he realized it was politically advantageous to him, and his whole party did it at once. Would be quite a coincidence if everyone in the Liberal Democrat party just happened to decide they actually preferred right-wing nationalism at the same time.
I think that this is quite biased description: Orban shifted from liberal-right to conservative-right. Whole party didn't do it at once, in 1993 actually significant part of Fidesz left and created its own party (led by Gábor Fodor)
They didn't create a new party, they joined a liberal party that had existed for about the same time as Fidesz. (It was a major party in the 90s but it has disappeared since then.)
Most modern democracies are really some combination of democracy, liberalism, and technocracy (Trust Experts).
Orban (and Erdogan and Modi) strike me as being radically pro-democracy, at the expense of liberalism and technocracy. Some of the main complaints here are: (1) he does what he thinks the most people will want instead of having consistent personal beliefs, (2) he allows a lot of Hungarians who live in other countries to vote, (3) politicians can fire any civil servant, and (4) the people who win elections should control the press. These all increase democracy at the expense of liberalism or technocracy.
For example: Making principals accountable to politicians is more democratic than having them mostly insulated from public opinion. It would be even more democratic to have principals directly elected by their school district, but that isn't what the EU is pushing for.
Unfortunately, we have come to use the word "democracy" to mean "government we like". So the European Union says that Hungary is being "anti-democratic" instead of arguing why liberalism or technocracy is the more important value in this situation. This is especially ironic since the EU is a mostly liberal technocratic organization: only one of the seven major decision making bodies of the EU is directly elected by the people.
I should add that voter fraud is definitely anti-democratic. Gerrymandering is somewhat anti-democratic, but most democracies do it at least to some extent.
If you want to criticize Orban from a democratic standpoint, you should focus on these. Instead, most criticisms focus on how he has damaged liberalism and technocracy.
As opposed to other writings about Hungary on the non-Hungarian internet it did not contain any obvious errors (ot at least ones I could detect as an error, I don’t really follow politics).
I have a few comments though: (sry for bad english)
>The Hungarians believe themselves to be the descendants of proud steppe nomads.
>Realistically this is all false.
I would be very surprised if this was true and no one had told me about it. Many people in Hungary are very nationalistic and some believe much weirder false beliefs presumably because of it (eg. some Hungarians believe that Jesus was Hungarian),
but many are not (some on the left are even vaguely anti-Hungary) and I expect they would have told me about this widespread falsehood.
But, I don't actually know this and I will reasearch it a bit, when I will have some time.
There are a class of images which I semi-commonly come across on the Hungarian internet which constitute small evidence in favour of the separate genetics hypothesis (small partly because I never checked the veracity of sources) and for fun I will leave them here without (much) comment:
>Or maybe it’s colonial guilt: the West is wracked with it, but Hungary, never having colonized anywhere, doesn’t see why it owes anything to the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s because bad blood between the Hungarians and Roma has soured Hungary on the entire concept of having minorities. Whatever the reason, anti-immigrant measures in Hungary were polling around the mid-80s-percent.
There is definitely a sense of Hungary defending Western Europe from various invading powers and not receiving much thanks for it from history, and so the “not feeling obligation towards the rest of the world” part is true and often referenced, but I’m pretty sure most of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from common attitudes towards minorities.
> Is [policies trying to increase fertility rate] working? Lyman Stone analyzes the question at length here and says “maybe a little”. I am a bit skeptical [..]
My impression was that the most consequental family planning policies only recently started and it is too soon to evaluate them. For example CSOK started in 2015 (in some cases 10 million Ft state support + favourable interest rate loan for new houses), but I might be wrong. For me they only recently became relevant and that might color my impression.
>That if you have enough kids, the government repays your student loans?
While true, I don’t think this matters to most people as most already have their education paid for by the state.
I think some mention/analysis of Orban’s relationship to other authoritarian regimes, eg. Russia and China would have been interesting.
The second. And to be clear, I didn't emphasise, because it is obvious to me as a Hungarian, but it might confuse foreigners: I'm not talking about the Hunnic relationship instead specifically whether the current Hungarians are descended from the nomad tribes arriving into the Carpatian Basin around 900 (possibly earlier).
Note to foreigners: The country name contains "hun" only in English. In Hungarian Hungary is "Magyarország" and the people are called "magyarok" which references the Magyar nomad tribes not the Huns.
I'm kind of surprised that there are still so many ethnic Hungarians outside of Hungary given all the ethnic cleansing that went on in Europe last century.
A lot of Germans got pushed out of eastern Europe after the world wars as well. And Stalin did a lot of people-resettling, though mostly past the Urals and not in Europe per se.
In addition to the Germans, Ukrainians were ethnically cleansed from Poland and Poles were ethnically cleansed from Ukraine. Tony Judt and Keith Lowe in their books Postwar and Savage Continent respectively mention other ethnic cleansing that took place in postwar Central and Eastern Europe for the purpose of creating homogenous states.
Ethnic Cleansing includes expulsion. "the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society." The German speaking populations of East Prussia (now Poland), The Sudetenland, etc. were all ethnically cleansed of Germans in the aftermath of WWII.
The Soviets didn’t have as direct a security interest in the ethnic composition of Hungary and its immediate neighbors as they did in the corridor between themselves and Germany (hence the expulsion of Poles from post-war Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine into heretofore German territory and of Ukrainians from post-war Poland).
Historically, "football" is a reference to ball games played while running or walking, *as opposed to on horseback* (I.e. on one's feet). And "soccer" is just a British slang for "association football," the ruleset for soccer/football hammered out between several English private schools.
I've heard the "horseback" thing before, but I'm not convinced, because I've never seen any reference to these horseback ball games that the name supposedly distinguishes them from.
The only horseback ball game we have these days is polo, but polo comes from Central Asia and didn't reach Europe (via British India) until the 19th century, while the English word "football" dates back to the 1300s.
Was there a 1300s-era ball game played on horseback in Europe? Given the cost of horses at the time, it must have been an elite pastime. But I can't find any reference to it.
Unrelatedly, though, it had never clicked for me that the word "soccer" comes from the "soc" in "association", so thanks for that.
(Also, Australian Rules Football is the one true football, not soccer or grid iron.)
As a Hungarian, I found some glaring problems in the review, almost enough that I feel myself in a Gell-Mann Amnesia situation. I don't really blame Scott though, getting informed about the politics of a foreign country is very hard. Still, I trust the Erdogan and Modi reviews significantly less now.
First of all, I broadly agrre with the personal characterization of Orban, and I also think he is an extremely corrupt leader and a threat to democracy.
The review doesn't even mention some of the worst strikes against him: his schoolmate from his home village, who he got to know while going to the same football mathces is now the richest person in the country, whose hand is in every conveivable industry. Everyone knows he is Orban's straw-man, and collects the money for him and for his political cause.
Also, at one point, Orban's agents secretly bought up the largest Leftist newspaper, Népszabadság, and simply cancelled it. In the post Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, Scott wonders if there is so surprisingly littel money in politics, why doesn't some billionaire simply buy up all the newspapers and get to control what people hear about. Orban did exactly that, using the money his straw-men, like Mészáros, got from corruption.
On the other hand, the review is probably based on books and articles seriously biased against Orban, which causes the review to be seriously misleading about a number of things.
Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting. I suggest that this quote should be removed form the review, unless it is supported by more sources, because I stronly suspect it is just blatantly false.
Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymendeing that can explain that.
The main change Orban's new Constitution brought was that previously Hungary had more or less a proportional electoral system: every party gets seats in the parliament proportional to the number of votes they got. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, in the UK, every district delegates one member of the parliement with first-past-the-post voting.
In my opinion, both system has advantages and disadvanteges, the German system is more balanced, but its result is that usually no party has parliamentary majority, which forces them to form coalitions, which can be a nightmare of instablility (eg Italy).
Orban changed the Hungarian electoral system to be a mix of the two: there are 199 seats in the parliament and 106 districts delegating members with first-past-the-post voting. The other 93 seats are distributed among the parties proportionally with the votes they got. (On a ticket, you vote both for a delegate in your district and you also vote for a party.)
I think this system is not entirely unreasonable, although the first-past-the-post element gives the winner more seats compared to the previous system, so it is easier to win 2/3 majority. But this also means that it is aeasier for the opposition to get 2/3 and remake the changes (although it is very unlikely that they will get that in this election).
The votes from abroad are also seriously overemphasised in the review. It is true that they overwhelmingly vote for Orban, but only the 4% of votes come from abroad, and they don't have district delegates, so that's like 4 seats from the 199. Significant, but Orban's power doesn't depend on these few seats.
I had some othe minor problems: Orbán emphasisees Christian, not Catholic ethics, as Hungary has a significant Protestant population (Orban himself is Protestant). The review claims that Orban was pretty bad in governing during his 1998-2002 leadership, meanwhile I usually hear from older friends, both left and right, that Orban-government was reasonably good back then, they were a moderate center-right party and mostly played by the rules. Most people I know claim that Orban only really broke evil when he lost the election of 2002.
Also, I feel the review is a bit too kind to Socialist leader Gyurcsány: when he gave the infamous speech, he was already the prime minister for two years, the speech is about his premiership, not his predecessor's. And after he was caught on tape claiming he lied all day and night and meanwhile didn't do anything good, he refused to step down. He used police brutality against the protesters and governed for three more years while being probably the most hated man in the country. No wonder Orban won in a nandslide after that. And Mr Gyurcsány still didn't step down after that, because there is approximaeetly 10% of voters who are really devoted to him, so he can remain an important figure in the opposition to this day, while the majority of the country still loathes him for his speech, for the police brutality and for mismanaging the 2008 recession which hit Hungary especially hard. Any reasonablye person would retire in his place, but he is never going to, because he is as much of a mud-fighter as Orban is. A big part of the reason the Left can't beat Orban is that they can't throw out Gyurcsány and his devoted supporters, but they can't win until he is on the ticket.
Also, border wall: not long after Orban built his wall and was called a fascist for that, the Germans also panicked after the first one million migrants poured in in a few months, so they made a deal with Erdogan, and paid Turkey not to let in more migrants to Europe, so now most Syrian migrants are stopped on the turkish border, sometimes by gunfire.
Orban is understandably bitter about being called a fascist, when in a sense he was just ahead of the curve, and I agree with him that EU leaders were pretty hypocritical about this. Also, before Orban bouilt is wall, leftist critics in Hungary also confidently calimed that it won't stop any migrants, but it did. I give it a nice chance that Trump's wall would work too.
Overall, Orban is still very bad, and I agree it is a shame that some western right-wingers are admiring him, but his critics often seriously exeggerate: somewhat similarly with the situation with Trump. If you only hear about Trump from texts written by angry leftists, you will get a very biased image, hited with a few banal lies. Scott has some good articles from the past calling out some of the craziest accusations against Trump. There are a similar number of absurd accusations written about Orban in the western media, but fewer well-informed people calling them out. So treat everything with a grain of salt.
The details here are interesting but don't substantially change my views of Orban from the post.
Gerrymandering can do a lot - e.g. Alabama has 6/7 safe republican seats despite voting about 40% democrats (and that's even without moving the numbers within a 75-100 range, which could make gerrymandering even more efficient). So I believe the efficiency numbers are probably more accurate than you'd assume based on the district sizes, assuming Orban combines it with packing opposition votes.
you can see that Orban won almost literally all districts outside Budapest, often with pretty high margins. I don't really see how it could have been achieved by packing opposition votes, they are just a minority almost everywhere outside Budapest.
So this is true, but I think the correct measure of dictatorness is how much public opposition it would take to overthrow him. E.g. if he currently has 70% support but has set up a system where he'd stay in power even with 30% support (both these numbers seem roughly correct?), That still seems fairly dictatorial.
Also, while I don't know much about Hungary, I'm looking at the shape of those districts and I'm not seeing anything that you'd call crazily gerrymandered.
Without knowing anything about Hungarian geography, I can at least see that all districts have reasonably looking compact blob-like shapes, unlike certain other countries https://www.statista.com/chart/21313/most-gerrymandered-districts-us/ ... so if any gerrymandering has happened it has at least been reasonably subtle
Depends. Since they're in practice geographically clustered, you'd except 2-4 if it was done by a blind algorithm. A fair district or would of course have it at 3. And as you said someone going completely at random would have it at 0 (but otoh, if you did the nationwide districting at random you'd have a roughly 100% democratic Congress).
All districting systems are pretty ripe for abuse though - anyone who controls the district lines can usually maintain control in almost all circumstances. Non-PR systems are inherently pretty vulnerable.
Some of this depends on the definition of "Safe" (how much of an advantage do you need to be safe in a neutral year versus a 'wave' year for the other party?) If all the Alabama districts were 60/40 GOP/Dem, that could perhaps qualify as all of them being "safe"; agreed that geographic clustering means this wouldn't happen without deliberate design.
But I don't understand the "if you did the nationwide districting at random you'd have a roughly 100% democratic Congress" point at all. The 2020 House elections had approximately 51% Dem votes to 48% GOP votes (plus a few third-party votes), again with a ton of regional variation and clustering. I agree that with random assignments of districts we might be more Dem-leaning than now, given that the GOP overall got the better of the last redistricting in 2010 due to strong performance in State legislature elections that year, but nowhere close to 100%.
"I had some othe minor problems: Orbán emphasisees Christian, not Catholic ethics, as Hungary has a significant Protestant population (Orban himself is Protestant)."
And apparently that is down to the Ottoman influence, in another one of the ironies of history:
"The Ottomans practiced relative religious tolerance, and Christianity was not prohibited. Islam was not spread by force in the areas under the control of the Ottoman Sultan...
The relative religious tolerance of the Ottomans enabled Protestantism in Hungary (such as the Reformed Church in Hungary) to survive against the oppression of the Catholic Habsburg-ruled Hungarian domains.
...By the end of the sixteenth century, around 90% of the inhabitants of Ottoman Hungary were Protestant, most of them being Calvinist."
It is only partially down to Ottoman influence. At this time, the country was split into three, the Catholic Habsburg-ruled part, the Ottoman part with its religious tolerance (such as it was), and the Principality of Transylvania, which was also predominantly protestant.
The Hungarian electoral system has been a mix of a proportional and a majoritarian component (FPTP with some compensation for the losers but less than to make it proportional) both before and after the Fidesz' changes. Fidesz made it somewhat more majoritarian.
> I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
The claim came with a link ("one observer calculates..."). I haven't read it, but you could get numbers like this if you looked at the ratio of MPs to votes of various parties. But the biggest reason for that isn't gerrymandering, it's a majoritarian electoral system (partial FPTP), while the opposition is/was fragmented. It's definitely not the case that left-leaning districts have twice the population of right-leaning ones (which the claim could be understood as).
The opposition's fragmentation (only tangentially mentioned in the post) has been a major factor in Orbán's stay in power. From 2006, the old Socialist Party became extremely unpopular. Since then, until 2018–2020, the opposition was fragmented between the Socialist Party and its splinter, new left-wing groupings (some of whom ruled out any cooperation with the old socialists), and the far-right Jobbik (which mutually hated each other with the left). This meant easy victory, even supermajority, for Fidesz. Jobbik has since become more moderate as Fidesz moved farther right, and nearly all opposition parties finally realized that they have to run jointly to stand a chance. So the 2022 elections will be between two approx. equal sized factions for the first time since 2006.
As another Hungarian, I would like emphasize as well that this is comment indeed much closer to reality than Scott's review. To be honest, I was baffled to read how biased Scott's post is, feels like a hard case of Gell-Mann Amnesia for me. Not untrue, but really unbalanced.
Orbán ran a nazi-style hate campaign with state media continuously bombarding people (most of whom have never seen a non-European person in their life) with how every single refugee is a murderous rapist terrorist degenerate who is after the Hungarian women, spreads exotic illnesses, wants Sharia law, and is part of a sinister international plot to destroy Christianity and resettle Europe with muslims. The fence was just a small part of why he was called a fascist.
> Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
As the linked source said, "51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds."
With gerrymandering - and sometimes without gerrymandering - an outcome like this is possible even if all electoral districts have the same size, so it sounds like you don't understand how gerrymandering works.
All systems based on single-winner electoral districts (and especially the first-past-the-post system used in the US, Canada, and I assume Hungary) tend to amplify the number of seats won by the largest parties. With gerrymandering it is possible to amplify those winnings even further for one particular party—again, even if the population in each district is identical.
It's curious that Orban specifically has become this cause celebre for American reactionaries - even here, the comment section on Erdogan seemed to agree Erdogan was bad, and even the one on Modi still didn't seem as swarmed by his defenders.
As to why.... Republicans don't praise Putin because they genuinely dislike Russia due to the Cold War (also they'd get called Russian spies for it, even more than they are now). India has friendlier relations, but it's a significant power, so idolizing Modi would also cause concern about split loyalties. Even Turkey and Poland are regional powers, and supporting them is a geopolitical statement as well as an ideological one. So Orban is idolized precisely because Hungary *isn't* relevant, because despite his claims he hasn't made it significantly stronger, and therefore his oppression is only hurting Hungarians. (See also: Salazar's Estado Novo.) Of course, for the most part this is initial conditions rather than actual competence or lack thereof.
I suppose that for most commenters here, Hungary and Orbán are merely a metaphor for something about American politics.
The few Hungarian commenters seem to mostly agree with the article. (As do I. Not a Hungarian, although technically I probably could get Hungarian citizenship based on Orbán's law.)
Aside - I do take some issue with the "realistically this is all false" bit about Hungarians being Magyar. Yes, genetically there isn't much admixture, but assimilation is a thing, despite Orban and those like him making a career of claiming the opposite. Hungarian really is a Uralic language, and it really is a very long way away from its relatives and unique in central Europe; there's even some continuity of government with the medieval state, via the Habsburgs. Inasmuch as any country should be proud of its morally questionable history (and most of history is morally questionable), Hungary can be proud of being the heir of the medieval Magyars . (Of course, while Hungary is exceptional, all countries are exceptional. Just with the language thing, you have Romanian as the only major eastern Romance language, Albanian and Greek as isolates within Indo-European, Finnish&Estonian also being Uralic, and that's before mentioning the Basques or the Caucasus.)
For your first point: I've seen more praise on the right for Putin than Orban, especially because Putin and Russia are simply much more notable than Orban and Hungary, but not much for either. I personally don't think either are particularly praiseworthy: as in my previous comment, I don't think either has a real plan for solving their countries' demographic or economic problems and they rely on the same thuggish playbook of machine politics common to the western liberal parties. They are better than our own ruling class only in the sense that they aren't openly fighting against their majority populations, but that's an awfully low bar to clear.
For your second point: India isn't a significant power outside of its immediate neighborhood and as far as I'm aware Modi has basically zero cachet outside of ethnic Indians. The rare Indian American who goes full Hinduvata is clearly not loyal to the US, but that's not particularly interesting or surprising. I don't see a meaningful difference between India and, say, Poland for these purposes: India is much larger but neither has any force projection or soft power that ordinary Americans need to worry about.
For your last point: The problem here is that Scott and you have yet to be demonstrate any oppression in Orban's Hungary beyond the aforementioned machine politics. Corruption, one party having full control of the mainstream media and education system, election shenanigans: none of this is new or notable in 2021. It sucks to live under the rule of a pathological liar propped up by a corrupt and insular party apparatus, I'll agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. But, given that this seems to be the only choice on offer, I'll take the one who at least pretends to care about his people and their values over the one who openly despises and mocks them.
I think a couple of issues might account for it. I haven't seen anyone praising Orban in the small corners of the RW I've happened to frequent, for what it's worth. But I think that there are several points to consider:
1) This profile is less charitable and more ironic (sarcastic?) than the profiles of Erdogan or Modi.
2) This is a European country, dealing with the EU. And while Turkey has its complicated relationship with the EU and is right nearby, it's still an "other", more mentally associated with the middle-east. Many commenters here are Europeans, not just Americans. I've noted commenters claiming to be German, Polish, Czech so far, so I think the subject matter hits closer to home. And sometimes I feel like people don't know exactly how to treat the post-Communist Eastern Europeans: (Europeans just like us? corrupt? Socially backward? The last bastions of reason in Europe in a continent gone mad with progressivism? Etc.) There just isn't this closeness, relevance to our history, or familiarity for the average reader educated in America or Europe (where I think most ACX readers reside).
3) Relatedly, the issues covered here are democracies where we come to expect democracy (i.e. in Europe), and the issues of (Muslim) immigration to Europe
4) The Modi one got pretty heated, and it was cool to see how many Indian readers there were who commented. On all of these, even if the sample is very biased, it's very interesting and informative to read the comments and their different perspectives, at the very least to see what friends from the relevant country/ethnic group have to say about these perspectives.
It's not very hard to understand how Orbán rose to power if you don't make the very surprising omission from the description of circumstances you made (unfortunately using Paul Lendvai as a source is an extraordinarily bad choice, as evidenced by the many factually false statements in the post, but this is something that sort of stands out anyway). The country was coming out of communism, and the political party you describe as the Socialists consisted of the people who operated that party-state previously (as the party itself was and continues to be legally the same entity as the former communist state-party ). And as the Socialists kept winning elections after what you incorrectly call a revolution, and maintained most of the economic power and media influence, the millions of people who were on the receiving end of their activity for decades basically gave Orbán a carte blanche as long as he defeats the ancienne regime. And this kind of support is available to him to this day, and he in turn used it to grab all that economic power and media influence to himself. This is such a massive overlook that basically any reasonably informed Hungarian with no personal ties to the communist party-state establishment would have immediately called your attention to it, and explains most of the power dynamic.
It is somewhat ironic though, that a lot of Orbán's current and former key players (such as the current minister of the interior) were also members of said state-party. Of course, I think the best idea would be if they were also removed from politics.
Yes, of course, although in the particular case of the minister of interior former party membership is by no means the largest question mark. And simple membership in the old communist party in itself is not necessarily an indictment - lot of people were members for various reasons, and it did not mean wielding power in the old system, which some other currently or recently active politicians certainly did as well. But the irony is indeed there - as Orbán's unrelenting support ultimately relies on having some of the old commies around as living mnemonics of the great enemy, he does seem to actually finance a lot of their political activity through back-channels.
Not only that, but the Socialist Party's policies post-1990 had little in common with those of the communist state party before 1990, arguably less than Fidesz does. "Successor party" is a common smear for the Socialist Party, but it's not much of an argument (it's literally true, but the intended implications aren't). That doesn't mean it doesn't convince many people, of course.
The argument was never about policies in any way, it was about people. The particular people in the Socialist party governments were usually either high officials in the communist regime or part of the economic halo that made its way with state property before during and after 1990. If you only look at the prime ministers they gave, 2 of the 4 participated in rather severe atrocities themselves, one was a latecomer but still a rather high official in the old regime, and definitely an economic beneficiary, and the fourth was in office for a few months only. So the people supporting Orbán (the unrelenting core, not the ones being swayed by whatever trends) are entirely right that with Socialist governments the old commies stayed in power directly (and that basically all of western media acts like this isn't the case - but that's another story). What they are wrong about is whether Orbán actually wants them to go away (and also whether his policies are generally sensible, but this is definitely secondary to them).
the first dude volunteered into the paramilitary organisation tasked with stamping out anti-soviet activity in 1956, and as far as I remember he's likely to have been present at occasions where these units shot into unarmed crowds, although I don't have the source for the latter, more specific claim right now and am not entirely sure it's correct. about the second dude I remembered somewhat wrongly, as he was a member of the external branch of the secret police, supposedly tasked with countering foreign agents, instead of the internal one, which was tasked with blackmailing random people into reporting about their friends to the state police. so he was probably personally less involved in the large-scale atrocity by the state police, only a member of the organisation committing it in an officer rank. and of course both of these became widely known only after they got elected. whether such affiliations qualify them as "bad people" is up to everyone's moral stance, but similar revelations are generally expected when electing "successor party" people in CEE
I don't consider this very fair assesment of Orban - couple of points which make Orban look better (or at least not so bad) from the perspective of the Czech (which means that Hungary is both locally and culturally close):
1) his huge advantage is that he (unlike his opposition) doesn't have communist past. He usually don't mention people from opposition by name, he says only "left"
2) all ordinary people in central and eastern Europe hate immigration from Islamic countries - it is seen as danger to our own culture
3) but they hate allocation quotas even more
4) Hungarian border wall was popular even here because it did divert the path of refugees
5) his described cronyism is quite normal here: his friends getting suspiciously rich? Normal. At least he himself doesn't profit billions
7) unlike Czech politicians he was vastly successful in all kind of negotiations with EU (partly because he was able to use to his advantage interests of German companies in Hungary - he may be dictator, but if he gets stuff done...)
8) he is true populist - he makes popular political decisions and he is vastly popular (as seen on his FB page, for which he had never any ads) - compare it with our own leaving PM who himself owned biggest newspaper in country and his business made got literally billions from state, he was never that popular. You can talk about being a dictator, but since 1998 elections Orban's Fidesz did always get at least 40% of votes, even when they lost.
9) his government handled Covid pretty well (started vaccination sooner etc) (yes, Hungarian numbers don't reflect it, but Hungary has quite old and obese population)
some points to history:
10) you make Gyurcsany seem like a nice guy even with his speech about lying all day and night - but he told it after elections in which his party retained position in government - so it took another 4 years before Orban got his landslide victory
11) Fidesz did prioritize getting media influence only after losing really badly in 1994 - unlike parties with post-communistic connections, Orban's party didn't have money and media influence (and then it kind of repeated in 2002 when Fidesz was predicted to win) - that's why Simicska built media empire (in 2005 BBC wrote "With the exception of the conservative Magyar Nemzet, all the political broadsheets have left-liberal leanings." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4068565.stm )
12) that said citation from NY is BS - Hungary's most viewed TV is RTL, which has been critical of Fidesz. And most popular news site 24.hu also doesn't support government
13) Simicska's media empire was actually against Fidesz before 2018 elections (supported Jobbik) , but when Fidesz won they came back to supporting Fidesz
P.S.: since it seems that opposition is really uniting in Hungary, I expect* Fidesz losing next elections (which will make this post age quite badly :) ), even then they will still be a party with biggest support in whole Europe.
* 55% confidence? (but don't take it too seriously, even though I'm officially a superforecaster ;) )
10) Fidesz' promises were no healthier for the budget. Either they would have followed through (in which case they would have continued the fuck-up, unsustainable deficit spending, Gyurcsány was referring to) or not (in which case they were lying just as much, they just never had a speech where they admit it get public).
Eventually yes. They didn't undo the previous government's austerity measures, which means they were lying when they called them unnecessary (and even traitorous). Whether their 2006 promises would have turned out to be lies had they won the election, or followed by irresponsible spending, we don't know (probably the former).
"The American equivalent would require 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress, which seems hard to do in these polarized days (though LBJ managed it, briefly)"
Plus 75% of the states ratifying the proposed amendment - there is a reason that the US only has a handful of amendments while states like CA and TX have over 500
Your retelling of the refugee crisis of 2015 irks me. Having volunteered at a makeshift shelter for a short time, and sorting donations for refugees for months in 2015, I've met a couple of people who went through Hungary at that time.
"When there was no food or tents left, they rioted" - your own image source, under the picture right after that sentence, tells this differently: Hungary, in violation of Schengen, erected a border fence and gate, refugees tried to break through, police responded with tear gas, the refugees started throwing stuff in retaliation. The article mentions at least two children being thrown over the fence by their desperate parents.
The image description in that article is "Refugees throw rocks, water bottles at Hungarian police, who respond with tear gas at the Röszke/Horgos border crossing."
You do not source your quote that you chose for yours, instead: “Muslim migrants [shouted] ‘Allahu akbar!’ as they set garbage bins on fire and jumped on cars in the parking lot outside the refugee camp” I assume this has happened at some point somewhere, but Google turns up nothing for that quote. You probably tried to keep this part dense and meshed together events. Your point is probably to make us see refugees with Hungarian nationalist eyes. But I think you're being actively dishonest here.
You ask "But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?" - I would offer one point you didn't mention, which is that there has been very little exposure to cultural diversity in the East, nothing compared to Western levels. Speaking of East Germany as that's what I know (from living here, and taking an active interest in this history, and having taken classes on the differences in the lives East and West, specifically): the foreign workers (from Vietnam, mostly, also Mozambique, Cuba and, guess what, Hungary) were segregated and often exploited, there was little integration going on, and very few managed to stay beyond their contracts. After the fall of the wall, immigrants coming to Germany started being allocated into East German counties by quotas, too, with lots of NIMBY-style backlash, political failures to house them and a series of violent racist attacks, one of which my home town of Rostock is world famous for.
I am guessing immigration to Hungary has been mostly from neighbouring countries until 2015, because Hungary didn't have a West Hungary that had an influx of immigrants from all over to distribute. As with the pogroms of the 90s in East Germany, this could be the backlash of (purposefully) badly-managed culturally/racially different immigrants to a population unused to them. Keep in mind that most were only trying to pass through - keep them from boarding trains, keep them without access to food, shelter, toilets and yes, the locals will not be happy with them.
Under a picture of the Hungarian border fence you ask "Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?" I assume this is a rhetorical question, but in case it wasn't: because 1. It's a proper fence, Trump's hasn't been. 2. Hungary is about three times more densely populated than the US, making it easier patrollable and more efficient. 3. There is no pre-existing economy dependent on exploitation of immigrants (at least, not those). 4. There's no pre-existing trafficking routes, drug trade etc for those refugees to use. 5. There's no large pre-existing community of people of the refugees' ethnicity for them to "disappear into" undetected. You can probably think of more reasons in that vein - to stop a long history of migration is harder than stopping a new, disorganized influx (that also has waned for unrelated reasons).
The border fence wasn't a violation of Schengen. Arguably it was a violation of the Geneva convention. But yeah, the post completely misunderstands the problems with refugees, who didn't riot or anything, and in fact got a lot of assistance from Hungarian citizens (hostility against refugees is largely a result of a relentless government propaganda campaign that happened *after* the refugee crisis).
My impression, inherited from Western European family, is that the EU and its constituents routinely condemn Orban as dictatorial (rightfully so) and decry his policies on everything, including immigration. But they're also grateful, whether secretly or openly, for his immigration policies. Whether you think "the problem" is the influx of immigrants and their behavior, or nativist reaction to and resentment of them - there's no question that increases in immigration have blown up European political systems and often vaulted right-wing parties to power. Obviously the right-wingers like Orban; but the leftish parties are also acutely aware that their hold on power depends on his policies. And nobody is actually eager to accept more immigrants, or to have tent cities on their borders. So a grudging gratitude for Orban's policies is the norm.
TL;DR: when it comes to immigration, the only thing Europe would detest more than Orban, is no Orban.
I understand this might sound like a conspiracy theory - "they might complain but they're secretly grateful!" is kind of an extraordinary claim. But as evidence, I'd direct people to consider the difference between grumbling about Orban, vs. loud complaining about Turkey allowing immigrants through to the West during the onset of the crisis. Western Europe's *revealed* preferences are very, very strongly for Orban's policies.
The issues with building a fence on the US border are, AIUI:
1. Unlike Hungary, the border is really long. We do have a fence in the places where it would be most useful, but a lot of the remaining length is too desert-y, environmental-damage-y or eminent-domain-y to be worth the trouble.
2. A fence isn't much good without guards to patrol it, and recruiting border guards who won't needlessly brutalize foreigners has been a recurring problem. Presumably this isn't a worry for Orban.
3. The most common way to become an illegal immigrant isn't "sneak across the desert in the dead of night," it's "overstay your visa," and a fence doesn't do anything for that.
Agreed strongly on 1 and 2. But re: 3 - is it some big talking point now that border crossings don't matter that much because more people overstay? Because it's been brought up many times on this thread, and it's ludicrous. Of course we should worry about both! And border crossings present unique and powerful concerns relative to visa overstay, justifying policies which prevent and discourage crossings.
Unvaccinated people sparking new COVID waves; security concerns; funding human trafficking; people dying on the way here - all of them are issues that rise and fall with illegal crossings, not visa overstay. It makes sense to prioritize border security and discourage crossings, regardless of how many Canadians overstay their visas.
Did I say "tear down the border wall and defund ICE?" No? Then I am worrying about both, I just think we currently have the right amount of worry about fences.
Also, "Unvaccinated people sparking new COVID waves" is like, the most hilariously transparent GOP talking point being circulated right now. Their party is full of all-American native antivaxxers, but god forbid a dirty foreigner come into this country without a vaccine!
To take Haiti, the country with the highest year-on-year increase of illegal crossings: 1% of Haitians have even one dose, uniquely bad among any non-African country. Either (a) vaccination is not significant to inhibiting spread, or (b) the significant number of Haitian immigrants currently crossing will result in increased Covid transmission in border communities. I think on balance, the evidence speaks in favor of (b).
Of course political actors are seizing on this to their own disingenuous ends - but that doesn't change the truth of it. The government is requiring everyone coming in on a visa to be vaccinated (negative test not sufficient starting 11/8). No such requirement holds of people crossing illegally. This has consequences. Disregarding them because they're politically useful to your opponents is just plain old confirmation bias.
Firstly, while I shouldn't have to point this out, Haiti is an island, and a border fence would do very little to prevent entry from there. That's my entire point, that fixating on physical barriers is missing the target.
>I think on balance, the evidence speaks in favor of (b).
Would you like to *share* this evidence? Do you have numbers on how many people have caught Covid that originated in Haiti?
>This has consequences.
Every action has "consequences" of some sort. Are they *significant* consequences? Consequences that are worth spending large amounts of money to prevent? Again, show some evidence.
I agree with you that a wall isn't the best way - again, I agree with 1 and 2. But if "your entire point" is that border security is irrelevant to Haitian immigration because Haiti is an island, your point is ignorant of recent events. Haitians are coming in record numbers, and they're coming through Mexico. That's how a large encampment of Haitians ended up under a bridge on the border, in case you missed that story too.
Evidence in favor of (b) - well, either vaccination rates affect transmission, or they don't. I think they do, based on the same studies the CDC looked at and the same data everyone's been arguing about. Allowing uniformly unvaccinated people to enter, with no tests and no knowledge of whether they even have the disease, lowers the overall vaccination rate and creates additional vectors for spread.
This has also been in the news, but in the same way that you didn't know about the rise in immigration from Haiti, I figure you haven't paid attention to this either. If you want evidence that it's not just a right-wing talking point, here's a July article from left-leaning WaPo talking about how spikes in COVID in immigrating populations have shaped the administration's policy and forced them to be tougher on immigration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/title-42-biden-border-covid/2021/07/28/aeeca526-efa7-11eb-ab6f-b41a066381df_story.html
So... the Biden administration thinks that the risk, and reality, of illegal immigrants spreading COVID is serious enough that they have *literally already taken action* based on that principle. So yes, I think that people who are actually informed on this issue agree that it is worth taking action to prevent.
Suppose that we concede that the US border wall is not an especially efficient way to reduce illegal immigration, and that if the US Government is interested in protecting its borders then there are far better ways to do it with less flashy but ongoing enforcement. Is there a way in which the border wall might still make sense?
I would argue yes. Why? Because Government in the US consists of a vast number of people pulling in different directions, and a great many of these people are _not_ interested in stopping illegal immigration, for one reason or another.
The most sensible and efficient ways of reducing illegal immigration require an ongoing commitment from various different organs of government, but can easily be sabotaged by the pro-illegal factions (e.g. "sanctuary cities"). Building a wall, on the other hand, is a permanent step you can take, that only needs to be achieved once, that can be achieved within one presidential term, and which doesn't require the buy-in of every single organ of government. It's like sober you putting a big lock on your liquor cabinet to stop drunk you from getting in there; it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.
But an unpatrolled wall *isn't* better than nothing. Not cost-of-a-wall better, at least.
The effort necessary to scale a wall is trivial compared to the gains expected by the would-be immigrants. Simplistically, the wall will delay them by the day or so it takes to buy a ladder and get it to the border, and the five minutes it takes to erect and scale the ladder. They're not going to be deterred by an extra day's effort. But the five minutes might matter, *if* there's a border guard four minutes away.
If the US government really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they'd go for the Nordic model. Force companies that are found to employ undocumented workers to top those employees' pay up to minimum wage. Go after landlords who provide housing that isn't up to standard.
Make sure that any information gathered never gets passed on to ICE or otherwise used directly against the immigrants.
> But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
This question disappears if you stop defining the West as the US plus a few Western countries. The Hungarian position is mainstream in Eastern Europe and has significant popularity in the Western countries, too (even Germany -- unless I have ended up in a bubble of my own). The US shouldn't be a comparison, as the differences between the refugees (South Americans vs. Arabs/Afghanis/Africans) go far beyond language, and as the expectation of security and urban functioning is a lot higher in Europe than in the US. I'd say Germany and Sweden are the two outliers here, not Hungary and Poland. Germany is a case of incredible political inertia: I won't be surprised if the migration crisis finally launches the Right into power in 2035 because none of the issues around crime and housing (I don't think the "taking our jobs" is a big thing in Germany) will be resolved by then; nor will I be surprised if it does so with a majority of the 2015 immigrants' votes. Sweden seems to have cooled on immigration as well, if Malcom Kyeyune isn't exaggerating ( https://unherd.com/2021/09/swedens-cultural-revolution/ ).
Orban's popularity post 2015 is no mystery to me at all; it's his pre-2015 success that worries me.
But Orban is also unique in how he can be treated by the international community.
If he isnt an ideologue and is smart and willing enough to change his mind and his policies, then perhaps he can be reasoned with to pivot his policies towards more 'common good' ideas
I don't mean liberalism here, just sounder economic policies/experiments. Orban's stance seems to be that he isn't willing to take chances with him winning,
But anything that might let hold onto power/deepen his wealth, would be amenable to him..
It would at least be more unexpected a play than the current EU negotiation playbook that Orban has already dismissed.
Fidesz moved to the right around 1993, but it wasn't usually considered far-right within the Hungarian political palette. Since the mid-2010s it has shifted farther right.
Gyurcsány definitely didn't mean the previous government in his infamous speech. He made it shortly after the 2006 elections that he won; "the last one-and-a-half, two years" referred to his own government (he'd became PM in 2004). The "fuck-up" and "lies" referred to holding off the austerity measures until after the elections, and pretending that the deficit spending was sustainable. OTOH Fidesz promised even more in terms of reckless spending, and bashed the budget cuts all the while they bashed Gyurcsány for the "fuck-up", so in some ways it was the pot calling the kettle black.
Amending the Constitution never took a 4/5 majority. What I could find about this is that there was some rule that some step towards writing an entirely new consitution took a 4/5 majority; Fidesz proceeded to write a new constitution after removing this rule. But they could have done pretty much the same thing by amending the old constitution beyond recognition.
As far as I understand, the anti-migrant sentiment was mostly a top-down thing, created by Fidesz's fear-mongering. Previously, many Hungarians hated the Gypsies, some hated the Jews, but even on the far-right, but immigration was a low-priority question even on the far-right. And the Syrian refugees were mostly passing through Hungary, trying to go to Western Europe, rather than stay in Hungary. (But I have moved from Hungary by then, and I haven't followed the Hungarian situation very closely since then, so I'm not sure about the order of the events between people fearing the refugees and Fidesz starting its propaganda.)
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
On the off chance that this isn't a rhetorical question, Hungary's southern border (the one with the fence) is 523 km long and the Hungarian border patrol has 12,000 men. The US border patrol has 21,370 agents but the US-Mexican border is 3,145 km long. As I think we discussed back on SSC a few times, walls and fences only serve to delay crossings, hopefully long enough for actual border guards to show up. The guards stop people from crossing the border, the barrier is a force multiplier (and you get most of the available multiplication from a good three-meter fence) Hungary has three times as many border guards per kilometer of contested border.
Also, I suspect Hungarian border guards don't need to spend nearly as much time filling out paperwork when they just shoot some poor SOB trying to cross the border, or on a good day beat them up and throw them back, which is another sort of force multiplier.
A wall in itself won't work. But a wall is both a symbolic and practical indication of intention. If you want to control your borders, and there are elements within the state who want to disintegrate them, a wall of some kind is necessary, otherwise you demonstrate that you do not have the ability to resist those elements.
The number of US border guards is set by congress. Independent of CBP's budget, they are authorized exactly 21,370 agents - hiring agent #21,371 would be illegal, and if #21,370 quits it is I think illegal not to at least pretend you're immediately trying to hire a replacement. So if you want to bring the US up to par with Hungary, you'd need to have Congress pass a law saying "OK. CBP gets 72,160 border guards".
So if you really want to keep illegal immigrants out of the US, you'd want a Republican President with a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and the sense to say "OK, we're going to need a decent fence and an extra 50,000 guards, I should ask for that in the next budget".
"I suspect Hungarian border guards don't need to spend nearly as much time filling out paperwork when they just shoot some poor SOB trying to cross the border"
- lol, are you mistaking Hungary for wild west? They shoot warning shots and in extraordinary situations like when immigrants are trying to force the way, they use rubber bullets
On the topic of Hungary's Hunnic heritage, Attila actually is a pretty interesting figure. He really reads like the love interest from a romance novel.
Attila, the barbarian king, has dear ties to the Romans: their great general, Flavius Aëtius, spent his exile living with and learning from the Huns, and he has aided the empire in several campaigns. But then, his aid is asked in a very strange way. Honoria, the sister of Emperor Valentinian, sends Attila her engagement ring and a plea to free her from an arranged marriage to a repellent senator.
Attila, naturally enough for the love interest of a romance novel, interprets this as a proposal of marriage to him, and graciously accepts, asking only half the empire as his dowry. Aghast, the Emperor writes to Attila denying that his sister was really proposing to Attila, but Attila responds that he will not allow Valentinian to gainsay his sister and so besmirch her honor. Attila begins to march towards Rome at the head of a vast army.
Meanwhile, Valentinian is irate at his sister Honoria for precipitating the invasion, and plans to have her executed. However, their mother, Galla Placidia pleads with him to spare Honoria, and Valentinian relents, sentencing her to exile instead.
The defense of the Roman Empire is entrusted to General Aëtius, Attila's old friend. Attila's army is formidable, razing cities where it passes — though it can be turned aside by priestly intercession, since Attila respects the power of the Catholic Church. Aëtius harries Attila's army, driving them back for a time, but at last Attila reaches Rome itself. The Pope himself comes out, flanked by the highest civilians of Rome, and persuades Attila to make peace. Attila, persuaded by the Pope (and disease and starvation in his army) accepts and returns home, to later attack the largely-unrelated Eastern Roman Empire.
> To that end, he - probably sarcastically - opened Hungary to “genuine refugees”, by which he meant refugees from globalism [...]. A few right-wingers took him up on it and resettled in Hungary. Potentially his most famous admirer is former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who’s been going back and forth to Hungary as part of his plan to build a populist network across Europe.
> I’m on the fence about how exaggerated this is.
This might be unfair of me, but — do the comments on this post shift where you are on that fence?
3. Is there an expiration date when supporting palestinians' territorial claims vs Israel becomes far-right irredentism? Or Tibet's territorial claims? By the dictionary definition all the colonial independence movements were irredentist. Allies splitting up Hungary with the stroke of a pen in 1920 was kinda like the UK splitting up Africa with the stroke of a pen. I don't mind the status quo borders, but I sympathize with the Hungarians who are pissed.
4. "Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party"
What does a "personal connection to [Fidesz]" mean? Anyone among your close friends or family is a party member? By that standard one could probably say that 99% of US media are owned or controlled by people a personal connection to the DNC. If the standard is that either the owner or controller must himself be a registered democrat, maybe that number comes down to 90%. I've seen data that 96% of political donations from journalists go to the DNC.
5. "Viktor Orban shocked Europe by saying no. Not no as in “we agree with your grand vision but we request that you lower our quota”. No as in “haha, as if”."
For all his other flaws, this was the best thing about Orban: standing up to the EU on immigration and not letting them bully Hungary into becoming yet another multicultural melting pot. 90% of white countries is more than enough for the multicultural experiment. Let's let Hungary and Poland be the control group. There's no fundamental reason Ethnonationalism can't be compatible with liberal democracy. I wish we could get some relatively normal politicians who were that hawkish on immigration and otherwise mostly libertarian.
6. "Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
I suspect bad faith arguments from people who want to allow as much illegal immigration as possible but won't admit it openly. Every other country I have data on that built a border wall saw levels of illegal border crossings go down a lot. Even the US saw a large drop coincident with its construction of a border fence in the 2000's. If it was only yet another billion dollar useless pork barrel project, the DNC would have acquiesced to it to avoid a long government shutdown that was much more costly than the wall would have been. They knew what they were doing. Biden knows what he's doing by stopping arrests of illegal immigrants in the interior of the country (unless they have a long rap sheet of other crimes). It's a big game of red rover. If you get through, you can stay. Biden doesn't actually want to reduce illegal immigration because it benefits his party. The American people never got to have a real debate and political process for deciding whether they wanted to become a minority in their own homeland. Politicians just elected a new people by looking the other way for decades. A border wall would have been a more permanent barrier, not subject to the whims of an administration that wants to look the other way.
7. "It so completely outflanked Jobbik that they gave up on being neo-Nazi and switched to being a moderate pro-EU party that “rejects hatemongering” (what is it with Hungarian parties changing their whole platform?)"
The former is what hostile outsiders called them, and the latter is what they called themselves. More than half of the change is probably in the perspective rather than in the referent. I don't know anything about Jobbik, or if they were ever actually neo-nazis, but I know most of the media can't be trusted to tell me if they were, since journalists cry wolf so often. Also wikipedia has a tendency to cherrypick the worst epithet that any journalist ever published about a right wing figure. Then other journalists who don't know any better copy wikipedia. So a symbiosis of wikipedia editors and bad journalists basically get to invent facts this way. In 2016 Stefan Molyneux was just an anarcho-capitalist who advocated peaceful parenting on his youtube channel. But after five years of the dysphemism treadmill applied to all immigration restrictionists in an extremely politicized media he's a nazi, allegedly. Also he's falsely alleged to be a "cult leader" just because he suggests people with abusive parents should consider cutting off contact instead of enduring abuse out of a sense of duty or societal expectations or whatever.
8. My hope is that the experience of Trump and Orban has shown that being hawkish on immigration is wildly popular, and some more-normal and more-competent politicans will follow that incentive gradient so that we can get some immigration restriction without the downsides of those two. Maybe we can even get the libertarian party to stop advocating the mass importation of people that disproportionately oppose libertarian policies.
10. "Overall I agree with Lyman that maybe Orban has boosted the fertility rate by 0.1 - 0.2 children per women, certainly no more. And this is by bringing out all the stops - transforming the entire culture and spending heaps of money on the project. I’m not sure this really provides some kind of exciting proof that conservative policies work, even if you’re only looking at the fertility rate."
This is a good point and I have updated away from blaming low fertility on liberal views of sex and gender.
11. "I also have to recommend banning court-packing, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. I can’t stress enough how many descents into dictatorship go through something like that, and how much it’s a gaping security hole in our current system."
"Viktor Orban is a man who almost automatically believes in the veracity of whatever he considers to be politically useful to him"
I mean, if we're going to be rude about that, how about all the politicians who were very much pro-defence of marriage and then, when the polls showed a shift, those same politicians were suddenly very pro-gay marriage?
Maybe they all genuinely had a change of heart. Or maybe some of them didn't give a damn one way or the other, but if the focus group says "the public likes blue", then they came out with "my favourite colour is blue!" and then five years later "my favourite colour is brown! orange! purple!"
Probably a bit of both. If the timing of the public perception change fit a bell curve, and the politicians were very compressed into the center of the bell curve, that would sort of quantify how much the politicians were probably lying.
The views of much of the population also changed, so it's not exactly inconceivable that the views of many politicians also changed around the same time.
Also, how many politicians were "very much pro-defence of marriage and then," and then became "suddenly very pro-gay marriage", rather than just not discussing the topic much either then or now?
This is what the more honest politicians would do: just avoid talking about the subjects where they hold unpopular views. Even if it's necessary to get elected, I think it's wrong to reinforce a false belief among the public by pretending to agree.
4) What really matters is that they spew centrally decided propaganda that's designed to maximally help Fidesz and smear the opposition. They aren't even independent right-wing media that agree with Fidesz more often than not; they are pro-Fidesz propaganda organs. This includes the publicly funded government broadcaster as well as formerly independent right-wing or centrist media, while some left-wing media were shut down.
7) "I don't know anything about Jobbik, or if they were ever actually neo-nazis" If you don't know anything about Jobbik, then how do you claim to know that "The former is what hostile outsiders called them, and the latter is what they called themselves"? Sure, you shouldn't trust when left-wing media says they were neo-nazis, so you may not know, but that doesn't mean you know they weren't, or that you know what they were saying about themselves. They wouldn't have said that they were a moderate pro-EU party in the 2000s or the early 2010s at all. Neo-nazi is an overstatement but not by much; they definitely become much more moderate in the last few years (some members left because of it), at least in rhetoric (I don't know what goes on inside their minds), as Fidesz moved farther to the right.
quoting wikipedia: "In 2014, the party was described as an "anti-Semitic organization" by The Independent and a "neo-Nazi party" by the president of the European Jewish Congress.[39] From 2015 to 2020 (amidst increasingly hardline rhetoric from Fidesz), the party started to re-define itself as a more moderate conservative people's party and changed the controversial elements of its communication, culminating with its new declaration of principles now defining itself as a centre-right, pro-European party with some residual moderated nationalist tendencies (the position Fidesz originally occupied). According to the party's "Declaration of Principles", Jobbik will "always focus on the interests of Hungary and the Hungarian people instead of a political group or an ideology. On the other hand, [Jobbik] reject[s] hatemongering and extreme political views that are contrary to Christian values and ethics."[40]"
Also I have a prior that groups tend to use slightly-more-charitable-than-the-truth terms to describe themselves, while hostile journalists and NGOs from the opposite end of the political spectrum tend to use much-less-charitable-than-the-truth terms.
>Haha, no, he decided to destroy Gyurcsany harder than anyone had ever been destroyed before. Without leaking the speech, Orban started shifting the frame, starting a PR campaign around the idea of the Socialists as liars. When the Socialists said they weren't, then Orban leaked the speech.
>He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts. Left-wing voters were crammed into a few very large districts; likely Fidesz voters were put into many much smaller ones.
This is not gerrymandering. This is malapportionment. Gerrymandering (drawing a bunch of equal-population districts in an unequal way) is strictly less bad than malapportionment (drawing districts with unequal population); malapportionment at the extremes allows a literal aristocracy (give each aristocrat a one-voter seat, to which he will elect himself, and stuff everyone else into a single seat), while gerrymandering cannot be used to hold onto power with less than 25% of the vote (50%+1 of voters in 50%+1 of districts). Gerrymandering is more common than malapportionment in Western countries, because malapportionment is generally unconstitutional (though Joh Bjelke-Petersen performed malapportionment in Queensland), but the distinction is important and shouldn't be elided.
Point of order, Joh Bjelke-Petersen didn't start the malappoirtionment of Queensland. It was originally malapportioned by the Labor Party in 1949, but over time the Labor base became more urbanised so it wound up benefiting the Country Party instead.
As I understand it, Bjelke-Petersen kept the existing malapportionment system (which allowed geographically enormous areas to have fewer people) but shifted around the exact borders to benefit his party.
>The Hungarians believe themselves to be the descendants of proud steppe nomads.
>Realistically this is all false. Some steppe nomads conquered Hungary in the 9th century, but their lineage soon died out, probably through centuries of bloody warfare. The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.
Isn't continuity of language more evidence of continuity of culture than is continuity of genes?
Is there a big difference here between mostly-genetic-German Hungarians believing they are descendants of Attila vs. some other mostly-genetic-Germans believing they are descendants of Abraham?
Coming from Poland, another country that likes refugees even less than Hungary - all the reasons you mentioned are valid, but the most important one you need to understand is - we saw the shitshow already happening in Western EU and we want none of it.
EU as a whole fails terribly at integrating immigrants into the host societies.
In any case, this doesn't explain why post-socialist Central European countries seem to be *more* opposed to letting in refugees than Western European countries. Whatever shitshow Central Europeans see happening in Western Europe, Western Europeans must see it too (except if it's exaggerated by Central European media).
You don't understand: in Western Europe, where we see the situation every day, media have wildly different political positions, and school programs are not directly controlled by political leaders, we are all indoctrinated. So indoctrinated that we refuse to believe our own eyes when evaluating integration!
You know instead who is not indoctrinated about the situation in western Europe? Hungarians and Poles. Sure, their government shuts down media they don't like with force. Sure, what it taught in schools is heavily decided by the government. Sure, they have seen Western Europe with their own eyes only as tourists. But because of their magical power, they still know our situation better than us! Isn't that just incredible (in the etymological meaning)?
Unless you are arguing as much in bad faith as the Polish government, you can't seriously see the new media law as anything but a way to shut down TVN, which just happens to be both the only company affected and the only broadcaster consistently anti-government
I was surprised there was no mention of Orban's hatred of George Soros, using him as a scapegoat when any problem in the EU comes up. Before the elections, Fidesz spread anti-Soros billboards throughout the country. Orban wants people to believe that Soros is literally building an evil empire inside EU. This rhetoric is also often latently anti-semitic.
Funnily enough, Orban studied in Oxford thanks to a scholarship awarded by Soros himself. Soros even donated money to Fidesz in the early nineties. This was all before Orban's metamorphosis.
Was that article the example of anti-semitism, or is there some other examples?
As far as I'm able to read from this article, it's just Orban accusing Soros of orchestrating a network that undermines traditional values (using his money), and Soros accusing Orban of orchestrating a network that undermines progressive-liberal values (using his cronies), in a cycle that appears to go back quite a while. Orban also accuses Soros of being a bandit, merely because Soros had once crashed the British Pound for fun and profit. While that did happen, the accusation is still quite *colorful* when considering what the word "bandit" is normally taken to mean. Orban is in turn accused of being corrupt (which is correct - and not too uncommon outside of a few nordic countries) and a dictator (also quite colorful, when considering what the word "dictator" is normally taken to mean).
It's a pretty nice-looking structure. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the economic justification for this privately funded stadium is other than making the Prime Minister pleased.
What if Orban isn't a Fascist, what if he's just a politician who is maybe slightly to the left of JFK's favorite mayor, Richard J. Daley?
> what if he's just a politician who is maybe slightly to the left of JFK's favorite mayor, Richard J. Daley?
Touche :). Informing myself about the said old-school gentleman - and a highly proficient political-machine operator, to boot - has been most instructive. Not least as a reminder that back then, being a Democrat might simply have meant that you were a Catholic, and not necessarily that you were soft-on-crime (+ hard-on-thoughtcrime). What a different generation.
As for the category of "bespoke football stadiums named after gov'nors built in their quaint provincial hometowns," we could also add the Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium in Graz, Austria. At least that's what it had been for a few years. That romance had ended in 2005 when Arnold refused to grant the pardon from death row to the founder of the L.A. Crips gang.
although the rhetoric is called "latently anti-semitic" by Orban's critics, objectively speaking Orban had an exceptional relationship with Netanjahu and I believe that Hungary has been ranked the second safest country for Jews in Europe (after the Czech Republic).
Orban's refusal to help out the German Chancellor after she decided in 2015 upon a whim with no effective consultation with other EU members to invite into Europe a million young Muslim men is often implied to be proof of Orban's anti-Semitism.
From a different perspective, however, one could argue that Orban was helping protect Hungary's Jews from anti-Semitic attacks, such as those in France.
I don't follow that much of the rhetoric, and there's rhetoric like that in the US too, or has been. It's a fuzzy line where "legitimate criticism" ends and "latent antisemitism" begins. Critics of Israel are accused of being anti-Semitic, and they will respond that criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism. And I think depending on the speaker, it may or may not be motivated reasoning, but you have to be able to abstract the arguments and facts of the matter from the speakers and the hypotehtical motivations, and judge them on their factual merit.
It's like that with Soros. Does his organization, or he personally, fund this or that? Is it problematic, is it extra-legal, does it undermine this or that? All arguments to have. They would be relevant and he should be open to criticism regardless of his ethnicity.
Much of the anti-Orban writings in the West tend to have as their basis in logic the notion that to criticize George Soros is, rather than being an expression of the Open Society that Soros has long campaigned for, is impermissible because Soros is ethnically Jewish and therefore any effective criticism of Soros and his multitudinous political operations is anti-Semitic and thus verboten.
That kind of thinking -- the political actions of politically active billionaires must be above criticism if they are Jewish and left of center -- strikes me as rather anti-liberal. But what do I know?
Re: steppe nomad origin theory. A classically over-politicized, but ultimately undecidable historical question. While it seems undeniable that 9th century Hungarians did come from the east as steppe nomads, who _exactly_ those steppe nomads were is a question that does tie in to politics (a sort of identity politics, albeit a different one to the one in the US).
Take language, for example. The claim that modern Hungarian is a descendant of a proto Finno-Ugric is/was contested by groups who claim that '“Finno-Ugrism” was devised to serve the political goals of Habsburg and, later on, Soviet imperialism' (quote from here https://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/antifqa.html ), basically robbing the local populace from the "more noble" Turk origin. You can read more about it on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_theories_of_Hungarian_language_origins ), but if you see that someone with no Hungarian roots takes the time to put together a FAQ on this issue, then you can be sure this is a serious issue for some. Now, my guess is that these views are not shared by most of population: going to festivals portrayed in the photo is a fringe activity, at best -- and probably strongly correlated with your political views, that is, you would find probably zero liberals at these events.
Really? All the Gauls were eliminated by the Romans? I didn’t think the Romans had a high enough birthrate to do anything like that. If anything Rome itself was a population sink.
I think it’s perfectly fair to associate yourself with a genetic as well as a cultural legacy. If I didn’t I’d consider my self English, but I don’t - I consider myself Irish.
The Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language is firmly established in Hungary as well (to the consternation of some on the far right), but genetically they seem less related, so a lot comes down to how you define "origin".
A few points on EU immigration policies that seem not to have been noticed by non-European ACT readers:
EU refugee migration is regulated according to the so-called Dublin agreement. The core point is that a refugee must seek asylum in the first EU country he/she enters.
This means that if you have a large border with a non-EU country, EU countries further inland can send refugees back to wherever they first entered. Since Hungary has a border with non-EU countries, the Hungarians risk being stuck with refugees, even if the refugees themselves would prefer to move further West or North. (The problem is even larger in countries like Italy and Spain.)
…A North American equivalent would be if there had been an agreement between Canada, US and Mexico that refugees could be returned to the country of “first entry” – which would usually be Mexico. For obvious reasons, Mexico would not have been happy with such an agreement (and EU countries bordering on non-EU countries, including bordering on the Mediterranean, have also tried – so far unsuccessfully- to change the Dublin agreement).
Are other EU countries secretly “happy” about the Hungarian border fence, as some commentators suggest? Well, because of Dublin, they should not really care that much, since they can legally send refugees crossing from Hungary back to Hungary.
Notice that it therefore makes sense for Hungary to build a fence, since they risk being stuck with refugee migrants thanks to Dublin.
...Which can also explain why the Poles now build a similar fence at the border of non-EU Belarus.
On the moral issue: The main ethical dilemma in EU does not concern Hungary, but EU money channelled to sometimes rather brutal governments or even paramilitary gangs in so-called “transit countries”, to prevent refugees originating in the Sahel region or beyond from reaching EU territories.
The support of Libyan paramilitary groups is particularly tricky, but difficult to avoid (if you want to prevent refugees from reaching EU land) since Libya is a failed state at the moment, i.e., no government holds the monopoly on violence in the territory (=Max Weber’s classic definition of a state).
..a US equivalent would be if the US paid rulers in countries further South to prevent migrants moving Northwards - by whatever means they chose. Less ethically tricky though, since the US would not have to make deals with very unsavoury paramilitary groups in lieu of a government (like in Libya).
The Belarus situation is interesting because the Belarussian army is literally transporting these people across the country, promising them safe passage then dumping them at our border into barbed wire and armed guards. Everyone is understandably upset about it, most of all the scammed refugees, and this is a very much manufactured crisis with likely involvement from Putin et al.
I find it interesting from a rationalist perspective that Scott would object more to Orban for rationally but unauthentically adopting the platform that would bring him support and popularity, than to other 21st century leaders/dictators who were (at least in part) ideologues who got swept into power by being in the right place at the right time.
Should we give more credit to the principled over the rational actor? For me the answer could be yes, but it depends on what your principles are.
This is what I was thinking as well. Hard to see how this kind of populism is a negative thing as opposed to just keeping your ear to the ground.
Especially the metaphor about running focus groups and adopting the outcomes, what's so evil about that? I would say it even puts a dent in the dictator narrative. Is Erdoğan a less evil dictator because he sticks to his guns?
"All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud" . . . and how is this different than in many U.S. states post-pandemic?
In the US, only one wing of one party suspects rampant voter fraud, and only suspects it in the states where they lost, and when they took their suspicions to court and made their case to judges *appointed by that party,* they got nowhere.
So Orban has amassed all this power, didassembled the checks of democracy. I keep waiting for him to do something evil with it, but it doesn't seem to have happened. Or I don't know about it, I guess. Has he done something directly harmful to ordinary Hungarians? Has he destroyed their economy or security in some way? You could say he was bad to immigrants, but that seems to enjoy widespread public support there, so chalk that up to democracy.
Not that I think disassembling democracy is not a bad thing, I'm just not sure why you would do it unless you wanted to do something the public is opposed to. Is it just thirst for power by an individual?
So what you're saying is, that unless you jeopardize security or economy of ordinary Hungarians, it's fine? By this logic, a dictatorship exercising censorship, political processes, closed borders etc. is fine too, right?
Not sure what would classify as evil in your book. In Orbanistan, journalists and academics cannot criticize him or they'll be kicked out and nobody will employ them. The newspapers and TV are in his/his cronies` pockets. LGBT rights are suppressed. But sure, he is not Pinochet nor Pol Pot, there is no genocide, no political murders. So I guess all is well?
I don't think all is well. I think threatening democracy is one of the worst things a leader can do, and a fantastic reason to kick him out. What I'm wondering is what things he wants to do with that power, which aren't widely supported by the people. Because if there aren't such things, why would he need all that power?
I think the main problem with lack of democracy is its potential to lead to horrendous things that the people would never have wanted. That's why I'm distinguishing "procedural" things like suppressing journalism and opposition (which are mostly bad because they threaten democracy and could lead to direct harm) from actual direct harm to the population.
Harming LGBT citizens would qualify as direct harm, except I don't know if it doesn't enjoy popular support in Hungary (unfortunately, it certainly does in many places, and did in almost all places until a few decades ago), in which case it is again something which could have happened without subverting democracy.
So why does he do it? Personal enrichment? Desire for power? Are there other things he passed which are extremely unpopular? Did I manage to explain my question?
I think I understand what you mean. Sorry if I sounded confrontational needlessly.
While I am hardly an expert, I can offer a long-term view of an interested central-European citizen. A part of Orban's motivations can surely be attributed to the central premise of every dictator (according to The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce de Mesquita): "Leaders do whatever keeps them in power". Orban has demonstrated plenty of times that he is ready to change his ideological position from one extreme to another if it suits his public image. In this respect, he is not too different from a large number of populists in other EU countries.
Secondly, I would say that several of his actions are motivated by an effort to raise Hungary to prominence inside the EU, making its voice important as it once was during the imperial era. Hungary is a pretty small country with 10 million inhabitants and its weight inside EU is comparable to Austria, Czechia, Sweden, etc and not the important players (Germany, France, Italy, ...). However, sentiments of a pre-Trianon era are still alive in Hungarian society and Orban fuels them often. (For example, he has a huge map of Hungary from 19. century in his office which he happily shows to visiting prime ministers from other countries). They want to feel like an important power again. To do this, Orban tries to portray Hungary as the "savior of christian Europe" - saving it from Ottomans in the past, and now saving it from muslim immigrants. In my opinion, he is relatively successful in building his image in conservative media, although his power to influence processes inside EU is quite limited.
Thirdly, his motivations connected to internal politics, which is what you were probably mostly interested in - unfortunately, I just do not know enough about Hungarian politics to know this. Perhaps a Hungarian ACT reader who is reading this can say.
Also, some of his populist economic policies involving ex post facto laws would have likely been found unconstitutional by an independent supreme court.
My impression is that a lot of the outrage by Western liberals toward populist democracies in Central Europe like Hungary and Poland is that:
A. State media is a big part of the media
B. The elected officials act as if winning elections mean they can hire their own people at state media rather than just submit to their political enemies maintaining their sinecures forever, the way that, say, NPR never changes politically no matter who wins or loses elections in the U.S.
It's important to write about dictators' rise to power through democratic means, and it's a great hook. But I wonder, is it in some sense lacking to look at the individual people, and not the entire country? Seems like it's not the work of an individual alone, and there are certainly structural factors in the country as a whole which contribute to these rises (many people vote for them, most people don't violently resist the government, ...). I wonder if there's more to learn by a more holistic analysis of the countries involved.
There has been some debate on the precise nature of the loophole. But I'm pretty convinced the issue centered on amendments to the amendment process itself:
> As Syrians began trickling in, Orban watched the neo-Nazi Jobbik Party’s polling numbers go up and up, until they started to look like a serious competitor. But they only had one issue, and Orban could easily steal it from them. So he did.
Loopholes aside, it's hilarious that selfish, power-hungry populists are among the most effective centrists in a democratic system, because they care about winning elections above any ideological commitment. (See also: Trump's embrace of non-interventionism and protectionism which for the past 40+ years had been mostly Democratic talking points.)
>I also have to recommend banning court-packing, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. I can’t stress enough how many descents into dictatorship go through something like that, and how much it’s a gaping security hole in our current system.
I agree, but I don't know if that's enough.
One time in DC, I sat down to eat dinner at a restaurant and happened to be about three feet away from John Roberts, in the next booth over. And the thought I couldn't get out of my head was: good lord, it would be so easy to assassinate him right now. He had no security -- not nearby, and not anywhere around the room, unless they were in plain clothes and tremendously convincing actors.
It's absolutely insane that such a vitally important individual hangs on by such a thread wherever he goes. Far and away the greatest risk to the political future of the country, in my mind, is that someone will perform a coordinated assassination of politically hostile Supreme Court justices to leave openings for an Orbanesque president to simply take over the entire Court. Sure, a Biden-type would probably appoint three moderate Republicans as a gesture toward bipartisanship, but I doubt someone like Trump would.
I'm not sure how we mitigate this. Something like "mandate at least 3 justices of each political party on the Court" would seem the best option, but then political affiliation becomes another checkpoint that can be systematically undermined quite easily, considering political party membership can be switched at will.
It's not guaranteed - the would-be Orban would have to have the approval of the Senate as well, and he has no way to compel the loyalty of the justices once they're appointed - but I agree it's a risk.
One suggestion I've seen for removing the problem of "you appoint as many justices as happen to die while you're in office" is to give the justices 18-year staggered terms, one replaced every 2 years. If you know you're guaranteed to get 2 appointments during your term, that reduces the incentive to "help them out the door."
I just want to note the (anti-)rhyming of history, that (victor) orban is a hungarian who built a wall to keep out muslims, and orban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban) was a hungarian who built cannons so that muslims could get through the walls of constantinople.
I don't know a lot about Orban or Hungary but it seems kind of wack to me to declare him a psychopath capable of anything when you don't even list him ordering any assassinations or mass killings or running torture camps, all of which are things recent dictators have done and are doing
"There’s an urban legend about a test for psychopaths. Usually the test is some kind of riddle that can only be solved by killing a person for some completely stupid reason - the one I remember hearing involved how to meet with one of your father’s friends, without your father knowing, when you don’t have their contact info - and the answer was to kill your father and assume he would come to the funeral. I assume none of these tests work at all, but the assumption behind them is that if you’re evil enough, it you have more possibilities in your solution set than normal people.
This is what I think of when I look at Orban. He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them. I imagine that being Orban feels puzzling, like everyone else is leaving low-hanging fruit on the ground constantly. He’s a fascinating psychological specimen, but everyone else needs to up their game and stop leaving things open for people like him to take advantage of."
> He granted the franchise to Hungarians living abroad. Remember, the Treaty of Trianon took 2/3 of Hungarian territory and gave it to neighboring countries (especially Slovakia and Romania). Lots of ethnic Hungarians still live on that land; Orban gave them all voting rights. Their situation made them natural irredentists and nationalists, plus Orban was the only person who thought it was reasonable to let them vote, so in all subsequent elections they have voted 95%+ for Fidesz. Or something. All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud.
Italy does this too. I was born in the US and have never lived in Italy, but gained Italian citizenship by blood. After learning of my existence, the Italian consulate has started sending me ballots to vote for my US-based Italian parliament representative. That is, portions of the world outside of Italy are also districts in the Italian parliament(!)
I'd never thought of the political implications of this very much. The messaging about which party I was supposed to give my undying loyalty to as a result of this never made it to me.
I'm allowed to vote by mail instead of driving 500 miles to the consulate, so I have to assume I'm a favored group. Hmm....
It was the most annoying possible thing, actually.
None of us had any idea that I was a citizen. My parents had visited Italy once and brought me with them while I was an infant, and I guess that's how they learned about me. Then they populated me in some database in the town my parents were born in. Then when I turned 18, people from the armed services in that town started hitting my relatives up demanding to know my whereabouts because, according to their system I was now a draft dodger. My relatives insisting "he has never lived here, he's in the US" was not good enough for them.
So I had to gather a bunch of documentation in the US, have it internationally notarized, submit it to the Italian consulate in the US, and then they stopped hassling my relatives. They also gave me a letter to present to border agents in Italy in case I ever wanted to visit, which basically said please don't arrest me for draft dodging I am domiciled in the US.
Anyway, after that I started getting ballots in the mail for Italian elections.
I am a long time reader who did not like this article, it's tone was much less balanced than your previous work, and reading it felt like the analysis was below your usual standards. I don't have any Gell-Mann amnesia because I suspect that Orban's actions hit closer to home in a western democracy, "this could happen here" elicits more of reaction than a sober charting of the course of a Modi or Erdogan.
Nevertheless I reject the part III characterisation of Orban as a dictator for the following
1. "There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted."
Orban used his democratically elected two-thirds majority to amend the constitution, through the procedures established by a democratic constitution. Maybe, if the content of those amendments was "I am now the eternal president and cannot be removed even after I am dead and this clause may never be removed from the constitution" but the mere fact of amending the constitution, in a European civil law context where this is normal means exactly nothing.
2. "He passed a new law saying he could fire any civil servant at will, then fired people in key positions and replaced them with his cronies and college buddies. He made sure everyone knew that their continued employment was dependent on his good will"
The independent civil service, which in the modern world is how most of government is actually done, is normally subject to no democratic oversight or constraint whatsoever. I am not sure how amending this makes one a dictator, in reality it seems he is bending the power of the state to his will (which, given his democratic election, is the mediated will of the people). The idea that the civil service can never be interfered with by politicians is a *non-democratic* concept.
What Orban is doing is not even a novelty, it was the normal practice of the United States for most of its history. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system> Is Orban's spoils system a likely occasion for corruption and incomptence? Yes. Is it dictatorial? No.
3. Media Control
I accept that Orban is using every possible advantage here to benefit himself and his party. Nevertheless media organs favouring one party over another is hardly exclusive to Hungary, and the country has a free press, social media and tolerates dissent. If those things were fiddled with the dictatorial claim would have some weight.
Orban introduced reforms to the electoral system in 2012, this "reduced" anomalous differences in the population of districts. Your source seems to assert that the districts where likely fidesz voters live are all slightly smaller than districts where other voters live, but it states openly that it lacks the data to make a real determination.
Further, it states of the gerrymandering claim:
"Fidesz won 45% of the votes in the individual constituencies in 2014 and yet got 88% of the seats. The effects of the gerrymander, even on the rough analysis above, assisted massively in producing such a disproportionate effect."
I'm sorry but a 20% margin across the entire country, in a first past the post system, is going to produce a result like that without any manipulation at all. I am unwilling to trust a source like this. If the opposition to Orban were not divided, this would not have happened, but it is and that is a problem for the opposition and not Orban to solve.
Of the overseas Hungarians, these amounted to around 120,000 votes in a franchise of over 5 million, this is hardly a corruption of democracy, whatever the legitimacy of the actions is.
I don't see how any of this makes Orban a dictator, he has certainly undermined the checks on democracy, and is facilitating a system open for corruption and future degredation of democracy itself. Nevertheless, he has the support of a plurality of Hungarian voters, but can be lawfully removed by a united, serious opposition.
Orban is a case of using democracy to reshape the country and gain further advantages for himself and his party, this may all be awful, but it is not dictatorship. Your criticism should be directed at the Hungarian opposition and perhaps the fact that people opposed to the Orban program tend to move to Western Europe and not stay to change Hungary.
One missing angle from this post is the EU accession of Hungary in 2004. This opened up two things: 1) Access to the single market for a country with low labour costs 2) turned on the taps of EU aid money.
Hungary has been riding a wave of economic growth based on EU accession. the economic growth has driven support for Orban as a leader overseeing raising living standards, and dished the aid cash out to supporters.
Orban now looks a bit more vulnerable as the economy has stalled and the EU has belatedly started to act on the funding.
For those wondering why the EU has done nothing, Poland has also had run ins with the EU, and it requires a consensus of all other countries to act - Poland and Hungary have protected each other. The EU is now moving toward qualified majority voting for some funding aspects, and there are some issues Poland will not protect Orban on.
What about the impact of easy emigration within the EU? I hear a lot from Central Europe about all the young, liberally inclined people moving westwards and leaving the country disproportionately old and authoritarian.
It’s not. The target isn’t the median person, but the most vulnerable. The immunocompromised, the infant. Not being vaccinated creates externalities and is an appropriate place for govt to step in.
"An extreme right-wing pensioner seized control of an old Soviet tank that had been wheeled out as an exhibit for the commemorations, and for a shot time drove it around the center of Budapest".
I want to join the previous Hungarian posters who were having feelings of Gell-Mann amnesia: I can't stand Orban, and the stories of endemic corruption and taking over newspapers are true, yet I don't recognize the country I'm reading about here. Maybe learning about a foreign country's politics from books simply can't replace following the local news as they happen - try to imagine what kind of picture you would get about US politics if you tried learning about it from books instead of following it in the news and on social media.
Putting Orban in the same club as dictators like Erdogan or Putin, whose political opponents or journalists that criticize them actually end up jailed or murdered, is simply ridiculous. The closest equivalent to Orban might instead be Netanyahu, and just as the opposition united to unseat him not long ago, there is a very real chance that Orban will lose the next election against the united opposition in 2022 where everyone from the far-right Jobbik to the inner city liberals will be running on a shared ticket against him.
Orban's shift from liberal to the hard right was much more gradual than described here, and it played out over decades, it wasn't some sudden decision one day.
About the descent from steppe nomads thing: there is a considerable right-wing subculture that takes this thing very seriously, but the way the article presents this as a general property of Hungarian society comes across as strange.
The "charitable reading of Gyurcsany's speech", that it was describing his predecessor's administration, is complete nonsense: the "last one and a half years" he is talking about in the quoted text was his own administration, and no one ever believed otherwise.
The metrics about the voting system like "1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes" are obvious exaggerations.
Electoral tricks like gerrymandering, giving voting rights to foreign residents, or taking over much of legacy media, are not what's keeping Orban in power - they might be enough to add a few % points that push him over the 2/3 majority needed for rewriting the constitution, but he would still have the strongest party without any of these.
Because the Left's collapse in Hungary, which started with Gyurcsany's infamous speech in 2006 and was made much worse by the 2008 economic crisis, was largely self-imposed. After discrediting themselves so spectacularly, they started splintering into ever-smaller new parties because of petty infighting. They also lost touch with the average voter, while Orban doubled down on his new messaging strategy that was the exact opposite of how the liberal intellectuals talked and thought. The leftist parties, for example, had nothing to say about the migration crisis: they were afraid of opposing things like the border fence that had >80% popularity among voters, even though it went against the sensibilities of the liberal intellectual class, so they just sat out the biggest political event of the decade, without saying much about it (except for the previously mentioned Gyurcsany, who alone among the opposition, campaigned against the border fence, gaining him even more notoriety). Another symbolic issue is the question of the Roma (gypsy) minority: Fidesz politicians regularly make racist comments about them, while the Left is constantly talking about how their social programs are going to lift them out of poverty: yet almost all gypsies vote for Fidesz, not the Leftist parties - the world of liberal intellectuals is simply too alien for them, while Fidesz is offering them money or other tangible goods in exchange for support.
In fact, the only message the opposition has left is that it wants to undo Orbán's system, this is the only thing they campaign on, and they can't put forward any other political vision. It's as if the Left had nothing left to say to the average Hungarian voter, nothing to say about global events, while the right can always fall back to invoking family, nation, identity etc.
"He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them."
When I was learning about electoral systems in University, my professor, Reuven Hazan, a worldwide expert in voting went on to talk about an international academic conference he was at, where some academic presented an idea for a voting scheme that was supposed to be very good and democratic. Basically, when voting for a party in a non regional election (unlike the US and UK), there's importance to the order of candidates - the ones at the top of the list are more likely to get into the legislature and then be given Ministerial jobs. The academic suggested that when voting for a party in such an election, the voters would get to rank the candidates for that party in the order they'd want.
At the questions portion, Professor Hazan stood up and asked: "But what if people who are against that party choose to vote for it and rank the worst/most radical members of the party in first place?"
The academic was stunned by this question, and answered: "But... that's simply not done!"
The lesson, Professor Hazan told us, is to never build any political system based on the assumption that some things are simply not done.
I have a bunch to say, but I will keep it at this. The evidence that his gerrymandering was very effective is - on it's face - thin at the system level. If you look at the bias between votes and seats in the election that gave Orban the 2/3's needed, and you look at the elections after, you see at best, evidence for a tiny effect. Gerrymandering is a problem whenever you have districts as you and every politically conscious American knows. It's not a unique autocratic problem. If the effects are gross and lead to strong inconsistencies consistently over time.. that's an issue. But there is no evidence of that here. Hungary does have a strong gerrymandering effect as far as I can see. The 'big picture' doesn't suggest a 'absurdly gerrymandered' picture.
Overall, though, I am not seeing the portrait of a dictator. I am seeing the portrait of a politician governing at a time when liberal democracy's appeal among average citizens is seriously strained by the actions and conduct of the elites controlling and shaping that system and is - as you say - channelling illiberal notions popular on BOTH the left and right of American politics. I just hope he loses the next election to the opposition... because then we can know for sure... because autocrats don't willingly give up power after elections.
On the subject of countries raising fertility, I wonder how much of the decline is associated with improvements in contraceptive technology. Suppose a country banned the pill or severely restricted it and was able to enforce the ban, make it hard for most people to get it. One result would probably be a reduction in non-marital sex because women would be worried about pregnancy. That would increase the incentive for men to get married. Once married, being limited to less effective ways of reducing the number of children — rhythm, interruptus, non-vaginal intercourse — would presumably raise the marital birth rate.
Would that have a significant effect on average fertility? Has any country tried it?
Ireland banned contraception for religious reasons until the 1980s, which kept its fertility above replacement for much longer than equivalent GDP/Capita countries.
Romania also banned contraception for, well, less religious reasons around the same time, after it was legal for much of the 20th century. There was a sharp rise in fertility and then a gradual drop back to original levels, however Romania was also deeply corrupt and officials and doctors could be easily bribed.
>There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted. In fact, his party started amending the Constitution like it was going out of style. Certainly they removed roadblocks to their power. But they also wrote new laws they passed directly into the Constitution so future governments couldn’t change them.
This reminds me of the impeachment of Paraguay's president 11 years ago. The impeachment followed Paraguayan law. The president and other critics called it e.g. a "parliamentary coup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Fernando_Lugo).
When (if ever) is it illegitimate for a legislature to legislate/amend/confirm/impeach? In other words, what is the difference between legitimacy and legality? This is the upstream question. How the legislature should vote regarding Lugo, Orban, Trump, the composition of the US Supreme Court, etc. is the downstream question.
In constitutional theory, what are the basic positions on this issue?
On the topic of "want to succeed? Be his college roommate". I think that it's pretty suggestive of something, but in a country with <10M people, where 10% of them live in the same city (Budapest), you're going to have like a 3rd degree of separation between everyone who matters. If social, political, business, etc. elites are more or less organically drawn from a handful of urban locales and educational institutions, into which they had been previously selected by educational attainment, money, interests, etc., there is already a high degree of connectedness that you'd have to expect, much much more than - a priori - in gigantic countries from US to India, to even Germany at 80M.
(I'm googling the population figures, so I don't know how accurate those are, but I think they're roughly right to make my point.)
Several parallels to the Polish case come to mind: PiS, the governing party, was already in office 2005 – 07. They were quickly voted out of government, which seemed to come like a shock. When they entered government again in 2015 it sure seems they were strategically prepared to ensure they will not lose power that quickly again. Their very first moves were against the Supreme Court. Also, their victory was helped by several tapes that were published revealing corruption among the leading party. Those tapes were recorded in a restaurant where members of government used to meet regularly, and it’s still unclear who recorded them. As in Hungary, the government also claims that it wants to get rid of the communists who according to their narrative are still occupying various posts.
There are also differences: Orban seems strategic and willing to change position when needed, the Polish government rather conveys the image to be full of true ‘believers’ up to being fanatics. This maybe explains the common image that Orban backs down vis-à-vis the EU once he realizes he is really going to lose something – while Poland remains stubborn, regardless of the consequences.
The ‘true believer’ image especially holds for J. Kaczynski, who is unanimously regarded to be the unchallenged leader and most influential politician, despite being only chief of party 2015 – 2020. Since late 2020 he is Deputy Prime Minister of Poland.
Hey, you may not see this, since it is buried under hundreds of comments, but as a Hungarian I like the article. I would add that the fertility policies work out well, we are the second most fertile nation in the EU (according to the latest surveys I read, it is not sure but I will read). Even Orbán's opponents like Márky-Zay likes them.
1992 was more of a conservative turn, not a far-right, that started around 2015 (I would call his government rather right wing populist). In my opinion Gyurcsány was a terrible prime minister who privatized healthcare and insulted ethnic Hungarians, also abused his power during 2006. He resigned in 2009. And Orbán managed to upkeep a great set of cultural values, the Hungarian film industry skyrocketed under him (especially under Andy Vajna, his friend).
Despite this and the fact that I am conservative, I learned much about Orbán's childhood and it was a great summary on his road to power, so keep doing these articles.
This article did not convince me I should dislike Victor Orban, or even that I should care about him that much. If all it takes to be a dictator is gerrymandering and helping your college buddies to buy newspapers, then we are certainly defining dictatorship down. The population of Hungary is smaller than the NY metro area, and politically Hungary did not seem from this description to be much less small-d democratic than NY city. "Illiberal democracies" of various sorts are common and we in the U.S. might be one ourselves.
Scott can be a delightfully original thinker about more obscure stuff, but he usually falls in line with the bien-pensant coastal conventional wisdom when it comes to issues where such a conventional wisdom has been declared.
The post gets almost its details wrong (except the part about what mechanics Orbán used to transform democracy into a sort of plausibly-deniable soft-dictatorship, which is mostly accurate). I'll just focus on the biggest ones:
1) Orbán being a genius noticing the hidden backdoors no one else did has little basis in fact. He is a competent politician for sure, on par with the average European head of state. But absolute power basically just fell into his laps. The previous Socialist government screw up the economy (resulting in Hungary being the only country in the region in the state economic stagnation, during a period of global economic boom), then lied about it and made completely unrealistic promises, then the country got hit by the recession generated by the US subprime crisis, resulting in all kinds of austerity measures; the Socialist party basically collapsed, spent half a year at the height of the crisis searching for a new leader and not really doing anything; the new leader ended up being an outsider businessman with some experience in the recovery of bankrupt companies who saw his half-term as a purely economic exercise and made no attempt to improve the party's standing in the polls. Orbán (the leader of the opposition party in a mostly-two-party-system) then won a narrow two-thirds victory just by the virtue of being there and not being the Socialist party.
The Hungarian legal system was completely vulnerable to takeover with a two-thirds majority; any law (including the constitution) could be rewritten and any official could be replaced with that much support; and there wasn't anything like the staggered elections in the US (where a one-time swing of popular opinion would only affect a third of the Senate seats for example). This was a known flaw; when the system was designed in 1989, a two-thirds majority was assumed to be unlikely, and the system was meant kind of provisional. It's hard to blame the people involved - they had to ensure a peaceful transition from a communist dictatorship with state planning to a democratic free-market capitalism, in very short time, requiring changes to vast swathes of the legal and institutional system. And then of course it turned out that once the constitution is in place, it's impossible to gather the near-unanimous political support needed to change it.
So this was a known flaw (maybe not to the public, but to the scholars and statesmen, for sure), and Orbán just made use of it. Maybe the only remarkable thing is how little resistance there was from his own party and administration, and the intellectual elite that supported him. (Those who opposed him did protest but they of course could be ignored.) Whether that was his skill at organizing or manipulating people, or just plain political polarization, is hard to tell. (Compare how far Trump, a complete anti-talent in most required skills, got in overturning an election. Polarization is powerful. And Hungary had lots of it - the two ruinous totalitarian regimes, a fat-right one murder half million Jews and entangling the country in a devastating war, and a far-left one taking away everyone's property and forcing the country to forty years of economic decay and poverty, were still recent memory. No one who mattered associated themselves *with* either of those regimes; but most people positioned themselves as *against* one while kinda ignoring the other, and calling the other party a fascist or communist for not doing likewise.)
2) Orbán did some gerrymandering (and a number of other transformations to election law that benefited him) but it wasn't that substantial. Hungary is not significantly more gerrymandered than, say, US presidential elections are - the left needs to win with 3-4% of the votes to get an equal share of seats. Unfair, but hardly unsurmountable, nor unprecedented in democracies. Likewise, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that he orchestrated some straight-out voter fraud, but the scale of it wasn't too significant; and while giving the franchise to half the country's population's worth of ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries is scary in theory, and he might well tap more into it in the future, so far they haven't actually voted in significant numbers. The actual pillars of Orbán's power are:
* Money. It's hard to overstate the significance of this. He systematically stripped the opposition of resources by fines and by scaring away potential donors; kept them away from public funds using various means; and used public funds as a basicly unrestricted source of campaign money for himself, from transforming state media to a propaganda outlet, to making state-owned companies advertise at his newspapers, to running huge "public awareness campaigns" and "consultations" which were not-even-concealed party propaganda, to embezzling ridiculously huge amounts of taxpayer money and directing it to party slash funds. He owns the prosecution and the police, and the judiciary has no initiative of their own, so he can break any law with abandon. Estimates for how far he outspends his opposition at campaigns, polling, party infrastructure building etc. are around two or three *magnitudes*.
* Economic pressure. He replaced aid to the poor with public work, and his people decide who gets work and who doesn't, and voting and otherwise supporting the ruling party is fairly openly part of the requirements. In the poor rural areas he has built a kind of feudal system with the local mayor having a huge power over the people, and the mayors tell them the village won't have access to state funds if it doesn't vote pro-Orbán at a high-enough rate.
* Media takeover (and turning the taken-over media into propaganda tools which are little more than proxies repeating centrally-crafted messages), but this was already mentioned in the post.
* Creating an election system that's very favorable to large parties, which is how he could get a two-thirds majority with a minority of the votes: lots of first-past-the-post seats. The opposition is now forming a single "election party", but they are all across the spectrum from social democrat to libertarian to nationalist populist so of course this is painful and costs them votes.
3) It is just not true that Hungarians were less welcoming to refugees than other countries, and this would have pushed Orbán to the far right. He has spent years making the country xenophobic, with his media swamping people in far-right propaganda on how "immigrants" (the word "refugee" was banned in his media channels, likewise mentions of any connection to the Syrian war) are violent, rapist, a terrorist threat, disease-ridden, and a plot of George Soros and the international J̶e̶w̶r̶y̶ financial interests to destroy Christianity and eradicate white people. (This chart tells the story: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-030-25666-1_8/MediaObjects/464293_1_En_8_Fig1_HTML.pnghttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-25666-1_8 - note that Hungarians had basically no contact with refugees outside of the capital, which still remains relatively refugee-friendly; this was no organic change of opinion.)
Initially this wasn't even out of electoral calculation, I think. As mentioned in other comments, the Dublin Regulation (which governs admittance of people into the part of EU that's free of internal borders) requires the country of first entry to be responsible for the asylum seekers (other countries can ship them back to the country of origin if they so choose), this put a huge and unfair burden on countries which were on the EU border and on a major migration pathway, and Orbán was somewhat understandably worried that despite all the Willkommenskultur, Western countries might abuse that if the situation sours and eg. send back the most problematic refugees to Hungary (who then would be stuck with them - it's pretty much impossible to force non-EU countries to take refugees back when they are denied asylum). So first he put up the wall to reroute refugees to enter through some other EU country, and when he got criticised for that, he went full racist just to make sure no one would think forcing Hungary to admit asylum seekers a good idea. The whole thing ended up not mattering that much (Merkel got a deal with Erdogan and the refugees were stopped in a way that let the EU wash its hands of the means), but it proved great at the polls and a much needed distraction from corruption and other scandals, so Orbán stuck with it, and has since then has built his politics on demonizing random groups (refugees then NGOs then LGBTQ people).
The natalist policies in Hungary are a bit different from those made in many other places. In that they seem to have a longer term target (how very un-populist). They don't just give a baby bonus - which tend to just result in a one time baby bump. They specifically target larger families. Special benefits for 4+ children (if you have zero children, its going to take some years to reach 4). They promote marriage (married birthrates are much higher than average), and marriage rates have indeed skyrocket - but it still take some years for this to materialize into a higher birthrate. But when it does, it will likely be of a more permanent character than with a baby bonus. So while the birthrate has probably risen a bit already, it is really too soon to determine the effectiveness of the policies.
Also, I don't know why you'd include Austria in the graphs. Its clearly not a country which has had a post WWII history with the others.
I hooe orban’s gerrymandering works. For if the opposition wins they can just flood the country with economic migrants from the third world, forever limiting the electoral prospects of Orban’s party (kind of similar to the strategy of certain political parties here in the west).
And these tactics seem a hell of a lot more effective illiberal and antidemocratic to me than anything orban has done
You are mostly basing your claims about Orban on the claims of his most bitter enemies (some of them are from a book written on him before the 2002 election, which was clearly a hit job on him, not objective at all), not exactly neutral observers. Lot of these are simply not true or anecdotal, hearsay. Yes, Orban started as a liberal guy, but he didn't turn right-wing nationalist just overnight. Fidesz was still member of the Liberal International in 1998. He gradually shifted to the right though, more so after his 2002 defeat.
Your claim about massive gerrymandering is patently false for example. The new districts are more evenly distributed population wise as another commenter said too. Part of the changes introduced by Orban was to make the parliament smaller so the number of districts was reduced from 176 to 106, but there are no US style absurdly shaped districts or like that, and actually the populations of districts became more evenly distributed.
You claim that Orban controls almost all media in the country and the opposition cannot reach people. That is far from the truth too, while state radio and television is government propaganda, and the pro-Fidesz media companies own most local daily newspapers there is still a nationwide pro-opposition newspaper Nepszava (allegedly because Orban's wish is that it has to kept alive). The German owned national RTL Klub television channel's news are quite critical of the government and almost the entire population can watch it if they want, as it is free-to-air. ATV, another pro-oppostion TV channel is also available, it is not free-to-air though but included in most basic cable plans. Even most middle aged people use the internet and Facebook where Orban cannot stop them from reading/watching pro-opposition content.
I wish you'd preserved the acute accents on vowels in the names etc. Hungarian has a wonderfully phonemic and consistent writing system. You don't have to know much more than that stress is on the first syllable, the accent marks indicate a longer vowel and that c, s, z are used for roughly the English ts, sh, z or combined in the digraphs cs, sz, and zs (ch, s, and the French "j"), while y is used in the digraphs ty, gy, ly, ny as a palatalization marker to write roughly the sounds ty, dy(!), y, ny (i.e. ñ).
"The Hungarians" don't claim Hunnic descent; the relatively small pre-Orbán far-right claims that. (Orbán's own far-right is more of an import of the US alt-right, with not much focus on ethnic origins.) It was a popular claim in the middle ages, in line with how other countries tried to bolster their pedigrees at the time. Today, the theory popular on the wider right (but unpopular in academia) partially originates Hungarians from Pannonian Avars, who lived in the area some two hundred years after the Huns.
Because while in Western democracies nobody has, as yet, tried the full panoply of Orban's tricks, one or the other of them has been used. As has been pointed out - giving spoils to your college chums? Cronyism? Jobs for the boys? This is not a uniquely Hungarian problem.
Control of the press? In the heyday of the Tories, it was Rupert Murdoch (an opportunist who changes citizenship and support to a particular political party as he changes his shirts) who used one of his tabloid newspapers, "The Sun", to push an anti-Labour and pro-Tory agenda, in the end boasting after the 1992 general election, "It's The Sun Wot Won It":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It
The same here in Ireland during the 90s when one national newspaper was very pro-one of our parties and used its influence to do down the opposition party.
Gerrymandering? Allegations of voter suppression/vote fraud? Again, not uniquely Hungarian.
Changing the Constitution to suit your own special interests? We've had several referenda in my country, since you can only change the constitution by that means, where activist groups pushed and pushed for change and got it.
Then there's ruling by the courts to extract from the Constitution what some might question was never in it - emanations of penumbras, so to speak.
Orban may be going the full nine yards, but it's not as if "perfectly democratic" countries haven't gone down at least part of the same path, for the same reasons, via the same means.
But I think it makes sense to take a diagnostic view of what constitutes a dictatorship. There's a reason psychologists don't diagnose people with mental disorders just for having 1-2 symptoms from the diagnostic checklist; if they did, literally *everyone* would be considered mentally ill in some way. But if someone has 7-8 symptoms from a 10 symptom checklist, then it's probably safe to say they have the disorder in question.
Likewise, if you count any nation-state with 1-2 "symptoms" of autocracy to be a dictatorship, then yes, you won't find a single government on Earth that *isn't* dictatorial. But what makes the regime in Hungary different from the U.S. or Ireland or Germany is that it doesn't just have 1-2 autocratic elements, it has a whole slew of them.
Yeah, I'm not saying Orban is a democrat. I am saying that the rest of us may not have perfectly pure, unsullied, clean hands democracies either. If we're going to condemn Orban for blatant "making my pals rich", there's a ton of politicians in all the Western countries as well who should be nervously shuffling their feet and looking down.
Orban is shaping the country to keep himself in power. But other countries have a lot of things they're kicking under the bed, as well.
I think you're basically arguing the Nirvana fallacy at this point. I've skipped out on feeding the meter and engaged in other petty crimes in my life, but that doesn't mean I lose the right to pass moral judgement on Richard Ramirez- for that matter, neither does a purse-snatcher.
The comments on this post seem to have attracted some very right wing folks, even more than the normal collection of fringe views. I wonder if its been shared elsewhere
Perhaps you could demonstrate your claim with some positive spin on Hungary's richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros, who had little money 15 years ago. Don't forget to explain that his old friend Viktor Orban wasn't involved.
this was quite overblown - Fidesz made a rule which affected foreign operated universities (and was admittedly aimed at CEU). That said, George Soros is quite unpopular around central Europe and he did so through democratic means, so it can be hardly called dictatorial.
In what sense was the CEU “forced out of the country”? They still operate in Budapest and accept students there: https://www.ceu.edu/campus
Certainly not the *most* dictatorial thing. E.g. half a year ago, he "privatized" two-thirds of Hungarian universities - and by privatized I mean, gave them away for free, to his loyal henchmen, in a legal construct that would require a two-thirds majority to undo.
> half a year ago, he "privatized" two-thirds of Hungarian universities - and by privatized I mean, gave them away for free, to his loyal henchmen, in a legal construct that would require a two-thirds majority to undo.
That sounds like a terrible scandal, can you provide a source in English or Hungarian?
In English: https://www.ft.com/content/18bad232-860d-4a2a-bd57-b180afcfaa75
In Hungarian: https://444.hu/2021/04/27/megszavazta-a-parlament-hogy-alapitvanyokba-szervezzek-ki-a-kozvagyont
It would probably be a terrible scandal, had the Hungarian public still any endurance to pay attention amidst what had been a multi-year sequence of non-stop scandals. (E.g. this week's news is the government setting a gasoline price cap that's slightly below the market price for gasoline, so gas station owners now lose about $0.1 on every litre of gas, having to sell it for that much less than they are buying it. They are required by law to continue selling it; if gas is unavailable at your has station continuously for more then two days, the government takes the station away from you and gives it to someone else to operate.)
He's not a dictator for defending his country's borders, he's a dictator for everything he did in part III of this review.
Orbán's government just made a law that Hungarian companies are allowed to do the exact same thing, by the way.
I meant vaccination. I am not 100% caught up on US politics at the moment, is it already at the point where the company gets fined if they employ people without vaccination?
Hoo boy. Very much so. $14k a pop I think for each unvaccinated worker.
I would say (if I remember right) giving himself the power to amend the constitution freely, giving himself the right to fire any public servant, and making education workers public servants so they can’t protest against him is worse.
We could ask 100 teachers, nurses, cops, etc whether they would prefer a forced vaccine or the president having the ability to fire them (or their boss, so same thing) for speaking against them. I would guess the majority would be against the latter more.
But would the majority of anti-vaccine be against the latter? I’m unsure.
The government actually being in charge of the bureaucracy is a good thing.
Yeah, kind of? Supreme Court declared mandatory vaccination constitutional in 1905, which is well before I think it can be accused of becoming an apologist for dictatorship.
Using mandatory vaccines to stop the spread of diseases that kill people is squarely within the spirit of the law.
The essence of dictatorship is not whether the government's own courts sign off on something, otherwise there'd be no dictatorships at all. It's about governments dictating to people what they can and cannot do to a degree well beyond what is considered reasonable, necessary or appropriate. Forced vaccinations are absolutely none of those things, therefore, they are a dictatorial thing to do.
No, the essence of dictatorship is the completely dominant power of the dictator's personal will. The original "dictatorship" was a Roman institution where an individual was given vast and sweeping emergency powers with absolutely no checks and balances (intentionally).
The fact that you don't like some policy that the government does, doesn't make it a dictatorship.
I don't see how your definition is any different to mine? What "checks and balances" exist in the USA against vaccine mandates, exactly? As far as I'm aware it wasn't voted on by Congress, has been reviewed by no courts, is unjustifiable via any sort of logic, was not an announced policy during the election campaign (or was it?), and is being implemented entirely via executive order. Which makes it an expression of the completely dominant power of the President's personal will.
Note that dictators don't have to be dictators-for-life and often aren't. Dictatorships are defined by the ability of the leader to force the population to do whatever they want, not longevity of individuals.
How many people have to consider a thing unreasonable before it becomes dictatorial?
Wow!
It turns out, all civil societies are dictatorships!
We live in the blasted lands, where I can't even shoot heroin while driving the wrong way down the street firing my M32 into the nearest McDonalds for taking the beef fat out of their fry oil!
Where's the freedom, dude?
😔
I highly recommend reading more into the history of public health mandates, beyond Jacobson vs. Massachusetts. The best paper I've seen on the topic is the following: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906452
Basically, the 1905 ruling only permitted very narrow means of enforcement - a fine for noncompliance - in emergency situations. The current state of the law of public health mandates rests not primarily on Jacobson, but a series of other decisions, including one endorsing forcible sterilizations ("three generations of idiots is enough", if you recognize that iconic phrase).
So the history of U.S. law around mandatory vaccination is probably more closely tied to human rights abuses than you think. (I say all this as someone who thinks people should get the vaccine.)
I would push back on that characterization. The early 20th Century isn't exactly a high water mark for liberalism on the Supreme Court. Jacobson is... problematic, to say the least, and the only reason why it still exists as precedent at all is that it provides a convenient fig leaf judges can hide behind while refusing to hold state and local governments accountable to the Constitution.
Government-funded propaganda, for example. Forced vaccination isn't used to create an uneven playing field for subsequent elections. Regardless of etymology, dictatorship is normally used as an antonym of democracy, and democracy is normally used to include representative democracy.
How does that create an uneven playing field? The punishment for not getting vaccinated doesn't include losing the right to vote, does it? (If anything, forcing those Republicans to get vaccinated means fewer of them will die before the next election, but that's likely too small an effect to matter.)
Well, would Orban qualify as a dictator for this one, then?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungary-make-covid-19-vaccinations-mandatory-healthcare-workers-pm-2021-07-23/
I don't really see how Orban qualifies as a dictator. Even with the absurdly gerrymandered electoral system and the corrupt influence buying, Hungary is still a democracy and Orban is still a democratically elected head of state. To my mind, the line separating democracies from dictatorships is whether or not a majority of the people can vote out the party/leader in power, and whether or not people can openly campaign against the party/leader in power without being arrested or murdered. Both things are still pretty clearly true in Hungary. If Orban were to rig an election or violently repress his opposition, he would hop right over that line, but I don't think even his harshest critics have claimed that he's done that yet.
All democracies exist on a spectrum from more-or-less gerrymandered and more or less corrupt, but even the ones at the extreme end of the spectrum are still in fact a democracy.
I know nothing about Orban, but am amused by Modi being called a dictator. Did these people know nothing of India in the past 70 years?!
It was also interesting that the book on Modi reviewed here had decided apriori that Modi was a genocidal murderer and that if the Supreme Court said there was no evidence, it could only be because the court made "a controversial decision"!
This in a time when the all-powerful actual dictator Sonia Gandhi, who saw in him a future political opponent, had hounded him for 12 years with no evidence. And in 1984, her party actually led a pogrom against Sikhs. With tons of evidence.
Yeah, if anything Modi has done a lot more than the opposition at keeping Democracy intact.
The Press is still free. Hell, they are overwhelmingly negative towards Modi. Now he counters that using social media platforms, but that's just good politics.
The Courts are still free. They have routinely given judgements that go against Modi, and many times strengthened aspects of the constitution that they felt was under threat.
The elections are the freest they have been in India. Gone are the days of Booth capture and even the most remote towns have accessible voting. Hell, India has a more robust set of parties at the state level than were tolerated by the Congress.
While Modi does use majoritarian rhetoric, but his policies have continued to benefit minorities either directly [1] or indirectly [2] via economic handouts. The most-muslim state of India gets 10x the funding per capita of any other state [3]
Modi is also held accountable within his own party organization. The organization is brutally meritocratic, where underperforming leaders are quickly reshuffled and if his popularity drops, then Modi will be replaced just as quickly. (Yogi is already clawing at his heels). Modi also doesn't have any Children, so nepotism is out of the picture.
Many young and highly educated politicians have been joining the BJP (Scindia Harvard/Stanford grad), and leaving the Congress because the structure of that party is far more dictatorial. (More monarchical, but whatever). Similarly, many Congress veterans are similarly abandoning the party due to disillusionment from the high command. (See Punjab CM : Amrinder Singh. Best friend of Rajiv Gandhi leaving due to disillusionment from his son Rahul). This is not what squashing your opposition looks like.
Modi has many real issues as a leader of a democratic nation. His IAS aides are often incompetent and he still has an expert sourcing problem because of the image issues. Economics in particular has been lackluster and the biggest moves have led to bigger disasters. 2020-2021 has actually been amazing policy wise. So, I have my fingers crossed for some positive growth. Afterall, in a nation as poor as India, that is all that matters.
[1]: https://theprint.in/india/more-muslims-govt-scholarships-modi-govt-congress-upa/308154/
[2]: https://theprint.in/india/modi-govt-announces-27-reservation-for-obcs-10-quota-for-ews-in-medical-dental-courses/705935/
[3]: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/JampK-gets-10-of-Central-funds-with-only-1-of-population/article14506264.ece
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata basically threw out the communist party there that was in power for over 3 decades, but used the same strategies - preventing voters from the other side (say, certain caste Hindus) from voting. Actually what they'd do is create a riot in certain Hindu neighborhoods. And provide safe passage to her voters : typically Muslim voters and certain caste Hindu voters.
If you wonder why there's so much violence in West Bengal on election day, this is it ..
Over 25 years ago, the Congress party (and really all parties) would do "booth-capturing" en masse, particularly in the state of Bihar. Their thugs would capture booths and stamp ballot papers as they wished.
T.N. Seshan (election commissioner) and electronic voting machines put an end to it. He had the right to bring in the army and was incredibly bold.
Mamata has been running a military style totalitarian govt. She basically created her own street armies.
Election violence in India happens only in the state of West Bengal now.
Communists pioneered these techniques and they believe so much in what they do that they justify their violence. So, this used to be bad in Kerala too, the other communist run state in India.
After T.N.Seshan shone a light on and cleaned up all of Indian elections, they have been real. Except West Bengal - police there works as thugs for Mamata.
The way BJP has been making inroads in to WB is to bring in their own thugs and say we will watch this street, so no riots can be started here.
Former election commissioner T.N. Seshan has to be one of the greatest Indians of all time. The EVM has been a huge success too.
2020-21 has been amazing policy-wise? Do you mean the policies that put us at the lowest growth in almost the entire world? Presumably not. So what's the policy that's been so amazing as to counter the truly monumental mess ups they made with respect to lock down?
You already had this debate in the comment section of that post - are you going to come to every post in the series to complain about Modi being called a dictator in a previous entry?
I might, if it seems relevant. My point is, it is relative. He was preceeded by hard-core dictators..
It's not relevant to the subject of this blogpost, though, is my point. You're just piggy-backing on someone else who is actually talking about the subject of this blogpost ("to what extent is Orban a dictator?") in order to continue complaining about something you didn't like about the previous post.
Maybe you're right. I shall cease and desist.
I'd like to take a moment to applaud your willingness to do that -- dropping a topic you feel strongly about is pretty hard to do, and is not something I see very often in discussion threads here or elsewhere.
Neither of them are dictators. They are just very naughty boys.
It is possible for an underdog enemy of one dictator to come to power and establish their own. Which is not to say that's what I think happened with Modi, as far as I'm aware I think him losing power in an election is still possible.
What do you think of benevolent dictatorships, like in Singapore? They limit speech a little.
I don't know that much about Singaporean politics, so instead I'll just point to what Bryan Caplan has written about it: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/01/democracy_in_si_1.html
Great link. Thanks.
If I were born in Singapore, I'd be bankrupt from defending myself from libel lawsuits by the government.
> It was also interesting that the book on Modi reviewed here had decided apriori that Modi was a genocidal murderer and that if the Supreme Court said there was no evidence, it could only be because the court made "a controversial decision"!
Am I parsing your comment wrong? The book on Modi reviewed here was extremely favorable to Modi
That is so interesting! I viewed it as promoting the usual "What about 2002?"
You're parsing my comment correctly. I just saw the review as negative!
You make a good point, and a lot of political scientists have been groping for some way to describe Orban's regime - "illiberal democracy" and "mafia state" have both been mooted.
But a few points. First, if a majority of people voted against Orban, he would still win handily from the gerrymandering, the ethnic-Hungarians-abroad vote, and the possible voter fraud, and the laws favoring his party and causes would still be in the Constitution and require opponents to win by 2/3 to repeal. So I think it would take something like 80 - 90% of Hungarians voting against him to change policy very much.
Second, yes, you can campaign against him, but the media will just ignore you and nobody will know you exist - the books gave some good examples of this. You can campaign against Putin in Russia - you can campaign against Erdogan in Turkey. I think one of the big stories of the late 20th early 21st century is that traditional "dictatorship" is less stable and valuable for leaders than some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy, and there's a spectrum from perfectly functional democracy to total sham democracy which might as well be a dictatorship. Orban goes pretty hard to the sham side, and he's better at it than other leaders (ie he maintains the same low chance of ever getting voted out while having fewer bright line violations of the rituals of democracy).
Without wanting to claim I can draw a bright line here, I think he's a valuable target for this book club in the sense of learning about things that I don't want to have happen to democratic countries.
First off, you're right, I forgot that the the current gerrymandering means that some possible majorities wouldn't be able to vote him out. But some majorities still could, which I think keeps Hungary over the line, albeit barely.
And I don't think the media ignoring you really matters here. It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate, it's more like background entertainment while the real action happens on social media. I don't see how a corrupt media is any more or less important than a corrupt civil service or a corrupt industrial ownership class.
As for the comparison with Putin/Erdogan, and their electoral management, I don't think the comparison holds water. Putin has killed, attempted to kill, and jailed multiple electoral opponents. Erdogan has multiple political frenemies who've decided that it would probably be best if they didn't live in Turkey anymore for their own safety, and just a few years ago there were tanks rolling in the streets of Istanbul while jets flew overhead as some kind of real/fake "coup" was staged. Orban hasn't done anything close to that.
Overall though, I do agree that Orban is a worthy inclusion in this series for the reasons you laid out. I just still object to him being referred to as a dictator.
If the US is any guide, the regular media provides the raw materials for social media. Someone writes an article somewhere, be it CNN or Townhall, and that gets posted on social media to "prove" one side or the other. The right went nuts about a NY Post article being censored.
There definitely are still independent newspapers in Hungary, ie 24.hu now that index.hu was bought by an Orban friend, and explicitly leftist papers, ie 444.hu
Those are news sites, "newspapers" as a printed medium are almost exclusively under Orbánist control by now.
Hmmmm. Fair point, and I suppose something I simply wouldn't notice in a mostly left wing Budapest environment.
Can you not get news from foreign networks there, like Der Speigel or Reuters or something? I mean, sure, it might be a bad situation overall to have consolidated control of dead tree newspapers in the hands of one not so scrupulous political faction, but Hungary is a small country floating in a see of independent media companies in Europe.
A 100% majority would be an infeasibly high bar. I suppose US presidential elections where no party gets to gerrymander electoral votes seems better in comparison.
They certainly *have* gerrymandered electoral votes, back when states were still being admitted to the Union, this is one reasonable perspective on the Missouri Compromise et sequens.
True, but they can't just do that at will when they feel like it.
I think you underestimate the power of traditional mass media when there isn't much opposition. I am not ready to defend any claims about younger people (I would expect them to be somewhat affected on average) but elderly people often tend to watch TV a lot and be affected by it a lot.
>And I don't think the media ignoring you really matters here. It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate, it's more like background entertainment while the real action happens on social media.
I doubt that.
In the political context I know best - Germany - media play a huge role for the political debate and for elections.
I looked up some figures (all for Germany) for the general dimensions: sinking number of printed daily newspapers: from roughly 20 million printed copies daily to 12 million in 2021. At the same time 13 + x million reading newspapers online daily. The association of newspaper publishers claims that newspapers daily reach ¾ of the german-speaking population. The two main TV evening news in public television got an average of 12 million viewers (first programme) and 4 million (second programme) daily in 2020. 35 million listen to the radio daily – though this need not be related to news. Overall population in Germany over 14 years: 72 million.
Compared to social media: Regarding Twitter in Germany, I found the following information: 3,6 million use Twitter at least once a week – other sources mention 5 million active Twitter users/ month or 12 million registered accounts. 14 million use Instagram and 19 million use FB at least once a week. Note, that while the figures above were ‘daily’ the social media figures refer to ‘at least once a week’, and more importantly, this is for all kind of topics, with news & politics probably less prominent than other fields of interest. Btw. 5% of Germans > 14 years say they read a blog at least once a week.
No ambition to be precise, rather to show general dimensions.
I'm even a bit surprised by the high numbers of traditional media use. However, their overall importance seems evident.
I guess this is different in different countries, but I doubt that ‘social media is so important, forget about media’ is a realistic description in most.
The vast majority of the people (myself included) still get most of their political information from traditional media.
"It seems like media has never been less important for electoral campaigning/coalition building/policy debate" That may have been correct 5 years ago in the US, but then the media made itself relevant again by leaning on big tech to suppress all political dissent that the media dislike. Looks like democracies will continue to be largely ruled by media and tech elites until the centralized corporate social media platforms are replaced with decentralized free and open source software.
I agree that allowing expatriates to vote is not a great idea, which is why I don't support efforts to extend the franchise in my own country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_Irish_expatriates_to_vote
I'm not at all sure if such a proposal makes us a "mafia state", sometimes given the way our governments in whatever combination behave, it's very tempting to think that.
I know that was recommended for Jamaica because expats would not be controlled by indigenous gangs. https://paulromer.net/enfranchising-the-jamaican-diaspora/
Sounds like an exceptional situation, but also very parternalistic. like Jamaicans couldn't decide for themselves what was good for them.
Garett Jones & Bryan Caplan would say voters often shouldn't be tasked with deciding what's good for them.
If you're going to allow people to vote because they *might* live in your country someday, and particularly if their living-in-your-countriness is contingent on your government's actions today then, Population of Germany, 1914: "Some of us might decide we want to live in Extreme West Germany, er, France, in 1918 if things go well, so we vote for defunding the French army and immediate unconditional surrender".
Voting is for people with skin actually in the game, not just theoretically.
Are you even an expatriate if it's your grandpa or great-grandpa who was born in the homeland?
This section of the wiki page seems to say that never-resident citizens have NOT been included under these proposals; only citizens who have lived in the country for some period of time and recently expatriated (regardless of whether they are citizens by remote ancestry or not).
AIUI, they define "lived in the country" by the pre-1918 borders.
An impressively spicy clause!
Sorry, I meant to link a section of the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_Irish_expatriates_to_vote#Debate_on_extending_the_franchise
I meant Hungary as well, I haven't a clue about Ireland.
Here in italy, expats can vote from abroad since 2001. Alas, as much as italy may or may not be a mafia state, it's not because of this. Their impact on the parliament is marginal at best, with a grand total of 12 representatives and 6 senators
There is a huge difference between expats being able to vote and ethnic minorities abroad being able to vote.
The difference is that Hungary allows anyone who is ethnically Hungarian (not sure how they define that) to vote if they live within the boundaries of pre-1918 Hungary. There are three whole modern countries (Slovakia, Croatia and Bosnia) plus sections of two others (Transylvania in Romania and Vojvodina in Serbia) that were part of the "Crown of St Stephen". Hungary's policy basically doesn't entirely admit this terrority isn't Hungarian. If you're a Hungarian in Transylvania, you can vote by post and you retain your citizenship through an number of generations. If you're a Hungarian in the rest of Romania, you have to go to a consulate, and your grandchildren are not Hungarian citizens.
Most countries in Europe have a citizenship rule that has two types of citizens: ones that have lived in the country and ones that haven't - children born outside the country to a citizen that has lived in the country are citizens, but those children are now citizens that haven't lived in the country, so if they have children then those children aren't citizens.
The weird thing Hungary is doing is that they say that Hungarian citizens living in these lands (the ones they lost at Trianon) are treated as being Hungarians who live in Hungary, so any number of generations later, their children are still citizens.
"The difference is that Hungary allows anyone who is ethnically Hungarian (not sure how they define that)"
Basically you need to speak Hungarian and have to be able to prove that it's reasonably probable that one of your ancestors was a Hungarian citizen.
Dang it, now you've got me fantasizing about Canada adopting this policy...
I've attempted to speak Magyar myself, and from that traumatic experience I have to say that the ability to do so fluently would be proof enough for me that a person must have Hungarian (not to say eldritch) blood.
There's a piece of Ukraine that was part of Hungary. Do they count too?(I know of that piece because two of my great-grandparents were from there.)
The definition of the group probably doesn't matter if the votes are fraudulent anyway
I think the Irish proposal is totally different. It’s just for people born in Ireland who have recently emigrated. Ireland can’t afford to give everybody who can get an Irish passport the vote - the locals could be overwhelmed.
Yeah, the article says Ireland has 4.8m residents, 2m never-resident diaspora members who have claimed Irish citizenship, and 1m diaspora members who have lived in Ireland for some period of time (all numbers including children) - the proposals here would only enfranchise that last group.
Also, as a never-resident citizen-via-ancestry of Ireland myself, I half suspect the whole project is just a way to extract money out of nostalgic Americans via fees. Getting an Irish citizenship + passport was *extremely* easy, but did cost several hundred dollars in fees...
We definitely don’t want you voting for the main parliament, though. Do you even know Irish political parties?
That said it’s a valuable passport.
I can remember driving down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago in the spring of 1989 past the Polish consulate and seeing a huge line of Polish expatriates queued up to vote and thinking to myself, "Holy cow, things must be changing behind the Berlin Wall if all these Polish expatriates are bothering to vote!"
I guess I can see a few problems with this argument. Let me play the devil's advocate.
Firstly, there are lots of places where the media doesn't enthusiastically cover opposition parties or goals. UKIP notably managed to bring about Brexit despite both receiving a mix of (at first) zero coverage and then later almost entirely negative coverage, mostly the former, and they achieved this through the basic hard work of doorstep campaigning until their vote share rose high enough that the government couldn't ignore them anymore. In the USA there actually are parties beyond the big two but you never, ever hear about them in the media. Yet the USA is still democratic. Media coverage of other parties and policies doesn't seem to be a genuine requirement of being a democracy.
Secondly, people who are abroad being able to vote is also very common in western democracies. It took me 15 years to lose my UK right to vote after moving abroad. Is the UK not a democracy as a consequence? The difference here seems to be a quantitative one - Hungary has way more Hungarians abroad as a consequence of losing WW1. I think there's a fairly good argument that people who move abroad should lose the right to vote in a country after some time period, and I wasn't upset at losing my own voting rights, as it seems unfair to be able to influence policies that almost exclusively affect other people. But I was surprised to discover that none of my friends still in the UK agreed with that! I figured they would agree even more strongly but no, they didn't like the fact it worked that way. Also there seems to be an implicit assumption in this argument that "of course" Hungarians outside of Hungary are all wildly pro-Fidesz because ... umm ... well ... go Hungary! .... but that feels like a weak part of the thesis. Why are they like that? Expats routinely vote for left wing parties in other countries. Perhaps they are not actually very different to the Hungarians at home, where, it seems, Orban has no difficulty picking up genuine votes?
Thirdly, although you say Hungary is a dictatorship due to gerrymandering, again, the USA has some very oddly shaped districts and the UK has had problems for years with unfair boundaries that - ironically - actually penalize the party in power. They're only now fixing it. Of course they were going to be accused of gerrymandering so they've layered the whole process in 'independent' reviews and so on, but ultimately it's still the government redrawing boundaries in ways that will benefit its own vote and you could paint that badly if you wanted to. Yet the UK and USA are democracies.
Finally, it sounds like even when he had the power to change the constitution in any way he saw fit, he retained the 2/3rds majority rule. That's a pretty common threshold for amending constitutions, isn't it. Is there some specific problem with this threshold in Hungary?
I guess my over-arching point is that if a book author sets out to make an elected leader look like a dictator, it seems to be pretty easy to do so. Governments do change constitutions, reform voting boundaries and change the franchise, especially in the years following communist rule. And as you admit, Fidesz is genuinely popular. He's not literally a dictator. He wins elections by adopting popular policies. That's .... kind of what we want politicians to do.
To me it seems a qualitative difference if you are an expat who was born in Hungary and moved abroad, or if your grandparents or great-grandparents were Hungarian and get the right to vote without ever having lived in the country.
Yes. That was clear to me. Scott did say irredentist so he is talking about ethnic Hungarians across the border. These kind of people are always nationalist.
> Also there seems to be an implicit assumption in this argument that "of course" Hungarians outside of Hungary are all wildly pro-Fidesz because ... umm ... well ... go Hungary!
It's not an assumption, it's a fact. In 2018, 96% of the Hungarians abroad without a Hungarian address (the ones that can vote by mail) voted for Fidesz, while 45% of the entire electorate did.
FWIW, I personally am quite happy to call America undemocratic; I believe the technical term is something like "flawed democracy". FPTP + gerrymandering is the main structural issue, but there are cultural ones as well.
As for overseas citizens, the distinction between expats and people who've never lived in the country is significant. I am a UK citizen, but can't vote in their elections because I have never been resident there; France, I assume due to it's colonial legacy of random tiny islands all over the place, does allow overseas citizens to vote but the numbers are small enough that the main consequence is a bit of pork-barrelling. It sounds like Orban's policy allows ethnic Hungarians 100 years removed from living within the borders of Hungary to vote, and that there are a large number of these....
"is less stable and valuable for leaders than some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy, and there's a spectrum from perfectly functional democracy to total sham democracy which might as well be a dictatorship."
Authoritarianism has evolved to be far more respectable (think transition from mustachioed guys in uniform to legalese-babbling men in suits) since the mid-20th century. There's a particularly amusing graph summarizing this on pp. 115 here: https://econ.ntu.edu.tw/uploads/asset/data/60b469f548b8a1027b023ecc/HKBU_1100602.pdf
I suspect that the grand finale of this book series will be Putin. The main problem is that there are very few dispassionate dispassionate writers on the topic in the West, most of them are jilted journalists and emigre oligarch-funded activist types. On the chance you're interested in books that are not anti-Putin jeremiads but strive for some degree of objectivity, my recommendations, in this order, would be:
* Richard Sakwa - The Crisis of Russian Democracy, possibly still the single best characterization of Putinism as a "dual state" (though anything by Sakwa will be good)
* Daniel Treisman - The Return
* Hutchins & Korobko - Putin
* The English translation of Mikhail Zygar's All the Kremlin's Men
Incidentally, only one of them are pro-Putin apart from Hutchins/Korobko, the others are neutral to skeptical, but they at least have the advantage of not being driven by ideological animus like the Masha Gessens and Lucases and Pomerantsevs.
On that graph, where would Western (semi-)democratic leaders of the early 20th century be placed? Say, Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle? The graph might just be picking up an atmosphere change towards pacifism across the world.
But yes, I agree that authoritarians have learnt quite a few tricks since the 1990s, starting with the "leave your borders open on the inside so the troublemakers can go to America" one that the Soviets had to be stuffed down their throats so violently. (Which is why I was so surprised about the Australian lockdowns...)
I'm curious about your book recommendations. When you say "in this order", do you mean "from most to least important"?
The charts have FDR.
I think using the term "gerrymandering" may soft-peddle what Orban has done. We normally think of gerrymandering as drawing funny-shaped districts precisely because of the need to manipulating a district's partisan makeup while keeping the total population in each district the same.
But it sounds like Orban is using the "rotten borough" strategy in which unpopulated areas get the same vote as more populated areas. That does violate the basic "one man, one vote" principle.
OTOH, in fairness, that was a common and legal practice for drawing state legislative districts until the Baker v. Carr decision in 1962. And of course unequal geographical representation is also a feature of the U.S. Senate. Moreover, I just did a quickie Google search and learned that Germany has an upper house in which the delegates are not directly elected but appointed by state legislatures (like pre-1913 US Senators). And in that chamber: "The number of votes a state is allocated is based on a form of degressive proportionality according to its population. This way, smaller states have more votes than a distribution proportional to the population would grant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Bundesrat#Composition
I guess this is why it's hard to pin an anti-democratic label on Orban. Each individual thing he does to consolidate his power has precedent in other democracies. But the sum total starts to look a little dictator-ish.
I do not think this is true. Hungarian election laws what were implemented by Orban, have their roots in 2005 Supreme Court decision(when Orban was in opposition). Basically court said that due to demographic changes districts do not represent "one man, one vote" principle. Old way was more like "rotten borough" strategy.
When Orban implemented the law, I guess he used it to manipulate partisan makeup, but at the same time moved away from "rotten borough". Today population disparity between different districts is much smaller.
Very interesting. Thanks.
Directly electing Senators made them more like members of the House, rather defeating the purpose of the separate chamber.
Well, not entirel I think. Probably the main purpose of the Senate, cf. the Grand Compromise, was to prevent bigger states from dominating a collection of smaller states, a very real concern when New York and Pennsylvania had 75% (or whatever) of the population of the United States, not to mention all the money.* The Senate made each state co-equal, so Delaware and Maine had equal weight with New York and Pennsylvania. That feature remains notwithstanding the Seventeenth Amendment.
It was a bit different pre baker v carr. You couldn’t actually draw new districts unequally - you could only let very old district lines stay for approximately forever.
I suggest "democratic dictators".
The gerrymendering situation is not actually that bad and the current electoral system generally favors the winner getting diproportianally many seats, so the opposition can probably get 2/3 majority in the parliament by getting 55% or 60% of the vote.
So I wouldn't call Orban a dictator, and although the situation is very bad, and is not nearly as bad as some parts of the review suggests. In a comment above, I try to explain how I see things from Hungary.
Do the ethnic Hungarians abroad not count toward a "majority" in your view?
I do wonder how they are represented geographically for gerrymander purposes.
No. They do not live in Hungary and are not impacted by the policies the government makes. Just because they speak the same language as most people in Hungary does not entitle the to suferrage. If they want to vote they should go through the immigration process like everyone else.
Currently, as a matter of fact, they are even exempted from the citizenship exam that everybody else has to take.
A clear case of discrimination.
Actually, AFAIK, descendants of Hungarian citizens could get expedited citizenship if they moved to Hungary even before the new rules. The main change is that they can get citizenship and vote even without moving to Hungary. Fidesz talked about the "symbolic unity of Hungarians", but it was entirely about giving Fidesz votes.
No, for the reasons Monkaap said.
Non-resident Hungarians can only vote for party lists, not for candidates in districts. This reduces their impact. (Hungary has a mixed electoral system with both single-member constituencies and party lists.)
If it's a similar hybrid system to Germany, that still gives them almost as much power on the national stage.
The Hungarian system is more majoritarian than the German one. In Germany, party list seats are assigned in a way that more-or-less completely compensates for the FPTP seats, and produces a result proportional to the party list votes. In Hungary, party list votes have much less weight. Party list seats are assigned partly based on party list votes, and partly for compensation for the FPTP seats, but the latter is based on the FPTP votes, not the party list votes.
I always got the impression, that 'illiberal democracy' was what Orban liked to call his government style, hinting that this was just another kind of democracy. But I'm not up-to-date with political science literature on this.
Looked it up, there are poli-science papers using the term 'illiberal democracy'. Not sure how common this is in the literature, but certainly common enough for the statement: '"illiberal democracy" and "mafia state" have both been mooted.'
Unfortunately (il)liberal democracy is something of an ambiguous term, open to equivocation fallacy/motte and bailey. As far as I understand, it's often used to refer to values such as a free press, due process and not suppressing the opposition: values that were originally considered liberal, but which nowadays every mainstream party upholds in a well-functioning democracy, and without which a country can't really be considered democratic at all. But it could also be used to literally refer to a country where the governing party is liberal in a modern sense.
So when a party tries to control all the media or harasses opposition, and gets accused of dismantling liberal democracy, it can retort "we soundly defeated liberals in the elections, so why should we be expected to uphold liberal democracy?" Conversely, modern liberals can accuse non-liberal politicians of dismantling "liberal democracy" simply for not being liberal in the modern sense, which (to some people) has worse connotations than what is actually happening.
Some other observations:
In the election of 2010, before Orban got the chance to change any of the rules or before he gave voting rights to Hungarians abroad, it was still possible for him to get 68% of the seats in the parliament with just 52% of the popular vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Hungarian_parliamentary_election
So I was mistaken in my comment above, the Hungarian system was not "more or less proportional" even before Orban's reforms, the remorms just made it even more majoritarian, although still less so than the British system. Thanks for 10240 for pointing this out.
In 2014, with all the changes, he got 67% of the seats by getting 42% of the domestic popular vote and in 2018 he got 67% of the seats by getting 46% of the domestic vote. This is a significant change from 2010, but not super-significant, and I wouldn't call it "rigging the elections".
Also, these results are mostly the consequence that Hungarian politics in 2014 and 2018 didn't yet adapt to the fact that the system became more similar to first-past-the-post. Political theory tells us that first-past-the-post elections favor a two-party system, but Hungary had many parties before, and it took them time to coordinate (partially because of the selfishness and incompetence of certain opposition figures). So in 2014 and 2018 Orban could win almost all districts, because opposition votes wre fractured among more parties.
Now the opposition parties learned from their mistakes and formed a single coalition against Orban, they even held primary elections and in 2022 there will be only one Opposition candidate facing one Fidesz candidate in each district. A lots of things can happen until April 2022, but I give it a 40% chance that Orban will lose this election.
What happens after the Opposition wins, with many key positions still filled with Orban's loyal supporters who can't be removed without 2/3 majority is a very good question.
Still, I wouldn't call the Orban-regime ditatorical, because there is an actual cahnce for democratic change in power. It is just an extremely corrupt democratic governmet that shows many warning signs of becoming an actual sham-democracy (like Russia) one day.
If you want to talk about a regime where voting procedures and requirements are manipulated to encourage favorable demographics to vote and ambiguously enable fraud among those ballots, where super-legislative constitutional law is used to systematically advance the regime's priorities and frustrate attempts to reverse them through the ordinary political system, where the press is dominated by the regime and ignores or slanders real opposition... aren't you just describing the current US?
Orban has probably gone further and been more blatant about it than the amorphous and non-personalized US system has, but it looks to me very much like the same kind of "manipulating procedural outcomes", without any major categorical difference.
Tell me more about how Fox News is "dominated by the regime".
It's interesting that my impression from these posts is that what you don't want to happen to democratic countries does not begin and end with "what the people in those countries want to happen." If a sufficient number of people in a *democratic* country vote for X (and whether the technical definition of "sufficient" is 50% + 1 vote or 80-90% or any number short of 100% is irrelevant to the point) -- then if you believe in democracy per se, that should be good enough. If enough people vote for Orban or Modi, then whether or not you like his policies, or person, that should be good enough in terms of "what's good for Hungary" or "what's good for India."
Unless, of course, you *don't* believe in democracy, or perhaps if there are some other values that trump democracy. That certainly not at all unreasonable -- I can think of dozens of ethical values that trump democracy, myself, in part because my view on democracy aligns with Churchill's ascerbicism -- but one should be clear about this.
A democratically made decision to abolish democracy would arguably still count as undemocratic. And these aren't national referendums in these countries either determining the policies which affect how "democratic" it is.
> what you don't want to happen to democratic countries does not begin and end with "what the people in those countries want to happen.
Indeed, domocracy does not begin and end with 'what the majority of people in those countries want to happen' at a given moment. Democracy enables people to vote people in power and out of power; it also allows the different majorities to decide on and implement concrete policies. It does not allow the majority of a given moment to strip minorities of their basic rights, and it does not allow the majority to change the rules of the game in a way that wouldn't give future potential majorities the same chance to vote for their goverment in the same way and have the same chance at implementing their policies. It is embeded in a set of rules, and safeguard mechanisms that should ensure that nobody gains total control - not even if this would be the wish of the majority.
The distinction between policies and rules of the game is important.
Majorities can vote for and implement their own policies. They mustn't touch the rules of the game that ensure that the system remains democratic (which doesn't mean they can never change, but not in a way that cripple the functioning of democracy).
Housing policy, foreign policy or migration policies are examples of a policy. The system of checks and balances is one very basic part of the rules of the game.
Orban can decide not to take in any migrants - that's maybe not nice, not showing solidarity or even inhumane, but it's still a democratic decision. If Orban decides to take over the media, making sure that it gets difficult to publish other opinions, this is changing the rules of the game, and its undemocratic. It will make it harder for other opinions to be heard and for other majorities to vote their people in power - it's applying the axe to the foundations of democracy.
>then if you believe in democracy per se, that should be good enough
This holds true, if you believe 'democracy' is 'rule of the majority'. The confusion is solved though, if you define democracy as a system that enables the souvereign to choose its government - not only now but also in future, a specific system of goverment that is charicterized by regular elections, rule of law, a system of checks and balances, and the protection of minorities. Characterized also in current conditions by a media landscape and civil society that support the expression of a pluralism of opinions. Once you assume this understanding of democracy, being 'very much pro-democracy' and saying 'Orban mustn't do this and that' even if he has a majority, are only two different expressions of the same.
"It does not allow the majority of a given moment to strip minorities of their basic rights"
That sounds like liberalism, not democracy. When Friedrich Hayek was defending the Pinochet regime he said he would rather have a dictatorship that preserved some liberalism than an illiberal democracy. The founders of the US distrusted democracy and set rights in a Constitution that would be very difficult to amend (the section guaranteeing equal representation of the states is even separated out as impossible to amend).
"a specific system of goverment that is charicterized by regular elections, rule of law, a system of checks and balances, and the protection of minorities"
Only the bit about elections is a matter of democracy.
Thin ice here. My grandparents´generation in Germany was much too fond of Hitler at least for some time. Democracy doesn't have to be badly flawed to lead to catastrophy. There doesn't seem to be a sustainable alternative though.
Free trade should prevent collective madness but it depends heavily on law, which in turn has to be agreed upon somehow.
The Nazis won some votes, but they never took power legally.
If you're going to continue this book club, you could do an effective altruism crossover by weighing the developmental successes of Paul Kagame's government against widespread allegations of its brutality. See e.g. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/books/review/do-not-disturb-michela-wrong-rwanda.html).
"Some kind of hybrid regime that keeps the trappings of democracy" is a trick that goes back at least to Caesar; that's why Caesar was called an "imperator" (usually translated into English as "emperor", but previously it was a military term meaning "commander") and "dictator" (a sort of commissioner with emergency powers, prior to Caesar always being temporary) but never a "king" ("rex") like Tarquin. The Roman Senate was the governing body in the Republican period, but it continued to exist all the way through the entire Western Empire and for another century-plus after the Western Empire fell; and, in the East there was still a Roman Senate for another 600 years after that, though not quite until the final fall of Constantinople.
So, rather than saying that this is "one of the big stories of the late 20th/early 21st century," I would say that this is one of the big stories of the first century BCE to the 12th century CE. This is precisely how the Roman Republic was destroyed. And it's far from novel even in modern times.
The USSR retained the trappings of its bottom-up grassroots democracy (that's what the "soviets" were) even while the Party took over real control.
Here in Argentina, our Congress has served unbroken since 01854, 167 years, despite coups installing dictators in 01930, 01943, 01955, 01962, 01966, 01971, and 01976, plus Perón taking Orban-style measures to consolidate his power to such a frightening degree during his first period of rule (01946-01958, during which he changed the constitution to permit his re-election) that in the 38 years since the restoration of democracy in 01983, the party Perón founded has ruled for 27 years, and other parties only 11 years.
In Venezuela, Maduro is clearly a dictator, which results from Hugo Chavez gradually clearing out all the obstacles to dictatorship. But Chavez himself was never a dictator, and he always preserved the forms of democracy, in fact greatly strengthening them in appearances. But at the same time, he weakened them to the point that his successor would face no significant opposition.
It's the same in most recent dictatorships. Hosni Mubarak held multi-party elections which he won, and the Egyptian Parliament was never dissolved during his brutal reign. Pervez Musharraf held elections to, in theory, decide whether he would continue in power, but nobody else was allowed to run. Hungary itself, though Communist, was theoretically a parliamentary republic from 01946 to 01949 and still had a multiparty legislature until 01953; even after opposition parties were prohibited from running candidates, the Hungarian Parliament continued to hold regular elections, and many independent (that is, non-Communist) candidates continued to gain seats.
This is exactly the trick. If you are a wannabe-dictator, but you don't want the US or UN making noises at you (or sending drones to blow up your cities), then you must be careful to:
(1) Do not directly threaten US interests. If you make the right noises and play nicely, you can oppress and suppress at home all you like (ask Saudi Arabia for guidance on this).
(2) Keep the trappings of democracy: elections are a fun day out for all the army! have as many elections as you like! get plenty of people to vote! what counts is who does the counting, and you've got your people doing that. Fix it right, and you can be returned to power on 98% of the vote for the next thirty years as Perpetual President, and nobody will say boo to you!
tangential, by why have you written all the years in your post as 0XXXX instead of the more usual XXXX?
Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/
"Second, yes, you can campaign against him, but the media will just ignore you"
In contrast to the USA, where the Hunter Biden's laptop scandal was trumpeted out by all the news media and social media.
Or the sexual assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh (including at least one that was a fake accusation and admitted as such, for partisan purposes) versus the Tara Reade accusation against Biden. The Kavanaugh accusations (remember, the high school drug rape gang one?) got plenty of play and were treated as seriously as the Christine Blasey Ford accusation, which at least could have happened, but the Tara Reade soon fell under "we never said 'believe *all* women'" and "she's crazy" because it was inconvenient.
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh had to defend himself against the fake accusation as well as the rest of them, nobody was saying "well plainly this one is crazy":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh#Judy_Munro-Leighton
Here's our old friend the New York Times and how they treated Kavanaugh versus Biden allegations:
(1) "Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.
Deborah Ramirez’s Yale experience says much about the college’s efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s." (That one was the "we all got drunk at a frat party and maybe he stuck his dick in my face, I don't remember, I had to talk to my friends for a week before I decided" one).
(2) "Ms. Reade, a former Senate aide, has accused Mr. Biden of assaulting her in 1993 and says she told others about it. A Biden spokeswoman said the allegation is false, and former Senate office staff members do not recall such an incident."
What is the NYPost if not "media"?
This is a criticism that could also be leveled against Erdogan and Modi's inclusion in the list. Methinks `Dictator book club' needs a different name. Possibly `elected strongman book club' or something.
I always learned that for a democratic state, you need: regular, free, equal and confidential elections, rule of law, division of powers and protection of minorities.
I would add, that you need a minumum of free and diverse media and of diversity in civil society.
I don't claim this is the only possible definition, but 'there are elections' is certainly not enough.
You are quoting a definition for a LIBERAL democracy. If you don't care about the liberal modifier, then regular, free, equal and confidential elections are sufficient. Indeed, you could argue that each of Modi, Erdogan, and Orban has moved his country along the spectrum from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy, but the `dictator' claim seems hard to support.
I don't know where do you got this from. Care to provide me with some poli-science sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiberal_democracy
Thanks. I use wikipedia, but I'm far from being convinced that it adequately reflects whatever scientific or political philosphy consensus - if there is one.
If you wanted to go with wikipedia, the first paragraph on 'democracy' includes a sentence like this: "Cornerstones of democracy include freedom of assembly, association and speech, inclusiveness and equality, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
Ultimately, it's a matter of wording / definition. One question could be: what is more common/better argued for in political science? The other could be: what is more useful in a given context?
I wasn't aware this was a discussion in political science. Insisting on narrow academic definitions is like CNN insisting that CRT ISN"T TAUGHT in Virginia schools. The `illiberal democracy' label seems in pretty common mainstream use.
This appears to be the original source (and a clearer exposition than wikipedia) https://web.archive.org/web/20051015040527/http://fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/democracy.html
Okay, I had a quick look at the source and also a very quick look at google.scholar - my impression is, that this is used to describe and discuss specific phenomena in the past 20 years, rather than being at the core of more general definitions/descriptions of modern democracy. So I still get the impression, that if you want to convey the basic functioning of a democratic state, you go with the broad definition as above. The other is maybe more something for a specialized debate?
Ultimately, as in my comment to the wikipedia source, a matter of definition. As long as we agree that the thing we want is the one with rule of law, division of powers and protection of minorities ... Do we?
Interestingly, a lot of German political science paper seem to use 'flawed democracy' (or 'faulty' / 'damaged' democracy - defekte Demokratie) or put 'illiberal democracy' in " " where papers published in english might talk about illiberal democracy.
The problem with using a single term to encompass a system that has `each of a long list of characteristics' is what do you do if you have all but one? Calling it `dictatorship' doesn't seem appropriate because that describes a system with none of the characteristics. An intermediate term for a system with some but not all of the desiderate is useful. Perhaps the German language press has converged on `faulty democracy' while the English language press has on `illiberal democracy.'
Also, it makes semantic sense (to me at least) to use `democracy' to simply mean `you can get rid of your leaders via the ballot box' (something pretty rare historically!), with modifiers `liberal' or `illiberal' (or `faulty' if you prefer) to indicate whether it has the other desirable characteristics. But also, the `ballot box' bit is a fairly clear cut, bright line thing, whereas the other aspects are more of a continuum.
If every political leader can just leave some infinitesimal mechanism by which they might theoretically be voted out and thus opt out of being called a 'dictator' then the term is fairly useless. It is also pretty clear that many of these leaders would change the rules in a moment if their grasp appeared to be slipping. It sounds like dictatorship to me.
`Infinitesimal mechanism' is not right. I don't know the situation in Hungary or Turkey that well, but Modi for instance could absolutely lose power via the ballot box. And his party *has* lost state elections, without engaging in extra-constitutional shenanigans to hold on to power. Hell, he's a Prime Minister not a President, he could lose power even without losing a federal election, if his party turns against him. This doesn't sound much like a `dictator' to me. I don't know enough about Hungary to know if the same is true there, but I suspect it might be.
I was only referring to Hungary. I don't know enough about Modi judge.
Yes and no? I agree that he could lose. But I also feel like there's a clear pattern of 'extra constitutional shenanigans' which put him pretty far along the illiberal line. Yes he is pretty far away from being a dictator, but he tries to make it so that he can come as close as he can.
"There are elections" is definitely not enough. Rotten boroughs participated in elections, but nobody would say those were free and fair and representative. Landlords directing their tenants as to whom they would vote for (or else be evicted) were not free and fair elections - this is why Daniel O'Connell's movement to get the mass of people into an association was so successful, and so threatening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_O%27Connell#Emancipation_and_the_agrarian_crisis
"To broaden and intensify the campaign for emancipation, in 1823, O'Connell established Catholic Association. For a "Catholic rent" of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), this, for the first time, drew the labouring poor into a national movement. Their investment enabled O'Connell to mount "monster" rallies (crowds of over 100,000) that stayed the hands of authorities, and emboldened larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-Emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
The government moved to suppress the Association by a series of prosecutions, but with limited success. Already in 1822 O'Connell had manoeuvred his principal foe, the Attorney General, William Saurin, into actions sufficiently intemperate to ensure his removal by the Lord Lieutenant. His confrontation with Dublin Corporation, equally unbending in its defence of the "Protestant Constitution", took a more tragic turn.
Outraged at O'Connell's refusal to retract his description of the corporation as "beggarly", one of their number, John D'Esterre, challenged O'Connell to a duel. As an experienced duellist, there was some hope that D'Esterre, would dispose of a man considered "worse than a public nuisance". In the event it was O'Connell who mortally wounded D'Esterre. Distressed by the killing, O'Connell offered to share his income with D'Esterre's widow. She consented to a small allowance for her daughter, which O'Connell regularly paid for more than thirty years until his death.
In 1828 O'Connell defeated a member of the British cabinet in a parliamentary by-election in County Clare. His triumph, as the first Catholic to be returned in a parliamentary election since 1688, made a clear issue of the Oath of Supremacy—the requirement that MPs acknowledge the King as "Supreme Governor" of the Church and thus forswear the Roman communion. Fearful of the widespread disturbances that might follow from continuing to insist on the letter of the oath, the government finally relented. With the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, invoking the spectre of civil war, the Catholic Relief Act became law in 1829. The act was not made retroactive so that O'Connell had to stand again for election. He was returned unopposed in July 1829.
...Entry to parliament had not come without a price. Bringing the Irish franchise into line with England's, the 1829 Act raised the property threshold for voting in county seats five-fold, eliminating the middling tenantry (the Irish "forty-shilling freeholders") who had risked much in defying their landlords on O'Connell's behalf in the Clare election. The measure reduced the Irish Catholic electorate from 216,000 voters to just 37,000."
All true, but the point I've repeatedly been trying to make is that `free and fair elections to determine who is in charge' and `the suite of civil liberties taken for granted in modern Western societies' are two conceptually different things, and you can have societies that have (either) one but not the other. Graphically, you can put `free and fair elections' on the x axis and `liberal society' on the y, and while most societies cluster close to the diagonal there is no hard rule that says it has to be so, and you can imagine (and there exist) significant outliers in either direction.
> 'free and fair elections to determine who is in charge
Free elections are mostly meaningless,
- if different options can't effectively compete to win the electorates favour (for this you need freedom of assembly, pluralism in the press and rule of law that makes sure you don't land in jail and are free from discrimination if you hold another view),
- if you can't publicly discuss different points of view (which despite the growing importance of social media still highly depends on the traditional media)
- if you get only the goverment's PR view on what they are doing, without additional insights, opposing views and critical analysis (effective opposition, diverse media)
- if nobody makes sure that the given majority does not do things that encompass their power (like changing the election rules in way that give them 99% advantage, use their 60% majority in one chamber to change basic law that can be changed only with 2/3 majority in two chambers and so on - here you need rule of law again and division of powers/ checks and balances)
From our discussion above it seems you like clearcut definitions. I challenge you to find an example of a modern state which has regular elections but: no rule of law, no devision of powers or checks and balances, no free and/or diverse press, no freedom of assembly, no pluralism in civil society and which we still call a democracy.
not -> note. wish ACX allowed edits to fix typos.
I don't think I can find en example where all these values are set to zero but we call the state a democracy but (a) these values are continua, not binaries. For instance, `freedom of the press' can be abridged to greater or lesser extend by libel law, hate speech legislation etc. and (b) some of these values are easier to separate from free and fair elections than others. For instance, (i) minority rights (on your original list but not your latest): Examples of states generally considered democracies but without minority right abound. Jim Crow era USA for one (de facto at least). (ii) rule of law (as opposed to substantial discretionary powers vested in individuals): It is debatable to what extent the Republic of India has had rule of law (including before Modi). (iii) checks and balances: all Westminster model parliamentary democracies (such as the UK and its `children') have practically speaking no checks or balances on the power of the legislature.
Now, freedom of assembly, speech and press seem harder to separate from the regular exercise of free and fair elections (for reasons that you articulate in another post), but here too, I will note that over the past two years large swathes of the West have suspended freedom of assembly and curtailed freedom of speech, and yet I have not heard it seriously argued (except on DSL) that e.g. Australia is no longer a democracy.
I agree with most of what you say. I don't think it speaks much for the 'elections are sufficient' - definition.
a) continua not binaries for many of those 'values': definitely.
(I had a long text related to this in one of my former comments - just saying in case it got overlooked, quite easy to happen I guess.)
b) no country I know is 100% maximum on all of those aspects. They also don't need to be. Also, each democracy evolves in a certain context, and the country-specific solutions differ a lot.
So what you would do is: you'd look at all the relevant elements (free media, checks and balances, ...) in a specific country, try to understand how they work in practice, and check to which extend they 'function well'. Then you put your results on all those elements together to get a picture that leaves you with an image of 'clearly democratic' 'clearly not democratic' or eg. 'mostly democratic, but worrysome with regard to x and z'. To make things more fun, often those elements interact, and you only understand the functioning of one if you understand the whole system pretty well.
Once you have a category with several elements that are continua, it makes no sense to say: look, in country x there are problems with this one criterion z and we still call the thing a democracy, so criterion z can't be relevant. It's the specific value of each criterion and the combination of all those together that counts.
Therefore I don't want to go too much into detail with the examples you mention, as 'this one criterion in country x has value y' is not very relevant. Still, '*no* checks and balances' in UK is an overstatement.
I don't know Australia very well. I can certainly think of western countries where we might say 'clearly a democracy, but looking quite worrysome with regard to criterion x and z'. Whether this fits the Australian case, no idea. I'm not in the mood to start the next part of the discussion, so I refrain from mentioning any names.
Excuse the long extract, but it sums up why "nominal democracy" and "effective dictatorship" may have a considerable overlap:
"Orbán is the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator. Twentieth-century dictatorships were about ideology and repression: physical repression with this detestable ideology. Twenty-first-century authoritarianism works through economic means rather than physical means. So economic coercion is everywhere in Hungary. But, if you went there on vacation, you would never guess that it’s a dictatorship. And that’s because the way that Orbán exercises control is through money. Orbán has eliminated the system of welfare and unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test. With the media, his oligarchs have bought out all the media that were critical of him. They’ve consolidated the banking sector in their hands.
"And so this is the new form of oppression. It doesn’t look like oppression if you’re on the streets of Budapest. But if you live there and you have no money and you can’t get an income because no one will hire you, then what happens? You have to leave. So, it’s a combination of regulatory adjustments, but mostly it’s economic measures, and those are not very visible. Human-rights groups are not really attuned to tracking those the way that they would track journalists in jail."
From "Why Conservatives Around the World Have Embraced Hungary’s Viktor Orbán
A sociologist explains why the country’s Prime Minister is “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.”"
at https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-conservatives-around-the-world-have-embraced-hungarys-viktor-orban
My partner is Hungarian, so I've been there a lot over the past 20 years. It's true that, to an "outsider", like me, it seems essentially "normal", like other European countries of my experience. (Fwiw I also visited East Germany, when it still existed, and that felt very different, even to a visitor.)
But the normality is just "surface". What matters, in the long term, is how the various mechanisms, de jure and de facto, of checks-and-balances and accountability are being dismantled and subverted. (Cf. what the current Tory govt in the UK is doing or trying to do.)
Hungary is no longer a democracy by most rankings. It's perhaps a little better than Russia - the opposition doesn't routinely end up murdered - but not by too much.
> perhaps a little better than Russia
Seriously? "perhaps" "little"
> the opposition doesn't routinely end up murdered
Can you give examples of political murders on orders of ruling party/Orban?
Huh? *Unlike* Russia.
"perhaps a little better than Russia" suggested that it is almost as bad as in Russia
In that it's almost as undemocratic - i.e. essentially zero - not that it's almost as murderous.
It appears quite likely that Orban will be voted out in the next elections, what is far away from situation in Russia.
China technically has elections, its just that coincidentally the only people who ever win are CCP members. I guess that makes China a democracy? You're giving too much focus to symbolic structures not outcomes
Nail on head.
Hungary needs to retain the pretence of democracy to remain in the EU (vital to its economy), but if only one party can win, it is only a pretence
> Even with the absurdly gerrymandered electoral system [...] Hungary is still a democracy. To my mind, the line separating democracies from dictatorships is whether or not a majority of the people can vote out the party/leader in power
Gerrymandered electoral systems often (usually) mean that a majority of people can vote against a leader and that leader still be re-elected. E.g. in the UK election in 2019, the Tories won 56.2% of the seats despite only getting 43.6% of the votes. Consequently, countries that use FPTP, such as the UK and many of its former colonies (India, USA, Canada, etc) aren't full democracies.
The winner in FPTP usually has a plurality of the vote, if not a majority. Claiming that in a multiparty system every vote not for a given party is a vote against them is disingenuous. Even under proportional representation with multiple parties the person who ends up in charge of the executive is normally not from a party that commanded a majority of the vote. This line of argument leads to the conclusion that no multiparty system can ever be a democracy. (Unless perhaps it implements a strictly two party runoff, French Presidential election style). But if we are making isolated and ridiculous demands for rigor, why stop there? Why not go the whole `no representative system can ever be a democracy, Switzerland is the only democracy to ever exist.'
> Claiming that in a multiparty system every vote not for a given party is a vote against them is disingenuous.
It certainly isn't a vote *for* them! Under PR, the largest party would have to do deals with smaller parties if it didn't get a majority of the votes, if it wanted to control a majority of the seats.
Furthermore, under FPTP many voters end up voting for one of the 2 biggest parties, even though they don't like either of them, because otherwise their vote may be wasted. That's why the last 4 times their was a UK-wide election under a semi-proportional system, the Conservatives and Labour between them got less than half the vote. Both these parties know full well the voters don't like them, which is why they keep FPTP, in order to thwart democracy.
> Even under proportional representation with multiple parties the person who ends up in charge of the executive is normally not from a party that commanded a majority of the vote.
Under PR, there is usually no party that got a majority of the vote. E.g. in the 2021 Scottish election no party got a majority of the votes or seats, and the result was a coalition between the SNP and Greens.
> This line of argument leads to the conclusion that no multiparty system can ever be a democracy.
It's a nonsense argument. Under a pure PR system, a group of parties that have a majority of seats will have a majority of votes, so most voters will have voted for one of the parties in it.
> (Unless perhaps it implements a strictly two party runoff, French Presidential election style)
Presidential elections -- and elections for 1 place generally -- are different because they can't be proportional, since one candidate must get 100% of the seats and everyone else get 0%. They can avoid the wasted vote phenomenon e.g. by having run-off elections as they do in France.
> But if we are making isolated and ridiculous demands for rigor
I fail to see where I have done any such thing.
> Why not go the whole `no representative system can ever be a democracy, Switzerland is the only democracy to ever exist.
They *do* have representatives in Switzerland. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Swiss_federal_election
They also have referendums, as do several places. I do think referendums are part of making a country a democracy, particularly when the people want one thing and the politicians something else.
But really, it's not a binary thing. Democracy is instead a continuum, with Norway near one end and North Korea towards the other end.
The New York Times is currently very excited about the prospect of Orban being voted out of office, if only his rivals can unite:
"In Hungary’s Heartland, Orban Faces a Unified Challenge to His Rule
"The country’s normally fractious opposition has rallied around a conservative mayor who just might be able to oust the authoritarian prime minister after more than a decade.
"By Andrew Higgins and Benjamin Novak
"Oct. 18, 2021"
Some dictator ...
Orban has been in power for 11 years, but Bibi Netanyahu spent 15 years as Israel's supremo and finally got pushed out by a guy to his right, Naftali Bennett. The notion that Orban is a dictator rather than a talented politician appears to be largely a concoction of another talented politician who used to be Orban's mentor, George Soros.
"The notion that Orban is a dictator rather than a talented politician appears to be largely a concoction of another talented politician who used to be Orban's mentor, George Soros."
It's irrelevant whether Soros "concocted" the notion that Orbán is a dictator (in some sense or other of the word) — you just have to look at what Orbán has done to come to a conclusion about whether he is some sort of 'effective dictator' or not.
Mind you, given Orbán's vendetta against Soros and the CEU, it'd be hard to blame Soros for thinking like that.
In any case,, plenty of other people regard Orbán in a very similar way.
So many people that they might just vote The Dictator out of office in the upcoming election...
Soros conspiracies, *really*?
Even in old age, George Soros is a brilliant, vastly wealthy, and highly effectual man who has been organizing political operations all over the world for decades to attain his goals (such as, among much else, electing anti-law & order prosecutors like Chesa Boudin in San Francisco: https://www.thesfnews.com/george-soros-backs-district-attorney-campaigns-nationwide/66204).
It's an insult to Soros to assert that he couldn't possibly help organize all the movements -- because that would be a conspiracy theory -- that he has famously helped organize.
Using language like 'anti-law & order prosecutors' and relying on the highly partisan Daily Caller News Foundation as the primary source for your exemplar story shifts my needle, at least, in the direction of 'yeah, I guess we're doing Soros conspiracies here now'.
Since you speak admiringly of the dark arts of political manipulation, I don't feel too uncharitable in pointing this out as a shortcoming.
You are demeaning Mr. Soros by refusing to acknowledge his impressive effectiveness at getting anti-law and order prosecutors elected across America.
I suggest Pulitzer winning nytimes guy Joe Lelyveld's book "Great Soul", on Gandhi, next. :)
Sadly every Hungarian I have met were extremely nationalistic and somehow believed it to be the best country in the world and Hungarians to be the best at everything. Never mind reality.
That's a gross misrepresentation of the population – not to say that that couldn't have been your experience, but sounds like your sample is quite small.
It is my experience, as I wrote. And a lot of people clearly votes for Orban.
Alternatively the ones who disagree don't talk about it very loudly, for health reasons
Better than being a self-hating white Briton who longs to be a minority in their own homeland.
I don't think any of the people in the so-called "Dictator's Book Club" have actually been dictators. I really dislike the hyperbolic use of dictator for anybody who has any kind of "authoritarian" tendencies, it really cheapens the label and makes the word meaningless.
Should probably plug here that Hungary has elections coming in 2022 in which all of the non-Fidesz parties have united into a single coalition, and are currently leading in the polls. Unclear how much that will matter given all the gerrymandering, but this is the most significant threat to Orban's power in a long time: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/28/hungary-anti-orban-alliance-leads-ruling-party-in-2022-election-poll
It looks like the opposition might win!
Betting markets are not particularly liquid but one bookie is offering odds which imply a 60-70% chance that Fidesz will not win a majority at the next election.
https://www.olbg.com/blogs/hungarian-general-election-betting-odds-and-history
All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries. In fact, if he ever rigged an election it could be called "fortifying" it (see NYT on February 4, 2021).
I think OP meant this one https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ which is from Time rather than the New York Times but the dates match.
"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."
Having read that before many of the things were reasonably termed as 'fortifying' but the one thing that truly shocks me is that Zuckerberg ran about 300 million through swing state governments with around $20 to $1 spent in get out the vote advertising in liberal vs conservative areas. 95% of turnout funding targeted at the preferred voters of a billionaire
You become what you fear sometimes
Molly Ball
All of the things? Like amending the constitution dozens of times? The 2013 amendment runs 15 pages. Here's a full list of changes: https://lapa.princeton.edu/hosteddocs/hungary/Fourth%20Amendment%20to%20the%20FL%20-Eng%20Corrected.pdf
If they got a 67% majority? Of course.
67% majority thanks to extreme gerrymandering. It's like if the US Senate were the only parliamentary body and 80% of the states had the population of Wyoming.
And nice moving of the goalposts from "all these things are routine on the left" to "in a theoretical universe where western leftists routinely get 67% majorities."
Orban's 67% majority came when he was in opposition so gerrymandering is not an explanation, and also I don't know how you can imagine a scenario where leftists get a supermajority and not completely insert their agenda into the constitution. If dictatorship is winning a big majority and doing what your base wants, then dictatorship is not that bad.
They won that before they were in power. So if anything, the gerrymander would have been against them.
I'm sorry, what did you say? I believe it was "All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries."
So far we have at least one thing they don't do; and I have sneaking suspicion that if you looked hard enough; you'd see that number climb a little higher.
They have a bare majority now and are seriously considering court packing. Which is just a barrage of constitutional amendments by another procedure.
What's that?
"Bare Majority" and "Considering" I see.
You are moving the goalposts. The claim in the GP comment was
“All of the things you accuse Orban of doing, are routine with the Left in most Western countries.”
Which was rightly challenged by the parent comment as hyperbole. “If they got 67% majority” is a hypothetical that is irrelevant to the concrete claim about the actual Left in actual Western countries.
So, if Democrats today, packed the Supreme Court, eliminated the filibuster, changed the voting laws to ensure Republicans needed 80% of the vote to win, eliminated (and made illegal) Fox News and all other Right wing media, you would not consider that dictatorial?
Those are all things that haven't happened...Huw are they "routine".
Those are the kinds of things that Orban is doing. Modifying the system through the system to make it impossible for the opposition to win. He was saying Orban is not a dictatorship. I was asking if he would feel the same if it was by the other tribe in his own country. He said he would feel the same.
I think we have all established(in this lengthy comments section) that the line between illiberal democracy and dictatorship is not entirely clear. Accordingly, I took him at his word. Assuming it isn't your position that Orban is a hero, then we probably largely agree and the issue is semantic. If you claim that you _do_ think he's a hero, that's on you.
NPR and BBC criticizing state-sponsored media.
+1
NPR and BBC are politically independent. You can accuse them of bias but it is certainly not the case that the BBC is doing Boris Johnson's bidding.
I don't know about the BBC, but NPR is known to be widely trusted by Democrats and distrusted by Republicans. That doesn't suggest political independence when your source of funding is the government.
NPR's bias is the same regardless of which party is in power.
Yes, but since NPR's bias is pro-"Government has all the answers" that does seem to imply they are not terribly independent. They are simply more dependent on the bureaucratic state as a whole instead of who is sitting in an elected seat.
Gabor Fodor - any relation to Magda, Eva and Zsa Zsa? In Hungary the family name is first, like in China.
No. All names in the article are Western order.
Was this post written by someone else? It doesn't read like Scott's usual writing at all and is riddled with strange typos.
It reads like Scott’s style. For example, the “just kidding” joke he did maybe twice here is classic Scott
Thanks for this
It's interesting that Orban seems to be, by your description, a tyrant in the original Greek sense of the word: an illegitimate popular ruler. With the caveat that the illegitimacy here is by liberal procedural standards.
That said, given that we have illegitimate unpopular rulers in the States today I'm not sure it's such a bad trade. Orban writes blank checks to his supporters of taxpayer money; likewise with Biden (see Build Back Better). Orban transparently rigged the election via insecure mail-in voting, expanding the franchise with foreign nationals, and his party's near-total control of the media; likewise with Biden (see Fortifying the Election). Orban is a pathological liar; likewise with Biden (see his bizarre Amtrak story and history of similarly weird and insistent lies). Honestly, following polling and implementing popular measures rather than Davos-favored ones seems like a plus.
I don't expect Orban to solve Hungary's problems, whether their poor fertility or poor economic prospects, but again I've seen no movement on that front by any equivalent liberal politician in the West. So if they're not going to have their problems solved either way, in the end it comes down to whether you prefer ineffectual corrupt populism or ineffectual corrupt elitism. Just by the numbers the former seems preferable.
No, the original Greek sense of the word meant seizing power through violence.
Yeah, I think the word he is looking for is Demagogue
I would be enjoying this series so much more if it were the Demagogue Book Club. Erdogan, Modi, and Orban all definitely belong to a type of world leader who has become more common in the 21st century -- right-wing populist who wins a majority large enough to change the Constitution of the state in a manner conducive to their own remaining in power -- but they're not dictators. Opposition parties in all of these states have real power (to give an interesting example, the mayors/premiers of all three capital cities are from important oppositionist parties -- the Republican People's Party in Ankara, the Dialogue Party in Budapest, and the Common Man Party in Delhi), even if they've been curtailed in a way that makes seizing power unlikely (though this is less true in India than Hungary or especially Turkey, I think). Note that polls currently have Orban losing the popular vote in the next Hungarian election (though he may still be reelected given gerrymandering) and Erdogan losing the next Turkish presidential election (though Turkish elections are more questionable than Hungarian or Indian ones, I think).
Nothing of the sort would ever be conceivable in Russia! (Much less more oppressive dictatorships like Belarus or China or many Arab states...). I think a series exploring just where the line between democracy and dictatorship lies would be interesting and important, as would analyzing *why* leaders like this have been coming to power so often in the modern world. (Duterte is a really obvious one for Scott to analyze, as would examples where a leader like this comes to power but then fails to consolidate -- this seems to be happening to Bolsonaro).
An actual 21st-century example of a formerly democratic country truly ceasing to be democratic would be something like Nicaragua, or Venezuela, or Egypt. Ortega, Chavez, and Sissi would all be fascinating case studies. But they seem categorically different from Erdogan/Modi/Orban.
Good points
Can you give me a source on that?
I could believe it, after all I'm not a classics scholar by any means, but the Encyclopedia Britannica seems to back me up that it's about illegitimacy (they say "unconstitutional") rather than specifically violence. Violence is one illegitimate means of establishing tyranny but I was under the impression that the term applied more broadly.
You points could be valid, but your basic premise is wrong.
The Democratic party won a majority of votes for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and yet the Republican party STILL has 50% of the legislature.
It's kinda weird you can look at a country where the minority right wing party routinely controls all branches of government while losing the popular vote in all branches of government, and decide that it's languishing under leftist tyranny.
As someone looking in from, well, slightly less outside than before, I cannot emphasize how insane people who are complaining about Democrats rigging elections sound to me. You're telling me someone became president when more than half the people voted against him?
America's presidential election does not operate on the popular vote, period. I wish people would stop making this argument; or else perhaps try to get together the political wherewithal to amend the Constitution so that it is, if they believe it's so outrageous
I know perfectly what is the case. I am arguing what is the case is dumb. Perhaps that misunderstanding is at the heart of your disagreement with "people".
I debated whether to respond to this, because it's going to be unproductive, but ultimately since I was the one to bring up the comparison there's no way around it.
The problem with this narrative of the US system being stacked against the Democrats is in my view twofold:
1. The first issue is that we don't actually have any sense of how many of those votes were cast by the people alleged to have voted. The Democrats are centered in cities, to the point that even solidly blue states like New York are oases of blue urban areas in a sea of red counties, and city political machines are notorious for stuffing ballot-boxes. As a result of the 2020 audits and investigations, we know that *at least* tens of thousands of voters who are deceased or are not residents of their counties were listed as having voted in the presidential elections in Wayne county, Maricopa county, and a dozen other democratic strongholds. Given how few safeguards there are to detect fraud even prior to the sweeping unconstitutional changes introduced last year, it's safe to assume that the cases of careless election fraud we do manage to find are only a drop in the bucket.
2. The second issue is that the Democratic party has bypassed the legal immigration process to import tens of millions of voters both in the form of illegal immigrants who themselves vote (via corrupt laws such as the motor voter act which bypass citizenship requirements) or who give birth to children who cannot be legally prevented from voting in US elections. The latter is a substantial shift in demographics in favor of the Democratic party: in 2015 alone, births by illegal immigrants were an estimated 7.5% of the entire US total (https://cis.org/Report/Births-Legal-and-Illegal-Immigrants-US).
Both of the above are tactics deliberately and systematically undermine the majority vote, both by adding voters who only exist on paper in the short term and by manufacturing favorable ethnic voting blocks, in ways which would make Tammany Hall proud.
(Here I'm ignoring wonky procedural issues like gerrymandering required by the Civil Rights Act to maintain black majority districts which hurt democrats in national elections, because frankly that sort of thing isn't very important to me.)
You're right, it's going to be unproductive. It usually is unproductive when you put forward a bunch of thoroughly disproven falsehoods in front of a well informed (and reasoned) group of people.
+1
-1
I mean, if we're saying obviously fake things I could go on about how Trump is a lizard person.
OMG, obviously only the Dem's are lizard people. That's just basic canon.
“He passed a new law saying he could fire any civil servant at will, then fired people in key positions and replaced them with his cronies and college buddies.”
Smart. Trust people you have known all your life, and no one else. I’m at that point myself. It's good practice, in any line of work.
“But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?”
Sanity? Not being guilt-ridden suicidal leftists? Not being willing to your country be invaded and destroyed? The Swedes, to pick one example, are living the wreckage of their own stupidity. Everyone else is finally waking up in Europe. Orban gets no credit for seeing what a fucking catastrophe this was going to be, and preventing it? Really, Scott?
“And in fall 2015, he constructed a Trump-style wall along the eastern border. Immigration numbers dropped from tens of thousands a month to a trickle.”
Orban should get The Defender of Civilization Lifetime Achievement Medal. Bring on the Trump style walls. They are one of the few public policies with a proven track record of actually working.
“Still, it’s not really obvious what positive lessons one could learn from the policies of Orban’s Hungary.”
See above. It's plenty obvious.
Funny, Orban is described as a guy who makes a mockery of democracy and is unaccountable. Yet he keeps getting elected. Democracy and elections, there is some connection there, what was it again? How weird is it that a guy figures out what voters want, does what they want, and when it works, they like it, and he keeps getting elected. How undemocratic can you get???
And his main enemy is the totally undemocratic and totally unaccountable EU. Not a word about that.
Orban looks to me like the kind of guy Yarvin writes about, a guy who uses executive power to benefit his people. We are used to elected governments being totally ineffectual and doing what their experts want, often the college cronies of the people in office, and smirking at the voters, stupid chumps, who never get what they want. So when we see a democracy that works, doing what it was elected to do, and executive power that is achieving critical goals, like national survival, it looks ... weird. That is because we are no longer democracies, not because Hungary is not.
As a Hungarian, absolutely fucking nope to this post. Orbán has always consistently worked towards a) securing his own position b) maximizing the amount of wealth extracted both from the EU and the home country. There is not an ounce of consideration of his going into any remotely idealistic or moralistic or ideological concern, "national survival" or "protection of the country from immigrants".
Hungary has never been a serious target of immigration; it has always been at best a transit country for those who aim for the more generous and affluent states to the west and north. The posturing about migrants is manufactured cynically, laser focused on domestic political goals. There is even a recent state-sponsored (but un-advertised) immigration program from eastern (and middle eastern) countries as part of diplomatic cozying to like-minded illiberal countries.
Fidesz won the election last time, getting two-thirds majority in parliament, by receiving 2,6 million votes in a country of 9.8 million. It's simply the result they achieved after taking over almost all popular media outlets (with the exception of the internet at large) and engineering the system, as described in the OP.
Orbán has no ideology and no concern for any fuzzy notion of "popular will". He is, in essence, a purely selfish min-maxing agent that opportunistically hijacked the governance of a small country. To think that Orbán has performed anywhere near "well" in terms of developing the country and improving its geopolitical position, is pure retardation.
Scott wrote: "And in fall 2015, he constructed a Trump-style wall along the eastern border. Immigration numbers dropped from tens of thousands a month to a trickle.” To say that tens of thousands a month of unwanted transients passing through, even if they do not plan to stay there, is not a problem, is pure retardation. And to say that stopping this problem with a simple solution, a fence, performing a fundamental function of government, securing the border, is also pure retardation. The USA is incapable of employing equally simple means to perform equally critical, basic functions. That is because the political class that runs the USA is in the grip of pure retardation.
I am not very much concerned about US affairs in the context of this post. I reacted to the sentiment in your previous post which sounded like praising Orbán both for performance and for ideals. I stress again that emulating Orbán will simply not lead to furthering the well-being of humans anywhere; he's an amoral wealth-extracting agent.
Not a mind-reader, so I don't know if he has any ideals. I don't care if he does. As an American, I care about Orban mainly as showing that basic functions of government can be made to work if the government exerts itself, including securing the border and requiring that entering the country must comply with that country's laws. The only emulation of Orban I recommend is border security, which he has accomplished. The voters in Hungary apparently wanted that, and he delivered it. That does not look anti-democratic from over here.
And Mussolini made the trains run. That doesn’t particularly make me want to emulate fascist Italy, if I have to take the rest of the system along with it.
We all know that mentioning Hitler means you just lost. Same thing goes for mentioning Mussolini, to be fair. A more general, unrelated-mid-20th-century-fascists rule means you have passed into Godwin's Law territory. And, no having border security does not mean you have to "take the rest of the system with it." It means you have to use the necessary means to secure the border, even if your own bureaucrats, the EU, the American government, and the international news media, says you can't.
> Mussolini made the trains run
[citation needed] - as far as I know his propaganda claimed this, despite lack of real success
There are far better places to look for examples of exercising government function for good. If not for the party propaganda campaign, the topic of migrants would have remained domestically obscure and politically irrelevant.
Perhaps there are more appealing political leaders. Maybe. I don't much like any of them. But there are precious few who have promised to secure their borders, then won an election on that promise, then actually done it.
>There are far better places to look for examples of exercising government function for good.
Which?
If unelected officials in government can be hired at will, why can they not be fired at will?
The US just went through 4-years of a shadow government usurping the will of the people at the hands of unelected ideologues. These people, these unelected people, should be easily replaceable.
People with real power should be electable, and hence fireable by the people, but a sub-class of unelected bureaucrats are the responsibility of those who are elected.
No, it's because the political elite that runs the US do not have the interests of the US at heart. Most of them are reasonably intelligent people, but their values are horrible.
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
1. Take a quick look at a map. If you build a wall and people can go around it, the wall works fine. Refugees can go through Croatia instead of Hungary. It's like if Texas was split into two states, one which accepted refugees and one that didn't. Which one would you go to?
2. As Vampyricon says, in another reply, even a perfect wall does not decrease illegal immigration because most of the illegal immigrants came legally then their visas expired. In fact, when we made it harder to get in, illegal immigration increased, because the people in the US didn't want to go home, because then it would be harder to get in again. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5049707/
Wasting huge amounts of money on a wall when we could fund visas is what liberals think of as "pure retardation". Just don't make the workers legally in your country illegal and watch that problem dissapear.
But what if we as a country decide we like the visa time limits we have, and we don't want people to stay after their visas have expired? A wall isn't the best way to solve this problem, but extending the visas doesn't solve it either (and actually makes it worse).
>performing a fundamental function of government, securing the border
I have never seen this as a fundamental function of government, but then, I *am* a dirty lefty and an Australian whose only National borders are the sea. The point remains though that you probably have a different conception of fundamental government functions than those to whom you are addressing your posts.
>by receiving 2,6 million votes in a country of 9.8 million
That's a really misleading way to put it. According to wikipedia, he got 2.8 out of 5.7 million votes.
I was wondering about that. I am surprised that Hungary has that kind of voter turn out, but 100% seemed excessive :) Thanks for bringing that up.
>Bring on the Trump style walls. They are one of the few public policies with a proven track record of actually working.
Yeah, it'd work real well when the majority of illegal immigrants are there by overstaying their visas.
>Funny, Orban is described as a guy who makes a mockery of democracy and is unaccountable. Yet he keeps getting elected. Democracy and elections, there is some connection there, what was it again?
They're related when each person gets equal voting power. Evidently, whatever Orbán is doing, it is not democracy.
So I guess any country without proportional representation like Canada, the French Parliament, EU etc aren't democracies either?
The point has been raised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_legitimacy_of_the_European_Union
I know, my point is I wonder whether he is equally quick to label "whatever the EU, Trudeau and France is doing is not democracy". It generally seems to be a partisan critique.
And even countries with "proportional representation" aren't really proportional if they have a minimum threshold for representation, since many votes are effectively worthless then.
"There are also countries such as Portugal, South Africa, Finland, the Netherlands and North Macedonia that have proportional representation systems without a legal threshold, although the Netherlands has a rule that the first seat can never be a remainder seat, which means that there is an effective threshold of..."
I guess those are some of the only democracies that exist by this definition.
I mean, it is a spectrum. Iran is a democracy, and the EU is a democracy, and America is a democracy, and I guess Hungary is a democracy, but some of those are "more a democracy" and some less. For instance, I'll readily agree that Germany's threshold rule creates a problem for its democratic legitimacy. And "unelected bureaucrats in Brussels" is not just something I agree with, but a widespread talking point. My point is that, although these arguments are often used in a partisan or confused way, they are part of the Overton window.
>The Swedes, to pick one example, are living the wreckage of their own stupidity.
What are you talking about? Can you state some evidence of this alleged Swedish "wreckage"? From my stand point in a country close to Sweden, they seem to do just fine. For example, the Swedish economy is showing no signs of trouble, compared to other countries in Europe.
> Everyone else is finally waking up in Europe.
Again, what do you mean? We are doing just fine in Europe, nobody I know is "waking up" about anything.
Swede here. The immigration has caused some *very* significant problems, including rampant gun violence and a high unemployment. Not exactly a complete wreckage, but it has put Sweden significantly behind the curve compared to our Nordic neighbours. 2015 is now widely - even on much of the left - regarded as a policy fiasco.
If Swedish income levels and social services are wreckage then I invite people to wreck my country as soon as possible please
"the totally undemocratic and totally unaccountable EU"
It's not, and it isn't.
On the refugees then main reason they dropped is the crisis abated. Numbers dropped to The rest of Europe as well. Check out numbers for arrivals in Germany as an example.
The EU is democratic. The law making body is the elected parliament and the council of ministers, which consists of the leaders of each country (I.e. elected leaders) holds the rest of the power. If Hungary wants to leave the EU they can - so how is it a main enemy?
The whole criticism of Orban in the post is that he does not use executive power to benefit his people but to benefit himself!
It’s interesting to here from someone with a different viewpoint but your post became an illogical rant
"But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?"
Well, maybe I'm an idiot, but if we combine (1) national foundation mythology you have already mentioned, historical "we were stomped by the Ottoman Empire like most of Eastern Europe and who cared about us then?" and that these were Muslim refugees with (2) using an emotive issue to build your party's support, then we can get "No to letting Muslims back into our country because we remember what happened the last time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Hungary".
Yes, it was cynical political seizing of advantage by Orban, but so was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez crying for a photo opportunity: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/politifact-aoc-parking-lot-fact-check-mockery
(No, I am not saying AOC is the same as Orban, or that Orban is okay, or whatever. I'm saying part of the natural political animal instinct is to glom onto an opportunity that appeals to the gut, not the head).
"There’s an urban legend about a test for psychopaths. Usually the test is some kind of riddle that can only be solved by killing a person for some completely stupid reason - the one I remember hearing involved how to meet with one of your father’s friends, without your father knowing, when you don’t have their contact info".
Hmm. My solution to that would be "Ask your mother" since it's usually the women of the family who keep up with contact details like that.
I am also smiling at the part about "wow, Orban gave plum jobs to all his college buddies".
No, really? Thank goodness fine upstanding Western democracies don't do things like that!
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-57860969
Or that twenty out of the fifty-five Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom all attended Eton:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom_by_education
https://www.getreading.co.uk/news/reading-berkshire-news/every-single-uk-prime-minister-21474956
Western "democracies" are also not democracies in any meaningful sense, they're oligarchies
Can't believe we let five non-Etonians slip through the net, we'll have to be more vigilant in future.
They were trying to be Diverse And Inclusive, so these things happen 😀 To quote Dorothy Sayers from "Murder Must Advertise":
“I like to be agreeable with everybody,” said Mr. Smayle, “but reelly, when it comes to shoving your way past a person into the lift as if one wasn't there and then telling you to keep your hands off as if a person was dirt, a man may be excused for taking offence. I suppose Tallboy thinks I'm not worth speaking to, just because he's been to a public school and I haven't.”
“Public school,” said Mr. Bredon, “first I've heard of it. What public school?”
“He was at Dumbleton,” said Mr. Smayle, “but what I say is, I went to a Council School and I'm not ashamed of it.”
“Where's Dumbleton?” demanded Ingleby. “I shouldn't worry, Smayle. Dumbleton isn't a public school, within the meaning of the act.”
“Isn't it?” said Mr. Smayle, hopefully. “Well, you and Mr. Bredon have had college educations, so you know all about it. What schools do you call public schools?”
“Eton,” said Mr. Bredon, promptly, “—and Harrow,” he added, magnanimously, for he was an Eton man.
“Rugby,” suggested Mr. Ingleby.
“No, no,” protested Bredon, “that's a railway junction.”
Ingleby delivered a brisk left-hander to Bredon's jaw, which the latter parried neatly.
“And I've heard,” Bredon went on, “that there's a decentish sort of place at Winchester, if you're not too particular.”
“I once met a man who'd been to Marlborough,” suggested Ingleby.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Bredon. “They get a terrible set of hearty roughs down there. You can't be too careful of your associates, Ingleby.”
“Well,” said Mr. Smayle, “Tallboy always says that Dumbleton is a public school.”
“I daresay it is—in the sense that it has a Board of Governors,” said Ingleby, “but it's nothing to be snobbish about.”
“What is, if you come to that?” said Bredon. “Look here, Smayle, if only you people could get it out of your heads that these things matter a damn, you'd be a darn sight happier. You probably got a fifty times better education than I ever did.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said, “I'm not deceiving myself about that, and I'd give anything to have had the same opportunities as you. There's a difference, and I know there's a difference, and I don't mind admitting it. But what I mean is, some people make you feel it and others don't. I don't feel it when I'm talking to either of you, or to Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Hankin, though you've been to Oxford and Cambridge and all that. Perhaps it's just because you've been to Oxford and Cambridge.”
He struggled with the problem, embarrassing the other two men by his wistful eyes.
“Look here,” said Miss Meteyard, “I know what you mean. But it's just that these two here never think twice about it. They don't have to. And you don't have to, either. But the minute anybody begins to worry about whether he's as good as the next man, then he starts a sort of uneasy snobbish feeling and makes himself offensive.”
“I see,” said Mr. Smayle. “Well, of course, Mr. Hankin doesn't have to try and prove that he's better than me, because he is and we both know it.”
“Better isn't the right word, Smayle.”
“Well, better educated. You know what I mean.”
“Don't worry about it,” said Ingleby. “If I were half as good at my job as you are at yours, I should feel superior to everybody in this tom-fool office.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head, but appeared comforted.
“I do wish they wouldn't start that kind of thing,” said Ingleby when he had gone, “I don't know what to say to them.”
“I thought you were a Socialist, Ingleby,” said Bredon, “it oughtn't to embarrass you.”
“So I am a Socialist,” said Ingleby, “but I can't stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn't happen.”
I think a simpler explanation is that "the West" was never keen to accept refugees; only the people who run those countries were.
Mass lower-class immigration is one of those things that tends to be incredibly popular among the elite (who benefit from cheap labour and don't live anywhere that lower class people go anyway) and incredibly unpopular among everyone else (who get all the downsides).
Agree about the court packing thing. Any route to a dictatorial America pretty much has to go down that road. Amending the constitution not only requires 2/3 of both houses of congress, it must also be ratified by a simple majority in 75% of state legislatures. Basically impossible in 2021. Or you appoint 10 of your buddies to the supreme court and they make it so the constitution has always said whatever you want it to.
Right - thanks for pointing this out it's more than just 2/3 of Congress you need to change the U.S. constitution
There's another possibility: just ignoring the constitution and court. Every president does so to some degree already.
But dictatorship isn't the only threat to democracy. A system where, based on arbitrary timing of judges dying and retiring, the party in power at one point can lock in their political preferences for a generation with no further democratic checks is absurdly antidemocratic. Court packing serves as an important part in the US system of checks and balances and if you wanted to remove it you'd have to make other changes to limit the power of the courts relative to the other branches.
Indeed, changes that shift effective power from the judiciary and executive back to the legislature would be highly desirable. Any idea what these changes would look like?
I like the proposal to appoint justices to fixed 18 year terms as a not especially radical change that would still reduce a lot of the absurdities in the current system.
Seems like a clear improvement. But doesn't do all that much to shift power from the judiciary back to the legislature. Something better than nothing I suppose.
I propose that, with a 2/3 majority in both legislative houses, Congress can declare any particular federal court decision null and void.
I further propose that, immediately after this is adopted, revisiting old decisions that de facto are not followed anymore but de jure are technically still valid and voiding them. Some nice feel-good votes to immediately void Korematsu, etc., just to make it clear why this is necessary when terrible decisions like that have stood for 80 years.
I support this proposal.
I strongly like the idea but it seems essentially equivalent to eliminating the requirement for the states to vote in order to amend the Constitution. It seems less risky to work on the Supreme Court itself.
Incidentally, why specifically 18 years? 20 appeals to me more by virtue of being a round number, but of course there is no particular reason to privilege round numbers. We could also make it 17. Like cicadas.
I think to create one opening in the Supreme Court every 2 years.
It's specifically to avoid partisan advantage. Every president is guaranteed 2 appointments per term, and it takes at least three consecutive presidential terms for any particular party to create a majority, providing the public two separate opportunities to throw a party out of power (not counting mid term elections) before the Court can be fully captured
I notice that the Modi book review expressly noted that the book being reviewed was biased, and gave a perspective slanted in favor of Modi (I believe the term "hagiography" was used). In both the Erdogan review and this one, the book's claims seem to be taken much more at face value.
Scott, was it the tone of the Modi book that stood out to you, or were you just aware of other sources that dramatically contradicted that book's claims, whereas you're not aware of counter-evidence against the Orban book's claims? The contrast between reading the Modi review, which pauses repeatedly to discuss the reliability of the narrative we're getting, and reading this review is striking.
(To be clear, I'm not arguing that you were wrong to question the Modi narrative; biased hagiographies are absolutely to be guarded against when talking about polarizing dictators.)
I didn't make as much of a deal about it this time because I read two Orban books biased in slightly different directions, and because the Modi book really was directly from Modi's own lips which seemed especially bad.
"The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways."
To be fair, the etymology of Attila is debated, and half the people are saying it is of German origin :D
Steppe nomads are not all the same; Attila was a Hun, not a Magyar. They might as well name their kids Genghis.
Of course, for all I know, they do.
Seeing as Genghis' grandson Batu almost destroyed Hungary as a country in the 1200-s (killing 40-50% of the population), that would be somewhat of a self-own.
The country is called Hungary, so naming the kids after Attila the Hun makes some sense. And Genghis is a great name to give to a kid anyway :)
You and I call it Hungary; the Hungarians call themselves Magyars, and the country Magyarorszag. Their self-identification with the Huns is the historic equivalent of fanfiction.
But weren't Magyars direct descendants of Huns anyway? And in any case, they speak the language too. Denying a people their history based on their supposed genetic ancestry is not done to first world nations, people are what they are.
No idea about ancestry (I'd guess a mixture), but Hunnic language was Altaic, so not related to Hungarian.
They aren't, they never were, but there is a persistent myth that they were that some Hungarians like
Apparently they are neither genetically nor culturally descended from the Steppe(at least according to geneticist historians).
https://razib.substack.com/p/hungarians-as-the-ghost-of-the-magyar
My takeaway from that article is that they *are* culturally descended from the steppe.
Steppe Magyar invade and become the elite. Their subjects assimilate into Magyar culture. Then the elites die out in a series of wars, leaving their culture in the hands of the subjects.
The Huns settled in the area of modern Hungary, so there is a level of connection which they don't share with the Mongols. Maybe an analogy would be English people naming their kids Arthur.
I was under the impression that the Huns weren't an ethic group (as we'd understand it today) anyway.
This Sunday there will be a presidential election in Nicaragua. President Ortega is expected to win easily his fifth presidential term (his third consecutive term). The reason for that expectation is quite simple: this time the other main candidates are in jail.
The select few candidates in question violated the law, so of course they were arrested. Ortega will win again for the same reason he has won every other election, he is immensely popular because of his economic successes.
Many of them are more 'accused of breaking the law' at this point than actually breaking the law, as far as I can tell.
He has arrested most of the opposition candidates. You really think all of them are actually criminal? Or is it more likely that he had the justice system accuse them of such for the purpose of removing any remotely popular opposition figure from participating in the election?
I think the answer is extremely obvious, but apparently not to everyone.
Have they been convicted?
As far as I can tell, no. They have been arrested under an intentionally vague law, law 1055 that prosecutes things like "treason", "attacking the rights of the people", and "threatening national sovereignty" without defining any of those terms. So basically Ortega has had them arrested for whatever he wants. And they are in jail or under house arrest. And he increased the time you can detain without charges from 2 days to 90 days, which is quite suspicious as well.
5 major candidates were all polling better than Ortega earlier this year. All 5 have been arrested, as well as another challenger. 2 others have fled the country, afraid of being arrested as well. If this isn't obvious corruption I don't know what is.
I'm curious who this "Chris Allen" guy could be who is defending Ortega. You really just have to ignore all common sense to think this is anything but a dictator manipulating the institutions of government to cling to power.
"Most of his opposition candidates"? There's no evidence for that
> You really think all of them are actually criminal?
Have you looked into the cases and the specific charges?
There certainly is evidence for that. Most of the important oppositional candidates have either been arrested or went into exile on threat of being arrested. This is so uncontestable I don't even feel the need to source it. Google it for 2 seconds if you disagree. I guess you could argue there are many small and insignificant oppositional candidates still running, but that's a pretty technical objection. The major players have been removed.
I have not delved deeply into each of their specific charges, no. I have read of them on a high level, but as only a casual observer I'm not going to devote hours of my time to parsing the evidence of each individual case. It's not my country. A lot of them, though, seem to be charges of "treason" or "violating national sovereignty" under the intentionally vague law he had passed, which does not even specify what those terms have to mean. This is textbook authoritarian.
To me, and I think this is a fair assumption though I can already tell you disagree, if a strong man leader who has cracked down hard on political dissent, as Ortega has in response to the riots of the last few years, suddenly has the good fortune of all his most promising political oppenents simultaneously committing crimes barring them from running, that is likely not an accident. He is probably behind it, wielding the influence he holds in the country to manipulate the criminal justice system and strangle the opposition, and keep his hold on power.
If you look at any dictatorship in history this is the classic playbook. Putin does the same thing in Russia every election. Lukashenko has done the same thing in Belarus. Maduro has done it in Venezuela. If they don't just out and out jail the opposition like Ortega, they ban their parties from running.
If you run a country and everyone against you is claimed to be a criminal, you are the criminal.
Latin America has an history of quislings selling out their country for the USA so its just business as usual for the opposition in Nicaragua.
Also, saying "oh its so obvious I don't even need to justify it" is not very compelling.
If you can't bother to spend 3 minutes searching the internet to confirm a very obvious fact, that the major opposition candidates have all been jailed or fled into exile, then there's not much conversation to be had.
When I read your first comment, I thought you were joking and I laughed at your comment. Now it's clear you were not joking so you should agree that Che Guevara violated Bolivian law and he deserved to be punished and that all Cubans that voted with their feet violating Fidel's laws should be deported back to Cuba and punished there. I can tell you about the many rebellions and revolutions in Latin America in the past 70 years and how old and new leaders often violated their countries' laws to grab and keep power. In 1951, before the electoral campaign in which Perón expected to be reelected (he managed to change Argentina's 1853 Constitution so he could be reelected), his main rival Ricardo Balbín was incarcerated for a short time (I used to go with an uncle, his main adviser, to deliver him some meals). Now I live in Chile where a Constitutional Assembly has been set to write a new Constitution. The funny thing is how some Assembly members don't doubt breaking the law claiming it doesn't apply to them because they represent the People. Also, we can talk about what is going on today in the U.S. where a senile President is breaking the law to appease the radicals he needed to win the election.
If the law is a good one I'm OK with criminals being prosecuted. Being corrupt and calling for foreign intervention are rightfully crimes by all standards, including yours.
Here's a list, for the reference of others because I suspect you are only playing at not knowing this, here are the names of jailed or exiled oppositional candidates:
Cristiana Chamorro
Juan Chamorro
Arturo Cruz Jr.
Luis Fley
Medardo Mairena
Felix Maradiaga
Miguel Mora
Noel Vidaurre
And yes, this is most of the opposition.
>And yes, this is most of the opposition.
Evidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Nicaraguan_general_election#Presidential_candidates
This source claerlay states that the only candidates left are Daniel Ortega and George Enriquez. Fomr the other 10, one is exiled, onw resigned, one suspended and the other seven have been arrested
Man what a weird coincidence everyone who opposes him is a criminal. Guess he's just lucky
That is not the case though, at all.
Hungary is such a beautiful place with a dour populus, many folksongs tell of famous defeats and battles lost. That being said Orban is doing his best to lead them to a glorious future. EU has paid for vast infrastructure upgrades and expected compliance for these bribes.
Instead the EU have aroused the great unwoke. Now Orban and his little coalition of like-minded states ( Poland et Al) will catalyse the downfall of the EU experiment. Not Bad for a Hick from Hicksville.
The Hicksville in Orban's case is Hungary's ninth city. Hicks from Hickvilles just as hickish or more have been at the helm of their respective countries during various "interesting times"; Churchill, Franco, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Mugabe, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin, Tito, Washington, the list *really* goes on.
In other words, the hickishness is hardly the defining aspect of the case at hand. A more defining aspect is precisely that facile, disdainful and self-congratulatory dismissal of hickishness. Which is at work in this article as well as in the world at large.
The part of the article that most puzzled me is that the border-enforcing stance is presented as a *pivot*. The "liberal democrat to right-wing nationalist" is a pivot, all right. But "right-wing nationalist to border-enforcer", a pivot? Nope. It might be a middle finger extended to the globalists by an Orban looking them in the eye while telling them "pivot on this", but it is not a case of Orban himself pivoting. (unless I had missed that part where Orban had been cheering for the settling of such immigrants just moments ago?)
Oh yes, it was actually "beyond the pale of conventional opinion" - or at least this is the defining aspect that I speak of. What does "conventional" even mean in that sentence? The implied point /was/ that the "opportunistic pivoter" took the stance that the majority of the citizens wanted. (which is often called "democracy", although I know that "democracy" has many definitions). Does "conventional" opinion then mean the opinion held by most people? Obviously not. Does it mean the opinion held by the people who are disdainful of all those hicks? Seems a stronger match.
P.S. I don't think anything Orban does will cause the unraveling of the EU. On the contrary, my feeling is that if UK had applied Orban-like stances to immigration in the past decade, Brexit itself would never have been voted and UK would still be in EU today.
I’d just like to note that Winston Churchill was by birth a member of one of the most aristocratic families in Britain, and as such Europe. Makes me reconsider the trustworthiness of the rest of your argument.
Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt was born into an American aristocratic family which had already produced a President.
Aah, a hardboiled reactionary, I see, with the *proper* amount of disdain for the concept that all men are created equal?
Churchill was created an aristocrat, true. But unlike the typical ruling elites of today, Churchill was decidedly not of the Eton/Oxbridge cloth. That he didn't "excel academically" is an understatement, he barely made it into a military school on the third attempt. His formative environment was the army. The credentialists of today would basically sneer at him.
Aristocrat or not, Eton/Oxbridge or not, he *has* read quite a few books. (As have all of the 12 people that I'd named, except perhaps Stalin and Mugabe). And he sure could write. "The Dream" from 1947, in which he meets his father (deceased 1895) and brings him up to speed on the world's events in the past fifty years, is *exquisite*, and whoever hasn't read it, should. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/winston-churchills-dream-1947/
I don't think that the word "trustworthiness" means what you think it means. But if that word helps you disregard my argument, sure, suit yourself.
I only read the first part, but I found a factual error and two things that misrepresent what Orban faced during his youth.
First, he didn't speak against the church at Imre Nagy's reburial. He just didn't, and why would he do that anyway: the regime he was speaking against was anti-clerical, systematically so, you might say. 1989 anti-communists in CEE didn't have anti-clerical rhetoric, tropes, sentiments. The cosmopolitan, liberal part of that group had those later, after 1990, as a response against pre-WW2 and conservative-clerical nostalgia.
You mention how poor he was as a child: the hot-water tap and so. I checked what his parents' jobs were and that indicates that his family was okay. He wasn't excessively poor compared to his peers in Hungary in the 1970s.
Finally, you mention that he had to drop his accent. Don't envision a British Isle-like cast system based on accents in Hungary. First, Hungarian regional variations had almost all gone by the 1970s, and where he is from doesn't have a distinguishable one anyway. The most he probably had to do was to get his enunciation more articulated to make it standard. Second, whatever social linguistic stigma he might have had (his parents were sufficiently educated not to hand over a very stigmatised version) was rooted out in primary school, I'm sure.
So after the above startled me, I didn't read it on. I'd like to read about the topic, and I have been thinking about democracy, kleptocracy, Orban, Russian and Chinese influence in Hungary and in Europe, but I want to trust the writer; I welcome outside views, so even if they aren't impeccably knowledgeable about the context (Orban talking anti-church re: Imre Nagy???), I want them to be humble about their gaps and focus on what they grasp firmly about the topic.
The book states that he was born poor, but that his parents rose through the ranks later in his childhood. Lendvai: "The circumstances in which he grew up were certainly orderly, but he was without doubt very poor...there was no running water...Orban recalled how unbelievably hard he had to work in the fields as a young child...pulling beets, sorting potatoes, collecting corncobs". Later, "His parents' social rise was closely associated with the political and economic consolidation of the Kadar regime...hard work combined with ceaseless learning were the keys to the family escaping its poverty. Orban's father was 30 years old when he resumed his previously interrupted studies by means of a correspondence course and he completed university as a mechanical engineer."
Lendvai, page 14: "In an interview, Orban later mentioned that it took him half a year to successfully overcome his rural accent and behavior".
I'm possibly confusing later anti-clerical statements with statements during the Nagy reburial; I'll double check that and edit out if so.
Oh shit, I was poor! Never felt like it. I'm a compatriot and contemporary of Orban's. I grew up in the Hungarian countryside and my single-mother (!) rose through the ranks in the Kadar era, she finished college when I was already a toddler in the day-care. She nfetched water from the well and coal for heating from a shed at the house that the village provided for her as the teacher in the village school. We moved from there when I was five. The next teacher who moved in still had to do that as far as I know for until the late 80s or early 90s. I worked hard on my grandparents small farm (the size that was still allowed) and I was actually working in the sun in the vineyard with my grandparents and my mother when Orban gave his speech in June 1989. We were listening to it on the radio.
Such an upbringing means nothing really. Hungary and countries like that had a shift in those years; I'm not quite sure if I refer to the right framework, but I think what was going on is that Hungary was becoming an income level 4 country out of an income level 3 (Rosling) in the 1970s. Orban's experience was pretty standard. The accent thing is nothing either. Orban has plenty of complexes, accent never stuck me as one. It hardly ever is in Hungary. There was a lot going on with him at the turn of those decades. I would dig into Soviet/Russian intelligence measures. The poor boy and the accent thing might pique Anglo-Saxon people's interest. It isn't an issue with his contemporaries in Hungary.
Oh, I meant to write 'struck,' of course. So one of the complexes I attribute to him is the rich peasant mentality: you acquire land and then more land, and you have to get richer than your parents were: yeah, you have to have more land. The other is what the author here was getting at: Orban was probably frustrated when Budapest elites patronised him. I can well imagine that that happened when he was rising in power but he was still clumsy among cosmopolitan intellectuals despite his liberal credentials (remember that he used to have some). But I'm no expert on Orban. I just wanted to point that he didn't bash the church in any way in the Imre Nagy speech, and I felt that Orban's upbringing is misinterpreted. Plus, the accent is not an issue.
Well, I grew up in Soviet union and here it was compulsory for school children to go and help in collective farms: pulling beets, sorting potatoes. And during summer vacations, lots of children did it voluntarily because collective farms paid very well. Once painted some barrels in collective farm during my summer vacation (I was maybe 10 years old) and for two days work I was paid 40 roubles what was my mothers (she was teacher) 10 days salary.
Point being: communist regimes were weird, absurd. Maybe Hungary was different, but In Soviet Union, pulling beets or he had no running water said very little about ones economic or social status.
""In an interview, Orban later mentioned that it took him half a year to successfully overcome his rural accent and behavior"."
If it had taken half a year only, it couldn't have been a serious issue to start with. A real accent one can't shed, c.f.: Fiona Hill. It was probably just watching himself to make better formed sentences and slicing the smoked paprika sausage in the dorm room, instead of biting it as it was. There were plenty of other countryside boys in Budapest dorm rooms to make him feel comfortable, and if he took offence at being looked down by some jerks, it tells about an insecurity that is individual, not something inevitable due to his background. The accent must have been undetectable with Hungarian as unified as it is inside the borders.
Point of fact - to freely amend the US constitution requires the control of three quarters of state legislatures, which is probably - though not certainly, maybe getting a tiny majority in a lot of different states is easier than getting a supermajority in the federal congress - the higher bar to clear. In any case it's significant, because controlling lots of less-powerful legislatures, all of whom have relatively little to do with each other and answer to different electorates, is a very different task from controlling one really thoroughly.
(Possibly, amending the US constitution *only* requires those three quarters of state legislatures. While it's never been used, the amendment process as written can be started by two thirds of state legislatures - a strictly lower bar than three quarters - with not a single vote in the federal congress, but in traditional fashion, no details are given, and the congress still needs to call a convention that noone has any idea what it would look like, it's a whole mess.)
> But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
You mentioned some ideas. In my opinion (as Eastern European), it's simply the fact that most of the countries in this region are much more ethnostatey than e.g. Western European countries. These countries have often very similar history: Being oppressed by Germany, Russia, Ottomans and each other for the past 200 years since the notion of national state came into this region. They often have only really young democratic regimes (most of them ~30 years) and they don't yet really match the level of democratic society that the Western countries have. Additionally, they are feeling economically left behind with not clear path forward and depressive demographic trends. This mix creates a very defensive countries. They finally get the chance to have a truly independent national states, but the future looks bleak and they will probably never catch Western Europe. They are worried about their fragile countries that are just started to get on their feet, and they are not willing to change their national identity by incorporating completely foreign elements
Also remember that these countries have very little history of accepting migrants from outside of Europe (you mentioned no colonial history). But on top of that, these nations are still mentally processing conflicts from the first part of the 20th century, where literally millions of people were forced to move between these countries to make them ethnically homogeneous. These people really like their pure ethnostates and they are not yet ready to accept different people.
“Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee. But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant.”
Isn’t that, like, the whole idea of democracy?
Yes and no. Two points:
i) On the level of individual reps, there are different positions on how an elected official ought to act with respect to their constituents, much like there are different views on what corporate governance . Wikipedia has a page on "Representation" that roughly tracks what I remember from AP Civics
ii) I think on a more philosophical level, there's a commonplace (but not universal) expectation that a politician is putting forward views that they themselves believe, independent of the electorate. I can't think of a particular example off the top of my head, but it seems like anecdotally there is distaste for things that come off as too manufactured, focus grouped, etc.
politicians doing what people want is dangerous for our democracy. Also I think Scott wrong re Trotskyism - politicians might avoid destructive policies even if they are popular. good example here Putin, similar authoritarian populist who governs in the country where recently nostalgia for Soviets hit all time high (around 70%) and people think negatively of market economy, yet Russia is not turning communist.
I don't think that is the whole idea of democracy. Generally, people want to elect people who truly share their values, not someone who just goes where the wind blows. So, if people wanted Orban's policies and values, in the ideal democracy they'd elect someone who had those things "honestly".
So do you think that the Hungarians are mainly duped into thinking that Orban is a true believer? Or do they not care?
I do not know, but I don't think the answer is relevant to your root comment.
The part you quoted says that Orban is basically saying that Orban goes where the wind blows, and you seem to be saying that's the point of democracy.
Whether Hungarians have been duped or not is not relevant to whether politicians changing their apparent core values to gain power is the point of democracy.
Maybe, or maybe that’s just how we think of democracy in the IS because of our cultural aversion toward “inauthenticity”. That is, I think the relevance of the question, because if the people of Hungary know he is not a true believer, but just gives them what they want, and vote for him anyway, then I would be hard pressed to think that this was not democracy at work….
This leaves aside, of course, the obvious in democratic ways Orban stacks the deck in favor of himself. I’m just kind of struggling with the idea that, “Do stuff that is popular, and then people will like you and vote for you,” isn’t where the incentives of democracy isn’t supposed to end you up.
I think the incentives may very well end you up there.
I just don't think anyone from the Greeks to now would say that's what the whole idea of democracy is supposed to be that.
The point of things and how they actually end up are often very different.
I think Scott Smith has a good point there. If you imagine a whole range of politicians that hold different ideological beliefs, and when the public changes their minds on various issues they elect different politicians that match their new preferences, that is a well functioning republic (nobody has a democracy). Now, if all those politicians happen to be named "Orban", that doesn't mean the system is no longer functioning.
The mistake is thinking that "democratic" or "republican" is the same as "properly functioning."
It’s a good point… but I suspect that most people want to vote for a “true believer” in their ideology, not someone that is just in it for the votes who will flip-flop as soon as the winds change.
There seems to be a very strong political cost to changing your mind on any subject, because voters are not ideologically flexible and this don’t want their representatives to be.
Given all this I’m very perplexed about how someone can make such a 180 and be taken seriously. But maybe it’s just a matter of the public having a fairly short memory; after all Trump used to be a Democrat and no Republican holds that against him now.
Maybe some time is elided in the retelling but It does sound like Orban’s political shift happened fairly abruptly.
Well, representative democracy and direct democracy are two different things.
In a direct democracy, depending on how you designed it, yes, policy could change on a dime like this to follow popular preference. However, in a direct democracy, you wouldn't be electing people like this in the first place, you'd just be voting on policy.
In a representative democracy, which is what we're talking about here, the way it generally works is that you assume politicians have actual beliefs and convictions, and then you elect the politician that matches your own beliefs and convictions best. There are two main reasons this is better than just electing someone who will change with public opinion instantly: 1. Because you can trust someone with beliefs and convictions to actually work to uphold them, more than someone who is just doing a job they don't believe in, and 2. The representative is supposed to use their judgement in cases where the average voted doesn't have enough expertise or information to vote directly in a coherent way on a niche or complicated issue, which someone who is only echoing the public will can't really do effectively.
1.) Your bafflement that so many of Orban's key players are his college roommates is... strange. Orban's political movement came out of reformist anti-Communist student movements. Of course they're a bunch of people who knew each other in college. That's what a student political movement is! You get to it eventually but this change is not even vaguely surprising. There's a long history of reformist but kind of conservative, kind of liberal rural movements in Eastern Europe. They were called Agrarian Parties or Peasants Parties and were usually distinct from the socialists but seen as a kind of popular power movement. That is the direction Orban moved in. It's not particularly unusual for conservatives in the region. The more unusual thing is that usually they end up the junior partners of Christian Democrats. In Hungary, the Christian Democrats are their junior partners.
2.) The Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads to at least the extent that Americans are descendants of the English. You can equally say most Americans have very little English blood and have it be true but a weird take. Now, Magyarism as a nationalist ideology is full of weird false facts. The idea they're the Huns that invaded Rome is just plain false. But there's significant linguistic and cultural continuity between Hungarians and their ancestors in addition to a distinct ethnic gene cluster. The article you cited itself even says this. Now, do they have large amounts of Germanic (and even more Slavic) blood? Yes, absolutely.
3.) You've misjudged Orban's background. Orban grew up in Communist Hungary and went to university. Yes, he was from a peasant background and probably emphasized that fact because it was advantageous in the Communist regime. And his parents weren't particularly powerful. But they were solidly middle class. I think one was an agricultural scientist and the other a doctor(?). He had a good education, got to study abroad even in the west, and if he had an accent it was no bar to him taking fairly prominent positions. Do you think the Communists let random nobodies give speeches at key events?
4.) The idea that Orban doesn't have core beliefs is a bit of a smear. He clearly does and his brand of conservatism has its unique traits. Notably, it's one of the more intellectual brands of conservatism. Fidesz sponsors colleges, holds scholarly symposia, etc. It also tends to promote expertise far more than populist revolts though its funding of schools means it actually has sympathetic intellectuals. Compare the Hungarian EMP from the Danube Institute (iirc) vs the Poles sending an actual monarchist reactionary troll.
5.) My understanding of the conservative Hungarian mood following their 2002 government was that it was basically just something they had to wait out. They considered the socialist policies bad and corrupt and thought the country had a natural disgust for socialism after Communism. More objectively, they spent their eight years out of power winning European Parliament, consolidating right wing parties and voters under their banner, winning local races and building party infrastructure.
6.) I haven't read these books but the fact it skips right over the mismanagement, economic issues, failed attempts to fix or strengthen the economy, the corruption, and the various scandals and lies makes me suspicious. It's "Orban pounces." It's not that the Socialists actually DID anything. It's that Orban reacted. The part that attributes the view of the Socialists as liars to Orban gives him more power than he had. The Socialists had been caught lying several times and denied it. Now, Gyurcsany was committing to change this in the speech. But it confirmed what the right had been saying for years: that the Socialists were lying and knew they were lying. Imagine if a tape leaked where Biden said something like, "Look, we need to run a better, more clean Democratic Party. We can't keep stealing elections like we did in 2020 or burying stories like my son's laptop or sabotaging investigations like we did with Benghazi!"
7.) Also, this is a small detail, but it wasn't leaked to Orban. It was leaked to the Hungarian equivalent of NPR and other journalistic establishments. The fact this is all attributed as Orban's doing rather than something he took advantage of, again, makes me suspicious of this source.
8.) Most of the description of Orban's tactics are pretty accurate. Though I will note that Orban does not use violence or actually interfere with the votes as far as anyone's been able to prove. Both sides accuse the other of election fraud when they lose but there's been no outside confirmation as far as I know. Orban's power continues because the left is fractured into multiple warring factions and because he's built a strong political machine. Which is definitely not good for democracy but is also short of an actual dictatorship. Orban took some pretty heavy losses the last election and the opposition has finally united heading into 2022. If Orban starts rigging things to defeat the United Opposition then that will be a transition to an Erdogan or Putin-like figure. If he doesn't then he was just a party boss in an imperfect democracy.
9.) Another way Orban resists the EU is a strategic alliance with Poland which allows them to protect each other in Parliament.
10.) Yeah, Fidesz's control of the country, at least for now, is not impregnable. The left could win. But it'd need to unite and make a concerted push. And getting a supermajority would be hard due to gerrymandering. And if it didn't win a supermajority the various constitutional provisions and stacked bureaucracy would make things lean continually towards Fidesz's policy preferences. But this is also the case in, say, Texas or Illinois. Which is not to say this isn't bad! But, again, I think there's a qualitative difference betwen that and (say) Russia. And there's definitely a difference between that and North Korea.
11.) Jobbik is a third way party, arguably semi-fascist in the "nationalist, moderate economically, conservative culturally" sense. Their big issues are things like the mistreatment of Hungarians in surrounding countries or Orthodox persecution of Catholics. (These are not made up issues, by the way. But they do tend to exaggerate.) They were never the farthest right party, that was various forms of openly Fascist irrendetist militias, but they were the most socially acceptable form of that politics. They dislike the European Union because they're nationalists. But they like many of the European Union's economic policies, see it as a path to prosperity, and like when it intervenes to protect Hungarian minorities (as it does with minorities generally). The big reversal was not some huge shift in policy but moving away from ties to those openly Fascist militias and cooperating with the left on the economic issues they always agreed on. It helps the Hungarian left isn't exactly happy about those Hungarian minority populations being mistreated either.
12.) The right likes Orban because he's the only right wing leader who's successfully established a right wing intellectual elite. Plus the various technocrats necessary to run a competent administration. Also, those right wing intellectuals invites academics over to Hungary to give talks or do various kinds of academic work in a welcoming environment. That's basically the only academic culture in the world where being openly right wing gets you a pat on the back. This attracts a lot of favorable commentary from intellectual right wingers who spend a few months teaching there or whatever.
13.) The fact you dislike most the one who hasn't done actual violence or led ethnic pogroms or used the military is strange to me. Partly, I think it's because you read a book that seems like it was written by the opposition. Partly, I think it's that the source apaprently didn't give you any idea of the underlying political issues in Hungary. You don't mention anything about Hungary's economic policies or the various political issues aside from refugees. Contrast the Modi and Erdogan reviews where various political coalitions and their motivations were touched on. This let you put Modi/Erdogan in their political contexts. Something you haven't really done with Orban. You know Jobbik exists but you don't know why they'd cooperate with the left. You don't even mention the other right wing parties Orban went into coalition with. You don't talk about how the left failed to form a unified opposition. Etc. Everyone is more sympathetic in context. Even corrupt party boss types.
14.) The equivalent in the US would require getting a 2/3rds majority in Congress and a 2/3rds majority of governorships and state houses and then several court cases because we're not a unitary state. The people who wrote the Constitution were specifically aware of people grabbing large temporary majorities and doing things like this. For good or ill, we've been increasingly tearing down these barriers for a century and a half because some people see these limits as intolerable. You can have a debate about those trade offs, of course. Maybe goverments that do more and swing more radically between parties are better than stable but rigid ones. But it is a trade off.
That's a difference of degree rather than kind though. I agree that it's a sign the US system is healthier than the Hungarian on the whole.
Gerrymandered into more districts being one party than would be normal, sure. Gerrymandered to send more reps of one party or another to the federal level, definitely. Gerrymandered into one party rule?
2014 Cornyn got 61% statewide. 2018 Cruz got (barely) over 50% statewide. 2018 Abbot got 55% statewide. 2020 Trump 52%. Gerrymandering doesn't affect those elections and it's still one party.
Fidesz doesn't control all the media in Hungary. Largest viewership has RTL which is far from being supportive of Fidesz.
The two big channels (RTL and TV2) are head-to-head, currently I believe TV2 has slightly bigger popularity, and they are massively pro-Orbán.
It doesn't take a supermajority to change the governor of Texas. Unless PMs in Hungary are elected differently than in other parliamentary systems, that's a completely different situation.
It wouldn't take a supermajority to change Hungary's PM either. Though, due to gerrymandering, probably more than a bare majority.
So we're working with slippery language here. A supermajority is just a percentage that is significantly larger than 50%+1. Is 55% a supermajority? Probably not, but 60% seems to be definitely yes. Based on the OP, the districts in Hungary have different sizes (and by that and other context I assume that means different numbers of people). Then there is the bit about with today's margins one vote for Orban equals 2-3 for other parties. That difference narrows I'm sure if previously Orban districts flip before being re-gerrymandered. But even at a 1:1.5 ratio that's pretty harsh.
The lowest definition of supermajority is 60% and the most common one is two thirds. I admittedly can't find good numbers but most of what I've seen of Hungary's map is pretty standard packing and cracking such that a lower absolute vote total could win.
The real issue is that Orban basically gave himself a bunch of powers, changed a bunch of stuff, then abolished those powers. That means someone would have to take a vote similar to his more than two thirds to change things again. And if Fidesz/conservatives can maintain even a third of the vote in a map gerrymandered in their favor then they can block a lot. Though on the other hand that is a gamble since it means if the United Opposition gets more than a third they get a real seat at the table on anything new Fidesz wants to do. Or at least an opportunity at obstruction.
In 2018 Orban's party won 133 of the 199 seats with between 47 and 49% of the popular vote. In other words he had a supermajority of electoral power without even a majority of voters. It doesn't seem like a far claim that it would take a supermajority of votes against him to take away his majority of electoral power.
Saying that's the same thing as Texas where a bare majority can replace the governor seems pretty incorrect.
Could you help by clarifying your original claim?
What sort of clarification do you want? My claim is that we regard systems as democracies where simple majorities cannot win legislative power, a practice known as gerrymandering. (Orban is not the President of Hungary who is directly elected.)
In Hungary's current system, there is 5% cut off for party (and 10% for 2-coallition / 15 for 3-coallition) - this may play huge role in such results - for example here in Czechia there were elections couple weeks ago - we have similar rule and percentage of biggest parties bellow cut off were: 4.68%, 4.65%, 3.6%, 2.76%, 1.33%, 0.99% - if they were together, they would be third biggest formation in our parliament.
Currently it seems that opposition will be successful in forming big coalition in Hungary and that they have pretty good chance to win.
actually, according to wikipedia, districts have roughly same sizes and are far more similar in size than before:
"In the old system, the population of the smallest constituency was 33077, while the population of the largest one was 98167, which meant that the constituency vote of people living in larger constituencies was worth 3 times less than of those living in smaller constituencies. In the new system the difference between the population of the largest and smallest constituencies is lower than 30% (79208 and 109955) and the standard deviation of the population of the constituencies has also reduced from 20% to 8%"
Thanks for that! That seems to be an error in the OP then. Hoepfully @Scott addresses it.
There seems to be a terminology issue in play here. Orbán did change the voting system a lot, but not by gerrymandering. There was a very good post upstairs which detailed these changes.
Americans are genetically closer to the English than Hungarians are to the old Magyars. We're a relatively young country, and the indigenous population was mostly wiped out with the arrival of the settlers.
Last I'd heard, the pure British percentage of America has fallen from something like 80-85% at independence to something like .5% today. So perhaps more so but not very much at any rate. What's common with those older and modern Americans, and what is common between the Magyars and modern Hungarians, are a lineal dissent of institutions, traditions, a language, a culture, etc.
Nope: https://www.newgeography.com/content/005051-race-ancestry-and-genetic-composition-us
That is a chart of people who have any amount of British ancestry, not of people who are genetically similar to the British.
It's not "any amount", or the sums of the components would dwarf the larger group they're part of.
Well, perhaps we are genetically closer than I thought. The point remains many Americans without British ancestry are American because of cultural survival and there was cultural survival in Hungary. The point about the Hungarians being the same people who sacked half of Europe, as I said from the start, is silly nationalism.
I'm sure the Hungarians aren't "pure" German either; the point is that most of their genetic ancestry is similar to that of Germans. The gene pool of Americans is still largely English - or at least, some combination of English and Celtic that's hard to pull apart.
Unless you're referring to a specific group of White Americans, "Americans" aren't of any particular genetic makeup at all. We're defined by nationality, not ethnicity.
Americans are a lot of different genetic makeups, but we can speak of them in aggregate being closer or further away from other groups.
5) and 12): Hungarians may have a disgust for socialism when it's called socialism, but they have remaining socialist impulses. Fidesz has often had anti-capital, especially anti-foreign-capital rhetoric and policies (except when the capitalists are their cronies). Their rule is absolutely not about rule of law, strict respect for property rights, and economic freedom, as needed for a well-functioning capitalist economy.
Orbán has always been skilled (whether in power or in opposition) at focusing public discourse around issues where he is popular, forcing his opponents on the defensive. Since 2015, the main such issue was immigration, as discussed in the post. Between 2006 and 2010, it was bashing the socialists' austerity at the same time as bashing them for their "fuckup" (which referred to the preceding, unsustainable deficit spending). Either Orbán would have also implemented austerity (in which case he is no less of a liar) or not (in which case he would have been even more irresponsible fiscally). Between 2010 and 2014, it was retroactively overruling foreign currency mortgage contracts allowing debtors to repay them at more favorable exchange rates at the banks' expense (the Hugnarian currency weakened during the financial crisis), and imposing price controls on utilities. At the same time, they de facto confiscated private pension funds (~9% of the yearly GDP), and spent them in two years.
I wouldn't think this is a competent right-wing economic policy in the Western sense, and I don't think it's something Western right-wingers should support or try to emulate IMO.
11) "They were never the farthest right party, that was various forms of openly Fascist irrendetist militias" Those weren't political parties, and IIRC around 2008–2010 most were affiliated with Jobbik. Around those times IMO Jobbik was among the most disgusting far-right parties in Europe.
6) IMO the more interesting question isn't "was Orbán wrong to exploit the left's weaknesses?" (no, any politician would have done it), it's "did the fact that he succeeded so much lead to a bad outcome?" (Yes, as a result Fidesz could get away with stealing an order of magnitude or two more than the socialists ever hoped to. Seriously, the biggest corruption scandals under the socialist government involved sums equivalent to ~$1M, while Orbán's friend Mészáros has made ~$1B from nothing mostly through government contracts and the like.)
> Hungarians may have a disgust for socialism when it's called socialism, but they have remaining socialist impulses.
> I wouldn't think this is a competent right-wing economic policy in the Western sense, and I don't think it's something Western right-wingers should support or try to emulate IMO.
That kind of economic interventionism is not unusual for right wing populists. But I agree with your broader point. Fidesz is not some kind of middle class, bourgeois, business class conservative party like the Tories, Republicans, etc. And some of the move of those groups away from those more standard values are due to Fidesz's influence on the wider conservative world. As much as Americans like to gripe about the religious right, I'd take the Christian Democrats or Religious Republicans over Fidesz and their fellow travelers any day of the week.
> Those weren't political parties, and IIRC around 2008–2010 most were affiliated with Jobbik. Around those times IMO Jobbik was among the most disgusting far-right parties in Europe.
Many of them did have minor political wings. Sometimes not in Hungary itself but the surrounding countries. At least if what I heard was right. You're right that Jobbik was highly affiliated with them and there wasn't any kind of strong barriers between them. But it was more than just the political wing of these militias who often had their own political wings.
Jobbik was riding an extremist wave and was pretty noxious, though it wasn't atypical for its context. I don't say that as a compliment: Fascist parties in the 1920s weren't atypical for their context either.
Again, to refer to history, things like the Agricultural Union fought with more Fascist elements even as they opposed moderate socialism and Communism. So this isn't unusual for the region. (Yes, I know those aren't from Hungary.)
> IMO the more interesting question isn't "was Orbán wrong to exploit the left's weaknesses?" (no, any politician would have done it), it's "did the fact that he succeeded so much lead to a bad outcome?
Agreed, though I think you're underplaying Socialist corruption. You're definitely right it got much worse under Fidesz.
One thing I've learned from history is that there's a lot of wisdom in supporting the more democratic, less radical side even if they're directly opposed to your personal preferences/interests. Dictatorial regimes of the right and left have a way of eating their supposed allies and looting the state in a way that hurts you more than whatever deals they've made with you. They often keep the deals but you've lost more than you've gained. Fidesz isn't nearly as bad as various dictators. But it's still a step away from democratic, anti-corruption norms. Keep in mind when I say "he's better than Putin and infinitely better than Kim Jong Un" that's a very low bar.
I wouldn't oversell the disgust for socialism, anyway. The Socialist Party (that's the same Socialist Party that ran the communist dictatorship) won the second free elections in 1994 with two-thirds of the vote, and won again in 2002 and 2006.
Yes. A minor correction: the Socialists only had a 2/3 majority in 1994 in coalition with the liberals, but they did get a plurality of the votes on their own, and a majority of the seats.
"The Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads to at least the extent that Americans are descendants of the English."
Seems wrong, both by autosomal and Y-DNA:
https://razib.substack.com/p/hungarians-as-the-ghost-of-the-magyar
Someone else made that point. I think the point that Hungarians have a continuous culture still stands but apparently the specific genetics are different. It was my mistake.
I may be missing something, but doesn't the mean American have quite a lot of of English blood?
Yes, several people have brought this up. I though immigrants had swamped the English. Apparently not as much as I thought.
Re: what is going on in Austria. Fertility there is about as low as it has been in the past 20, 30 odd years: the recent spike is in those areas that have seen a large influx of largely Muslim migrants. In quite a number of areas in Vienna children of recent migrants are the absolute majority in public primary schools. Out in the countryside, much less so: but there, fertility rates are about the same as they have been those past few decades.
Having this sort of scenario playing out at his doorstep is something Orbán exploits for his nationalistic propaganda. Not openly, but indirectly - "you don't want to end up like the Austrians or the Germans, now do you?"
It does seem like the more relevant data for Orban's argument is to look at the fertility rate of ethnic Hungarians / Austrians / Czechs / ... , rather than the fertility rate of everyone in the country.
That is exactly what I am saying: the fertility rate is quite different for the ethnic groups in Austria. Any uptick in numbers of children per couple is not due to the locals at the moment.
From the BirthGauge Twitter account:
Detailed fertility indicators for Austria - TFR in 2020 (2019 in brackets)
Austria 1.44 (1.46)
Women with...
Austrian background 1.34 (1.35)
EU/EFTA b. 1.52 (1.56)
form. Yugoslavian b. 1.91 (2.00)
Turkish b. 1.93 (1.99)
B. from other country 1.93 (2.07)
(https://twitter.com/birthgauge/status/1431755670475399168)
Regarding Austria: Scott Alexander should really use TFR, not birth rates, which are dependent on the population age structure and as such much less useful for international comparisons.
https://twitter.com/BirthGauge/status/1428844093568921603
After this adjustment Austria becomes rather meh, staying within the 1.44-1.49 range throughout the 2010s. (The actual reason is that Austria had an early transition to very low fertility, in the 1970s like Germany, so there were already much fewer women to give birth even by 2010, whereas in Eastern Europe, this transition only happened during the early 1990s, i.e. there were still a lot of women in childbearing age in 2010, but far fewer by 2020, hence the sharp declines in annual births).
What we see is that Hungary has been modestly successful at raising TFR, going from 1.26 in 2010 to 1.62 in 2020.
> Fertility there is about as low as it has been in the past 20, 30 odd years: the recent spike is in those areas that have seen a large influx of largely Muslim migrants.
"The fertility rate is very low, if you ignore the high fertility rate in a portion of the population I choose to ignore." That argument is only meaningful if you consider citizenship in purely ethnonationalist terms. Maybe you could save time by just listing what types of people you think count as "real" Austrians, at least then you'd be explicit
If you interpret the european data as: "Hungary's fertility policies can't explain much of the TFR increase given that TFR has moved in similar directions elsewhere" --
If we chalk up the other countries fertility trajectories either to policies similar to Hungary's or ethnically replacement (one or the other) -- and it turns out that hungary has not had much of the latter, then it does seem like evidence in favor of the fertility boost not being coincidental.
There's a difference between saying "Hungary's policies had no effect" on the one hand and "Hungary could have solved its fertility problem simply by importing muslims, which is ethically at least as good as boosting the fertility of people already living there"
> The Hungarian border fence (source). Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?
From Mexico you want to get to USA and only USA, while Hungary is not destination andyou can get around?
Also, difference in scale, remoteness and resources of people trying to get through?
Compare length of this fences. Also, this is clearly designed to be patrolled/manned on scale impossible with planned Trump fence.
(all above are uneducated guesses)
I thought the same thing regarding scale. Some quick Googling gives the Hungarian fence's length as 523 kilometres, or 325 miles. For comparison, just the Rio Grande chunk of the US-Mexico border is about three times that.
The USA is a much bigger and wealthier country, though.
And hence is the actual target of migrants. Nobody actually wants to go to Hungary, they just want to get through it. We could definitely do better regarding the border, but I’m not sure it’s actually cost effective to build a wall, especially when many people just claim refugee status and never show up to court anyway.
Right, but my point was only that the USA is much bigger than Hungary economically, so could afford to build and maintain a much longer wall. I pass no judgement on how effective it'd be for the USA.
It worked for Hungary, not in general - most of refugees want to go to Germany or other country with generous social system - if path through Hungary is closed, they go via other routes more.
If you wonder why Hungarians won't let them just go through, the reason is that countries further along the way would have excuse to send them back to Hungary.
Hungary does also have more experience with border fences, albeit on the other side of the country.
My favorite bit about Orbán is that when he was 20, he played in a movie (the movie version of a famous Hungarian children's book), where he played a robber turned into a football player. Make of that what you will :D
Wut?
"seized control of an old Soviet tank that had been wheeled out as an exhibit for the commemorations, and for a *shot* time drove it around the center of Budapest".
This is one of the great typos, but it should probably be corrected anyway.
Well, some of the political developments in Hungary since 1992 may have to do with Hungarian national culture. Orban might to some extent be an example of the "there goes my people - I am their leader - I must follow them" leadership strategy.
This is admittedly political gossip (since I have not bothered consulting serious historical research to back it up), but Hungarians have a long-standing reputation in neighbouring countries as rather nationalistic and big-brotherish.
Some claim that this is a result of losing 2/3 of their territory after World War 1, which still gnaws on the collective memory.
While others claim that this loss only amplified feelings that were already there. It is said (yes, I have not checked the sources) that in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the Hungarians were the nasty ones. They pressed for forced Magyarization of smaller (mainly rural) ethnic/national minorities living in the large Hungarian borderlands. Unlike the German-speaking Austrians, who took a liberal/multicultural view. Good old grandfather-of-the-nation, Kaiser Franz (and Vienna with him), had the classic-paternalistic "you are all my children" attitude.
It was Hungary, not Austria, that were the nationalists. (Although both were - and to some extent still are - crabby about the Czechs, who were the ones that made it abundantly clear they wanted out in 1918, and got the Slovaks with them.) The distant past still casts long shadows in Europe. At least for some of us.
Perhaps ACT readers in those parts of Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere that formerly were part of the Hungarian part of the Empire have more, or different, historical reflections.
Yes, but this wasn't due to a liberal or nice guy sentiment. The Magyar noblility that ran the Crown of St. Stephen had all the minorities they wanted and generally didn't have an interest in more empire building (in particular, they didn't want to have the crown tax them to pay for it). It was Vienna that had to deal with the South Slavic issues and Belgrade's efforts to replace them as overlord of the Croats and Bosnians and hence were much more keen on a Balkan showdown to assert that they were a great power and Serbia was poor, tiny state with outsized pretensions of grandeur.
I am Slovak and I can confirm that you described the prevailing reputation of Hungary in the eyes of Slovak/Czech/Ukrainian/etc peoples very accurately.
I cannot judge on the historical accuracy of these claims, but e.g. forced Magyarization during the 19. century is a big topic in our history, and a huge pain point. The consequences are present to this day - while the relationships between countries in the region have been generally really good in the past decades, Hungary stands out, having strained relationships with several neighboring countries due to Orban's imperialistic rhetoric and actions (e.g. granting voting rights for Hungarian minorities in neighboring states)
>But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
The West wasn't eager to accept them. The few countries that were are the exception that requires an explanation, not the hundreds of countries that did not. E.g. judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_civil_war, Sweden took in about one Syrian per 90 inhabitants, whereas the US took in one per 39k and Hungary took in one per 10k. Hungary is not the outlier here.
The UK also wasn't keen on that and didn't do so. It's still the West.
The reality is that lots of people in western Europe actually didn't want to accept loads of refugees, but those countries are run by people who are very experienced with making unpopular decisions at the EU level, where they become invulnerable to any kind of genuinely democratic oversight for a mix of legal and ideological reasons (in particular the heavily pushed narrative that opposition to anything EU=nazi-ism etc). Even in Germany the decision tanked Merkel's popularity in a major way, and in France Macron is regularly opposed in the final round by openly anti-immigrant, anti-refugee candidates. It just wasn't a popular move anywhere but, ironically, only supposedly un-democratic Hungary had a leader who actually acted on it. Note: other leaders are catching up. See Priti Patel flailing around trying to stop the boat crossings as an example after decades of more or less blindly pro-immigration governments.
Merkel's party/coalition just had its worst results ever. Her personal popularity was in the 70s in 2015, when she made that decision, it then started falling significantly and continued falling for years. It now hovers around 50% despite her basically reversing her stance on unlimited refugee/migrant acceptance.
https://www.dw.com/en/merkels-approval-ratings-improve/a-19083943
For Macron, I only said that his primary challenger is now always running on an anti-Muslim-immigration platform, not that he did poorly in his election.
Merkel’s coalition was replaced by a more-pro-immigrant coalition, so I’m not sure that really supports your point.
Ah, when did that happen? Last I read (and currently still according to Wikipedia) they were still trying to form a new coalition, hence why Mutti is turning up to COP in Glasgow despite theoretically not being in charge anymore.
At any rate the process of government formation in places like PR often leads to more or less incoherent coalitions. Green+FDP wouldn't make any sense for instance and certainly couldn't be said to represent a coherent set of policies that anyone "wants".
*Laschet's* party has just had its worst results ever.
Presumably e.g. Sweden voted for splitting because they were eager not to get so many refugees. If other countries had been eager to accept them, no splitting would have been necessary; those countries could have just done what Sweden and to a lesser extent Germany did and accepted them anyway. I don't think that if the US had been eager to accept them, geography would have been an issue.
My impression from living in Sweden at the time is that splitting was expected to reduce the burden on Sweden. See https://www.svd.se/stefan-lofven-sa-ska-fler-dela-pa-ansvaret for an example of that type of rhetoric.
"a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's"
To be fair, those are just a normal 's' sound and a normal 'zh' sound (as in the sound in the middle of 'measure') - they just have a confusing spelling system where an 's' that *isn't* followed by a 'z' is what we would normally write as 'sh' (or, I guess, think of it as the 's' in 'sugar').
What really gets you are the 'gy' and 'ty' sounds - try saying the 'g' in 'good' and the 'j' in 'judge' at the same time, and you'd not be far off - the middle of your tongue comes up to meet the roof of your mouth...
... which means that the Hungarians have provided us with a neat resolution, if we are brave enough to accept it, of the perennial squabble over how to pronounce 'gif'.
Normally I am all for the proliferation of Hungarian language quirks (no grammatical gender would be a blessing), but whoever succeeds in getting people to pronounce it gyif will become my eternal enemy :D
I don't know, I think it's kind of funny. Certainly not any worse than fájl and the likes.
Not worse that's true, since those are also all terrible.
My goal is to get the velar fricative adopted and get people to pronouce it ɣif .
"I don’t see any of that with Orban. Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee."
Wait. So he's giving the people what they want and trying to be popular? The bastard!
He's basically running a Tammany Hall on the Danube. But I think that's still democracy.
On the subject of appointing friends ... Henry Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR — and a neighbor and friend of FDR. I can't think of other examples, but I suspect the pattern is common.
The Institutional Revolution by Douglas Allen is an interesting book about premodern institutions, why they existed and why they changed. An important part of that was the patronage system, where someone got appointed to a job not because there was evidence he was competent at it but because he was someone the person in charge could trust. I discuss it in some detail in a draft chapter I have webbed: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Economics/History.pdf
Kennedy put his brother in as attorney general
Here is Wikipedia on the political beginnings of James Baker, who became Ronald Reagan's chief of staff and later George H.W. Bush's secretary of state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baker):
>Baker's first wife, the former Mary Stuart McHenry, was active in the Republican Party, working on the Congressional campaigns of George H. W. Bush. Originally, Baker had been a Democrat but too busy trying to succeed in a competitive law firm to worry about politics, and considered himself apolitical. His wife's influence led Baker to politics and the Republican Party. He was a regular tennis partner of George H. W. Bush at the Houston Country Club in the late 1950s. When Bush Sr. decided to vacate his Congressional seat and run for the U.S. Senate in 1970, he supported Baker's decision to run for the Congressional seat he was vacating. However, Baker changed his mind about running for Congress when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer; she died in February 1970. Bush Sr. then encouraged Baker to become active in politics to help deal with the grief of his wife's death, something that Bush Sr. himself had done when his daughter, Pauline Robinson Bush (1949–1953), died of leukemia. Baker became chairman of Bush's Senate campaign in Harris County, Texas.
Information on Wikipedia is probably the tip of the iceberg in tracing politicians' sponsorship of their friends' careers.
I'm just slightly too young to have met Orban, but I was involved in European Liberal youth politics (an organisation called LYMEC, which still exists) in the mid 1990s when Fidesz was still officially liberal - they switched from the liberal* group to the main right-wing group in 2000. While the Fidesz people I did meet were obviously on the right of liberals, they were mostly liberals and you would get them quietly complaining about how far right and how conservative Orban was getting. Especially the gay ones.
I know that Fidesz had a split in 1993 and some of the liberals left for SZDSZ, but there was another one around 2000 when they formally left liberalism, and I think all the people I knew left back then. At the time, we all thought that Orban was going to vanish entirely... which shows how arrogant a bunch of mid-twenties liberals could be.
*Liberals in Europe comprise two wings, one which is similar to American liberals; we call that group left-liberals or social liberals, the other is what we call right-liberals or economic liberals and you'd probably call something like "moderate libertarians". They tend to be liberal on social issues, though rarely radically so (they were generally a little ahead of the average party on gay marriage, but not as early as the greens or the left-liberals), pro-business but tend to prefer small and medium-sized businesses to corporates, in favour of low taxes, hostile to unions and also usually calling for a smaller welfare state (though smaller than Germany or Sweden is still much bigger than the US). All European liberal parties are members of the liberal group (it was ELDR back then, later ALDE, now Renew Europe), but the individual parties are sometimes just one strand and sometimes both. So the British Liberal Democrats are both, the Dutch have D66 (left) and VVD (right), the Germans have the FDP (used to be both, kicked the left out in 1982 and has been right since). Fidesz was a right-liberal party until they switched to joining the main "centre-right" group (PPE). This is the same group that Merkel is in, to give you an idea of what a typical PPE party is like.
Oh, and please bear in mind that Europe has social democratic or socialist parties as well, so liberals are not usually the main left-wing party.
The British Lib Dems haven't really had a coherent political ideology or position for quite some time now.
As a member, that's true, but there are people and groups within the party that do. The main reason for the incoherence is that there's an ongoing battle within the party between different ideologies, so one will win on one issue and another on another.
Your above overview of the Liberal Democrats' factions is interesting. If the UK, or at least England, were to shift to a two-party system, what share of Liberal Democrat MPs would you expect to go Conservative instead Labour (or whatever more inclusive new name the left might adopt)?
The problem with this is that there are literally 12 MPs and the answer would be about personal assessments that have little to do with the underlying forces within the party. That is, it's about who happened to win the primary in the particular seats that we won; it would be more useful to consider across the 50 or so seats we could win.
The other problem is that the sort of Conservative that the right-wing of the Lib Dems would choose to join is exactly the sort that Johnson expelled from the party in the purge he conducted in 2019; those people would be completely homeless. But if the Cameronites magically regained control of the Tories, then I'd guess that, of that 50 or so: 50% to Labour, 25% to the Conservatives and 25% to quit politics entirely in preference to choosing.
as an addition: Fidesz is no longer part of the EPP conservative party group in the European Parliament. The group was preparing to throw them out, and Orban pre-empted that by leaving himself.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-hungary-idUSKBN2AV138
Yes, I considered whether to include that - Scott had alluded to this in the article as well - but it didn't seem relevant to my personal experiences of Fidesz from when they were still liberal.
My German brother in law voted for the FDP and Die Linke - the latter for the candidate because he liked him.
That’s supposedly a much greater political distance than republican and Democrat in the US, but there’s far less hostility in Germany between the multitude of parties than the two supposed centrist parties in the US.
This is all fine, but I would just point out that this is the year of our lord 2021 and it's been a good decade at least since newspaper coverage was any sort of key to political success. I'm not sure a crooked politician buying friendly media coverage is quite the trump card it once was, in the age of social media (are there Hungarian substacks out there, like Matt Taibbi, only of Magyar lineage?). To this cynic, it sounds more like Hillary Clinton supporters blaming fake news pages on Facebook for why she lost to Trump in 2016. Didn't help, but it was probably wasn't higher than 455th on the list of reasons she took the L in that election.
Hungarians (especially in more rural regions) still put a lot of stock in newspapers, so it helps a lot if you control all of the county-level newspapers completely.
The media landscape in other countries is not the same as that of the USA.
“I don’t see any of that with Orban. Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee. But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant.”
Tongue firmly in cheek, but this sounds like a remarkable new flavour of democracy-by-proxy.
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
I assume that this is a joke and Scott is fully aware that the US-Mexico border is extremely dissimilar to Hungary's borders. Just to be explicit, illegal immigration in America is driven primarily by visa overstays, which is why a wall would mostly not work.
I wonder if the Straussian reading of this, that Scott is pandering to the MAGA crowd, is correct.
https://apnews.com/article/illegal-immigration-archive-immigration-cb7493650af7e1a06f6eeaf9628ecf7a
Then why do I keep hearing about "crisis at the border!" and "family separations at the border!" and "border patrol does racist-looking thing at the border!" and so on?
I think the main difference is that there isn't a 3rd country at the USA-Mexico border and USA is the target country for immigrants anyway. Hungary is just one of a several countries on a route from Middle East to Western Europe, so if they make their wall slighly more inconvenient than the neighboring countries that's enough to sway the torrent of immigrants another way.
To extend the analogy - Hungary is more like Mexico than the US. And Mexico actually *really doesn't like* being a pass-through to the US, which is why they've been happy to comply with and support more restrictionist policies like "remain-in-Mexico" which discouraged caravans and crossings over the past 4 years.
Remain in Mexico, btw, is now being reimplemented by the Biden administration in what qualifies as a stunning reversal, given that he previously called it "inhumane."
Did it ever stop?
Ah, my information is outdated, the administration is now bringing more challenges against it. Here's a link with a timeline of events up to the current date. https://cis.org/Arthur/State-Play-Remain-Mexico
Yes, it has stopped for the time being - although a court has ruled that they need to restart a while ago, and the Supreme Court agreed, and the administration appears to be slow-walking it while bringing another challenge against it. (That slow-walking is the subject of yet more lawsuits.)
The crisis generally comes when capacities get exceeded. So, Obama wanted more people detained (as an intentionally punitive deterrent measure, if you can believe it), Trump expanded the policy and made it increasingly heartless, and the product was more detainees than places to put them.
Now under Biden, there's still the detainee bottleneck, and people are actually still being detained - policy moves slowly - but there's also just a huge, huge surge of immigrants coming. (The timing makes it pretty obvious that Biden's the reason, although not because of any particular policy. It seems like optics really are that powerful when people are deciding whether to come.) That more thoroughly overwhelmed border control's capacity to manage the influx - they're unable to process people's applications in a timely manner or keep any semblance of order, leading occasionally to sensational moments like the one you may have seen in the news with the Haitian tent city under border bridges. It's a genuine crisis, even if we see the most sensational parts of it.
If you click through to the link in the original comment, it's about 2016 numbers specifically, and illegal crossings are still a significant component. Since Biden came into office, there's been a massive spike, and facilities have been overwhelmed.
There are half a million illegal entries to the US every year. So while most illegal immigrants are here in the US on VISA over stays, it is wrong to claim that there are not also a lot of border crossings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States
I think the true answer is that the US is the intended destination, whereas Hungary would simply be a stopping point of convenience - there are a lot of wealthy alternatives available.
Because those are acute and visible crises. In the same way that people talk about plane crashes but not heart disease,
> Just to be explicit, illegal immigration in America is driven primarily by visa overstays, which is why a wall would mostly not work.
Any actual stats on this? What fraction of illegal aliens entered with a visa?
Of course a failure to enforce visas is another huge problem. The US is the only country I can recall going to which doesn't check who you are on the way out of the country, so the US has no way of even knowing whether someone has overstayed their visa or not!
I'm tempted to say this is a very simple change which could be made, although arguably it requires a massive redesign of every international airport in the country to have a post-emigration departures area. Still, it's fair to say that the complete lack of interest in this change exhibited by the government shows how uninterested both major parties are in the rule of law when it comes to immigration.
Wikipedia says 500K illegal entries annually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States
> The US is the only country I can recall going to which doesn't check who you are on the way out of the country
Which countries are you thinking of that check who you are on the way out of the country! I've visited Canada, Mexico, and India, and I only recall passing through US Customs checks on the way home, while the countries I was visiting only checked me on the way in.
The link doesn't actually support your point. Overstays were higher in 2016, but illegal crossings have been higher historically. The numbers are consistently within a factor of 2 of one another. On any reading of the numbers in the article, border crossings are still a primary driver of illegal immigration. And this year, with the massive spike in crossings we've seen so far, I would give at least 2-to-1 odds that crossings will outnumber overstays (perhaps narrowly).
Also, it's reasonable to be more concerned about border crossings than overstays. People who entered legally once and were vetted to do so are less of a security risk. The process of their coming the U.S. doesn't involve and fund human trafficking, or the violations and deaths that are a direct product of illegal crossings. A wall still might not be the most effective way, but reasonable people can be and should be more concerned about the state of the border than about F-1 and TN overstays.
In the paragraph where the writer (Scott?) writes about how Hungary’s history with communism, and how not being a colonial power, shaped its modern day political beliefs a fairly significant historical part was missed out: Hungary was colonised by the Ottomans, and it wasn’t pretty. A country with that history is going to be less sympathetic to the ideology of white guilt.
(And actually the distribution of “white guilt”, even the use of the term whiteness, across Europe isn’t related to imperialism but to US influence).
In the paragraph about the fertility increases in Hungary I don’t really see a regression to mean at all - not that that’s a guaranteed statistical certainty anyway - the rate recovers after 2010 more than it falls before it.
"Hungary was colonised by the Ottomans, and it wasn’t pretty. A country with that history is going to be less sympathetic to the ideology of white guilt."
Maybe people in Europe take a different view, but from a U.S. perspective, Turkish people are largely considered White, at least as much as Southeast Europeans, Central Asians, etc., so the oppression of the Ottoman Empire would simply confirm the narrative of White colonialism's evils rather than refuting it. Generally Japan and China are considered the only major non-White colonial powers of the modern era.
Granted, there are some people with a narrower definition of Whiteness who might say that Turks aren't truly White, but those people almost certainly wouldn't consider Hungarians to be "White" either. Granted, the fact that Hungary is predominantly Christian makes them a closer cultural match to Western Europe than Islamic Turkey, but White is a racial classification, it doesn't merely equate to "culturally Christian."
What the US thinks about what and what isn't whiteness is not really all the important in Europe, or rather it shouldn't be, unfortunately your woke ideology here is not too distinct from Nordicism. I mean, do you really think that the people who don't see Turks as white would not see Hungarians as white? Scott thinks they are Germans.
I probably however should have said " less sympathetic to the ideology of European guilt". That said the "at least as much as Southeast Europeans" is fairly telling, as very few Europeans don't see southern or south eastern Europeans as anything other than European. Clue, I suppose, is in the name.
In the US, there are basically three different views on what counts as White. There's the official legal definition used by the US government, in which "White" refers to anyone who isn't Sub-Saharan African, East Asian, or an Indigenous American/Australian/Pacific Islander, i.e. anyone with a Caucasoid skull shape. By that classification, Turks would be White, but so would Arabs and Persians, and even Indians, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, etc. despite the fact that some of them are very dark-skinned.
There's also the colloquial definition of White, but that's constantly changing over time. (In the past, Irish and Italians and Poles weren't considered White, but they are now.) Even now, different individuals and different regions of the country define Whiteness in different ways, and there are various other inconsistencies that pop up: For instance, Arabs and Persians are generally considered "brown," but Ralph Nader and Tony Shaloub and Nassim Taleb are widely considered White despite being Arabs. People from the Balkan region and the Slavic countries and Central Asia are sort of a grey area, where they're sometimes seen as White and sometimes seen as "brown." But you'd be hard-pressed to find people who'd argue "this one Christianized group of Steppe nomads from the southern Eurasian border is White, but this other Islamicized group of Steppe nomads from the southern Eurasian border isn't."
The third definition of White is the one that hardline White supremacists and ethno-nationalists use, which pretty much only includes people from Northern or Western Europe. Very occasionally, some people on the left use this framing too, as a way of arguing that some oppressed minority group from Southeast Europe or Central Asia doesn't really have "White privilege" like Anglo-Saxons and Germans and Nordics do, or at least not to the same degree.
ye ok but as I said most Europeans would consider( historical) Europeans = White : Greeks, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians and Spaniards alike.
In everyday life, race is all about how you look. I think if you showed a typical American a picture of typical Hungarians and asked if they were white, the answer would be "yes, obviously". Ralph Nader is white for the same reason, though he might be able to turn non-white if he changed his clothes.
As for Scott's claim that Hungarians are " mostly Germans" and "completely normal white people," he's probably just incorrect about that, as others in this thread have pointed out. Even if he is right, that's certainly not how Hungarians perceive themselves, nor is it how they're generally perceived in the US. (In fact, most Americans probably don't think about Hungary at all, and if they do, they're likely to conflate Hungarians with "gypsies", Slavics, or even Central Asians - "Borat people" - than with modernized and industrious Germans. People in this country don't have a very good grasp of the outside world, unfortunately.)
The Hungarians are clearly white European. I am not sure why this is being argued against. They are in Europe, their skin is white. Whats the problem?
I am not inclined to take the US view on "white" seriously, as you yourself conflate Europeans with Central Asians here.
As an American white, I’ve never once heard or read anything that would suggest Hungarians or northern Slavs wouldn’t count as white - actually, I’ve never seen any such thing for Balkan people either, who look less like Northern Europeans than do Hungarians. How could we claim that sweet cultural cachet from ancient Greece otherwise? The ‘white’ ethnicity does become very vague and somewhat arbitrary as you move east and/or south (North Africans, Anatolian Turks, Siberians, Armenians, Caucasians, Persians, the less East-Asian looking central Asian Turks, etc.), but it doesn’t start at Hungary.
Its astonishing that you can't seem to think of any other reason people might want to give refuge to people who are fleeing war and deprivation than "the ideology of white guilt."
I didn’t say anything about the refugee crisis. In my country and in gelebt, where I’ve lived, i worked with refugees. I don’t believe in white guilt though. Certainly not in countries that were never colonisers.
That said it’s pretty astonishing that people from the country who have destabilised the region by killing millions of people lecture any country on how they handle the refugees, the number of which can be destabilising for smaller countries. The Belarusian president is using refugees as a political tool against the EU.
I do believe in the ideology of American guilt though, it’s just a pity there weren’t more of it.
Ugh. Gelebt = Germany.
You forgot vaccines, Hungary under Orban performed far above replacement politician on getting vaccines to the population, and then turning off unnecessary restrictions.
Do you mean compared to the average right-wing authoritarian, who seem to have no have no problem throwing people's lives away to a rampaging infectious disease in favour of scoring points in the culture war? Or compared to normal politicians?
Hungary's vaccination rate is in the lower half of EU countries:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1196071/covid-19-vaccination-rate-in-europe-by-country/
That's a matter of the population bit wanting vaccination. But due to using sputnik and sinopharm people here were able to get vaccinated around a month faster than elsewhere. And then the level of restrictions were quickly reduced once it became clear that the people who wanted to get vaccinated had their shots.
"But you can tell that if focus groups ever started saying nice things about Trotskyist international socialism he’d pivot in an instant."
There's something that he'll never have to pivot on.
But that is his sin, isn't it? He isn't a urban intellectual, he isn't an EU yes man. He actually has the nerve to defend his nation's borders, he has the nerve to fire civil servants at will, he is not a globalist/one-world/davos pig at the trough.
Imagine living in a nation that was behind the iron curtain, gaining freedom, and then having the socialists again force austerity measures upon you - of course you do not want what the liberal effete are selling when they are really doing is serving you stale bread.
"How do we prevent it from happening here?" End judicial filibusters? Import millions of illegals? How about colluding with big tech to quash your opponents' messaging? How about completely overreact to a bad situation and scuttle the economy? Make everyone get a covid ID, but end the filibuster process in the Senate and assure no one ever needs a voter ID?
Interesting how parts I and II, I'm thinking Trump Trump Trump, then it all changed to the dem playbook (but doing nationalist things instead of anti-American things).
Good stuff, well written (should go without saying). Budapest is a wonderful city...if I was 25 again and have a bit of cash, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Perhaps it would do well to treat cultural lineage at least as, if not more, seriously than genetic lineage. If "The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.", then the Portuguese are, realistically, a completely normal Gaelic people who get up to silly cultural projects like speaking a Latin language and showing up at Roman churches; or the Ashkenazim to be, realistically, completely normal white people who give their kids names like "Schlomo" and play Klezmer music to celebrate the ancient ways. Though the Hungarian identification might not have as consistent an arc over the millennia or two that stands behind the Portuguese or the Ashkenazim, I don't see why it deserves a little gaff of derision.
This is very well put, thank you. That paragraph was making me a bit uncomfortable as well, and part if it is what you have described. But another part is that most Hungarians do not, in fact, build yurts and celebrate the ancient ways. (Attila is a fairly common name though.) It's like equating Americans in general to Mormons or the Amish.
Well, with Ashkenazim there's a genetic lineage as well. (I can't speak to the Portuguese.) I take your overall point about cultural heritage -- even in an alternate world where the Khazar theory was supported by evidence I wouldn't appreciate a section like that directed at Jews -- but Ashkenazim are a poor example to support it.
Yeh, I thought that weird too but didn’t know enough about the Magyars to comment. Sometimes invaders lend you their language, other times they take yours. It depends on many things but the main factor would probably be the number of invaders. Also if the existing language was obscure and isolated it would have a better chance of disappearing.
Scott says the Magyars died out, and German isn’t obscure or isolated. So that doesn’t work.
I was about to make this exact comment, but luckily read this and prevented clutter. Agree wholeheartedly.
I also think we should consider taking the importance of place seriously. They might not be related to Attila genetically, but Attila is among the most important things to happen where they live. Does Pontiac, MI have to change its name because the residents are all descended from Africans and Europeans rather than Algonquin-speaking Native Americans? Or Detroit, MI because there aren't many French people? Surely not.
I'm not sure how serious you were with your fence comment, but there were two main arguments I saw.
1) Unlawful entry only accounts for a small portion of illegal immigration in the US, with most immigrants entering legally and overstaying their visas. [This article](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/real-immigration-crisis-people-overstaying-their-visas/587485/) was the first Trump-era hit on the subject I found on Google. As far as I can tell, the current numbers are similar, with there being about double the number of visa overstays annually as unlawful entries. Obviously a wall would only affect unlawful entry.
2) The wall would not necessarily be effective at preventing unlawful entry in the long term for practical reasons. America's southern border is almost 2000 miles long and crosses several different types of terrain. The barrier would not only need to be built, but manned and maintained across this huge distance. This task is much cheaper and easier for a country like Hungary, whose barrier is only 325 miles.
Argument 1 is hard to dispute. If your overall goal is to reduce illegal immigration, it's not very cost-effective to spend billions to maybe reduce it 30%. Argument 2 is weaker in my opinion; I think it's probably true, but impossible to really prove without actually building a wall and finding out.
> If your overall goal is to reduce illegal immigration, it's not very cost-effective to spend billions to maybe reduce it 30%.
Honestly that sounds pretty darn cost-effective to me. It's hard to think of any other major social problems that can be reduced by 30% for a cost of single-digit billions.
Each Ford-class aircraft carrier costs $13 billion, and I don't think it decreases anything by 30%.
Well, the "maybe" is doing a lot of work. Perhaps it would have been better phrased as "in the absolute best case scenario" since the point is that even a magic wall that stopped every unlawful entry forever would still leave 2/3 of the problem unaddressed.
Also I have no idea where you're getting single-digit billions. The most recent number I can find is that $15 billion in funding was set aside for Trump's partial barrier. Actually sealing the border and maintaining the barrier over time would cost much more.
More cost effective to spend the same amount of money on fixing the problems that are causing refugees to turn up on the border, like drug wars in latin america
I wrote something to the same effect elsewhere, but I'll restate... first, overstays outnumbering crossings is only a recent phenomenon, not likely to continue in 2021 given the numbers we've already seen; and if you look at the numbers, crossings are still super significant. But most importantly, they're not comparable problems.
If someone got a visa to enter the U.S., they were vetted for security risks and judged to have a valid reason to enter the U.S. They had a connection, or could make a contribution, or were Canadian. (Canadians get far easier entry due to treaties.) They came via a standard port of entry. They're required to be either vaccinated or tested for COVID. (Just vaccinated, starting 11/8.)
Contrast that with illegal crossings. People who cross aren't vetted or vaxed. The majority are victims not perpetrators, but some are previous deportees with criminal records. They fund human trafficking and organized crime in order to have a better chance of crossing. Many of them tragically perish.
It makes sense to worry more about one of these things than the other. A wall might not be the best way, but of *course* CBP and USCIS are more worried about crossings than overstays, as they damn well should be.
After reading through some of this thread, I'm going to add that I agree with a third point made elsewhere.
3) Putting a lock on your door won't keep determined trespassers out. It will only make them try another house first. Hungary is next door to many other countries with comparable or better living conditions and easier entry. The USA is a big mansion with no other houses anywhere close. It's very plausible that the US would have really determined immigrants whereas Hungary's just look elsewhere.
I'm not sure I get your point... the southern border is the only significant source of illegal crossings (not overstays). The Canadian border is secure, in large part thanks to the Canadians, who look after *their* southern border very carefully; and we have oceans all around us elsewhere. (Desperate souls sometimes raft over from Cuba, but not in significant numbers. Seas are very good walls.)
Our house is surrounded by impending, towering walls, but one has massive, gaping holes in it. Of course plugging the hole would decrease illegal crossings, there's no other easy illegal way in! (A wall isn't the best way to plug the hole, but I'm responding to point 3 here, not point 2.)
This was more about explaining the apparent effectiveness of Orban's wall -- I'm suggesting that crossings stopped not because walls are incredibly effective, but because in Europe it's easier to go around them than through them. If we tried a wall here, I'm sure crossings would decrease to some degree, but we might also find that walls aren't so great at keeping out people with no other options.
Ah, gotcha. I think stemming the southern border influx would have a bigger impact than you seem disposed to believe. But you're definitely right that this could have been a big reason Orban's wall was effective.
"I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you."
Per capita 325 miles should be much more expensive for Hungary than 2000 miles is for the US.
"Is there something he’s doing that proves that being conservative works, or is better than expected?"
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
These questions seem to answer each other.
Biden created a commission to look into Supreme Court reform. They haven’t released their final report yet, but they released a preliminary version (link in article below). I was pleased to see the report was very negative on the idea of court packing, and warm-ish on the idea of term limits (with some details to be worked out, including whether or not it would require a constitutional amendment). FWIW the Orban post makes me the most uncomfortable out of all these because if one of these paths were to be taken in the US, I think it would look a lot more like Orban than like Modi or Erdogan.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/10/15/biden-supreme-court-commission-releases-discussion-materials-on-court-packing-term-limits-and-other-issues/
Thank goodness
"There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority."
Ending the filibuster with only a 50 vote majority seems like exactly the same sort of thing.
This is an occasion where a large enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one. If you have a 51% majority, it's easy to imagine being a 49% minority in a couple years so you preserve the rule that will protect you in the latter case; if you have a 67% majority, it's hard to imagine being a 33% minority anytime soon, so have at it.
The general principle is:
A rule that mandates X% for something should also require at least X% to change.
I do think that this applies in both cases. Otherwise, requiring X% is not really a requirement.
>The general principle is:
>A rule that mandates X% for something should also require at least X% to change.
The unspoken assumption is that the rule was first established with >=X% support. That's often not the case, and when true I don't see any particular reason changing said rule should require more support than establishing it in the first place.
On the object level, I have a hard time picking what number the general principle ought to apply in the case of the filibuster, if at all: the 1806 nigh-unlimited version can only really be said to have been created by procedural accident, and while the developments in cloture has always been forced to meet that threshold the resulting compromise votes can't really be said to be reflective of what the rule would have been intentionally set at in the first place.
> That's often not the case, and when true
Ugh, terrible wording. "When [the previous clause is] true [meaning the assumption is false]..." You know what I mean.
Yes, the 1806 rule change that accidentally created an almost unlimited filibuster is not the best foundation for a rule. Luckily, this rule has been put on a much stronger footing since then.
The cloture rule in the US Senate dates to 1917, when it was adopted with a 76-3 vote. This was modified in 1949 (62-23), 1959 (77-22), 1975 (56-27), 1976 (2 amendments: 72-22 & 78-17), 1979 (76-18), and 1986 (67-21). This was established with a large supermajority and there is a tradition of not changing it without at least the (stricter) requirements of the rule. Exactly what the threshold should be was intentionally changed multiple times: either 2/3 or 3/5 of either the Senators present or all the Senators.
Source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-112SPRT66046/pdf/CPRT-112SPRT66046.pdf For 1917, p. 186 (192 of the pdf). For 1949, p. 192 (198). For 1959, p. 197 (203). For 1975, p. 208 (214). For 1976, p. 210 (216). For 1979, p. 218 (224). For 1986, p. 224 (230).
> Luckily, this rule has been put on a much stronger footing since then.
This is exactly what I was referencing when I said "[because] developments in cloture [have] always been forced to meet that threshold the resulting compromise votes can't really be said to be reflective of what the rule would have been intentionally set at in the first place." You can't treat the cloture thresholds as foundational because they themselves were quite literally built on an unsound foundation - the general principle isn't quite enough to establish a true ratchet effect, but it does create an asymmetry that gets badly exacerbated when an initial unprincipled X% is set too high.
Alright, toy example time. Say you have a newly-minted legislature considering creating an absolute minimum for the support required to alter a rule, including this one. The "no lower than" levels and their support are as follows:
50% threshold -> 99% support
60% threshold -> 65% support
70% threshold -> 52% support
80% threshold -> 38% support
90% threshold -> 3% support
Given this set of preferences, the filibuster gets set at 60% and everyone breaks for lunch early.
Except, there was an error in the drafting process and it turns out you're working with a preexisting 90% threshold that only those 3% actually approve of. Oops. Now you don't have any way to reach that justifiable 60% threshold, because 35% would object to lowering it that far. You can't even get to 70%!
You actually need a separate set of "no higher than" preference data to figure out how far you *can* lower the threshold, but for the sake of argument let's say it works out to around 80% for a reflectively consistent case. The equilibrium settles at a threshold that doesn't have the ability to slide further in either direction, but that initial drafting error means it can't be said to be a principled result of the legislators' preferences.
I'm not sure that these numbers make sense from the opposite direction. If we start at a 90% threshold that only 3% of the group supports, then wouldn't 97% of the group prefer an 80% threshold over the current system? Everyone who supports lowering the threshold from 90% to 60% should also prefer lowering the threshold from 90% to 80%.
Of course, this might be difficult to make this vote work in practice. Compromising is sometimes bad optics.
I have often thought this precise thing when the subject of abolishing the filibuster comes up (which is often, of late). What baffles me is why, with all the hand-wringing about 'if we don't, what if they do', this idea is never raised in practice? If legislators wish to preserve the filibuster, but don't trust their colleagues across the aisle to respect that precedent when they are in power, why not get together to formalize a rule that works as you describe?
One thing needs to be added to the article : Hungary is a very strange country, independently from Orban. I have been there twice, the last time was 3 weeks ago. I have traveled in most of European countries, I speak 5 European languages, but I have never felt so disconnected from the people living there; communication is very difficult, simply because most people only speak Hungarian (even younger ones). And foreigners are simply not welcome. Oh, and just ask my son about his football teammates who happened to be black...
This is very different from, say, Poland, Croatia or the Czech Republic. Poland may be super-conservative, yes, maybe more than Hungary; but I never felt rejected there...
It is strange alright. I like it but there’s an oddness there - all the more odd because it’s definitely European. And yet strange.
Sounds like a very based country.
"Based" seems like a coward alt right newspeak for "Racist"
True. For me, the biggest thing is the Hungarian nationalism, though Poles are also not that far off in this regard.
I live in Czechia, so I am biased, but one of the things I love is the lack of nationalism. My favorite example of this: https://cdn-vsh.prague.eu/object/1867/170328-pct-stredni-00048-curajici.jpg - a sculpture of two figures pissing on a map of Czech Republic, placed in the capital. Good fun. You won't find this in Budapest.
I am quite surprised about the review. I am no expert of Hungary, but my understanding has been a bit different.
My impression (even reading opponents of Orban) has been:
1) Fidesz rise to power was caused by Socialists, their corruption and mismanagement of Hungarys economy.
2) "We lied" tape was leaked in 2006, Fidesz won elections in 2010. The review gives an impression that these two events were closely related. They were not.
3) Reading opposition newslets of Hungary, I would say that up until 2013-2014, their main narrative was: socialist were bad, Fidesz promised change and won, thats the reason, not leaked tapes or tricks by Orban. And (grudgingly) Orban has delivered change and improved economic situation of Hungary, that boosted his status even more. From 2013-2014 stories about corruption, anti-democratic measures etc have became more prominent.
4) For most of his political career Orban was described (even by his opponents) as quite ordinary right of center free marketeer. Just recently reread some stuff from Anne Applebaum, typical liberal cosmopolitan, what she said about Orban: "For 20 years we were on the same side".
5) I am not hungarian, but I am from Eastern-European country. I do not think that hick vs urban elite applies here. If talking about social status and background, communism (and fall of communism) changed so much, that everything else is irrelevant. I am coming from a small Baltic country and most of our political parties have their historical roots in different underground movements of 1980-s. 30 years late you can still see lot of friends, schoolmates, roommates in politics. So, I am not surprised that smth similar can be seen in Hungary.
6) I am not sure what to make about gerrymandering. It seems that Orban has used it to benefit himself, but I have read some credible people who say that these accusations and effects of gerrymandering have been overblown.
Overall, I am on the fence. Having watched situation in Hungary for years, it seems to me that critics of Orban (especially from the outside) are a bit biased, they simplify, exaggerate and misinterpret sometimes. At the same time, I also cannot agree with defenders of Orban, who say that nothing is wrong and they attack him only because he is conservative. This does not seem true either.
"2) "We lied" tape was leaked in 2006, Fidesz won elections in 2010. The review gives an impression that these two events were closely related. They were not."
The tape was leaked after the general election, but before the local elections (for mayor and such), the latter was won by Fidesz pretty decisively. Also, the events are related in my opinion by the fact that Orbán and Fidesz derive their legitimacy in large part still based on the events of 2006.
This. The socialists' popularity immediately plummeted (partly due to the leak, partly due to the austerity measures that started around the same time), and never recovered.
4) Center-right (rather than far-right), yes. Free marketer, everything but. Since at least the 2000s the left has been less hostile to free market liberalism in Hungary. (On economic matters, their left-ness manifested in supporting somewhat more redistribution.)
I am from Hungary and follow politics quite closely. Your points are all correct. I don't think fears around Orbán are overexaggerated, but the specific ways in which he has been authoritarian and bad to the country are indeed misunderstood / misconstrued a lot. And indeed until the early 2010s he has been a fairly average, if somewhat populist, right-wing politician.
I'm mostly curious why you seem so certain that Orban's political opinions are insincerely held.
"Yeah, after learning that right-wing nationalism did well in focus groups, he became a right-wing nationalism; after learning that refugees did poorly in focus groups, he turned anti-refugee"
Isn't it more parsimonious to assume that actually he's just a fan of right-wing nationalism, and that everything else is downstream of his genuine beliefs?
Mostly because he converted very quickly as soon as he realized it was politically advantageous to him, and his whole party did it at once. Would be quite a coincidence if everyone in the Liberal Democrat party just happened to decide they actually preferred right-wing nationalism at the same time.
I think that this is quite biased description: Orban shifted from liberal-right to conservative-right. Whole party didn't do it at once, in 1993 actually significant part of Fidesz left and created its own party (led by Gábor Fodor)
They didn't create a new party, they joined a liberal party that had existed for about the same time as Fidesz. (It was a major party in the 90s but it has disappeared since then.)
Most modern democracies are really some combination of democracy, liberalism, and technocracy (Trust Experts).
Orban (and Erdogan and Modi) strike me as being radically pro-democracy, at the expense of liberalism and technocracy. Some of the main complaints here are: (1) he does what he thinks the most people will want instead of having consistent personal beliefs, (2) he allows a lot of Hungarians who live in other countries to vote, (3) politicians can fire any civil servant, and (4) the people who win elections should control the press. These all increase democracy at the expense of liberalism or technocracy.
For example: Making principals accountable to politicians is more democratic than having them mostly insulated from public opinion. It would be even more democratic to have principals directly elected by their school district, but that isn't what the EU is pushing for.
Unfortunately, we have come to use the word "democracy" to mean "government we like". So the European Union says that Hungary is being "anti-democratic" instead of arguing why liberalism or technocracy is the more important value in this situation. This is especially ironic since the EU is a mostly liberal technocratic organization: only one of the seven major decision making bodies of the EU is directly elected by the people.
I should add that voter fraud is definitely anti-democratic. Gerrymandering is somewhat anti-democratic, but most democracies do it at least to some extent.
If you want to criticize Orban from a democratic standpoint, you should focus on these. Instead, most criticisms focus on how he has damaged liberalism and technocracy.
As a Hungarian I liked the review.
As opposed to other writings about Hungary on the non-Hungarian internet it did not contain any obvious errors (ot at least ones I could detect as an error, I don’t really follow politics).
I have a few comments though: (sry for bad english)
>The Hungarians believe themselves to be the descendants of proud steppe nomads.
>Realistically this is all false.
I would be very surprised if this was true and no one had told me about it. Many people in Hungary are very nationalistic and some believe much weirder false beliefs presumably because of it (eg. some Hungarians believe that Jesus was Hungarian),
but many are not (some on the left are even vaguely anti-Hungary) and I expect they would have told me about this widespread falsehood.
But, I don't actually know this and I will reasearch it a bit, when I will have some time.
There are a class of images which I semi-commonly come across on the Hungarian internet which constitute small evidence in favour of the separate genetics hypothesis (small partly because I never checked the veracity of sources) and for fun I will leave them here without (much) comment:
https://image.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/233425450/display_1500/stock-vector-map-of-penis-size-in-the-world-233425450.jpg
https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/1d3/703/5f09c3b25c8a9619e829f0cae3e39750c1-02-penis-sizes.jpg
>Or maybe it’s colonial guilt: the West is wracked with it, but Hungary, never having colonized anywhere, doesn’t see why it owes anything to the rest of the world. Or maybe it’s because bad blood between the Hungarians and Roma has soured Hungary on the entire concept of having minorities. Whatever the reason, anti-immigrant measures in Hungary were polling around the mid-80s-percent.
There is definitely a sense of Hungary defending Western Europe from various invading powers and not receiving much thanks for it from history, and so the “not feeling obligation towards the rest of the world” part is true and often referenced, but I’m pretty sure most of the anti-immigrant sentiment comes from common attitudes towards minorities.
> Is [policies trying to increase fertility rate] working? Lyman Stone analyzes the question at length here and says “maybe a little”. I am a bit skeptical [..]
My impression was that the most consequental family planning policies only recently started and it is too soon to evaluate them. For example CSOK started in 2015 (in some cases 10 million Ft state support + favourable interest rate loan for new houses), but I might be wrong. For me they only recently became relevant and that might color my impression.
>That if you have enough kids, the government repays your student loans?
While true, I don’t think this matters to most people as most already have their education paid for by the state.
I think some mention/analysis of Orban’s relationship to other authoritarian regimes, eg. Russia and China would have been interesting.
> I would be very surprised if this was true and no one had told me about it.
What do you mean? No one told you that you are descended from steppe nomads? Or no one told you that you *aren't* descended from steppe nomads?
The second. And to be clear, I didn't emphasise, because it is obvious to me as a Hungarian, but it might confuse foreigners: I'm not talking about the Hunnic relationship instead specifically whether the current Hungarians are descended from the nomad tribes arriving into the Carpatian Basin around 900 (possibly earlier).
Note to foreigners: The country name contains "hun" only in English. In Hungarian Hungary is "Magyarország" and the people are called "magyarok" which references the Magyar nomad tribes not the Huns.
I'm kind of surprised that there are still so many ethnic Hungarians outside of Hungary given all the ethnic cleansing that went on in Europe last century.
in central Europe, the main defining factor isn't ethnicity (everyone looks the same), but language.
And only groups in Europe that suffered ethnic cleansing in 20th century were first during WW2 Jews and Gypsies and later in 90s Bosniaks
A lot of Germans got pushed out of eastern Europe after the world wars as well. And Stalin did a lot of people-resettling, though mostly past the Urals and not in Europe per se.
In addition to the Germans, Ukrainians were ethnically cleansed from Poland and Poles were ethnically cleansed from Ukraine. Tony Judt and Keith Lowe in their books Postwar and Savage Continent respectively mention other ethnic cleansing that took place in postwar Central and Eastern Europe for the purpose of creating homogenous states.
Ethnic Cleansing includes expulsion. "the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society." The German speaking populations of East Prussia (now Poland), The Sudetenland, etc. were all ethnically cleansed of Germans in the aftermath of WWII.
> And only groups in Europe that suffered ethnic cleansing in 20th century were first during WW2 Jews and Gypsies and later in 90s Bosniaks
That is blatantly untrue. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ethnic_cleansing_in_Europe
For examples some small selection from Poles were targeted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_occupied_Poland_during_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_actions_in_German-occupied_Poland
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths_by_country and sort by deaths as % of population - around 16% to 17% of population was murdered (and not only Polish Jews).
Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_the_Ingrian_Finns
Or many, many, many other unfortunate events.
That claim is ridiculously untrue, if you sincerely though that is true I would advice to learn more about history.
The Soviets didn’t have as direct a security interest in the ethnic composition of Hungary and its immediate neighbors as they did in the corridor between themselves and Germany (hence the expulsion of Poles from post-war Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine into heretofore German territory and of Ukrainians from post-war Poland).
When did we start calling it football?
when we looked which part of the body usually touches the ball in the given sport ;)
when did that happen?
That would be shoe-ball then.
(Also baseball is now bat-ball and glove-ball, because the ball almost never touches the base.)
Historically, "football" is a reference to ball games played while running or walking, *as opposed to on horseback* (I.e. on one's feet). And "soccer" is just a British slang for "association football," the ruleset for soccer/football hammered out between several English private schools.
I've heard the "horseback" thing before, but I'm not convinced, because I've never seen any reference to these horseback ball games that the name supposedly distinguishes them from.
The only horseback ball game we have these days is polo, but polo comes from Central Asia and didn't reach Europe (via British India) until the 19th century, while the English word "football" dates back to the 1300s.
Was there a 1300s-era ball game played on horseback in Europe? Given the cost of horses at the time, it must have been an elite pastime. But I can't find any reference to it.
Unrelatedly, though, it had never clicked for me that the word "soccer" comes from the "soc" in "association", so thanks for that.
(Also, Australian Rules Football is the one true football, not soccer or grid iron.)
As a Hungarian, I found some glaring problems in the review, almost enough that I feel myself in a Gell-Mann Amnesia situation. I don't really blame Scott though, getting informed about the politics of a foreign country is very hard. Still, I trust the Erdogan and Modi reviews significantly less now.
First of all, I broadly agrre with the personal characterization of Orban, and I also think he is an extremely corrupt leader and a threat to democracy.
The review doesn't even mention some of the worst strikes against him: his schoolmate from his home village, who he got to know while going to the same football mathces is now the richest person in the country, whose hand is in every conveivable industry. Everyone knows he is Orban's straw-man, and collects the money for him and for his political cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C5%91rinc_M%C3%A9sz%C3%A1ros
Also, at one point, Orban's agents secretly bought up the largest Leftist newspaper, Népszabadság, and simply cancelled it. In the post Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, Scott wonders if there is so surprisingly littel money in politics, why doesn't some billionaire simply buy up all the newspapers and get to control what people hear about. Orban did exactly that, using the money his straw-men, like Mészáros, got from corruption.
On the other hand, the review is probably based on books and articles seriously biased against Orban, which causes the review to be seriously misleading about a number of things.
Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting. I suggest that this quote should be removed form the review, unless it is supported by more sources, because I stronly suspect it is just blatantly false.
Also, you can just look at the election maps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hungarian_parliamentary_election
Orban won almost all districts. There is no gerrymendeing that can explain that.
The main change Orban's new Constitution brought was that previously Hungary had more or less a proportional electoral system: every party gets seats in the parliament proportional to the number of votes they got. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, in the UK, every district delegates one member of the parliement with first-past-the-post voting.
In my opinion, both system has advantages and disadvanteges, the German system is more balanced, but its result is that usually no party has parliamentary majority, which forces them to form coalitions, which can be a nightmare of instablility (eg Italy).
Orban changed the Hungarian electoral system to be a mix of the two: there are 199 seats in the parliament and 106 districts delegating members with first-past-the-post voting. The other 93 seats are distributed among the parties proportionally with the votes they got. (On a ticket, you vote both for a delegate in your district and you also vote for a party.)
I think this system is not entirely unreasonable, although the first-past-the-post element gives the winner more seats compared to the previous system, so it is easier to win 2/3 majority. But this also means that it is aeasier for the opposition to get 2/3 and remake the changes (although it is very unlikely that they will get that in this election).
The votes from abroad are also seriously overemphasised in the review. It is true that they overwhelmingly vote for Orban, but only the 4% of votes come from abroad, and they don't have district delegates, so that's like 4 seats from the 199. Significant, but Orban's power doesn't depend on these few seats.
I had some othe minor problems: Orbán emphasisees Christian, not Catholic ethics, as Hungary has a significant Protestant population (Orban himself is Protestant). The review claims that Orban was pretty bad in governing during his 1998-2002 leadership, meanwhile I usually hear from older friends, both left and right, that Orban-government was reasonably good back then, they were a moderate center-right party and mostly played by the rules. Most people I know claim that Orban only really broke evil when he lost the election of 2002.
Also, I feel the review is a bit too kind to Socialist leader Gyurcsány: when he gave the infamous speech, he was already the prime minister for two years, the speech is about his premiership, not his predecessor's. And after he was caught on tape claiming he lied all day and night and meanwhile didn't do anything good, he refused to step down. He used police brutality against the protesters and governed for three more years while being probably the most hated man in the country. No wonder Orban won in a nandslide after that. And Mr Gyurcsány still didn't step down after that, because there is approximaeetly 10% of voters who are really devoted to him, so he can remain an important figure in the opposition to this day, while the majority of the country still loathes him for his speech, for the police brutality and for mismanaging the 2008 recession which hit Hungary especially hard. Any reasonablye person would retire in his place, but he is never going to, because he is as much of a mud-fighter as Orban is. A big part of the reason the Left can't beat Orban is that they can't throw out Gyurcsány and his devoted supporters, but they can't win until he is on the ticket.
Also, border wall: not long after Orban built his wall and was called a fascist for that, the Germans also panicked after the first one million migrants poured in in a few months, so they made a deal with Erdogan, and paid Turkey not to let in more migrants to Europe, so now most Syrian migrants are stopped on the turkish border, sometimes by gunfire.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/18/eu-deal-turkey-migrants-refugees-q-and-a
https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-border-guards-accused-of-shooting-at-syrian-refugees/a-42444813
Orban is understandably bitter about being called a fascist, when in a sense he was just ahead of the curve, and I agree with him that EU leaders were pretty hypocritical about this. Also, before Orban bouilt is wall, leftist critics in Hungary also confidently calimed that it won't stop any migrants, but it did. I give it a nice chance that Trump's wall would work too.
Overall, Orban is still very bad, and I agree it is a shame that some western right-wingers are admiring him, but his critics often seriously exeggerate: somewhat similarly with the situation with Trump. If you only hear about Trump from texts written by angry leftists, you will get a very biased image, hited with a few banal lies. Scott has some good articles from the past calling out some of the craziest accusations against Trump. There are a similar number of absurd accusations written about Orban in the western media, but fewer well-informed people calling them out. So treat everything with a grain of salt.
Thank you for this remarkably balanced and interesting comment.
I would like to second this comment as a Hungarian as balanced and correct.
The details here are interesting but don't substantially change my views of Orban from the post.
Gerrymandering can do a lot - e.g. Alabama has 6/7 safe republican seats despite voting about 40% democrats (and that's even without moving the numbers within a 75-100 range, which could make gerrymandering even more efficient). So I believe the efficiency numbers are probably more accurate than you'd assume based on the district sizes, assuming Orban combines it with packing opposition votes.
I agree that this is a possibility in some places, but if you look at the election map from 2014 of 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hungarian_parliamentary_election
you can see that Orban won almost literally all districts outside Budapest, often with pretty high margins. I don't really see how it could have been achieved by packing opposition votes, they are just a minority almost everywhere outside Budapest.
So this is true, but I think the correct measure of dictatorness is how much public opposition it would take to overthrow him. E.g. if he currently has 70% support but has set up a system where he'd stay in power even with 30% support (both these numbers seem roughly correct?), That still seems fairly dictatorial.
Also, while I don't know much about Hungary, I'm looking at the shape of those districts and I'm not seeing anything that you'd call crazily gerrymandered.
Without knowing anything about Hungarian geography, I can at least see that all districts have reasonably looking compact blob-like shapes, unlike certain other countries https://www.statista.com/chart/21313/most-gerrymandered-districts-us/ ... so if any gerrymandering has happened it has at least been reasonably subtle
You don't need weird shapes if you're allowed to draw them with different population sizes.
actually, the sizes of districts are now much more similar than they used to be
Then it's less bad than it used to be. But still bad.
> Alabama has 6/7 safe republican seats despite voting about 40% democrats
How many safe seats would you expect without gerrymandering?
I mean, if you spread the voters of Alabama among the seats at random, you'd expect 7/7 seats to be safe Republican.
Depends. Since they're in practice geographically clustered, you'd except 2-4 if it was done by a blind algorithm. A fair district or would of course have it at 3. And as you said someone going completely at random would have it at 0 (but otoh, if you did the nationwide districting at random you'd have a roughly 100% democratic Congress).
All districting systems are pretty ripe for abuse though - anyone who controls the district lines can usually maintain control in almost all circumstances. Non-PR systems are inherently pretty vulnerable.
Some of this depends on the definition of "Safe" (how much of an advantage do you need to be safe in a neutral year versus a 'wave' year for the other party?) If all the Alabama districts were 60/40 GOP/Dem, that could perhaps qualify as all of them being "safe"; agreed that geographic clustering means this wouldn't happen without deliberate design.
But I don't understand the "if you did the nationwide districting at random you'd have a roughly 100% democratic Congress" point at all. The 2020 House elections had approximately 51% Dem votes to 48% GOP votes (plus a few third-party votes), again with a ton of regional variation and clustering. I agree that with random assignments of districts we might be more Dem-leaning than now, given that the GOP overall got the better of the last redistricting in 2010 due to strong performance in State legislature elections that year, but nowhere close to 100%.
In the sense that it's what would happen if you assigned each person to a random district (without regard for geography).
"I had some othe minor problems: Orbán emphasisees Christian, not Catholic ethics, as Hungary has a significant Protestant population (Orban himself is Protestant)."
And apparently that is down to the Ottoman influence, in another one of the ironies of history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Hungary
"The Ottomans practiced relative religious tolerance, and Christianity was not prohibited. Islam was not spread by force in the areas under the control of the Ottoman Sultan...
The relative religious tolerance of the Ottomans enabled Protestantism in Hungary (such as the Reformed Church in Hungary) to survive against the oppression of the Catholic Habsburg-ruled Hungarian domains.
...By the end of the sixteenth century, around 90% of the inhabitants of Ottoman Hungary were Protestant, most of them being Calvinist."
It is only partially down to Ottoman influence. At this time, the country was split into three, the Catholic Habsburg-ruled part, the Ottoman part with its religious tolerance (such as it was), and the Principality of Transylvania, which was also predominantly protestant.
How did Turkey wind up Muslim if the Ottomans practiced religious tolerance? What happened to all the Byzantine Christians?
They were expelled after the Ottomans were gone and Turkey got a secular government.
The Hungarian electoral system has been a mix of a proportional and a majoritarian component (FPTP with some compensation for the losers but less than to make it proportional) both before and after the Fidesz' changes. Fidesz made it somewhat more majoritarian.
> I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
The claim came with a link ("one observer calculates..."). I haven't read it, but you could get numbers like this if you looked at the ratio of MPs to votes of various parties. But the biggest reason for that isn't gerrymandering, it's a majoritarian electoral system (partial FPTP), while the opposition is/was fragmented. It's definitely not the case that left-leaning districts have twice the population of right-leaning ones (which the claim could be understood as).
The opposition's fragmentation (only tangentially mentioned in the post) has been a major factor in Orbán's stay in power. From 2006, the old Socialist Party became extremely unpopular. Since then, until 2018–2020, the opposition was fragmented between the Socialist Party and its splinter, new left-wing groupings (some of whom ruled out any cooperation with the old socialists), and the far-right Jobbik (which mutually hated each other with the left). This meant easy victory, even supermajority, for Fidesz. Jobbik has since become more moderate as Fidesz moved farther right, and nearly all opposition parties finally realized that they have to run jointly to stand a chance. So the 2022 elections will be between two approx. equal sized factions for the first time since 2006.
As another Hungarian, I would like emphasize as well that this is comment indeed much closer to reality than Scott's review. To be honest, I was baffled to read how biased Scott's post is, feels like a hard case of Gell-Mann Amnesia for me. Not untrue, but really unbalanced.
> Also, I feel the review is a bit too kind to Socialist leader Gyurcsány
There are a lot of reasons Hillary was disliked, deserved or not. I don't think it's that important when discussing Trump.
The review doesn't claim Orban won unfairly or that he can't win elections unless they are rigged.
Orbán ran a nazi-style hate campaign with state media continuously bombarding people (most of whom have never seen a non-European person in their life) with how every single refugee is a murderous rapist terrorist degenerate who is after the Hungarian women, spreads exotic illnesses, wants Sharia law, and is part of a sinister international plot to destroy Christianity and resettle Europe with muslims. The fence was just a small part of why he was called a fascist.
> Most importantly, the gerrymendering problem is way less serious than the review portrays. I looked up the population of electoral districts, and all have population between 75 000 and 102 000. I couldn't find a source how the article quoted in the review got that 1 Fidesz vote = 2 Left votes, but it must have used some very creative accounting.
As the linked source said, "51% of voters will get only 33% of the seats. And Orbán will get his two-thirds."
With gerrymandering - and sometimes without gerrymandering - an outcome like this is possible even if all electoral districts have the same size, so it sounds like you don't understand how gerrymandering works.
All systems based on single-winner electoral districts (and especially the first-past-the-post system used in the US, Canada, and I assume Hungary) tend to amplify the number of seats won by the largest parties. With gerrymandering it is possible to amplify those winnings even further for one particular party—again, even if the population in each district is identical.
It's curious that Orban specifically has become this cause celebre for American reactionaries - even here, the comment section on Erdogan seemed to agree Erdogan was bad, and even the one on Modi still didn't seem as swarmed by his defenders.
As to why.... Republicans don't praise Putin because they genuinely dislike Russia due to the Cold War (also they'd get called Russian spies for it, even more than they are now). India has friendlier relations, but it's a significant power, so idolizing Modi would also cause concern about split loyalties. Even Turkey and Poland are regional powers, and supporting them is a geopolitical statement as well as an ideological one. So Orban is idolized precisely because Hungary *isn't* relevant, because despite his claims he hasn't made it significantly stronger, and therefore his oppression is only hurting Hungarians. (See also: Salazar's Estado Novo.) Of course, for the most part this is initial conditions rather than actual competence or lack thereof.
I suppose that for most commenters here, Hungary and Orbán are merely a metaphor for something about American politics.
The few Hungarian commenters seem to mostly agree with the article. (As do I. Not a Hungarian, although technically I probably could get Hungarian citizenship based on Orbán's law.)
Aside - I do take some issue with the "realistically this is all false" bit about Hungarians being Magyar. Yes, genetically there isn't much admixture, but assimilation is a thing, despite Orban and those like him making a career of claiming the opposite. Hungarian really is a Uralic language, and it really is a very long way away from its relatives and unique in central Europe; there's even some continuity of government with the medieval state, via the Habsburgs. Inasmuch as any country should be proud of its morally questionable history (and most of history is morally questionable), Hungary can be proud of being the heir of the medieval Magyars . (Of course, while Hungary is exceptional, all countries are exceptional. Just with the language thing, you have Romanian as the only major eastern Romance language, Albanian and Greek as isolates within Indo-European, Finnish&Estonian also being Uralic, and that's before mentioning the Basques or the Caucasus.)
I think you're off-base on a few points here.
For your first point: I've seen more praise on the right for Putin than Orban, especially because Putin and Russia are simply much more notable than Orban and Hungary, but not much for either. I personally don't think either are particularly praiseworthy: as in my previous comment, I don't think either has a real plan for solving their countries' demographic or economic problems and they rely on the same thuggish playbook of machine politics common to the western liberal parties. They are better than our own ruling class only in the sense that they aren't openly fighting against their majority populations, but that's an awfully low bar to clear.
For your second point: India isn't a significant power outside of its immediate neighborhood and as far as I'm aware Modi has basically zero cachet outside of ethnic Indians. The rare Indian American who goes full Hinduvata is clearly not loyal to the US, but that's not particularly interesting or surprising. I don't see a meaningful difference between India and, say, Poland for these purposes: India is much larger but neither has any force projection or soft power that ordinary Americans need to worry about.
For your last point: The problem here is that Scott and you have yet to be demonstrate any oppression in Orban's Hungary beyond the aforementioned machine politics. Corruption, one party having full control of the mainstream media and education system, election shenanigans: none of this is new or notable in 2021. It sucks to live under the rule of a pathological liar propped up by a corrupt and insular party apparatus, I'll agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. But, given that this seems to be the only choice on offer, I'll take the one who at least pretends to care about his people and their values over the one who openly despises and mocks them.
I think a couple of issues might account for it. I haven't seen anyone praising Orban in the small corners of the RW I've happened to frequent, for what it's worth. But I think that there are several points to consider:
1) This profile is less charitable and more ironic (sarcastic?) than the profiles of Erdogan or Modi.
2) This is a European country, dealing with the EU. And while Turkey has its complicated relationship with the EU and is right nearby, it's still an "other", more mentally associated with the middle-east. Many commenters here are Europeans, not just Americans. I've noted commenters claiming to be German, Polish, Czech so far, so I think the subject matter hits closer to home. And sometimes I feel like people don't know exactly how to treat the post-Communist Eastern Europeans: (Europeans just like us? corrupt? Socially backward? The last bastions of reason in Europe in a continent gone mad with progressivism? Etc.) There just isn't this closeness, relevance to our history, or familiarity for the average reader educated in America or Europe (where I think most ACX readers reside).
3) Relatedly, the issues covered here are democracies where we come to expect democracy (i.e. in Europe), and the issues of (Muslim) immigration to Europe
4) The Modi one got pretty heated, and it was cool to see how many Indian readers there were who commented. On all of these, even if the sample is very biased, it's very interesting and informative to read the comments and their different perspectives, at the very least to see what friends from the relevant country/ethnic group have to say about these perspectives.
It's not very hard to understand how Orbán rose to power if you don't make the very surprising omission from the description of circumstances you made (unfortunately using Paul Lendvai as a source is an extraordinarily bad choice, as evidenced by the many factually false statements in the post, but this is something that sort of stands out anyway). The country was coming out of communism, and the political party you describe as the Socialists consisted of the people who operated that party-state previously (as the party itself was and continues to be legally the same entity as the former communist state-party ). And as the Socialists kept winning elections after what you incorrectly call a revolution, and maintained most of the economic power and media influence, the millions of people who were on the receiving end of their activity for decades basically gave Orbán a carte blanche as long as he defeats the ancienne regime. And this kind of support is available to him to this day, and he in turn used it to grab all that economic power and media influence to himself. This is such a massive overlook that basically any reasonably informed Hungarian with no personal ties to the communist party-state establishment would have immediately called your attention to it, and explains most of the power dynamic.
It is somewhat ironic though, that a lot of Orbán's current and former key players (such as the current minister of the interior) were also members of said state-party. Of course, I think the best idea would be if they were also removed from politics.
Yes, of course, although in the particular case of the minister of interior former party membership is by no means the largest question mark. And simple membership in the old communist party in itself is not necessarily an indictment - lot of people were members for various reasons, and it did not mean wielding power in the old system, which some other currently or recently active politicians certainly did as well. But the irony is indeed there - as Orbán's unrelenting support ultimately relies on having some of the old commies around as living mnemonics of the great enemy, he does seem to actually finance a lot of their political activity through back-channels.
Not only that, but the Socialist Party's policies post-1990 had little in common with those of the communist state party before 1990, arguably less than Fidesz does. "Successor party" is a common smear for the Socialist Party, but it's not much of an argument (it's literally true, but the intended implications aren't). That doesn't mean it doesn't convince many people, of course.
The argument was never about policies in any way, it was about people. The particular people in the Socialist party governments were usually either high officials in the communist regime or part of the economic halo that made its way with state property before during and after 1990. If you only look at the prime ministers they gave, 2 of the 4 participated in rather severe atrocities themselves, one was a latecomer but still a rather high official in the old regime, and definitely an economic beneficiary, and the fourth was in office for a few months only. So the people supporting Orbán (the unrelenting core, not the ones being swayed by whatever trends) are entirely right that with Socialist governments the old commies stayed in power directly (and that basically all of western media acts like this isn't the case - but that's another story). What they are wrong about is whether Orbán actually wants them to go away (and also whether his policies are generally sensible, but this is definitely secondary to them).
What rather severe atrocities did they participate in?
the first dude volunteered into the paramilitary organisation tasked with stamping out anti-soviet activity in 1956, and as far as I remember he's likely to have been present at occasions where these units shot into unarmed crowds, although I don't have the source for the latter, more specific claim right now and am not entirely sure it's correct. about the second dude I remembered somewhat wrongly, as he was a member of the external branch of the secret police, supposedly tasked with countering foreign agents, instead of the internal one, which was tasked with blackmailing random people into reporting about their friends to the state police. so he was probably personally less involved in the large-scale atrocity by the state police, only a member of the organisation committing it in an officer rank. and of course both of these became widely known only after they got elected. whether such affiliations qualify them as "bad people" is up to everyone's moral stance, but similar revelations are generally expected when electing "successor party" people in CEE
I don't consider this very fair assesment of Orban - couple of points which make Orban look better (or at least not so bad) from the perspective of the Czech (which means that Hungary is both locally and culturally close):
1) his huge advantage is that he (unlike his opposition) doesn't have communist past. He usually don't mention people from opposition by name, he says only "left"
2) all ordinary people in central and eastern Europe hate immigration from Islamic countries - it is seen as danger to our own culture
3) but they hate allocation quotas even more
4) Hungarian border wall was popular even here because it did divert the path of refugees
5) his described cronyism is quite normal here: his friends getting suspiciously rich? Normal. At least he himself doesn't profit billions
6) electoral system giving unfair advantage to big parties? We've had worse one since 2000 => no big deal (that said 2 party system in the US isn't coincidence either); + when I looked at wikipedia, it doesn't look that bad comapred to previous one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Hungary#The_voting_system_between_1990_and_2010
7) unlike Czech politicians he was vastly successful in all kind of negotiations with EU (partly because he was able to use to his advantage interests of German companies in Hungary - he may be dictator, but if he gets stuff done...)
8) he is true populist - he makes popular political decisions and he is vastly popular (as seen on his FB page, for which he had never any ads) - compare it with our own leaving PM who himself owned biggest newspaper in country and his business made got literally billions from state, he was never that popular. You can talk about being a dictator, but since 1998 elections Orban's Fidesz did always get at least 40% of votes, even when they lost.
9) his government handled Covid pretty well (started vaccination sooner etc) (yes, Hungarian numbers don't reflect it, but Hungary has quite old and obese population)
some points to history:
10) you make Gyurcsany seem like a nice guy even with his speech about lying all day and night - but he told it after elections in which his party retained position in government - so it took another 4 years before Orban got his landslide victory
11) Fidesz did prioritize getting media influence only after losing really badly in 1994 - unlike parties with post-communistic connections, Orban's party didn't have money and media influence (and then it kind of repeated in 2002 when Fidesz was predicted to win) - that's why Simicska built media empire (in 2005 BBC wrote "With the exception of the conservative Magyar Nemzet, all the political broadsheets have left-liberal leanings." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4068565.stm )
12) that said citation from NY is BS - Hungary's most viewed TV is RTL, which has been critical of Fidesz. And most popular news site 24.hu also doesn't support government
13) Simicska's media empire was actually against Fidesz before 2018 elections (supported Jobbik) , but when Fidesz won they came back to supporting Fidesz
P.S.: since it seems that opposition is really uniting in Hungary, I expect* Fidesz losing next elections (which will make this post age quite badly :) ), even then they will still be a party with biggest support in whole Europe.
* 55% confidence? (but don't take it too seriously, even though I'm officially a superforecaster ;) )
10) Fidesz' promises were no healthier for the budget. Either they would have followed through (in which case they would have continued the fuck-up, unsustainable deficit spending, Gyurcsány was referring to) or not (in which case they were lying just as much, they just never had a speech where they admit it get public).
I don't know that much about Hungarian budget, but looking at debt to GDP ratio at https://tradingeconomics.com/hungary/government-debt-to-gdp it seems that Fidesz practice was healthier for the budget
Eventually yes. They didn't undo the previous government's austerity measures, which means they were lying when they called them unnecessary (and even traitorous). Whether their 2006 promises would have turned out to be lies had they won the election, or followed by irresponsible spending, we don't know (probably the former).
In fairness the atomic bomb was also a Hungarian high school project, so maybe Hungarian education is just very good at building impactful cliques.
+1
What a great comment.
(In case anyone else didn't get it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress isn't the hard part. It's 3/4 of the states.
"The American equivalent would require 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress, which seems hard to do in these polarized days (though LBJ managed it, briefly)"
Plus 75% of the states ratifying the proposed amendment - there is a reason that the US only has a handful of amendments while states like CA and TX have over 500
Your retelling of the refugee crisis of 2015 irks me. Having volunteered at a makeshift shelter for a short time, and sorting donations for refugees for months in 2015, I've met a couple of people who went through Hungary at that time.
"When there was no food or tents left, they rioted" - your own image source, under the picture right after that sentence, tells this differently: Hungary, in violation of Schengen, erected a border fence and gate, refugees tried to break through, police responded with tear gas, the refugees started throwing stuff in retaliation. The article mentions at least two children being thrown over the fence by their desperate parents.
The image description in that article is "Refugees throw rocks, water bottles at Hungarian police, who respond with tear gas at the Röszke/Horgos border crossing."
You do not source your quote that you chose for yours, instead: “Muslim migrants [shouted] ‘Allahu akbar!’ as they set garbage bins on fire and jumped on cars in the parking lot outside the refugee camp” I assume this has happened at some point somewhere, but Google turns up nothing for that quote. You probably tried to keep this part dense and meshed together events. Your point is probably to make us see refugees with Hungarian nationalist eyes. But I think you're being actively dishonest here.
You ask "But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?" - I would offer one point you didn't mention, which is that there has been very little exposure to cultural diversity in the East, nothing compared to Western levels. Speaking of East Germany as that's what I know (from living here, and taking an active interest in this history, and having taken classes on the differences in the lives East and West, specifically): the foreign workers (from Vietnam, mostly, also Mozambique, Cuba and, guess what, Hungary) were segregated and often exploited, there was little integration going on, and very few managed to stay beyond their contracts. After the fall of the wall, immigrants coming to Germany started being allocated into East German counties by quotas, too, with lots of NIMBY-style backlash, political failures to house them and a series of violent racist attacks, one of which my home town of Rostock is world famous for.
I am guessing immigration to Hungary has been mostly from neighbouring countries until 2015, because Hungary didn't have a West Hungary that had an influx of immigrants from all over to distribute. As with the pogroms of the 90s in East Germany, this could be the backlash of (purposefully) badly-managed culturally/racially different immigrants to a population unused to them. Keep in mind that most were only trying to pass through - keep them from boarding trains, keep them without access to food, shelter, toilets and yes, the locals will not be happy with them.
Under a picture of the Hungarian border fence you ask "Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?" I assume this is a rhetorical question, but in case it wasn't: because 1. It's a proper fence, Trump's hasn't been. 2. Hungary is about three times more densely populated than the US, making it easier patrollable and more efficient. 3. There is no pre-existing economy dependent on exploitation of immigrants (at least, not those). 4. There's no pre-existing trafficking routes, drug trade etc for those refugees to use. 5. There's no large pre-existing community of people of the refugees' ethnicity for them to "disappear into" undetected. You can probably think of more reasons in that vein - to stop a long history of migration is harder than stopping a new, disorganized influx (that also has waned for unrelated reasons).
The border fence wasn't a violation of Schengen. Arguably it was a violation of the Geneva convention. But yeah, the post completely misunderstands the problems with refugees, who didn't riot or anything, and in fact got a lot of assistance from Hungarian citizens (hostility against refugees is largely a result of a relentless government propaganda campaign that happened *after* the refugee crisis).
My impression, inherited from Western European family, is that the EU and its constituents routinely condemn Orban as dictatorial (rightfully so) and decry his policies on everything, including immigration. But they're also grateful, whether secretly or openly, for his immigration policies. Whether you think "the problem" is the influx of immigrants and their behavior, or nativist reaction to and resentment of them - there's no question that increases in immigration have blown up European political systems and often vaulted right-wing parties to power. Obviously the right-wingers like Orban; but the leftish parties are also acutely aware that their hold on power depends on his policies. And nobody is actually eager to accept more immigrants, or to have tent cities on their borders. So a grudging gratitude for Orban's policies is the norm.
TL;DR: when it comes to immigration, the only thing Europe would detest more than Orban, is no Orban.
I understand this might sound like a conspiracy theory - "they might complain but they're secretly grateful!" is kind of an extraordinary claim. But as evidence, I'd direct people to consider the difference between grumbling about Orban, vs. loud complaining about Turkey allowing immigrants through to the West during the onset of the crisis. Western Europe's *revealed* preferences are very, very strongly for Orban's policies.
The issues with building a fence on the US border are, AIUI:
1. Unlike Hungary, the border is really long. We do have a fence in the places where it would be most useful, but a lot of the remaining length is too desert-y, environmental-damage-y or eminent-domain-y to be worth the trouble.
2. A fence isn't much good without guards to patrol it, and recruiting border guards who won't needlessly brutalize foreigners has been a recurring problem. Presumably this isn't a worry for Orban.
3. The most common way to become an illegal immigrant isn't "sneak across the desert in the dead of night," it's "overstay your visa," and a fence doesn't do anything for that.
Agreed strongly on 1 and 2. But re: 3 - is it some big talking point now that border crossings don't matter that much because more people overstay? Because it's been brought up many times on this thread, and it's ludicrous. Of course we should worry about both! And border crossings present unique and powerful concerns relative to visa overstay, justifying policies which prevent and discourage crossings.
Unvaccinated people sparking new COVID waves; security concerns; funding human trafficking; people dying on the way here - all of them are issues that rise and fall with illegal crossings, not visa overstay. It makes sense to prioritize border security and discourage crossings, regardless of how many Canadians overstay their visas.
Did I say "tear down the border wall and defund ICE?" No? Then I am worrying about both, I just think we currently have the right amount of worry about fences.
Also, "Unvaccinated people sparking new COVID waves" is like, the most hilariously transparent GOP talking point being circulated right now. Their party is full of all-American native antivaxxers, but god forbid a dirty foreigner come into this country without a vaccine!
To take Haiti, the country with the highest year-on-year increase of illegal crossings: 1% of Haitians have even one dose, uniquely bad among any non-African country. Either (a) vaccination is not significant to inhibiting spread, or (b) the significant number of Haitian immigrants currently crossing will result in increased Covid transmission in border communities. I think on balance, the evidence speaks in favor of (b).
Of course political actors are seizing on this to their own disingenuous ends - but that doesn't change the truth of it. The government is requiring everyone coming in on a visa to be vaccinated (negative test not sufficient starting 11/8). No such requirement holds of people crossing illegally. This has consequences. Disregarding them because they're politically useful to your opponents is just plain old confirmation bias.
Firstly, while I shouldn't have to point this out, Haiti is an island, and a border fence would do very little to prevent entry from there. That's my entire point, that fixating on physical barriers is missing the target.
>I think on balance, the evidence speaks in favor of (b).
Would you like to *share* this evidence? Do you have numbers on how many people have caught Covid that originated in Haiti?
>This has consequences.
Every action has "consequences" of some sort. Are they *significant* consequences? Consequences that are worth spending large amounts of money to prevent? Again, show some evidence.
Haiti is an island, so in order to get in, they first go to Central America and then come over the porous Southern border. One source, of many recent ones about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/10/22/arrests-of-haitian-migrants-at-the-us-mexico-border-soared-last-month---heres-why/?sh=4fc076e25ee8 .
I agree with you that a wall isn't the best way - again, I agree with 1 and 2. But if "your entire point" is that border security is irrelevant to Haitian immigration because Haiti is an island, your point is ignorant of recent events. Haitians are coming in record numbers, and they're coming through Mexico. That's how a large encampment of Haitians ended up under a bridge on the border, in case you missed that story too.
Evidence in favor of (b) - well, either vaccination rates affect transmission, or they don't. I think they do, based on the same studies the CDC looked at and the same data everyone's been arguing about. Allowing uniformly unvaccinated people to enter, with no tests and no knowledge of whether they even have the disease, lowers the overall vaccination rate and creates additional vectors for spread.
This has also been in the news, but in the same way that you didn't know about the rise in immigration from Haiti, I figure you haven't paid attention to this either. If you want evidence that it's not just a right-wing talking point, here's a July article from left-leaning WaPo talking about how spikes in COVID in immigrating populations have shaped the administration's policy and forced them to be tougher on immigration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/title-42-biden-border-covid/2021/07/28/aeeca526-efa7-11eb-ab6f-b41a066381df_story.html
So... the Biden administration thinks that the risk, and reality, of illegal immigrants spreading COVID is serious enough that they have *literally already taken action* based on that principle. So yes, I think that people who are actually informed on this issue agree that it is worth taking action to prevent.
Suppose that we concede that the US border wall is not an especially efficient way to reduce illegal immigration, and that if the US Government is interested in protecting its borders then there are far better ways to do it with less flashy but ongoing enforcement. Is there a way in which the border wall might still make sense?
I would argue yes. Why? Because Government in the US consists of a vast number of people pulling in different directions, and a great many of these people are _not_ interested in stopping illegal immigration, for one reason or another.
The most sensible and efficient ways of reducing illegal immigration require an ongoing commitment from various different organs of government, but can easily be sabotaged by the pro-illegal factions (e.g. "sanctuary cities"). Building a wall, on the other hand, is a permanent step you can take, that only needs to be achieved once, that can be achieved within one presidential term, and which doesn't require the buy-in of every single organ of government. It's like sober you putting a big lock on your liquor cabinet to stop drunk you from getting in there; it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.
But an unpatrolled wall *isn't* better than nothing. Not cost-of-a-wall better, at least.
The effort necessary to scale a wall is trivial compared to the gains expected by the would-be immigrants. Simplistically, the wall will delay them by the day or so it takes to buy a ladder and get it to the border, and the five minutes it takes to erect and scale the ladder. They're not going to be deterred by an extra day's effort. But the five minutes might matter, *if* there's a border guard four minutes away.
If the US government really wanted to stop illegal immigration, they'd go for the Nordic model. Force companies that are found to employ undocumented workers to top those employees' pay up to minimum wage. Go after landlords who provide housing that isn't up to standard.
Make sure that any information gathered never gets passed on to ICE or otherwise used directly against the immigrants.
> But why were Hungarians so opposed to refugees when the West was so eager to accept them?
This question disappears if you stop defining the West as the US plus a few Western countries. The Hungarian position is mainstream in Eastern Europe and has significant popularity in the Western countries, too (even Germany -- unless I have ended up in a bubble of my own). The US shouldn't be a comparison, as the differences between the refugees (South Americans vs. Arabs/Afghanis/Africans) go far beyond language, and as the expectation of security and urban functioning is a lot higher in Europe than in the US. I'd say Germany and Sweden are the two outliers here, not Hungary and Poland. Germany is a case of incredible political inertia: I won't be surprised if the migration crisis finally launches the Right into power in 2035 because none of the issues around crime and housing (I don't think the "taking our jobs" is a big thing in Germany) will be resolved by then; nor will I be surprised if it does so with a majority of the 2015 immigrants' votes. Sweden seems to have cooled on immigration as well, if Malcom Kyeyune isn't exaggerating ( https://unherd.com/2021/09/swedens-cultural-revolution/ ).
Orban's popularity post 2015 is no mystery to me at all; it's his pre-2015 success that worries me.
But Orban is also unique in how he can be treated by the international community.
If he isnt an ideologue and is smart and willing enough to change his mind and his policies, then perhaps he can be reasoned with to pivot his policies towards more 'common good' ideas
I don't mean liberalism here, just sounder economic policies/experiments. Orban's stance seems to be that he isn't willing to take chances with him winning,
But anything that might let hold onto power/deepen his wealth, would be amenable to him..
It would at least be more unexpected a play than the current EU negotiation playbook that Orban has already dismissed.
A few notes from a Hungarian:
Fidesz moved to the right around 1993, but it wasn't usually considered far-right within the Hungarian political palette. Since the mid-2010s it has shifted farther right.
Gyurcsány definitely didn't mean the previous government in his infamous speech. He made it shortly after the 2006 elections that he won; "the last one-and-a-half, two years" referred to his own government (he'd became PM in 2004). The "fuck-up" and "lies" referred to holding off the austerity measures until after the elections, and pretending that the deficit spending was sustainable. OTOH Fidesz promised even more in terms of reckless spending, and bashed the budget cuts all the while they bashed Gyurcsány for the "fuck-up", so in some ways it was the pot calling the kettle black.
Amending the Constitution never took a 4/5 majority. What I could find about this is that there was some rule that some step towards writing an entirely new consitution took a 4/5 majority; Fidesz proceeded to write a new constitution after removing this rule. But they could have done pretty much the same thing by amending the old constitution beyond recognition.
As far as I understand, the anti-migrant sentiment was mostly a top-down thing, created by Fidesz's fear-mongering. Previously, many Hungarians hated the Gypsies, some hated the Jews, but even on the far-right, but immigration was a low-priority question even on the far-right. And the Syrian refugees were mostly passing through Hungary, trying to go to Western Europe, rather than stay in Hungary. (But I have moved from Hungary by then, and I haven't followed the Hungarian situation very closely since then, so I'm not sure about the order of the events between people fearing the refugees and Fidesz starting its propaganda.)
Just a note. There are two section IV's and no section V's.
"Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
On the off chance that this isn't a rhetorical question, Hungary's southern border (the one with the fence) is 523 km long and the Hungarian border patrol has 12,000 men. The US border patrol has 21,370 agents but the US-Mexican border is 3,145 km long. As I think we discussed back on SSC a few times, walls and fences only serve to delay crossings, hopefully long enough for actual border guards to show up. The guards stop people from crossing the border, the barrier is a force multiplier (and you get most of the available multiplication from a good three-meter fence) Hungary has three times as many border guards per kilometer of contested border.
Also, I suspect Hungarian border guards don't need to spend nearly as much time filling out paperwork when they just shoot some poor SOB trying to cross the border, or on a good day beat them up and throw them back, which is another sort of force multiplier.
A wall in itself won't work. But a wall is both a symbolic and practical indication of intention. If you want to control your borders, and there are elements within the state who want to disintegrate them, a wall of some kind is necessary, otherwise you demonstrate that you do not have the ability to resist those elements.
The number of border guards isn't set in stone, is it? The US has 33 times the population of Hungary, for a 6 times longer border.
I doubt that Hungarian border police are much shootier. Beat them up and throw them back, that's much more likely.
The number of US border guards is set by congress. Independent of CBP's budget, they are authorized exactly 21,370 agents - hiring agent #21,371 would be illegal, and if #21,370 quits it is I think illegal not to at least pretend you're immediately trying to hire a replacement. So if you want to bring the US up to par with Hungary, you'd need to have Congress pass a law saying "OK. CBP gets 72,160 border guards".
So if you really want to keep illegal immigrants out of the US, you'd want a Republican President with a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and the sense to say "OK, we're going to need a decent fence and an extra 50,000 guards, I should ask for that in the next budget".
"I suspect Hungarian border guards don't need to spend nearly as much time filling out paperwork when they just shoot some poor SOB trying to cross the border"
- lol, are you mistaking Hungary for wild west? They shoot warning shots and in extraordinary situations like when immigrants are trying to force the way, they use rubber bullets
The real drama is, that the EU is somewhere in between being helpless and being not willing to risk a conflict.
>How do we prevent it from happening here?
... or elsewhere? To me, that's the key question.
On the topic of Hungary's Hunnic heritage, Attila actually is a pretty interesting figure. He really reads like the love interest from a romance novel.
Attila, the barbarian king, has dear ties to the Romans: their great general, Flavius Aëtius, spent his exile living with and learning from the Huns, and he has aided the empire in several campaigns. But then, his aid is asked in a very strange way. Honoria, the sister of Emperor Valentinian, sends Attila her engagement ring and a plea to free her from an arranged marriage to a repellent senator.
Attila, naturally enough for the love interest of a romance novel, interprets this as a proposal of marriage to him, and graciously accepts, asking only half the empire as his dowry. Aghast, the Emperor writes to Attila denying that his sister was really proposing to Attila, but Attila responds that he will not allow Valentinian to gainsay his sister and so besmirch her honor. Attila begins to march towards Rome at the head of a vast army.
Meanwhile, Valentinian is irate at his sister Honoria for precipitating the invasion, and plans to have her executed. However, their mother, Galla Placidia pleads with him to spare Honoria, and Valentinian relents, sentencing her to exile instead.
The defense of the Roman Empire is entrusted to General Aëtius, Attila's old friend. Attila's army is formidable, razing cities where it passes — though it can be turned aside by priestly intercession, since Attila respects the power of the Catholic Church. Aëtius harries Attila's army, driving them back for a time, but at last Attila reaches Rome itself. The Pope himself comes out, flanked by the highest civilians of Rome, and persuades Attila to make peace. Attila, persuaded by the Pope (and disease and starvation in his army) accepts and returns home, to later attack the largely-unrelated Eastern Roman Empire.
> the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz” in an outlying province
I looked this up, and it's only a few miles from Budapest.
What here is called "the dance of the peacock", is in other places known as the Queen's Duck: https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
See also TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CensorDecoy
> To that end, he - probably sarcastically - opened Hungary to “genuine refugees”, by which he meant refugees from globalism [...]. A few right-wingers took him up on it and resettled in Hungary. Potentially his most famous admirer is former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who’s been going back and forth to Hungary as part of his plan to build a populist network across Europe.
> I’m on the fence about how exaggerated this is.
This might be unfair of me, but — do the comments on this post shift where you are on that fence?
1. Alcsutdoboz is only 40km from central Budapest. Doesn't seem like the furthest reaches of Hicksville.
2. "Viktor Orban is a man who almost automatically believes in the veracity of whatever he considers to be politically useful to him"
LBJ was said to have a very similar trait: https://erenow.net/biographies/master-of-the-senate-the-years-of-lyndon-johnson-3/38.php
I am not a fan of either.
3. Is there an expiration date when supporting palestinians' territorial claims vs Israel becomes far-right irredentism? Or Tibet's territorial claims? By the dictionary definition all the colonial independence movements were irredentist. Allies splitting up Hungary with the stroke of a pen in 1920 was kinda like the UK splitting up Africa with the stroke of a pen. I don't mind the status quo borders, but I sympathize with the Hungarians who are pissed.
4. "Around ninety per cent of Hungarian media is now owned or controlled by people with personal connections to Orbán or his party"
What does a "personal connection to [Fidesz]" mean? Anyone among your close friends or family is a party member? By that standard one could probably say that 99% of US media are owned or controlled by people a personal connection to the DNC. If the standard is that either the owner or controller must himself be a registered democrat, maybe that number comes down to 90%. I've seen data that 96% of political donations from journalists go to the DNC.
5. "Viktor Orban shocked Europe by saying no. Not no as in “we agree with your grand vision but we request that you lower our quota”. No as in “haha, as if”."
For all his other flaws, this was the best thing about Orban: standing up to the EU on immigration and not letting them bully Hungary into becoming yet another multicultural melting pot. 90% of white countries is more than enough for the multicultural experiment. Let's let Hungary and Poland be the control group. There's no fundamental reason Ethnonationalism can't be compatible with liberal democracy. I wish we could get some relatively normal politicians who were that hawkish on immigration and otherwise mostly libertarian.
6. "Does anyone want to explain why this wall apparently worked but everyone says Trump’s wouldn’t?"
I suspect bad faith arguments from people who want to allow as much illegal immigration as possible but won't admit it openly. Every other country I have data on that built a border wall saw levels of illegal border crossings go down a lot. Even the US saw a large drop coincident with its construction of a border fence in the 2000's. If it was only yet another billion dollar useless pork barrel project, the DNC would have acquiesced to it to avoid a long government shutdown that was much more costly than the wall would have been. They knew what they were doing. Biden knows what he's doing by stopping arrests of illegal immigrants in the interior of the country (unless they have a long rap sheet of other crimes). It's a big game of red rover. If you get through, you can stay. Biden doesn't actually want to reduce illegal immigration because it benefits his party. The American people never got to have a real debate and political process for deciding whether they wanted to become a minority in their own homeland. Politicians just elected a new people by looking the other way for decades. A border wall would have been a more permanent barrier, not subject to the whims of an administration that wants to look the other way.
7. "It so completely outflanked Jobbik that they gave up on being neo-Nazi and switched to being a moderate pro-EU party that “rejects hatemongering” (what is it with Hungarian parties changing their whole platform?)"
The former is what hostile outsiders called them, and the latter is what they called themselves. More than half of the change is probably in the perspective rather than in the referent. I don't know anything about Jobbik, or if they were ever actually neo-nazis, but I know most of the media can't be trusted to tell me if they were, since journalists cry wolf so often. Also wikipedia has a tendency to cherrypick the worst epithet that any journalist ever published about a right wing figure. Then other journalists who don't know any better copy wikipedia. So a symbiosis of wikipedia editors and bad journalists basically get to invent facts this way. In 2016 Stefan Molyneux was just an anarcho-capitalist who advocated peaceful parenting on his youtube channel. But after five years of the dysphemism treadmill applied to all immigration restrictionists in an extremely politicized media he's a nazi, allegedly. Also he's falsely alleged to be a "cult leader" just because he suggests people with abusive parents should consider cutting off contact instead of enduring abuse out of a sense of duty or societal expectations or whatever.
8. My hope is that the experience of Trump and Orban has shown that being hawkish on immigration is wildly popular, and some more-normal and more-competent politicans will follow that incentive gradient so that we can get some immigration restriction without the downsides of those two. Maybe we can even get the libertarian party to stop advocating the mass importation of people that disproportionately oppose libertarian policies.
9. I too am an admirer of Lee Kuan Yew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxaBCg72hxs
10. "Overall I agree with Lyman that maybe Orban has boosted the fertility rate by 0.1 - 0.2 children per women, certainly no more. And this is by bringing out all the stops - transforming the entire culture and spending heaps of money on the project. I’m not sure this really provides some kind of exciting proof that conservative policies work, even if you’re only looking at the fertility rate."
This is a good point and I have updated away from blaming low fertility on liberal views of sex and gender.
11. "I also have to recommend banning court-packing, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. I can’t stress enough how many descents into dictatorship go through something like that, and how much it’s a gaping security hole in our current system."
Definitely.
"Viktor Orban is a man who almost automatically believes in the veracity of whatever he considers to be politically useful to him"
I mean, if we're going to be rude about that, how about all the politicians who were very much pro-defence of marriage and then, when the polls showed a shift, those same politicians were suddenly very pro-gay marriage?
Maybe they all genuinely had a change of heart. Or maybe some of them didn't give a damn one way or the other, but if the focus group says "the public likes blue", then they came out with "my favourite colour is blue!" and then five years later "my favourite colour is brown! orange! purple!"
Probably a bit of both. If the timing of the public perception change fit a bell curve, and the politicians were very compressed into the center of the bell curve, that would sort of quantify how much the politicians were probably lying.
The views of much of the population also changed, so it's not exactly inconceivable that the views of many politicians also changed around the same time.
Also, how many politicians were "very much pro-defence of marriage and then," and then became "suddenly very pro-gay marriage", rather than just not discussing the topic much either then or now?
This is what the more honest politicians would do: just avoid talking about the subjects where they hold unpopular views. Even if it's necessary to get elected, I think it's wrong to reinforce a false belief among the public by pretending to agree.
A minor point: on the topic of gay marriage, we are talking about normative preferences rather than beliefs.
4) What really matters is that they spew centrally decided propaganda that's designed to maximally help Fidesz and smear the opposition. They aren't even independent right-wing media that agree with Fidesz more often than not; they are pro-Fidesz propaganda organs. This includes the publicly funded government broadcaster as well as formerly independent right-wing or centrist media, while some left-wing media were shut down.
7) "I don't know anything about Jobbik, or if they were ever actually neo-nazis" If you don't know anything about Jobbik, then how do you claim to know that "The former is what hostile outsiders called them, and the latter is what they called themselves"? Sure, you shouldn't trust when left-wing media says they were neo-nazis, so you may not know, but that doesn't mean you know they weren't, or that you know what they were saying about themselves. They wouldn't have said that they were a moderate pro-EU party in the 2000s or the early 2010s at all. Neo-nazi is an overstatement but not by much; they definitely become much more moderate in the last few years (some members left because of it), at least in rhetoric (I don't know what goes on inside their minds), as Fidesz moved farther to the right.
quoting wikipedia: "In 2014, the party was described as an "anti-Semitic organization" by The Independent and a "neo-Nazi party" by the president of the European Jewish Congress.[39] From 2015 to 2020 (amidst increasingly hardline rhetoric from Fidesz), the party started to re-define itself as a more moderate conservative people's party and changed the controversial elements of its communication, culminating with its new declaration of principles now defining itself as a centre-right, pro-European party with some residual moderated nationalist tendencies (the position Fidesz originally occupied). According to the party's "Declaration of Principles", Jobbik will "always focus on the interests of Hungary and the Hungarian people instead of a political group or an ideology. On the other hand, [Jobbik] reject[s] hatemongering and extreme political views that are contrary to Christian values and ethics."[40]"
Also I have a prior that groups tend to use slightly-more-charitable-than-the-truth terms to describe themselves, while hostile journalists and NGOs from the opposite end of the political spectrum tend to use much-less-charitable-than-the-truth terms.
>Haha, no, he decided to destroy Gyurcsany harder than anyone had ever been destroyed before. Without leaking the speech, Orban started shifting the frame, starting a PR campaign around the idea of the Socialists as liars. When the Socialists said they weren't, then Orban leaked the speech.
Khrushchev did this to the US in the U-2 incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident#American_cover-up_and_exposure
>He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts. Left-wing voters were crammed into a few very large districts; likely Fidesz voters were put into many much smaller ones.
This is not gerrymandering. This is malapportionment. Gerrymandering (drawing a bunch of equal-population districts in an unequal way) is strictly less bad than malapportionment (drawing districts with unequal population); malapportionment at the extremes allows a literal aristocracy (give each aristocrat a one-voter seat, to which he will elect himself, and stuff everyone else into a single seat), while gerrymandering cannot be used to hold onto power with less than 25% of the vote (50%+1 of voters in 50%+1 of districts). Gerrymandering is more common than malapportionment in Western countries, because malapportionment is generally unconstitutional (though Joh Bjelke-Petersen performed malapportionment in Queensland), but the distinction is important and shouldn't be elided.
Point of order, Joh Bjelke-Petersen didn't start the malappoirtionment of Queensland. It was originally malapportioned by the Labor Party in 1949, but over time the Labor base became more urbanised so it wound up benefiting the Country Party instead.
As I understand it, Bjelke-Petersen kept the existing malapportionment system (which allowed geographically enormous areas to have fewer people) but shifted around the exact borders to benefit his party.
>The Hungarians believe themselves to be the descendants of proud steppe nomads.
>Realistically this is all false. Some steppe nomads conquered Hungary in the 9th century, but their lineage soon died out, probably through centuries of bloody warfare. The modern Hungarians are genetically more or less German. Realistically, they're completely normal white people who give their kids names like “Attila” and build yurts to celebrate the ancient ways.
Isn't continuity of language more evidence of continuity of culture than is continuity of genes?
Is there a big difference here between mostly-genetic-German Hungarians believing they are descendants of Attila vs. some other mostly-genetic-Germans believing they are descendants of Abraham?
Hey, anyway I feel like since so many Hungarians are commenting on this post, it's a good place to mention that I'm running a monthly meet-up in Budapest and that our next meeting should be Sunday. https://www.lesswrong.com/events/NuFAwmKmpJ9FJCWnE/budapest-less-wrong-ssc-1
Coming from Poland, another country that likes refugees even less than Hungary - all the reasons you mentioned are valid, but the most important one you need to understand is - we saw the shitshow already happening in Western EU and we want none of it.
EU as a whole fails terribly at integrating immigrants into the host societies.
What shitshow?
In any case, this doesn't explain why post-socialist Central European countries seem to be *more* opposed to letting in refugees than Western European countries. Whatever shitshow Central Europeans see happening in Western Europe, Western Europeans must see it too (except if it's exaggerated by Central European media).
You don't understand: in Western Europe, where we see the situation every day, media have wildly different political positions, and school programs are not directly controlled by political leaders, we are all indoctrinated. So indoctrinated that we refuse to believe our own eyes when evaluating integration!
You know instead who is not indoctrinated about the situation in western Europe? Hungarians and Poles. Sure, their government shuts down media they don't like with force. Sure, what it taught in schools is heavily decided by the government. Sure, they have seen Western Europe with their own eyes only as tourists. But because of their magical power, they still know our situation better than us! Isn't that just incredible (in the etymological meaning)?
> Poles. Sure, their government shuts down media they don't like with force.
Which one?
Unless you are arguing as much in bad faith as the Polish government, you can't seriously see the new media law as anything but a way to shut down TVN, which just happens to be both the only company affected and the only broadcaster consistently anti-government
I was surprised there was no mention of Orban's hatred of George Soros, using him as a scapegoat when any problem in the EU comes up. Before the elections, Fidesz spread anti-Soros billboards throughout the country. Orban wants people to believe that Soros is literally building an evil empire inside EU. This rhetoric is also often latently anti-semitic.
An example: https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-soros-letter-post-eu/
Funnily enough, Orban studied in Oxford thanks to a scholarship awarded by Soros himself. Soros even donated money to Fidesz in the early nineties. This was all before Orban's metamorphosis.
Was that article the example of anti-semitism, or is there some other examples?
As far as I'm able to read from this article, it's just Orban accusing Soros of orchestrating a network that undermines traditional values (using his money), and Soros accusing Orban of orchestrating a network that undermines progressive-liberal values (using his cronies), in a cycle that appears to go back quite a while. Orban also accuses Soros of being a bandit, merely because Soros had once crashed the British Pound for fun and profit. While that did happen, the accusation is still quite *colorful* when considering what the word "bandit" is normally taken to mean. Orban is in turn accused of being corrupt (which is correct - and not too uncommon outside of a few nordic countries) and a dictator (also quite colorful, when considering what the word "dictator" is normally taken to mean).
Here's a superb soccer stadium built in the small hometown of Orban by the Friends of Orban:
https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/53f2/ca8e/c07a/80c3/8400/051d/large_jpg/28_Pancho_Arena_-_Felcsut_Hungary_-_Photo_Jozsef_Takacs.jpg?1408420470
It's a pretty nice-looking structure. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the economic justification for this privately funded stadium is other than making the Prime Minister pleased.
What if Orban isn't a Fascist, what if he's just a politician who is maybe slightly to the left of JFK's favorite mayor, Richard J. Daley?
> what if he's just a politician who is maybe slightly to the left of JFK's favorite mayor, Richard J. Daley?
Touche :). Informing myself about the said old-school gentleman - and a highly proficient political-machine operator, to boot - has been most instructive. Not least as a reminder that back then, being a Democrat might simply have meant that you were a Catholic, and not necessarily that you were soft-on-crime (+ hard-on-thoughtcrime). What a different generation.
As for the category of "bespoke football stadiums named after gov'nors built in their quaint provincial hometowns," we could also add the Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium in Graz, Austria. At least that's what it had been for a few years. That romance had ended in 2005 when Arnold refused to grant the pardon from death row to the founder of the L.A. Crips gang.
although the rhetoric is called "latently anti-semitic" by Orban's critics, objectively speaking Orban had an exceptional relationship with Netanjahu and I believe that Hungary has been ranked the second safest country for Jews in Europe (after the Czech Republic).
That is true, Orban definitely is not anti-semitic openly and does not like being portrayed that way.
Orban's refusal to help out the German Chancellor after she decided in 2015 upon a whim with no effective consultation with other EU members to invite into Europe a million young Muslim men is often implied to be proof of Orban's anti-Semitism.
From a different perspective, however, one could argue that Orban was helping protect Hungary's Jews from anti-Semitic attacks, such as those in France.
I don't follow that much of the rhetoric, and there's rhetoric like that in the US too, or has been. It's a fuzzy line where "legitimate criticism" ends and "latent antisemitism" begins. Critics of Israel are accused of being anti-Semitic, and they will respond that criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism. And I think depending on the speaker, it may or may not be motivated reasoning, but you have to be able to abstract the arguments and facts of the matter from the speakers and the hypotehtical motivations, and judge them on their factual merit.
It's like that with Soros. Does his organization, or he personally, fund this or that? Is it problematic, is it extra-legal, does it undermine this or that? All arguments to have. They would be relevant and he should be open to criticism regardless of his ethnicity.
Criticizing George Soros would appear to be a fulfillment rather than a betrayal of George Soros' ideal of the Open Society.
Similarly, I was surprised there was no mention of Soros's hatred of Orban.
Much of the anti-Orban writings in the West tend to have as their basis in logic the notion that to criticize George Soros is, rather than being an expression of the Open Society that Soros has long campaigned for, is impermissible because Soros is ethnically Jewish and therefore any effective criticism of Soros and his multitudinous political operations is anti-Semitic and thus verboten.
That kind of thinking -- the political actions of politically active billionaires must be above criticism if they are Jewish and left of center -- strikes me as rather anti-liberal. But what do I know?
Re: steppe nomad origin theory. A classically over-politicized, but ultimately undecidable historical question. While it seems undeniable that 9th century Hungarians did come from the east as steppe nomads, who _exactly_ those steppe nomads were is a question that does tie in to politics (a sort of identity politics, albeit a different one to the one in the US).
Take language, for example. The claim that modern Hungarian is a descendant of a proto Finno-Ugric is/was contested by groups who claim that '“Finno-Ugrism” was devised to serve the political goals of Habsburg and, later on, Soviet imperialism' (quote from here https://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/antifqa.html ), basically robbing the local populace from the "more noble" Turk origin. You can read more about it on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_theories_of_Hungarian_language_origins ), but if you see that someone with no Hungarian roots takes the time to put together a FAQ on this issue, then you can be sure this is a serious issue for some. Now, my guess is that these views are not shared by most of population: going to festivals portrayed in the photo is a fringe activity, at best -- and probably strongly correlated with your political views, that is, you would find probably zero liberals at these events.
Really? All the Gauls were eliminated by the Romans? I didn’t think the Romans had a high enough birthrate to do anything like that. If anything Rome itself was a population sink.
I think it’s perfectly fair to associate yourself with a genetic as well as a cultural legacy. If I didn’t I’d consider my self English, but I don’t - I consider myself Irish.
The Finno-Ugric origin of the Hungarian language is firmly established in Hungary as well (to the consternation of some on the far right), but genetically they seem less related, so a lot comes down to how you define "origin".
A few points on EU immigration policies that seem not to have been noticed by non-European ACT readers:
EU refugee migration is regulated according to the so-called Dublin agreement. The core point is that a refugee must seek asylum in the first EU country he/she enters.
This means that if you have a large border with a non-EU country, EU countries further inland can send refugees back to wherever they first entered. Since Hungary has a border with non-EU countries, the Hungarians risk being stuck with refugees, even if the refugees themselves would prefer to move further West or North. (The problem is even larger in countries like Italy and Spain.)
…A North American equivalent would be if there had been an agreement between Canada, US and Mexico that refugees could be returned to the country of “first entry” – which would usually be Mexico. For obvious reasons, Mexico would not have been happy with such an agreement (and EU countries bordering on non-EU countries, including bordering on the Mediterranean, have also tried – so far unsuccessfully- to change the Dublin agreement).
Are other EU countries secretly “happy” about the Hungarian border fence, as some commentators suggest? Well, because of Dublin, they should not really care that much, since they can legally send refugees crossing from Hungary back to Hungary.
Notice that it therefore makes sense for Hungary to build a fence, since they risk being stuck with refugee migrants thanks to Dublin.
...Which can also explain why the Poles now build a similar fence at the border of non-EU Belarus.
On the moral issue: The main ethical dilemma in EU does not concern Hungary, but EU money channelled to sometimes rather brutal governments or even paramilitary gangs in so-called “transit countries”, to prevent refugees originating in the Sahel region or beyond from reaching EU territories.
The support of Libyan paramilitary groups is particularly tricky, but difficult to avoid (if you want to prevent refugees from reaching EU land) since Libya is a failed state at the moment, i.e., no government holds the monopoly on violence in the territory (=Max Weber’s classic definition of a state).
..a US equivalent would be if the US paid rulers in countries further South to prevent migrants moving Northwards - by whatever means they chose. Less ethically tricky though, since the US would not have to make deals with very unsavoury paramilitary groups in lieu of a government (like in Libya).
The Belarus situation is interesting because the Belarussian army is literally transporting these people across the country, promising them safe passage then dumping them at our border into barbed wire and armed guards. Everyone is understandably upset about it, most of all the scammed refugees, and this is a very much manufactured crisis with likely involvement from Putin et al.
I find it interesting from a rationalist perspective that Scott would object more to Orban for rationally but unauthentically adopting the platform that would bring him support and popularity, than to other 21st century leaders/dictators who were (at least in part) ideologues who got swept into power by being in the right place at the right time.
Should we give more credit to the principled over the rational actor? For me the answer could be yes, but it depends on what your principles are.
This is what I was thinking as well. Hard to see how this kind of populism is a negative thing as opposed to just keeping your ear to the ground.
Especially the metaphor about running focus groups and adopting the outcomes, what's so evil about that? I would say it even puts a dent in the dictator narrative. Is Erdoğan a less evil dictator because he sticks to his guns?
"All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud" . . . and how is this different than in many U.S. states post-pandemic?
In the US, only one wing of one party suspects rampant voter fraud, and only suspects it in the states where they lost, and when they took their suspicions to court and made their case to judges *appointed by that party,* they got nowhere.
So Orban has amassed all this power, didassembled the checks of democracy. I keep waiting for him to do something evil with it, but it doesn't seem to have happened. Or I don't know about it, I guess. Has he done something directly harmful to ordinary Hungarians? Has he destroyed their economy or security in some way? You could say he was bad to immigrants, but that seems to enjoy widespread public support there, so chalk that up to democracy.
Not that I think disassembling democracy is not a bad thing, I'm just not sure why you would do it unless you wanted to do something the public is opposed to. Is it just thirst for power by an individual?
So what you're saying is, that unless you jeopardize security or economy of ordinary Hungarians, it's fine? By this logic, a dictatorship exercising censorship, political processes, closed borders etc. is fine too, right?
Not sure what would classify as evil in your book. In Orbanistan, journalists and academics cannot criticize him or they'll be kicked out and nobody will employ them. The newspapers and TV are in his/his cronies` pockets. LGBT rights are suppressed. But sure, he is not Pinochet nor Pol Pot, there is no genocide, no political murders. So I guess all is well?
Sorry, I see I phrased myself confusingly.
I don't think all is well. I think threatening democracy is one of the worst things a leader can do, and a fantastic reason to kick him out. What I'm wondering is what things he wants to do with that power, which aren't widely supported by the people. Because if there aren't such things, why would he need all that power?
I think the main problem with lack of democracy is its potential to lead to horrendous things that the people would never have wanted. That's why I'm distinguishing "procedural" things like suppressing journalism and opposition (which are mostly bad because they threaten democracy and could lead to direct harm) from actual direct harm to the population.
Harming LGBT citizens would qualify as direct harm, except I don't know if it doesn't enjoy popular support in Hungary (unfortunately, it certainly does in many places, and did in almost all places until a few decades ago), in which case it is again something which could have happened without subverting democracy.
So why does he do it? Personal enrichment? Desire for power? Are there other things he passed which are extremely unpopular? Did I manage to explain my question?
I think I understand what you mean. Sorry if I sounded confrontational needlessly.
While I am hardly an expert, I can offer a long-term view of an interested central-European citizen. A part of Orban's motivations can surely be attributed to the central premise of every dictator (according to The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce de Mesquita): "Leaders do whatever keeps them in power". Orban has demonstrated plenty of times that he is ready to change his ideological position from one extreme to another if it suits his public image. In this respect, he is not too different from a large number of populists in other EU countries.
Secondly, I would say that several of his actions are motivated by an effort to raise Hungary to prominence inside the EU, making its voice important as it once was during the imperial era. Hungary is a pretty small country with 10 million inhabitants and its weight inside EU is comparable to Austria, Czechia, Sweden, etc and not the important players (Germany, France, Italy, ...). However, sentiments of a pre-Trianon era are still alive in Hungarian society and Orban fuels them often. (For example, he has a huge map of Hungary from 19. century in his office which he happily shows to visiting prime ministers from other countries). They want to feel like an important power again. To do this, Orban tries to portray Hungary as the "savior of christian Europe" - saving it from Ottomans in the past, and now saving it from muslim immigrants. In my opinion, he is relatively successful in building his image in conservative media, although his power to influence processes inside EU is quite limited.
Thirdly, his motivations connected to internal politics, which is what you were probably mostly interested in - unfortunately, I just do not know enough about Hungarian politics to know this. Perhaps a Hungarian ACT reader who is reading this can say.
> Personal enrichment? Desire for power?
Those two, mostly.
Also, some of his populist economic policies involving ex post facto laws would have likely been found unconstitutional by an independent supreme court.
My impression is that a lot of the outrage by Western liberals toward populist democracies in Central Europe like Hungary and Poland is that:
A. State media is a big part of the media
B. The elected officials act as if winning elections mean they can hire their own people at state media rather than just submit to their political enemies maintaining their sinecures forever, the way that, say, NPR never changes politically no matter who wins or loses elections in the U.S.
It's important to write about dictators' rise to power through democratic means, and it's a great hook. But I wonder, is it in some sense lacking to look at the individual people, and not the entire country? Seems like it's not the work of an individual alone, and there are certainly structural factors in the country as a whole which contribute to these rises (many people vote for them, most people don't violently resist the government, ...). I wonder if there's more to learn by a more holistic analysis of the countries involved.
Note how Dracula - ethnically Hungarian - goes on and on about his Hunnish heritage.
Kurt Gödel was concerned about a similar loophole in the U.S. Constitution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole
There has been some debate on the precise nature of the loophole. But I'm pretty convinced the issue centered on amendments to the amendment process itself:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2010183
> As Syrians began trickling in, Orban watched the neo-Nazi Jobbik Party’s polling numbers go up and up, until they started to look like a serious competitor. But they only had one issue, and Orban could easily steal it from them. So he did.
Loopholes aside, it's hilarious that selfish, power-hungry populists are among the most effective centrists in a democratic system, because they care about winning elections above any ideological commitment. (See also: Trump's embrace of non-interventionism and protectionism which for the past 40+ years had been mostly Democratic talking points.)
>I also have to recommend banning court-packing, by Constitutional amendment if necessary. I can’t stress enough how many descents into dictatorship go through something like that, and how much it’s a gaping security hole in our current system.
I agree, but I don't know if that's enough.
One time in DC, I sat down to eat dinner at a restaurant and happened to be about three feet away from John Roberts, in the next booth over. And the thought I couldn't get out of my head was: good lord, it would be so easy to assassinate him right now. He had no security -- not nearby, and not anywhere around the room, unless they were in plain clothes and tremendously convincing actors.
It's absolutely insane that such a vitally important individual hangs on by such a thread wherever he goes. Far and away the greatest risk to the political future of the country, in my mind, is that someone will perform a coordinated assassination of politically hostile Supreme Court justices to leave openings for an Orbanesque president to simply take over the entire Court. Sure, a Biden-type would probably appoint three moderate Republicans as a gesture toward bipartisanship, but I doubt someone like Trump would.
I'm not sure how we mitigate this. Something like "mandate at least 3 justices of each political party on the Court" would seem the best option, but then political affiliation becomes another checkpoint that can be systematically undermined quite easily, considering political party membership can be switched at will.
It's not guaranteed - the would-be Orban would have to have the approval of the Senate as well, and he has no way to compel the loyalty of the justices once they're appointed - but I agree it's a risk.
One suggestion I've seen for removing the problem of "you appoint as many justices as happen to die while you're in office" is to give the justices 18-year staggered terms, one replaced every 2 years. If you know you're guaranteed to get 2 appointments during your term, that reduces the incentive to "help them out the door."
This reminds me of "The Pelican Brief" by John Grisham.
I just want to note the (anti-)rhyming of history, that (victor) orban is a hungarian who built a wall to keep out muslims, and orban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orban) was a hungarian who built cannons so that muslims could get through the walls of constantinople.
I don't know a lot about Orban or Hungary but it seems kind of wack to me to declare him a psychopath capable of anything when you don't even list him ordering any assassinations or mass killings or running torture camps, all of which are things recent dictators have done and are doing
"There’s an urban legend about a test for psychopaths. Usually the test is some kind of riddle that can only be solved by killing a person for some completely stupid reason - the one I remember hearing involved how to meet with one of your father’s friends, without your father knowing, when you don’t have their contact info - and the answer was to kill your father and assume he would come to the funeral. I assume none of these tests work at all, but the assumption behind them is that if you’re evil enough, it you have more possibilities in your solution set than normal people.
This is what I think of when I look at Orban. He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them. I imagine that being Orban feels puzzling, like everyone else is leaving low-hanging fruit on the ground constantly. He’s a fascinating psychological specimen, but everyone else needs to up their game and stop leaving things open for people like him to take advantage of."
> He granted the franchise to Hungarians living abroad. Remember, the Treaty of Trianon took 2/3 of Hungarian territory and gave it to neighboring countries (especially Slovakia and Romania). Lots of ethnic Hungarians still live on that land; Orban gave them all voting rights. Their situation made them natural irredentists and nationalists, plus Orban was the only person who thought it was reasonable to let them vote, so in all subsequent elections they have voted 95%+ for Fidesz. Or something. All these people vote by mail in poorly-observed conditions and a lot of observers suspect rampant voter fraud.
Italy does this too. I was born in the US and have never lived in Italy, but gained Italian citizenship by blood. After learning of my existence, the Italian consulate has started sending me ballots to vote for my US-based Italian parliament representative. That is, portions of the world outside of Italy are also districts in the Italian parliament(!)
I'd never thought of the political implications of this very much. The messaging about which party I was supposed to give my undying loyalty to as a result of this never made it to me.
I'm allowed to vote by mail instead of driving 500 miles to the consulate, so I have to assume I'm a favored group. Hmm....
Did you have to apply for citizenship and go through some process? Did you end up with an Italian passport? Or did they just send you a ballot?
It was the most annoying possible thing, actually.
None of us had any idea that I was a citizen. My parents had visited Italy once and brought me with them while I was an infant, and I guess that's how they learned about me. Then they populated me in some database in the town my parents were born in. Then when I turned 18, people from the armed services in that town started hitting my relatives up demanding to know my whereabouts because, according to their system I was now a draft dodger. My relatives insisting "he has never lived here, he's in the US" was not good enough for them.
So I had to gather a bunch of documentation in the US, have it internationally notarized, submit it to the Italian consulate in the US, and then they stopped hassling my relatives. They also gave me a letter to present to border agents in Italy in case I ever wanted to visit, which basically said please don't arrest me for draft dodging I am domiciled in the US.
Anyway, after that I started getting ballots in the mail for Italian elections.
I am a long time reader who did not like this article, it's tone was much less balanced than your previous work, and reading it felt like the analysis was below your usual standards. I don't have any Gell-Mann amnesia because I suspect that Orban's actions hit closer to home in a western democracy, "this could happen here" elicits more of reaction than a sober charting of the course of a Modi or Erdogan.
Nevertheless I reject the part III characterisation of Orban as a dictator for the following
1. "There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted."
Orban used his democratically elected two-thirds majority to amend the constitution, through the procedures established by a democratic constitution. Maybe, if the content of those amendments was "I am now the eternal president and cannot be removed even after I am dead and this clause may never be removed from the constitution" but the mere fact of amending the constitution, in a European civil law context where this is normal means exactly nothing.
2. "He passed a new law saying he could fire any civil servant at will, then fired people in key positions and replaced them with his cronies and college buddies. He made sure everyone knew that their continued employment was dependent on his good will"
The independent civil service, which in the modern world is how most of government is actually done, is normally subject to no democratic oversight or constraint whatsoever. I am not sure how amending this makes one a dictator, in reality it seems he is bending the power of the state to his will (which, given his democratic election, is the mediated will of the people). The idea that the civil service can never be interfered with by politicians is a *non-democratic* concept.
What Orban is doing is not even a novelty, it was the normal practice of the United States for most of its history. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system> Is Orban's spoils system a likely occasion for corruption and incomptence? Yes. Is it dictatorial? No.
3. Media Control
I accept that Orban is using every possible advantage here to benefit himself and his party. Nevertheless media organs favouring one party over another is hardly exclusive to Hungary, and the country has a free press, social media and tolerates dissent. If those things were fiddled with the dictatorial claim would have some weight.
4. Gerrymandering and irredentist franchise
This is the most egregious error on your part.
"He shamelessly gerrymandered unequally sized districts."
Orban introduced reforms to the electoral system in 2012, this "reduced" anomalous differences in the population of districts. Your source seems to assert that the districts where likely fidesz voters live are all slightly smaller than districts where other voters live, but it states openly that it lacks the data to make a real determination.
Further, it states of the gerrymandering claim:
"Fidesz won 45% of the votes in the individual constituencies in 2014 and yet got 88% of the seats. The effects of the gerrymander, even on the rough analysis above, assisted massively in producing such a disproportionate effect."
I'm sorry but a 20% margin across the entire country, in a first past the post system, is going to produce a result like that without any manipulation at all. I am unwilling to trust a source like this. If the opposition to Orban were not divided, this would not have happened, but it is and that is a problem for the opposition and not Orban to solve.
Of the overseas Hungarians, these amounted to around 120,000 votes in a franchise of over 5 million, this is hardly a corruption of democracy, whatever the legitimacy of the actions is.
I don't see how any of this makes Orban a dictator, he has certainly undermined the checks on democracy, and is facilitating a system open for corruption and future degredation of democracy itself. Nevertheless, he has the support of a plurality of Hungarian voters, but can be lawfully removed by a united, serious opposition.
Orban is a case of using democracy to reshape the country and gain further advantages for himself and his party, this may all be awful, but it is not dictatorship. Your criticism should be directed at the Hungarian opposition and perhaps the fact that people opposed to the Orban program tend to move to Western Europe and not stay to change Hungary.
One missing angle from this post is the EU accession of Hungary in 2004. This opened up two things: 1) Access to the single market for a country with low labour costs 2) turned on the taps of EU aid money.
Hungary has been riding a wave of economic growth based on EU accession. the economic growth has driven support for Orban as a leader overseeing raising living standards, and dished the aid cash out to supporters.
Orban now looks a bit more vulnerable as the economy has stalled and the EU has belatedly started to act on the funding.
For those wondering why the EU has done nothing, Poland has also had run ins with the EU, and it requires a consensus of all other countries to act - Poland and Hungary have protected each other. The EU is now moving toward qualified majority voting for some funding aspects, and there are some issues Poland will not protect Orban on.
What about the impact of easy emigration within the EU? I hear a lot from Central Europe about all the young, liberally inclined people moving westwards and leaving the country disproportionately old and authoritarian.
"Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary and an Orban voter granny why her grandkids were born in Germany."
It’s not. The target isn’t the median person, but the most vulnerable. The immunocompromised, the infant. Not being vaccinated creates externalities and is an appropriate place for govt to step in.
typo shot - short
"An extreme right-wing pensioner seized control of an old Soviet tank that had been wheeled out as an exhibit for the commemorations, and for a shot time drove it around the center of Budapest".
I want to join the previous Hungarian posters who were having feelings of Gell-Mann amnesia: I can't stand Orban, and the stories of endemic corruption and taking over newspapers are true, yet I don't recognize the country I'm reading about here. Maybe learning about a foreign country's politics from books simply can't replace following the local news as they happen - try to imagine what kind of picture you would get about US politics if you tried learning about it from books instead of following it in the news and on social media.
Putting Orban in the same club as dictators like Erdogan or Putin, whose political opponents or journalists that criticize them actually end up jailed or murdered, is simply ridiculous. The closest equivalent to Orban might instead be Netanyahu, and just as the opposition united to unseat him not long ago, there is a very real chance that Orban will lose the next election against the united opposition in 2022 where everyone from the far-right Jobbik to the inner city liberals will be running on a shared ticket against him.
Orban's shift from liberal to the hard right was much more gradual than described here, and it played out over decades, it wasn't some sudden decision one day.
About the descent from steppe nomads thing: there is a considerable right-wing subculture that takes this thing very seriously, but the way the article presents this as a general property of Hungarian society comes across as strange.
The "charitable reading of Gyurcsany's speech", that it was describing his predecessor's administration, is complete nonsense: the "last one and a half years" he is talking about in the quoted text was his own administration, and no one ever believed otherwise.
The metrics about the voting system like "1 Fidesz vote = 2.1 Left Alliance votes" are obvious exaggerations.
Electoral tricks like gerrymandering, giving voting rights to foreign residents, or taking over much of legacy media, are not what's keeping Orban in power - they might be enough to add a few % points that push him over the 2/3 majority needed for rewriting the constitution, but he would still have the strongest party without any of these.
Because the Left's collapse in Hungary, which started with Gyurcsany's infamous speech in 2006 and was made much worse by the 2008 economic crisis, was largely self-imposed. After discrediting themselves so spectacularly, they started splintering into ever-smaller new parties because of petty infighting. They also lost touch with the average voter, while Orban doubled down on his new messaging strategy that was the exact opposite of how the liberal intellectuals talked and thought. The leftist parties, for example, had nothing to say about the migration crisis: they were afraid of opposing things like the border fence that had >80% popularity among voters, even though it went against the sensibilities of the liberal intellectual class, so they just sat out the biggest political event of the decade, without saying much about it (except for the previously mentioned Gyurcsany, who alone among the opposition, campaigned against the border fence, gaining him even more notoriety). Another symbolic issue is the question of the Roma (gypsy) minority: Fidesz politicians regularly make racist comments about them, while the Left is constantly talking about how their social programs are going to lift them out of poverty: yet almost all gypsies vote for Fidesz, not the Leftist parties - the world of liberal intellectuals is simply too alien for them, while Fidesz is offering them money or other tangible goods in exchange for support.
In fact, the only message the opposition has left is that it wants to undo Orbán's system, this is the only thing they campaign on, and they can't put forward any other political vision. It's as if the Left had nothing left to say to the average Hungarian voter, nothing to say about global events, while the right can always fall back to invoking family, nation, identity etc.
If you're looking for a more debatable dictator, but in a country perhaps more similar to the USA, you might look into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joh_Bjelke-Petersen. I don't know a good book - maybe https://www.amazon.com/hillbilly-dictator-Australias-police-state/dp/064212809X
Honestly Joh's elections were less democratic than Orban's, though weak federalism in Australia kept him from much power.
"He was able to beat everyone else by taking advantage of loopholes everyone else left open because they didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to use them."
When I was learning about electoral systems in University, my professor, Reuven Hazan, a worldwide expert in voting went on to talk about an international academic conference he was at, where some academic presented an idea for a voting scheme that was supposed to be very good and democratic. Basically, when voting for a party in a non regional election (unlike the US and UK), there's importance to the order of candidates - the ones at the top of the list are more likely to get into the legislature and then be given Ministerial jobs. The academic suggested that when voting for a party in such an election, the voters would get to rank the candidates for that party in the order they'd want.
At the questions portion, Professor Hazan stood up and asked: "But what if people who are against that party choose to vote for it and rank the worst/most radical members of the party in first place?"
The academic was stunned by this question, and answered: "But... that's simply not done!"
The lesson, Professor Hazan told us, is to never build any political system based on the assumption that some things are simply not done.
I have a bunch to say, but I will keep it at this. The evidence that his gerrymandering was very effective is - on it's face - thin at the system level. If you look at the bias between votes and seats in the election that gave Orban the 2/3's needed, and you look at the elections after, you see at best, evidence for a tiny effect. Gerrymandering is a problem whenever you have districts as you and every politically conscious American knows. It's not a unique autocratic problem. If the effects are gross and lead to strong inconsistencies consistently over time.. that's an issue. But there is no evidence of that here. Hungary does have a strong gerrymandering effect as far as I can see. The 'big picture' doesn't suggest a 'absurdly gerrymandered' picture.
Overall, though, I am not seeing the portrait of a dictator. I am seeing the portrait of a politician governing at a time when liberal democracy's appeal among average citizens is seriously strained by the actions and conduct of the elites controlling and shaping that system and is - as you say - channelling illiberal notions popular on BOTH the left and right of American politics. I just hope he loses the next election to the opposition... because then we can know for sure... because autocrats don't willingly give up power after elections.
On the subject of countries raising fertility, I wonder how much of the decline is associated with improvements in contraceptive technology. Suppose a country banned the pill or severely restricted it and was able to enforce the ban, make it hard for most people to get it. One result would probably be a reduction in non-marital sex because women would be worried about pregnancy. That would increase the incentive for men to get married. Once married, being limited to less effective ways of reducing the number of children — rhythm, interruptus, non-vaginal intercourse — would presumably raise the marital birth rate.
Would that have a significant effect on average fertility? Has any country tried it?
Ireland banned contraception for religious reasons until the 1980s, which kept its fertility above replacement for much longer than equivalent GDP/Capita countries.
Romania also banned contraception for, well, less religious reasons around the same time, after it was legal for much of the 20th century. There was a sharp rise in fertility and then a gradual drop back to original levels, however Romania was also deeply corrupt and officials and doctors could be easily bribed.
>There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted. In fact, his party started amending the Constitution like it was going out of style. Certainly they removed roadblocks to their power. But they also wrote new laws they passed directly into the Constitution so future governments couldn’t change them.
This reminds me of the impeachment of Paraguay's president 11 years ago. The impeachment followed Paraguayan law. The president and other critics called it e.g. a "parliamentary coup" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Fernando_Lugo).
When (if ever) is it illegitimate for a legislature to legislate/amend/confirm/impeach? In other words, what is the difference between legitimacy and legality? This is the upstream question. How the legislature should vote regarding Lugo, Orban, Trump, the composition of the US Supreme Court, etc. is the downstream question.
In constitutional theory, what are the basic positions on this issue?
On the topic of "want to succeed? Be his college roommate". I think that it's pretty suggestive of something, but in a country with <10M people, where 10% of them live in the same city (Budapest), you're going to have like a 3rd degree of separation between everyone who matters. If social, political, business, etc. elites are more or less organically drawn from a handful of urban locales and educational institutions, into which they had been previously selected by educational attainment, money, interests, etc., there is already a high degree of connectedness that you'd have to expect, much much more than - a priori - in gigantic countries from US to India, to even Germany at 80M.
(I'm googling the population figures, so I don't know how accurate those are, but I think they're roughly right to make my point.)
Several parallels to the Polish case come to mind: PiS, the governing party, was already in office 2005 – 07. They were quickly voted out of government, which seemed to come like a shock. When they entered government again in 2015 it sure seems they were strategically prepared to ensure they will not lose power that quickly again. Their very first moves were against the Supreme Court. Also, their victory was helped by several tapes that were published revealing corruption among the leading party. Those tapes were recorded in a restaurant where members of government used to meet regularly, and it’s still unclear who recorded them. As in Hungary, the government also claims that it wants to get rid of the communists who according to their narrative are still occupying various posts.
There are also differences: Orban seems strategic and willing to change position when needed, the Polish government rather conveys the image to be full of true ‘believers’ up to being fanatics. This maybe explains the common image that Orban backs down vis-à-vis the EU once he realizes he is really going to lose something – while Poland remains stubborn, regardless of the consequences.
The ‘true believer’ image especially holds for J. Kaczynski, who is unanimously regarded to be the unchallenged leader and most influential politician, despite being only chief of party 2015 – 2020. Since late 2020 he is Deputy Prime Minister of Poland.
Hey, you may not see this, since it is buried under hundreds of comments, but as a Hungarian I like the article. I would add that the fertility policies work out well, we are the second most fertile nation in the EU (according to the latest surveys I read, it is not sure but I will read). Even Orbán's opponents like Márky-Zay likes them.
1992 was more of a conservative turn, not a far-right, that started around 2015 (I would call his government rather right wing populist). In my opinion Gyurcsány was a terrible prime minister who privatized healthcare and insulted ethnic Hungarians, also abused his power during 2006. He resigned in 2009. And Orbán managed to upkeep a great set of cultural values, the Hungarian film industry skyrocketed under him (especially under Andy Vajna, his friend).
Despite this and the fact that I am conservative, I learned much about Orbán's childhood and it was a great summary on his road to power, so keep doing these articles.
I recently saw Hungary pop up near the top in a study of parent happiness vs non-parent happiness: https://mercatornet.com/the-countries-with-the-happiest-parents/20980/
This article did not convince me I should dislike Victor Orban, or even that I should care about him that much. If all it takes to be a dictator is gerrymandering and helping your college buddies to buy newspapers, then we are certainly defining dictatorship down. The population of Hungary is smaller than the NY metro area, and politically Hungary did not seem from this description to be much less small-d democratic than NY city. "Illiberal democracies" of various sorts are common and we in the U.S. might be one ourselves.
Scott can be a delightfully original thinker about more obscure stuff, but he usually falls in line with the bien-pensant coastal conventional wisdom when it comes to issues where such a conventional wisdom has been declared.
The post gets almost its details wrong (except the part about what mechanics Orbán used to transform democracy into a sort of plausibly-deniable soft-dictatorship, which is mostly accurate). I'll just focus on the biggest ones:
1) Orbán being a genius noticing the hidden backdoors no one else did has little basis in fact. He is a competent politician for sure, on par with the average European head of state. But absolute power basically just fell into his laps. The previous Socialist government screw up the economy (resulting in Hungary being the only country in the region in the state economic stagnation, during a period of global economic boom), then lied about it and made completely unrealistic promises, then the country got hit by the recession generated by the US subprime crisis, resulting in all kinds of austerity measures; the Socialist party basically collapsed, spent half a year at the height of the crisis searching for a new leader and not really doing anything; the new leader ended up being an outsider businessman with some experience in the recovery of bankrupt companies who saw his half-term as a purely economic exercise and made no attempt to improve the party's standing in the polls. Orbán (the leader of the opposition party in a mostly-two-party-system) then won a narrow two-thirds victory just by the virtue of being there and not being the Socialist party.
The Hungarian legal system was completely vulnerable to takeover with a two-thirds majority; any law (including the constitution) could be rewritten and any official could be replaced with that much support; and there wasn't anything like the staggered elections in the US (where a one-time swing of popular opinion would only affect a third of the Senate seats for example). This was a known flaw; when the system was designed in 1989, a two-thirds majority was assumed to be unlikely, and the system was meant kind of provisional. It's hard to blame the people involved - they had to ensure a peaceful transition from a communist dictatorship with state planning to a democratic free-market capitalism, in very short time, requiring changes to vast swathes of the legal and institutional system. And then of course it turned out that once the constitution is in place, it's impossible to gather the near-unanimous political support needed to change it.
So this was a known flaw (maybe not to the public, but to the scholars and statesmen, for sure), and Orbán just made use of it. Maybe the only remarkable thing is how little resistance there was from his own party and administration, and the intellectual elite that supported him. (Those who opposed him did protest but they of course could be ignored.) Whether that was his skill at organizing or manipulating people, or just plain political polarization, is hard to tell. (Compare how far Trump, a complete anti-talent in most required skills, got in overturning an election. Polarization is powerful. And Hungary had lots of it - the two ruinous totalitarian regimes, a fat-right one murder half million Jews and entangling the country in a devastating war, and a far-left one taking away everyone's property and forcing the country to forty years of economic decay and poverty, were still recent memory. No one who mattered associated themselves *with* either of those regimes; but most people positioned themselves as *against* one while kinda ignoring the other, and calling the other party a fascist or communist for not doing likewise.)
2) Orbán did some gerrymandering (and a number of other transformations to election law that benefited him) but it wasn't that substantial. Hungary is not significantly more gerrymandered than, say, US presidential elections are - the left needs to win with 3-4% of the votes to get an equal share of seats. Unfair, but hardly unsurmountable, nor unprecedented in democracies. Likewise, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that he orchestrated some straight-out voter fraud, but the scale of it wasn't too significant; and while giving the franchise to half the country's population's worth of ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries is scary in theory, and he might well tap more into it in the future, so far they haven't actually voted in significant numbers. The actual pillars of Orbán's power are:
* Money. It's hard to overstate the significance of this. He systematically stripped the opposition of resources by fines and by scaring away potential donors; kept them away from public funds using various means; and used public funds as a basicly unrestricted source of campaign money for himself, from transforming state media to a propaganda outlet, to making state-owned companies advertise at his newspapers, to running huge "public awareness campaigns" and "consultations" which were not-even-concealed party propaganda, to embezzling ridiculously huge amounts of taxpayer money and directing it to party slash funds. He owns the prosecution and the police, and the judiciary has no initiative of their own, so he can break any law with abandon. Estimates for how far he outspends his opposition at campaigns, polling, party infrastructure building etc. are around two or three *magnitudes*.
* Economic pressure. He replaced aid to the poor with public work, and his people decide who gets work and who doesn't, and voting and otherwise supporting the ruling party is fairly openly part of the requirements. In the poor rural areas he has built a kind of feudal system with the local mayor having a huge power over the people, and the mayors tell them the village won't have access to state funds if it doesn't vote pro-Orbán at a high-enough rate.
* Media takeover (and turning the taken-over media into propaganda tools which are little more than proxies repeating centrally-crafted messages), but this was already mentioned in the post.
* Creating an election system that's very favorable to large parties, which is how he could get a two-thirds majority with a minority of the votes: lots of first-past-the-post seats. The opposition is now forming a single "election party", but they are all across the spectrum from social democrat to libertarian to nationalist populist so of course this is painful and costs them votes.
3) It is just not true that Hungarians were less welcoming to refugees than other countries, and this would have pushed Orbán to the far right. He has spent years making the country xenophobic, with his media swamping people in far-right propaganda on how "immigrants" (the word "refugee" was banned in his media channels, likewise mentions of any connection to the Syrian war) are violent, rapist, a terrorist threat, disease-ridden, and a plot of George Soros and the international J̶e̶w̶r̶y̶ financial interests to destroy Christianity and eradicate white people. (This chart tells the story: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-030-25666-1_8/MediaObjects/464293_1_En_8_Fig1_HTML.png https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-25666-1_8 - note that Hungarians had basically no contact with refugees outside of the capital, which still remains relatively refugee-friendly; this was no organic change of opinion.)
Initially this wasn't even out of electoral calculation, I think. As mentioned in other comments, the Dublin Regulation (which governs admittance of people into the part of EU that's free of internal borders) requires the country of first entry to be responsible for the asylum seekers (other countries can ship them back to the country of origin if they so choose), this put a huge and unfair burden on countries which were on the EU border and on a major migration pathway, and Orbán was somewhat understandably worried that despite all the Willkommenskultur, Western countries might abuse that if the situation sours and eg. send back the most problematic refugees to Hungary (who then would be stuck with them - it's pretty much impossible to force non-EU countries to take refugees back when they are denied asylum). So first he put up the wall to reroute refugees to enter through some other EU country, and when he got criticised for that, he went full racist just to make sure no one would think forcing Hungary to admit asylum seekers a good idea. The whole thing ended up not mattering that much (Merkel got a deal with Erdogan and the refugees were stopped in a way that let the EU wash its hands of the means), but it proved great at the polls and a much needed distraction from corruption and other scandals, so Orbán stuck with it, and has since then has built his politics on demonizing random groups (refugees then NGOs then LGBTQ people).
The natalist policies in Hungary are a bit different from those made in many other places. In that they seem to have a longer term target (how very un-populist). They don't just give a baby bonus - which tend to just result in a one time baby bump. They specifically target larger families. Special benefits for 4+ children (if you have zero children, its going to take some years to reach 4). They promote marriage (married birthrates are much higher than average), and marriage rates have indeed skyrocket - but it still take some years for this to materialize into a higher birthrate. But when it does, it will likely be of a more permanent character than with a baby bonus. So while the birthrate has probably risen a bit already, it is really too soon to determine the effectiveness of the policies.
Also, I don't know why you'd include Austria in the graphs. Its clearly not a country which has had a post WWII history with the others.
I hooe orban’s gerrymandering works. For if the opposition wins they can just flood the country with economic migrants from the third world, forever limiting the electoral prospects of Orban’s party (kind of similar to the strategy of certain political parties here in the west).
And these tactics seem a hell of a lot more effective illiberal and antidemocratic to me than anything orban has done
You are mostly basing your claims about Orban on the claims of his most bitter enemies (some of them are from a book written on him before the 2002 election, which was clearly a hit job on him, not objective at all), not exactly neutral observers. Lot of these are simply not true or anecdotal, hearsay. Yes, Orban started as a liberal guy, but he didn't turn right-wing nationalist just overnight. Fidesz was still member of the Liberal International in 1998. He gradually shifted to the right though, more so after his 2002 defeat.
Your claim about massive gerrymandering is patently false for example. The new districts are more evenly distributed population wise as another commenter said too. Part of the changes introduced by Orban was to make the parliament smaller so the number of districts was reduced from 176 to 106, but there are no US style absurdly shaped districts or like that, and actually the populations of districts became more evenly distributed.
You claim that Orban controls almost all media in the country and the opposition cannot reach people. That is far from the truth too, while state radio and television is government propaganda, and the pro-Fidesz media companies own most local daily newspapers there is still a nationwide pro-opposition newspaper Nepszava (allegedly because Orban's wish is that it has to kept alive). The German owned national RTL Klub television channel's news are quite critical of the government and almost the entire population can watch it if they want, as it is free-to-air. ATV, another pro-oppostion TV channel is also available, it is not free-to-air though but included in most basic cable plans. Even most middle aged people use the internet and Facebook where Orban cannot stop them from reading/watching pro-opposition content.
I wish you'd preserved the acute accents on vowels in the names etc. Hungarian has a wonderfully phonemic and consistent writing system. You don't have to know much more than that stress is on the first syllable, the accent marks indicate a longer vowel and that c, s, z are used for roughly the English ts, sh, z or combined in the digraphs cs, sz, and zs (ch, s, and the French "j"), while y is used in the digraphs ty, gy, ly, ny as a palatalization marker to write roughly the sounds ty, dy(!), y, ny (i.e. ñ).
Anyone have any reference to something that summarizes how many dictatorships get started with something like court packing?