Last week I was in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had just won his third straight landslide electoral victory. Afterwards, tens of thousands of mostly young and educated Hungarians came out into the streets of Budapest to demand a new election. The government duly ignored them.
The ruling Fidesz party had skewed the rules and monopolized the media, while the rubber-stamp Constitutional Court approved all such moves. The government is massively corrupt but only opposition figures are prosecuted by the Prosecutor General loyal to Orban. The resources of the state – which include large EU subsidies – are used to reward loyalists.
Orbán calls his system “illiberal democracy”, but given the rhetoric he employs – which includes racism, xenophobia and vague dreams of the Greater Hungary of yore – a better term would be “liberal fascism”.
After the rally I talked with a friend who had spent two decades in the US before repatriating to Hungary. After pointing out that Orbán comes across as vulgar and crude, he grudgingly admitted that he is also a kind of political genius: “He understands what makes Hungarians tick and knows what buttons to press.”
Hungary, once a great empire in its own right, is now a small, relatively poor, inconsequential country. But Orbán fits into an anti-democratic populist trend that is infringing on major liberal democracies. Each regime is different – some are nastier, in others fascism is more liberal, at least for now – but they display similar characteristics.
Each regime is headlined by a charismatic figure – a kind of Duce who becomes an object of popular adoration and fawning by associates. To their more educated compatriots – the “liberal elites” whom the populists revile – those leaders seem laughable, incompetent nincompoops. Their rise often appears accidental, temporary, easily reversible. But they’re unexpectedly durable and deadly efficient. They relentlessly and swiftly alter national priorities, change the political discourse, reverse loyalties and subvert existing constitutional systems. Once established, they begin to exclude their opponents – marginalizing them, arresting them or even eliminating them physically.
Look at Vladimir Putin, the godfather – or mascot – of the current populist swell. The Family – a coterie of officials and oligarchs with access to the Kremlin – picked him after working through a number of potential candidates. He was chosen because he was one of the greyest flunkies whom they thought they could manage. His rise was accidental – Boris Yeltsin wanted to step down, the presidential election was imminent and a stand-in was urgently needed.
But then Putin swiftly effected a coup, outsmarting and defeating men who were far smarter than he and reshaping Russia. He eliminated all opposition, built an oligarchic kleptocratic “vertical of power” and imbued the country with a kind of fascistic, xenophobic nationalism.
Looking at his Russia you may see a country where the government squandered and pilfered trillions of petrodollars, one where infrastructure is rotting and education, health care and culture are neglected. It is isolated and hemmed in by sanctions, its economy is stagnating, etc. But there is another picture, too: a nuclear-armed rogue state that invades its neighbors, wreaks havoc around the world, kills its opponents abroad and undermines liberal democracies to promote right-wing populism.
Donald Trump entered the presidential race as a marketing ploy and won thanks to a few fortuitous coincidences: Clinton’s unpopularity and poor campaigning, voter apathy, Russian hacking, FBI director James Comey’s intervention and peculiarities of America’s electoral system. Trump’s ignorance and incompetence are mind-boggling. The White House is in a state of perpetual chaos. And yet in less than eighteen months he has changed America beyond recognition. Behavior, corrupt practices, sliminess, statements and policies that would have been unthinkable in January 2017 are now acceptable.
More to the point, everybody is carrying out Trump’s agenda – even if he himself is often unsure what it is. Men like Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Housing and Human Development boss Ben Carson, who two years ago were regarded as either moronic or insane, are doing a stellar job of reshaping America along Trumpian lines. While some lawmakers even among the Republicans are sharply critical of Trump, Congress is invariably being dragged along. Courts delay Trump’s decrees but are unable to stop their implementation. Resistance by individual states, such as New York or California, do nothing to alter the national course.
While Trump is embroiled in scandal and is under at least two investigations, it now seems likely that he will emerge unscathed from all of them – even if many of his associates end up in jail. His popularity rating has been inching higher through it all.
Modern historians typically regard events and actions which as results of independent decisions by individuals. Visions of massive shifts – or waves, of the kind described by Russian Marxist economist NIkolai Kondratiev (shot by the NKVD in 1938) – are not in fashion. Yet, a wave, or a current, seems an apt image for what is happening in populist autocracies: when it rains, individual raindrops fall at random, but the water runs into a drain and flows in a predetermined direction. Minor rivulets are formed but they all end up as part of the same flow.
There is a sense of inevitability about the rising populist/fascist tide. Liberal democracies look fragile and in one election after another battle relentless encroachment by populist parties. In a number of core EU countries democratic candidates managed to hold on in 2017. However, the onslaught continues and, once the populists win, they promptly implement their agenda and it becomes impossible to dislodge them – witness the latest example, in Poland, and even in the UK the populist revolt known as Brexit seems unstoppable even though a sizeable majority of the Brits are having second thoughts.
But second thoughts are a rare phenomenon. The adoring masses are willing to shift their perceptions along with their Dear Leaders – very much as George Orwell described it in 1984. Russians are once again leading the way here: they faithfully followed the party line by turning their hatred first on Georgians and now on Ukrainians, while suddenly becoming enamoured of Chechens who had previously been mortal enemies. In Hungary Fidesz members suddenly gave up their age-old suspicion of Russia once their leader became friends with Putin, and in the US the same transmogrification has occurred within the Republican Party now that Trump turns out to be in bed with Putin.
The 1930s saw a similar irrational flight toward dictatorships and adoration of charismatic dictators. Resisters – who also saw Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Franco as bloodthirsty buffoons – were swept away. All those dictators similarly emerged as if by accident and could have been derailed countless times on their way to power. But they weren’t – and then everything fell into place for them even though they seemed remarkably incompetent and their programs were mostly harebrained improvisations.
The 1972 film Cabaret is a study in the rise of fascism and ineffectiveness of opposition to its wave. Opponents cleverly troll the brown shirts, who grimly, humorlessly accumulate power. In America, late-night TV comedians live the golden age by poking fun at Trump while Trump relentlessly destroys their democracy.
There is a sense of inevitability in today’s rise of fascism. In Leon Feuchtwanger novel The Oppermanns, a Jewish intellectual amuses his guests by reading excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. They laugh at the Fuehrer’s coarse style, grammatical errors and moronic reasoning. Then, when the same intellectual is arrested and sent to a concentration camp, he is forced to memorize passages from Hitler’s book.
American comedians, who are now ridiculing Trump’s idiotic tweets, may yet end up learning them by heart, typos and all.
