The New York Times has an articletoday about Hungary, which is an autocracy masquerading as a democracy. Other than a brief mention that Steve Bannon is a fan of dictator in all but name Viktor Orban, the article doesn’t draw any comparisons with these United States, but it’s awfully difficult to read the article and not see that many of the devices Orban used to solidify control are at work here. Consider this paragraph for example:
And though Mr. Orban commands a formidable majority, it is partly the result of this echo chamber in the media, which has muted alternative voices, and the redrawing of electoral boundaries and the restructuring of the electoral system to favor his party.
We’ll get to the echo chamber in a moment, but lets think about electoral boundaries, etc. We don’t often think about state lines as being electoral boundaries but they are when it comes to our most significant legislative chamber, the Senate, which controls appointments to the judiciary. There is an anti-democratic bias baked into our system, which is far and away more biased now than at the time it was designed. It suits the billionaires that buy our politicians to a T. No need to pay for an expensive Californian Senator when you can get two from Wyoming for a lot less, and, not only are they just as powerful, but the Wyoming electorate is far more easily made subject to Fox propagandizing. There’s a lot of talk about gerrymandering, as there should be, but the fact is that this country will never have a government that reflects the will of the majority so long as the Connecticut Compromisecontinues in effect. I haven’t researched it, but just as an example, Brett Kavanaugh would likely not be on the Supreme Court right now if the votes of the populated state’s Senator’s were weighted to take account of population differences. In sum, we have a system in which it’s fairly easy for the autocrats to buy the courts and the Senate, with gerrymandering taking care of the House. So it’s not that unlikely that Orban picked up some of his techniques from the USA.
Where Orban has American autocrats beat is in his total domination of the media, though I’d say it’s a tie in the courts.
Unlike in Communist-era Hungary, there is a Constitutional Court, along with dozens of other nominally independent state watchdogs. There is a plethora of private media outlets, whose journalists do not face physical danger for their reporting. And there are free elections in which anyone can run, but which Mr. Orban has won handsomely since re-entering office in 2010.
Beneath this veneer lies a more complex reality.
Mr. Orban’s allies control the Constitutional Court, while loyalists control which prosecutions make it to court in the first place. They have rarely, if ever, pursued corruption allegations against Mr. Orban and his ministers — and even if they did, few would hear about it.
By applying financial pressure on the owners of independent media outlets, Mr. Orban has gradually persuaded them to sell to his friends, or toe a softer line.
State media, meanwhile, is entirely loyal to Mr. Orban. After state television channels failed to broadcast more than a few fleeting clips of recent anti-Orban demonstrations, a group of opposition lawmakers visited their headquarters last week to request some airtime. They were refused, and later ejected by force.
We still have a somewhat independent media, though the non-propagandists are almost as destructive as Fox and Sinclair, since their guiding principle is a distorted both siderism, which insists on balancing genuine attacks on our fundamental democratic principles by Republicans with trivial Democratic transgressions, like lacking civility in their responses to Republican outrages.
It is comforting to think that Trump is too incompetent to pull off the total destruction of American democracy, and that the backlash against him will wind up strengthening our system. It’s unlikely that’s in the cards, though we have to hope. I’m beginning to think that there might be the votes in the Senate to impeach, now that Trump has pissed off the billionaires by tanking the stock market. If that happened, Fox would immediately beatify Pence, and he would pursue autocracy far more effectively and far more below the radar than Trump.
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