Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.
Let me introduce you to Viktor Orbán — and if you don’t know who Viktor Orbán is, congratulations. You’ve been living your best life, and I’m genuinely sorry to ruin it for you right now.
Orbán is the soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, a landlocked Central European nation roughly the size of Indiana that has contributed to world civilization the following things: goulash, the Rubik’s Cube, and — apparently — the complete philosophical architecture of the American radical right.
He looks like a Soviet-era refrigerator that somehow achieved sentience and got itself elected. He has the vibe of a regional assistant bank manager who has decided that God personally anointed him to save Western Civilization — which is a sentence that should frighten every single person within earshot of this broadcast.
When Orbán took power for the second time in 2010 — yes, he was bad enough that they fired him and then, like a nation with a spectacular death wish, hired him back — he didn’t do what American right-wingers had been doing for forty years. He didn’t say get the government off your back. He didn’t do the whole Reagan-era bumper-sticker routine about the nine most terrifying words.
No. Viktor looked at the government — that vast, groaning apparatus of bureaucratic power — and said, and I’m paraphrasing only slightly:
“I’m keeping all of this. It’s mine now. All of it. The courts, the media, the elections, the civil service, the national wallet. Mine. Sit down.”
He rewrote the constitution in 2012 the way a mob boss rewrites the lease on a restaurant he’s just taken over. He gerrymandered the districts until they looked like a Rorschach test designed by a man with a grievance. He stacked the judiciary like a drunk playing Jenga. He seized control of the media and handed it to his cronies the way you’d hand your idiot brother-in-law a franchise — here, don’t screw this up, just say what I tell you.
He called it “illiberal democracy” — which is one of those phrases that sounds like it came out of a fortune cookie written by Mussolini.
Here’s the part that should make your teeth hurt.
American conservatives looked at this situation — this blatant, glittering, practically gift-wrapped authoritarian kleptocracy — and said: Goals.
The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, a man who has the energy of someone nursing a personal grievance against the Enlightenment since approximately 1687, declared:
“Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
The model. As if Viktor Orbán running a small, economically struggling, internationally isolated European nation of ten million people into the authoritarian ditch is the instruction manual these guys had been waiting for.
They flew to Budapest the way lesser tourists fly to Paris. They wore CPAC lanyards and gazed upon the Hungarian parliament building with the reverent, glistening eyes of pilgrims who’ve finally reached Mecca — if Mecca had worse food and a government that was secretly on Putin’s payroll.
Which, as it turns out, it was. Literally. On the payroll. Orbán was financing CPAC with Hungarian government money — money from a foreign government that was, as even a golden retriever following this story could have worked out, deeply cozy with Vladimir Putin.
Last October, Orbán told Putin — and these are real words that a real sitting head of government said out loud:
“In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”
He said this to the man who is actively shelling apartment buildings in Ukraine. And somehow, this is the individual whose governing philosophy the American right has adopted as their lodestar.
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Now let’s talk about Florida, because this is where the American strain of the virus really mutated into something spectacular.
Ron DeSantis arrived in the Florida governorship in 2019 like a man who’d read the Orbán playbook, highlighted every single passage, written YES THIS in the margins, and then decided to do a regional production of the same show — but with better weather and more theme parks.
DeSantis implemented Orbán’s model with the kind of diligent, joyless, bureaucratic thoroughness you’d normally associate with someone reorganizing a supply closet:
Laws prohibiting discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools? Check. Orbán had those.
Going after corporations that refused to toe the cultural line? Check. DeSantis literally tried to strip Disney of its governance structure — a company that has been operating in Florida longer than DeSantis has been successfully combing his hair.
The whole ideological apparatus — the culture war as a governing strategy, the use of state power not to shrink government but to weaponize it against perceived cultural enemies, the stoking of white evangelical grievance as electoral jet fuel — all of it traces back to this squat, belligerent, Vladimir-adjacent Hungarian in his Budapest palace, who figured out before anyone else that you don’t need to be popular if you control the referees.
Project 2025 — that Heritage Foundation fever dream that reads like a theocracy trying to write an employee handbook — is Orbánism with an American accent and a King James Bible on top.
The premise is simple and, once you see it, you can’t unsee it: democracy is too important to be left to the voters. The people keep making the wrong choices. They keep wanting things like healthcare and labor rights and the freedom to love who they love. Someone has to save these poor, misguided people from themselves — and that someone, conveniently, is the small group of very serious Christian men who’ve been waiting in the Heritage Foundation’s conference rooms since roughly the Carter administration.
J.D. Vance — the man who went from writing a book about Appalachian poverty to becoming the political instrument of a billionaire class that has done more to create Appalachian poverty than perhaps any other force in American history (a level of irony that should require a warning label) — wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts’ book and made it explicitly clear that the goal was:
“A fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics.”
Not Christian in the feed-the-hungry, heal-the-sick, blessed-are-the-meek sense. Christian in the sense that a very specific group of mostly white, mostly male, mostly extremely comfortable Americans have decided that their particular interpretation of scripture should be the organizing principle of 340 million people’s lives — whether those people have heard of it, agree with it, or indeed profess any religion whatsoever.
The whole magnificent con is built on Orbán’s foundational insight, which is this:
If your actual policies are unpopular — and they are, consistently polling somewhere between “root canal without anesthesia” and “finding a spider in your salad” — you don’t change the policies. You change the system.
You make it structurally difficult for the wrong people to vote. You own the information environment. You wrap every act of elite self-enrichment in the flag and the cross, and you tell the people who are being looted that the real threat is the immigrants, the gay schoolteachers, the coastal elites, the globalists — pick your villain from the spinning wheel of resentment and aim the crowd at it before they notice whose hand is in whose pocket.
Orbán did this. DeSantis tried to do this. Trump, with the instincts of a three-hundred-pound golden retriever who somehow understands television better than anyone alive, turbocharged this into a national movement.
And for a while, it worked like gangbusters.
Here’s the punchline, though, and it’s a good one.
Hungary just had elections. And the Hungarian people — who’ve been living under Orbán’s beautiful model for fifteen years — looked at the extraordinary personal corruption, the cronyism, the economy going sideways, the isolation from Europe, the cozy relationship with a war criminal in Moscow, and said, collectively and emphatically: no more.
Péter Magyar — a man whose existence alone gives me some residual faith in the democratic impulse — won in what appears to be a blowout. As he was giving his victory speech, Orbán’s outgoing foreign minister was reportedly shredding documents — which is exactly the move of a man who is confident he has nothing to hide.
The Orbán story is, at its core, the oldest story in the authoritarian playbook: a man promises to cleanse the nation of impurity, gets elected on culture war grievance, promptly begins stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, blames every problem on foreigners and minorities and political enemies — and eventually the people notice that the promised national renaissance looks a lot like their pockets being picked while someone waves a cross at them.
That story is playing out in Hungary. It’s playing out in Florida. It’s playing out in Washington.
Whether it plays out the same way here is, at this particular moment in history, very much the question. But somewhere in Budapest, in an office where a functionary is presumably still feeding documents into a shredder, the model is showing its cracks.
File that one away.
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The Cary Harrison Files — KPFK 90.7 FM / Pacifica Radio Network. More at caryharrison.com or goharrison.com· Live on YouTube & Substack · Text or message:310-737-TALK
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