As Donald Trump unconstitutionally allows Elon Musk to attempt to radically reshape the federal government along lines more congenial to Musk’s personal business interests ,some observers have sought to compare Trump’s and Musk’s actions with the authoritarian policies of Trump’s fellow right wing leaders and ideological soulmates from around the world: for example Benyamin Netanyahu of Israel, Narendra Modi of India and particularly Viktor Orbán of Hungary. 

Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister since 2010, is particularly relevant as his autocratic government is considered highly worthy of emulation by many American conservatives. President Trump has praised him on multiple occasions; he was glowingly profiled by Tucker Carlson on Fox News in 2021. In a 2022 interview with the publication Hungarian Conservative, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said: “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.” He has been praised by Steve Bannon as “one of the great moral leaders in this world.” 

Orbán said in a 2014 speech that “the new state that we are building is an illiberal state” which “gives priority to Christian culture.” Hungary’s parliament, controlled by a super-majority of his Fidesz party, has passed laws heavily restricting any public manifestation of LGBTQ culture, banned NGOs that receive financial assistance from non-Hungarian sources as well as those that provide material assistance or public advocacy for “illegal” immigrants. For much of his reign, Orbán has made the demonization of third world immigrants the centerpiece of his appeal to his primary voting base, Hungary’s socially reactionary rural residents. In 2015, as a surge of refugees from war torn and impoverished countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Libya sought sanctuary in Hungary and other European countries, Orbán–declaring that the refugee flight was part of a demonic plot by George Soros to destroy European Christian civilization–began implementing a draconian crackdown on the refugees, earning him the undying admiration of MAGA enthusiasts. In a 2022 speech attacking immigrants, Orbán warned that Europeans “do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.” 

Orbán has almost completely broken the independence of Hungary’s mass media. He has done so in multiple ways. One is by using the Hungarian government’s power as the country’s largest media advertiser to threaten the withholding of advertising business to outlets critical of him. Another is through a special government body which issues fines against media outlets for coverage deemed “unbalanced” i.e. critical of Orbán or Fidesz. Perhaps the most significant tactic he has used is utilizing his government’s  influence to encourage the buy-up of Hungarian media outlets by business oligarchs with close ties to his government. 

Orbán’s government has been notable for its corruption. If Orbán was an ideological opponent of the MAGA movement, activists in the latter would doubtless be denouncing him for running a “crony capitalist” government. But as he is considered a role model of the first rank by MAGA partisans, they avert their eyes from the more unsavory aspects of his regime. 

Vox journalist Zack Beauchamp has for years covered what he calls the “soft fascism” of Orbán’s regime, analyzing its corruption–describing how the Hungarian leader has rewarded business funders of his Fidesz party with government contracts which have made them filthy rich. In past years, one such uber rich business funder was Lajos Simicsksa, Orbán’s college roommate. Recently, on X, Beauchamp noted how Simicska played a role during the period after Orbán’s 2010 election victory remarkably similar to that which Elon Musk is currently serving for Trump. The unelected Simicska exercised dominant influence over Orbán government policy and bureaucratic personnel decisions. However in 2014, he had a falling out with Orbán, who put a stop to the government contracts which had made Simicska the sixth richest person in Hungary. In the coming years Simicska’s wealth would plummet dramatically as Orbán coerced the sale or government takeover of his media properties and he was also forced to sell off his construction companies. 

Competitive Authoritarianism

Beauchamp has been using his perch at Vox to sound the alarm since Trump’s unfortunate return to office last month about the threat of the Orbánization of American politics. A similar theme was evident in his book published last July entitled The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. 

In The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp aims to describe how Trump and his allies like Orbán, Netanyahu and Modi have engineered the erosion of democracy in their respective countries without actually eliminating the institutions of bourgeois democracy and while even claiming to be passionate defenders of democracy. Beauchamp uses the term “competitive authoritarianism” to describe regimes of the Orbán type. On a superficial level, Orbán’s regime usually engages in no blatant repression and respects the formal electoral processes of Hungary’s bourgeois democracy. However Fidesz controls the key Hungarian governmental institutions which oversee elections, allowing the party to construct election rules in its favor, especially through extreme gerrymandering. Beauchamp notes that, through  gerrymandering, both Orbán’s Fidesz and  Republicans in American state legislatures have been able to win supermajorities in legislative elections, even if only narrowly winning or even slightly losing the overall popular vote. 

As to why autocratic leaders like Trump, Orbán, Netanyahu et.al have gathered such strong support in their respective countries, Beauchamp’s book has a reasonable answer, one that he also elaborated upon in an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi last year. These leaders have preyed on the fears of previously dominant social groups that immigrants, LGBTQ people, Muslims,, “woke” leftists or similar “outsiders” are out to destroy their countries’ traditional way of life. Bourgeois democracy allows  marginalized groups space to demand greater rights in mainstream society and this fact terrorizes some members of previously dominant social groups. The supposedly mortal threat to everything they have ever known and loved encourages some voters to support governmental authoritarianism in order to repress the threatening minority groups. 

Liberal Blindness 

In The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp expresses great reverence for the institutions of bourgeois democracy. For him, one of the great moments in human history was the immediate post Cold War period in the 1990’s when more countries worldwide than ever before abandoned dictatorship and adopted liberal democratic government. He attributes America’s overwhelming global power as responsible for the worldwide spread of democracy. Quoting the University of Toronto political scientist Seva Gunitsky, he allows that American global democracy promotion has “often been clumsy, inconsistent and hypocritical.” He chastises the Biden administration for giving Narendra Modi a state dinner in June 2023 when the Indian autocrat visited the US. At that time Modi was only the third visiting foreign leader to whom Biden’s government had given the honor of a state dinner. Beauchamp attributes this to the US administration’s desire to cultivate India as an ally against China. In any case, he argues that where the US offers its most substantive encouragement for other nations to adopt democracy is as a role model of a virtuous democratic society–in Gunitsky’s words: “its exalted status as a model worthy of emulation.” He fears that with MAGA encouraging the erosion of American democracy, the US will no longer be a model of democratic virtue for the world and may even encourage the worldwide decline of democracy. 

In The Reactionary Spirit, while exalting the virtues of liberal democracy, Beauchamp offers virtually no acknowledgement of the overwhelming power that business leaders exercise in liberal democratic societies at the expense of ordinary voters. In capitalist democracy, politicians of all political parties work to implement policies that maximize capital accumulation. In most cases, “democracy” in liberal democratic societies means little more than ordinary people  periodically voting in elections for different political parties representing different factions of capitalists. Donald Trump is nowhere near as alien to the American political tradition as Beauchamp implies. In this increasingly decaying and unstable capitalist world we live in, MAGA’s brutality and authoritarianism serves the goal that American politicians of all political persuasions have pursued long before Trump: to increase the power and profits of American capitalists. 

Beauchamp notes the close relationship that Bibi Netanyhau had with the late billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, that Narendra Modi has had with the billionaire corporate executive Gautam Adani and that which Orbán had with Lajos Simicska. He implies that the corrupt relations  these leaders have had with business oligarchs is somehow alien to liberal democratic traditions. While, like Trump’s current partnership with Elon Musk, these relationships may be unusual in their brazen corruption, I think it is fair to state that they are also a logical occurrence under liberal democratic political systems– where, after all, wealthy capitalists have always held overwhelming influence in the political arena, long before the likes of Trump, Netanyahu, Modi and Orbán appeared on the scene. 

Liberal Zionist Blinders

In The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp reaches alarming levels of absurdity when he discusses Netanyahu and broader Israeli society–which is interesting because, at the same time, he also demonstrates flashes of intelligent understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is above the abysmal American norm. American born to a Jewish mother and descended from Holocaust survivor grandparents, he writes of taking tours of the occupied territories with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of IDF veterans working to expose the brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. He writes of “mass expulsions of Palestinians during Israel 1948 War of Independence;” of “Palestinian citizens of Israel [who] were governed under martial law until 1966, and remained socially marginalized afterwards;” of Israel beginning “indefinite military rule” over Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 “with Israeli settlers, supported by the government, seizing huge chunks of Palestinian owned land.”

When he covers more recent events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he resorts to irritatingly neutral language and liberal Zionist cliches. Of the fighting between the two sides during the early 21st century he writes: “The Palestinians, as the weaker side, always bore the brunt of casualties in this fighting. But Israelis suffered too. Hamas’s suicide bombings during the Second Intifada and rocket volleys out of Gaza soured [Israel] on the left’s vision of Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace.”

When he writes of the Israeli “left,” he includes the Labor Party governments of the 1990’s led by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. He writes that Rabin initiated the Oslo peace process in 1993 under a philosophy that “sought to subordinate the principle of ethnicity to the democratic principle of equality.” He claims the Oslo Accords were designed to eventually secure “a two state solution to the conflict” and lead to “full independence” for a Palestinian state. This is absurd. The Oslo accords, while featuring a layer of rhetoric from Labor Party leaders about equality and human rights for Palestinians, were actually designed to reinforce Jewish supremacy in the occupied territories, with Israel keeping almost all of its Jewish settlements and keeping control of the territories’ key natural resources while Yasser Arafat’s PLO served as merely local government administrators in Gaza and Palestinian population centers in the West Bank. The “pro-peace” Labor governments in the 90’s actually built more settlements in the occupied territories than Netanyahu did in his first go around as Israeli prime minister from 1996 to 1999. If the Palestinians had managed to get anything resembling a state out of the Oslo process, from all available evidence of Israeli intentions–including the 2000 Camp David summit where Barak allegedly made a generous offer to Arafat–suggested it would have consisted of Gaza and Palestinian population centers in the West Bank whose territorial contiguity would be broken up by Israeli controlled Jewish settlements and Jewish only bypass roads. 

In other words, the goals of Labor leaders like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in the 90’s, which are lauded by Beauchamp as being committed to democratic values and human rights, were not fundamentally different than the goals today pursued by Netanyahu–whom Beauchamp rightly excoriates for embracing the blatantly fascistic and Jewish supremacist doctrines of Itamar Ben Gvir. Rabin and Peres were much more sophisticated in their public relations than Netanyahu, framing their policies in progressive language so as to appeal to western liberals like Beauchamp. 

Beauchamp reaches the depths of absurdity when he praises the Biden administration for its “more nuanced and critical position [toward Israel] as the death toll increased” during Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza. He expresses the fear that instead of such sterling moral critiques of Israel as offered by Biden, Israel’s Jewish supremacism and military aggressiveness “could get legitimization” from a prospective second Trump administration–remember, he published The Reactionary Spirit before the November 2024 US presidential election. 

Yes he is actually fearful that Israeli atrocities could possibly get “legitimization” from the US government.  One would think that he would recognize that the billions of dollars in military aid  Biden sent Israel during its recent fifteen month genocidal campaign in Gaza–and the protection Biden gave Israel in vetoing resolutions demanding ceasefires at the UN–was more than enough US “legitimization” for Israel’s genocidal crimes. One would also think that a person of his intelligence and worldly experience would recognize that Biden’s periodic public criticism of Israel, his suspension of a single shipment of 2000 pound bombs and sanctions on violent West Bank Jewish settlers were completely meaningless as far as deterring Israel’s military aggression. 

Beauchamp also praises the Biden administration for publicly putting its foot down against “ideas like ‘transferring’ Palestinian civilians out of Gaza.” Trump, of course, has recently raised a pother for proposing, in his loutish and thuggish way, to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. However, it appears that the Biden administration also (unsuccessfully) pushed Egypt (privately, behind closed doors) in late 2023 to agree to accepting the “transfer” of Palestinians out of Gaza. 

The Bottom Line

Beauchamp has done useful work exploring the authoritarian policies of leaders like Viktor Orbán. The Reactionary Spirit contains at least one helpful suggestion for combatting right wing authoritarianism: he briefly advocates for labor unions, one of the very few occasions in his book when he even obliquely broaches the subject of economic inequality. He notes that struggling in solidarity with workers from different backgrounds can potentially help reduce racism and bigotry among ordinary people. 

However, Beauchamp and liberals of his ilk will have a hard time combatting right wing authoritarianism if they don’t begin to recognize that the traditional center-left and center-right politicians that Beauchamp praises for their commitment to democratic principles have helped lay the groundwork for the likes of Trump, Orbán, Netanyahu and Modi (as well as other right wing leaders Beauchamp refers to in his book like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and the crypto Nazi AfD party in Germany). For example Democrats in the US rightly excoriate Trump for his extremely racist anti-immigrant policies but often ignore the fact that their own party–including during the Biden years–helped legitimize those racist policies by their own insistence on the need for harsh policies against undocumented immigrants. 

Beauchamp is right to attack right wing authoritarian leaders. He should understand that such leaders are also symptomatic of a fundamentally rotten system of capitalist democracy.

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