Not long after Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp traveled to Hungary, where its authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, had implemented many of the populist-right policies that had energized the American president’s most ardent supporters. Notably, Orbán militarized Hungary’s southern border to stop the “invasion” of migrants — and he has made base racial appeals.
After a 2002 loss that his Fidesz Party blamed on fraud, Orbán regained power in 2010. As Beauchamp noted, he created “‘soft fascism’: a political system that aims to stamp out dissent and seize control of every major aspect of a country’s political and social life, without needing to resort to ‘hard’ measures like banning elections and building up a police state.”
Looking at Hungary, Beauchamp noted “warning signs for America.” Fast forward four years and one can’t help but recoil at the writer’s prescience. At its annual conference in Dallas last week, the Conservative Political Action Committee featured Orbán as a prominent speaker. He received the kind of rousing welcome that conservatives typically reserve for Trump.
