Regardless of which Party takes over following this year's election,
the damage is already done. If the Democratic Party gains control of
the Presidency and of both Houses, they will be faced with the task of
attempting to roll back the many programs cut or reduced by the Trump
administration. Even if there was a massive swing to the Progressive
Side, remember that Donald Trump has been busy approving a multitude
of conservative Federal Judges. The Supreme Court is now under the
control of the American Corporate interests. Money is still treated
as a First Class Citizen, and many social service agencies have been
eliminated or drastically reduced in size and effectiveness.
So whether we know it or not, we have already entered the New Dark Age.
Carl Jarvis, seeing no Light at the end of the Tunnel.
On 1/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
America Could Look Like Hungary if Trump Is Re-Elected
Donald Trump welcomes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the White
House in this still from a video from May. (The Guardian via YouTube)
Now that we’ve entered an election year, there is a lot of speculation
about
what America could look like if Donald Trump gets another term, by hook or
by crook. As Trump uses a crisis he created in the Middle East to distract
us from impeachment, increases his chances of reelection, and boosts the
fortunes of his buddies in the Military-Industrial Complex, it’s important
to understand how other demagogic leaders consolidate their power.
Steve Bannon has said that Hungary’s strongman prime minister Viktor Orbán
was “Trump before Trump.”
In August of 1989, my best friend Jerry Schneiderman and I spent the better
part of a week sitting in outdoor cafes on the Buda side of the Danube
River, eating extraordinary (and cheap!) food, staying in a grand old
hotel,
and generally exploring Budapest.
Two months earlier, there had been massive pro-democracy demonstrations
involving hundreds of thousands of people, demanding that the Soviet Union
let Hungary go. The summer we were there, over a quarter-million showed up
in Heroes’ Square for the reinterment of the body of Imre Nagy, a hero of
the ill-fated 1956 rebellion against the USSR. The final speaker was
26-year-old Viktor Orbán, a rising politician who would soon be a member of
Parliament. To an explosion of enthusiastic cheers, Orbán defied the
Soviets
(the only speaker to overtly do so) and openly called for “the swift
withdrawal of Russian troops.”
Nine months later, in March of 1990, Hungary held its first real elections
since 1945; in 1999, it joined NATO; and in 2004, it became a member of the
European Union.
For 20 years, Hungary was a functioning democracy; today, it’s a corrupt
oligarchy.
In nine short years since he was elected in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán, now fabulously wealthy by Hungarian standards and an oligarch
himself, succeeded in transforming his nation’s government from a
functioning European democracy into an autocratic and oligarchic regime of
single-party rule.
Orbán took over the Fidesz Party, once a conventional “conservative”
political party, with the theme of restoring “Christian” purity and making
“Hungary great again.” His rallies regularly draw tens of thousands.
He campaigned on building a wall across the entirety of Hungary’s southern
border, a promise he has largely kept.
He altered the nation’s Constitution to do what we’d call gerrymandering
and
voter suppression, ensuring that his party, Fidesz, would win more than
two-thirds of the votes in pretty much every federal election well into the
future.
He’s now packed the courts so thoroughly that legal challenges against him
and his party go nowhere.
His party has rewritten grade school textbooks to say that refugees
entering
the country are a threat because “it can be problematic for different
cultures to coexist.” Using this logic, he has locked up refugee children
in
cages.
When the Hungarian Helsinki Committee said “the indefinite detention of
many
vulnerable migrants, including families with small children, is cruel and
inhuman,” Orbán said the influx of Syrian refugees seeking asylum “poses a
security risk and endangers the continent’s Christian culture and
identity.”
He added, “Immigration brings increased crime, especially crimes against
women, and lets in the virus of terrorism.”
Five years and one week before American Nazis rallied in Charlottesville
and
murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing “patriots” held a
torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest
minority group, chanting “We will set your homes on fire!” Orbán’s police
watched without intervening. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of
Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”
Orbán refused to condemn him or the anti-Roma violence.
Orbán has handed government contracts to his favored few, elevating an
entire new class of pro-Orbán businesspeople who are in the process of
cementing control of the nation’s economy, as those who opposed him have
lost their businesses, been forced to sell their companies, and often fled
the country.
Virtually the entire nation’s press is now in the hands of oligarchs and
corporations loyal to him, with talk radio and television across the
country
singing his praises daily. Billboards and social media proclaim his
patriotism. His media allies are now reaching out to purchase media across
the rest of Europe to spread his right-wing message.
Last year he began dismantling the Hungarian Science Academy, replacing or
simply firing scientists who acknowledge climate change, which he has
called
“left-wing trickery made up by Barack Obama.”
The world, in particular the EU, has watched this nine-year political
nightmare with increasing alarm, and even the EU’s 2015 and 2018 attempts
to
essentially impeach Orbán have backfired, increasing his two reelection
margins as his handmaids in the media proclaim him a victim of a European
“deep state” and meddling foreigners, particularly George Soros (who,
ironically, once paid for a young Orbán to study in Britain).
While he blasts Soros and his own country’s Jewish leaders with
anti-Semitic
tropes, he was feted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who called him “a
true friend of Israel.” Orbán replied, “A Hungarian patriot and a Jewish
Israeli patriot will always find something in common.”
In May, the same month Rudy Giuliani said he had a former Ukrainian
prosecutor willing to testify that Joe Biden was corrupt, Donald Trump
invited Orbán to the White House for a state visit; Orbán has been one of
Trump’s two primary sources of information about how Ukraine opposed or
tried to sabotage the U.S. president.
In a rally three months before his White House meeting, Orbán said that
countries that accept refugees are producing “mixed-race nations.”
Orbán is now back in Hungary, ruthlessly using his own nation’s diplomatic
and criminal justice systems to aid foreign criminal oligarchs, having
hired
his own local versions of Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo.
Before you say, “It can’t happen here,” you may want to make a trip to
Budapest.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent
Media Institute
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of
the War on Voting and more than 25 other books in print. His most recent
project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing
fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
