Latest / The Nation Podcasts / How Hungary Fought Their Fascists w/ Zack Beauchamp and Jennifer McCoy | Fighting Fascism

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How Hungary Fought Their Fascists w/ Zack Beauchamp and Jennifer McCoy | Fighting Fascism · The Nation Podcasts

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[SPEAKER_04]: One fine morning, I was awakened And Bella Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chobela Chob
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[SPEAKER_04]: Oh part de jano, take me with you We'll build a child, build a child, build a child Child, child part de jano, please take me with you I don't feel frightened anymore Welcome listeners to another episode of The Fighting Fashism podcast on your co-host Aaron Reganburg and I'm here today with a great friend Matt de Silva and we're back with Jonathan Smucker who we missed last week
0:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, hey.
0:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Hi.
0:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Some exciting things have happened this past week.
0:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, big week, authoritarian dictatorship crumbling.
1:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Pretty sweet.
1:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I, that's pretty low energy.
1:06
[SPEAKER_06]: It's awful.
1:08
[SPEAKER_08]: It's 84 degrees in New York City right now and I'm kind of melting because I don't have my air conditioning units that up yet So we're uh, we're the podcast about how we beat right with authoritarianism and 10 million people in Europe just beat right with authoritarianism pretty sweet coincidental that it happened only a month after our podcast launching Excellent point
1:34
[SPEAKER_07]: As we will argue today, it's not a coincidence.
1:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Matt, this is of a noted hungry expert.
1:41
[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks to credit.
1:43
[SPEAKER_08]: We talked about this.
1:45
[SPEAKER_08]: There's a lot of hungry experts that have appeared out of the weeds over the last couple days, since the election.
1:53
[SPEAKER_08]: But we actually brought on to you actual.
1:56
[SPEAKER_08]: Hungry experts are guests today are Zach Beach and who's a senior correspondent at box Who has studied hungry and right wing authoritarianism in a lot of places is a book the reactionary spirit and Dr. Jennifer McCoy Who is regions professor political science at Georgia State University
2:14
[SPEAKER_08]: and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
2:18
[SPEAKER_08]: These guys know what they're talking about, which is nice.
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a fun conversation.
2:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was really cool.
2:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I really know a lot about Hungary until the best we can do.
2:27
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a bad guy in charge.
2:29
[SPEAKER_03]: You get a hot guy defecting from the bad guy government once a really great campaign.
2:36
[SPEAKER_03]: motivates people that, you know, corruption is bad and all the, and I think what our guest Jennifer talked about is like connecting the corruption of the urban government to the everyday lived experience of people in Hungary and like really drawing those lines and making it clear like, hey, you know, your health care is bad and all these different things that are happening in the country that are bad are because this guy's been in
3:04
[SPEAKER_03]: We should put him out.
3:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And he is kind of hot in some of these pictures.
3:08
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I thought it was a great conversation.
3:09
[SPEAKER_08]: I don't think we didn't agree on everything, which was nice and interesting.
3:14
[SPEAKER_08]: And we were trying to be transparent about when we were trying to fit this event into our sort of thesis and worldview.
3:22
[SPEAKER_08]: Though I think there's a good argument that it does fit quite well.
3:27
[SPEAKER_00]: This once again reinforces all of our priors.
3:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, my, all my takes are right.
3:32
[SPEAKER_03]: All my enemies are wrong.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I thought, you know, that was interesting.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: We were bantering before we officially started recording.
3:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing we were talking about with Zack is just how, I think it's a good thing to remember in conversations like this.
3:46
[SPEAKER_00]: How Americans are so used to.
3:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this even extends into the left.
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Americans are so used to any conversation about foreign policy being like,
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and how does it affect America?
3:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was fun to it was interesting to see them really insist upon some of the particulars of the situation of Hungary and try to elucidate those to us that there, you know, some of them are not like anything here and that this election was, you know, Hungary
4:17
[SPEAKER_00]: on its own terms.
4:19
[SPEAKER_08]: But also, we be one of them.
4:21
[SPEAKER_08]: We can beat the others.
4:22
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
4:22
[SPEAKER_08]: Trump's going down.
4:23
[SPEAKER_08]: Bad day in Trump World.
4:25
[SPEAKER_08]: Bad week in JD Vance World who went there and looks like an idiot as usual.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was really, that was really interesting.
4:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll, our listeners will hear it, but the perspective of Trump's bad brand around the world, including with other authoritarians and the reasons behind it, that's really sticking with me.
4:49
[SPEAKER_08]: Such a loser.
4:50
[SPEAKER_08]: He's even a loser among Nazis.
4:54
[SPEAKER_08]: Yet we lost him.
4:57
[SPEAKER_07]: Hope doesn't like him.
4:59
[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks again to our collaborators at the nation.
5:02
[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks again to course radish, who does the music for this podcast.
5:07
[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks again to our wonderful producer, Nick Demons.
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[SPEAKER_08]: And if we could ask where four episodes in now, I think we can make one ask of our audience, which is if you've been enjoying this, you can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever.
5:24
[SPEAKER_08]: It'll help us reach more people.
5:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you rate me five stars, I'll rate you five stars.
5:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And share it on social media, you know, the rolling ask.
5:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Text it to your friend and your biggest enemy.
5:43
[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you so much.
5:44
[SPEAKER_08]: Zach and Jennifer for joining the Fighting Fashges podcast on short notice to talk about this incredible event that just occurred.
5:51
[SPEAKER_08]: We're really, really excited to have folks with your expertise and deep, deep, long standing knowledge on this to help us think this through.
6:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, despite all my best efforts of becoming a hungry expert in the last 24 hours, I don't think I could have cared the water on this one.
6:12
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, this is the self-awareness we were talking on this before the show.
6:16
[SPEAKER_09]: I just like I feel like...
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[SPEAKER_09]: everybody pretends that they've been studying this for a long time now.
6:21
[SPEAKER_09]: But there's the honesty that we're craving here.
6:24
[SPEAKER_08]: There was an onion article in like 2001 or something that was like guy who like just bought book about Afghanistan.
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[SPEAKER_08]: Won't stop talking about everything you know is why I'm getting stuff.
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[SPEAKER_03]: 100% 100%.
6:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Zach, with that, can you start by giving listeners and myself?
6:39
[SPEAKER_03]: A little background on the electoral earthquake that just shook hungry and why it is so significant.
6:46
[SPEAKER_09]: Yes, so in, let's go back to why the clock back to 2010, that year Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban returned office.
6:56
[SPEAKER_09]: He had been Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002 at that point, and had ruled as basically a pretty conventional central right European politician.
7:04
[SPEAKER_09]: For the most part, there were few exceptions.
7:06
[SPEAKER_09]: One, Hungarian intellectual who turned that to have been prescient, called him a kind of fascist.
7:10
[SPEAKER_09]: And Orban himself said, his party contested the election results, but didn't really go anywhere in 2002, and he went on the office, basically saying he needed to build what he called a central political force field that would allow him to rule for two decades.
7:24
[SPEAKER_09]: And they spent those next eight years out of office from 2002 to 2010, planning all of the different things that they would do to ensure that they would not lose future elections, like they did in 2002.
7:38
[SPEAKER_09]: Think about Projects 2024, only much more systematic, much more rigorous and coordinated by a guy who was a very, very sophisticated political mind to begin with.
7:49
[SPEAKER_09]: Fedor was a trained lawyer, ironically, given who his enemies were.
7:53
[SPEAKER_09]: He studied in the UK on a fellowship, paid for by George Soros back in the day.
7:58
[SPEAKER_09]: When he started out as like an early anti-Soviet pro-democracy, that is a great fact.
8:04
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's a lot of money.
8:05
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, he did.
8:06
[SPEAKER_09]: He got the Soros paper.
8:07
[SPEAKER_09]: He got the Soros paper.
8:09
[SPEAKER_09]: So Orban comes to power and one of the first things he does is rewrite the constitution with nine days of debate.
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[SPEAKER_09]: Constitution was rewritten in secret.
8:17
[SPEAKER_09]: There are nine days of parliamentary debate and this totally transformed the Hungarian political system.
8:21
[SPEAKER_09]: And it did so in all sorts of different confusing and complicated ways that very few people, including even in Hungary, understood at the time.
8:30
[SPEAKER_09]: but the effect was basically to decap the democratic system and to lock in a variety of different changes that over the course of time would compound and make it harder and harder for the opposition to compete under a living level playing field.
8:45
[SPEAKER_09]: So 2010, Hungary's like a pretty normal post-communist democracy, right?
8:49
[SPEAKER_09]: Actually, it was widely regarded as one of the most successful case studies of a country transitioning to democracy from authoritarian communism.
8:56
[SPEAKER_09]: By 2026, Hungary was widely seen by experts and Jennifer can talk more about this as the only authoritarian country in the European Union.
9:03
[SPEAKER_09]: But something between 80 and 90 percent of the Hungarian media was owned by the government or government-aligned allies.
9:08
[SPEAKER_09]: The entirety of the judiciary had been taken over including the two high courts, the constitutional court and the Supreme Court by loyalists of the government.
9:18
[SPEAKER_09]: The main businesses in the country were often run by Orban's childhood friends, or sometimes there's law school friends, or sometimes just someone who really told me it up to them well.
9:28
[SPEAKER_09]: Basically, the corporate class in Hungary was overwhelmingly now, people who depended on government handouts.
9:33
[SPEAKER_09]: because the government had shifted the regulatory framework to be a highly political, that you would really only succeed if you aligned yourself with the state.
9:42
[SPEAKER_09]: And all of this was directed.
9:43
[SPEAKER_09]: This intense amount of corruption, the messing with the political system, the level of gerrymandering in Hungary was totally off the charts.
9:50
[SPEAKER_09]: We can talk about the details about how it worked.
9:52
[SPEAKER_09]: But the end result was to lock in a system that's widely described as a version of authoritarianism.
9:59
[SPEAKER_09]: The thing that they didn't do though was stuff the ballot boxes, right?
10:04
[SPEAKER_09]: It wasn't cheating in the formal sense of going in and changing what the ballots actually said.
10:10
[SPEAKER_09]: They relied on all these legal machinations, and some really kind of dirty old fashioned boat coerced vote by in certain places, in order to ensure that they would maintain power.
10:21
[SPEAKER_09]: The system seems nearly impregnable.
10:25
[SPEAKER_09]: But that nearly, I feel like I've written this article many times.
10:29
[SPEAKER_09]: So almost impossible for Orban to lose nearly unproignable.
10:33
[SPEAKER_09]: And I was with the adjective there because I was anticipating a case like this one.
10:37
[SPEAKER_09]: Smart.
10:37
[SPEAKER_09]: Where the public would backlash so effectively that eventually there might be something that would overwhelm their ability to control information.
10:46
[SPEAKER_09]: And so what happened essentially is the beginning.
10:49
[SPEAKER_09]: I emphasize beginning here, again, for reasons we can talk about later, the beginning of a form of a like oral machine change, a government that had transformed a democracy has now lost and they've been replaced by somebody who has the mandate to switch things back in the Hungarian system.
11:06
[SPEAKER_09]: If you have two thirds of votes in parliament, you can amend the Constitution at will and no one can stop you.
11:18
[SPEAKER_09]: And so they can do it, right, they can amend the Constitution.
11:21
[SPEAKER_09]: They could theoretically, if they're creative and aggressive enough, do a kind of legalistic regime change and build a democratic system in the ashes of the authoritarian one, or they could take over the old authoritarian one and bend it to their own purposes, become a new party.
11:35
[SPEAKER_09]: It's, it's, so it's not clear how Gary and democracy do you think there's a chance of that?
11:39
[SPEAKER_09]: I think it's theoretically possible, but it's too early to say.
11:42
[SPEAKER_09]: it's not impossible and I think there are reasons why it wouldn't happen.
11:45
[SPEAKER_09]: It's one of the possibilities.
11:46
[SPEAKER_09]: I would give it probably the lowest probability if any of the different outcomes, but it's not impossible.
11:52
[SPEAKER_09]: But what I will say right now is that there's hope for democracy and hungry for the first time at a long time.
11:57
[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you so much for laying that out Zach.
12:00
[SPEAKER_08]: And Jennifer, I want to bring you in an animating philosophy of this podcast is that the antidote to right-wing authoritarianism in America is a genuine economic populism that directs people's anger and frustration towards the forces that are actually causing them pain, which in the US, we would identify as
12:24
[SPEAKER_08]: billionaires, you know, corporate interests are take over of our political and economic and as billionaires.
12:30
[SPEAKER_09]: It's my best Bernie.
12:31
[SPEAKER_09]: That's good.
12:32
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah.
12:34
[SPEAKER_09]: Be, be, be, be, be, plus.
12:35
[SPEAKER_09]: Great.
12:36
[SPEAKER_08]: Thanks.
12:36
[SPEAKER_09]: That's what I'm going for.
12:37
[SPEAKER_08]: This might be a mystery, but in a lot of ways, I think that's kind of like a slightly different way of articulating in the concept you've developed of repolarizing from a left-right access to a
12:50
[SPEAKER_08]: to a top-down access, I think you've called it a nation versus oligarchs access, can you tell us a little bit more about this repolarization analytical framework of your words and how you see it applying to what just took place in Hungary?
13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, when I first saw the results of these elections, I thought, wow, this is a perfect illustration of this framework that I had developed with a co-author of Marat Sumer and from Turkey.
13:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is that when we're already in a polarized state, what we call a pernicious polarization, extreme toxic polarization that's harming democracy.
13:28
[SPEAKER_01]: then simply depolarizing, trying to just diffuse it may not work, because it's very hard to to bring together these two sides that have been so polarized.
13:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And so instead what we were arguing is to shift the axis, the line of conflict, the axis that it was had been on, the
13:51
[SPEAKER_01]: especially that the incumbent government that is polarizing has defined it as, whether that's left or right, or, you know, in case of a hungry, it could be European, you know, EU versus Russia on safety versus fear.
14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what Orban was running on.
14:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So shift that to another line definition of the conflict that could
14:20
[SPEAKER_01]: galvanize a large majority of people.
14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what I saw him do, he defined as the nation versus the clan, referring to Orobod's clan, the cronies of the Zappus talking about.
14:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's really a corrupt oligarchy.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And the nation is the good of the people.
14:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is how can we, and I think in the US, what people are talking about here is how can we create a country where everyone can thrive,
14:48
[SPEAKER_01]: a country that is truly for all, for all people living here, and so that could be presented as, you know, it used to be called the 99% versus the 1%, but it could be, you know, the whole country, the people of the country versus the billionaires versus,
15:08
[SPEAKER_01]: the corrupt oligarchy, whatever you want to, what words to resonate is something that needs to be defined.
15:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's what I was thinking was a wonderful lesson from Hungary.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But I would say that besides doing that, to do that, you have got to connect the concepts to people's everyday lives.
15:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And so if we, you know, we had tried before democracy versus authoritarianism.
15:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And I saw that
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And for that election, and also in Turkey in 2023, and in those cases, the framing of democracy versus the authoritarianism did not
15:46
[SPEAKER_01]: settle.
15:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It did not reach people.
15:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Democracy is too abstract and it needs to be tied to the daily lives of people.
15:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's also what I saw Peter Majar doing in his campaign.
15:58
[SPEAKER_01]: The corruption is affecting your life this way.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't have a functioning healthcare system in hospitals because of the corruption of this clan of Orban.
16:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's got to be tied to the daily lives of
16:16
[SPEAKER_08]: You listed Turkey there and a couple of countries.
16:20
[SPEAKER_08]: I think we'd add maybe.
16:23
[SPEAKER_08]: The United States, 2024, the Harris campaign, which talked a lot about democracy, and I think talked about it in a much less concrete way than Peter Rajar.
16:33
[SPEAKER_09]: I just want to register that I profoundly disagree with this diagnosis of what happened with Harris and with utility of democracy is a political idea and conversation idea in general, but I don't want to derail our council to bring it in.
16:46
[SPEAKER_09]: Look, I just recently did this long research project about this, and I think it's just important that people understand what the purpose and the utility of democracy rhetoric.
17:00
[SPEAKER_09]: I think the campaigns are very different in terms of where and utility the talking about democracy is an abstraction can produce.
17:07
[SPEAKER_09]: First of all, I think there's no compelling evidence that this is an empirical question but there's no compelling evidence that it cost Harris's lost in 2024, which I think was largely over-determined by, well,
17:17
[SPEAKER_09]: But secondly, you also had just the year before that, midterm elections were democracy, and Republican extremism was an extremely prominent U.S., or a prominent campaign theme, and it was really effective.
17:31
[SPEAKER_09]: Then you have other elections, like the Brazilian election,
17:33
[SPEAKER_09]: That elected Lula where democracy was no overarching theme in a really popular and powerful one as deployed by a left populist right, but was brought in Central Wright voters that proved crucial to his win, but also I think more fundamentally talking about democracy as a concept is important this electoral analysis tends to align the value of talking about democracy under attack when you're dealing with an incumbent authoritarian regime, rallying people against that regime really requires naming what the kind of attack it is.
18:03
[SPEAKER_09]: And so there's a, and that I think, I just, I can send this whole article that I wrote about this recently, but it's comparative evidence suggests that's overwhelmingly important in galvanizing opposition to a current income and take it over effect.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Zach, let me dig into that with you for a minute here.
18:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that the democracy rhetoric cost Harris so much as that it didn't do anything for her.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And specifically, you talked about that it was helpful for Biden in 2020.
18:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he was also helpful for Democrats in the midterms in 2018.
18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: However, there's two things I want to unpack with that, and I'd be curious about either or both of your thoughts on this.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: One is that, and you mentioned this yourself, that some of this is is the role of talking about democracy when,
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's combined with anti-incumbency versus when you are the incumbent because part of what's happening right now is there's so much anti-incumben sentiment and this is a global phenomenon that's basically sticking to everyone probably because the underlying neoliberal order isn't going anywhere and
19:10
[SPEAKER_00]: and it is in serving people, right?
19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So that there's the anti-accompancy piece.
19:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second piece, I'm curious about your thoughts on this.
19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think it did a lot for Biden, with certain voting demographics in both 2018 and the midterms for Congress, and then for Biden in 2020.
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: But,
19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: In the United States, even though Democrats swept in 2018, they didn't win more than our plus two districts, and I was alarmed by the results in 2018 because Republican turnout, the incumbent party, the party in control of the White House,
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: had greater turnout in 2018 than any time in 50 years before that, and that was alarming to me, and not only that, the Democratic turnout was more affluent voters and all the while, both in 2018, 2020, then in 2022 and 2024, progressively, Democrats continued to bleed out at expedited rates, working class voters, and at first it was mostly white working class voters, and as we know it then became
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: uh uh black and and brown and Asian working class voters as well so I I guess my proposition I'm not advocating that we stop talking about democracy.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't get me wrong.
20:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I care about democracy But I think in a situation like we have that rhetoric of defending democracy has played with more affluent highly educated people
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And it hasn't landed with working class voters who might not think that democracy is necessarily doing very much for them at this moment.
20:43
[SPEAKER_08]: One time I'd ask again for both of you is what did you see in this last election with what measure was how he was deploying concerns about democracy and how he was connecting them to the everyday.
20:57
[SPEAKER_08]: lived experience and struggles of Hungarians as they were feeling and under this anti-democratic system.
21:04
[SPEAKER_09]: Let me start with the first question.
21:06
[SPEAKER_09]: And at first, first of all, say there's a reason I mentioned the 2022 midterms, not the other ones.
21:11
[SPEAKER_09]: Biden was an incumbent, defending an unpopular incumbent record.
21:14
[SPEAKER_09]: And yet, he put up the best, I think it's the second best performance in a midterm election for a president, the best in the modern era, the best one being,
21:26
[SPEAKER_09]: state of affairs, right?
21:27
[SPEAKER_09]: And the reason that that performance was so good in Congress was because voters, and this is very clear in the data post-mortem's by catalyst to other places, voters punished Republican extremism.
21:37
[SPEAKER_09]: State Secretary of State candidates that ran on the big lie lost, I think, pretty much across the board.
21:42
[SPEAKER_09]: Candidates that were strongly associated with Republican stances on the 2022 2020 election excuse me.
21:47
[SPEAKER_09]: or on rovers as way it right exactly.
21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That was huge.
21:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I was going to say.
21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, where we can't ignore how important reproductive rights was and the role of what?
21:58
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, no, I totally agree.
22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Which was not, which was not the abstract democracy.
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's how is it going to affect your life?
22:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the freedom, the freedom, and freedom is a good word in the United States.
22:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That resonates more than democracy because
22:15
[SPEAKER_01]: we are divided on democracy and populist authoritarians also say they are going to restore or deepen democracy.
22:24
[SPEAKER_01]: They run on democracy as well.
22:26
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the problem.
22:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're polarized in the United States about who is the threat to democracy and whether it's improving or not who's improving it.
22:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So, sorry Zack, I interrupt you.
22:37
[SPEAKER_09]: No, I agree that that's what they're trying to do.
22:40
[SPEAKER_09]: Right, but that's that's the whole way, which they succeed is by taking up the mantle of democracy for themselves, so you made your part of the argument in my book.
22:48
[SPEAKER_09]: The so that's that's really important.
22:50
[SPEAKER_09]: It's essential to bring in, but I also think.
22:53
[SPEAKER_09]: that movements that are inherently that are by their nature of authoritarian, they can't keep up that mask forever.
22:59
[SPEAKER_09]: And they do things that cause a contradiction between democracy, which is actually a widely held value.
23:05
[SPEAKER_09]: I think if you look at polling data, most people in the United States and Hungary, by the way, including Warbon supporters and deep Trump supporters, believe that they were upholding democracy and say they believe even it.
23:15
[SPEAKER_09]: And when you can point out a contradiction, a gap,
23:17
[SPEAKER_09]: between their actual actions and the things that they say to believe.
23:20
[SPEAKER_08]: And this is why, like when armed gunmen shoot, you know, citizens in the prison.
23:25
[SPEAKER_08]: Exactly.
23:25
[SPEAKER_09]: Or when you send thugs to raid the Capitol, right?
23:28
[SPEAKER_09]: Now, can you where six has, has faded in the public memory, but it mattered in 2022.
23:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that was the take.
23:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I was, I mean, it feels like, in some ways, the midterms in 2022 were just closer to Jan 6.
23:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And by, you know, we were talking about this earlier, like people's attention spans are so short by November 2024.
23:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Jan 6 didn't matter, which is crazy, but kind of feels like, I don't know, that was the case with a lot of people.
23:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the things that Majar did and his campaign that were related to democracy was he talked about the rule of law.
24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: He actually talked about,
24:04
[SPEAKER_01]: hungry, rejoining within the European Union, rejoining the European Prosecutors' Office, which would then be able to come and help to investigate and charge and bring to trial that corrupt offenders.
24:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had maybe a little bit too much punishment in his,
24:25
[SPEAKER_01]: campaign message, I'd be curious what Zack thought about that, but yeah, he did talk about retribution a lot, and that holding them accountable and restoring the rule of law was an important part, and he brings that together with the corruption and how the corruption was affecting their hospitals and their loss of jobs and all of that.
24:44
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I would also add this sort of
24:53
[SPEAKER_09]: By most European countries standards, he might just be considered right-mind.
24:56
[SPEAKER_09]: He sets in pretty awful things about migrants during the campaign.
25:00
[SPEAKER_09]: One comment about migrants potentially eating the animals, the Buddha Peshizu, right?
25:04
[SPEAKER_09]: This is a guy who under normal circumstances, well, the serves of this podcast would not want to vote for.
25:11
[SPEAKER_09]: I think I'm a whole, right?
25:12
[SPEAKER_09]: But,
25:14
[SPEAKER_09]: Why did left-wing Hungarians vote for him overwhelmingly?
25:18
[SPEAKER_09]: And why did not only did they vote for him, but left-wing parties did not run candidates in key districts.
25:25
[SPEAKER_09]: Right, they just suspended.
25:26
[SPEAKER_09]: Basically suspended their existence as political parties to allow a battle between a far right and a center-right party.
25:32
[SPEAKER_09]: Why do they do that?
25:34
[SPEAKER_09]: Well, there's one answer, it's democracy.
25:36
[SPEAKER_09]: They knew it was the only way they were going to survive.
25:38
[SPEAKER_09]: So democracy played this incredibly important, uniting role because, and it probably would have had gone the other way, too, right?
25:46
[SPEAKER_09]: If it had been the case in 2024, and Peter Muggier emerged as like the key candidate of the opposition, had he been someone on the center left?
25:54
[SPEAKER_09]: It would have caused, and this had sort of happened in other countries, right?
25:57
[SPEAKER_09]: It would have caused an alignment against the authoritarian.
26:01
[SPEAKER_09]: This is, again, to go back to the 2022 Brazilian election.
26:04
[SPEAKER_09]: You saw the same thing right away, Lulo is the candidate of the left and belongs to any candidate of the left.
26:08
[SPEAKER_09]: But after the first round runoff, center-right candidates flooded to endorse him, because they thought that Jerbal Sonara was a much greater threat to Brazilian democracy.
26:16
[SPEAKER_09]: And so that was a really important way in which democracy glued the coalition together, people who agreed on the fundamentals of the system.
26:23
[SPEAKER_09]: the need to defeat an authoritarian were able to unite despite ideological oppositions because they believed that everyone should get a fair shot at competing in the democratic game.
26:34
[SPEAKER_09]: And so it was really essential, even if it wasn't, you know, I probably didn't move the median feed as a voter, I think that's true, but appeals to democracy and concern for it where we're essential to the electoral outcome.
26:47
[SPEAKER_08]: Can I ask you on this point that Manjara?
26:50
[SPEAKER_08]: And by the way, are we saying that right?
26:52
[SPEAKER_08]: Manjara?
26:53
[SPEAKER_08]: Manjara?
26:54
[SPEAKER_08]: Manjara?
26:54
[SPEAKER_08]: All right.
26:55
[SPEAKER_08]: But on this point that Manjara is a conservative and Zack, this is the last time and the most time where we're going to, I'm going to try to do the like, our worldview does it match or not, and just want to be very open about that.
27:14
[SPEAKER_08]: It would be very convenient for folks like Smucker and me and Matt who believe the Democratic Party needs to go into more popular lister action to stay.
27:22
[SPEAKER_08]: Yes, Majar is a conservative in his background, but he focuses campaign right as Jennifer said on oligarchy on running against the corruption of of Orbans billionaire buddies.
27:35
[SPEAKER_08]: He said a few families own half the country.
27:38
[SPEAKER_08]: he promised a wealth tax on the ultra rich.
27:41
[SPEAKER_08]: Right, to my ear, it sounds a lot like economic populace in the US from your impression of Bernie Sanders, is there on Mondani to Greg and Platner to less left-coded populace, like James Telenrico and Texas, I guess the question for both of you is is that a fairer comparison or in my twisting reality to match my world view in agenda?
28:06
[SPEAKER_09]: think it's complicated.
28:08
[SPEAKER_09]: Fair.
28:08
[SPEAKER_09]: Right.
28:09
[SPEAKER_09]: And I, let me start this by saying where I agree with you, or rather, maybe I disagree with everybody.
28:15
[SPEAKER_09]: Because I read this editorial in the New York Times that was like, he's proof that what we need to do is pivot to the center on cultural issues, if Democrats do that, and they run on
28:25
[SPEAKER_09]: a more slightly more popular second on the platform they will win, and I just thought they're reading this and thinking, yes, no, that hungry is a different country, right?
28:32
[SPEAKER_09]: It's a different country with really fundamentally different politics, and it's culture, different culture, and a different political context and background, like this is a country that had been in the authoritarian state for 16 years, right?
28:44
[SPEAKER_09]: What was going to unite people?
28:46
[SPEAKER_09]: What was going to work in the contours of that?
28:48
[SPEAKER_09]: After, you know, again, 16 years of fetus demagoguery against LGBT people, against migrants, against George Soros, against academics, like, imagine if Fox News was literally the only thing that you were allowed to watch on television.
29:02
[SPEAKER_09]: Right, Peter Meijar was not allowed to go on Hungarian state TV.
29:05
[SPEAKER_09]: They banned him.
29:06
[SPEAKER_09]: He did his first interview after winning.
29:08
[SPEAKER_03]: That's how I was going to click by the way where he was like, that's great to be here.
29:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I am shutting this thing down when I take it.
29:14
[SPEAKER_03]: It's wild.
29:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It's wild.
29:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's wild.
29:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really good clip.
29:19
[SPEAKER_09]: That is.
29:20
[SPEAKER_09]: So yeah, like I think you probably did need to do that kind of stuff in Hungary and try to defuse the culture war element of it.
29:30
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't think that same situation is operative in the United States when people have much more socially liberal views on all these issues.
29:36
[SPEAKER_09]: Hungry is a culture and more conservative country than the United States says.
29:41
[SPEAKER_09]: It's also more economic and redistribution of the country.
29:43
[SPEAKER_09]: The United States has much more complicated relationship with the state and with the idea of the state being involved in the economy than Hungarian stew.
29:52
[SPEAKER_09]: To the point where the Hungarian right is offering those kinds of proposals that you describe.
29:56
[SPEAKER_09]: And those proposals were also happening and being offered in the context of a country where the concentration of wealth and corruption had become synonymous with the ruling regime, right?
30:08
[SPEAKER_09]: It was, everyone had been really frustrated at economic underperformance by the government.
30:13
[SPEAKER_09]: And so a Latin corruption was a way of saying, I'm going to tear down this system that is causing there been a massive level of out migration.
30:20
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm great at being experiencing a population decline.
30:23
[SPEAKER_09]: because not because the birth rate was low, that's part of it, but because people were leaving, especially young people.
30:28
[SPEAKER_09]: Here, anyone, like one guy met said this country was shutting down, and that was back in 2018, and it's gotten worse since then.
30:34
[SPEAKER_09]: And so that level of despair and anger,
30:39
[SPEAKER_09]: uh it really is difficult to compare to a country like the United States that had a prior to Trump relatively strong global economic performance and what people are unhappy with the economy and lots of ways it's not the same level of all-consuming demolition.
30:54
[SPEAKER_09]: So, it just makes me very, very cautious in either direction, because you can spin this narrative in the way that you just did or in the way that your time stood.
31:03
[SPEAKER_09]: It makes me cautious about saying that importing the lesson here is to import either of those, any of the Peter Mushard tactics into the United States.
31:13
[SPEAKER_09]: I just think the context is so different when it comes to the campaign trail and I'm not sure how central political messaging even was to that, but I hesitate to give it that level of power if that makes sense.
31:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think Zach is right here because when I'm talking about what we can learn is how he repolarized, how he reframed the narrative, it doesn't have to be the same narrative, the same new dividing line.
31:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm saying every country has to pick what's going to be good for them.
31:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's the problem in the United States.
31:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Americans really respect economic success.
31:46
[SPEAKER_01]: and the people who achieve economic success.
31:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in some ways, like inequality is not a winning theme in the United States, incredibly, even with our vast income inequality and wealth inequality.
32:00
[SPEAKER_01]: That alone is not because people think that the billionaires got there from their own merit.
32:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And it has to be laid out as in Bernie tries to do this and others try to do this.
32:12
[SPEAKER_01]: that they didn't get there just by themselves.
32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: They had a lot of help.
32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that was always Elizabeth Warren's message as well.
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is that concept in the United States.
32:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very strong, a respect for somebody who raises themselves up supposedly, you know, by the bootstraps and does it all on their own, that we have this myth, even though it's not true.
32:31
[SPEAKER_08]: So the next step, I would argue that the next step, which is that these billionaires and corporations are rigging the rules.
32:41
[SPEAKER_08]: rotten system that has a lead in punity where if you're rich, you can be a pedophile and nothing happens even, right?
32:48
[SPEAKER_08]: Like I think there's a way, I think there's a way that to your point Jennifer of doing that bottom-up polarization, even given some of those cultural dynamics you mentioned.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's right, Eridan, and even with Occupy Wall Street, which you mentioned Jennifer and with Sanders rhetoric, and there's been a number of studies on this that it's the intersection of the concentration of wealth and and the game being rigged.
33:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not just that these people got rich, it's that then they rigged the game and that people who were supposed to be serving the the public interest are instead, you know, kind of the lap dogs of these billionaires, that that's really, there's a lot of evidence that
33:26
[SPEAKER_08]: That was Trump's message, right?
33:28
[SPEAKER_08]: Like, the system's broken.
33:29
[SPEAKER_08]: I'm not in the slump, and it worked.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
33:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was Trump's was ambiguous.
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't saying like, hey, wealth is concentrated too much.
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And the problem is concentrated wealth.
33:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is this, you know, this empty drain the swamp.
33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: message.
33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, exactly what you were saying.
33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's true.
33:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like any time a victory happens.
33:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, this case proves all the things that I was going to say, which Aaron very self-aware, the New York Times editorial, not as self-aware.
33:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't see the same person writing New York Times article saying, Mundani refused to throw Palestine or trans people into the bus and why?
34:01
[SPEAKER_00]: That's therefore clearly the template of how Democrats should do it, right?
34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the immediate question for me is not your right wing on all these social issues in a way that we would not endorse How much did that even matter?
34:23
[SPEAKER_00]: How much was it necessary?
34:24
[SPEAKER_00]: What if he had done differently?
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know there's too many there's too many factors, but I wanted to ask a question about Madger's Focus on Orben's corruption
34:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we joked about before we started that, you know, of course, we're all coming from the context of the United States, so we're all like, how does the supply to the United States are not applied to the United States.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But my understanding is that a hungry corruption has a different kind of resonance, both because of, you know, the past, however long with Warbon, but also it's associated with the old guard communist regime that a lot of people hated.
35:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a structural resonance there that some people might argue just doesn't work in the same way here.
35:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe Americans just don't care about corruption as much.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's that we're resigned to it.
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm curious about what you think about that.
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the Trump regime is arguably the most corrupt administration in the history of the country.
35:34
[SPEAKER_09]: On these messaging questions, this is the one that I feel like there should be the most to draw on here in the United States from what happened in Hungary for for those reasons.
35:46
[SPEAKER_09]: But this is something that I struggle with all the time because you look at the data in the abstract.
35:54
[SPEAKER_09]: And it's like, I think Americans really hate corruption in principle, right?
35:58
[SPEAKER_09]: There've been the progressive movement in the late 19th century.
36:02
[SPEAKER_09]: It was really focused on the corruption of the urban machines and the need to install good governance and so on.
36:07
[SPEAKER_09]: So corruption's been a politically powerful theme in the US at different points in time.
36:12
[SPEAKER_09]: And the evidence suggests people are angry about it right now.
36:17
[SPEAKER_09]: There's the political scientists that we have at Stanford, James Adam Bonica, who does a lot of work on the need for corruption as a sort of political load star for Democrats and compiles a lot of compelling data on this point.
36:29
[SPEAKER_09]: And it gets them all and keeps not happening, right?
36:31
[SPEAKER_09]: It just doesn't emerge.
36:33
[SPEAKER_09]: as this issue that does the kind of repolarization that Jennifer has rightly identified is really important to defeat the authoritarianists.
36:40
[SPEAKER_09]: Now, why is that not happening?
36:43
[SPEAKER_09]: And this is something I don't have a good answer to, right?
36:46
[SPEAKER_09]: But we can let's look at the Hungarian case.
36:47
[SPEAKER_09]: Like, so why is it that it took so long for corruption to become such an issue in Hungary?
36:53
[SPEAKER_09]: Because in 2022, there was a central right opposition candidate who was sort of a consensus.
37:01
[SPEAKER_09]: and was trying to do exactly what happens in 2026, but he failed.
37:05
[SPEAKER_09]: He lost and Orban won a majority of the popular vote for the first time since 2010, and had maintained his two-thirds seat in parliament.
37:14
[SPEAKER_09]: So that formed very poorly, right, despite the corruption of the government, what's the, what's the variable?
37:21
[SPEAKER_09]: It's the difference here.
37:23
[SPEAKER_09]: Why is Magja are so much more effective?
37:26
[SPEAKER_09]: And I almost think it has less to do with the content, the political content of what he was saying, and the credibility of him as a messenger.
37:35
[SPEAKER_09]: He's a very good public speaker, very good at tireless campaigner.
37:38
[SPEAKER_09]: He went across, I believe literally the entire country went to every constituency and campaigned in all of them, small countries, he's here to do.
37:46
[SPEAKER_09]: But he also,
37:49
[SPEAKER_09]: Kessa was from the machine, and so when he talked about corruption, when he produced recordings as evidence of corruption ongoing, people were like, oh, so what I'm hearing, the stuff, these rumors that are floating around, the stuff that I can catch in the opposition press, that's all real, and this guy's validating it, and it made him this incredibly old and messenger independent of his positions on actual political issues.
38:16
[SPEAKER_09]: It was the
38:19
[SPEAKER_09]: that mattered so much.
38:20
[SPEAKER_09]: And I think what's missing in the American context is not like a regime defector in the way of their being.
38:25
[SPEAKER_09]: We've had plenty of people broken with the Trump administration and done the same thing.
38:28
[SPEAKER_09]: I mean, and this is like contrary to everything I believe about politics, which is that most things are structural and a lot of out of individual hands.
38:36
[SPEAKER_09]: I think you need somebody to fill that role and it won't be exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons.
38:44
[SPEAKER_09]: But somebody who's personal biography and whose position of credibility when talking about these issues gives them a way to highlight the deep corruption of the Trump administration, I think that would be the catalyst to take corrupt or maybe events out in the world, maybe something
38:59
[SPEAKER_09]: comes to light that is so bad.
39:01
[SPEAKER_09]: I though I don't know what the possibly be worse than we already know.
39:03
[SPEAKER_09]: In terms of Trump corruption, right?
39:05
[SPEAKER_09]: It's pretty bad.
39:06
[SPEAKER_09]: The underlying happens.
39:07
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's a couple.
39:09
[SPEAKER_01]: The fact that the fact that he is a defector from the regime is some I'm just going to bring up too.
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's that's incredibly important.
39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not that we want to say that has to be the candidate for the United States as well.
39:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody, you know, from inside the
39:28
[SPEAKER_01]: There we go.
39:29
[SPEAKER_01]: There we go.
39:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the candidate.
39:31
[SPEAKER_01]: The difference, uh, another difference between 2022 and 2026 in Hungary is that those were all established parties that that coalition was trying to run.
39:43
[SPEAKER_01]: behind.
39:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And many of those parties, particularly the largest and the leftist one, the socialist one, was completely discredited from the last time they ran.
39:52
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not even change their leader.
39:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was the problem too.
39:57
[SPEAKER_01]: In Turkey, they wouldn't change the leader of the establishment party.
40:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he wouldn't leave.
40:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The leaders don't leave.
40:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is an important lesson, I think.
40:05
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, that has no application to the United States.
40:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
40:09
[SPEAKER_08]: The party where the leadership is entrenched in the United States.
40:13
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fact of coming and, you know, establishing a new party as Modger did was is one thing.
40:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So blowing up the party system and the other parties just, you know, have no representation in the parliament anymore.
40:25
[SPEAKER_01]: right now.
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and another thing is, how do you get your message out and exact described?
40:31
[SPEAKER_01]: He went around personally around the country.
40:33
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a small country.
40:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's only 10 million people.
40:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the United States, Jonathan asked, why doesn't this become an issue, the corruption and the rigging in the US?
40:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, part of it is people don't know about the Trump corruption.
40:52
[SPEAKER_01]: because it's not being covered.
40:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you got to break through, which should be much easier in the U.S than even it wasn't hungry.
40:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, since he couldn't even get on the main, you know, public television stations exact described.
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So that should be easier, but it still is breaking through to get that through.
41:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we can also look at how galvanizing the Epstein scandal has been
41:22
[SPEAKER_01]: or the sacs and the pedophilia that is really upsetting people, but the impunity there is key and that has broken through.
41:35
[SPEAKER_03]: had a few thoughts about this in reading in my 48 hours of becoming a hungry expert.
41:41
[SPEAKER_03]: One was like, so being so jealous of the ability to just start a new party, I just feel like there's so much baggage associated with the Democrats that if you had like a charismatic
41:54
[SPEAKER_03]: really, you know, good politician, and then you named it like the Mississippi River Party, because it's the tissue of party seemed after a river, right?
42:03
[SPEAKER_03]: In Hungary?
42:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like, you know, off the bat, even before you launch a policy page, you're pulling at like 30%.
42:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the Rocky Mountain Party or something, and you just have like a random, you know, decently a talented person.
42:18
[SPEAKER_08]: I think the Republican Party kind of did this to the degree that you can do it in our two-party system in 2016, right, where they had this outsider who had no ties to the unpopular establishment that, you know, George W. Bush, Iraq Warl, like there was a lot of baggage Republicans had.
42:33
[SPEAKER_08]: Trump was able to exercise that by running against as an insurgent against that system Everyone in that system tried to stop them and he beat them all and then he could say okay Like we're exercised of all that and I think Americans in a large part were then like okay This is clearly a new thing because Trump was so outside of it I don't have to worry about you know the Iraq War and George W. Bush and whatever other baggage I had it And so I think that like the as close as we could come if we thought the students the big lesson
43:03
[SPEAKER_08]: is like 20 to 28 having as much as possible an outsider who's run into an insurgent campaign against the establishment and winning.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, real just to piggyback on that for a second.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think we forget this now.
43:17
[SPEAKER_00]: We now look because Trump has consolidated control of the Republican Party.
43:20
[SPEAKER_00]: We forget on the left and liberals forget this that Trump wage in all our insurgency that the establishment tried to stop.
43:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And
43:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of the key demographics that he won over, or disaffected folks, low voter turnout folks that made his winning coalition go over the top, were convinced by that by that display of actually, taking out one coordinated person after another, and of course Hillary Clinton.
43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: was the grand prize in 2016.
43:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, absent a parliamentary system where we can viably create a new party and have a fresh start.
43:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We need, I mean, in some ways it's basic.
43:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the corporate boardroom structure our corporation has a crisis.
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: What do they do?
44:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd be head to leader publicly and say this person is acts.
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how you rebrand the corporation.
44:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the Republican party needed it and they consolidated with it.
44:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's lessons for the Democratic Party.
44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why I am,
44:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I am an M&M, a 2028 person, you heard it here first.
44:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it sounds like a joke, but it's like we actually need somebody who gets their political and social capital from outside of the system, even Bernie Sanders, in my opinion, plays too nice within the system.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We need somebody to flood it and blow it up.
44:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry to go on my rant here, I was talking about M&M.
44:38
[SPEAKER_00]: M&M, 2028.
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they're a foul for a second.
44:41
[SPEAKER_09]: I thought you were saying, yeah, M&M and you were like, M&Dani, M&Dani, someone else and like, he can't run for president.
44:45
[SPEAKER_00]: No, he can't run, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
44:59
[SPEAKER_00]: the stuff writes itself.
45:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But where are we going with a question for this for our panelists?
45:04
[SPEAKER_08]: Wait, is there any response to that?
45:06
[SPEAKER_09]: The smokers, I read, I don't know anything about Eminem's policy platform, so I'm not gonna, it's pretty good, actually.
45:17
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm not gonna weigh in on him for president, I'm trying to imagine it's me next.
45:22
[SPEAKER_09]: I don't know anything about him.
45:24
[SPEAKER_09]: In fact, that's, but I guess this kind of argumentation has made me much more sympathetic than I was in the past to the sort of pie in the sky ideas of making America into a multi-party democracy.
45:51
[SPEAKER_09]: you know, parting with legislate its way out of existence, but I think that one of the arguments he's been making over the years that is one of the over is there is so much voter disgust with the current structure of the two party system that somebody who can credibly campaign as an anti system candidate, not just in the sense of I'm from the outside right everyone calls themselves an outsider in it.
46:18
[SPEAKER_09]: where you talk about Graham Platten earlier is like this sort of portraying self-slipped blue collar guy when his grandfather's a famous architect, right?
46:26
[SPEAKER_09]: There's an effort to build yourself up as a certain kind of person because that's what people want and that's certain that a person somebody wants is somebody who's not from the traditional lead class.
46:38
[SPEAKER_09]: And that's because there's huge amounts of public frustration in the United States with the traditional lead class, right?
46:46
[SPEAKER_09]: And that could create significant amounts of public support, I think, for a fundamental revision to the political system.
46:53
[SPEAKER_09]: And so I do think that down the line, it's not totally impossible.
46:57
[SPEAKER_09]: But that would require an immense amount of things to happen, to change in the United States first in Rota for the sort of stars and constellation to align for shift towards the multiparty democracy, which wouldn't like fix everything.
47:09
[SPEAKER_09]: There's no institutional fix to a social crisis,
47:14
[SPEAKER_09]: be uniquely almost useful in the United States because we've had a two-party system for so long as a means of thinking about structural change.
47:22
[SPEAKER_09]: That it would feel eminently different and would scramble the contours of political conflict in ways that would make another monocratic episode that our current one must likely.
47:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have to put it in plug here because I am advocating.
47:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I work with Lee to put this on the agenda.
47:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm a strong advocate of moving to proportional representation system away from our single member district or winner take all kind of system.
47:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And what most people don't know is we can change the electoral system how we elect members to the House, to the US House of Representatives,
48:04
[SPEAKER_01]: with no constitutional amendment required.
48:07
[SPEAKER_09]: That's true.
48:07
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what most people don't know.
48:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And states can decide, every state can decide.
48:13
[SPEAKER_01]: They just want to change their system to elect people to the US Congress.
48:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that it can happen.
48:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what I'm also advocating and pushing for because even if it doesn't create many more parties, we don't need a lot more parties.
48:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We just need three or four or five total.
48:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It would actually allow to have different factions within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to have representation within a larger district within your own state.
48:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is what I talk about whenever I talk to the public audiences.
48:49
[SPEAKER_01]: is so I think it can happen and I think it's got to happen.
48:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So I just want to say, I'm an advocate along with Lee.
48:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we're going to, we've been talking.
48:56
[SPEAKER_08]: We're going to have, I think at some point, a full episode on the idea of the proportional system.
49:04
[SPEAKER_08]: And I'd love to hear a little bit more about like the degree to which people are actually talking about, like, or not at this point, but like, how do we build?
49:14
[SPEAKER_01]: the movement that I can start trying to get it on the agenda, which is what we're trying to do.
49:18
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why Lee and I talk about all the time.
49:20
[SPEAKER_01]: For Lee, it's one, you know, I mean, the multi-party, he's got a couple of ways to get there, but it includes PR.
49:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I talk about multiple things, but yeah.
49:29
[SPEAKER_09]: I agree with Jennifer.
49:30
[SPEAKER_09]: I think that's the best way to do it.
49:31
[SPEAKER_09]: Right?
49:32
[SPEAKER_09]: It's legislation for PR at the sea level.
49:35
[SPEAKER_08]: There is a little bit of conflict here in that we just talked about one of the core things that needed to happen to defeat Orban was everyone coming together in a really remarkable way around one person.
49:47
[SPEAKER_08]: And when we were talking about that, I was like, oh, that's one good thing about our two party system that that already automatically happens.
49:54
[SPEAKER_08]: And so there is, you can see the way that like, you know,
49:58
[SPEAKER_08]: the fascist parties have pumped to power in the 20th century with pretty significant minorities because of the way a multi-party system works.
50:11
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, look, I think this is a really important challenge.
50:14
[SPEAKER_09]: I think that institutional arrangements are not a vaccine against authoritarian populism.
50:19
[SPEAKER_09]: You can't just legislate them out of existence.
50:22
[SPEAKER_09]: It's never going to work.
50:23
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, the question is what country has what in your country, what set of institutional arrangements can disrupt the current way in which that sort of authoritarian virus manifests to make it less likely to become terminal to democracy?
50:38
[SPEAKER_09]: And I think that there's evidence, I brought a Brazil a few times in this podcast.
50:41
[SPEAKER_09]: Here I think Brazil and its performance under Bolsonaro, which was much stronger than the US's performed under Trump too,
50:47
[SPEAKER_09]: is an exceptionally positive example of how a presidential electoral system can combine with multi-party elections and a multi-party system to constrain executive of grandisement.
50:59
[SPEAKER_09]: And that in there also another important variant of their system is that presidential elections are two staged.
51:06
[SPEAKER_09]: So first there's the everyone from all sorts of parties runs and then second after that there's a runoff between the
51:15
[SPEAKER_09]: And that allowed for both the virtues of presidentialism or, sorry, of two parties, which is to say everybody consolidate against an authoritarian leader, but also multi-partyism in the sense that other parties could exist.
51:27
[SPEAKER_09]: And in fact, they made a huge difference through their existence in the late legislature in constraining Bolsonaro's agenda prior to that.
51:34
[SPEAKER_09]: And then afterwards, the credibility of independent leaders of centering parties in Dorsan Lula ended up playing a major role in his victory in the second stage of the presidential election.
51:44
[SPEAKER_09]: So the system can be designed to accommodate that phenomenon.
51:50
[SPEAKER_09]: But I just also, the reason that I become more bullish on multi-partyism in the United States is because we haven't had it for a long time.
51:58
[SPEAKER_09]: And so our authority is manifesting through a very particular mechanism, which is not Germany, which has a multi-party system is having a different dimension of it, Israel, which has a multi-party system is having a very different version of it.
52:09
[SPEAKER_09]: Even though they share ideological precepts in common, the ways in which the game system are different.
52:14
[SPEAKER_09]: And so our current version of it to be short cut.
52:17
[SPEAKER_09]: Significantly I think you're multi-partyism.
52:19
[SPEAKER_09]: Sorry, Jennifer, I cut you off.
52:20
[SPEAKER_09]: You were saying something.
52:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I forgot now, but I will say just because you brought up Brazil, there's another important aspect of bad election of how they defeated Bolsonaro that is relevant for the United States as well.
52:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, and that is that Lula was able to build this broad coalition, not just among parties, but with the whole society.
52:44
[SPEAKER_01]: former rivals, political rivals, yet central bankers, he had the intelligentsia and the economic elite coming together with him.
52:56
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not agree on his leftist economic agenda, but for democracy to fight for democracy and supporting him.
53:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was multi-stakeholder, and that's what is critical and that we're missing right now in the United States.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: J.D.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Vance coming to campaign for Orban and it looking like it hurt him, do you think that this says anything about the global authoritarian moment?
53:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there any reason to be hopeful for this or is this, you know, I mean Trump Trump is kind of the center representative of
53:29
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... the global authoritarian movement right now uh... and it hurting him like it is is is is the brand being damaged by trump right now does vance is appearance campaigning in it and it hurting or bond mean anything i don't i don't think it was that impactful actually uh... in hungry i don't think that many people you know no jade vance or you know just i i don't think it had that much affect one way the other because it was much more about what was happening within
53:57
[SPEAKER_01]: hungry, they're very concerned about their domestic situation, but generally, but yes, the way it's seen here in the United States is kind of a slap in the face to Trump.
54:08
[SPEAKER_01]: because they had so openly supported him, and this is something that, of course, that Trump has been doing in many of the elections, you know, in Argentina, in Honduras, you know, coming out in openly like threatening countries that they will, he will hurt them economically if they don't vote for his candidate.
54:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we have not seen that before.
54:29
[SPEAKER_01]: that it just wasn't that impactful and hungry because there wasn't an economic threat.
54:34
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't there's none the economic relationship to threaten so much and hungry.
54:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It was mighty.
54:40
[SPEAKER_09]: So I think the other important thing to note here is that Trump is severely damaging his own movement in the international arena.
54:50
[SPEAKER_09]: You've seen in the past year, but especially since the beginning of this year, far right parties across Europe starting to distance themselves from Trump.
55:00
[SPEAKER_09]: Now, why are they doing this?
55:02
[SPEAKER_09]: The first thing was the tariffs turns out that when you target one of these countries economically, they no one in the country really likes it.
55:09
[SPEAKER_09]: But what's been really impactful, and I think it's sort of under-discussing the U.S. is the Greenland stuff, right?
55:15
[SPEAKER_09]: When Trump threatened to annex Greenland, I mean, think about what that is.
55:19
[SPEAKER_09]: Right?
55:19
[SPEAKER_09]: It's a threat to try to seize by force a European state sovereign holdings.
55:24
[SPEAKER_09]: And what are these European parties first and foremost more than anything else?
55:28
[SPEAKER_09]: They're nationalists.
55:29
[SPEAKER_09]: And what is nationalist hate more than anything else?
55:31
[SPEAKER_09]: Trying to steal land from your country.
55:35
[SPEAKER_09]: It is like the whole thing.
55:37
[SPEAKER_09]: And so that act of threatening Europe has splintered the European far-right movement.
55:43
[SPEAKER_09]: And it broke it in part into pro-Trump and anti-Trump movements.
55:46
[SPEAKER_09]: And Orban was very much separated from his friends in Western Europe on this, and that's what's only a century during the Iran War, as Trump has continued to scream at European allies as a fault of a war that he himself is losing, because he launched it for dumb reasons, and conducted it immorally, and incompetently.
56:05
[SPEAKER_09]: And the Europeans are furious for being blamed for the fact that he didn't have a plan to fix the Strait of Orban for Europe being threatened and NATO being threatened over this.
56:12
[SPEAKER_09]: So you have Georgia Maloney who's like, you know, her party is a descendant of the fascist party, sort of in Italy, right?
56:21
[SPEAKER_09]: She's not not allowing US basing rights.
56:24
[SPEAKER_09]: I believe that's exactly how it works.
56:27
[SPEAKER_09]: Or just allowing a participation of US or US assets on a talent soil for the war, because she doesn't want to be involved in it at all.
56:33
[SPEAKER_09]: It is really angry at Trump for threatening in this fashion.
56:37
[SPEAKER_09]: So the movement when expert recently referred to it, when I was speaking to him
56:41
[SPEAKER_09]: right, the Trump brand is toxic for the global far right right now.
56:45
[SPEAKER_09]: And that doesn't mean they're suffered electoral consequences for yet because there haven't been enough contest for us to be able to say that hungry, I think, Jennifer's right, it's just like, it didn't matter at all.
56:54
[SPEAKER_09]: I suspect in most domestic elections, it won't matter because these parties are now increasingly smart enough that they're not going to say where the Trump parties and the way they did a year ago, right, when he first took off this, he's, he's managed to screw up one of the
57:11
[SPEAKER_08]: The vibe shift extended overseas.
57:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of wild that like it's the greenland thing which is like the 20-aith, like most resonant thing that's happened in the last year.
57:22
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like not high in the list of like, fuckery, you know, the Trump has done at least, you know, domestically speaking for us.
57:31
[SPEAKER_09]: So yeah, it's weird.
57:33
[SPEAKER_09]: Hi, high risk lower ward.
57:35
[SPEAKER_09]: I saw the first version of this.
57:36
[SPEAKER_09]: I live in Canada now and so I saw the first version of this when with the 51st state stuff like Americans of totally moved on Right like nobody thinks about that at all.
57:44
[SPEAKER_09]: Canadians have not held this.
57:46
[SPEAKER_09]: This is they're so mad They're so mad.
57:49
[SPEAKER_09]: You see it every day.
57:50
[SPEAKER_09]: She's every day.
57:50
[SPEAKER_09]: We my wife is she's boycotting as many American products as she can So now we get these crappy Canadian made dishwasher pods
57:57
[SPEAKER_09]: they have to rip off the individual plastic of each of them in order to make sure that they actually work in your dishwasher.
58:03
[SPEAKER_09]: But it's like it's purchased because economic nationals in the such a thing here, it is because the US has worked Canada has been so targeted and not just economically through tariffs, but it's sovereignty called into question.
58:16
[SPEAKER_09]: It's so, I just think
58:19
[SPEAKER_09]: Americans don't understand the damage that Trump has done with these threats to upend the global order that the United States builds to in the eyes of countries that benefited from that.
58:31
[SPEAKER_09]: And I think we're all going to be living with that for a long time.
58:35
[SPEAKER_08]: We don't, yeah, we don't think we, I don't think there's an understanding that our memory and the rest of those operate on different time skills when we offend and fuck with them.
58:47
[SPEAKER_08]: I mean, the one my one other thought on the advancing that I think is just interesting is that.
58:53
[SPEAKER_08]: that this like international authoritarian project is important enough to the administration that they would see that Orban was in danger know that it was possible that he could lose
59:07
[SPEAKER_08]: And then throw down their capital on him by sending the vice president there like that's you could imagine them seeing that and being like okay we don't want to be embarrassed by this let's pretend like we've never you know we've never supported or bond but they they seem they care enough about.
59:24
[SPEAKER_08]: this larger project that they didn't do that, or at least that's one possible takeaway.
59:28
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I'm not even sure it was that they, I think it was Vans personally.
59:32
[SPEAKER_09]: Like if I had to guess, I'm not speaking for many administrations sources here, to be clear, I'm just sort of speculating, but Vans has been, I mean, he is the administration representative of the post-liberal movement on the political right.
59:44
[SPEAKER_09]: in the US, right?
59:45
[SPEAKER_09]: In the post-liberals, are the people who love Victor Orban more than anybody else.
59:49
[SPEAKER_09]: They are the sub-faction that has relentlessly touted him as a model for the United States.
59:56
[SPEAKER_09]: The point where two of their leading writers and intellectuals literally moved to Budapest to take jobs at government-sponsored institutions.
1:00:04
[SPEAKER_09]: right so there are two prominent American conservative writers who are currently on Victor Robon's payroll, functionally, and living out there right now and they're from the same wing of the party's fans.
1:00:14
[SPEAKER_09]: One of them, Rod Dreyer, he's paid born directly from the government, but Dreyer is like a very close confidant of the answers.
1:00:22
[SPEAKER_09]: right, they've done interviews together.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_09]: He's interviewed him.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_09]: He advises him.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_09]: They're close.
1:00:27
[SPEAKER_09]: Personally, I think this and advanced had spoken for years.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_09]: He said this when I met him, right, and I talked about this very briefly, but did hope about it.
1:00:36
[SPEAKER_08]: I love that they that there are people who uprooted their lives to go move there and now they are probably going to have to uproot their lives again and get the fuck out.
1:00:44
[SPEAKER_09]: That's not great for them.
1:00:45
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah,
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_09]: That world cared so much about Victor Orban that I don't know if someone in the Trump administration said, JD, you have to go.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_09]: I think JD was like, I want to go.
1:01:01
[SPEAKER_09]: I want to do what I can.
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_09]: And what he says, I'm like, the right thing to do is to campaign there.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_09]: He said in an interview recently, I think he believes that.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_09]: I think he believes in this particular project.
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_09]: He's called himself an opponent of the American regime, right?
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_09]: He's a regime change when he was a senator.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_09]: He said this.
1:01:17
[SPEAKER_09]: He believes in all this post-level stuff.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_08]: The man who is so slimy as to have almost no beliefs that he won't exchange for his own at that unspit.
1:01:26
[SPEAKER_03]: The one thing that he is going to go down with the ship is Viktor Orba, and I hope the Popex team unicates him, it's the only thing that could make his life even worse.
1:01:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it is cross.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Should we do the last question?
1:01:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
1:01:44
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
1:01:44
[SPEAKER_08]: What is making you most fearful right now?
1:01:47
[SPEAKER_08]: What's making you the most hopeful?
1:01:48
[SPEAKER_01]: What's making me fearful are two things within the United States.
1:01:53
[SPEAKER_01]: One is that the Republican Congress is not going to step up to stop the damage that the Trump administration is doing to the world, and particularly with the Iran War and more broadly, what we're seeing, that they just want to do it in time, in time before there's a lot of damage cost.
1:02:19
[SPEAKER_01]: are still the number of people that feel powerless.
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_01]: When people feel disempowered, we're powerless to change things.
1:02:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they don't try.
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Then that's when, you know, that level of it's, and it's not just apathy, it's really powerlessness that makes it very difficult to change a society.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the other hand, what makes me hopeful is that I do see a lot of,
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_01]: people getting engaged within the United States and working together and working together across various political belief systems.
1:02:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that I think is galvanizing people now, another theme that we didn't talk about, is cruelty.
1:03:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people get very upset when they see the cruelty of things happening.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They care also about fairness.
1:03:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So for me right now, what I'm thinking of, the two kind of themes are freedom and fairness, versus cruelty and corruption, as themes that really resonate with people.
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that level of organizing happening in local communities within the United States and rebuilding these communities, is the first step of building up and renewing American democracy.
1:03:38
[SPEAKER_09]: So what makes me most hopeful is that we are hurtling with incredible speed towards the 2026 midterms.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_09]: And by that, I don't just mean that I'm getting older and so my perception of time passing is going quicker, though that's certainly part of it.
1:03:53
[SPEAKER_09]: It's that as we move towards these elections,
1:03:57
[SPEAKER_09]: The Trump administration is not doing what you need to do to rig elections.
1:04:01
[SPEAKER_09]: It's quite complicated.
1:04:02
[SPEAKER_09]: It takes a lot of work and they have done, they've taken steps in that area.
1:04:08
[SPEAKER_09]: But they also have failed to impose the controls on state elections to nationalize,
1:04:13
[SPEAKER_09]: the election in the way the Trump has said that he wants to, and then to use that nationalized power to bring the elections.
1:04:20
[SPEAKER_09]: And every day that we get closer to the midterms without that happening is every day it becomes less plausible that it will.
1:04:27
[SPEAKER_09]: And the United States will have a free and fair election in 2026, which I believe it will.
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_09]: And I believe that Trump will lose his majority, at least one house of Congress almost certainly, and possibly both.
1:04:38
[SPEAKER_09]: And that means that, like, this is not really about partisanship here, it's about whether or not the United States under an authoritarian president has the capacity to display meaningful democratic checks, right, for democracy to operate.
1:04:50
[SPEAKER_09]: And I think we will prove in the fall that it will, and that makes me very hopeful, because that Congress will also impose those constraints that Jennifer was just talking about the Republican Congress moment.
1:04:59
[SPEAKER_09]: What makes me most fearful is that
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_09]: the most common pattern of democratic failure is when you have clashes between the executive and the legislative branch, and the two cannot agree on a procedure for resolving those disputes.
1:05:17
[SPEAKER_09]: That leads to a crisis where the executive typically, though, occasionally it's a legislature, but really mostly the executive ends up asserting a kind of unilateral power, extra constitutional power, that creates a constitutional crisis, and can lead to regime
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_09]: do I think that that's going to happen in the United States?
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_09]: No.
1:05:36
[SPEAKER_09]: Do I think it is possible that that happens that the result of Democrats controlling Congress is that we have President Trump just acting extra legally, Congress passing laws and Trump ignoring them and they're being a constitutional crisis?
1:05:48
[SPEAKER_09]: I think there's a very real chance that something like that happens and I'm just not sure our system is bigger than handle it.
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_09]: So that's what makes me the most worried about the coming years.
1:05:57
[SPEAKER_08]: does not make sense to that big against the constitutional crisis in the coming years.
1:06:02
[SPEAKER_08]: That's for sure.
1:06:04
[SPEAKER_08]: Well, thank you again so much.
1:06:06
[SPEAKER_08]: Really, really great to have you on.
1:06:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
1:06:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks.
1:06:09
[SPEAKER_09]: All this is great.
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
1:06:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, guys.
1:06:12
[SPEAKER_09]: Great talking with you both.
1:06:13
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm glad we could be episode four.
1:06:14
[SPEAKER_09]: That means a lot to you.
1:06:19
[SPEAKER_03]: The Fighting Fashism podcast is produced by Nick Damont and Collaboration with the Nation.
1:06:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Music by Horst Rattish.
1:06:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Questions, comments, concerns, email us at fightingfashismpod at gmail.com.
1:06:35
[SPEAKER_05]: And some day people will pick the flower When a child and a child, a child, a child, a child Some day people will pick the flowers And say how beautifully they grew
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_05]: These are the flowers, a part of Janno A little child, a child, a child, a child, a child These are the flowers, a part of Janno A little child, a child, a child, a child A little child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child, a child