Republican primary season is in full swing, and surprisingly little attention has been paid to the fact that the Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Budapest, Hungary this past week. That may in part be due to the fact that American media and other members of the press were barred from the conference. But although supporters of the American right have touted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his party as an aspirational political model for some time, the decision to hold a major gathering of powerful American conservative political players in a country with Hungary’s record of authoritarianism warrants more discussion.
We hear too little about how the GOP’s adulation of Orbán, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is part of its transformation into a far-right party bent on destroying liberal democracy in America.
We hear too little about how the GOP’s adulation of Orbán, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is part of its transformation into a far-right party bent on destroying liberal democracy in America. Powerful and influential Republican figures like Tucker Carlson hold up Hungary as a model of governance for the United States. Visits to the Hungarian capital give U.S. extremists space to air their ideas and strategize about how to apply them back home.
Orbán set the tone in an address to CPAC guests as the conference kicked off Thursday. “American friends, I think you have seen the likes of this,” he said, referring to the days when he and his party “were dragged down by the swamp of the Hungarian left” in 2002, when Orbán was driven out of office. Over the next eight years, apocalypse ensued, he said. “[T]he socialists spent the people’s money, Hungary sank into debt, and economy fell into recession, inflation ran out of control, unemployment rose … Street violence broke out and paramilitary groups were on the march.”
But Orbán returned to power in 2010, restoring so-called law and order. “Hungary is the laboratory in which we tested the antidote to dominance by progressives,” he concluded triumphantly. “The patient has been completely cured.”
The “medicine” Orbán prescribes for Americans is “illiberal democracy,” the 21st century way of being a strongman that keeps a veneer of democracy going while turning elections into sham events and slowly taking away judicial and press freedoms. As Hungary expert Kim Lane Scheppele writes, Orbán knows how to “game the system.” He rigs elections in technical ways, including threatening voting officials or harassing them with expensive legal proceedings, and has domesticated the media so that the campaign ads of opposition politicians reach far fewer voters.
We can also see Orbán’s impact on things like the rollback of reproductive rights in the U.S. Former Vice President Mike Pence previewed the Supreme Court opinion in Budapest last fall as a speaker at Orbán’s “Summit for Democracy” where “pro-family” agendas, meant to increase the “right” kinds of births (white, Christian births) twinned with anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ platforms.
“Hungary must defend itself because the Western left wing is attacking. It is trying to relativize the notion of family. Its tools for doing so are gender ideology and the LBGTQ lobby,” Orbán had claimed at the summit.
The Trump presidency always had a double aim: to wreck democracy at home, rolling back reproductive, voting and other rights, and align the country with the far right abroad.
Pence’s speech hewed to similar rhetoric, diagnosing “a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself” caused by “the erosion of the nuclear family, marked by declining marriage rate, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates.” Pence hoped that “a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life….”
Such illiberal positions have a long history among U.S. Evangelical Christians like Pence. Yet seeing them only within the frame of American tradition is short-sighted. From anti-LGBTQ legislation to election manipulation through gerrymandering to the use of propaganda, the GOP’s principles and methods are as authoritarian as Orbán’s. To the great displeasure of the GOP and its counterparts abroad, America is still a democracy. Indeed, the election of Joe Biden dealt a grave setback to the GOP’s process of autocratic capture of institutions and the judiciary. It makes sense then why Orbán in his CPAC speech positioned himself as an all-knowing veteran of the war on liberal democracy who pledged to help the American illiberal cause. “Washington and Brussels will decide the battle for Western civilization. Today we hold neither of them,” he concluded, placing the White House and the E.U. in his sights. As I observed in 2019 on the occasion of Orbán’s White House visit, the Trump presidency always had a double aim: to wreck democracy at home, rolling back reproductive, voting and other rights, and align the country with the far right abroad. With moves like holding CPAC, an American political convention, on Orbán’s turf, we can see how this new brand of authoritarianism is trickling in. It’s evidenced in a GOP that increasingly glosses over the criminal backgrounds and illiberal actions of many of its recently elected leaders (Herschel Walker has faced allegations of domestic violence, although he denies he broke the law; Marjorie Taylor Greene has consistently promoted messages of white nationalism; we’ve seen an alarming number of election deniers run for Republican primary offices — and more) in favor of solidifying Republican control. Trump may be gone, but Orbán remains in office and is creating an international network of far-right parties and institutions with Budapest as its hub. The sooner we see the GOP as a party that wants to administer Orbán’s illiberal medicine to Americans, “curing” them of their attachment to freedom, the more prepared we will be to defend our democracy.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on authoritarianism and propaganda. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships and an adviser to Protect Democracy. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets. She publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present" (2020), looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence and machismo and how they can be defeated. 
