The Bad Case and the Worst
Bringing a little Hungarian pessimism to their woes and ours.
October 28, 2025
I’ve seen a number of posts expressing excitement at the crowds that came out in Budapest this weekend, and I want to suggest taking the crowds with a stiff dose of good old Hungarian fatalism. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is facing his most competitive election yet. But protests are not much of an indicator of change. By and large, in Hungary today, protests do not matter.
If “liberal democracy” means being both free and self-governing, you can undermine it by taking away either part of the equation. The Hungarian system, which Viktor Orbán dubbed “illiberal democracy,” is misnamed. The ruling Fidesz party has undermined self-governance to such a degree that freedom is easy to tolerate – because the ruling party has confidence that it will never amount to a victory at the polls. The government has rewritten the constitution, packed the judiciary, and used EU investment funds cannily to reward allies and regions that vote for the party. Further, a vast swath of private media companies are now controlled by a quasi-governmental corporation that gives the party a near monopoly over the airwaves.
Beyond this, to the extent that Hungary still has reasonably fair elections, the opposition has still stood little chance of winning enough seats in parliament to oust Fidesz. Two million of the ten million people in the country live in Budapest, and the rest live in small cities and towns across the hills and the Carpathian basin. These more rural voters have reliably supported Fidesz over the past fifteen years.
These voters are conservative, which had helped Fidesz to lock down elections when Budapest-based opposition parties ran candidates to the left (the last serious contender was Ferenc Gyurcsány, the mayor of Budapest). Recent decisions by the European Union to freeze funding for the country over the constriction of academic freedom and other human rights issues has contributed to stagnating wages and begun to hit the pocketbooks of rural voters, which is why the opposition candidate Péter Magyar is making inroads in one-time Fidesz strongholds. But Magyar is himself a defector from the Fidesz camp, and his party, Tisza, is center-right. There is hope that the country will become less autocratic, but that will not deliver much actual policy change for most Budapesters.
Ten months into the new Trump regime, there are characteristics that the U.S. shares with Hungary. The urban-rural divide fairly accurately maps our right-left fault lines, with Trump support concentrated in areas where the population is more diffuse. Mid-decade gerrymandering in Republican states is in part a response to concerns about weakening support in the GOP base, but also a recognition that isolating and minimizing the electoral power of urban Democratic strongholds in red states is essential to creating any kind of permanent majority in which Republicans can enjoy the system of concentrated power that they are creating.
The media environment, likewise, is slanting downwards towards the White House as the weight of that concentration of power distorts the terrain. The installation of Bari Weiss at CBS News, many instances of capitulation at the Washington Post, and word that the CEO of CNN told reporters to “ease up” on coverage of Trump’s White House demolition all suggest shifts towards sycophancy in the “legacy media.”
I have worried that liberal autocracy poses a particularly acute risk to the American system of government, precisely because it leaves intact our personal liberties while undermining the burdensome responsibilities that self-governance imposes. From a political point of view, it seems entirely possible that we could utterly lose our democracy without many people noticing. As in Hungary, the tell for most people, and the thing that for the Trumpian revolution, with its trade wars and mismanagement, is especially risky, will be the economic consequences. When the economic pain settles in – for forty million people, that will be this coming Saturday – people might start wanting accountability, and with accountability comes a revival of democracy. Maybe.
This is the bad case scenario: a Hungarian-style stagnant and hollowed democracy, one where the ruling party buys support in key regions through government largesse, where we abandon the professional civil service to the patronage system that existed before it killed President Garfield, where we aren’t really all that free, especially if we are trans, or are women, or are immigrants, or etc, but for the rest, our day-to-day lives are pretty much our own. The government works just well enough, if we lower our expectations and raise our levels of cynicism. As long as the economy is good enough, or else we are too desperate to organize resistance, the U.S. could stabilize into another “hybrid regime.”
It’s not good, but it’s not jackboots marching menacingly through the streets. And there is the problem: while Trump officials are mostly building an Orbánist system behind the scenes, another powerful faction is pushing for authoritarianism with a harder edge. Mass deportations are where the worst case comes into play.
News reports over the weekend again showcased the growing use of intimidation tactics and violence in the course of mass deportation efforts. In one Chicago neighborhood, ICE agents reportedly deployed tear gas at a children’s Halloween parade. A group of agents swarmed a mother and a group of children in an elementary school, terrorizing everyone and hauling off the woman and her child. Protesters are increasingly being injured and menaced, including a veteran who had a weapon pointed at him by an agent who allegedly said “bang bang” and “you’re dead, liberal.” One 67-year-old man suffered broken ribs and internal bleeding after apparently turning his car onto a street blocked off by ICE. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the revanchist architect of the mass deportation policy, has erroneously claimed that it would be illegal for local authorities to arrest federal agents for breaking local laws.
The scale of deportations, their cruelty, and the authority and impunity that the government asserts to carry them out is a threat to liberty that, in combination with the other threat to self-government, could tip us over into the older, more oppressive, violence-based model of authoritarianism. It will not stop with immigrants; it has already expanded beyond that.
The worst case comes wrapped in a virulent nativism with an expanding enemies list. If we allow mass deportations to be the pretext for building a vast, insufficiently disciplined, unaccountable army, we hand expansive new powers to the President. And powers given are rarely relinquished.
What you do unto the least of us, you do unto me, some guy once said.