I have a hard time knowing how much I should worry about authoritarianism. On the one hand, one of our two major parties backed a guy with obvious authoritarian tendencies, and that guy tried to stage a coup. On the other hand, the coup was really goddamned goofy. I know what Trump did was awful, I know there was horrible violence at the capitol, but it’s hard to be completely straight-faced about an event that featured a guy dressed like Hagar the Horrible if he was auditioning for the Village People.
Different pundits are different amounts of worried about the authoritarian threat. Ross Douthat seems to be a smidgen concerned, Jonathan Chait is quite concerned, and Jeet Heer has shat his pants. Having an election overturned remains a high-impact/low probability event; several things have to happen before it could come to pass. Of course, it’s weird that we’re even talking about this. Assessing the threat is like assessing the threat of being eaten by a shark: It would be very bad, but it’s pretty unlikely, though exactly how likely depends on your behavior. And I understand that an authoritarian turn is a shark attack-like event, though I do feel that we’re metaphorically swimming in the ocean wearing meat pants right now.
A milestone in the slide towards authoritarianism may have happened last week, when Tucker Carlson filmed an entire week of shows in Hungary. That’s a weird thing to do; it’s not like you flip on the TV and go “Oh, Fallon’s in Hungary this week.” You only go to Hungary for a specific reason, and Carlson’s reason was to give Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian regime a blowjob so explicit that the whole thing should have been moved to the Spice Channel.
This baffled me. Shouldn’t the right run from comparisons to Orbán? Isn’t the whole point of a subtle shift towards authoritarianism the ability to deny that it’s happening? Why openly declare your affinity for the man who embodies the slow devolution to one-party rule? Doesn’t that undermine your argument that Democrats are a bunch of hyperventilating pee-pants who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
I was curious enough to do something I never do: I watched Tucker Carlson. Worse yet: I watched the clips on his Facebook page. So, now my Facebook algorithm is fucked. For the foreseeable future, my newsfeed will be weird-ass articles about Ivermectin and pop-up ads for MyPillow and Rascal Scooters, because my algorithm now thinks that I’m an 85 year-old Tucker Carlson fan (who also watches a lot of Radiohead clips -- good luck solving that riddle, algorithm!).
I forgot how impressively stupid Fox News is. Their stupidity is like the Grand Canyon: You know it’s remarkable, but you still can’t help but be awe-struck when you actually see it. The first sentence of the segment setting up Carlson’s interview with Orbán is:
“Of the nearly 200 countries on the face of the Earth, precisely one of them has an elected leader who publicly identifies as a Western-style conservative.”
Okay, counter-argument: Boris Johnson. I don’t know what asterisks Carlson is attaching to his definition with words like “publicly” and “Western-style” (“Western-style” probably means “not Shinzo Abe”), but if the category is “foreign leaders Americans know,” Boris Johnson is the first name on that Taboo card. And I think it’s fair to call him conservative, because he leads the Conservative Party. It’s such a weird falsehood; it’s like if I started this column by writing: “Tucker Carlson first rose to prominence as an adult film actor under the name Mandingo Thunder.” It’s so obviously untrue that for me to think I could get away with it would indicate a lack of respect for my audience.
Carlson seems to be counting on his audience not knowing anything about Viktor Orbán. Orbán has been widely condemned for seizing control of the press, amending the constitution to remove checks on his power, and altering the country’s voting processes so that he can stay in power with a minority of the vote (in 2018, Orbán’s party won 67% of parliamentary seats despite receiving less than half of the vote). Carlson waves all that away with one passage:
“We've read many times how repressive Hungary is. Freedom House, an NGO in Washington that's funded almost exclusively by the U.S. government describes Hungary as much less free than South Africa with fewer civil liberties. That's not just wrong, it's insane.”
So: Nothing to see here! Freedom House gets government funding, and they made one comparison to a country Carlson’s viewers also surely nothing about (worth noting: Carlson feels the need to inform his viewers that “Hungary is a small country in the middle of Central Europe”), so all criticism of Orbán can be dismissed. There are Wiggles songs with more intellectual heft. But Carlson has ridden this formula to become the most-watched show in cable news.
I don’t like throwing the word “stupid” around, but the stupidity of Carlson’s segment needs to be addressed in order to understand why he thought this interview was a good idea. Why would he risk cozying up to an authoritarian? Because his audience can be convinced that Orbán isn’t an authoritarian. Carlson can simply say “this guy’s cool,” and his audience will believe him. So, my confusion came partly from assuming that Carlson’s audience is somewhat plugged in to reality. I admit I was wrong, and I’ve learned from my mistake.
In Carlson’s telling of the story, the West hates Orbán purely because of his immigration policies.1 And it’s true that Orbán’s immigration policies are unpopular in much of Europe, though that’s partly because Europe was faced with a refugee crisis and Hungary’s position was basically “fuck you, you deal with it.” Still, differences over immigration are policy disagreements, which happen all the time. Policy disagreements don’t cause the (now former) President of the European Commission to greet you like this:
“Here comes the dictator”, followed by the whitest high-five in history, followed by an open-palm pimp slap. The strangest greeting for a head of state since Tony Blair greeted Silvio Berlusconi by honking his boobs and yelling “Look who peeled himself off a prostitute to join us!” Of course, Jean-Claude Juncker greeted Orbán that way because Orbán has effectively dismantled Hungarian democracy, and that’s a problem for an organization that lists representative democracy as one of its foundational values. Orbán is a pariah because of his illiberalism, not because of his immigration policies.
But immigration is central to the narrative Carlson is promoting. Carlson and Orbán portray Hungarian civilization2 as under attack. From whom? From the media, “neoliberals”, and Western democracies including the US (we’re one of the bad guys in this narrative!). But mostly from immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants. Orbán portrays himself as the resolute defender of Hungarian culture; here he is talking about immigration:
“You have to defend your people against any danger.” … “This is not a human right to come here. No way, because it's our land. It's a nation, it's a community. Families, history, tradition, language.”
The important thing here isn’t Orbán’s immigration policy; lots of people support tight limits on immigration. What’s important is the narrative. The narrative is “we’re under attack.” The discussion ceases to be about abstract liberal principles (boring!) and becomes about defending your culture against invaders (spicy!). Plus, “extreme measures are needed in response to this threat” has been the justification for dictatorships for literally as long as the word “dictator” has existed.
Which brings me to the second reason why Carlson probably decided to run this segment: He’s not a politician, he’s a guy with a TV show. “I’m going to cozy up to this ethno-nationalist guy” might not be a winning message with the American public, but it’s a winning message with his audience. TV shows are all about giving your audience the narrative they want; it’s a fucked-up feedback loop of mutual reassurance. Carlson’s 20-minute slobber session with Orbán portrayed ethno-nationalism as sensible and desirable. Which -- what a coincidence! -- is what Carlson’s audience already believed.
A challenge for Democrats is to communicate to voters just how extreme the Republican Party has become. I began this column by admitting that I struggle to take the threat seriously; after all, how could the United States -- where democracy is as much a part of our brand as weak beer and pushing the outer limits of the meat-to-bread ratio in a sandwich -- cease to be a democracy? And honestly, I do think Hungarian-style one-party rule is off the table; if nothing else, the measures Orbán took to control the media don’t seem possible in the US. But a stolen election is possible. We know there’s at least one guy who will steal the election if he can, and we know there’s a sizable portion of the Republican Party that will follow him.
Democracy is now a wedge issue for Republicans. Diehard Republicans might be fine with the GOP rigging the game so that they basically can’t lose, but most people aren’t. The polling on the January 6 riots is still very bad for Republicans. Democrats should make every effort to portray that as what it was: The product of a belief that’s taken root on the far right that Republicans should be able to cling to power even if the people vote them out.
Carlson’s Hungarian trip is another symptom of that disease. His Orbán interview might end up being a liability for Republicans; if Rachel Maddow went to Venezuela to sing the praises of Nicolás Maduro, something tells me that Conor Lamb would end up answering questions about that for the next two years. And Republicans will say “Tucker Carlson doesn’t speak for me,” which is an argument that would be a lot more convincing if most of them hadn’t spent the months since January 6 passing new voter suppression laws, protecting gerrymandering, blocking a January 6 commission, letting Trump off the hook for his role in the insurrection, and putting the pieces in place to let states nullifying a close election. Tucker Carlson can praise Viktor Orbán because most of his audience would gladly trade democracy for an end to immigration. I’d be very surprised if most Americans see things the same way.
From Carlson’s segment: “What does Viktor Orbán believe? Just a few years ago, his views would have seemed moderate and conventional. He thinks families are more important than banks. He believes countries need borders. For saying these things out loud, Orbán has been vilified.”
It might be more accurate to say “Magyar civilization” than “Hungarian civilization”, since Magyar is the ethnicity generally associated with the Hungarian state, though it is not synonymous with the Hungarian state. And because my audience is very different from Tucker Carlson’s audience, I will probably get someone pointing that out in the comments if I don’t footnote it here.
I’ve seen headlines about Tucker in Hungary, but I was too demoralized to click. Thanks for explaining it along with some comic relief. (“Fallon’s in Hungary this week” made me laugh out loud)
I was in Budapest in Summer 2019 on a tv crew. We had a local "fixer" whose normal employment was as a journalist, but as we spent time together he confided that he was in hiding because he'd had the foolish temerity to write several 100% true articles about politico-corporate corruption & graft and the "authorities" had made it clear the wanted to "speak to him."
He was certain he'd likely disappear, were he to be "questioned" by the "authorities."
Pretty sure there was an ethnic bigotry undertone too, as he was considered "gypsy" - sorry for any insult, I do not know all the intricacies of European us/them bigotry.
Budapest is also the only place I've seen municipal officials give so few fucks that they were happy to put a boot on hydrant-adjacent-parked Ferrari. (<- justice) Probably just happily messing with visiting Russian gangsters.