Category Archives: Fascism

Is Hungary a Fascist State?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Fascism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason

 

 

Andrew Marantz is a writer from the New Yorker and in the last couple of years has been paying a lot of attention to Hungary. He has visited it a number of times and he is very concerned about it. Besides writing about it, he has appeared in a number of podcasts together with Tyler Foggatt as part of The New Yorker Political Scene Podcasts.

 

Like me Marantz and Foggatt wanted to know: How bad have things got? How close to an authoritarian state has the United Statement become? And they started by looking at Hungary.

 

First, Marantz said when you go to Hungary, “it’s not a police state. It’s not like Russia.” This made me feel a little better. I was at the time travelling there. I have now been there again. When I was there I worried a bit about whether or not I had to be careful of what I looked at or read or wrote about. To the extent that fear was justified, Hungary is no longer a democracy, but an authoritarian state.

 

I wondered when I was there whether or not I should worry about what I wrote on my computer? Could I criticize Hungary? Could I criticize their leader Orbán? I really didn’t  want to go to jail. But I also didn’t want to shut up either.

 

Marantz also said this about Hungary on the podcast:

 

“It’s not like, you know, North Korea.  It’s a beautiful European capital where you walk around and it’s nice and you sit by the river and sip an espresso. And I interviewed all kinds of dissidents, academics, journalists who are opposed to the regime. And they didn’t say okay, you know, we can’t talk here. We have to go somewhere where we’re not going to be, you know hauled off into a van or something. Like that’s not the vibe.”

 

That sounded pretty good. I know Christiane and I visited Budapest in 2004 and I never once, not once, felt uneasy about being in a former Soviet satellite country.  But that was then. This is now.  And thanks to Viktor Orbán things now in 2025 are very different. And Hungary is a very good example for the rest of us about what can happen to a functioning democracy. Democratic countries can slide into autocracy or illiberal democracy or even fascism and many believe Hungary has done so under the second presidency of Viktor Orbán. He changed.

 

I know this time I felt a little different. I don’t want to exaggerate the feeling, but I don’t want to deny it either. So, what happened in Hungary between our last visit in 2004 2025.

 

First, what happened in Hungary has happened in many places in varying degrees.  A lot of countries around the world have been flirting with autocracy?  I visited some of them on this trip? Romania. Bulgaria. Serbia. And above all, Hungary. Why did this happen? That is the question I would really like to answer.

 

Some have suggested that we have a natural inclination to autocracy and not democracy. Disturbing research has shown that in many countries the popularity of democracy as a political system is in serious decline. And most disturbing of all is that the decline is pronounced in the United States, the country long known as the leader of the free world. It often claims to be the first constitutional democracy. Is it possible that democracy is declining even there? There is actually a lot of evidence, particular in the reign of Trump 2.0 that it has moved sharply in that direction.  Can America and Canada learn something from what happened in Hungary? Those are things that interest me.

Hungary: From Communism to Democracy to Fascism?

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Authoritarianism, Fascism, Hungary, The Sleep of Reason

Ever since we signed up for the tour of the Balkans, tour without adequate thought as I have said, I have thinking about Hungary?  Why would a country that came so close to a successful revolt against Soviet Union domination in 1956 that it became for a while the darling of the west, now, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, and Hungary became a democracy  not very long ago, be sliding back into autocracy?  Hungarians  know what Communism was like? How and why could this happen? Why would they allow it to happen? These are the questions that have haunted me and for which I have sought an answer, or at least an insight. I never have answers, who am I kidding? I just get more questions.

 

It seems like such a long journey: from Communism to Democracy to Fascism, but Hungary seems to have moved there in a flash. Not that is completely fascist yet, but it sure seems to headed in that disturbing direction. To me it seems like that is the journey Hungary has embarked upon under the direction of its populist leader Viktor Orbán. But is that really such a long journey? I actually think not. After all, communists and fascists agree on one very important thing—democracy is bad; autocracy is good. It is a movement from extremism on the left communism, to democracy and then to extremism on right namely fascism.

 

It is actually a very short journey from communism to fascism. Communism began with a dream of universal brotherhood of man—i.e. from each according to his means to each according to his needs. A beautiful dream that turned into a nightmare.  As Max Eastman, said, communism was “the God that failed”. The dream curdled from hope to violence. Lenin may have been the cook that switched the recipe when the proletariat, working people, gave up the hopes of freedom and justice in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat. When the communist leaders crushed the dreams of fellow feeling in their citizens  the  dreams of the proletariat turned inward and their hate and pain transformed  them into wolves instead.

 

When there is no longer room in the heart for empathy, it dies and kills part of us and the result is, as the singer song-writer Martyn Joseph said, “the good in us is dead.” Joseph feared would happen in that other Balkan state, Kosovo. What was left there were vicious dogs snarling and biting each other. And the brotherhood of man was given up as an empty dream. The best in them was dead. Leaving an empty burnt-out husk, incapable of love, empathy or fellow feeling. Only a corpse remained. That is the power of hate. It is as transformative as the power of love but in the opposite direction.

 

A couple of decades later, the world was left with another leader, Donald Trump who as I have said before, has the empathy of a turnip. His hatred turned a nation of brave men and women into a nation that feared itself, and found a scapegoat, the immigrants, who could be dispatched by a crowd in a packed arena at the 2020 Republican National Convention chanting gleefully, “Deportation Now.”  All of this while holding signs underneath smiling faces that read “Mass Deportation.”  This looked to me like the brownshirts of Nazi Germany who viciously turned on their Jewish neighbours. That was how the American MAGA crowd turned on their brown immigrant neighbours, demanding they be deported or sent to Latin American jails for torture. When your empathy is shredded what else could you do but shout for joy around calls to “lock them up?” The ugly ideology of Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht had taken over in America. To me it felt viscerally, like there was a direct lineal line of descendant, from the Night of Broken glass in Germany against Jews led by the Nazi Party’s SS troops and aided by the hateful Hitler youth and then ordinary, but rancid, Germans to those American Republicans. The bullies again were in control, only this time in America.