"Never Again a Country Without Consequences"
A News Link Round-Up
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, focusing on two main issues. The first is last week’s election defeat of Victor Orbán, who went much farther than Donald Trump in using authoritarian means to entrench himself in power for 16 years—but he still could not prevent a vast wave of rejection by the people of Hungary. The second issue is the Supreme Court’s growing use of a highly dubious “shadow docket” in which it makes often highly partisan decisions with no explanations. In between are a few notes about the Iran war; the corruption, mismanagement, and inebriation of Trump’s imperial court; and the actual effect his policies have had on immigration.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
“Never Again a Country Without Consequences”
How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets
Hungary is a small country, but as Viktor Orbán has pointed out: “There is one thing that makes our country an important place: the fact that Hungary is an incubator, where experiments are being conducted for the conservative politics of the future.”…
The sociologist Ferenc Pataki talks about Orbán’s project as “a neo-collectivist, neo-communist experiment,” and similarly, the Fidesz oligarch Simicska has said that the party decided to pick up “the commies’ methods.” But while Fidesz is opposed to free markets and has used nationalization and state intervention to control the economy, it does not have an egalitarian ideology, and the party does not think it is necessary to place ownership in the hands of the state itself, as long as it is in the hands of friends.
Others have called it a fascist system, referring to how the government controls the economy and society through many different institutions and turns to nationalism and xenophobia to rally support. However, while Fidesz’s rhetoric is often aggressive, it refrains from the overt kinds of racist and anti-Semitic legislation that characterize fascist states.
These descriptions also ignore the ideological flexibility of Fidesz’s pursuit of power. Regarding the party, Orbán was onto something when he said: “It is not an organization based on one single coherent system of principles or an ideology—such an organization is incapable of expanding beyond a certain point.” Instead, he described the party as “reality without ideology.” He has been adept at transforming the party’s ideas whenever that helps it cling to power, saying that he has no need for his thoughts “to be forced into the cage of any ideology that can be summarized in a book.”
Bálint Magyar, a sociologist and former education minister, thinks that Orban’s Hungary has become another form of state altogether, a “mafia state.”…
It is not a case of “state capture” in which oligarchs draw the state under their control. Rather, it is a case of “society capture,” in which the government uses procurement, subsidies, regulations, and taxes to replace market actors with its own oligarchs who are offered protection and privileges as long as they stay loyal. If they are not, or cease to be useful, they are taken down and replaced. The primary concern is not principles and ideology but the consolidation of power and wealth for the ruling clique
This is just an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed report that is worth reading.
