Jan-Werner Müller has a new essay in the New York Review of Books, titled “Make Europe Great Again.” Müller describes the emerging connections between far-right Christian nationalists in the United States, and Hungary’s Fidesz government under Viktor Orbán, identifying their common focus on the state’s administrative and judicial machinery. For observers of European politics, the story of Hungary’s slide towards electoral authoritarianism is well-known. Observers of American conservative politics and the decay of the Republican Party will likewise be familiar with conservatives’ fascination with Fidesz, and with Orbán version of statist Christian nationalism, culminating in the bizarre spectacle of holding the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest.
Müller emphasizes that these national conservative forces, which have captured liberal (Fidesz) and republican (the GOP) political parties with relative ease, have their eyes on the state. Broadly speaking, they—and their ideas—are actually not that popular. They know that they must prevail in elections to gain office, but their claim to rule once in office rests on their ability to use the state, bending it to serve their purposes. Elections are not to be contests of ideas, policies, or platforms, nor are they to be referenda on parties’ performance in office; they are to be plebiscitarian affirmations of a singular model of the state as embodied by the ruling government.* Writes Müller of the implications of Fidesz’s record since 2010,
The lesson has not been lost on aspiring autocrats elsewhere. Don’t waste time on culture wars, instead capture state institutions. Once judges and civil servants are on your side, you can go after all the liberal journalists, professors, and NGOs you want. And if you take control of parliament and the public prosecutor’s office, you can turn public procurement into an ATM for your cronies; envelopes need not change hands under the table. The Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar describes Orbán’s regime as a “post-communist mafia state” that serves to enrich the leader’s “adopted political family.”
What better way to describe the Trump Organization, the Trump presidency, and Project 2025 as articulated by its own authors and advocates? Read the Project 2025 playbook for yourself: none of it is about advancing policies that have popular support, and none of it is about working with American people to identify their hope, their dreams, or their desires. It is about staffing the federal government:
The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is our 180-day Transition Playbook and includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency. Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful.
Müller’s analysis clarifies two important points for political scientists and concerned citizens alike. The first is just how irrelevant popular opinion would be for a national conservative government that seizes power. At a time in which Americans watch the polls closely to see which politician is most popular, and parties poll on issues to see what mobilizes voters, it is easy to ignore that 99% of what happens in government is about governing rather than winning elections. Governments may be responsive to public opinion to win elections, and they may follow mass opinion on issues of the day (as my research on Hungarian politics with Kriszti Szabó and Ádám Reiff has shown). But public opinion does not bind in the same way as it does in a liberal democracy. To repeat, for the national conservatives who admire Fidesz, elections are to be affirmations. To say “the people don’t support this” is to miss the point of how the national conservatives conceptualize the popular will.
Second, and relatedly, is to refocus attention on defending democracy, from hearts and minds to power and authority. Fidesz, Trump, and others are often portrayed as populists, and for good reason. Populism is a notoriously difficult concept. But many theories of populism highlight how it thrives on the notion of a binary opposition between the elites and the people, how populists imagine a form or style of leadership that expresses the popular will without the distractions or frustrations created by intermediary institutions (parliaments, courts, bureaucracies, etc). See for example Moffitt and Tormey, who note that populists espouse a
more general distrust of the complex machinery of modern governance and the complicated nature of policy solutions, which in contemporary settings often require consultations, reviews, reports, lengthy iterative design and implementation.
But Orbán, Trump, and others like them do not wish to tear down the state. They just wish it to do something else. The national conservatives want to harness the state, not eviscerate it. Trump no longer talks of Draining the Swamp, he and his Project 2025 allies wish to use it to establish a new form of politics in which the administrative machinery of the state is a tool for control. Whether the people “like it” is immaterial. The national conservatives have model of authority and they will implement it for the people. The model here is not populism with a minimal state. It is corporatism with a muscular state.
For a vision of what this means, we can look to an essay on contemporary Hungary by Christopher Rufo, which I discovered by following the link in Müller’s essay. Here, Rufo, a national conservative, insists that Hungarian democracy is fine. He writes,
Life proceeds as usual: People spend the day working, political parties squabble, everyone is worried about inflation.
He might as well have been quoting directly from my essay “Life in Authoritarian States is Mostly Boring and Tolerable,” in which I write about contemporary authoritarian regimes:
You go to work, you eat your lunch, you go home to your family. There are schools and businesses, and some people “make it” through hard work and luck. Most people worry about making sure their kids get into good schools. The military is in the barracks, and the police mostly investigate crimes and solve cases. There is political dissent, if rarely open protest, but in general people are free to complain to one another. There are even elections.
Once you see that the national conservative project seeks to harness the state rather than destroying it, you can appreciate how deeply it threatens contemporary liberal democracies. And, more to the point, you can see that defeating democracy’s opponents requires more than just victory at the ballot box.
NOTE
* This is why Trump and his allies cannot accept the legitimacy of any election that they lose, and why they tried to overthrow the government rather than step down. They believe that elections should be affirmations of their authority, not referenda on their authority. Any election that does not affirm their authority is hence invalid.
Tom Pepinsky 