Byline Supplement — A Q & A with Jason Stanley on America’s Two Futures
It’s up to us to decide if we want to become like Hungary or we want to preserve our imperfect democracy
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After RadPod’s most recent interview with How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley, I thought about the choices he laid out:
We either become like Orban’s Hungary — a soft fascist state — or we do everything we can do preserve democracy in November, allowing Biden to make some big moves over the next four years to strengthen America.
Yes, we need deep structural reforms — our only chance to begin that process is retaining the presidency, and for Democrats to secure the House and the Senate — November could decide Senate control for years.
So with that on my mind, I took RadPod’s interview with Stanley, and applied his teachings to this report for Byline Supplement:
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Here is an excerpt:
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban…He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it…He’s the boss.”—Donald J. Trump, introducing Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago, 8 March 2024
All the World’s a Stage
My son once told me that if Donald Trump were not trying to destroy America, he would make a fine game show host or Vegas lounge act. As I watched a clip of him at his gilded oligarch-chic beach hotel, Mar-a-Lago, I thought of this. How schticky loungey it all is. Models getting their hourly rate to pose next to disgraced politicians — the thumbs-up posturing a subliminal flick of the nose to law enforcement.
There on stage last Friday night is Donald J. Trump praising Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — saying there’s “nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán… a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it…He’s the boss.”
Orbán is the living embodiment of the dream for wannabe dictator Trump, who is facing ongoing legal entanglements and likely a seventh bankruptcy and/or more oligarch bailouts as recent judgements approach a half-billion dollars.
The timing of Orbán’s visit is designed to steal President Joe Biden’s thunder after his historic State of the Union address. Biden came out swinging, putting Vladimir Putin on notice and framing the narrative correctly. Not since 1941, have America and other democratic nations faced such peril.
Meanwhile, the lounge host is dancing with dictators.
“What's life like in Orbán's Hungary, the most corrupt country in the EU? Miserable, especially if you're a child, (high malnutrition rates), a young adult, a woman, LGBTQ+ person and ally, a refugee, and anyone with an open mind,” wrote filmmaker and author, Andrea Chalupa. She then cited a recent study that concluded Hungary is the most corrupt country in the EU.
But for the MAGA cult, reality is continually inverted and subverted, pesky facts swatted away like flies, as a misuse and abuse of words muddies the darkening waters.
A Thirst for Dictators
In Trump’s praise of Orbán, I hear another gnawing thought, a memory of something Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the Strongmen author, told me in our first interview with her for Byline Times, about what happens when a country develops a thirst for an autocrat:
“We should feel overjoyed that we were able to vote out Trump in the middle of his process of autocratic consolidation because we saw from the great result he had – over 70 million people voted for him – that the thirst is not quenched,” she said. “The problem is, once the bond between leader and follower is consolidated, almost nothing can break it.”
America’s fascist flirtation revealed the very fragility of democratic freedoms.
“What the Trump years have shown us is how fragile our democracy is and how no country is immune from the temptations of a leader who says ‘I can fix this. I am your voice,’” Ben-Ghiat added. “We have to build democratic protections into our everyday lives. We can’t think it’s going to survive without our help.”
As I listened to the laughing approval when Trump praised Orbán for legitimately being a dictator I thought about this thirst — a lack of awareness that authoritarians benefit only the authoritarian. They can’t even be counted on to benefit their closest allies, because if you have what they want, it belongs to them.
Receding Freedoms
As we reported in our ‘Unmusked’ investigation, in 2018, Orbán encouraged owners of hundreds of Hungarian media properties to ‘donate’ them to a Government allied foundation. The Central European Press and Media Foundation (CEMPF) began absorbing cable news channels, internet platforms, newspapers, radio stations, and magazines. The result was a centralized right-wing Government-controlled media syndicate.
Freedom of the press has been on a steady decline in Hungary ever since.
Orbán’s attacks on the rule of law ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he declared a state of emergency and began seizing unlimited power to rule by decree. Among the targeted groups were the LGBTQ+ community, women, journalists, academia, and asylum seekers.
In our first interview with Ben-Ghiat, she noted the nature of Orbán’s style of power consolidation.
“Orbán is a very interesting case because he has managed to consolidate his control without physical violence… it’s not without violence entirely, but he has also not used mass detention. He’s not poisoning people like Putin, and he’s not sending hundreds of thousands to be arrested like Erdogan does. He’s used the media. He’s used buy-outs, he’s used threats, and he used COVID very effectively because he saw this as a moment to consolidate his power.
“While I was writing the book, he got Parliament to allow him to rule by decree, so COVID was a moment where some rulers made their moves because they knew that it could hurt them – that mass disease and economic hardship could hurt them – so they made their moves to go the opposite direction so now no one can remove Orbán.”
No one can remove Orbán
I offer this deepish background to understand what the US is facing in this moment — a tale of two futures. One, where freedoms are rapidly on the decline. Or, a future where we hold the line in defense of an imperfect democracy, so we can begin patching the vulnerabilities revealed by the Trumpocene.
A Tale of Two Futures — Jason Stanley Warns America
And that brings me to my recent interview with the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Jason Stanley, who said that if Trump should win in 2024, we can expect our version of fascism to look “a lot like Hungary under Orbán”.
We began our interview with him chiding the notion that Trump is facing four more years in office.
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I hear echoes of your book How Fascism Works in my daily reporting, and why is there, still, in your mind, a disconnect about how our Fourth Estate is reporting this moment in time? I am not encouraged at the continual normalization coverage of this race.
Jason Stanley: It's scandalous. If Trump wins, it's a historical failure on the part of outlets like the New York Times, who are influenced by a staff that is totally cynical about the situation. That it’s just ‘another election — whiners and haters are saying it's different’. I mean, they'll say things like, ‘Oh, how can you risk another four years of Trump?’ Another four years of Trump!? Do you think Putin stays in for four years? It's absurd.
It's not another four years of Trump. When you end the democratic system, it's not another four years of a leader. Maybe it'll be a different Trump — maybe it’ll be Donald Jr or our first Jewish President, Ivanka. But reporting on it, like the risk is just another four years of Trump, is a fail.
We have a far-right, undemocratically appointed, Supreme Court — the majority was appointed largely by a President who didn't win the popular vote. They are showing themselves to be simply there to grease the wheels to end democracy — to end the rule of law. So it's a terrible situation. And the newspapers are reporting it like a horse race, like it's just another Democratic and Republican election. And anyone who points that out is called a hysteric.
HSC: Yes, or called a conspiracy theorist. I focus on the disinformation component so let’s talk about your latest book, The Politics of Language. Can you explain how words are misused by fascist leaders and the dangers that poses — our mutual friend Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls it ‘the upside-down’.
JS: The Politics of Language helped me think through the kind of language we're seeing from the far right — the kind of authoritarian ‘cult of the leader’ kind of speech. It's an academic book. And I’ve also been working on a new book Erasing History, which documents how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.
That is about the attack on our schools, the education system, universities, the way that country after country around the world is rewriting its textbooks, attacking university professors — trying to stack the universities in the schools with ultra-nationalist supporters of whoever the autocratic leader there is.
I'm trying to tie the threads together, as you also often do on your program, between different countries and the far right movement — the far right autocratic cult of leader movement — we face in the United States today.
And what I’m finding with the language of propaganda — I call it undermining — when you use words in the reverse meaning.
So [the cult leader says], ‘You're the ones threatening democracy’, which is just an old one — projection.
But they empty the vocabulary of its meaning by using it in the service of goals that are quite the opposite of the words’ actual meaning…
Russia did this — Vladislav Surkov did this as a political technologist. They would back opposition movements, who are like official ‘liberal’ opposition movements, who are bound to failure, so people would lose all faith in democracy. Democracy became meaningless. And that's what Trump is very astutely doing with the vocabulary of democracy.
HSC: Trump is what Ruth calls a ‘superb propagandist’ and thank you for explaining how words are drained of meaning. I have been investigating House Speaker Mike Johnson and his ties to Russian oligarchs who make munitions for Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and his tentacles to the Council for National Policy network. He’s spent a career trying to take away my rights and your rights, and is now holding up support for Ukraine, and my point is, you’ve been to Ukraine recently and taught there. How do we wake people out of this stupor to see that if the West does not do everything we can to help Ukraine fight Russian imperialism, our allies can no longer trust us, and we’re certainly not helping ourselves.
JS: It’s the complete destruction of the United States as an international power…But Ukraine is a very clear case. It's an extremely clear case, and it looks like there is from what one hears, Russian funding flooding into the United States, literally.
Traitorous politicians are undermining our standing internationally…
‘Undermining Propaganda’
But that’s not it. It’s ‘undermining propaganda’, it's robbing words of meaning…
Domestically, they're literally undermining faith in the United States, economically, and politically — domestically and internationally.
It is literally an attack on the United States. If you want that, go ahead, but label it correctly.
The enemies of the United States couldn't have wanted anything more than Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.
It’s astounding. Ukraine is fighting against a clearly fascist empire that Mike Johnson is threatening — and just completely needlessly kowtowing to — to hand them the country of Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers are willing to fight and die en masse to fight Russia, they just need weapons. They're not asking for anyone to fight for them…
At some point, we're going to get legal targeting of opponents, probably through the tax system or something like that, if they're going to continue to imitate Viktor Orbán.
I don't think we'll get a Putin-style assassination of political opponents here. I think it'll be like Hungary where, anti-Trump business people will have to sell their businesses and will get pressure on them.
I don't think that we're going to get a Russian-style, violent (system). I don't think they're going to be imprisoning people. I think they're going to be doing what they did to (Jim) and tie people up in courts and use the legal system to target opponents, but not in the brutal ways that Russia does, but more in the ways that Orbán does.
To read the rest of the report — as noted, please subscribe to Byline Supplement if you can, or reach out to me directly.
You can watch the core interview with Stanley on Ep86 of RadPod.
Please also if you have a moment, check out my recent reporting in Salon:
Thank you as always for your support of my work.
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Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine and Substack bestseller. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members. Thank you, as well, to those who support my work with coffee tips and who buy my ebooks. My reflection, Confessions of a ‘Fox Blonde’ was just published in Byline Supplement. A reviewer of my ebook, the erotic novella Fox Undercover, called me “the punk rock Anaïs Nin” and a “powerful woman - the book is smart and sexy AF.”
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Writing for a growing global audience brings her great satisfaction.