Regarding authoritarianism, Viktor Orban and the MAGA wealth and power movement

A NYT opinion by Hungarian born reporter Kati Marton (not paywalled): 

Why I’m Not Giving Up on American Democracy

For a time [after 1989], Mr. Orban, no longer bearded or skinny, head of the youth party Fidesz, befriended Richard and me. He invited us to dinner and the opera, and we hosted him in our New York apartment at a return dinner. (As it happens, the financier and philanthropist George Soros — whom Mr. Orban has aggressively attacked in recent years — was also present on that occasion.)

Orban in 1989

But in 2002, defeated at the polls after a single term as prime minister, Mr. Orban made sure that he would not be defeated again. Re-elected in 2010, he proceeded to weaken much of Hungary’s nascent civil society — its independent judiciary and its independent media. In this way, he began turning the country into a one-party state.

By some views, Mr. Orban’s Hungary is a soft autocracy, since dissidents and reporters aren’t jailed; they are merely driven out of business and — in the case of thousands — out of the country. Mr. Trump has evidently been impressed by Mr. Orban’s skill at eroding democratic norms and ridding himself of pesky political opponents. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” Mr. Trump has gushed.

Neither individuals nor nations escape history for long, and with Mr. Trump’s election, history threatens to barge into our American democratic sanctuary with a vengeance.

No American child has yet had to open her front door, as I did in 1955, to face three secret policemen, disguised in workers’ overalls, declaring, “Your mother called about the meter. Go get her.” I called out, “Mama!” returned to my room and my playmate, and did not see my mother for a year. There was no one to report my parents’ arrest to the world, since they were the last independent journalists, and now they were silent inmates.  

A chapter of my parents’ past opened in 2005, when, after their death, I got access to the files that the secret police had kept on my family during the years of Soviet domination (even the drawings I made as a 6-year-old merited a place in the Marton dossier). .... I found a document stating that under brutal interrogation my parents “did not compromise a single Hungarian citizen.” In his “confession,” which I also found in the files, my father had written how 10 years earlier, under the Nazis and their Hungarian allies, “we lost pretty much everything we owned, and I have absolutely no hope that in my lifetime I can rebuild again.” .... Even though they were victims of the two worst experiments on humankind, Nazism and Communism, my parents did rebuild again, here in the New World.

As much as I miss my parents, these days I am almost relieved that they are not alive to see the current version of the country they considered the greatest on earth, the United States. They would now barely recognize it.

Today, I do not contemplate leaving the New World, which allowed us to restart our lives several decades ago. As my parents’ daughter, I will not flee into the silence of internal exile, but hold tight to my first glimpse of America: an offering of oranges for a little girl temporarily orphaned by an indecent state. (emphases added)

Yes indeed, history threatens to barge into our American democratic sanctuary with a vengeance. But most Americans cannot see it. This is the sort of authoritarianism I fully expect DJT, MAGA elites and GOP politicians to try very hard to establish by 11/1/26, just before the next mid-term elections.

Q: Will people like Germaine and sites like Dissident Politics face the kind of self-righteous discipline inflicted by MAGA that Orban and his thugs inflict on Hungarians who oppose him?

Bonus stuff for the hard core politics enthusiasts:

And, for those who forgot this 5 minute interview with Kim Scheppele I posted here in Aug. 2022, here it is again:

Orbann argues democracy is failing and power like his is rising to replace it. He just might be right.

Civics quiz

A 10 question civics quiz (not paywalled). I got 9/10. ☹️

Democracy updates: Rethinking regulations, etc.

I'm a huge fan of data-driven politics. But in my experience, that is a concept that is rarely touched on by the MSM or its MAGA counterpart. And when it is touched on, it tends to get distorted by ideology, political opportunism, etc. Fortune magazine writes:

Politicians claim regulation hurts small businesses. When you look at 

real-world data, the truth is more complicated

We found that regulation-related tasks account for up to 3.3% of total labor costs for the average American establishment—costing all companies combined a total of $239 billion in 2014 ($289 billion including equipment). To give a sense of the scale, U.S. gross business income taxes amounted to $353 billion in the same year. Yet regulatory burdens vary widely across firms of different sizes. Midsize firms with around 500 employees spend, on average, about 47% more on regulatory compliance costs per employee than small firms—and 18% more than large firms.

Some regulations only apply to medium to large-size businesses and exclude smaller businesses. This can facilitate entry by small firms but creates a big hill to climb as these businesses wish to expand.

Large firms benefit from economies of scale that allow them to hire dedicated compliance specialists and put systems in place for managing compliance and reporting efficiently. These practices are more cost-effective than spreading the task among many nonspecialized employees. Large firms may also have a hand in shaping the rules to limit competition. [Well duh! That's just pay-to-play politics]

The uneven impact of government regulations creates a hump that companies must climb as they grow. The high regulatory compliance costs faced by midsize companies could prevent their growth, or even deter them from trying to grow. Companies sometimes bunch below the size threshold at which onerous regulations would begin to apply. 

Agencies could also test whether individual regulations are truly worth the expense through pilot programs. Before adding a new sanitation requirement for restaurants, for example, a city’s public health department might first roll out the regulation to a subset of establishments. The agency could then track how much the costs of compliance go up, and whether rates of food-borne illness go down relative to restaurants that are not operating under the new regulation. [Unbelievable -- someone arguing for testing to see if and how well something works or fails to work! What a shocking idea -- too good to be true /s]

A person can easily see big companies structuring regulations to prevent companies from getting too big. That limits competition and fattens profits, a twofer! It's a win-win strategy for the behemoths and lose-lose for the pipsqueaks.


Trump picked his lawyer for a top Justice Dept. job. Does it matter? -- If confirmed as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche should recuse from Justice Dept. matters related to cases where he represented Donald Trump, experts say. -- Blanche would fix “a broken System of Justice,” Trump declared in a statement. Days later, Blanche was hard at work in his current role, signing a court filing that derided one of the cases against Trump as “politically-motivated and fatally flawed” and argued that it should be dismissed.

MSNBC confronts viewer frustration, changes and an identity crisis -- The network’s audience has declined since the Nov. 5 election, as viewers have tuned out. Its parent company is spinning it off. -- “We’re going to become a guest-driven, fully opinion operation that doesn’t even have the appearance of being a news-driven operation,” predicted one MSNBC journalist who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. -- Some critics questioned what the hosts meant by saying they were going to take a “different” approach to covering Trump. “The big problem with the announcement is that they all but said they’re going to give warmer coverage, which is a strange thing to announce,” the network insider said.

I've said it before and say again, professional journalism is not compatible with for-profit capitalism. Maybe it's not even compatible with rational politics, unless one defines rational politics to include irrational, e.g., populist, politics. Being at least somewhat irrational may actually be the rational thing to do for pro-democracy people.


Russia, Targeting Ukraine’s Grid, Moves to Cut Off Its Nuclear Plants (not paywalled) -- Moscow has increasingly hit critical substations linked to nuclear power plants in an effort to disconnect them. At the same time, Ukraine replaced the commander of its ground forces. “Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is extremely fragile and vulnerable, putting nuclear safety at great risk,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the agency, the I.A.E.A., said in a statement released late Thursday. Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the war’s first winter two years ago, in an effort to collapse its grid and make life miserable for its citizens. The Ukrainian authorities reported that Russia used cluster munitions — weapons that break apart in midair, scattering smaller bomblets over a wide area — to attack the grid.

Women despair over Taliban rules, but many Afghan returnees don’t see it (not paywalled) -- For the first time since the Taliban takeover three years ago, Afghans living outside the country have begun flocking back to their homeland, usually to visit relatives who have remained in Afghanistan. Upon their return, few seem preoccupied by the Taliban’s increasingly draconian restrictions on women — including bans on women going to university and school above sixth grade — or by the reluctance of many local women to leave their homes out of fear of encountering the morality police, according to interviews with residents and visitors. Instead, many of the visitors, carrying foreign passports or visas, marvel about the sense of security and the construction of new roads under Taliban rule. They post photos of their favorite Afghan dishes, discuss business plans and shop in the Kabul airport’s new duty-free store.  During a recent family trip to Kabul — her first since the Taliban takeover three years ago after years of war — Zahra, 34, was pleasantly surprised. “There’s freedom now,” said Zahra, an Afghan who lives in London. She indulged herself in shopping for gold jewelry and is already planning another trip to Afghanistan next year. For Afghan women who have had to live under Taliban rule, the enthusiasm of visiting relatives can be puzzling and, increasingly, frustrating.

Comment: This bit about Afghanis outside not caring about people living there is fascinating but disturbing. Assuming this reporting is more right than wrong, it clearly suggests that a lot of people have curiously limited amounts empathy. In this case, maybe that is mostly dues to an understanding that there is nothing outsiders can do to improve the plight of the oppressed, trapped natives. So why not take advantage of what there is to take advantage of and blithely carry on? Or, is something else going on here? 

Pandamonium!

The NYT writes about pandas (not paywalled):

For decades, American zoos have raised tens of millions of dollars from donors and sent the money to China for the right to host and display pandas. Under U.S. law, those funds were required to be spent protecting pandas in the wild.

But the Chinese government instead spent millions on apartment buildings, roads, computers, museums and other expenses, records show. For years, China refused even to account for millions more.

Regulators with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the payments, have for two decades raised concerns about this with American zoo administrators and Chinese officials alike. The U.S. government, on three occasions, froze payments to China over incomplete record keeping, documents show.

Zoos, too, have known that the money was not always going toward conservation. But they worried that if Fish and Wildlife cut off the money altogether, China could demand the return of its bears. Zoos count on pandas for visitors, merchandise sales and media attention.

Ultimately, the regulators allowed the money to keep flowing and agreed not to check the spending in China so thoroughly, according to records and former officials.

“There was always pushing back and forth about how the U.S. shouldn’t ask anything,” said Kenneth Stansell, a former Fish and Wildlife official who traveled to China throughout the 2000s to discuss pandas. He said his Chinese counterparts argued that “it shouldn’t be of any concern to the U.S. government.”

None of this has been revealed to the public.

The rule of law? Meh, whatev dude. Don't get your knickers in a bunch.