--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Johnny Harris, we're going to spend the week talking about the fact that you outfitted your whole family with Quip electric toothbrushes at getquip.com. Who should we start with?
--:-- Johnny Harris: I think the person we should start with is my wife, Isabel, or Izzy, as we call her around here. She was kind of the impetus of this whole thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She was. I got back from Hong Kong, all jet lagged. And in passing, I was unpacking. I was like, oh, I lost my Quip. I should just order another one. And she goes, no, you're not going to order another one. Like, you're not just going to indulge in your quip addiction without getting the rest of us a quip as well. And you did.
--:-- Johnny Harris: I did. We're used to hearing about democracies becoming autocracies. But it usually involves a military overthrow, maybe an assassination, a citizen uprising. But what about when it happens slowly over time? That process is called democratic backsliding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beachum has been reporting on democratic backsliding for Vox, and he just got back from Hungary, which is sort of ground zero for the process.
--:-- Zach Beachum: In Hungary, you really need to go back to right around the end of the Cold War. Hungary was obviously a communist country. And its current leader, Viktor Orban, its prime minister, who was duly elected, was back then a youth activist in the anti-communist movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He got famous for giving a really rousing speech, actually, at the anniversary of the 1956 uprising against communism by Hungarians.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And Orban built up this big reputation as, you know, one of the important political players all before he was 30 years old. His movement, which initially started out as a kind of middle-of-the-road liberal thing, shifted to the right. And he began to exert profound amounts of control over the way that the party operated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In Budapest, I talked with a Hungarian legislator. Her name is Susanna Selenyi. She was in Fidesz, which is the name of Orban's party, but quit in 1994.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Basically, I left Fidas in 1994 because I thought Orban had so much power by the time, which I just couldn't live with together, you know? He was not only moving the party to the right, but displaying early signs of an authoritarian temperament in the way that he ran it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I didn't want in 1994 that my political career and any prospects in my career is in the hand of Victor Orban.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Do you have any idea what caused him to shift from, I don't know, sort of activist to conservative leader?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, the dominant party in Hungary, right after communism, was a social democratic center-left party. There were other parties, but there was no mainstream conservative party.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Orban thought that the best way for Fidesz to differentiate itself from the other post-communist parties was to develop a conservative identity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He is, according to basically everybody, a political opportunist par excellence.
--:-- Zach Beachum: One of his biographers, in fact a former Fidesz member, said that something like – and I'm paraphrasing – Victor Orban's greatest talent is being able to persuade himself of the absolute rightness of whatever is good for him at this particular political moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's what happened with Fidesz early on. It started to become a mainstream conservative party. And it won an election in 1998. And so Orban, at the age of 35, was the leader of Hungary.
--:-- Zach Beachum: But that term only lasted until 2002, where they were voted out of power. And Orban's lessons from this were interesting, according to the people that knew him and were talking to him at the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They weren't, you know, this is the way democracy works. They weren't, you know, I screwed up.
--:-- Zach Beachum: His reaction was, we lost because the competition was too fair. He didn't think it that way he didn't say it that way but his view was basically that Fides couldn't get its message out well enough and that was because they didn't control the media and the levers of government and so he spent the next few years with some allies building up not only an independent media architecture that was slavish to the pro-Fides line but also a plan a plan for what they would do if they took power again, how they would change the Hungarian government, such that it would be very difficult for Fidesz to ever lose again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2009, he gave a speech that's now quite famous, in which he said they wanted to build up a gravitational political center in Hungary that would be in power for 15 to 20 years We talking extended one rule
--:-- Zach Beachum: And that what he was saying even before 2010 the second Orban term begins in 2010 So he's out of power eight years. That's right. But he comes back with this absolutely massive majority, in part because of corruption scandals afflicting the socialists, and in part because incumbent parties all did really badly around 2010 because of the Great Recession.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And while Fidesz didn't campaign as an authoritarian party, after Orban took power, it was this incredible fast burst that started to change the way that Hungarian politics operated.
--:-- Zach Beachum: So what did he and Fidesz do once they got back into power?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there were basically three prongs to the Fidesz offensive on Hungarian democracy.
--:-- Zach Beachum: The first one is changing the rules of the game. In the first two years alone, they rewrote the Constitution, and they rewrote it in ways that would give Fidesz distinct advantages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of them was a pretty extreme form of gerrymandering. This made it such that it was possible for Fidesz to win two-thirds of the parliamentary seats with less than 50% of the national vote.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They expanded the size of the constitutional court that reviewed their decisions so they could appoint cronies to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They set a maximum age limit for judges at age 62, the idea being you force people to retire and then you can appoint your people and there'll be less scrutiny.
--:-- Zach Beachum: OK, so the first thing Orban and his party, Fidesz, do is rewrite the Constitution. They start to take control of the judiciary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's the second thing?
--:-- Zach Beachum: The second is seizing control over the media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you're in charge of the government, you can put a lot of pressure on media organizations to sell.
--:-- Zach Beachum: In a country like Hungary, public advertising is a big source of media revenue. They would withhold ads from government-critical publications and give them disproportionately to government-friendly ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: By 2017, one Hungarian scholar estimates, 90% of all media was either owned by the government or owned by somebody who was government-friendly.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Okay, number two, take control of the media. What's next?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The third one is a kind of crony capitalism.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Crony capitalism. Yeah, this is a really interesting one because like obviously the point of corruption is to make yourself rich, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's not actually the strategic purpose of corruption in Hungary.
--:-- Zach Beachum: The strategic point is that if you're concerned about somebody bankrolling the opposition or you're concerned about somebody starting up a new media outlet that might be able to challenge the government's hegemony on information, well, then you're concerned about rich people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what Fidesz did is concentrate economic power in the hands of loyalists and ostentatiously punish people who cross the government by cutting off government aid, by refusing to give them fair bids on EU contracts, by sending auditors after them, harassing them with weeks or months of intensive and paralyzing bookkeeping.
--:-- Zach Beachum: To the point where it was very clear that you couldn't do well in business if you crossed the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Orban and his friends got super rich.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And so it's a brilliantly designed system, right? You rig the elections such that in a fair fight, the opposition has no chance.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You make sure that there's no independent media that could make the opposition stronger and allow it to potentially overcome the unfair advantages that you built in to the electoral system.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And then you crush independent economic power so no one could start a new opposition party or any kind of new media outlets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's this whole system that seems democratic, if you look at it from the outside, but isn't.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Democratic backsliding isn't just a thing that's happening in Hungary. It's contagious.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's next on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so which quip did you get for Izzy?
--:-- Johnny Harris: I got Izzy a light silver chrome quip. Which is like top of the line quip, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, yeah. I figured I needed to redeem myself here with my actions.
--:-- Johnny Harris: The cool thing about the quip is that you can get family package. This is at getquip.com slash explain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yep, you like can poke around and you can see the family package and it comes with two plastic and two chrome.
--:-- Johnny Harris: It's like, could it be any more perfect? Plastic for the kids, chrome for the adults.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Johnny Harris: And she was pleasantly surprised when it arrived. She liked it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. And it made up for the whole not having a quip for a while.
--:-- Johnny Harris: All was redeemed, especially because in the family pack, there comes a large tube of toothpaste and three small travel tubes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh. And she's a travel filmmaker as well.
--:-- Johnny Harris: And so that just, that was the cherry on top.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach, I mean we established that Hungary is basically in this sort of semi-state.
--:-- Zach Beachum: What did being there feel like? What was it like in Budapest?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Budapest is an awesome city. It's beautiful.
--:-- Zach Beachum: There's this stunning classical architecture, a giant parliament building that feels like a monument to democracy, a temple to democracy almost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a world-class city. It is consistently ranked as one of the top party cities in Europe.
--:-- Zach Beachum: When I was there, I kept running into big clumps of college or 20s-aged people come over from other European countries to have a good time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They have this unique ruin pub scene.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Ruin bars are old buildings turned into bars without any major renovation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eat your heart out, Brooklyn.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Yeah, you know, it's arty, it's fun, it's a great place to visit because you can just basically ignore the politics and move on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not obvious. Like I was recently in the UAE and like it's obvious that that's an authoritarian country.
--:-- Zach Beachum: So what's life like for people who aren't going to ruin bars?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For ordinary people, it is not that different.
--:-- Zach Beachum: But if you are in a sphere of work that involves politics tangentially or directly, you really feel the pull of Fidesz and the Orban government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's one story, I can't tell you his name or the field that he works in, but he's a businessman who was doing really well and was happy with his work.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And then one day he got a call from some random government official, had nothing to do with the sphere in which he was working.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the guy was like, I hear your company is for sale.
--:-- Zach Beachum: In his head, he thought, no, no, it's not. We weren't advertising or anything. We didn't have any plans to sell.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he has to take a meeting with a government official saying something like that.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And the guy comes over and says, you know, I'm going to orchestrate a purchase for your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Laughably claims it's from some wealthy, independent Middle Eastern buyer, which is obviously not true.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And so then he realizes what's going to happen. If they didn't sell, they were going to be frozen out of the markets they needed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They wouldn't be able to get investment. They wouldn't be able to get access to any EU funding because the government would block their capital.
--:-- Zach Beachum: So he had to sell to the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now he told me he's leaving the country.
--:-- Zach Beachum: He said this place is shutting down and he wants to go to a real European country where his kids aren't trapped by a government that represses them and controls their own destiny.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If there's no one to criticize Orban and Fidesz from inside the country in any meaningful way, are their voices from outside?
--:-- Zach Beachum: Like, do the European Union have an opinion?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The EU has been wishy-washy on Hungary.
--:-- Zach Beachum: You know, they've voiced concerns about things that are going on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, Mr. Arbant, you have not the right to say that these people here are fighting against the Hungarian interest.
--:-- Zach Beachum: It's the opposite. It's true. It's not your interest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But your interest is not the Hungarian interest.
--:-- Zach Beachum: What we are defending here is Hungarian democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But one thing that's interesting about the European Parliament, the EU legislative body, is that they have blocs.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They're kind of like super parties. You know, representatives from each national party of a certain kind is in this EU-wide super party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So all the social democratic parties are in one block.
--:-- Zach Beachum: All the conservative parties, the mainstream ones, are in the EPP, as it's called, the European People's Party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And some of the factions in the EPP are like, we can't keep Fides in here.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They're authoritarians. They're destroying democracy in their country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have to kick them out. But they can't mobilize enough support to do it.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Because they've got friends. Yeah, they have friends and they're seen as leaders on the immigration issue, which is the principal way that Orban has gotten support.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right. I saw that Orban couches it all as protecting Europe from the immigration wave that's waiting at its doorstep, right?
--:-- Zach Beachum: That's right. He calls it an invasion and he talks about the threat to Christian values.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's important to understand what that means.
--:-- Zach Beachum: It is understood in civilizational terms, right? It is what Europeans, meaning white people, have done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A Fides MP in longtime Orban L.A. named Janos Lazar, he went to Vienna.
--:-- Zach Beachum: You know, it's a three-hour train ride from Budapest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he went around the capital and he filmed all these different immigrants, mostly Muslims, but some Sikhs too, some Africans, walking around.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And he talks about how dirty they made the streets and how dangerous they made the streets of Vienna and how we need to do everything to keep them out of Hungary or they will destroy Budapest the way that they've destroyed Vienna.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these people aren't doing anything.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They're just walking around. They're not like littering or beating people up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's just implying, not implying, he's straight up saying the very presence of non-white people makes a city more dangerous and more dirty.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And that is the way that Fidesz has built up an independent popular base.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why so many people in Hungary like them.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They have figured out a way to combine rigging the system with an ideology that resonates with a lot of conservative Hungarians
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you ever read The Sun Also Rises?
--:-- Zach Beachum: Yeah I not a Hemingway fan
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this really funny line where one character asks another, how did you go bankrupt?
--:-- Zach Beachum: And the character says, slowly first, and then all at once.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I wonder, is that how Hungary's democracy is disappearing?
--:-- Zach Beachum: I feel like we're used to seeing democracies overturned in a day by the military or something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this is just this slow, creeping, insidious, oh, whoops, we're not a democracy anymore.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Yeah. Oopsie.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, that's right.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Have you heard of this idea in philosophy called the Ship of Theseus?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, yeah. Remind me.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Okay. So it's this neat thought experiment, which is mostly academic, but it's from a Greek myth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, if you take a ship and you take out one wood beam, obviously it's the same ship, right?
--:-- Zach Beachum: But how many wood beams do you have to take out before it's a different ship?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Zach Beachum: But each time one individual beam shouldn't make the difference. It's just a beam. Right.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when? Under how many different times?
--:-- Zach Beachum: Because if you replace all the beams, it's a totally new ship.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah.
--:-- Zach Beachum: This reminds me of one of my favorite Onion headlines, which is how bad would the environment can throwing away one plastic bottle be like 30 million people wonder?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly. Exactly.
--:-- Zach Beachum: So Hungary is like that, only it's democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You take out one little thing that is important to how a democracy functions.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And you're still a democracy. You've got problems. Every democracy has problems.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You take out another thing. Oh, okay, every democracy has multiple problems.
--:-- Zach Beachum: After a certain point, you're not a democracy anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But no one can say exactly for sure when that happened, and that's exactly the point.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Orban needs to be able to say, oh, we're still a democracy. Look, we have elections. We're still a democracy. Look, we have opposition parties.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And not be as embarrassingly blatant about that being a lie as when Russia does it.
--:-- Zach Beachum: Nobody's under the illusion that Russia is actually a democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in Hungary, when you talk to FIDA supporters, they're convinced that this was, you know, the last election was fair.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, you mentioned Russia. Russia is an obvious comparison here.
--:-- Zach Beachum: But we've seen democracies crumble before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or what about what's happening in Hungary feels new to you?
--:-- Zach Beachum: The thing about Hungary that I find so fascinating and chilling is that it is an example of how a democracy can die in a country where people are still Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Poll after poll of Hungarians shows really strong support for democratic values.
--:-- Zach Beachum: They want to have free elections. They want to have a free press. They want to be free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the government's whole thing depends on a large portion of the population buying the myth that this is still a democratic system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is not a crazy scenario in other Western countries you can think of too, right?
--:-- Zach Beachum: There's all of this panic about weakening democracy and the rise of populism in Western countries, but nobody believes there's going to be a military coup in France.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's just not plausible.
--:-- Zach Beachum: So how could these people be a threat to democracy?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, Fidesz. Fidesz shows how modern right-wing movements corrupt democracy without formally overturning it.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And slowly, over the course of time, replace it with a system that looks like democracy, but doesn't function like it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To the point where their supporters can still be lackadaisical and think everything is fine.
--:-- Zach Beachum: And people sounding the alarm, well, they just get marginalized.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's so much more clever, so much more subtle, and in that way, so much more scary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beachum is the host of the worldly podcast at Vox.
--:-- Zach Beachum: He went to Hungary on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on crisis reporting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now you've resolved. It sounds like you've resolved the domestic strife.
--:-- Johnny Harris: Never been better with our toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great. And you're about to resolve your Hong Kong trip by posting the last Borders video today.
--:-- Johnny Harris: I'm finally publishing the fifth episode about the strange housing situation in Hong Kong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People in Hong Kong are living in houses that are not much bigger than a coffin.
--:-- Johnny Harris: Wow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that video, what, YouTube.com slash Vox?
--:-- Johnny Harris: Yeah. Is there a better website?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think YouTube.com slash Vox, or if you just Google Vox Borders Hong Kong, you'll see it.
--:-- Johnny Harris: And getquip.com slash explain for the toothbrushes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Totally.
--:-- Johnny Harris: One last thing before we go, a recommendation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Check out the Reveal podcast if you haven't yet.
--:-- Johnny Harris: It's one of my favorites.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's got some of the best investigative work you'll ever hear on a podcast.
--:-- Johnny Harris: One of my favorite episodes dropped back in the summer of 2016, before the election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was called Pumped on Trump, and one unforgettable segment featured a Sri Lankan American reporter hanging out with a Trump-supporting motorcycle gang, and the gang was very confused about the reporter's origins, but they all talked it out.
--:-- Johnny Harris: Find the Reveal podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and find out more about the show at revealnews.org.
