Subscriptions
Read our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
A democratic republic will always attempt to root out corruption, as Thomas Paine, the English-born political activist who galvanised support for American independence, observed. But a monarchy or mixed government — he was thinking of Great Britain of the late eighteenth century — cannot survive without it. Corruption is the operating principle of autocratic rule. This is worth bearing in mind as we take in the Trump administration’s setbacks in the past weeks in Hungary and Iran.
To listen to conservative apologists, you might think that the defeat of Viktor Orbán’s pseudo-religious kleptocracy in Hungary offers a valuable lesson for supporters of Trump-style “populism.” Just go easy on the corruption, and don’t forget about the economy, and maybe then you won’t lose the next election.
But corruption is the baseline principle of autocratic regimes everywhere, and economic destruction is its inevitable byproduct.
The Iran war has prompted a similarly misguided hunt for a teachable moment. Maybe if the America First team had invested a little more in analysis and management, it wouldn’t be lurching from one deadly fiasco to the next, or so some suggest.
However, incompetence is ever the eternal helpmeet of corruption. Asking the Trump administration to relinquish ineptitude is like asking the proverbial leopard to give up its spots. It wouldn’t be Trumpism if it didn’t involve pushing individuals of principle and talent out of Government in favour of flunkies and grifters.
Consider last week’s election results in Hungary, where Peter Magyar’s centre-right party trounced former Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, and the chaos and strategic folly involving Trump’s war of choice in Iran, which has unnecessarily turned the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global pipeline, into a political football. Both developments expose much of the basic machinery — and major failures — of the anti-democratic movement. They also represent a culmination of Christian nationalism and its modes of operation.
Trump’s Iran War Is Pushing the Post War International Order to Breaking Point
The US President’s reckless actions risk destroying the global political order, but could something good emerge from the wreckage, asks Alexandra Hall Hall
Former Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán famously coined the term “illiberal democracy” to describe his own Government. It was nothing of the sort. It was a pseudo-religious kleptocracy: “pseudo-religious” because it involves the use or exploitation of religious imagery and narratives for political purposes, often by people who don’t even believe in the religion they are selling.
The outlines are at this point well-known, and the overwhelming majority of voters in Hungary appear to have seen the essentials. At the centre is the kleptocrat-in-chief. Everyone near him — his school buddies, his lieutenants — gets extremely rich. Everybody else gets a gerrymandered political system; a propagandistic media system; and, above all, a rush of religious nationalist ideology, spiced up with racist and misogynist rhetoric, because every authoritarian movement needs scapegoats.
To those with a passing grasp of American politics, this all sounds familiar. What is less well-known, however, is the extent to which this model relies on global support from like-minded pseudo-religious kleptocrats. Orbán received critical support from Russia, in exchange for which he abused Hungary’s membership in the European Union to stymie and degrade European interests and undermine the NATO Alliance. He also made excellent use of America’s supposedly conservative movement and its Christian nationalist organisations.
Here are some of the highlights of American religious nationalist movement’s involvement in the organised looting of Hungary:
The Heritage Foundation, the powerful organisation that coordinated Project 2025, signed a landmark “cooperation agreement” with the Danube Institute, a rightwing think-tank which that manufactured ideology for Orbán.
CPAC, which runs MAGA and Christian nationalism-aligned conferences several times every year, hosted five conferences in Hungary. In return, Orbán funnelled taxpayer money to CPAC.
But CPAC was hardly alone in supporting Orbán’s regime. The Alliance Defending Freedom, the well-funded legal advocacy organisation behind many of the court cases undermining church-state separation in the US, has dramatically increased its funding for its international outposts, which pursue the culture war causes dear to the hearts of autocrats like Orbán.
A Hungarian foundation channelled Government funds to Orbán-friendly American intellectuals like Rod Dreher and Christopher Rufo and the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl, to dress up illiberalism in grand philosophical language.
The Claremont Institute has intensive ties, lavishing Orbán’s regime with gushing reviews as “the future of Europe” and getting involved in lobbying on behalf of Orbán.
JD Vance, who is best seen as the love child of the far-right Claremont Institute and the billionaire Peter Thiel, made his famous visit to Hungary on election eve, where he castigated the EU for alleged interfering in the election even as he himself interfered to help Orbán.
And, of course, Trump met with Orbán, praised him, and got him to denounce the threat of “antifa” . In fact, he and members of his administration are reportedly trying to invent “antifa” — or resistance to fascism — as an international threat and to tie it to groups and individuals in the US, in order to prosecute them.
For these and other groups who signed up for Orbán’s programme of enrichment for his friends and family, the election results must come as a setback. It remains to be seen whether democratic groups will succeed in rolling back the systemic changes Orbán enacted.
What we can take for granted is that neither America’s Christian nationalist leaders, nor their Russian allies, are likely to re-think their basic vision or mode of operation. In both Russia and America, the money machine that funds pseudo-religious kleptocracy is still present.
Furthermore, while the MAGA movement is showing some division around the war in Iran, there is little sign that the base of religious nationalist supporters has lost its appetite for culture wars against the supposedly “woke.”
I’d like to dwell a little longer on the religious-nationalist element that we saw in Hungary and continue to enjoy in the US.
Those who have not studied the movement often express some surprise on seeing the connection between Christian nationalism and corruption. These people are supposed to have Jesus and the Bible on their minds, not Mammon, right? But religious grifting is something of a cottage industry in the US.
Does anybody remember Jerry Falwell Jr, the high and holy Christian nationalist whose endorsement of Trump in 2016 was pivotal, but who then lost his job in a morass of yacht-based sex and money scandals?
This is a movement that doesn’t just succumb to the occasional grifter, but rather produces them regularly, and then backs the grifter-in-chief all the way to the end of time. More than that, as both Orbán and Trump have understood extremely well, religious nationalism offers a permission structure for the worst kinds of corruption, violence, and abuse. If God is on your side and the devil is on the other side, after all, anything goes.
ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE
Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.
We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.
Now let’s turn from Hungary to Trump’s war-of-choice on Iran. A clue to the extraordinary blend of corruption and incompetence in this venture is to be found in Trump’s family deals with weapons companies, oil interests, and real estate ventures in the region. All of it is justified by the Christian nationalist rhetoric that has inevitably come to envelop it.
Here’s the key feature of these extraordinarily anti-democratic moves: It is that they are all done out in the open.
In the old days, we may have imagined that authoritarianism is something that happens in darkened rooms and in the silence of the oppressed. Today, authoritarianism operates according to a different set of principles. Its proponents don’t need or want to break the law in private or through secret dealings. They want to do it as publicly as possible, so that the public comes to the conclusion on its own that the law no longer matters.
The strategy here is to break the law in the open, over and over, until the law itself appears to be broken.
And that is the conclusion that the new, postmodern authoritarian wants you to reach. They want you to understand that all the nice words from the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation about the Constitution and “rule of law” are just for show. The Constitution, they say or imply, just means whatever the Dear Leader says it means. The “rule of law” just means that the leader is the law.
For those of us who live outside the information bubble of the anti-democratic movement, the meaning of events in Hungary and Iran should be clear. There is no compromise with Trumpism, wherever it is to be found. Like the Hungarians, we must throw the bums out. And then, as the Hungarians have vowed to do, we must hold them to account.