Regunberg: Thank you so much, Zack and Jennifer, for joining the Fighting Fascism podcast on short notice to talk about this incredible event that just occurred. We’re really excited to have folks with your expertise and deep, longstanding knowledge to help us think this through.

DaSilva: Yeah, despite all my best efforts to become a Hungary expert in the last 24 hours, I don’t think I could have carried the water on this one.

Beauchamp: This is the self-awareness. We were talking about this before the show. I just feel like everybody pretends that they’ve been studying this for a long time now.

Regunberg: There was an Onion article in like 2001 or something that was like, “Guy who just bought a book about Afghanistan won’t stop talking about everything he knows about Afghanistan.”

DaSilva: Zack, with that, can you start by giving listeners and myself a little background on the electoral earthquake that just shook Hungary and why it is so significant?

Beauchamp: Yes. So let’s wind the clock back to 2010. That year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán returned to office. He had been prime minister from 1998 to 2002 at that point and had ruled as basically a pretty conventional center-right European politician for the most part. There were a few exceptions. One Hungarian intellectual who turns out to have been prescient called him a kind of fascist. And Orbán contested the election results, but it didn’t really go anywhere in 2002. And he went out of office basically saying he needed to build what he called a central political force field that would allow him to rule for two decades. And they spent those next eight years out of office from 2002 to 2010 planning all of the different things that they would do to ensure that they would not lose future elections like they did in 2002. Think about project 2025, only much more systematic, much more rigorous and coordinated by a guy who is a very, very sophisticated political mind to begin with. Viktor Orbán’s a trained lawyer. Ironically, given who his enemies were, he studied in the UK on a fellowship paid for by George Soros back in the day when he started out as an early anti-Soviet pro-democracy.

Regunberg: That is a great fact. Get that Soros money.

Beauchamp: Yeah, he did. He got the Soros paper. He got the Soros paper. So Orbán comes to power. And one of the first things he does is rewrite the constitution with nine days of debate. And this totally transformed the Hungarian political system. And it did so in all sorts of different confusing and complicated ways that very few people, including even in Hungary, understood at the time.

But the effect was basically to decapitate the democratic system and to lock in a variety of different changes that, over the course of time, would compound and make it harder and harder for the opposition to compete on a level playing field. So 2010, Hungary is a pretty normal post-communist democracy, right? Actually, it was widely regarded as one of the most successful case studies of a country transitioning to democracy from authoritarian communism. By 2026, Hungary was widely seen by experts as the only authoritarian country in the European Union.

Something between 80% and 90% of the Hungarian media was owned by the government or government-aligned allies. The entirety of the judiciary had been taken over, including the two high courts, the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, by loyalists of the government. The main businesses in the country were often run by Orbán’s childhood friends, or sometimes his law school friends, or sometimes just someone who really toadied up to him. Basically, the corporate class in Hungary was overwhelmingly now people who depended on government handouts, because the government had shifted the regulatory framework to be highly political, that you would really only succeed if you aligned yourself with the state. This intense amount of corruption, the messing with the political system, the level of gerrymandering in Hungary was totally off the charts. We can talk about the details about how it worked, but the end result was to lock in a system that’s widely described as a version of authoritarianism.

The thing that they didn’t do, though, was stuff the ballot boxes. It wasn’t cheating in the formal sense of going in and changing what the ballots actually said. They relied on all of these legal machinations and some really dirty, old-fashioned, coerced vote-buying in certain places in order to ensure that they would maintain power. The system seemed nearly impregnable. But that “nearly” – I feel like I’ve written this article many times, “almost impossible for Orban to lose,” “nearly impregnable” – I always put the adjective there because I was anticipating a case like this one, where the public would backlash so effectively that eventually there might be something that would overwhelm their ability to control information.

What happened, essentially, is the beginning of a form of electoral regime change. A government that had transformed a democracy has now lost, and they’ve been replaced by somebody who has the mandate to switch things back. In the Hungarian system, if you have two-thirds of votes in parliament, you can amend the constitution at will and no one can stop you. Peter Magyar, the guy who beat Viktor Orban, has a two-thirds majority under his new parliament, the Tisza party. They can do it. They can amend the constitution. They can theoretically, if they’re creative and aggressive enough, do a kind of legalistic regime change and build a democratic system in the ashes of the authoritarian one. So what I will say right now is that there’s hope for democracy in Hungary for the first time in a long time.

Regunberg: Thank you so much for laying that out, Zack. Jennifer, I want to bring you in. An animating philosophy of this podcast is that the antidote to right-wing authoritarianism in America is a genuine economic populism that directs people’s anger and frustration towards the forces that are actually causing them pain, which in the U.S. we would identify as billionaires, corporate interests, their takeover of our political and economic systems. This might be a misread, but in a lot of ways, I think that’s a slightly different way of articulating the concept you’ve developed of repolarizing from a left-right axis to a top-down axis. I think you called it a nation-versus-oligarchs axis. Can you tell us a little bit more about this repolarization analytical framework of yours and how you see it applying to what just took place in Hungary?

McCoy: Yeah, when I first saw the results of these elections, I thought, wow, this is a perfect illustration of this framework that I had developed with a co-author, Murat Somer from Turkey. It is that when we’re already in a polarized state, what we call pernicious polarization, extreme toxic polarization that’s harming democracy, then simply depolarizing, trying to just diffuse it may not work, because it’s very hard to bring together these two sides that have been so polarized. Instead, what we were arguing is to shift the axis, the line of conflict, the axis that it had been on, especially that the incumbent government that is polarizing has defined it as – whether that’s left or right, or in the case of Hungary, it could be EU versus Russia, safety versus fear. That’s what Orban was running on. So shift that to another line, another definition of the conflict that could galvanize a large majority of people. And so what I saw Magyar do, he defined it as the nation versus the clan, referring to Orban’s clan, the cronyism that Zack was talking about.

And that’s really a corrupt oligarchy. And the nation is the good of the people. And I think in the U.S., what people are talking about here is, how can we create a country where everyone can thrive, can flourish, a country that is truly for all, for all people living here? And so that could be presented as, it used to be called the 99% versus the 1%, but it could be the whole country, the people of the country versus the billionaires, versus the corrupt oligarchy.

What words to resonate is something that needs to be defined. But that’s what I was thinking was a wonderful lesson from Hungary. But I would say that besides doing that, to do that, you have got to connect the concepts to people’s everyday lives. We had tried democracy versus authoritarianism before. I saw that tried earlier. I was in Hungary in 2022 for that election, and also in Turkey in 2023. And in those cases, the framing of democracy versus authoritarianism did not reach people. Democracy is too abstract, and it needs to be tied to the daily lives of people. And that’s also what I saw Peter Magyar doing in his campaign. The corruption is affecting your life this way. We don’t have a functioning health care system and hospitals because of the corruption of this clan of Orbán. And so it’s got to be tied to the daily lives of people to get them to pay attention.

Regunberg: You listed Turkey there and other countries. I think we’d add the United States in 2024, the Harris campaign, which talked a lot about democracy, but I think talked about it in a much less concrete way than Peter Magyar.

Beauchamp: I just want to register that I profoundly disagree with this diagnosis of what happened with Harris and with the utility of democracy as a political idea. I just did this long research project about this. And I think it’s just important that people understand what the purpose and the utility of democracy rhetoric is. I think that campaigns are very different, in terms of the utility of talking about democracy as an abstraction.

First of all, I think there’s no compelling evidence that it caused Harris’s loss in 2024, which I think was largely overdetermined by, well, Biden and inflation. But secondarily, you also had just the year before that midterm elections where democracy and Republican extremism was an extremely prominent campaign theme, and it was really effective. Then you have other elections like the Brazilian election that elected Lula, where democracy was an overarching theme and a really popular and powerful one as deployed by a left populist, but brought in center-right voters that proved crucial to his win.

But also, I think more fundamentally, talking about democracy as a concept is important. This electoral analysis tends to elide the value of talking about democracy under attack when you’re dealing with an incumbent authoritarian regime. Rallying people against that regime really requires naming what the kind of attack is. And comparative evidence suggests that’s overwhelmingly important in galvanizing opposition to a current incumbent takeover effect.

Smucker: Zack, let me dig into that with you for a minute here. I’m not sure that the democracy rhetoric cost Harris so much as that it didn’t do anything for her. And specifically, you talked about how it was helpful for Biden in 2020. I think it was also helpful for Democrats in the midterms in 2018. However, there’s two things I want to unpack with that. One is that, and you mentioned this yourself, some of this is the role of talking about democracy when it’s combined with anti-incumbency versus when you are the incumbent. Because part of what’s happening right now is there’s so much anti-incumbent sentiment – and this is a global phenomenon that’s basically sticking to everyone, probably because the underlying neoliberal order isn’t going anywhere and isn’t serving people, right? So there’s the anti-incumbency piece.

And the second piece, I do think it did a lot for Biden with certain voting demographics in both 2018 in the midterms for Congress and then for Biden in 2020. But in the United States, even though Democrats swept in 2018, they didn’t win more than “R-plus two” districts. And I was alarmed by the results in 2018 because Republican turnout, the incumbent party, the party in control of the White House, had greater turnout in 2018 than any time in 50 years before that. That was alarming to me. And not only that, the Democratic turnout came from more affluent voters. And all the while, in 2018, 2020, then in 2022 and 2024, progressively, Democrats continued to bleed out working class voters. And at first it was mostly white working class voters. And as we know, it then became Black and brown and Asian working class voters as well. So I’m not advocating that we stop talking about democracy. Don’t get me wrong, I care about democracy. But I think that rhetoric of defending democracy has played with more affluent, highly educated people. And it hasn’t landed with working class voters who might not think that democracy is necessarily doing very much for them at this moment.

Regunberg: What did you see in this last election, regarding how Magyar was deploying concerns about democracy and how he was connecting them to the everyday lived experience and struggles of Hungarians under this anti-democratic system?

Beauchamp: Let me start with the first question. And first of all, I’ll say there’s a reason I mentioned the 2022 midterms. Biden was an incumbent defending an unpopular incumbent record, and yet he put up the second best performance in a midterm election for a president in the modern era, the best one being George W. Bush right after 9/11, which is a totally abnormal state of affairs, right? And the reason that that performance was so good in Congress was because voters – and this is very clear in the data postmortems by Catalyst and other places – voters punished Republican extremism. State secretary of state candidates that ran on the Big Lie lost, I think, pretty much across the board. Candidates that were strongly associated with Republican stances on the 2020 election.

Smucker: Or on Roe versus Wade.

McCoy: That’s what I was going to say. Yeah, we can’t ignore how important reproductive rights was and the role of women. Which was not the abstract democracy. It’s how is it going to affect your life in this case? The freedom, and freedom is a good word in the United States that resonates more than democracy because we are divided on democracy and populist authoritarians also say they are going to restore or deepen democracy. They run on democracy as well. This is the problem. And so we’re polarized in the United States about who is the threat to democracy and whether it’s improving or not, or who’s improving it. 

Beauchamp: I agree that that’s what they’re trying to do. That’s the whole way in which they succeed is by taking up the mantle of democracy for themselves. That’s a major part of the argument in my book. So that’s really important. I think it’s essential to bring in. But I also think that movements that are by their nature authoritarian, they can’t keep up that mask forever. And they do things that cause a contradiction between democracy, which is actually a widely held value. I think if you look at polling data, most people in the United States and Hungary, by the way, including Orban supporters and deep Trump supporters believe that they were upholding democracy and say they believe in it. And when you can point out a contradiction, a gap between their actual actions and the things that they say to believe.

Regunberg: Like when armed gunmen shoot citizens in the street.

Beauchamp: Or when you send thugs to raid the Capitol. Now, January 6th has faded in public memory, but it mattered in 2022.

DaSilva: Yeah, it feels like in some ways the midterms in 2022 were just closer to Jan 6. And people’s attention spans are so short that by November 2024, Jan 6 didn’t matter, which is crazy, but kind of feels like, I don’t know, that was the case with a lot of people.

McCoy: Some of the things that Magyar did in his campaign that were related to democracy was he talked about the rule of law. He actually talked about Hungary rejoining the European Prosecutor’s Office, which would then be able to come and help to investigate and charge and bring to trial the corrupt offenders. And he had maybe a little bit too much punishment in his campaign message. I’d be curious what Zack thought about that. He did talk about retribution a lot, but holding them accountable and restoring the rule of law was an important part. And he brings that together with the corruption and how the corruption was affecting their hospitals and their loss of jobs and all that.

Beauchamp: Yeah. I would also add that Magyar was a center-right candidate, right? And by most European country standards, he might just be considered right wing. He said some pretty awful things about migrants during the campaign. One comment about migrants potentially eating the animals at the Budapest Zoo, right? This is a guy who, under normal circumstances, listeners of this podcast would not want to vote for, I think, on the whole. But why did left-wing Hungarians vote for him overwhelmingly? And not only did they vote for him, but left-wing parties did not run candidates in key districts, right? They just basically suspended their existence as political parties to allow a battle between a far right and a center right party. Why did they do that?

Well, there’s one answer. It’s democracy. They knew it was the only way they were going to survive. So democracy played this incredibly important uniting role, and it probably would have gone the other way too, right? If it had been the case in 2024 when Peter Magyar emerged as the key candidate of the opposition, had he been someone on the center left, it would have caused, and this happened in other countries, it would have caused an alignment against the authoritarian for him.

This is, again, to go back to the 2022 Brazilian election, you saw the same thing, right? When Lula was the candidate of the left, the longstanding candidate of the left, but after the first round runoff, center right candidates flooded to endorse him because they thought that Jair Bolsonaro was a much greater threat to Brazilian democracy. And so that was a really important way in which democracy glued the coalition together, people who agreed on the fundamentals of the system. The need to defeat an authoritarian. They were able to unite despite ideological oppositions because they believed that everyone should get a fair shot at competing in the democratic game. And so it was really essential, even if it probably didn’t move the median Fidesz voter. I think that’s true, but appeals to democracy and concern for it were essential to the electoral outcome.

Regunberg: On this point that Magyar is a conservative – and Zack, this is the last time and the most time where I’m going to do the “our worldview, does it match or not”’ And just want to be very open about that.

But it would be very convenient for folks like Smucker and me and Matt who believe the Democratic Party needs to go in a more populist direction to say, yes, Magyar is a conservative in his background, but he focused his campaign, as Jennifer said, on oligarchy, on running against the corruption of Orban’s billionaire buddies. He said a few families own half the country. He promised a wealth tax on the ultra rich, right? To my ear, it sounds a lot like economic populist in the US from Bernie Sanders, to Zohran Mondani, to Graham Platner, to less left-coded populist like James Talarico in Texas.

I guess the question for both of you is, is that a fair comparison or am I twisting reality to match my worldview and agenda?

Beauchamp: I think it’s complicated. Fair, right? And let me start this by saying where I agree with you, or rather, maybe I disagree with everybody. Because I read this editorial in The New York Times that was like, he’s proof that what we need to do is pivot to the center on cultural issues. If Democrats do that and they run on a slightly more populist economic platform, they will win.

And I just sat there reading this and thinking, do you guys know that Hungary is a different country? Right? It’s a different country with really fundamentally different politics and culture, and a different political context and background. Like this is a country that had been an authoritarian state for 16 years, right? What was going to unite people and what was going to work in the course of that after 16 years of Fidesz demagoguery against LGBT people, against migrants, against George Soros, against academics. This had been like, imagine if Fox News was literally the only thing that you were allowed to watch on television. Right. Peter Magyar was not allowed to go on Hungarian state TV. They banned him. He did his first interview after winning.

DaSilva: I saw the clip where he was like, it’s great to be here. I am shutting this thing down when I take office.

Beauchamp: It’s wild, it’s wild, it’s wild. So, yeah, I think you probably did need to do that kind of stuff in Hungary and try to diffuse the culture war element of it. I don’t think that same situation is operative in the United States where people have much more socially liberal views on all these issues. Hungary is a culturally more conservative country than the United States is.

It’s also a more economically redistributive country, right? The United States has a much more complicated relationship with the state, and with the idea of the state being involved in the economy than Hungarians do, to the point where the Hungarian right is offering those kinds of proposals that you describe.

And those proposals were also happening and being offered in the context of a country where the concentration of wealth and corruption had become synonymous with the ruling regime. Everyone had been really frustrated at economic underperformance by the government. And so attacking corruption was a way of saying, “I’m going to tear down this system that is causing this.” There had been a massive level of outmigration. Hungary had been experiencing a population decline, not because the birthrate was low. That’s part of it, but because people were leaving, especially young people here. Like one guy I met said the country was shutting down, and that was back in 2018. And it’s gotten worse since then.

So that level of despair and anger, it really is difficult to compare to a country like the United States that had, or prior to Trump had, relatively strong global economic performance. And while people are unhappy with the economy in lots of ways, it’s not the same level of all consuming demolition.

So it just makes me very, very cautious in either direction, because you can spin this narrative in the way that you just did, or in the way The New York Times did. It makes me cautious about saying that the lesson here is to import any of the major tactics into the United States.

McCoy: I just think the contexts are so different when it comes to the campaign trail, and I’m not sure how central political messaging even was to that, but I hesitate to give it that level of power, if that makes sense. When I’m talking about what we can learn is how he polarized, how he reframed the narrative, it doesn’t have to be the same narrative. The same new dividing line. I’m saying every country has to pick what’s going to be good for them. And here’s the problem in the United States. Americans really respect economic success and the people who achieve economic success. And so in some ways, inequality is not a winning theme in the United States. Incredibly, even with our vast income inequality and wealth inequality. Because people think that the billionaires got there from their own merit. And it has to be laid out. Bernie tries to do this and others try to do this, that they didn’t get there just by themselves. They had a lot of help. I mean, that was always Elizabeth Warren’s message as well. But there is that concept in the United States of respect for somebody who raises themselves up, supposedly by the bootstraps and does it all on their own. That we have this myth even though it’s not true.

Regunberg: So I would argue that the next step is that these billionaires and corporations are rigging the rules, and we’ve got this rotten system that has elite impunity, where if you’re rich, you can be a pedophile and nothing happens even. I think there’s a way of doing that bottom up polarization, even given some of those cultural dynamics you mentioned.

Smucker: Yeah, I think that’s right, Aaron. And even with Occupy Wall Street, which you mentioned, Jennifer, and and with Sanders’ rhetoric, and there’s there’s been a number of studies on this – that it’s the intersection of the concentration of wealth and the game being rigged. So it’s not just that these people got rich, it’s that then they rigged the game and that people who are supposed to be serving the public interest are instead the lapdogs of these billionaires. There’s a lot of evidence that that’s the winning message.

Regunberg: That was Trump’s message, right? Like the system is broken. Drain the swamp. And it worked.

Smucker: Yeah. And Trump’s was ambiguous. It wasn’t saying like, hey, wealth is concentrated too much, and the problem is concentrated wealth. But it is this empty drain the swamp message.

And Zack, what you were saying – I mean, it’s true. It’s like anytime a victory happens, people say, “Oh, this case proves all the things that I was going to say.” Which Aaron was very self-aware about. The New York Times editorial, not as self-aware. You don’t see the same person writing in The New York Times article saying Mamdani refused to throw Palestine or trans people under the bus and that’s therefore clearly the template of how Democrats should do it. Right.

But I wanted to ask a question about Magyar’s focus on Orban’s corruption. As we joked about before we started, we’re all coming from the context of the United States, so we’re all like, how does this apply to the United States or not apply to the United States? But my understanding is that in Hungary, corruption has a different kind of resonance. Both because of the past however long with Orban, but also it’s associated with the old guard communist regime that a lot of people hated. And there’s a structural resonance there that some people might argue just doesn’t work in the same way here. Maybe Americans just don’t care about corruption as much. Maybe it’s that we’re resigned to it. But I’m curious about what you think about that. You know, the Trump regime is arguably the most corrupt administration in the history of the country. Does Magyar’s campaign provide any lessons to Democrats on how to actually make hay out of that corruption or not?

Beauchamp: On these messaging questions, this is the one that I feel like there should be the most to draw on here in the United States from what happened in Hungary. But this is something that I struggle with all the time because you look at the data in the abstract and I think Americans really hate corruption in principle. There was the progressive movement in the late 19th century that was really focused on the corruption of the urban machines and the need to install good governance and so on. So corruption has been a politically powerful theme in the US at different points in time. And the evidence suggests people are angry about it. Right now. There’s a political scientist, I believe, at Stanford, Adam Bonica, who does a lot of work on the need for corruption as a sort of political lodestar for Democrats and compiles a lot of compelling data on this point. And yet somehow it keeps not happening. It just doesn’t emerge as this issue that does the kind of repolarization that Jennifer has rightly identified as really important to defeating authoritarians. Now, why is that not happening? And this is something I don’t have a good answer to.

But we can look at the Hungarian case – so why is it that it took so long for corruption to become such an issue in Hungary? Because in 2022, there was a center-right opposition candidate who was sort of a consensus guy. He was a small town mayor and was trying to do exactly what happened in 2026, but he failed. He lost, and Orban won a majority of the popular vote for the first time since 2010 and maintained his two thirds seat in parliament, so that performed very poorly despite the corruption of the government.

What’s the difference here? Why is Magyar so much more effective? And I almost think it has less to do with the content, the political content of what he was saying than the credibility of him as a messenger. He’s a very good public speaker, a tireless campaigner. He went across, I believe, literally the entire country, went to every constituency and campaigned in all of them. But he also was from the regime. And so when he talked about corruption, when he produced recordings as evidence of corruption, people were like, oh, so I’m hearing the stuff, these rumors that are floating around, the stuff that I can catch in the opposition press, that’s all real. And this guy’s validating it, and it made him this incredibly potent messenger, independent of his positions on actual political issues. It was the nature of who he was that mattered so much.

And I think what’s missing in the American context is not like a regime defector – we’ve had plenty of people who’ve broken with the Trump administration and done the same thing. I think you need somebody to fill that role, and it won’t be exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. But somebody whose personal biography and whose position of credibility when talking about these issues, gives them a way to highlight the deep corruption of the Trump administration. I think that would be the catalyst. Or maybe something comes to light that is so bad. Although I don’t know what could possibly be worse than what we already know in terms of Trump corruption, right? It’s pretty bad, the underlying evidence.

McCoy: The fact that he is a defector from the regime is something I was going to bring up too. I think that’s incredibly important. And it’s not that we want to say that has to be the candidate for the United States as well. Somebody from inside.

Regunberg: Marjorie Taylor Greene, 2028! [Laughs]

McCoy: There we go. Another difference between 2022 and 2026 in Hungary is that those were all established parties that that coalition was trying to run behind. And many of those parties, particularly the largest and the leftist one, the socialist one, were completely discredited from the last time they ran. They did not even change their leader. And this was the problem too. In Turkey they wouldn’t change the leader of the establishment party. I mean, he wouldn’t leave. The leaders don’t leave. And that is an important lesson, I think.

Regunberg: Yeah, that has no application to the United States, the leadership of a losing party being entrenched and refusing to go!

McCoy: But the fact of establishing a new party, blowing up the party system and the other parties just have no representation in the Parliament anymore right now.

Another thing is how do you get your message out? As Zach described, he went personally around the country. This is a small country. It’s only 10 million people. And in the United States. Jonathan asked, why doesn’t this become an issue? The corruption and the rigging in the US? I mean, part of it is people don’t know about the Trump corruption if they’re only watching one news channel because it’s not being covered. And so you have to break through, which should be much easier in the US than it was in Hungary, since he couldn’t even get on the main public television stations. So that should be easier.

I think we can also look at how galvanizing the Epstein scandal has been in the United States. That kind of impunity, even though it’s not as much over money, it’s more the sex and the pedophilia that is really upsetting people. But the impunity there is is key and that has broken through.

DaSilva: I had a few thoughts about this, in my 48 hours of becoming a Hungary expert. One was being so jealous of the ability to just start a new party. I just feel like there’s so much baggage associated with the Democrats that if you had a charismatic, good politician, feel like off the bat, even before you launch a policy page, you’re pulling out like 30%. Maybe call it the Rocky Mountain Party or something, and you just have a random, decently talented person.

Regunberg: I think the Republican Party kind of did this to the degree that you can do it in our two party system in 2016, where they had this outsider who had no ties to the unpopular establishment – George W Bush, Iraq War, there was a lot of baggage Republicans had. And Trump was able to exercise that by running as an insurgent against that system. Everyone in that system tried to stop them, and he beat them all. And then he could say, okay, we’re exorcized of all that. And I think Americans in a large part were then like, okay, this is clearly a new thing because Trump was so outside of it. I don’t have to worry about the Iraq War and George Bush or whatever other baggage they had. And so I think that if we thought this was the big lesson, then the takeaway for 2028 is having as much as possible an outsider who is running an insurgent campaign against the establishment and winning.

Smucker: Yeah, just to piggyback on that for a second. I mean, I think we forget this now, because Trump has consolidated control of the Republican Party. We forget on the left and liberals forget this, that Trump waged an all out insurgency, that the establishment tried to stop. And some of the key demographics that he won over – disaffected folks, low voter turnout folks that made his winning coalition go over the top – were convinced by that, by that display of actually taking out one coordinated person after another. And of course, Hillary Clinton was the grand prize in 2016. I mean, in some ways it’s basic. It’s like the corporate boardroom structure. A corporation has a crisis. What do they do? They behead the leader publicly and say this person is axed. And that’s how you rebrand the corporation. Like the Republican Party needed it and they consolidated with it. I think there’s lessons for the Democratic Party.

This is why I am an Eminem 2028 person. You heard it here first. I know it sounds like a joke, but it’s like we actually need somebody who gets their political and social capital from outside of the system. Even Bernie Sanders, in my opinion, plays too nice within the system. We need somebody to blow it up. Sorry to go on my rant here.

Regunberg: Smucker’s always talking about Eminem 2028.

Beauchamp: For a second I thought you were like M and M, Mamdani and someone else.

Smucker: No, he can’t run. No, like Slim Shady. Literally Eminem. Yeah, yeah. And I’m actually serious and I would like to recruit him.

Beauchamp: I don’t know anything about Eminem’s policy platform, so I’m not gonna weigh in on him for president.

Smucker: It’s pretty good, actually!

Beauchamp: But I guess this is the kind of argumentation that has made me much more sympathetic than I was in the past to the sort of pie in the sky ideas of making America into a multi-party democracy. A friend of mine and Jennifer’s, Lee Drutman at New America, is the pioneer on this, and for a while I was like, Lee, you got to be kidding me with this. There’s no way that any of this could ever happen. That a party would legislate its way out of existence. But I think that one of the arguments he’s been making over the years that has won me over is there is so much voter disgust with the current structure of the two party system that somebody who can credibly campaign as an anti-system candidate, not just in the sense of I’m from the outside. Everyone calls themselves an outsider. But when you talk about Graham Plattner earlier. He’s portraying himself as a blue collar guy when his grandfather’s a famous architect. Right. There’s an effort to to build yourself up as a certain kind of person, because that’s what people want. Somebody who’s not from the traditional elite class. And that’s because there’s huge amounts of public frustration in the United States with the traditional elite class. It’s just very unpopular. And that could create significant amounts of public support, I think, for a fundamental revision to the political system. And so I do think that down the line it’s not totally impossible, but that would require an immense amount of things to happen to change in the United States first. For the sort of stars in the constellation to align for a shift towards a multi-party democracy. Which wouldn’t, like, fix everything. There’s no institutional fix to a social crisis of democracy, but I think it might be uniquely useful in the United States – because we’ve had a two party system for so long – as a means of thinking about structural change, that it would feel eminently different, and scramble the contours of the political conflict in ways that would make another autocratic episode, like our current one less likely.

McCoy: So I have to put in a plug here, because I work with Lee to put this on the agenda, and I’m a strong advocate for moving to a proportional representation system and away from our single member district or winner take all kind of system. And what most people don’t know is we can change the electoral system – how we elect members to the US House of Representatives as well as the state assemblies – with no constitutional amendment required.

That’s what most people don’t know. And states can decide. Every state can decide. If they want to change their system to elect people to the US Congress, it can happen. And this is what I’m also advocating and pushing for, because even if it doesn’t create many more parties, we don’t need a lot more parties. We just need, you know, three or 4 or 5 total. It would actually allow us to have different factions within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and to have representation within a larger district within your own state. So I think it can happen. And I think it’s got to happen.

Regunberg: We’re going to have a full episode on this idea of a proportional representation system, at some point. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about the degree to which people are actually talking about how do we build the movement that can start pushing for this?

McCoy: Well, we’ve got to get it on the agenda, which is what we’re trying to do. That’s why Lee and I talk about it all the time.

Regunberg: There is a little bit of conflict here in that we just talked about one of the core things that needed to happen to defeat Orban was everyone coming together in a really remarkable way around one person. And when we were talking about that, I was like, oh, that’s one good thing about our two party system that already automatically happens. You can see a way that fascist parties have come to power in the 20th century with pretty significant minorities because of the way a multi-party system worked.

Beauchamp: Look, I think this is a really important challenge. I think that institutional arrangements are not a vaccine against authoritarian populism. You can’t just legislate them out of existence. It’s never going to work. The question is, what set of institutional arrangements can disrupt the current way in which that sort of authoritarian virus manifests to make it less likely to become terminal to democracy?

I brought up Brazil a few times in this podcast here. I think Brazil and its performance under Bolsonaro, which was much stronger than the US has performed under Trump Two, is an exceptionally positive example of how a presidential electoral system can combine with multi-party elections in a multi-party system to constrain executive aggrandizement. Another important variant of their system is that presidential elections are two-staged. So first everyone from all sorts of parties runs. And then second after that, there’s a runoff between the top two vote-getters, unless someone gets a full majority in the first stage. And that allowed for both the virtues of two parties, which is to say, everybody consolidating against an authoritarian leader, but also multi-partyism in the sense that other parties could exist.

And in fact, they made a huge difference through their existence in the legislature in constraining Bolsonaro’s agenda prior to that, and then afterwards. The credibility of independent leaders of center-right parties endorsing Lula ended up playing a major role in his victory in the second stage of the presidential election.

So the system can be designed to accommodate that phenomenon. But the reason that I become more bullish on a multi-party system in the United States is because we haven’t had it for a long time. And so our authoritarian party is manifesting through a very particular mechanism, which it’s not. Germany, which has a multi-party system, is having a different version of it. Israel, which has a multi-party system, is having a very different version of it. Even though they share ideological precepts in common, the ways in which they game the system are different. And so our current version of it could be shortcut significantly through a multi-party system.

McCoy: I will say, just because you brought up Brazil, there’s another important aspect of that election of how they defeated Bolsonaro that is relevant for the United States as well, and that is that Lula was able to build this broad coalition, not just among parties, but with the whole society. He had the corporate sector, and he had his former political rivals. He had central bankers, he had the intelligentsia and the economic elite coming together with him. They did not agree on his leftist economic agenda, but to fight for democracy they supported him. So it was multi-stakeholder and that’s what we’re missing right now in the United States.

Smucker: So JD Vance came to campaign for Orban and it looked like it hurt him. Do you think that this says anything about the global authoritarian moment? Is there any reason to be hopeful for this? Does Vance’s appearance campaigning and hurting Orban mean anything?

McCoy: I don’t think it was that impactful actually in Hungary. I don’t think that many people, you know, know JD Vance, or that it had that much effect one way or the other because it was much more about what was happening within Hungary. They’re very concerned about their domestic situation. But yes, the way it’s seen here in the United States is it’s kind of a slap in the face to Trump and Vance because they had so openly supported him. And this is something that Trump has been doing in many of the elections – in Argentina, in Honduras – coming out and openly threatening countries that he will hurt them economically if they don’t vote for his candidate. I mean, we have not seen that before. But it just wasn’t that impactful in Hungary because there wasn’t an economic threat.

Beauchamp: I think the other important thing to note here is that Trump is severely damaging his own movement in the international arena. You’ve seen in the past year far right parties across Europe starting to distance themselves from Trump. Now, why are they doing this? The first thing was the tariffs. Turns out that when you target one of these countries economically, no one in the country really likes it. But what’s been really impactful and I think is sort of under discussed in the US is the Greenland stuff. When Trump threatened to annex Greenland – I mean, think about what that is, right? It’s a threat to try to seize by force a European state’s sovereign holdings. And what are these European parties first and foremost, more than anything else? They’re nationalists. And what do nationalists hate more than anything else? Trying to steal land from your country. It is like their whole thing.

And so that act of threatening Europe has splintered the European far right movement. And it broke it in part into pro-Trump and anti-Trump movements. And Orban was very much separated from his friends in Western Europe on this. And that split is only accentuated during the Iran war, as Trump has continued to scream at European allies as a fault of a war that he himself is losing, because he launched it for dumb reasons and conducted it immorally and incompetently. And the Europeans are furious for being blamed for the fact that he didn’t have a plan to fix the Strait of Hormuz, and for Europe being threatened. So you have Giorgia Meloni, who’s like, you know, her party is a descendant of the fascist party in Italy, right? She’s not allowing us basing rights. Or disallowing use of US assets on Italian soil for the war, because she doesn’t want to be involved in it at all, and is really angry at Trump. So the Trump brand is toxic for the global far right right now.

And that doesn’t mean they suffered electoral consequences for it yet, because there haven’t been enough contests for us to be able to say. And in Hungary, I think Jennifer’s right, it didn’t matter at all. I suspect in most domestic elections it won’t matter, because these parties are now increasingly smart enough that they’re not going to say they’re with Trump the way they did a year ago, right when he first took office. He’s managed to screw up one of the only places in the world where people actually liked him.

Regunberg: The vibe shift extended overseas.

I think my one other thought on the the Vance thing that I think is just interesting is that that this international authoritarian project is important enough to the administration that they would see that Orban was in danger, know that it was plausible that he could lose, and then throw down their capital on him by sending the vice president there. You could imagine them seeing that and being like, oh, okay, we don’t want to be embarrassed by this. Let’s pretend like we’ve never supported Orban. But they seem to care enough about this larger project that they didn’t do that. Or at least that’s one possible takeaway.

Beauchamp: Yeah. I’m not even sure it was the administration, I think it was Vance personally. Like, if I had to guess – and I’m not speaking from any administration sources here, to be clear, I’m just sort of speculating – but Vance is the administration representative of the postliberal movement on the political right in the US. Postliberals are the people who love Viktor Orban more than anybody else. They’re the subfaction that has relentlessly touted him as a model for the United States, to the point where two of their leading writers and intellectuals literally moved to Budapest to take jobs at government sponsored institutions. There are two prominent American conservative writers who are currently on Viktor Orban’s payroll, functionally, and living out there right now. And they’re from the same wing of the party as Vance. One of them, Rod Dreher, is a very close confidant of Vance’s. They’ve done interviews together. He advises him. They’re close. He said this when I met him.

Regunberg: I love that they that there are people who uprooted their lives to go move there, and now they are probably going to have to uproot their lives again and get the fuck out.

Beauchamp: That’s not great for them. Yeah, Dreyer’s already said he’s moving to Vienna. So yeah, I don’t know if someone in the Trump administration said, JD, you have to go. I think JD was like, I want to go. I want to do what I can. He said, “The right thing to do was to campaign there.” I think he believes that. I think he believes in this particular project. He’s called himself an opponent of the American regime, right? He wants regime change. When he was a senator, he said this. He believes in all this postliberal stuff.

Regunberg: The man who is so slimy as to have almost no beliefs that he won’t sell out for his own advancement. But the one thing that he is going to go down with the ship is Viktor Orban. It’s wild.

DaSilva: I hope the Pope excommunicates him. The only thing that could make his life even worse.

Regunberg: Fingers crossed. All right, should we do the last question? What is making you most fearful right now? What’s making you the most hopeful?

McCoy: What’s making me fearful are two things within the United States. One is that the Republican Congress is not going to step up to stop the damage that the Trump administration is doing to the world, and particularly with the Iran war. And more broadly, what we’re seeing that they just won’t won’t do it in time before there’s a lot of damage caused. And the second thing that makes me fearful is still the number of people that feel powerless. When people feel disempowered or powerless to change things, so they don’t try, then that’s when you know we’re in trouble. And it’s not just apathy, it’s really powerlessness that makes it very difficult to change a society.

But on the other hand, what makes me hopeful is that I do see a lot of people getting engaged within the United States and working together across various political belief systems. And one of the things that I think is galvanizing people now, another theme that we didn’t talk about is cruelty. I think people get very upset when they see the cruelty of things happening, and they care also about fairness. So for me, right now, the two themes I’m thinking about are freedom and fairness versus cruelty and corruption, as themes that that really resonate with people.

Beauchamp: So what makes me most hopeful is that we are hurtling with incredible speed towards the 2026 midterms. And by that, I don’t just mean that I’m getting older, and so my perception of time passing is going quicker, though that’s certainly part of it.

It’s that as we move towards these elections, the Trump administration is not doing what you need to do to rig elections. It’s quite complicated. It takes a lot of work and they have taken steps in that area, but they also have failed to impose the controls on state elections, to nationalize the election in the way that Trump has said that he wants to. And then to use that nationalized power to rig the elections. And every day that we get closer to the midterms without that happening is a day it becomes less plausible that it will and the United States will have a free and fair election in 2026, which I believe it will. And I believe that Trump will lose his majority in at least one House of Congress, almost certainly, and possibly both. And this is not really about partisanship here. It’s about whether or not the United States, under an authoritarian president, has the capacity to display meaningful democratic checks and for democracy to operate. And I think we will prove in the fall that it will. And that makes me very hopeful, because then Congress will also impose those constraints that Jennifer was just talking about, that the Republican Congress won’t.

What makes me most fearful is that in a presidential democracy, the most common pattern of democratic failure is when you have clashes between the executive and the legislative branch, and the two cannot agree on a procedure for resolving those disputes. That leads to a crisis where the executive typically ends up asserting a kind of unilateral power, extra constitutional power that creates a constitutional crisis and can lead to regime collapse. Do I think that that’s going to happen in the United States? No. Do I think it is possible that that happens, that the result of Democrats controlling Congress is that we have President Trump just acting extralegally, Congress passing laws and Trump ignoring them and there being a constitutional crisis? I think there’s a very real chance that something like that happens, and I’m just not sure our system is prepared to handle it. So that’s what makes me the most worried about the coming years.

Regunberg: It does not make sense to bet big against a constitutional crisis in the coming years, that’s that’s for sure. Well, thank you again so much. Really, really great to have you on. Thank you. 

Beauchamp: Oh, this is great. I’m glad we could be episode four!