This Revolution of Destroyers Demands New Names

History, a tragic cycle of gain and loss, has a way of slapping our illusions of progress in the face.

And to fully appreciate our new world disorder with its daily menu of betrayals, threats, tariffs, annexations and outright villainy, we require an honest political vocabulary.

So let’s call a spade a spade — and place the words we need in bold-faced italics. Words like revolution. Führer democracy. Orbánization. Mafia state.

Our neighbours to the south are in the throes of an ugly and (so far) bloodless, full-scale second American revolution.

Trump and his radical cadres have threatened Canada, abandoned European allies, humiliated and blackmailed Ukraine, dismantled the state’s bureaucracy, attacked its universities and embraced the ugly worldview of Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin.

These acts do not represent just another disruption or a transactional presidency. Or some new form of unconventional politics. We are witnessing a revolution that pretends to address numerous and often legitimate grievances by overthrowing the ruling social order.

In this revolution the virtual guillotines are now lining up for shocked members of government, media and universities. The crows are circling and there is no expiry date on the growing disorder. (Yes, fascism by its very nature is exhausting.) In revolutionary times, perfidy, calculation and fear carry the day.

Moreover, his remarkable upheaval, orchestrated by an ambitious clique of Christian nationalists, oligarchs and techno-fascists, seeks to mould a Führer democracy — a term coined by Hungarian political scientist Andras Körösényi.

The Hungary-born Austrian journalist Paul Lendvai is the one who has warned about the “Orbánization of America” last year.

Might makes Reich

But before parsing the Orbán model, let’s briefly revisit the thoughts of Hermann Göring, an old school strongman for some historical perspective.

Hitler’s number-two man operated as a ruthless technician of totalitarian rule before its material seductions undid his influence. He would certainly recognize this Trumpian moment as well as its insurrectionary character. Let us not forget that Hitler and company also used democratic institutions to erase democracy.

One of Göring’s first jobs in 1933 was to remove unreliables from the Prussian police force and replace them with loyalists. “My measures will not be enfeebled by any legalistic hesitations,” promised Göring in one of several shameless speeches on the need for revolutionary change. “My measures will not be enfeebled by any bureaucracy. Here I have not to exercise justice, here I have only to destroy and exterminate, nothing else.” How Trumpian is that rhetoric? How Muskian the tone?

Göring’s shamelessness underscores something highly relevant to our current predicament. Every preening autocrat, including Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk, Donald Trump or Danielle Smith speaks without shame in a post-truth world.

Once shame has been banished, the lawless can rule with impunity. This is why lies circulate more freely than house flies; why moral compasses pile up like plastic in a landfill and why reasoned arguments hold less currency than a Bill Maher joke. What did Hitler say? “Close your hearts to pity.”

Now Göring knew that Hitler’s nationalist revolution (and Hitler called it “the most bloodless revolution in world history”) was essentially about tearing down the ruling order and expanding lebensraum or “living space” for Germans in eastern Europe.

(Trump and his acolytes now propose to expand America’s living space into Canada, Greenland and Panama.)

Before Göring committed suicide in 1946, he lectured a Nuremberg defence lawyer about evil and power in a way that should resonate with our feverish times.

Evil lurches to full form, confessed Göring, in tyrannies that wield total power over life and death. Such power, he added, demands a whole-hearted embrace of professional villainy. “Let me have men about me who are arrant knaves. The wicked, who have something on their conscience are obliging, quick to hear threats, because they know how it’s done and for booty… Let me have men about me that are utter villains.”

Göring understood the dark ethic of the totalitarian world. Today’s mainstream media, a largely ahistorical and wounded animal, still thinks drinking from a fire hose is just a disruption. It is more interested in virtue signalling than truth-telling. Hence the need for an impolite vocabulary.

Ways of the Viktator

Fortunately, Hungarians can teach us a thing or two about this subject. The terms Führer democracy and its companion mafia state originated among Hungarian thinkers and journalists. For that’s how they now describe Viktor Orban and his authoritarian regime: a Führer democracy enriching a mafia state.

Even locals refer to Orbán as “Viktator.”

Orbán, a consummate lawyer and cynic, has ruled Hungary with an iron hand for the last 15 years. Critics think he could do so for another 20.

On the public stage, Orbán performs as a national populist defending “the real people” of Hungary. But backstage, he has neutered the courts, changed election laws and taken over the majority of media to extend his rule. Orbán proudly calls his concoction an “illiberal democracy.” Meanwhile, friends and family of Orbán count themselves among the richest people in Hungary.

“Hungary is a mafia state — the only one in the European Union, by the way, and very similar to Russia,” notes Bálint Magyar, a Hungarian sociologist and former politician. “The government acts like a centralized and hierarchical criminal organization.”

In a mafia state, a sort of adopted criminal family replaces the status quo. “The two basic motives of such autocracies are to concentrate political power and accumulate personal wealth,” notes Magyar. Meanwhile, whenever the European Union tries to teach a criminal organization like Orbán’s government how to fight corruption, it deludes itself into thinking a lion “can become a vegetarian.”

Writing the Trump and Vance playbook

Orbán’s tireless promotion of his autocratic brand has long excited right-wing national populist revolutionaries around the world.

In 2022, Kevin Roberts, president of the Trump-supporting U.S. Heritage Foundation, proclaimed that “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model. Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Australians — everyone — can and should learn from it.” America’s revolutionary Vice-President JD Vance agrees and says Orbán has made “smart decisions” the U.S. can learn from.

In fact, Orbán has become something of a magnet to aspiring autocrats in a might-makes-right world. Canada’s former prime minister Stephen Harper has trekked to Budapest and encouraged conservatives to forge closer ties with Orbán’s government. The Hungarian Conservative magazine has written glowingly of Danielle Smith, premier of Canada’s most Orbánized province.

Orbán, of course, salutes the rulers of China and Turkey as pillars of muscular governance. He embraces Saudi Arabia, a petro-state ruled by a murderous monarch. He remains Putin’s greatest ally in Europe and sings the executioner’s praises like some perverse nightingale.

Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu also salutes Orbán. For many years the two shared the same winning team of political consultants (George Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein). Netanyahu, who well fits the mould of Führer democrat, also played a critical role in introducing Trump to Orbán’s autocratic wiles. As a result, Orbán was the first political leader to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy. Since then, Trump has repeatedly described Orbán as “a very great leader, a very strong man.”

Not surprisingly, Orbán’s English language think tank has forged ties with the U.S. Heritage Foundation, the author of Project 2025 — a guide for turning a representative democracy into a Führer democracy.

The Orbán model is not rocket science or strictly ideological. It is all about concentrating power in the Führer or godfather by selectively changing the machinery of government. Orbán has done so with greater subtlety than either Trump or the chain-saw wielding Musk are now doing in the early days of the second American revolution.

Orbán began eroding Hungary’s democracy by first capturing the constitutional court. (He has since amended Hungary’s constitution 12 times.) He then gutted the bureaucracy not so much to downsize the state but to put his political servants in control of all key institutions. After a massive centralization of the executive branch, Orbán used the state budget as a cudgel against any who might oppose him. He particularly singled out NGOs critical of his government.

Meanwhile opposition newspapers lost all state advertising. He fired all the workers at the public broadcaster and made it a reliable instrument of state propaganda. The majority of Hungary’s media is now under Orbán’s control or that of friendly oligarchs.

A Führer democracy follows the logic of power: a captured judiciary will not protect a free press, and a captured press will not defend an independent judiciary. And that’s how the rule of law becomes the law of rule.

To disguise his incremental power grab, Orbán often orchestrated any number of public distractions and conspiracy theories explains constitutional expert Kim Scheppele in a revealing interview with the economist Paul Krugman.

One example included putting up “statues to raving anti-Semites” in order to preoccupy “the entire liberal opposition.” While they protested the statues, Orbán passed one statute after another “through the parliament consolidating Orbán’s power.”

Change the vocabulary

Various parts of Orbán’s model now seem self-evident in the United States. The Supreme Court is largely captured and has even given the president immunity for his actions. Much of the media is controlled by oligarchs sympathetic to the revolution. An unelected billionaire has knee-capped the federal bureaucracy. Inspector generals, the people in charge of rooting out government corruption, have lost their jobs.

The president, who dabbles in unaccountable cryptocurrencies, demanded and got a billion dollars in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in return for favourable treatment.

When consumers rejected Teslas as a symbol of rampant fascism, the Trump government readied an order for $400-million worth of Tesla armoured vehicles. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has documented much of this corruption more cogently than the media.

So revolutionary times require unique political vocabularies. Using the term “Führer democracy” or mafia state won’t necessarily stop the mayhem but it might dispel us of our delusions and remind us that, yes, political forces can act like tornadoes in a trailer park.

Referring to Trump as a revolutionary instead of a populist president won’t alter his behaviour, but it will better prepare people for the unpredictable historical forces now unleashed.

Expressions like Orbánization also remind us that there is precise method to the seeming madness. The voice of reason cannot turn lions into vegetarians.

In 2010, the historian and complexity expert Peter Turchin warned that the United States would enter an era of intense political instability in the 2020s. It was a prediction based on a data rich examination of the behaviour of 200 states over a 5,000-year period.

Over time states rise and collapse. Only a few ever renew themselves. The cycle begins with decades of stability before erupting into violence or state failure. That’s when four things typically go wrong: society’s wealth pump becomes a one-way pipeline that engorges the rich; as a result ordinary people experience declining fortunes from reduced life spans to smaller incomes; ruling elites lose their footing about what really matters and ignore the cancer of rising inequality; counter elites emerge with revolutionary ambitions due to elite overproduction.

Elite overproduction explains why we see crazed political instability. It is what befalls societies that have too many elite wannabes all vying for a fixed number of power positions. Subtracting chairs while adding players to the power game of musical chairs in faltering democracies tends to end in ruthless political brawls. The frustrated players often form alliances with marginalized working people to foment political turmoil and insurrection. And that’s the Trump revolution.

According to Turchin’s research the historical cycle of wild instability, civil war or state collapse only ends when the wealth pump flows back to the people, and the surplus elites are killed off or overthrow the social order.

When Turchin published his revelatory book End Times two years ago, he described “the United States as being in a revolutionary situation. Now, I would say we are in a true revolution. There are two aspects to this revolution. First, it’s a revolution of the elites — Trump and his network are trying to replace the established elites with their own members. Second, their intent is to make this revolution transformative, meaning they aim to fundamentally change attitudes toward their agendas and America’s role on the geopolitical stage.”

So don’t be afraid to use a bold vocabulary for our present reality. A serious revolution is underway, and it is being led by a Führer democrat along with a shameless gang of counter-elites and oligarchs. A mafia state is emerging. Years of discord await us.

Last year Orbán met Trump at Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s triumphant election. The two talked warmly about the politics of strong men.

Viktator then tweeted the familiar hubris of revolutionaries: “The future has begun.”

And yes, history has a way of rudely slapping progress in the face.