Is It Merely a Constitutional Crisis Or a Bloodless Coup D ’Etat?

  

Is It Merely a Constitutional Crisis Or a Bloodless Coup D ’Etat?

Hungary’s Viktor Mihály Orbán was duly elected and has served as that nation’s Prime Minister since 2010, as leader of Fidesz, his conservative party. He is MAGA’s poster-boy for a nationalist autocrat who orchestrated his repressive illiberal government in predictable stages. Taming the judiciary and the media, coupled with his arrests of dissidents, pressing for “correct thinking” in local schools, censorship, vigorous exclusion of encroaching immigrants, and tapping mega-rich oligarchs to purchase hammered media assets at distressed sale values, made Orbán wildly popular with American conservatives. MAGA officials often traveled to Budapest for rightwing gatherings, and Orbán appeared often at GOP functions in the United States… to adulation as a man who had converted Hungary into a perfect MAGA state.

But what propelled Orbán to power was his fervent embrace of reinforcing Hungarian culture above all else. White Magyar peoples, a mix of Roman Catholics and members of the Calvinist Reform Church (Protestant), even though in recent years, religious affiliation had fallen to 57% of the population. But for all practical purposes, the religion and the state were inseparable: when Orbán and his Fidesz Party gained leadership in 2010, most of the church property nationalized under communism remained under the control of the Hungarian government. A convert from Communist mandated atheism, Orbán was quick to remake his government as one of the last defenders of Christian culture in Europe. Everything else was the Hungarian equivalent of “woke.”

Orbán’s autocracy was easily imprinted on the Hungarian people. Even as he sealed Hungary’s borders from “invading” immigrants, the lily-white Magyars’ Hungarian language was not derived from any neighboring tongue. It is complex and difficult to learn, adding one more deterrent to peoples escaping Middle Eastern turmoil and desertification. Homogeneity seemed to seal Orbán’s complete control of his population. As Hungary was watching a drop in local birth rates, his push against immigrants was replaced with major incentives for Hungarian women to have increasingly larger families. Except Hungary’s position as an EU/NATO exposed its people, particularly rising generations yearning for the freedom than Orbán so completely repressed under this culture war.

Thus, there are now rising political forces, a charismatic opponent who has risen high enough the thwart arrest, that could change all of this. After all, Hungary still has elections, and virtually everything Orbán has stood for is an anathema to a very sizeable constituency. But as evidenced by recent protestors carrying a message to American voters: it is much easier to stop a rising autocrat at the beginning – before the infrastructure of repression is solidified – than fighting for your rights against such formidable institutionalized cultural domination. Hungary’s youth see the rest of the world via the Internet, so when Orbán moved to tax and control the Internet, the protests became massive (see above picture).

I’ve written this blog about the metaphor of Hungary to us, not just because what I see is the intentional erosion of the US Constitution by a mentally unstable Donald Trump using an equally mentally unstable Elon “I’ve leaving now” Musk. It happened in Hungary. After several decades under Orbán, this throwback, dictatorial culture war began to find growing opposition, and much like the rejection of rising autocracy in Poland, Americans should take heed that Trumpian/MAGA autocracy does not work. Culture wars are predicated on demonization and hatred, vilification that self-destructs over time. They accommodate a singular perspective that seldom keeps up with modernity, caters to rich incumbents above all else and always smacks of cronyism and corruption.

So, there are some cold, hard facts about what is happening in the United States right now. Fortunately for us, the missteps of the inept Trump administration are, obvious with its inane belief in tariffs and notion that trade imbalances only benefit the seller. Cheap goods benefit the importing nation far more than countries that export. While narrow-focused tariffs have a place in global economics, the broad-based Trumpian approach never works. The resultant retaliation and erroneous assumptions about major tariffs scheme misfired; we couldn’t bring back old-world manufacturing to a nation where 80% of non-governmental jobs are in the service sector,

There is no way outside of serious automation that we can return to generational labor patterns, as mega-out-of-touch Commence Secretary Howard Lutnick predicts. No, Howie, that is not the American dream. And don’t watch the fickle and volatile stock market, and remember, it takes months for the job market to reflect serious downturns. Instead, look at the traffic in our nation’s major ports. In early May, for example, Los Angeles/Long Beach, the largest harbor in the US, saw a reduction in container and ship traffic of between 35-40%. The chickens are roosting.

And as for that “constitutional vs coup” issue that prompted this blog in the first place, President Trump has written executive orders intended to implement almost half of the Project 2025 goals, all within his first 100 days, a record by a long shot. As “brown-shirt” ultra-rightwing senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, drools, fantasizing how our primary and secondary schools will produce “patriotic graduates,” cherishing white Christian nationalist values, the nation descends into freefall and soon to be an also-ran, former great power.

The collapse of the United States was very much programmed into the MAGA culture war, vectors mired in wishful thinking and groundless mythology. Elon Musk was never focused on reducing federal spending; his primary directive was to eradicate the federal bureaucracy (the “deep state”) which was this nation’s less-than-obvious first defense against autocracy. When people complained that the slash-and-burn approach did not present a post-decimation structure to resume government, perhaps it was because there was no intention to replace most of what was removed. Fewer experts in federal government, more of the whims of our Dear Leader could be implemented directly.

The Constitution had to be taken down as well. Surely the legislature and the courts would agree that the United States was at war, a battle against the invasion of undocumented immigrants. But that wasn’t a “war” such that constitutional protections could vitiated. To MAGAns, the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798 was intended to protect White nationalist culture. Trump’s attacking the First Amendment’s support for a free press, the right of people in the nation peacefully to protest against governmental polices, the prohibition against the establishment of a state religion, the term limits imposed on the presidency (22nd Amendment), the birthright citizenship mandate (14th Amendment), the right of those within our borders to have the right of due process before being deprived of liberty or property (5th and 14th Amendments), the relegation to the federal courts of the exclusive right to interpret statutes and the Constitution, etc., etc. were all limitations on legislative and executive powers, the guardrails of our democracy. Bye, bye!

And if those could be eliminated, either directly by interpreting them out of existence, or by appointing “Stepford wives” judges committed to the Big Boss’ directives without question… And if the Constitution could be eroded into meaninglessness, if Congress were too scared to act in contravention Boss Trump’s orders, if the federal courts (intimidated with threats) gave the Boss deference, and if that body of experts with decades each of relevant governmental experience could be fired, then, my fellow Americans, the least of our major fears should be our facing a constitutional crisis… that would have long since passed… it will be that a bloodless coup d’état is the new source of governance… and Boss Trump and his designated minions would be the unappealable prosecutors, judges, juries and executioners. No Constitution. No guardrails.

I’m Peter Dekom, and please listen to the messages from people living in former democracies who now wished they had acted before their dictators dug into their governing infrastructure so as to make return to freedom an unbearable and tortuous journey.