Whatever one thinks of the Florida governor, his agenda and his tactics both have plenty of precedent outside of Orbán’s Hungary.
Whatever one thinks of the Florida governor, his agenda and his tactics both have plenty of precedent outside of Orbán’s Hungary.
L ast week, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp reached out to me via email to ask if I wanted to share my thoughts for a piece he was working on “looking at the [Ron] DeSantis governing record in light of the rising affection” for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán “among conservatives.” I responded that, while there are important parallels between DeSantis and a figure like Orbán, those parallels are “less exclusive to Orbán than they are indicative of a broader shift in right-wing parties across the West.” “I think there are some pretty important and foundational differences between DeSantis and Orbán, and it can be tempting to overstate (both among right-wing admirers and left-wing critics of Orbán) the extent to which conservative culture-war types in America cross over with Orbán,” I wrote.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Beauchamp’s piece, “Ron DeSantis is following a trail blazed by a Hungarian authoritarian” — subtitle: “The Florida governor isn’t doing ‘competent Trumpism.’ He’s inventing American Orbánism” — reached a very different conclusion than the one I outlined in my email. Vox is a progressive outlet; its writers are not inclined to view someone such as DeSantis favorably. And it’s understandable that they would look to make comparisons between the Florida governor and the Hungarian prime minister, because Orbán strikes a particularly menacing figure in the progressive imagination. But I think the claim that DeSantis is somehow following an “Orbán model” of governance is wrong, and it’s worth pointing out why.
Beauchamp’s thesis is that “DeSantis . . . has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.” But in order to justify that claim, one would need to demonstrate that DeSantis’s policies mirror an agenda that is only (or at least primarily) being implemented in Hungary.
So what is the “American Orbánist” agenda that DeSantis is implementing? “On issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power,” Beauchamp writes. That includes the Parental Rights in Education Bill — the unfairly named “Don’t Say Gay” law, which banned the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten and first, second, and third grades and is favored by a margin of 16 points in polls of American voters — as well as the recent revocation of Disney’s tax-exempt status in response to the company’s effort to lobby against the legislation (a “use of regulatory power to punish political opponents” that “is right out of Orbán’s playbook,” Beauchamp argues). It also includes a hostility to higher education — Beauchamp cites Florida’s recent passage of the “Stop WOKE Act,” which “expressly regulates what professors are allowed to teach about race and gender in college courses” — and to Big Tech, exemplified by Florida’s legislative effort to give “state regulators the power to fine social media companies if state authorities determined they improperly ‘deplatformed’ a political candidate for office,” as Beauchamp puts it. “Finally,” he writes, “the Hungarian and Florida governments share a penchant for extreme gerrymandering.”
All of those policies do, to one extent or another, have parallels in Orbán’s Hungary. As Beauchamp points out, Orbán has cracked down on LGBT sex education in Hungarian schools. (The one thing that Beauchamp cites as substantive evidence of a link between DeSantis and Orbán is the fact that, during a panel discussion in Budapest, the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher said that “the Don’t Say Gay law . . . was in fact modeled in part on” its Hungarian counterpart. “I was told this by a conservative reporter who . . . said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida,” Dreher remarked on the panel. “And she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary’”). Orbán has also punished critics of his government’s policies via funding cuts and contract revocations, removed accreditation for gender-studies degrees in Hungarian universities, and rejiggered the electoral maps to favor his party. On Big Tech, his justice minister proposed a bill to regulate social-media companies in response to their bias against “Christian, conservative, right-wing opinions.”
But none of these stances are unique to Orbán — far from it. In terms of gerrymandering, for example, Beauchamp acknowledges that, while “the Hungarian and Florida governments share a penchant for extreme gerrymandering,” so “do quite a few other Democratic and Republican state governments.” As our own Dan McLaughlin has noted, for example, “no Republican state has the enormous advantage for one party that Democrats enjoy in California, where 5.6 million people voted Republican but the party won only eleven out of 46 contested two-party races, seven fewer than the proportional share of Republican voters in those districts.” Just this week, New York’s highest court ruled that the gerrymandering scheme favored by the state’s Democratic leaders was unconstitutional. By all accounts, this year’s redistricting benefited Democrats over Republicans: “There aren’t many breaks Dems haven’t caught in redistricting so far,” Dave Wasserman tweeted in February. So it’s not clear how Florida’s gerrymandering is indicative of DeSantis’s uniquely Orbánist ambitions.
The crackdown on left-wing cultural ideology in schools is also not an exclusively Orbánist project; to the contrary, it’s animating right-wing parties across the West. In the United Kingdom, new government guidance echoes the language of anti-critical-race-theory laws in the U.S., barring teachers from promoting “partisan politics” in the classroom and singling out “those associated with the Black Lives Matter movement” by name. France’s Emmanuel Macron — hardly a far-right authoritarian — has taken the most aggressive posture of arguably any leader in the West, advancing a ban on the use of gender-neutral terms in schools and declaring war on wokeness (or le wokisme) in higher education. Macron’s education minister went so far as to launch an “anti-woke” think tank, and announced an investigation into academics who are “looking at everything through the prism of wanting to fracture and divide.” “The French Senate even recently debated the ‘threats’ that wokisme poses for higher education — not at the request of the far right, but [of] the mainstream conservative Les Républicains party,” Foreign Policy reported earlier this month.
The turn against ideologically hostile corporate power and Big Tech is also a foundational component of the national-populist energy that is sweeping the West. Conservative parties across and beyond the Anglosphere are in the process of determining how to deal with Silicon Valley’s political influence; last year, for example, Australia’s conservative government passed a law aimed at weakening Big Tech’s power over the flow of information, mandating that platforms such as Facebook and Google pay for content generated by traditional news outlets in the interest of “helping to sustain public interest journalism in Australia.” France’s right-wing insurgent, Marine Le Pen, ran well to the left of the relatively moderate Macron on economics and big business, offering to appoint socialists to her cabinet if she won the French presidency. And right-wing-populist uprisings such as Brexit are a revolt, in part, against the influence of multinational corporations. (The U.K.’s most powerful corporations bitterly fought Brexit at every turn).
But this anti-corporate turn is hardly unique to the Right; in many ways, the populist Right’s willingness to use government policy to reward friends and punish enemies is an emulation of the Left. As Bradley Smith pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “President Obama’s IRS targeted conservative groups for more than two years prior to the 2012 presidential election,” and Obama wasn’t alone. “Democratic officials deserve much of the blame for the IRS’s improper and likely illegal harassment,” Smith wrote. “Democratic senators repeatedly wrote to IRS leadership to urge them to investigate conservative nonprofits.” It wouldn’t be the last time: In 2021, two House Democrats wrote a letter to AT&T, Verizon, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, and a number of other carriers suggesting that they de-platform “right-wing media outlets like Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), and Fox News.” The Biden administration is open about “flagging” content that it deems “misinformation” for censorship on social media.
Is Emmanuel Macron an Orbánist? Is Boris Johnson? Are the Australian Liberals? The entire Democratic Party? Of course not. And neither is Ron DeSantis. Whatever you think of the Florida governor, his social-conservative initiatives are a reflection of trends seen in lots of right-leaning parties well beyond Hungary, and his use of government policy to advance his political ends is squarely within the American political mainstream.