In an email, Nexon elaborated:
There is definitely a transmission belt of ideas between the U.S. and European right; for various stripes of conservatives — reactionary populists, integrationists, ethnonationalists — Hungary is becoming what Denmark is for the left: part real-life model, part idealized dreamscape.
Trump and Orban, Nexon continued,
are both opportunists who’ve figured out the political usefulness of reactionary populism. And Trump will push the United States in a broadly similar direction: toward neopatrimonial governance. During his first term, Trump treated the presidency as his own personal property — something that was his to use to punish enemies, reward loyalists and enhance his family’s wealth. If he wins in 2024, we’re likely to see this on steroids
Trump, in Nexon’s view, will be unable to match Orban — by, for example, installing a crony “as president of Harvard” or forcing “Yale to decamp for Canada” — but
it’s pretty clear that he’ll be better at installing absolute loyalists at the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense. So, if Trump succeeds, we’ll be able to find a lot of similar parts, but it won’t be the same model. I suspect it will be worse. The U.S. is a large federation with a lot of capacity for private violence, a major international footprint and a multitrillion-dollar economy. Hungary is a minor player in a confederation dominated by democratic regimes.
Cooley stressed in an email the “active networking among right-wing political associations and groups with Orban,” citing the Jan. 24 endorsement of Orban’s re-election by the New York Young Republican Club:
Today, both the United States of America and countries in Europe like Hungary face an existential crisis. The ruling elite and political establishment’s failed leadership and ideology have eroded the meaning and purpose of citizenship. For those against this ideology and for the preservation of Western civilization for all countries in the West, it is imperative that we stand in support of one another as national communities.
Orban’s appeal to the right flank of the Republican Party, in Cooley’s view, lies in an
ideology — which rests on redefining the meaning of “the West” away from liberal principles and toward ethnonational ideals and conservative values — and his strategy for consolidating power is to close or take over media, stack the courts, divide and stigmatize the opposition, reject commitments to constraining liberal ideals and institutions and publicly target the most vulnerable groups in society — e.g., refugees.
Orban has described Hungary under his rule as an “illiberal democracy.” In 2019, Freedom House downgraded Hungary from “free” to “partly free,” making it “the first country in the European Union that is not currently classified” as “free,” according to the Budapest Business Journal.
I asked a number of European scholars about the agenda Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress would be most likely to push in 2025.
In a March 2021 paper, “Authoritarian Values and the Welfare State: The Social Policy Preferences of Radical Right Voters,” Philip Rathgeb, a professor of social policy at the University of Edinburgh, and Marius R. Busemeyer and Alexander H.J. Sahm, both of the University of Konstanz, surveyed voters in eight Western European countries to determine what kind of welfare state voters of populist radical-right parties want and how their preferences “differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties.”
Rathgeb and his co-authors found that populist European voters
want a particularistic-authoritarian welfare state, displaying moderate support only for “deserving” benefit recipients (e.g., the elderly), while revealing strong support for a workfare approach and little support for social investment.
Rathgeb wrote in an email:
From an ideological perspective, it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump prioritized Medicare over Medicaid, given that the former is targeted at the “deserving” poor, i.e., the elderly and disabled. A pro-elderly outlook is very typical of the radical right in Europe too, because the beneficiaries of schemes like Medicare are typically native (white) citizens who have demonstrated their willingness to “work hard” over their lifetime, thus being deserving of welfare support. By contrast, I expect little support, perhaps even cuts, for Medicaid.
Rathgeb noted that populist parties oppose social investment policies because such programs are often based on
progressive gender values and a commitment to “lifelong learning.” For example, public provision of child care helps working women to reconcile work-family life (versus the male breadwinner model), while training and education foster social mobility in the “knowledge economy” (e.g., high-end services). These ideological considerations are reinforced by material interests, as the main target groups of social investment policies (i.e., the new middle classes, including women and the young with high levels of education) are distant from the typical radical-right voter, who usually displays lower levels of formal education.
In an email, Busemeyer described some of the differences and similarities between Trumpism and European populism:
In Europe, the welfare state and social policy more generally are much ingrained in people’s minds. This means that in the U.S., Trumpism goes along with criticism about the welfare state in general (see the attempts of the Trump administration to get rid of Obamacare), whereas in Europe, it’s really more about “welfare chauvinism,” i.e., protecting the good old welfare state for “deserving” people, namely hard-working natives.
In addition, Busemeyer wrote, “there is a strong ‘corporatist’ element in the Trump movement (i.e., business elites), whereas in European right-wing populism that’s typically not the case.”
The right-wing populist movements on both continents, he continued,
are similar in their rejection of a liberal attitude toward globalization, both regarding the economic side as well as the identity part of globalization. Also, they both subscribe to a traditional role model in the family and traditional gender roles.
Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford who studies French politics and the far right, wrote in an email:
If in 2024 Trump or a Ron DeSantis wins the presidency and Republicans control both the House and Senate, the general agenda would be a backlash against any anti-discrimination, against inclusive policies implemented by the Biden administration, for an attempt to shift further the Supreme Court pendulum toward anti-abortion, for originalist constitutionalists, for implementing voter suppression policies and for federal funding limitations on some forms of speech (critical race theory, the teaching or research of segregation, antisemitism or racism in the States) as well for as a return to extremely restrictive anti-immigration policies (rebuilding the wall, for curbing down further visa and green cards and for increasing deportations).
The Republican agenda, Alduy argued,
would be fueled by increased moral panic about white America’s decline, a professed sense of having been spoliated and “stolen the election” and a renewed sentiment of impunity for his most extreme backers from the Jan. 6 insurrection. My bet is that there is an active plan to reshape the political system so that elections are not winnable by Democrats, and the state be run without the foundation of a democracy.
