Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll follow up now on our segment yesterday about the Conservative Political Action Conference taking place in Budapest, Hungary. With a keynote address by Hungary's President Viktor Orbán, who advocates what he calls illiberal democracy. Orbán has become a hero to the rising faction of the American right, in ways similar to how Vladimir Putin has in these respects, eliminating checks and balances like an independent judiciary and an independent press.

Also similar to Putin, Orbán is openly hateful toward LGBTQ people. In his speech at the conference yesterday, Orbán called LGBTQ people deniers of biology, comparing them to people who deny science. He also touts conservative Christianity as a basis for government policy, similar to the organizer of the conference Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union.

In Budapest, yesterday Schlapp tied banning abortion to banning immigration. He touted banning abortion as a means to a more native-born population growth. Orbán has referred to, "The missing European children," meaning white babies who are not being born. The push for banning abortion in the US and the race-based push for banning immigration are related more than usually gets discussed.

It got discussed in Budapest. Our guest on this today is perhaps the leading expert on Hungary and Orbán in the United States, Princeton sociology and international affairs Professor Kim Scheppele. Among her many writings is an article on the website Verfassungsblog called, What Culture Wars Hide. Professor Scheppele, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Kim Scheppele: Thanks for inviting me.

Brian Lehrer: You write that American conservatives have chosen Hungary as proof of concept for the politics they want. What do you mean by proof of concept?

Kim Scheppele: To understand that I think it's worth remembering that back in the 1960s progressives in the United States used to look to Sweden as the country that progressive forces won lots of elections. They were able to establish a social state. They were able to introduce feminist reforms that look like a paradise to social democrats. Now we're seeing that the right-wing of American politics and particularly the Trumpist right of American politics is looking to Hungary in much the same way.

Viktor Orbán espouses the culture war issues that the Trump wing of the Republican Party is now famous for. He's also locked in power. Just a month ago, Orbán won his fourth successive election, even though the polls showed him neck and neck with the opposition on the eve of the election. In the end, he pulled out an election by 20 points. Basically, this is the vision that American conservatives would love to see here, a combination of culture wars on the surface and autocracy and never having to worry about losing elections underneath it.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think he was re-elected freely and fairly? Because even in the mainstream press in this country, that includes people being very critical of Orbán, I see many references to him winning re-election in April in a landslide, but you write that Orbán engages in persistent sabotage of democratic institutions, including converting minority support into parliamentary supermajorities. Was the election free and fair and how does he fiddle with parliament?

Kim Scheppele: No. The election was, as the international observers said, conducted on an uneven playing field. First of all, Orbán, after he came to power in 2010, completely changed the electoral system. It meant that the only way the opposition which was a set of fragmented parties both to the left of him and to the right of him, the only way they had a chance of dislodging him was if they work together and put up single candidates in each of the districts. Because otherwise, it's a first pass the post winner take all election system like American House races are.

It was very difficult to run that system in a multi-party election field. He forced the opposition or rather the opposition, after they'd lost several times, finally realized they had to join forces and work together. They did that for this election, which is why we thought that they had a chance of winning. In the end, Orbán made a bunch of other changes to the election law that allowed him to win an overwhelming victory, even though he does not have overwhelming political support.

Just to give you one example of this. He introduced this law as soon as he saw the opposition was figuring out his system and figuring out a way to get around it. He introduced a law last November that allowed him to essentially move his voters to the districts where they were needed to put close districts over the edge into his column. He picked not only his own candidates, but he picked his voters for this last election.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Did you see that in this country there's a Republican candidate for the nomination for Governor of Colorado who supports ending the popular vote for governor if he's elected and moving to an electoral college-style system vote for governor in the future? Based on a formula that would give more weight to the voters from rural counties, ending one person, one vote in gubernatorial elections? Is something like that being modeled by Orbán too?

Kim Scheppele: Exactly. Election law is complicated, it's technical and most voters' eyes glaze over when you try to explain how these systems work. What you see happening here, in fact, often encouraged by this collaboration with Orbán that has been going on between the American right and Orbán's people for quite some time now, it's possible to change the election rules to reach practically any result you want. The proposal you suggest from the Colorado Governor is one of those things.

There's another one called the independent state legislature theory that's being offered here in the United States wherein a presidential election if the results of the popular vote are unclear, a number of state legislatures are now proposing that they get to pick the electors if the voters haven't made a clear choice. Then the question is, what's the clear choice? What we've seen since 2020 is the possibility of denying a clear choice by simply denying that there was a clear choice.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, in this country now we have the Republican nominee after the primary this past week in Pennsylvania, who apparently would have been all too willing to do that in the 2020 election. Just say that it appeared to him that the result of the Pennsylvania vote for president was unclear and give it to the legislature.

Kim Scheppele: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: That's where we may be headed in this country. It's very interesting to hear you describe how Orbán, the hero now for many on the political right is modeling that. President Trump submitted a video for this conference this week. Tucker Carlson submitted a video for this conference this week. This connection between banning immigration and banning abortion that I mentioned in the intro based on a combination of Orbán's words and those of Matt Schlapp from the American Conservative Union in Budapest this week, that's been widely quoted, is that a connection you've heard before?

Kim Scheppele: Yes. It's true that Orbán actually shot to fame in Europe and also among the American conservatives when that massive wave of migration from Syria, from Iraq, from Afghanistan hit Europe in 2015. Orbán said, "Build a wall." He built a fence. He built the fence pretty quickly, but he put Europe on notice that people who didn't look like the Europeans already there were not going to be welcomed in Europe.

This generated quite a lot of attention from Republican conservatives here. In fact, the Trump plan for building a wall at the border follows almost step-by-step exactly what Orbán did, appeasement both with regard to Putin and with regard to Orbán. Orbán and Putin also have an alliance we can go into if there's time. Merkel's view was that you just keep talking to these people. If you keep talking to these people they won't hurt you, you won't hurt them and you can all live together.

Oddly, Merkel's appeasement of Putin, as you can see, is now widely regarded as a major failure. I think people are now starting to see that Merkel's appeasement of Orbán is also a failure. It turns out Hungary is one of the places that makes German cars and the economic health and well-being of Germany depended a lot on Orbán being on board. He knew it. He's protected the German car companies while he's ransacked the economy in other ways. He's been allowed to stay in power.

If I can just say one thing about the gender point. This is absolutely right, that far-right conservatives world over are really leaning into anti-LGBTQI rights and into the whole concept of gender fluidity. We see this with DeSantis's removing Disney's tax breaks here for honoring gay rights, and Orbán has been right on board with that. One thing I did when I lived in Hungary in the '90s, was I was the founder of the Central European universities Gender Studies program. I've seen this coming from a long way off, and Orbán has closed all the gender studies programs that we helped create. That many wonderful feminists in Hungary have created, all those are gone.

Central European University is out of the country, and Orbán continues his anti-gender fluidity campaign, up to the point where to circle back to the EU, every time the word gender is mentioned in an EU document, Orbán will resist, will actually force them into hours-long debates over removing the word gender. Yes, this is a big way in which he's annoying the EU.

Brian Lehrer: Where does all of that, the homophobia, the anti-gender fluidity, the male chauvinism fit into the nationalist politics that I think are at the heart of the movement in both countries, Hungary and here? That's not foreign immigration. People are who they are on the sexuality and gender spectrums, you can't make a political decision to be gay if you're not sexually attracted to people of your own sex, for example. Why otherwise native-born LGBTQ people, how is that relevant to their project?

Kim Scheppele: I think a lot of this is about the politics of nostalgia, right? Of making the world safe for the days when a small group of ethnically homogeneous men rule the world. Just as we're seeing intolerance of any form of ethnic, or certainly racial diversity, we're also seeing intolerance of gender diversity. Women have really changed the world in the last half-century, and there are a lot of men who are resisting this.

It comes out in all kinds of forms, from anti-abortion campaigns, which will keep women having kids and therefore not doing other things, all the way through to anti-gay activities.

Orbán's Parliament passed a law that bars displaying any form of gender fluidity to children. They've been going after book authors and bookstores that display children's books that show kids with two moms or something like that.

It's been really an aggressive anti-gay and anti-woman campaign. That's part of it. Ethnic nationalism is part of it, gender nationalism is another part of it, and unfortunately, they come together into a toxic mix.

Brian Lehrer: Here's my last question before we run out of time. Is Orbán therefore, establishing a conservative theocracy? Let me set up that question, with a clip of Matt Schlapp, organizer of the conference of American conservatives that's there on Orbán's orbit in Budapest right now. He's head of the American Conservative Union, and in this clip, he appears to want some kind of theocracy in praising Orbán.

Speaker: He has embraced their Christian heritage, and if Christian societies want to have their values reflected in government, that's a good thing.

Brian Lehrer: He said Christian societies want to have their values reflected in government. We see that in the abortion movement, certain brands of religion and trying, there's a law for everybody. Does Orbán want, or is he establishing a theocracy in Hungary?

They couldn't afford to operate under the tax burdens that the government saddled them with at that time. Orbán keeps defending Christian Europeans, he himself has been rarely seen in a church. What he's done instead, is to force the churches to buckle under his leadership. The churches maintain their tax breaks at the expense of their autonomy. He's constantly pressuring them to do favors for the government whenever he needs favors that churches can do. It's not a government where Christianity dominates the government, it's exactly the other way around.

I think if American Christian conservatives understood what Orbán has actually done with Christian Europe and Hungary, I think they would be appalled.

Brian Lehrer: Kim Scheppele, perhaps a leading US expert on Hungary and Viktor Orbán, she's a professor of sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, among her many writings, is an article on the website Verfassungsblog called What Culture Wars Hide, which is about a lot of what we've been talking about today. Thank you so much for so much time and so much enlightenment. We really appreciate it.

Kim Scheppele: Thank you so much. Love your show, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

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