Differentialdiagnose

Dear MAGA America. Dear Orbán Hungary. I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I have come to the conclusion that something has gone genuinely, historically, almost impressively wrong. America produced jazz, the national park system, the Marshall Plan, and the men who froze at the Bulge and bled on Omaha Beach. Those men built an alliance on a simple idea. That free nations stick together and that autocrats are best confronted early rather than photographed with enthusiastically. And then one family drove the whole thing into a wall at speed and walked away from the wreckage whistling. Look around. Look carefully at what is actually happening. There is a man in Washington building triumphal arches and gold statues of himself while announcing, in his own words, that he intends to take Canada, Greenland, Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, and the oil of Iran. He said these things out loud, repeatedly. There is a man in Moscow rewriting borders by force. And there is a man in Budapest facilitating both of them from inside the Western alliance, with Donald Trump Jr. flying in to offer his personal congratulations. The last time the world looked like this it was 1938. The truly unsettling thing about 1938 was not that it felt alarming. It felt like politics. Strongmen being strongmen, reasonable people making accommodations, everyone hoping it would sort itself out. It did not sort itself out. Germany has been replaced by the United States. The man with the triumphal arches is in Washington now, on a crusade for oil and territory, pulling the energy of the Middle East into the kind of confrontation that has a very poor historical record of ending tidily. And the checks and balances that were supposed to prevent all of this turned out, at the crucial moment, to be a paper tiger that looked at its shoes. Every Canadian, every European, every person who has stood in a Normandy cemetery knows exactly what this feels like. We are all in the same boat. And the boat is taking on water. Now, Hungary. The real one. Budapest is one of those cities where civilisation genuinely tried and largely succeeded. Hungary is European in every meaningful sense, geographically, historically, culturally, always pointing in one direction. West. It rose up against Soviet tanks in 1956 with magnificent stubbornness because the alternative was simply unacceptable. And yet Orbán Hungary is walking it back toward a 1956 moment. Dismantling courts, silencing press, rerouting the country away from the West and toward Moscow. Methodically. Quietly. Legally. Orbán Hungary is not a country. It is a project, lucrative for those running it and considerably less so for everyone else. Hungary belongs in the West. In 2026. Not in Orbán Hungary’s 1938. There is a choice coming. The rest of us will be watching with considerable affection for the real Hungary, which managed it once before under considerably worse conditions. I have every confidence it can manage it again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1