It is as if OJ Simpson’s Dream Team were now ruling an entire nation. Quis custodiet? Not the populace. Not the EU. Hungary is not a rudderless ship: It is the unchallenged fiefdom of a sociopathic gangster. The democratic world needs to figure out — and put into practise — all means of constraining and combatting this potentially fatal exploitation of the vulnerabilities of democracy itself by rogue regimes. For the Orban phenotype is anything but rare among would-be power brokers. (There’s a homologue in the White House.) Once they discover that the democratic world lacks — or lacks the will to use — the means to protect itself, the Orbans and Trumps will sprout like toadstools all over the planet; the defeat of the CEU, and of the heroic efforts of its founder to make and keep society open, democratic, and free will be the historic harbinger of the triumph of the toadstools — if anyone is still doing history in the new Dark Ages…
Stevan Harnad