Restore America to Its Own People

April 13, 2026 On April 12, the day of Hungary's parliamentary elections, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, posted on social media that it was closely watching the election and stood firmly behind Prime Minister Viktor Orban. As a major networking event and ideological trendsetter for the radical right in the United States, CPAC has been instrumental in celebrating Orban's Hungary as the center of the effort to destroy the liberal democracy of the United States and Europe in order to replace it with what Orban called illiberal democracy, or Christian democracy. His system replaced the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stopped the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and rejected adaptable family models in favor of the Christian family model. Today, Peter Magyar, the man who will replace Orban after winning the election in a blowout, revealed that Orban was using government money to finance CPAC. Orban has clearly been working for the benefit of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, and just days before the election, news broke that last October Orban told Putin, in any manner where I can be of assistance, I am at your service. So it appears that CPAC was funded by a foreign government that was working closely with Vladimir Putin. In a speech today, Magyar told reporters that the outgoing foreign minister, who has been accused of working closely with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was shredding confidential documents. The influence of Orban on the U.S. right wing marked a change in Republican politics. Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything. Although these people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way. First, a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights. Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to black or brown Americans or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth. The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters who turned against the government's protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to redeem American society from socialists who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again. When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1 percent, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American takers and celebrated economic leaders as makers, and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order. It's impossible to run a successful business without a level legal playing field, as businessmen realized after the 1929 great crash made it clear that insider trading had meant that winners and losers were determined not by the market, but by cronyism. And it's impossible to do business without freedom of the seas and the stability of international rules. But when Orban took office for the second time in 2010, he courted the right wing with promises not to get the government out of their way, as right wing politicians in the U.S. had done since the 1980s, but to use the government to impose their cultural values on the country at large. He established control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party and rewarding those who towed the party line. In 2012, his supporters rewrote Hungary's constitution to strengthen his hand. An extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power, while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, Orban used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country's judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. By 2026, Hungary still had elections, but state control of the media and the apparatus of voting made it very difficult for Orban's opponents to take power. Kevin Roberts put it, Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but THE model. Calling for institutionalizing Trumpism, Roberts pulled together dozens of right wing institutions behind the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to create a blueprint for a second Trump term that uses the power of the government to impose right wing religious values on the U.S. In his foreword for a 2024 book by Roberts, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance made it clear he saw himself and Roberts as working together to create a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics. Since taking power, Trump and Vance have followed Orban's model, both at home and internationally. Instead of working with our traditional allies, they have attacked Europe and aligned the U.S. with Hungary and Russia. The U.S. government Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump's tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump's rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade. In an op-ed in Fox News online today, Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote, Watching this from Kentucky, it's hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, federal European country was putting America's interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage, not its social policies, align with America's strategic interests. By that, he tried to recall the Republican Party to his faction, rather than that of the MAGA Republicans, by pointing out that Magyar's government seems more likely to resist America's adversaries and work with America's allies than Orban was. But the model that Hungarian voters' dramatic rejection of Orban offers to the U.S. is a more sweeping rejection of the whole radical right than McConnell suggests. Rather than centering an elite as lawmakers, as right-wing ideology does, it centers the people. Those who know Hungarian politics say that Magyar's party won because voters recognized that Orban's vow to purify Hungarian society turned out to be a cover for extraordinary corruption of party leaders and cronies, while the destruction of the economy hurt everyday people. Magyar and his party reminded Hungarians of the good in their country and reawakened their national pride. They promised voters a democratic state with the rule of law under a government that worked for the people. Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country's interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small. New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, as American democracy struggled to resist fascism. Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose, FDR said. Today, we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness among individual men and women and among nations. Let us be frank in acknowledgement of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to mammon that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards, we must abandon the false profits and seek new leaders of our own choosing. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people, FDR concluded. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves profits of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign, it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.