The Weekly Sift

Trump voters are beginning to regret their decisions. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn around. What Hungary can teach us about the full process.

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MAGA discontent. A running theme of many articles the last few weeks has been MAGA dissatisfaction with Trump — something I at least had given up on ever seeing. The cause doesn’t seem to be any one thing, but the constant drumbeat of betrayal: protecting the Epstein perpetrators, making inflation worse, starting an expensive foreign war for no apparent purpose, profiteering off his government power, and so on.

I could list a dozen articles making these points, and you’ve probably seen a number without my pointing them out. But the most interesting to me was Patrice Mersault’s “I Lied My Way into a MAGA Focus Group” (parts 1 and 2).

In a nutshell, Mersault (a pseudonym taken from a Camus novel) kept getting rejected for focus groups when he (the Camus character is male, so I’ll use male pronouns) answered questionnaires honestly, so he created an imaginary MAGAt in his mind and answered as that character. He got in, with the idea that he would pretend to turn against Trump and see how many members of the focus group he could take with him.

Not a good plan, exactly. More of a concept of a plan. The idea was to blend in, say the right things, earn a little credibility, and then, at the right moment, turn. Say what I actually think. Disrupt the room.

But once the conversation moved past why everyone in the room voted for Trump—the familiar grievances: the immigrants, the stolen elections, the belief that cruelty is somehow a form of patriotism—the room didn’t behave the way I expected it to.

It turned out that the other 11 members of the group were fed up with Trump too, even though they had all voted for him three times. (I suppose we have to consider the possibility that Mersault’s entire account is a fiction, but I’ve decided to take it seriously.) Asked to give Trump a letter grade, the participants gave him six D’s and six F’s.

Why? Food and gas prices. The war. Worries about maintaining Social Security and Medicare. Lack of jobs. Epstein.

Who knows how they felt about Trump’s outrageous tweets and behaviors a year ago? But now that they were criticizing him, they didn’t like his manner either. The rudeness, the divisiveness, seeing everyone who doesn’t agree as an enemy. The sense that everything is about him. They didn’t try to defend it; instead, they brought up those criticisms themselves.

So far, so good. But Mersault points out that the voters themselves don’t seem to have changed. He characterized them at the beginning as having a vague and inchoate sense of grievance:

The sense that something had been taken from them. Or was being taken. Or was about to be taken any minute now, unless someone stepped in and stopped it.

The grievances manifested as discontent with a familiar set of issues:

The pandemic. The border. The economy. Woke culture. The various Democratic alternatives, all described with varying degrees of contempt.

None of that has reversed. Nobody had seen the light of liberal wokeness and was saying, “I see now that Black and brown immigrants really don’t do me harm” or “I guess transgender folks aren’t as different as I thought they were” or “Women and minorities do need some government protection”.

They had looked at Trump as “a tool”, someone who would fight back against the forces that they think are taking away their country and their future. They still have that sense of grievance, and they are still looking for a tool to break a system that they see working against them.

The question is: What will they do now? The focus group showed no enthusiasm for a Trump successor like Vance or Rubio. But what are their alternatives? Find some new hero? Stay home? Switch parties?

The Hungarian example. For years, the Orbán regime in Hungary has been a model for the American Right: Get into office and start changing the rules. Get control of the media. Corrupt the courts. Destroy the independence of the universities. Use government favors and regulations as carrots and sticks to make businesses line up with you. Gerrymander. Make voting easy for your voters but hard for opposition voters.

For a long time the Orbán program worked. But then it stopped. On April 12, Hungarian voters decisively rejected Orbán’s party, in such numbers that the tilted playing field couldn’t save him.

The opposition leader Peter Magyar did something American Democrats would like to do: He didn’t just raise dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime. (In fact, he didn’t have to, it was already there.) And he didn’t just get dissatisfied Orbán voters to stay home. He got some large number of those voters to vote for him.

Americans have been trying to read that election for clues about strategy. Maybe, after years of being a model of how a right-wing authoritarian regime rises, Hungary could provide an example of how a right-wing authoritarian regime falls.

The article I like on this topic is by a Hungarian lawyer and mother who blogs under the name Zsofi: “I Lived in Orbán’s Hungary. This Is What It Actually Takes to Bring an Autocrat Down.“

She makes a few salient points about how Orbán came to power and stayed there: Hungarians were really fed up with the previous government, so Orbán represented a genuine uprising. And once he got into power and controlled the media, he made sure that every potential opposition leader was “pre-smeared”. Simply proposing to run so-and-so evoked a reaction of “Oh, not him again.”

But Magyar came from nowhere and represented no previous political movement.

Magyar Péter broke this because there was nothing to work with. He was, until early 2024, essentially unknown — a private citizen with no political career, no failed government, no scandal that could be weaponized. When the attacks came, as they did immediately and ferociously, they simply didn’t stick. Not because he was beyond criticism, but because what was said about him was, from the beginning, simply false. Without a kernel of truth at the center, the whole construction kept collapsing. Voters could feel the difference, even when they couldn’t articulate it. …

He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works.

She identifies two deadly ideas: that the regime is inevitable, and that society is irreparably broken into two enemy camps.

The [authoritarian] method is consistent everywhere it has been deployed. Find the genuine fault lines in a society: urban versus rural, educated versus working class, the people who feel left behind versus the people who seem not to notice. Pry those lines open. Make sure every election is a referendum on identity and culture rather than on whether the pension is adequate or the hospital is functional. Keep the two halves of society furious at each other, convinced the other half is the enemy, and make sure your coalition is always the slightly larger half. The culture war is not a byproduct of this politics. It is the mechanism.

Like Trump, Orbán had no authentic convictions.

This is worth understanding, because it changes what you’re actually fighting. You are not fighting a true believer. You are fighting a machine that is very good at finding the line that divides society just enough – and parking itself on the larger side of it.

And this seems like the key point:

The grievances that get exploited are real – that is what makes it work. The sense of being left behind, of being looked down on, of watching your children leave and not come back – that is not manufactured resentment. It is legitimate. The autocrat does not invent it. He finds it, names it, and then aims it in a direction that serves him rather than the people experiencing it. … You cannot say that grievance doesn’t exist because it doesn’t affect you. The autocrat has a ready-made answer for it – simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. The alternative is to have a better answer, not to pretend the question isn’t being asked.

The opposition also has to avoid “the performance of contempt”.

The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won. … The lesson, though, is not simply that these systems can be beaten. It is about how. You cannot win by playing from their script. The moment you accept their frame – that your society is divided into two enemy camps, one good and one irredeemably wrong – you have lost something you won’t easily recover. The autocrat wins not just when he stays in power, but when he gets you to see your neighbor as your enemy. When the hatred flows horizontally, between citizens, rather than upward, toward the people actually responsible.

The alternative is simpler and harder to hold onto: we belong to each other. We love the same country. We want it to be better. We disagree -sometimes bitterly, sometimes irreconcilably- about how. That disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.

What I learned in Europe. I spent the first week or so of April on a Viking Danube cruise. I went to Prague, Nuremberg, Vienna, Budapest, and a few other places. I walked through a lot of museums and talked to a lot of tour guides, but I’m going to resist the temptation to claim that I’ve become some kind of expert on Central Europe. I speak only a smattering of German, and no Czech or Hungarian at all. Most of the locals I spoke to (in English) probably aren’t typical or representative. So don’t interpret my trip as some kind of research project. I certainly don’t.

But the Danube trip did give me a good opportunity to meditate on America, and to see patterns in other societies that I should have recognized in my own.

On a walking tour of Prague, we eventually wound up at the castle that had been the seat of the German-speaking Habsburg emperor for a number of years around 1600 or so. The castle itself goes back well into the Middle Ages. While recounting some medieval transfer of power, the guide said, “And that was the last of our kings who spoke Czech.”

That sentence stuck in my mind. One perpetual theme of MAGA influencers is that the ruling elite (whoever you might imagine them to be) don’t understand ordinary Americans. That, they claim, is how you wind up with affirmative action programs and men playing women’s sports and vaccine mandates.

But in Czech history, that sentiment is literal: The kings can’t understand the ordinary people, because they don’t speak Czech. After the Habsburgs fell in 1918, there was briefly a Czechoslovakian democracy. But that fell into dictatorship, and then the Germans took over, and then the Russians. Today, the Czech Republic governs itself, but the transnational European Union is always looking over its shoulder. Czechs are probably fairly suspicious of this, and maybe that’s why they’re one of the few EU nations that don’t use the euro.

When I tried to imagine myself as a small-town Czech nationalist, I looked at Prague with great suspicion. The whole city is subtitled in English for the benefit of travelers. Lots of shops and other businesses seem not to have a Czech name at all. Places that ought to be sacred to Czechs (like that castle complex) are barely accessible, because they’re overrun with tourists speaking every known language. I might question whether Prague is Czech at all any more; it seems a lot like Czech territory occupied by some globalist empire.

That vision gave me a new appreciation of MAGA in America. There is real grievance in rural and small-town America, something I’ve written about before. It’s a sense that the place you live, which is maybe the place you grew up, has no obvious path into the future. The jobs are leaving, the talented young people are leaving, and there seems to be no end to it.

If that were the whole grievance, though, rural and small-town anger might focus where it really belongs: on the big corporations who rig the system in their favor and don’t care where they build things; and on the billionaires who get big tax breaks and leave no money behind for schools and roads and local investment. But laid over the economic grievance is a sense of dislocation: The America I grew up in isn’t just endangered, it’s already gone in lots of places. This gets you to the demonization of immigrants and people whose lifestyles diverge from what was socially acceptable in the past.

So often, when I run into conservatives obsessed with culture-war issues, I want to ask “Why do you care?” If someone with a penis wants to wear skirts and makeup and start using a name like Susan, what’s it to you that you should feel so incensed about it? If two men or two women want to marry, and to live a life not all that different from the one you live with your opposite-sex spouse, how are you harmed?

The dislocation theory makes sense of this. They aren’t harmed in any material sense, but the culture-war issues are symbols of their grievance: This is not their world any more. They used to know how they (and their children and their communities) could thrive, but now they don’t. The culture-war issue isn’t itself a grievance, but they’ve been trained to see it as a signpost pointing to grievances.

It also explains the hostility to cities. The new world, the world where they don’t belong and can’t succeed, has already taken the cities. The cities are territory occupied by a globalist empire.

It also explains the conspiracy theories. When you feel something, any story that explains and justifies the feeling seems plausible. Fact-checking the narrative doesn’t affect that sense of plausibility.

Progressive vs. centrist. At least since the Clinton administration, conflict has been raging between two theories of why Democrats lose and how they can win. The centrist theory says that Democrats lose when they become too liberal and alienate moderate swing voters. The progressive theory says that Democrats lose when they seem inauthentic and fail to give voters a clear new vision of where the country should go.

When they actually get into office, though, the two kinds of Democrats agree on a great deal. Centrists want to focus on proposals that are immediately achievable, while progressives see those same proposals as first steps on their path into the future.

Both factions want to spin current events in their favor. But if I take the lessons of Mersault and Zsofi to heart, I think both framings miss the point: what the reachable voters are looking for is not fundamentally a more liberal or conservative policy. They’re looking for authenticity and for someone they can trust. They want candidates who care about them enough to show up, to learn what they care about, and to speak to them as if they were intelligent people with real concerns. If you do that, you can get away with taking some principled stands they disagree with.

Look at candidates who are surviving or even thriving in what should be hostile environments. Andy Beshear is popular in Kentucky, but he still gets away with vetoing an anti-trans-rights bill. (“My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky. … I heard from children that believe this bill is picking on them, and asking — in many ways — why? I told them that I was going to show them that there is at least one person in Frankfort that cares for all of our children in the commonwealth, no matter what.”) In Texas, James Talarico’s Christianity takes him different places than MAGA Christianity does, but so far he hasn’t compromised his vision. Jon Ossoff is doing well in Georgia, largely because of his way of speaking in terms voters identify with. (Listen to him make the case against Trump’s corruption.) Pete Buttigieg isn’t currently running for anything, but he goes into enemy territory (like Fox News) and holds his own — and not by throwing unpopular Democrats or Democratic constituencies to the wolves.

Of course Democrats, like all politicians, should focus on their popular positions. But they should put themselves in positions to be challenged on unpopular positions, and they should be ready to defend those positions in easily understandable terms, tracing them back to core values that are widely shared, or at least widely appreciated. They need to answer criticism without denigrating the critic.

Most of all, Democrats need to send the message that they will look out for the country, and not just for their own voters.

The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won.

But the right path is not to pander to those you disagree with, but to address them honestly, intelligently, and respectfully

Disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.