History goes on ...

So Victor Orbán and his illiberal government have gone down to overwhelming electoral defeat in the Hungarian election. 

If most of us notice Hungary at all here in the USofA, it's as some little eastern European country that buddies up to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, keeping other European Union countries from fully getting on board with Ukraine against Russian invasion. Or something like that. Oh, and that all our domestic American fascists seem to dote on this Orbán guy who just got beat by popular vote

That student of Eastern Europe Timothy Snyder published some philosophical ruminations on the Hungarian story -- and on us -- before today's vote:

... although Hungary might be a small country, we can draw some larger conclusions. The world has been plagued for a century by various “ends of history,” and those ends of history have arisen disproportionately in central and eastern Europe, in Hungary in particular.

The fascists of the 1930s, in Hungary and elsewhere, said that history was over, that all that remained was a biological struggle directed by a party elite. The communists, who came to power in Hungary after 1945 and elsewhere, said that history was over, replaced by scientific administration directed by a party elite. After the end of communism, speaking about Hungary and other post-communist states, too many of us declared that history was now indeed over, since fascism and communism have exhausted themselves, and all that remained was the imperturbable triad of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism.

From Hungary, Orbán showed that this was not true: capitalism could be corrupted; liberalism could be replaced by illiberalism (his word); and democracy could be turned into a ritual. Seduced by Hungary’s success, many on the far right came to see the Hungarian alternative as the next end of history, the way that things would be, the way that things had to be.

And they are wrong; history goes on. Just as Hungary once offered the international oligarchical far right the confidence that a formula had been found, it now offers to men such as Vance and Trump the anxiety that voting might actually make a difference, that democracy might actually turn out to be more than a slogan, that unpredictable change is still possible, that the future is open.

It's interesting to remember how my generation first become aware of Hungary. In 1957, when I was ten, there was a new girl in my small school who had arrived with her parents from somewhere far away. She was skinny and different. I learned she was from a country called Hungary where Russian tanks had put down a revolution and many educated people had fled. We were supposed to feel bad for her. I remember her as bright, speaking pretty good English, mostly notable because her parents made her go after our school day to language school to learn Chinese -- they feared the family would have to flee once again. Refugees learn caution. 

And, as Snyder reminds us, the future is open -- and we have some power to decide what direction it moves in.