by Monty Donohew
It is a fair warning, and worth considering before reaching for the reassurance that America's separated powers and First Amendment make it inapplicable here.
But the Hungarian case, read carefully, does not indict reform as such. It indicts one kind of reform, and by implication it points toward another kind that a change of government cannot so easily undo.
The distinction is worth spelling out, because it bears directly on how conservatives should think about their own record, and about what to prioritize when they hold power.
Tisza is a center-right party in a parliament with no left-wing seats; "authoritarian liberalism" is a label, not a description. The vulnerability was the stock, not the ideology of the successor.
What made the Fidesz apparatus vulnerable was that its gains were stored as stock. MCC, the KEKVA foundations, the media holdings routed through them, the packed regulatory boards-these were assets sitting in institutions, and institutions have owners.
Change the owner and the asset changes hands.
A two-thirds majority built that architecture in 2021; a two-thirds majority is now unbuilding it, in a matter of months, using the same constitutional tools, by one account, reclaiming roughly 1,284 billion forints, about €3.5 billion, in public funds from the foundations alone.
That's not persecution. It is closer to a confession: an arrangement premised on holding office turns out to last exactly as long as the office is held.
Compare a different kind of reform from Trump's first term: the reporting requirements around crime and immigration status.
Before 2017, the public argument on illegal immigration and crime largely ran on managed silence.
Getting a real count of criminal-alien incarceration or declined detainers required someone to go build the case from scratch -- which is more or less what Ann Coulter did in Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (Regnery, 2015), assembling from scattered sources a picture that agencies were not routinely publishing.
The first Trump administration's contribution was not a new set of facts so much as a bureaucratic reform: Executive Order 13768 directed DHS and DOJ to produce quarterly reports on the immigration status of incarcerated aliens, and the resulting Alien Incarceration Reports made those numbers, and a declined detainer, a visible, countable "thing" rather than a clerical shrug.
I first wrote about Trump's disruptive reform as persistent in American Thinker, during that administration, arguing that what had changed was not the underlying reality but the public's access to it. I concluded it was, "clear that his administration is capable of changing the way politics and governance are conducted, and perhaps changing these for a very long time."
That distinction, between reforms that move institutional stock and reforms that change what the public can see -- is the one Hungary's story leaves out, and it matters because the two kinds of reform have different half-lives.
An asset can be reassigned. A foundation can be dissolved, a broadcaster restaffed, a board reconstituted. All of that happened to Fidesz's apparatus almost immediately once Tisza held the votes to do it, and nothing in the Hungarian constitution stood in the way once the supermajority existed.
Information behaves differently once it is public. So do citizens behave differently once they have experienced access to what was before inaccessible. A published dataset creates a copy outside the state's control; in newspapers, in congressional records, in advocacy-group archives, in the campaign ads and court filings that cite it.
A later administration can stop updating a series or quietly redefine its categories, and the Biden administration did narrow some of this reporting.
But it could not make the prior numbers disappear, and it could not make sanctuary jurisdictions' declined-detainer counts, or cases like Laken Riley's, unknown to the public that had already absorbed them. The argument did not vanish with the press release. It moved to state dashboards, to the Center for Immigration Studies, to victims' families, to campaign material.
That is not permanence. Categories can still be muddied, dashboards darkened, definitions stretched. But there is a meaningful difference between degrading a flow of information the public already expects and clawing back a foundation's shares. The first requires the public not to notice; the second only requires a vote.
The point is this: legislation can repeal a reporting mandate, but it cannot repeal what the electorate already believes it knows, or to change its collective mind about what it has a right to know. Hungary's public broadcaster could be switched off in a season because it was a transmitter with a single owner.
A changed set of public assumptions about crime, communication, access to candidates, or about anything else opened to scrutiny, behaves like public opinion on smoking after the 1964 Surgeon General's report. Tobacco companies spent the next three decades disputing methodology, funding rival studies, and softening warning labels in a sustained, well-financed effort to walk the finding back. None of it restored the prior assumption that cigarettes were harmless. The report didn't just add a fact to the record; it moved where the public's default sat, and every subsequent countermeasure had to argue uphill against that new default instead of simply erasing it.
Disruptive reform does not confer guarantees. The reporting fight over immigration and crime did not end the argument about the underlying numbers; researchers on both sides are still contesting how the Texas data should be read. What the first-term reforms settled was not a statistic but a taboo that the presumption that asking the question at all was suspect. That is a smaller achievement than capturing a university endowment, and Orbán's critics would be right to note that it is also less visible and harder to point to as evidence of durable change. It is, for that same reason, though, harder to confiscate.
The lesson for conservatives is not to abandon institution-building, and it is not to conclude that Hungary's warning is overstated.
Reclaiming captured assets after a change of power is exactly what a governing majority is entitled to do, and Fidesz's opponents are doing nothing that Fidesz itself did not pioneer. The lesson is about where to store the gains of a term in office. A movement that measures its success by who sits on which board, who owns which press subsidy, or which foundation holds which shares has built something a rival supermajority can dismantle in a season, because that is precisely what such an arrangement is designed to permit, in either direction. A movement that measures its success by what the public now knows, by what access the public now has, and by how costly it has become to hide the alternative, has put something out of easy reach.
Any list of reforms worth extending should be sorted on that basis: does it change who controls an institution, or does it change what the public can see and verify for itself? Crime and immigration reporting, border-encounter dashboards, visa-overstay data, asylum grant-rate disclosure, FOIA-accessible enforcement logs, belong to the second category.
So do the now numerous competitors to legacy media, the availability of platforms that allow insurgents to compete against institutional narratives, and the public's familiarity with access to unscripted and unrehearsed candidates belong in the second category, all a byproduct of Trump's disruptive reform of political communication. They can be politically contested and administratively narrowed, but they are not reversible in the way a foundation's ownership is reversible.
Budapest's lesson is real. It simply applies to the kind of reform that stores its gains in an office rather than in the public record. That distinction is the difference between a reform that survives an election and one that does not.
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