There’s a playbook to defeating autocrats. And no one in American politics is coming closer to following it than Georgia’s senator Jon Ossoff. “Politics is coin operated. Money goes in; favors come out.” Jon Ossoff talks constantly about corruption — “Secret money, corporate money, billionaire money.” “They’re crooks.” — and constantly tries to link it to the suffering that people are feeling in their own lives. “1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project.” And he sort of walks you through all the ways in which life has gotten worse and more precarious for most voters — “All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care.” — as it has gotten ever more lavish for what he calls the Mar-a-Lago mafia. “The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.” And in this phrase that he uses, it’s impossible for me not to hear echoes of Peter Magyar talking about Viktor Orban’s mafia state. In April, I went to Hungary to write about the election to dislodge Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party. “What I think of Viktor Orban? He’s a masked fascist. He is a traitor to the Hungarian people.” Viktor Orban has been the inspiration to autocrats around the world. “Great leader.” The American right, very much included. “To see Hungary as a beacon in the West.” “One place where Hungary clearly has led Europe is in reasserting its national identity.” “Mr. President, you are on with about 5,000 Hungarian patriots.” Orban’s cronies own the news networks. They own the newspapers. They were able to drive one of the most respected universities in Budapest out of the country. Really, it sought to make itself this kind of model to the international right. “We are kind of a special island of difference in a liberal ocean in Europe.” Then there was this candidate named Peter Magyar. And he was talking nonstop about corruption. Before Magyar’s rise, there had been a sort of consensus that an anticorruption message wasn’t going to work in Hungary because people were so cynical about politics that they just assumed that everybody was corrupt. And I think that there’s something kind of similar in the United States, where they see Donald Trump as corrupt but they also see the Democratic Party as corrupt. What Peter Magyar was able to do was to really tie it to people’s material suffering, to the struggles that they were feeling in their daily life. “The Hungarian people are fed up with the corrupt government.” He wrapped himself in the Hungarian flag, in Hungarian national mythology, in Hungarian poetry. “Magyar” literally means “Hungarian.” The equivalent would be somebody running with the name Joe America. And that, it turns out, is kind of the formula. It’s a combination of a laser focus on corruption and a reclamation of national mythology. As soon as I got home, it just seemed obvious that the person who was running the most similar playbook, whether accidentally or by design, was Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Jon Ossoff says he writes his own speeches. “Atlanta!” And they have this really simple two-part structure. So he talks about the rot at the heart of the American system. “This is the Epstein class.” “Vengeance and enrichment.” “So little effort to hide so much corruption.” But then in the second part of his speech — “But, Augusta, it doesn’t have to be this way.” — he lays out this optimistic — “People are telling me they’re desperate for change.” — pluralistic — “Because the power of the presidency is nothing compared to the power of the people.” — liberal vision — “Who came here today because you love our country?” — of American identity that sort of runs through our history, parallel to the nativist, white-nationalist version that Trump and his allies draw on. Look, if you were going to cook someone up in a lab to run in 2028, he — and I’m sad to say, it probably is going to be a he — would be someone who looked a lot like Jon Ossoff. Even if he doesn’t run, the formula that he has perfected, this combination of a relentless focus on the regime’s corruption and the need for reform, coupled with this very earnest and serious sort of patriotism is, I think, the formula not just for defeating Trump, who we assume is going to be gone in two years, but for defeating the whole reactionary, autocratic movement around him.
