How to survive a thousand papercuts

Introducing At the Edges

Moving to Hungary

In August, my wife, my son, and I will be leaving the US. We will be renting our Boston home and turning the key on a small apartment off a six-lane promenade, Andrássy út, in Budapest, Hungary. 

I’ve spent a time in Hungary before: six months in 2013. Remembering that season now, while looking around at the world on fire with fascist advance, feels like looking at a foreign country.

In 2008 when I first began learning Hungarian to do ethnographic research in Romania’s Hungarian ethnic enclaves, Hungary was said to be a “solved problem.” Twenty years of post-Communism had done the trick. “Hungary's transition to a Western-style parliamentary democracy was the first and the smoothest among the former Soviet bloc,” a 2009 US State Department report confidently declared. 

That same year, a journalist friend once told me, the British Broadcasting Company closed its Budapest bureau. Apparently the BBC, one of the world’s premier democracy watchdogs, thought their work in Hungary was done. 

I don’t know if this last piece of scuttlebutt is actually true. Nevertheless, for my journalist friend it had the desired effect on me: I laughed a rueful bark. My friend merely smiled and took another pull on his beer.

Today, Hungary is once again a problem. It’s back on the radar screen of journalists, cultural anthropologists, activists, politicians, and left-wing preachers - the folks I like to learn from and laugh with. Progressives are increasingly aware that Budapest is more than a destination on the cover of a Viking cruise brochure; something is very wrong in Hungary today. 

This newsletter, At the Edges, will have more to say about Hungary, especially the plan afoot in Budapest to export authoritarianism to the US. 

Just as importantly, I’ll tell stories about my Hungarian friends. Those courageous dissidents and resisters who are dreaming of open societies, not only in their own homeland but for the rest of the world, too. They’re prepared to haul this dream a long distance, since there’s no end in sight for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian system. 

I’m moving to Hungary partly to learn from this planning, patience, and worshipful dreaming,

Isn’t Hungary Dangerous?

For now, here in Boston, the news of my family’s impending relocation is prompting alarm. “Isn’t Hungary dangerous?” my friends and colleagues have asked, “Because, you know, the politics.”

It’s been hard to answer this question, to be honest. I’ve wanted to go deeper than a comment we might read in a travel guidebook, deeper than pickpockets and passport replacement. (Although I’ve certainly suffered thefts and freaked out at more than one consular official.) 

Mostly, though, I’ve hemmed and hawed, hoping for a lucidity that’s remained somewhere past the tip of my tongue. 

So let’s try one more time: Hungary is dangerous: It’s dangerous for Orbán’s enemies. But not dangerous in the way we might expect when we hear the word “authoritarian.” Certainly, the Hungarian state brings force to bear on its critics. But this is not the force of a closed fist or a deadly weapon, not the torture of Argentina’s Dirty War or Stasi shootings at the Berlin Wall.  

One of Orbán’s most prominent critics is Reverend Gábor Iványi of the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, a tiny 10,000-member branch of the Methodist church. Iványi is in his seventies with a prophet’s unruly white beard and intense brown eyes. Iványi learned the preacher’s trade on Budapest’s streets in the late 1980s. In Communism’s waning days, he witnessed to the Word of God to whoever would stop and listen.

Today, Iványi runs an extensive network of shelters and schools for families experiencing chronic homelessness. Until last year, the Oltalom Charity Foundation employed over 1,000 people. In 2019, Iványi received international publicity for denouncing Orbán’s corruption and centralization of power. 

Orbán saw a threat, but he has also learned from authoritarians’ past mistakes. He knows not to strike back with raw brutality. 

To silence Iványi, he did not send the police to put Iványi in handcuffs. That would draw attention to Iványi, and make him into even more of a hero. Orbán had his lackeys accuse Oltalom of tax evasion. He closed down the charity’s headquarters by sending officials from Hungary’s tax authority, the National Tax and Customs Administration, to search through the files for “evidence.” 

In Hungarian, the National Tax and Customs Administration is commonly known by its acronym, the NAV. Can you get any more boring and bureaucratic than an acronym? 

Pastor Gábor Iványi blessing a child at a Sunday worship service.

I interviewed Iványi last year, after attending a worship service at his modest A-frame wood church in a Budapest suburb. The NAV has continued its harassment campaign, even raiding the homes of other Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship clergy. Oltalom’s staff has been forced to conduct ridiculously intensive and expensive audits, Iványi told me during the post-worship coffee hour. 

The government is not operating in good faith, even if it says that the embargo it has placed on Oltalom’s funds will be lifted once the paperwork is sorted out. Meanwhile, Oltalom has begun shuttering its schools and shelters and laying off employees.

A friend of mine once wrote a book about Eastern Europe after Communism. She called it, “From the Iron Fist to the Invisible Hand.” It’s true, in Hungary there’s no “iron fist” for dissidents. Instead, Orbán wields bureaucracy like a weapon. He doesn’t kill critics. He harasses them with demands for forms in triplicate, and makes them jump through time- and money-consuming procedural hoops until they’re too tired or impoverished to carry on. 

It’s a kind of torture, I guess. Death by a thousand papercuts.

The Coming Right-Wing Love Affair with the IRS

In the US, Donald Trump has talked about taking his revenge on the federal bureaucracy that, he claims, stymied his first-term program. The Republicans’ effort to defund the IRS and slow down hiring at other federal agencies is only temporary, I fear. Once they remove non-loyalists from the bureaucratic administration, they will turn the funding spigot on again, because the IRS has lots of good tools to quietly take out the right’s political enemies. 

Hungary is a small country; it’s in the European Union’s single market. The US has a different political and economic system. I’ve made mistakes before with bad predictions, mostly by predicting that the American right will take X or Y Hungarian policy and plop it down unchanged in the US. In other words, I don’t think that the federal government is going to the send the IRS after America’s small liberal churches. 

The more likely targets will be national non-profits, groups like Planned Parenthood that the right has a track record of loving to hate. If Trump gets back into power, and if he installs political loyalists up and down the federal bureaucracy, I wouldn’t be surprised if the right wing expands beyond efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and begins a concerted bureaucratic effort to exhaust the organization’s capacities. 

Here is my cynical side: We’re giving too much ethical credit to the right wing when we talk about dismantling the administrative state. No, they don’t want a weak administrative state, tout court. They want to weaken the parts of the administrative state that they have not yet managed to capture and take over. They’ll be fine with a robust administrative state when they can confidently expect it to do their political bidding.

Where is hope?

After a recent caustic remark I posted to Facebook, a friend offered the suggestion, “Keep some hope and act on it.” I’m not so sure, though, if hope is a thing like an object - to keep, hold onto, or have. What do you think?

Right now, the day after my partner and I bought our plane tickets, my mind is less on the “what” of hope than the “where.” Where is our hope? I don’t think it’s in a specific geographic place or country, not any place that can show up in a Kayak flight search. It’s possible I could find it, with the help of Hungarian dissidents like Gábor Iványi, in the in-between spaces, the spaces between people where we meet in witness to the truth of love and compassion.

I hope that the community around this newsletter will combine the best of preacherly sentimentality and journalistic realism (Reinhold Niebuhr called it cynicism, but that sounds too harsh for me…for the moment). At the edges of sentiment and realism, Niebuhr suggested, we might find the gift of truth. Truth against authoritarianism’s lies and bureaucratic brutality. 

If my conversational skills aren’t the best, maybe the newsletter format will help me achieve some measure of coherence. Of course, the discussion we have together will be the ultimate proof. The community in the comments section is really what this At the Edges newsletter is all about. 

Thanks for reading!