NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

What makes the leader of a small central European country so appealing to conservatives in the world's richest democracy? Because Orban shows how the switch to illiberalism can be done. Success breeds imitation. The first time Orban was in power -- in 1998 -- he led a pro-small government free market party. He was defeated in 2002. In those days his Fidesz party had a lot in common with Reagan Republicans. When Orban returned to power in 2010, it was with a very different ideology. He was "Trump before Trump" as Bannon put it. The libertarian philosophy had been replaced by the politics of resentment. European identity made way for talk of defending Hungary's Christian civilisation. The new Orban was an enemy of independent media, courts and universities. He also became Europe's chief scapegoater of immigrants.

Unlike Trump, who promised to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, but only partially delivered, Orban blanketed Hungary's southern borders with barbed wire fencing. In 2015, the year after his party won the two-thirds majority he needed to overhaul Hungary's constitution, Orban said: "We are experiencing the end of all the liberal babble. An era is coming to an end." The jury is still out on whether he was right. Among US conservatives, however, the road map he has provided is too relevant to ignore.

Orban's example is two-fold. Peripheral Hungary is a surprisingly good model for the Republican heartlands of small town and rural America. Just as Orban harvested resentment of the networked metropolitans of Brussels, Berlin and Paris, so today's Republicans rail against New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Red state America is subsidised by its more urban Democratic counterparts -- the fiscal transfer from urban to non-urban America grows larger every year. Hungary, too, is dependent on huge subsidies from the EU. Both resent the cosmopolitan hands that feed them.

Orban has tilted Hungary's electoral system against opposition parties and shown how to win super-majorities without a majority of voters. In the country's 2018 elections, Fidesz won 67 per cent of the seats with 49 per cent of the vote. Orban's governance model is even more relevant. Having secured a stranglehold on power, he has parcelled out EU-funded largesse to allies on a grand scale. Almost half of Hungary's public contracts have just one bidder. This would be hard to replicate in a federal democracy the size of the US. But there are many pages that can be taken from Orban's book, including how to win a culture war with the urban elites.

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