"Tyrants Always Fall" - A Song and a Signal
Updated below 4/13 - Politics in Hungary is complicated, but the election result today was simple - a surging popular repudiation of the corruption, institutional damage and neglect of the public interest that come with authoritarian rule.
And, given what the prediction markets were saying in the last few days, all the efforts of Trump and JD Vance to sway the result to Viktor Orbán had precisely the opposite effect.
I can’t help but repost The Nields’s great anthem “Tyrants Always Fall” in honor of the enormous wave of citizen engagement in Hungary.
This snippet of the song is played with imagery I shot at one of our “No Kings” rallies in Ellsworth, Maine. You can listen in full below.
Tyrants Always Fall, by The Nields
As I discussed twice with the authoritarianism analysts at V-Dem Institute, u-turns from dictatorial rule can happen.
With Autocracy Surging, It's Worth Exploring a Paper Charting "U-Turn" Reversals to Democratization
Updated post-show: As Trump’s second term races through its “shock and awe” phase, I hope you’ll listen to, and share, my conversation with several authors of an important new study showing that, between 1900 and 2023, more than half of the world’s autocratic regimes were followed by a “u-turn” pattern toward restored or improved levels of democracy.
Here’s more on the result in Hungary:
Follow Péter Dósa’s The Hungary Report for more details in the difficult days ahead:
Inserted 4/13 - Greg Mitchell has posted a Between Rock and a Hard Place roundup of relevant music and cartoons. I particularly love the Santa Fe Raging Grannies reboot of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”!
You have to fit in a chuckle when you can these days, and Andy Borowitz offers one at JD Vance’s expense:
My immediate response to this news was: YES!!!!!