Perspective from the 19^th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

…..Part Two:  Defeating an Autocrat……

If, like me, you stand around wondering what you can do as an individual to oppose Donald Trump’s intention to become an autocrat – in other words, a supreme leader, much like a God — then read this.

It comes from something called Raw America.  Based at least in part on a column by M. Gessen in the New York Times, it chronicles how voters in Hungary outsmarted the would-be autocrat there, Victor Orban.

Could this be an example of what could be done in America to defeat Trump?  Perhaps.

There is no better approach today than to repeat the Raw America story as part two of my blogs on defeating Trump.  It is not necessary at the start to add any words from me, though I will at the conclusion of this blog.

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This week the New York Times ran a remarkable piece by M. Gessen from Budapest, reporting on the inauguration of Peter Magyar, the man who just did what almost no one in our era has managed to do.  He beat an entrenched autocrat at the ballot box and won decisively enough to start undoing the damage.

For 16 years, Viktor Orban ran Hungary the way Trump dreams of running America.  He dominated the media, re-wrote election laws to favor his own party, and built what observers called a “mafia state.”  He’d seemingly achieved what political theorists call “autocratic breakthrough,” the point past which you supposedly can’t vote a strongman out.

Some group held conventions in Hungary to study his methods.  J.D. Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for him.  And then Hungarians handed the opposition not just a win, but a constitutional majority.

Magyar didn’t build another “machine of power.”  He built an army of ordinary people:  2,000 local organizing hubs, tens of thousands of volunteers, thousands more working phones in the final week.  He traveled to 700 towns and villages, holding five rallies a day, because it turns out that people seeing a candidate in person, again and again, is a powerful antidote to media fearmongering.  When you can’t out-shout the propaganda machine, you go around it, mailbox to mailbox.

Magyar refused to mince words.  Where earlier opposition figures called Orban’s government “corrupt,” Magyar called it a criminal enterprise.  He ran on cleaning it up.  Post-election polling showed corruption, not the economy, was the number one reason voters turned on Orban.

People were moved by moral outrage.  By the sense that something precious was being stolen from the nation itself.  Sound familiar?  And the grassroots that powered the win weren’t political operations at all.  They were teachers, parents fighting for kids in state care, Pride organizers, ordinary people who’d been fighting their own fights.  In our context, Gessen notes, that’s the No Kings rallies, the ICE-resistance networks, and the people already in motion in your own town.

There’s one more lesson that matches our moment.  Magyar’s rise began when he exposed a child sexual abuse scandal that Orban’s government had tried to bury.  In Poland — the only other European country to claw back its democracy this way — a similar cover-up played a central role.  There’s something about these stories that shows people exactly what unaccountable power does behind closed doors.

Jeffrey Epstein is our version of this scandal.

Magyar didn’t win by being crueler or more vulgar than the man he beat (the way, say, Gavin Newsom sometimes tries to out-troll Trump on his own terms).  He won by being aspirational.  At his inauguration he invited a choir of Roma children, Hungary’s most discriminated-against minority, to sing in Parliament.  Grown legislators wept.

He told the people who’d voted against him that the country belonged to them too.  That there was “no left, no right, only Hungarians.”  He raised the European flag back over Parliament but kept a nationalist flag flying beside it, because his message was that this was everyone’s country now.

When the new prime minister finally walked out to the crowd, people were so desperate to close the distance that men hiked up their pants and went splashing straight across the reflecting pool the old regime had built to keep them away.

“This is your house now!” Magyar shouted.

I think we forget, in the grind of bad news, that elections are winnable.  That a democratic America is still in the fight.

An autocrat who looked permanent, who had every institutional advantage, who had the world’s illiberal movement cheering him on, lost.  Enough ordinary people refused to accept that he couldn’t be beaten and then organized like they believed it.

We are not powerless.  We’ve never been powerless.  The machine wants us to feel that way, because despair is what keeps it standing.

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A conclusion from me.  So, there is something we can do.  Join others to bring a budding autocrat – Trump – down and reclaims positive parts of our country.