George Soule, editor of The New Republic, said that with the New Deal, “We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages.” As the dean of FDR historians, William Leuchtenberg, put it, the New Deal was understood as part of the “Europeanization of America.”

Now, we should not ascribe to all of these people the sins and crimes of fascists and Bolsheviks. They saw what they wanted to see, and they wanted to see it in America. Underlying this vast intellectual and political project was a desire to use various foreign models as a cudgel against the American constitutional and political system. It was more about power than policy. They saw intellectual-activists riding in the saddle of the state and they wanted some of that action for themselves. As the progressive economist Stuart Chase, who arguably coined the term “a New Deal,” remarked: “Why should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?”

That’s mostly how I see all of this Hungary hullabaloo, and it’s no more persuasive to me because it comes from the right. But it is more dismaying to me to see the right being seduced by this stuff. I no more want to live in an America crammed into a Sweden-shaped hole by Bernie Sanders types than I want to live in an America shoved into a Hungary-shaped one. But I’m more dismayed by this crap on the right precisely because it concedes a crucial argument to the left. Shopping abroad for a duty-free model that lends credibility to social planners who wish to impose their will here at home is becoming a bipartisan affair.