And yet life in Budapest doesn’t feel authoritarian. It feels Western. It feels familiar.

Which, as I reflected on my trip — and on the midterm campaign that I returned home to — left me deeply unnerved.

Orbán is no Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. He doesn’t put opponents in jail or brutalize them. “There aren’t secret police listening to us,” one Orbán critic told me over dinner. Zselyke Csaky of Freedom House, the democracy watchdog, told me, “There is no violence, not any kind of political violence.”

What Orbán has done is to squash political competition. He has gerrymandered and changed election rules, so that he doesn’t need a majority of votes to control the government. He has rushed bills through Parliament with little debate. He has relied on friendly media to echo his message and smear opponents. He has stocked the courts with allies. He has overseen rampant corruption. He has cozied up to Putin. To justify his rule, Orbán has cited external threats — especially Muslim immigrants and George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian-born investor — and said that his party is the only one that represents the real people.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I cannot imagine the United States or a Western European country turning into Russia or China. But I can see how a major democracy could slide toward Hungarian autocracy. Orbán clearly has such ambitions, and the far right across much of Europe views him as its model. Steve Bannon has praised him as the world’s most significant politician.

Most alarming, the Republican Party has shown multiple signs of early Orbánism. No, the party is not as bad as Fidesz, and, yes, American democracy remains much healthier than the Hungarian version. But the parallels are there for anyone willing to see them: Like Orbán, Republican leaders have repeatedly been willing to change the rules and customs of democracy for the sake of raw power.