Why Conservatives Should Care About Hungary

Hungary/Orban

Why Conservatives Should Care About Hungary

A last word about the liberal freakout over Tucker Carlson's visit to Orbanistan

Rod Dreher

Aug 8, 2021 5:40 PM

Readers who have grown weary of my Magyar encomia will be pleased to know that I am at an airport hotel in Milan tonight, preparing to fly home to the US on Monday. The amount of Hungary posting here will dramatically decrease. But not just yet.

For me, the most important thing about Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed visit to Hungary is that it will prompt many American conservatives who either never heard of the place, or accepted as received wisdom the idea that it is a “fascist” country, to start paying attention to it. (Nota bene: yesterday in Esztergom I shared a stage with Peter Kreko, one of the best known liberal critics of the Orban government. Peter said from the stage that whatever his and my political differences are, we both agree that it is absurd to describe Hungary as “fascist”. So if you won’t take it from me, take it from a Budapest professor who publicly criticizes Orban and his Fidesz party.) Anyway, I published a piece last week in The Spectator making a “two cheers for Orban” case for the Hungarian leader’s relevance to Anglo-American conservatism.

I was pleased to read Budapest-based NYT writer Ben Novak’s piece on the Carlson visit. Unlike the dumb piece by his columnist colleague Jamelle Bouie, who describe he youth culture and music festival in Esztergom where Carlson, Kreko, Dreher, and many others — including leftists — spoke as a “conference of far right activists,” Novak’s piece was fair. Again, my complaint isn’t that people criticize Hungary and Viktor Orban; it’s that the criticism is so often in bad faith, or flat-out wrong.

Ross Douthat weighs in on the Hungary controversy in his Times column. He spends most of it trying to explain to the newspaper’s liberal readership why some American conservatives find Orban worth considering. Excerpts:

In this running debate, sharpened by the recent Tucker Carlson visit to Budapest, I was struck by an observation from The Atlantic’s David Frum, a fierce critic of the right’s Orban infatuation. As part of a Twitter thread documenting corruption in Orban’s inner circle, Frum wrote: “I visited Hungary in 2016. Again & again, I witnessed a gesture I thought had vanished from Europe forever: people turning their heads to check who was listening before they lent forward to whisper what they had to say. They feared for their jobs, not their lives — but still …”

This is a useful tweet for thinking about the fears motivating Hungary-watching Americans, left and right. On the one hand, there’s the fear that Trumpian populism will someday gain enough power to make its critics fear for their livelihoods. On the other, there’s the fear that progressivism already exerts this power in the United States, and that what Frum describes in dire terms, the cautious sotto voce conversation, is an important part of American life right now.

That’s a key observation, one that Douthat backs up with examples. In his speech yesterday in Esztergom, Tucker Carlson quoted an Anne Applebaum tweet listing her main criticisms of Orban’s Hungary – and pointed out that the things Applebaum trashes Hungary for are also true of woke America.

More Douthat:

Alternatively, you can document this fear by just keeping up with the ever-lengthening list of people who have had careers derailed for offenses against progressive norms. (Often they are heterodox liberals rather than conservatives, because conservatives are rare in elite institutions and less interesting to ideological enforcers.) Or by observing the climate of denunciation and abasement in various cultural spaces, from academic journals to law schools to the publishing industry. Or just by having everyday conversations in professional-class America: I’ve experienced more versions of the speak-quietly move — or its “don’t share this email” equivalent — in the last few years than I have in my entire prior adult life.

This fear is different from the fear that Frum discerned in Hungary, in the sense that nobody in the United States is afraid of criticizing the government. The censorious trend in America is more organic, encouraged by complex developments in the upper reaches of meritocratic life, and imposed by private corporations and the ideological minders they increasingly employ. If this is left-McCarthyism it lacks a Joe McCarthy: If you pushed your way into the inner sanctum of the Inner Party of progressivism, you would find not a cackling Kamala Harris, but an empty room.

For anyone on the wrong side of the new rules of thought and speech, though, the absence of a McCarthy figure is cold comfort. Whatever his corruptions, Viktor Orban might lose the next election, if the fractious opposition stays united. But where can you go to vote for a different ruling ideology in the interlocking American establishment, all its schools and professional guilds, its consolidated media and tech powers?

The “fractious opposition” includes the far-right Hungarian party Jobbik, which has moderated its stances in recent years, but which began as an actual fascist party with openly neo-Nazi members. The Hungarian Left is holding its nose and formally allying with Jobbik as the only way to defeat Orban. You haven’t read this in the past few days from American know-it-alls about Hungary, have you? Pointing out that the real far-right party in Hungary is in a coalition with the Left doesn’t fit the narrative. But it’s true.

I don’t believe Frum discerned that fear in Hungary. I lived there for three and a half months, and had many conversations with people who don’t like Orban or Fidesz, and didn’t mind saying so, even when I told them that I was on a fellowship at a think tank that receives Hungarian government funding. When I interviewed Peter Kreko earlier in the summer, he told me about a truly disgusting campaign of harassment that pro-government people subjected him to. As revolting as that was, it’s the same kind of thing that most controversial people in public life in America have to deal with. Kreko told me at the time that he can say whatever he wants to about the government in his classroom, and doesn’t have to worry that he will be harmed. Kreko has no reason to lie about this. Mind you, I did hear from Ben Novak a story about a particular public figure whose livelihood was made more difficult by the government after he began to criticize Orban publicly. I believe that this probably does happen from time to time. But I simply do not believe that Frum’s account in that tweet is an accurate statement of what life in Hungary is like for those who oppose the Fidesz government.

Anyway, Douthat’s argument gets to one big reason why US conservatives are interested in Orban. We find ourselves watching soft totalitarianism growing in America, as more and more people are compelled to be silent, and to live in fear that something they say or believe will offend the commissar class, and cost them their jobs. A friend of mine from a western European country told me in Esztergom, which she visited for the festival this past weekend, about how her academic career was destroyed because she started a petition denouncing cancel culture in her university. Friends and colleagues turned on her. They called her “fascist” – yes – for standing up for free speech! This is the insane world we live in.

Another academic friend I saw in Esztergom finds himself in a terrible situation at his US university. He has been falsely accused of “transphobia” by a mentally ill grad student, and is being frog-marched through a star chamber process that in his telling presumes his guilt. He is strongly considering taking retirement, because he can’t bear to work under the conditions in which a mere accusation by someone in a favored victim class is considered to be presumptive evidence of guilt.

On and on and on these stories go. Meanwhile, conservative American politicians do little or nothing about it. Most of them don’t even want to talk about it, probably out of fear that they will be called bigots. And it could well be that there is not a lot that can be done legislatively, given the nature of our system. The point is, our politicians of the Right are sitting back watching all this happen in America, and mostly staying quiet. One who didn’t, Donald Trump, was mostly talk, with little action.

One more passage from Douthat:

For others, though, this seems like a naïve form of cultural surrender: Like telling a purged screenwriter during the Hollywood Blacklist, “Hey, just go start your own movie studio.” Which is part of how a figure like Orban becomes appealing to American conservatives. It’s not just his anti-immigration stance or his moral traditionalism. It’s that his interventions in Hungarian cultural life, the attacks on liberal academic centers and the spending on conservative ideological projects, are seen as examples of how political power might curb progressivism’s influence.

Some version of this impulse is actually correct. It would be a good thing if American conservatives had more of a sense of how to weaken the influence of Silicon Valley or the Ivy League, and more cultural projects in which they wanted to invest both private energy and public money.

But the way this impulse has swiftly led conservatives to tolerate corruption, whether in their long-distance Hungarian romance or their marriage to Donald Trump, suggests a fundamental danger for cultural outsiders. When you have demand for an alternative to an oppressive-seeming ideological establishment, but relatively little capacity to build one, the easiest path often leads not toward renaissance, but grift.

I have said many times in this space that Orban impresses because he understands better than our own politicians the kind of wicked insanity we are up against. Last week, Tucker Carlson did a segment on Chris Chan, the male-to-female transsexual who was jailed after details leaked in which he described sex with his elderly mother. This Chan creep was to be sent to the female jail, until outrage compelled state authorities to put him with men. The gender ideology that has taken over the Democratic Party and most US institutions requires this stuff. Abigail Shrier wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the dangers faced by female inmates in California prisons, which, under state law, house penis-havers claiming to be women with biological women. Shrier points out that if Congress passes the Equality Act — which the Democratic-controlled House already has, and which President Biden said he would sign into law if it gets through the Senate — this madness would become the law of the land.

If most Americans understood this, would they object? The media rarely talk about it, do they? Well, Viktor Orban and his party passed a law recently banning this garbage ideology from Hungarian schools attended by minors. We couldn’t do that in America because of the First Amendment, but that’s not the point. The point is that Orban is willing to take the hard stances necessary to keep his country from losing its collective mind under assault by woke loonies. If the Hungarians don’t like it, they can vote him out. As Ross points out, we Americans can’t vote out the private institutional cultures that enforce wokeness on us. But it is time for US conservative politicians — those who actually want to govern instead of making crackpot speeches — to take a serious look at Hungary, and to see what lessons from Orban’s governance applies to us.

When Douthat mentions “grift,” in Orban’s case, he’s referring to the serious corruption problem associated with his rule. I wrote this in that Spectator piece:

In the three months that I have been living in Budapest, I have had countless conversations with people — many of whom intend to vote Fidesz in next year’s election — who complain that the Orbán government is far too indulgent of corruption. This anecdotal evidence is backed up by a recent survey by the anticorruption NGO Transparency International, which revealed that 69 percent of Hungarians believe that government corruption is a big, or very big, problem in their country.

To be fair, the European Union average is 62 percent, according to Transparency International, which, while depressing, puts the high Hungarian number into a more favorable context. Plus, corruption is a regrettable legacy of communism, one that affects every country in the former Soviet bloc. Still, there’s no gainsaying the corruption issue. A Western diplomat told me that while the Americans and Europeans focus on culture-war issues in Central European countries, corruption is a far bigger deal.

The taxi driver who drove me to the Budapest airport today told me that he is sick of Fidesz’s toleration for corruption, but he intends to vote for the party next year because he doesn’t trust the opposition to run the country competently. This is a common view, from what I’ve learned this summer in talking to Hungarians. Or, they are like the young woman with whom I shared a taxi in Budapest a few weeks back: she hates the corruption too, but told me that the moral and intellectual corruption that comes with the wokeness they see taking over the West is a more destructive kind. She’s right about that. I would rather have honest government over dishonest government, but if I had to choose between a corrupt president who rewarded his cronies, and a president who was morally fastidious, but whose administration stopped using the word “mother” in federal documents, substituting instead “birthing people” — well, that’s not a hard choice to make. A society can survive Huey P. Long; it cannot survive losing the meaning of “mother”.

Viktor Orban seems to understand that. Our US Republican leaders give no evidence that they do.

Most of the criticism of Tucker Carlson’s admiration for Orban’s Hungary has been pretty silly. Sometimes they’ll criticize Hungary without apparently realizing that the things they hate about Hungary exist in similar form in America (in this clip from his Esztergom speech, Tucker read aloud an Anne Applebaum tweet, and made this very point about “the total lack of self-awareness” of these critics). They’ll say things like, “Hungary is relatively poor. Why do these conservatives want to bring Orbanism to America to make us poor?” Actually, in the conclusion of his speech in Esztergom, Tucker handled that kind of jibe well. He pointed out that none of us who are interested in Hungary in a what-can-we-learn-from-it way have any interest in lifting particular Hungarian policies up and transplanting them in America. Hungary’s history, culture, and people are very different from America’s, and anyway, Tucker Carlson would not be happy with Hungarian gun laws or the aggressive way the Orban government responded to Covid. That’s not the point.

The point is that Hungary is ruled by a prime minister and a party that prioritizes defending the country’s sovereignty, its traditions, its way of life, and its moral conservatism — this, despite being under constant assault by the EU, globalists, and progressives. It’s run by an elected government that is affirmatively anti-woke, one that, as Carlson indicated on his broadcast last week, looks out at the cultural revolution overtaking the United States and western Europe, and wants no part of it. Orban has said over and over again that if other countries want to take a different approach to raising their children (and so forth), then that, of course, is their right. But let Hungarians decide what goes on in their own country. The Hungarians are not against the EU; they’re against the EU overstepping its mandate, and attempting to force a left-wing cultural revolution on countries that do not want it.

Hungary is an important example for American conservatives in part because it compels us to recognize that the state is the only means we have left to defend ourselves from those who despise us and our institutions, and want to force us to bow to soft totalitarianism. This is a hell of a thing for an American conservative raised in the Reagan era to grasp, but that’s where we are. Just as the king’s role was in part to protect the people from the depredations of the nobility, in this current era of leftist capture of US institutions (including the military!), the state is the only means by which we conservatives can exercise power in our own self-defense.

Recently, the person who writes the Cockburn column in The Spectator teed off on liberal critics of Hungary. Excerpts:

Wake up, everyone! Democracy is in peril again.

Blasting across Cockburn’s email feed recently was a new piece from Yasmeen Serhan for the Atlantic, titled ‘The Autocrat’s Legacy.’ The piece is about the unfathomable wickedness of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. He’s the autocrat.

Orbán doesn’t stick his opponents in jail or ban political parties or rig the votes in elections. He’s a much deadlier kind of authoritarian: the kind who wins elections but believes wrong things.

Orbán has been the dominant political force in Hungary since 2010, when his Fidesz party dominated elections so thoroughly that they achieved a supermajority capable of passing a new constitution (which they did; replacing Hungary’s Communist-era document). Whoops, that’s ‘supermajority’. Serhan puts the word in quotes to indicate that it is illegitimate, because Fidesz getting lots of seats when it wins by 18 points just isn’t fair.

‘Orbán doesn’t follow the classic authoritarian playbook of jailing opposition politicians, arresting journalists, or violently cracking down on protesters, as is so often the case in places such as Russia or Belarus,’ Serhan writes. So, in other words, Orbán is not an authoritarian. He’s just a guy who wins elections.

Cockburn goes on to list things that the American left bashes Orban for, and then shows that the same things happen in liberal America — but they don’t care, or even call it good. More Cockburn:

That’s really what this is all about in the end. For the trans-Atlantic Atlantic set, ‘democracy’ has stopped meaning ‘government through popular elections’ and instead means an ever-narrowing set of neoliberal priorities. Defy any of these priorities, and you’ve left the pale of democracy to embrace ‘competitive authoritarianism’, in Serhan’s paradoxical wording. On the other hand, for neoliberals, virtually any tactic is acceptable if done in the name of ‘preserving democracy’.

When Orbán makes appointments to his high court, it is ‘packing’ regardless of context. Last fall, Serhan’s colleague Adam Serwer overtly called for packing the Supreme Court to save democracy.

When independent media outlets in Hungary struggle to find advertisers, it is ‘soft autocracy’. When the most popular cable show in America can’t find any advertisers besides a pillow salesman, that’s corporate America standing against hate.

In 2019, the Washington Post complained that Hungary’s electoral commission rejected complaints on ‘formalistic grounds’, but the paper wasn’t perturbed at all a year later when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court kicked the Green party off the ballot for faxing an affidavit instead of mailing it in.

Winning three landslide election victories in a fair vote is not democracy if the government then bans gay marriage, but an unelected Supreme Court imposing gay marriage nationwide by a 5-4 vote is exactly what Cleisthenes envisioned 2,500 years ago.

More than ever before, Western elites simply equate democracy with their own power. In a time when Western power seems shakier than ever, they tell the public that democracy means they are the only acceptable choice to lead. So, who is really putting democracy in peril?

As I said the other day, it’s becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that liberalism as we have known it really is dead, and that the two choices facing us are leftist illiberalism, and rightist illiberalism. I prefer to live in classical liberalism, but that choice is not in front of us, is it? The problem with the American Left is that it doesn’t recognize what it does as illiberalism. The problem with the old-guard Establishment Right is that it has either reconciled itself to the dominance of leftist illiberalism, or it is popping the Pill of Murti-Bing. What’s that? I explained it a few years back:

The dynamic behind this phenomenon is what the Polish dissident writer Czesław Miłosz, in his classic study of intellectuals under Polish communism, The Captive Mind, called “the Pill of Murti-Bing.” The concept comes from a 1927 dystopian novel by Stanisław Witkiewicz in which an Asian army overruns Poland, and conquers its people in part by giving them pills to assuage their anxieties over their condition. From The Captive Mind:

Witkiewicz’s heroes are unhappy in that they have no faith and no sense of meaning in their work. This atmosphere of decay and senselessness extends throughout the entire country. And at that moment, a great number of hawkers appear in the cities peddling Murti-Bing pills. Murti-Bing was a Mongolian philosopher who had succeeded in producing an organic means of transporting a “philosophy of life.” This Murti-Bing “philosophy of life,” which constituted the strength of the Sino-Mongolian army, was contained in pills in an extremely condensed form. A man who used these pills changed completely. He became serene and happy.

For Miłosz, Polish intellectuals who capitulated to communism and Soviet rule had taken the pill of Murti-Bing. It was what made their condition bearable. They could not stand to see reality, for if they recognized what was really happening in their country, the pain and shock would make life too much to take.

OK, I’ll wrap up. It’s late here in Milan, and I’ve got an early flight back to the US tomorrow. I didn’t want to let Ross Douthat’s column go by without offering some remarks. The point of these remarks is simply this: if we conservatives are going to mount an effective political resistance to the soft totalitarianism taking over our country, then we are going to have to have aggressive, competent, national conservative leadership, one that is not averse to intervening in the economy for the sake of the common good. The best example of that now on the world stage is Viktor Orban. If we are going to I don’t want his tolerance for corruption to be brought to America. I don’t want all of his laws and policies repeated in the US. America is not Hungary. But neither is Hungary America, and I respect Orban for defending Hungary’s character, Hungary’s customs, Hungary’s sovereignty, Hungary’s natural families, and Hungary’s national interests against dictatorial progressive bullies from rich countries whose societies are coming apart at the seams.

With the possible exception of Poland’s leadership, about which I know next to nothing, Viktor Orban is the only Western leader who understands that Europe, at least, is facing a civilizational crisis, and is committed to addressing it as best as he can using political power. He might fail, but if he does, the failure will be felt by all of us in the decades to come, and it’s not going to be pleasant.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

As far as I can tell, the significance of Orban is a lot like the significance of Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is not going to cleanse the academic temple of SJWs, but his example is one we should emulate in the academy. In say 2015 it would have been very easy to just feel lost at sea in the academy amid all the SJW business. We didn’t quite know then that it would take over so thoroughly to the point it couldn’t really be questioned, but the old school liberals and conservatives knew we were in dangerous waters.

How do you respond to that? It is like being in new territory without a map, someone needs to trailblaze it. Peterson did it for me and I learned something about how to inhabit the academic world as a dissident. I could see what it would look like, the sort of criticism I would receive, how I might respond successfully.

Jordan Peterson allowed me to more effectively chart out the possibilities, play out scenarios and to go into uncomfortable situations with less anxiety because it wasn’t all new, it was somewhat familiar. I had seen Peterson argue with students and even lawmakers, that was huge.

I think maybe that’s what you and Tucker see in Orban: the guy to emulate in this war. Conservatives in America are pathetic. They are like lost children. Frum a conservative? Give me a break, that guy is Judas Iscariot. My background is working man’s Democrat so I grew up despising country club Republicans, hedge funders, Neocons, but now that I vote Republican for social issues, my judgment hasn’t changed. They’re dead wood.

Orban is an example that statesmen like DeSantis can emulate.

UPDATE.2: In his newsletter, Ben Sixsmith writes sympathetically about the affection for Hungary coming from American Rightists, but:

I caution conservatives against the search for trad-topia. What attracted leftists to Cuba, Venezuala et cetera was the idea that their values were thriving somewhere even if they had failed at home. Of course, I think right-wing ideas tend to better than left-wing ones. But the impulse behind ideological tourism can still obscure the actual conditions of a country.

That’s a good word. I have tried to be as straightforward as I can about the reality of corruption in Orban’s Hungary, while also pointing out that this is nothing particular to him, but rather endemic in the former Communist bloc nations. The left-wing government Orban’s party replaced was corrupt. Should a left-wing coalition government replace him next year, they too will likely be corrupt. As a native and current resident of the Great State of Louisiana, I can assure you that some polities loathe but tolerate a great deal of corruption, especially if the government is delivering on other things they care about. Huey P. Long was fantastically corrupt, but he delivered for the impoverished masses. This is not to say corruption isn’t important, or shouldn’t be fought. It is simply to say that Louisiana is not Minnesota, and Hungary is not the United Kingdom — but all are lovely places to live. As I’ve indicated in earlier writing, people have different standards for corruption. One young Budapest woman told me that she hates the financial corruption in her country, but she thinks that is not as bad as the moral corruption (in her view) that would come with normalizing in her country the western European orthodoxy on LGBT. This is the actual choice before her and Hungarian voters next year. I’m not trying to say that one choice is better than the other (though obviously I believe it is), but simply to point out that different peoples value different things.

Second, I am aware that I only saw Budapest, and the lovely small cities of Esztergom and Györ. The taxi driver who took me to the airport on Sunday (he’s a reluctant Fidesz voter; he’s fed up with corruption, but has no confidence in the opposition’s capacity to govern) pointed out the beautiful forests through which we drove, and the happy, prosperous villages of the Budapest exurbs. “You are not seeing the poor villages,” he said. “In the far east of the country, people are very poor. Very poor.”

I was living in downtown Pest during my stay there. It was beautiful — not posh, but beautiful. Yet hardcore drunks lingered around the liquor store around the corner from my flat. They didn’t menace anybody, but they looked like zombies. Sometimes they slept on the sidewalk. That said, you can find that in any big American city. I only mention it here because I don’t want to give you the impression that Hungary is a tradtopia. It is neither hellhole nor paradise. But who wants it to be, really? Tucker Carlson and I have both said we are Americans, and love our country — but that there is a lot to love and admire in Hungary, and lessons for American conservatives about the kind of political direction in which US conservatism should head.

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