Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited Hungary to attend “a three-day festival organised by the Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Esztergom… MCC is an extremely well-funded school for top students, whom [Prime Minister Viktor] Orban's Fidesz government are carefully grooming to become the country's new right-wing elite…
“[Orban] stands accused of using Pegasus spyware purchased from the Israeli company NSO to tap the phones and mine the personal data of up to 300 independent journalists, lawyers and businessmen not aligned with his Fidesz party. The European Commission has suspended the disbursement of post-Covid EU recovery funds, citing insufficient safeguards against corruption.” BBC
“Hungary’s government [last] Friday ordered booksellers to place children’s books that depict homosexuality in ‘closed packaging’... The order also forbids the public display of products that depict or promote gender deviating from sex at birth, and bans the sale of all books or media content that depict homosexuality or gender change within 200 meters (650 feet) of a school or church.” AP News
The right is generally supportive of Orban, arguing that he is better than the alternative, and that criticism of Hungary is overblown.
“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’.”
Rod Dreher, American Conservative
“A 2020 survey conducted by the Cato Institute found that 62 percent of Americans felt uncomfortable sharing their views because of the political climate, and ‘strong liberals’ were the only ideological group where the majority felt free to speak their minds. To the question, ‘Are you worried about losing your job or missing out on job opportunities if your political opinions became known?’ highly educated Americans were the most anxious, with 44 percent of respondents with a postgraduate degree and 60 percent of Republicans with a post-grad degree saying yes…
“[Unlike Hungary] 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… 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.”
Ross Douthat, New York Times
Dated but relevant: “At Vox, Zack Beauchamp held that democracy was the missing piece of ‘illiberal democracy.’ He has held that Orban in 2012 had rewritten the constitution in ways that were advantageous for his party, Fidesz. True, though Beauchamp fails to mention that the party had based the previous campaign on major structural reform of the government and had won its landslide victory on it, and that the government had the lawful supermajority support to pass it…
“Orban’s political success is due not to authoritarian structures but to the delivery of consistent economic growth… The minimum wage has more than doubled during his tenure. At the beginning of Orban’s second turn as prime minister, he promised 1 million new jobs — quite a lot for a country of 10 million people. A decade later, the count stands around 800,000.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review
Critics, however, argue, “At least when progressives were lauding Scandinavia, they were lauding countries that enjoyed higher standards of living than the United States. Hungary’s median household income, by contrast, is a fraction of America’s…
“Hungary’s life expectancy is lower than America’s. Its birth rate is lower—lower, in fact, than the EU average. It’s less free than the United States. Corruption is endemic. And if you think the new right might love it because of its religiosity, Hungary is far, far less religious than America’ least religious state…
“In the last five years I’ve heard quite a few new right pundits wax eloquent about the ‘common good’ and denigrate concepts like liberty or freedom. The presumption is that the new right will use government power to lead the nation into a new era of broad-based prosperity and public virtue. But if their model is Viktor Orbán, I see culture war and corruption, but not the common good. Hungary is a land that too many of its own citizens want to leave.”
David French, The Dispatch
The left condemns Orban’s illiberal tendencies and criticizes his supporters on the right.
The left condemns Orban’s illiberal tendencies and criticizes his supporters on the right.
“The irony, of course, is that under Orbán, it’s impossible for a Hungarian equivalent of Carlson—a loud television pundit, critical of the government, watched by millions of people—to exist. In Hungary, the ruling party doesn’t merely influence the press. It owns the bulk of the press, and not metaphorically. This is not some subtle form of influence: A few years ago, owners, even pro-government owners, were forced to ‘donate’ their media properties to a holding company controlled directly by people close to Orbán…
“Many independent radio networks and newspapers have been forced off the air and out of business through overt and covert intervention in the advertising market. The token independent outlets, mostly websites, that have been allowed to remain are subject to stringent government surveillance. The Hungarian government has gone so far as to use Pegasus spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group to track journalists, following their conversations, messages, and movements.”
Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
“It is certainly not Hungary’s economy that has attracted a growing number of American right-wing admirers. Hungary has fallen behind its central European peers as Orban’s corruption and crude populism have spurred many of the nation’s wealthier citizens to leave. Nor is there much conservative inspiration to be mined from Orban’s pandemic management, which has been simultaneously more heavy-handed and less effective than other European governments’…
“What makes this alliance especially chilling is that Hungary is the model of democratic backsliding that has loomed largest in their imaginations of internationalist thinkers…
“Orban’s corruption of a former democracy occurred step by step. He gerrymandered the electoral map to give his supporters an overwhelming advantage, stacked the judiciary with supporters, leveraged state power to force large businesses to support his party, and installed supporters in charge of the country’s largest media organs. (Think about Trump’s efforts to bully Jeff Bezos into putting a leash on the Washington Post by denying Amazon a lucrative Pentagon contract, and you have a picture of the methods Orban has used, with more success.)… If America ceases to be a democracy, it will likely follow a path similar to Orban’s.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“The legacy of European ethnic nationalism has been felt very strongly in Central Europe — it sparked multiple world wars, multiple genocides, rounds of ethnic cleansing, and now we have lots of itty-bitty, fairly homogenous countries there. And of them, Hungary is the most overtly gender traditionalist and xenophobic, and that’s what some American conservatives have decided they envy…
“The problem with this is that the parts of America that the populist right has decided it hates are precisely the parts that make the United States richer than Hungary. Our big tech companies dominate the global market capitalization listings. Our entertainment industry dominates global popular culture. Our universities dominate global higher education rankings. The foreign-born scientists and entrepreneurs are coming here, not Hungary.”
Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
“Students of American political history — and specifically students with a working knowledge of the history of the conservative movement — will recognize something familiar about this story. Here we have prominent conservative writers and intellectuals using their platforms to support or endorse regimes whose politics and policies align with their preoccupations, even as the values of those regimes stand in direct opposition to the ideals of American democracy. We’ve seen this before. Many times, in fact…
“In 1957, William F. Buckley Jr. published a ‘Letter from Spain’ in the pages of his magazine, National Review. An admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Buckley did not hesitate to praise him in the most effusive terms he could muster… Five years later, in 1962, Buckley traveled to Mozambique — then under Portuguese colonial rule — where he wrote favorably of the status quo and condemned the United Nations for its anti-colonialism…
“And in 1977, James Burnham, a staunch anti-communist and one of the most influential conservative political theorists of the postwar years, wrote a brief defense of the apartheid government in the former Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).”
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times
The best Nickelodeon character bracket.
The Ringer