Rod Dreher's Blog, page 54

America’s Afghanistan Humiliation

From the Ministry of Information:

U.S. airstrikes are helping to blunt Taliban advances across Afghanistan, although Pentagon officials warn American air power alone will not be enough to push back the insurgent offensive.

For weeks, the United States has been launching “over-the-horizon” strikes from its Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and from its carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf, hitting Taliban targets with a heavy mix of AC-130 gunships and MQ-9 Reaper drones.

But there have been questions regarding the effectiveness of the strikes, with Taliban officials claiming the group has captured seven provincial capitals over the past five days, and tweeting Tuesday that an eighth capital, Faizabad, in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, was about to fall.

“We have every confidence that those strikes are hitting what we’re aiming at and are having an effect on the Taliban,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Tuesday, saying additional strikes have been carried out “in just the last several days.”

I don’t believe the Pentagon. I think they are lying. The Afghan government has lost nine provinces in a week. The Pentagon has been lying to us for years about our prospects in Afghanistan. Why should we trust it now?

Oh look, we are literally begging the Taliban not to hurt us now:

American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group overruns the capital in a direct challenge to the country’s government, two American officials said.

The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off an evacuation of the embassy as the fighters rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. The Taliban’s advance has put embassies in Kabul on high alert for a surge of violence in coming months, or even weeks, and forced consulates and other diplomatic missions elsewhere in the country to shut down.

American diplomats now are trying to determine how soon they may need to evacuate the U.S. Embassy should the Taliban prove to be more bent on destruction than a détente.

A reader who is a veteran of our Mideast wars writes:

It isn’t the Chinese that are kicking our asses. It is the Taliban that have completely shredded a government we spent trillion dollars to build up, and then lied about the progress and prowess of. And there will be no consequences for anyone, which is why the underlying issues won’t be fixed — and then the Chinese will kick our ass.

Nope, no consequences for anybody. It will shock us all how quickly this is forgotten, as our ruling class gets us ready to start another war we can’t win. Sure do wish we had listened to Pat Buchanan and the “unpatriotic conservatives” (in David Frum’s wording) who tried to keep us out of that region. Well, at least this frees up our military brass to fight the only war they seems to be able to win now: the culture war against its own non-woke soldiers.

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The Media Construction Of Woke Reality

Sorry for the light posting. I’ve been struggling with jet lag and with the coming Sweet Meteor of Death catastrophe that is going to be dealing with my infirm mother when we bring her home from the rehab center, where she’s recovering from breaking her hip. She seems to have it firmly fixed in her mind that by sheer force of will she can overcome all limitations of her body, and continue to maintain her independent lifestyle. I am deliberately understating it. This is like me saying that the Golden Horde appears to believe it has the right to trespass upon the lands of European sovereigns, and behave rudely to the locals.

On the journey home from Europe, I read this incredible paper analyzing the frequency of use of “prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse.” This chart from the paper gives you an idea of what it’s about:

Incredible. I wrote about this phenomenon in Live Not By Lies, but this is further confirmation of it. Here’s how I mention it in LNBL:

Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movement has the power to drop the iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, did a deep dive on LexisNexis, the world’s largest database of publicly available documents, including media reports. He found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere.

What does this mean? That the mainstream media is framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.

It must be conceded that right-wing media, though outside the mainstream, often has a similar effect on conservatives: affirming to them that what they believe about the world is true. For all users of social media—including the nearly three quarters of US adults who use Facebook and the 22 percent who use Twitter—reinforcement of prior political beliefs is built into the system. We are being conditioned to accept as true whatever feels right to us. As Arendt wrote about the pre-totalitarian masses:

They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent with itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

I was thinking about how to write about the new information here when I saw that Ed West of UnHerd did a bang-up essay on it today. Excerpt:

The paper also found that this process long predated Trump and that in 2014: “The usage of words denoting racism, homophobia, transphobia or sexism were at or near, up to that year, all-time highs. These results suggest that the trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related words in media discourse precedes the political emergence of Donald Trump — although Trump’s presidency and subsequent reactions to it may have exacerbated these trends.”

Centrist outlets were least likely to use these terms, presumably because Right-wing websites spend so much of their time Owning the Libs and responding to the R-word, while centrist publications are busy focusing on unimportant stuff like climate change and people having enough food to eat.

The paper, like Zach Goldberg’s work in similar areas, points to a seismic shift in American liberal opinion from about 2013, a change in worldview almost without precedent; even during the 1960s and 70s public opinion changed quite slowly in western countries, and in Britain the basic premises of the sexual revolution weren’t accepted by the majority until well into the 1990s.

This is a form of runaway progressivism, driven by status anxiety, and it is usually attributed to social media and the iPhone, which encourages clickbait and dopamine-producing culture war content.

The shifting political position of upper-middle class Americans and the proliferation of prejudice-related words are obviously not unrelated, and presumably the causal arrow goes both ways. A radicalised population demands more morally-affirming condemnation of the sinners, but the proliferation of prejudice words pushes people into more radical political positions.

Read it all. 

The point is, progressives in media began to radicalize us all about a decade ago by framing ordinary human experience in highly prejudicial language. They still do. The problem is that progressive elites really don’t seem to grasp what they’re doing. They have absorbed this radicalism as normative, and demonize people who haven’t. As Ed West says, this pushes the demonized into more radical political positions too.

Consider the situation in Hungary, where a mostly secular population is nevertheless socially conservative. Hungary is being beaten up by the European Union now for holding to media standards for the presentation of sexualized content to children that would have been uncontroversial in many European countries fifteen or twenty years ago. EU elites, having absorbed current-year thinking as eternal universal truths, are trying to construe those who don’t accept them as enemies of the human race. Now, think about it: if you are Viktor Orban, the elected right-wing leader of Hungary, and you see charts like the one above showing how media discourse around race and sexuality has changed US society in ways you find profoundly destructive, how eager are you going to be to sit back and let that happen in your country?

This is how you get progressives in high places driving conservatives more to the Right.

Here is how you get people on the Right to turn against Woke Capitalists. Writing in the New York Post, the invaluable Chris Rufo reports that American Express has been captured by the neoracist Left. Excerpt:

American Express, which made a $2.3 billion profit last quarter, invited the great-grandson of the Nation of Islam’s founder to tell its employees that capitalism is evil.

It was part of the credit card giant’s critical race theory training program, which asks workers to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves on a hierarchy of “privilege.”

According to a trove of documents I’ve reviewed, AmEx executives created an internal “Anti-Racism Initiative” after George Floyd’s death last year, subjecting employees to a training program based on the core CRT tenets, including intersectionality, which reduces individuals to a tangle of racial, gender and sexual identities that determine whether he is an “oppressor” or “oppressed” in a given situation.

In a foundational session, the outside consulting firm Paradigm trained AmEx employees to deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their “race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship” onto an official company worksheet.

Employees could then determine whether they have “privilege” or are members of a “marginalized group”: White males presumably end up in the oppressor position, while racial and sexual minorities are considered oppressed.

In a related session, trainers instruct employees how to change their behavior in the office based on their relative position on the hierarchy. The trainers provide a blue flowchart with specific rules for interacting with black, female and LGBT employees: If members of a subordinate group are present, workers should practice “intersectional allyship” and defer to them before speaking.

In another handout, the instructions for white employees are even more explicit: “identify the privileges or advantages you have”; “don’t speak over members of the black and African-American community”; “it’s not about your intent, it’s about the impact you have on your colleague.”

Read it all.

Folks, this is not Women and Women First, the feminist bookstore in Portlandia; this is American freaking Express! This is the ideology of the ruling class now, and if you aspire to be part of the ruling class, you had better sign on for racial hatred.

This is our country, Americans. This is who we are becoming. This is what we are being turned into.

Did you see that the American Medical Association is now recommending that “male” and “female” be taken off of birth certificates? The AMA is on record now advocating for the denial of one of the most basic principles of biological science. Last weekend in Esztergom, I shared a stage with a prominent Hungarian liberal critic of the Orban government, an internationally respected academic whose most recent work has been in the area of science denial. I came away thinking that Hungarian liberals really don’t understand how radical America has become. Peter Kreko, my interlocutor, said a couple of times that surely I must be citing fringe examples and claiming that they represent the mainstream. Well, in US medicine, the AMA defines the mainstream. We really are this crazy now. We are destroying ourselves.

I was e-mailing last night with a Hungarian Catholic friend whose integrity and wisdom I respect greatly. She was commenting on my belief that Hungary has something to offer American conservatives when it comes to resisting this disorder politically. She’s not so confident. She wrote:

I personally think that the coming storm will swipe aside political solutions and we will need the bare essentials — what kept those dissidents going in prison, in concentration camps, in hunger and in thirst. I have just read about this Russian poetess who was involved in a show trial and as part of it, beaten up so badly that she lost her child. What are the things that keep one going in those circumstances? As far as I can recall, it is always some version of the true, the good and the beautiful, whether religious or not. Whatever is going on right now makes many of us angry, but I don’t really think anger is the right thing to spur one. It can be helpful, but it can make one easier to manipulate. Again, building political-intellectual networks might be part of the fight. I do not want to look down on it. It is important, I think. I am only saying that this should be rightly ordered.

It has long been my conviction that we don’t have what it takes to successfully repel this stuff. I hope I’m wrong, and in any case, we are obliged to fight it. But we can (and we must!) do two things at once: we can fight it openly using the means at hand, and we can also prepare for a long underground resistance.

Here’s a piece from Benjamin Kerstein, writing in Quillette about watching America crack up from overseas. Excerpts:

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

Can confirm, from recent experience in Hungary. If you live in the Anglosphere media space, as I do, you can easily become numb to the insanity. But talking to Hungarians about it, you realize that what’s happening in America is not remotely normal. It is, in fact, insane. Living overseas these past few months has made me even more aware of how much faith we Americans put in the idea that bad things that happen to people in other countries cannot happen to us.

Kerstein is very hard on the delusions of both the Left and the Right. I was interested to see him use on two occasions in the essay the term “soft totalitarianism” to describe what the woke Left is bringing about. Here’s one of the instances:

None of this lets the progressives off the hook. Soft totalitarianism is still totalitarianism. It may not be openly murderous, but this is essentially irrelevant, because it can murder everything that makes men free, and with it essential things like thought, creativity, and dignity. And a totalitarian America with the facade of a republic would be even closer to collapse than it already is. Whatever their other flaws, most Americans still care deeply about their freedoms, and will eventually fight for them should they deem it necessary. In such a culture, and especially such a heavily armed culture, any attempt to impose a soft totalitarianism faces the prospect of a hard resistance.

Read it all. It’s not a cheerful essay. But it tells some hard truths about the present and the likely future. Among them:

No republic can survive if the vast majority of its citizens no longer believe in it, and it does seem that more and more Americans no longer believe in their republic.

 

 

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Illiteracy, Enemy Of Racism

Watch this until the very end. We are seeing the collapse of a society under the pressure from leftist ideologues:

Heartbreaking: a Loudoun County public school teacher resigns on the spot in response to the district’s critical race theory training program that designated her an oppressor and silenced all dissent.

Watch until the end.pic.twitter.com/7Mlr8Z1S6F

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) August 11, 2021

Meanwhile, in Oregon:

For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at a high school level.

Gov. Kate Brown had demurred earlier this summer regarding whether she supported the plan passed by the Legislature to drop the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills. But on July 14, the governor signed Senate Bill 744 into law.

Through a spokesperson, the governor declined again Friday to comment on the law and why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements.

Brown’s decision was not public until recently, because her office did not hold a signing ceremony or issue a press release and the fact that the governor signed the bill was not entered into the legislative database until July 29, a departure from the normal practice of updating the public database the same day a bill is signed.

The Oregonian/OregonLive asked the governor’s office when Brown’s staff notified the Legislature that she had signed the bill. Charles Boyle, the governor’s deputy communications director, said the governor’s staff notified legislative staff the same day the governor signed the bill.

Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”

You got that? The Democratic governor of Oregon, and the Democrat-controlled Oregon legislature, have now said that in order to achieve equity, you don’t have to prove that you can read, write, or do math to graduate from Oregon public schools. Because expecting high school graduates to be literate is racist. 

We are led by corrupt elites, and deserve to have the Chinese kick our ass. Seriously, can you believe this? Can you believe that America is auto-destructing like this? How crack-brained do you have to be to make a law saying that an American can graduate from high school as an illiterate, and that’s fine, because we’re fighting racism?

Idiocracy. We are an idiocracy. The thing is, though, if all those Oregon BIPOX youth graduate as illiterates, how will they ever be able to keep up with the queering of superheroes? From the Daily Mail:

The friend who sent me that said that we are undergoing the stupidest collapse of a civilization ever. Yep.

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The Culture War In Four Minutes

I was on a panel at the MCC Feszt in Esztergom at which I was asked if the culture war was real? I have found it difficult to express to Hungarians how very real it is. I find that those who don’t pay a lot of attention to American culture struggle to imagine that it’s as insane as it is. It’s always good to have a fellow American present for these conversations, to back me up. It is a sign of how sane Hungary is as a country that Hungarians — even liberal ones — can’t grasp that something so insane could actually happen in America.

This clip is making the rounds. It is a pure distillation of the culture war — and due to foul language, it is doubleplus Not Safe For Work! Here’s the set-up. In working-class Aberdeen, Washington, the elderly owner of a Star Wars memorabilia shop had a sign up denying that trans women are women. A trans woman (that is, a man who presents as a woman) came to the store with a confederate to confront the old man, film the confrontation, and post it to social media to show what a horrible man the old fellow is. Not wanting trouble, the old man removed the sign when he spotted the trans in the store. But that wasn’t enough. The trans got all up in his business — and he (verbally) punched back, hard.

Keep in mind that this confrontation was filmed by the partner of the trans person. They think it makes the old man look bad. I think it makes him look heroic. And I think this old man speaks for many of us. In fact, I know he does.

Aside from the obvious culture war clash, what is especially interesting to me is how this trans troll went out of his way to track down this old guy to not only tell him off, but to have the telling-off filmed so that the trans troll could become a hero to online Social Justice Warriors. The persecutorial aspect of wokeness is perhaps its most distinctive characteristic. They can never let any sin go unpunished. All sinners must live in terror of the woke virtuous.

We are an insane country, though, so crotchety old storekeepers in working-class towns have to live in fear of being attacked by Social Justice Warriors, and having their name and business destroyed.

Here’s how sick and evil these creeps are. Disney — Disney! — is now grooming little children for sexual identity problems. They’ve turned the Muppet Baby Gonzo into a cross-dresser. I’m not kidding:

They really are coming for our children. And so, let us reflect on how in Hungary, thanks to a law passed by the Fidesz government this summer, this kind of thing would be illegal. Hungarian parents know that their government is on the side of their family, not the side of major corporations who seek to poison the minds of little kids. Hungary is ruled by a man. America’s men won’t even fight these corporate freaks on behalf of our own children.

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Why Conservatives Should Care About Hungary

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.

The post Why Conservatives Should Care About Hungary appeared first on The American Conservative.

Unpatriotic Conservatives™ 2021

It seems to me we’ve heard this song before:

The New American Right is now explicitly embracing the Old European Right. Not to put to fine a point on it, the New American Right is…anti-American. pic.twitter.com/fcKxJriHjn

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 5, 2021

Ah yes, that would be the infamous 2003 “Unpatriotic Conservatives” essay that Kristol’s neoncon compadre David Frum published in National Review, smearing Pat Buchanan and other conservatives who were opposed to the coming Iraq War. ‘Memba this conclusion?:

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

I re-read the essay, and I must say that many of the things Frum dug up about the paleocons and the things they believe(d) are things I find objectionable even today. But you know what Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and Sam Francis, for all their faults, did not do? Use their rhetorical gifts to lead this country into a catastrophic war that destroyed the Middle East, cost America blood and treasure, and shredded our global credibility. Eighteen years after “Unpatriotic Conservatives” and all that followed from it, it takes some nerve for a top neocon to call another conservative “anti-American” because he holds opposing right-wing views about how America should relate to smaller countries.

Besides, what a weird smear. Does Kristol call American leftists who oppose everything he stands for “anti-American”? What is he getting at here? It sounds so canned and desperate. Is anybody really moved by an older man calling a younger man “anti-American” because he goes to a NATO country and American ally, and speaks well of it? Isn’t that, you know, nuts?

This really is a telling moment. I never was a believer in Trump, but I certainly wasn’t a believer either in the pre-Trump GOP establishment. One big reason we got Donald Trump was because of their failures. If we get an American version of Viktor Orban, it will be in large part because:

The Republicans — including Donald Trump — failed to secure the borderThe Republicans — including Donald Trump — did very little to stop the illiberal leftist march through institutionsThe Republicans — including Donald Trump — delivered tax cuts for the rich, but not very much for the rest of usThe Republicans — including Donald Trump — talked a lot, but in the end, don’t have much to show for it

Even the US military leadership is woke now. Critical Race Theory is ripping through schools and other institutions, tearing the fabric of America apart. Gender ideology goes from strength to strength, with American corporations and media propagandizing children and teenagers constantly on behalf of this insane madness.

Where have the neocons been? One gets the idea that they are actually fine with the illiberal left takeover of society and culture, as long as they get to run foreign policy in their own interests. Or at least they are indifferent to the rout that social and religious conservatives are suffering.

My friend Jay Nordlinger, who is one of the kindest men around, so I’m not going to take any of you speaking ill of him, tweeted:

Well, hang on. Ronald Reagan left office 32 years ago. This would be like someone lamenting Democrats of 1977 abandoning FDR’s legacy. The world has changed massively since Reagan’s era. I will not put down Ronald Reagan, who was the right man for his time. But come on — what have the “Reagan conservatives” conserved? Again, conservatives have been routed, even as we have held national political power for much of the past three decades. We are watching America turning into an illiberal leftist society fast moving into a softer version of totalitarianism — as I explain in detail in Live Not By Lies — and what are the “Reagan conservatives” doing about it? Gassing on about “principled, Madisonian conservatism,” while the country is being torn apart, and ordinary people — say, the kind of people who have no choice but to send their kids to public schools, where their children will be indoctrinated into CRT race hate and gender ideology — get trampled by the woke mob.

(Bari Weiss, who is an anti-woke liberal, could tell the same story about the left-liberals sitting back watching things go to hell, terrified of being called insufficiently progressive.)

We don’t want “the clenched fist, and the roaring mouth, and the ‘wins'” in the sense Jay means. We don’t want to be wiped out. Official conservatism in America has become useless at conserving much of anything except the liberties of Big Business. Trumpian conservatism — long on brash display of emotion, but short on substantive accomplishment — has been too. The hour is late. Yes, I would like some real and lasting “wins,” as opposed to continuing to lose ground to the woke militants who have conquered the American establishment.

Who started the national pushback against CRT in schools? An activist named Chris Rufo, who came to prominence in part through his appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He was doing the work that Republican politicians should have been doing, but weren’t. He convinced late-term Donald Trump to move against CRT, an ultimately futile gesture that mostly served to highlight the fact that Trump could have been speaking out and acting, in whatever limited capacities a US president has about education policy (which is something that is sorted out locally), against this racist ideology all alone. But he didn’t, because Trump didn’t care enough about any of this to be effective. Lib-owning is fun, but it’s no substitute for actual governance, and real strategy.

I can’t think of anything in recent memory that has been more revealing of where we Americans actually stand politically than Tucker Carlson’s visit to Hungary. As I wrote in The Spectator a couple of days ago, Hungary is a country with lots of troubles, including corruption. I won’t go once again into listing all the reasons why it’s important for Western right-of-center people to come here and learn from the Hungarians — I’ve been blogging about that all summer; I invite you to go through the archives here — so I’m going to try to boil it down. First, though, here’s something from  Tucker Carlson’s monologue on Thursday night’s show:

Of the nearly 200 different counties on the face of the earth, precisely one of them has an elected leader who publicly identifies a western-style conservative. His name is Viktor Orban, and he’s the prime minister of Hungary.

Hungary is a small country in the middle of Central Europe. It has no navy, it has no nuclear weapons. Its GDP is smaller than New York state’s. You wouldn’t think leaders in Washington would pay much attention to Hungary, but they do, obsessively.

By rejecting the tenets of neoliberalism, Viktor Orban has personally offended them and enraged them. What does Orban believe? Just a few years ago, his views would have seemed moderate and conventional. He thinks families are more important than banks. He believes countries need borders. For saying these things out loud, Orban has been vilified. Left-wing NGO’s have denounced him as a fascist, a destroyer of democracy.

Last fall, Joe Biden suggested he’s a totalitarian dictator. Official Washington despises Viktor Orban so thoroughly that many, including neocons in and around the State Department, are backing the open anti-semites running against him in next April’s elections in Hungary.

We’ve watched all of this from the United States, and wondered if what we’d heard could be true. This week we came to Hungary to see for ourselves. We sat down with Orban for a couple of long conversations.

But first, a word about Hungary. Even if you understand that the American media lie, it’s always bewildering to see the extent of their dishonesty. Nothing prepares you for it. We’ve read many times how repressive Hungary is.

Freedom House, an NGO in Washington funded almost exclusively by the U.S. government, describes the country as less free than South Africa, with fewer civil liberties. That’s not just wrong. It’s insane.

In fact, if you live in the United States, it is bitter to see the contrast between, say, Budapest and New York City. Let’s say you lived in a big American city and you decided to loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden’s policies, on immigration or COVID or transgender athletes. If you kept talking like that, you would likely be silenced by Biden’s allies in Silicon Valley. If you kept it up, you might very well have to hire armed bodyguards. That’s common in the U.S. Ask around.

But it’s unknown in Hungary. Opposition figures here don’t worry they’ll be hurt for their opinions. Neither, by the way, does the prime minister. Orban regularly drives by himself with no security. So who’s freer? In what country are you more likely to lose your job for disagreeing with ruling class orthodoxy? The answer’s pretty obvious, though if you’re an American, it’s painful to admit it, as we’ve discovered.

Watch the monologue, and Carlson’s interview with Orban, here.Listen to Orban himself, and ask yourself: is this man a fascist? Really? Orban says in the interview that unlike other countries in the EU, he opposes the idea that Europe should become a post-Christian, post-national society.

I’ve mentioned in this space several times over the summer that Hungarian college professors are far more free than their American counterparts. They can stand in their classrooms and say whatever they like about Viktor Orban or anything else, and face no repercussions. That’s how it should be. But in many, perhaps most, US colleges, if an academic criticized a woke sacred cow, he or she would run the risk of losing their job and never being able to teach again. Six years ago, I spoke at a Catholic university on the East Coast in which several professors told me they would never even present the Catholic Church’s teachings on sex and sexuality in their classrooms, not even in a neutral sense, for fear that angry students would denounce them to the administration for creating a hostile classroom environment, and the administration would fire them. The state has nothing to do with it; this totalitarian environment is entirely a creation of institutional culture in the United States.

It takes some cheek for an American, a citizen of a country that is slip-sliding into soft totalitarianism, to lecture Hungary about its alleged unfreedom. Tucker played a clip in which Joe Biden called Orban a totalitarian thug. We Americans have to understand that this is total gaslighting. It’s a brazen lie. As Tucker pointed out, in some ways, Hungarians are more free than Americans. Again, in America, the government won’t come after you for violating orthodoxies — but you will be pursued, for sure. I have been in Hungary for three and a half months, and have had a number of conversations with people who bitterly denounced Viktor Orban. Nobody lowered his voice. In the US, even in my own Red American state of Louisiana, I have been present many times in which people have lowered their voice or at least looked around to see who was listening before they said something completely normal about race, gender, or politics. It’s truly insane.

It’s Friday here in Hungary, and I have been out in the town of Esztergom at a festival that one liberal media outlet described as a “far-right conference.” In fact, it’s a youth culture and music festival sponsored by a college consortium; check out the program on the website and see if this seems like a Nuremberg rally to you. I walked past booths just now where people were promoting yoga, Slow Food Hungary, the national Baptist relief services charity, programs for the Roma people, and so on. It’s a sunny day. Everybody is cheerful. The most political thing that’s going to happen today is a speech in a few minutes by the American talk show host Dennis Prager, whose academic field was the study of Eastern European communism.

OK, so what do we US conservatives have to learn from Hungary? Let’s stipulate that Hungary is a very different country from America. It is ethnically homogeneous, has a very different history, and a very different constitutional system. Some of what Orban’s government has done is legal here, but not under the US Constitution (e.g., the recent law prohibiting pro-LGBT propaganda to children and minors). My enthusiasm for Hungary has more to do with Orban’s ideals. As I see it, Orban grasps the nature of the fight in front of us much more clearly than most of his US counterparts. Perhaps because he is the leader of a small, landlocked country that has had to live for most of the last century under the thumb of foreign powers that controlled its destiny, it is hostile to the tyranny of the European Union. Note well that Hungarians are pro-Europe; they just don’t want the EU overstepping its bounds and telling them how to run their own country. As Orban says in his Tucker interview (I think it is), let the Germans decide for themselves how to educate German children, and let the Hungarians do the same for their own kids. Orban definitely tells Tucker that Trump’s “America First” policy was good for Hungary, because it implies that Hungarian leaders should be looking out first and foremost for the interest of their own country and its people. I agree. Nations, and national sovereignty, is important. The Hungarians don’t want to lose what makes them distinct, and they’re prepared to fight for it. Good for them. They know why you have to value your history, not be indifferent to it, or despise it — and they’re prepared to fight!

Orban understands clearly that the globalist, consumerist, secularist, anti-family ideology that is now dominant in the West will wipe out all the things that conservatives should be eager to conserve. Someone tweeted yesterday that they never imagined that American politics would come down to Team Soros vs. Team Orban. Actually, it does: you can have an aggressively globalist, woke progressive, secular, free-market ideology, or you can have an aggressively nationalistic, anti-woke conservative, religion-friendly (but not sectarian) ideology that believes in the free market, but not at the expense of more important values. The middle ground is fast decreasing. The “principled Madisonian conservatives” and their sort cannot stand against woke militancy. You are going to have to decide, or your stance will be decided for you by circumstances.

One of the more amusing attacks on Tucker Carlson and Hungary has come from pundits who think that Hungary’s lower standard of living is somehow a devastating argument against learning from it:

Nothing says “Ugly American” like pissing on a country because it doesn’t share the American enthusiasm for large appliances. Do you know that even in wealthy Western Europe, refrigerators are generally much smaller than American ones? So what! And:

What is that supposed to prove? All these countries that started out in 1989 with economies and civil societies destroyed by Communism are going to be at a great disadvantage even to poor American states. History came at these people hard. The 1990s were especially bad for them. And when Orban was elected in 2010, he had to deal with an economy that had been badly damaged by his corrupt socialist predecessor. I’m certainly not saying that economic performance and standards of living are beside the point — no political leader can afford to make that mistake — but I am saying that judging a nation’s worth by virtue of its material wealth is gross and philistine. Where is the William Faulkner of Washington state? The Bela Bartok of West Virginia?

There is something more serious here. Let me draw your attention to something I posted in this space last month. Excerpt:

My friend John O’Sullivan and I came back to Budapest with a nice professional driver I’ll call Sandor. We talked all the way back. I really liked him, and learned a lot about Hungary from talking to him. He’s 40 years old, a former teacher who left the classroom mostly because the pay was lousy, and he can make more money driving clients around the region.

After we got to know each other a bit, Sandor said there was another reason he left the classroom. “I don’t want to offend you, but one of my jobs was teaching English. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I realized that I was teaching my students how to speak a language that would make it possible for them to get jobs elsewhere and Europe, and they would leave the country.”

It is true that Hungary suffers from an outmigration of its young. Salaries here are lower than in western Europe. Last night in a pub, watching the England-Italy match, I talked to the bartender, who is demoralized by the economic situation here. She said you have to work so much longer just to make ends meet than you do in the rest of Europe. Sandor resists English as the language of cultural imperialism. He didn’t use those words precisely, but that’s exactly what he meant.

Talking to him, I realized like I had not yet done in my three months in Hungary what it feels like to be a citizen of a small, beleaguered country — beleaguered not only by politics (the European Union is always at Hungary’s throat), but also by the sense of loss. Nobody else in the world speaks your language. Your population is shrinking, both from emigration and lack of replacement. It’s a rotten place to be in.

Sandor is angry at the Orban government. He believes it overinvested in football stadiums and underinvested in teaching. Yet he expects to vote for Orban’s party, Fidesz, in the 2022 election. He says the opposition has nothing to offer, other than that they are Not Orban. Besides, he sees Hungary’s identity at stake. Sandor has thought a lot about globalization, in ways that Americans, and people of bigger, richer countries, rarely do.

He doesn’t understand the people in Hungary who are eager to imitate the West, particularly the young. Don’t they know that if Hungary is dissolved and assimilated, there will be no getting it back? Why, he wonders, do they never think about what it means to have a home, a place where people speak your language, and share your own history? He didn’t think about this either when he was young, but now it means a lot to him. He could go abroad in Europe and look for a better job, but Hungary is home. There is no other Hungary.

Why does the West demand that Hungary imitate it? He says that Hungary has had to deal with this kind of thing for a long time. The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, he says, ordered Hungarian schools to suppress history lessons that told the Hungarians about their pre-Habsburg ancestors — this, in an effort to control the cultural memory of the subject people, the Hungarians.

“If you don’t know who you are, it is easier for others to control you,” Sandor says. Yes, I tell him, I write about this in my latest book.

More:

I finished over the weekend an excellent book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. They are forthrightly liberal academics who explore in its pages the reasons why liberal democracy has had such a rough go of it in Central Europe and Russia since 1989. They also discuss Donald Trump and Trump populism as part of the same anti-liberal phenomenon.

Krastev and Holmes talk about how liberal democracy, led by Americans, was a missionary project to the rest of the world. The Soviets, of course, saw Communism in the same way, as did Mao’s China. According to Krastev and Holmes, it was the fate of the world’s non-democratic countries eventually to embrace democracy, liberalism, and capitalism — this, according to the way Westerners see it. The world must be shown that the American way of understanding politics and culture was the correct way. This is why you see the EU coming down on Hungary like a ton of bricks over its recent law regulating LGBT education and speech aimed at kids. To the EU, this isn’t simply a matter of Hungary, which is more socially conservative, choosing how to educate its own kids in line with its own cultural values. This is a counterrevolutionary insurrection that must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Modern China is not like that. It is certainly an imperialist power, in that it wants to spread its influence around the world. But unlike America “in the heyday of liberal hegemony,” they write, China doesn’t care what kind of government its allies have. It only wants to know that they will act favorably to China’s interests. “The expectation that others should adopt Western-style liberal democratic institutions and norms seemed as natural as the rising of the sun,” they write. That day is over. The liberal hegemony of the European Union, with its demands that Hungary accept its policies regarding LGBT, migration, and the rest, is driving a Western country, Hungary, into the arms of China, as a means of assuring national survival.

There is something to learn here about how our own internal politics work in the US. We are all living right now through the internal colonization of our country by the woke, who control nearly all the major institutions of American life. The woke are ruthless missionaries determined to exterminate ways of living and seeing the world that conflict with their ideological model. We see what they are doing in schools, but consider also the immense power of woke capitalist corporations, accountable to no one, to nullify the decisions of democratically-elected state legislators when those decisions conflict with woke principles. And with respect to the ethnos, the woke and their powerful, well-funded soldiers are making war on the received history of the American people, and in particular on the histories and experiences of white European peoples, trying to inculcate shame and self-hatred so that whites will become demoralized and accept woke totalitarian rule. (Whites, of course, appallingly did the same thing to Indians they conquered in North America, as the Anglo-Americans did to the Cajun French; no conquering culture’s hands are clean.)

Anyway, my driver Sandor correctly understands that economic globalism and liberal cultural hegemony wish to dissolve nations and peoples, and make everyone into deracinated consumers who have cast aside religion, traditions, and all impediments to “diversity,” by which they mean whatever the progressive ruling class says diversity means today. I don’t know if the strategies by which Hungary’s political leaders have chosen to fight this are correct, or at least usually correct. But I admire that they are at least fighting. It is certainly true that nationalist-populist politicians can use these ideas, and histories (real, invented, or a mixture of both), for disreputable, even wicked, ends. But it is also true that the ruling ideology of the West — liberal, democratic, free-market, wokeness — is far too often the enemy of sovereignty, of tradition (especially European), of religion, and of national self-determination. Flawed though it sometimes is, I prefer the way Orban is fighting back to the way our own conservative American politicians are not fighting back. The Hungarians know, in the particular way that people of a small country do, how much depends on the answers to the questions, “Who are we? What are the stories we live by? Who gets to tell them?”

The Bible says, “What does it profit a man to gain the world, but to lose his soul?” Well, what does it profit a Magyar to gain a clothes dryer, but to lose his nation’s soul? I’m not actually joking here. This is a question that is now facing many American Christians, and that is going to face every one of us sooner rather than later. Is our devotion to material possessions and professional status so great that we will deny our own religious beliefs for the sake of gaining access to professional occupations and circles? It may not be obvious to you on the surface, but this is the kind of thing that is most deeply at issue in this Team Soros vs. Team Orban fight.

The idea that an American conservative who admires some of what Viktor Orban does, and believes, is somehow “anti-American” is not only insulting, but is a smear designed to make people believe that to be a real American, you have to endorse selling your country, its institutions, and its traditions out to globalist liberals and American hegemons willing to start wars to turn the whole world into America. Forget it. I love my country, though I don’t love what it’s becoming. If I can learn from the Hungarians how to better resist what the people who are ruining America are doing, then that’s pro-American to me.

Finally, I got this message this morning from a left-wing secular American friend who is living in Istanbul this summer:

I see you spending summer in Hungary. I’m spending a month in Istanbul, in a working class Muslim neighborhood.

Whenever I travel outside of G7, I am reminded how soulless US culture is. So inclusive it is meaningless US culture is so individualistic, so secular, so soulless, it leaves people without any regulation or community. It leaves them sad and frustrated I am in a working class very Muslim neighborhood here in Istanbul, and like I saw jn Jakarta (and Ecuador and pretty much everywhere outside of G7) people have a place. A balance. A natural meaningful role (faith, family, nation) US culture has all the ethos of an office park. Drab, soulless, and endlessly competitive.

Yeah, but I bet those Istanbulis, like the Jakartans and Ecuadoreans, don’t have tumble dryers or Pride Month pronoun lessons for first graders from Black Queer Maestro. The poor saps.

The post Unpatriotic Conservatives™ 2021 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tucker To Hungary, Nixon To China

Maybe it’s because I have a personal intellectual investment in the Hungary story, but I can’t think of anything in ages that has revealed the biases and bigotries of the American Establishment like the reaction to Tucker Carlson’s current visit to Budapest. I hope you’ll forgive me for writing about it again, but liberal and Establishment conservative Twitter is going crazy about it. This is a teaching moment.

I had dinner with Tucker last night in Budapest. We talked about why American conservatives should be interested in Hungary. We agreed that it is an example of a country where — unlike our own — conservatives have successfully fought against wokeness and other aspects of the liberal globalist agenda. It’s a country that has successfully stood up to the cultural imperialism of the European Union, and reminded them that the EU was not designed to be a political entity in which rich and powerful Western European countries laid down the law, and the poorer Central European members obeyed unquestioningly. Here’s something Tucker broadcast about Hungary in 2019; it gives you an idea of why conservatives like Tucker and me are interested in Hungary:

Tucker Carlson on Hungary’s Steps to Boost Birth Rate

“Hungary’s Leaders actually care about making sure their own ppl thrive. Instead of promising the nation’s wealth to every illegal immigrant from the 3rd world they’re using tax dollars to uplift their own ppl, imagine that.” pic.twitter.com/0FvGBTQ1yf

— The Columbia Bugle (@ColumbiaBugle) July 30, 2019

You don’t have to agree with everything that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has done in order to come here, study what’s going on, and think about what lessons it might have for American conservatives, who have been routed by the Left and the Establishment Right, which apparently welcomes our new Woke Overlords, and would like to remind them that as trusted public intellectuals, they can be helpful at rounding up others. The key insight about Orban is that he believes that the future of his nation and of Western civilization hangs in the balance. He’s right about that. His various strategies for how to address that existential challenge may be wise or correct, or ineffective or morally wrong, but what sets him apart from American conservative leaders is that he recognizes the nature of the crisis, and is prepared to act boldly to address it. He believes that contemporary Western liberalism has surrendered to a civilizational death wish. I prefer the (possibly flawed) ways that Orban is meeting the crisis than the ways that the American Right is failing to do same.

(By the way, liberal readers, spare me your “How dare you be friends with Tucker Carlson?! Don’t you know that he believes ____?!” garbage. I don’t have cable TV, so I don’t watch his show regularly, but I am sure that there are issues on which we disagree. So what! One of the ugliest parts of the contemporary Left is this weird belief that you have to share the political views of someone with a high degree of consonance in order to be friends with them. Screw that. I think of the contemptible behavior of a friend of mine of four decades, who ended our friendship with a text after she read something I wrote in praise of a Louisiana Senator who voted to impeach Trump; her complaint — her friendship-ending complaint — was that I said Trump wasn’t entirely bad. This is inhumane. This is insane. Tucker was telling me last night about how an old friend of his had become militantly liberal. I asked him if that hurt their friendship. Of course not, he said; they’ve known each other too long. This is how normal human beings see the world. I count strong, outspoken liberals among my friends. I think they’re wrong … but I didn’t become friends with them based on their political views, and I’m certainly not going to quit being friends with them over that.)

Anyway, it is astonishing, but I guess not all that surprising, to read American commentators who heretofore had not said much of anything about Hungary discovering, now that Tucker is here, that Hungary is a dictatorial hellhole that all right-thinking people must denounce. It is remarkable watching their denunciations of right-wing illiberalism in Hungary as I struggle to recall how and when they raised their voices against left-wing illiberalism conquering US institutions and transforming America into a country many of us struggle to recognize.

For example, here’s a prominent Never Trump Republican:

I know Pete a little bit. He’s a good guy, I think. A former Bush White House official, he has spilled vats of ink over the past four or five years denouncing the Trumpist takeover of the GOP. I don’t blame him, frankly. If I were a man of Bushian GOP convictions, I would have felt the same way, and written as he did. In my own case, I shared, and do share, many of his concerns about Trumpism. The difference, I think, is that I try to recognize where Trump and Trumpism came from: in large part out of the failures of the Republican Party, and the Republican leadership class — which is to say, people like Pete Wehner (who, for the record, left the GOP a couple of years ago in disgust over Trump). As late as 2010, Wehner was praising the Iraq War, which was one of the most catastrophic strategic blunders in US history. It is no accident that Donald Trump, the first major GOP presidential candidate (I don’t include Ron Paul) to openly say the war was a mistake, later got the GOP nomination. Do these Republican establishmentarians ever ask themselves what they and their team did to open the door to Trumpism?

More important, what has Pete Wehner ever said to defend Christians, social conservatives, and others targeted by the various manifestations of wokeness that have emerged over the past five years? I searched his entire output of writing, collected on the Ethics & Public Policy Center website, since September 2016, and found exactly zero columns attacking any manifestation of wokeness. The only column critical of left-wing radicalization was a single Atlantic column — April 3, 2019 — lamenting the radicalization of the Democratic Party as made manifest in Bernie Sanders’ popularity. That’s it.

Know how many columns and op-eds Wehner wrote directly attacking Trump and Trumpism since today’s date in 2016? Sixty-five, out of 122 things he has written (collected on the website of the EPPC, where he is a fellow). Opposing Trump and what he stands for has been the overwhelming theme of Pete Wehner’s written output over the past five years, accounting for just over half of his output.

You see the problem. The United States is in the throes of a left-wing cultural revolution that is turning the country into a soft totalitarian society, as I’ve documented in Live Not By Lies, and as journalists like Bari Weiss and Abigail Shrier, activists like Christopher Rufo, and observers like Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, are revealing almost every day. You would think that a prominent conservative like Pete Wehner would notice this, and have something to say about it. Nope. Too busy gathering material for the sixty-sixth denunciation of Trumpism; maybe this next one will denounce the interest of American conservatives abandoned by the Pete Wehners of the country in the “autocracy” of Viktor Orban. Better hurry, though — there’s an election coming up, and even many Orban supporters are fearful that he will be voted out after 12 years in power. That’s how it goes in Hungarian autocracy, as seen by Western liberals: Viktor Orban is a horrible dictator who has taken freedom away from the Hungarian people, and that’s why Hungarians should vote him out next year. Golly, that Orban must be an incompetent autocrat if he allows free and fair elections to take place, and he permits anyone to stand in the street in Budapest and denounce him.

The fact of the matter is that the GOP

The British conservative writer Ed West laments that the US is turning into the Soviet Union. Excerpts:

The Soviet Union’s main adversary in the Cold War was also defined by ideology, to some extent. Many western nations had embraced liberalism, but no other was created with the words of John Locke enshrined in its foundation. Yet liberalism, too, faced its challenges in the late 20th century, not from the obviously failing Soviet Communism, but from rival ideas within the democratic tradition. Starting in the 1960s, a new way of thinking began to predominate in the US that was not really liberal, although its opponents confusingly still referred to it as such.

This new way of thinking was more hostile to freedom of speech, and its adherents began the process of chasing deviant thinkers out of academia that began in the late 1960s and would massively reduce political diversity by the 21st century; it supported not just personal sexual freedom, as did liberalism, but radical ideas about sex, including hostility to the family; it was anti-religion and would become more so when religion clashed with sexual rights. As for freedom of association, the “master freedom” in Christopher Caldwell’s words, this was also incompatible with a worldview that prioritised equality over liberty.

This new way of thinking — progressivism is probably the fairest term — is far less tolerant than liberalism. Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.

But globalisation came with a price, with millions of jobs lost after the 2001 trade deal with China, made two months after George W. Bush had followed the Soviet example by invading Afghanistan. It was in those former industrial heartlands where people first began to notice an epidemic of drug-related deaths that now constitutes one of the greatest social disasters in history.

Four decades on from its superpower rival, the United States had now become a country in which people were dying younger, driven by overdoses and suicides. That this epidemic took so long to register may have been the solitary and often legal nature of the drug problem; unlike Aids, it did not affect too many celebrities, Prince being the exception. But it could also be who the victims were — predominantly rural white Americans, neither powerful themselves nor championed by powerful supporters.

More:

There are other resemblances to the older empire. At the heart of Soviet thinking was the blank slate, the idea that life outcomes are determined entirely, or almost entirely, by social forces rather than genes. As Mao said of the peasantry, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it”.

Likewise, American progressivism today is entirely built on the blank slate, and as in the USSR, where belief in Mendelian genetics led to internal exile, American social scientists offering any sort of genetic explanation for outcomes face ostracism. Privately, lots of people will agree, but they’ll lose their job if they speak out, or their publisher will drop them, or it will only embolden the party’s enemies and harm the noble goals of progressivism.

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

Read it all. It’s terrific. And what does our ruling class have to say about this crisis? The dominant left-wing elites — including Woke Capitalists — see this as nothing but good news. Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Are Our Strength, and all that. The Establishment-class conservatives are too obsessed with politicians like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban to object to any of it — not that they would, because they have already reconciled themselves to the cultural revolution, and are busy constructing rationales for it. Most of the Trumpy rebels are wasting their energy and their minds on ridiculous own-the-libs performative stunts that give right-wingers the feeling of having done something, but which in fact do little or nothing to stop the woke consolidation of power in American life.

The American Left and its Establishment-conservative fellow travelers do not recognize the left-illiberal, soft totalitarian nature of the order they are bringing into existence. Bizarrely, neither do most on the Trumpy American Right, who seem to think that as long as we keep voting Republican and holding the right lib-owning views, that will be enough to protect our liberties.

Silicon Valley and Woke Capitalism are already laying down the rudiments of a social credit system. Where is the sustained opposition to this from the Right? Are there GOP lawmakers thinking of legislation to stop it? If not, why not?

Which brings us to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. It is quite sensible that Tucker Carlson and other conservatives would want to figure out what the leader of this small, relatively poor Central European country has done to hold off those like George Soros and the woke leadership of the European Union, to defend his country and its sovereignty. With our own conservative establishment either neutered or sidelined by pointless lib-owning enthusiasms, thinkers of the American Right who actually care about saving our civilization ought to be coming to Hungary and Poland to study these places, and to make common cause with these people. They could use our solidarity — and we can certainly use theirs.

Writing yesterday in The Spectator, Katja Hoyer pointed out the hypocrisy of the EU leadership when it comes to dealing with Hungary and Poland. Excerpts:

It is quite something when the self-proclaimed ‘illiberal’ prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, reminds Brussels of its liberal principles. As part of the ongoing row over a Hungarian law which bans the ‘depiction or promotion’ of homosexuality and gender reassignment, Orbán has argued that: ‘If we want to keep the European Union together, liberals must respect the rights of non-liberals. Unity in diversity.’

‘Unity in diversity’ has been the official motto of the European Union for over 20 years. The idea that the continent can unite in a common political and economic framework without losing the diversity of its constituent nations underpins the very idea of a democratic union of states. But this principle is proving increasingly difficult for Brussels to abide by as the ideological fabric of the EU begins to tear in a cultural tug of war.

Whether you agree with Orbán on the issue of sex education or not, he is onto something when he points out the EU’s problem with ‘illiberal democracies’. Brussels’s biggest threat does not come from Brexit, or even from the severe economic imbalances within the Union, but from the increasingly unbridgeable conflict between the two principles it purports to uphold: democracy and liberalism.

The EU’s biggest threat comes from the increasingly unbridgeable conflict between democracy and liberalism.

More:

Brussels’s problem is not really with Poland or Hungary. More fundamentally, ‘unity in diversity’ has become anathema to it. It cannot accept that the geographical borders of Europe do not neatly overlap with the European Union’s ideological fault lines.

Read it all. 

This is exactly right, and it exposes the fraudulence of American liberalism too. The US Left does not actually want diversity. It wants ideological uniformity — or else. The American Left has no problem with corporations threatening economic punishments to conservative American states whose democratically accountable legislatures pass laws that the corporations don’t like. Have you seen the Pete Wehners of the Right object to this? Of course you haven’t. Ideological coercion is fine as long as it is coercing democratic majorities to march leftward, or face losing their livelihoods.

Which is the only power capable of standing up to Woke Capitalists, as well as these illiberal leftists in academia, media, sports, cultural institutions, and other places? The state. That’s it. This is disorienting to Anglo-American conservatives, who are accustomed to seeing the state as the enemy, and institutions of civil society, especially business, as friends of freedom. It’s no longer true, and people on the Right who want to fight soft totalitarianism had better start to understand this. This is why American conservatives ought to be beating a path to Hungary and Poland (as well as to Spain, to talk to the Vox party, and to other European countries to learn from non-Establishment populist parties).

Tucker To Hungary is a kind of Nixon To China for conservative American intellectuals and thought leaders. He got here first. He won’t be the last. The unhappy truth is that liberalism as we Americans have known it is probably dead. Our future is almost certainly going to be left-illiberal or right-illiberal. It’s not the future I would prefer, but we are not being given a choice here. While the Establishment right, or what’s left of it, pens its sixty-sixth pointless column denouncing Trumpism while back-door surrendering to soft totalitarianism, and while the MAGA hotheads dissipate their anger in futile performative gestures, the right-of-center thought leaders who want to figure out how to resist effectively will be coming to Budapest to observe, to talk, and to learn.

I’m reading the English translation of a manuscript of a book by Dr. Balazs Orban (no relation to the PM), a Hungarian scholar, called The Hungarian Way Of Strategy. It’s kind of wonky, but I predict that it’s going to be a book that, if it finds an American publisher, conservative intellectuals are going to want to read.

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Tucker In Budapest: Blowing People’s Minds

I see now that Tucker Carlson’s being here in Hungary for this week has blown the minds of liberals and Establishment conservatives. I’m going to keep a running tally in this spot of some of the remarks I’m seeing online.

Well, look, if one of the leading neoconservative intellectuals who advocated for disastrous America’s war on Iraq, and who attempted to excommunicate from the Right the “unpatriotic conservatives” (his phrase) like Pat Buchanan, who opposed the war, hasn’t discredited himself enough, this tweet is the cherry on top. The idea that there is anything remotely comparable in democratic Hungary to those gruesome Communist regimes is revoltingly stupid. And it shows just how unhinged Establishment US thinking on Hungary is. Given how much Hungarians suffered under Soviet domination, that Frum made that comparison is deeply insulting.

He goes on:

He visited Hungary. I’ve lived in Hungary since April. I have never seen that, even when talking with people who despise Orban, and who had no qualms about saying so. I imagine it could happen in certain contexts … but then again, a DC friend told me about his Trump-voting federal bureaucrat who was afraid that the people he worked with in his Washington office would discover that he supported their boss, the sitting president of the United States. This kind of thing happens in woke institutions — academic, journalistic, corporate, etc — all the time. All. The. Time. Does that bother Frum? Has he used his platform to attack those soft totalitarians in his (our) own country who make people afraid to say what they think?

Anyway, a Budapest based journalist and journalism professor comments:

I live and work here and have never seen anything remotely like that – as a journalist, interviewing countless people. https://t.co/C5lU8keRNO

— Boris Kálnoky (@bkalnoky) August 3, 2021

And this great riposte from a libertarian:

When was the last time you visited America, David? https://t.co/goLf6sygKk https://t.co/RHtJVGYZEO

— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) August 3, 2021

Frum calls Orban a “foreign dictator.” You know how the Hungarians got Orban? They’ve voted for him in every election since 2010. There’s another election in 2022. They might vote him out. Because Hungary is not Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Castro’s Cuba. It is a democracy in which people vote the way folks like David Frum wish they would not. They vote for Orban because they’re doing better under his government economically than they were before. They vote for Orban because he defends Hungarian identity and sovereignty by opposing open borders immigration. They vote for Orban because like most Hungarians, he’s a social conservative whose views mirror theirs (though unlike most Hungarians, he is a practicing Christian).

Elsewhere in his tweetstorm, Frum said Orban is corrupt, having allegedly stolen a bunch of money. I don’t know how accurate that allegation is, but it seems clear from talking to many people here, even supporters of the government, that corruption is a big problem. That said, I have spoken to plenty of Hungarians who assume — as many people in the post-communist countries of this region do — that their leaders are going to indulge in corruption. I shared a taxi with a couple of young women not long ago, and asked them about the election coming up. One of them said that she doesn’t like the government’s corruption, but believes that Hungary can live with it. What it can’t live with, she said, is the kind of corruption that says it’s okay to teach children that they might be one of fifty genders. That form of corruption can destroy a society.

You ought to read a good book by the liberal academics Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, titled,  The Light That Failed. It’s a very well-written analysis of why liberal democracy has failed to take off in post-Communist Europe and Russia. Here’s a key segment, from pages 65-6 in the paperback editions:

Orban’s break with liberalism is often explained as either pure opportunism (he moved to the right because that was where the votes were) or as a result of his growing contempt for the liberal Budapest intellectuals whom he had initially admired, but who looked down on him with a transparent sense of superiority. The moment that best captures Orban’s tense relationship with Hungarian liberals who, unlike him, came from Hungary’s urban intelligentsia, is the widely reported story of how, during a reception, the well-known Free Democrat MP Miklos Haraszti went up to Orban, who was dressed like the other guests, and adjusted his tie with a supercilious gesture. Everyone present remembers that Orban blushed and was visibly flustered. The young and aspiring political leader was mortified at being treated as an uncouth relative from the countryside. Stendhal would have known how to describe what the young provincial felt at that moment.

It is tempting, then, to reduce Orban’s disappointment with liberalism to either political expediency or personal resentment at his condescending treatment by Budapest’s liberal intellectuals. But it cuts much deeper than this. Indeed, it goes to the heart of the liberal understanding of politics, including liberalism’s systematic ambivalence about the exercise of power. While Hungary’s liberals were preoccupied with human rights, checks and balances, a free press and judicial independence (all valued because of the constraints they place on power), Orban was interested in using power to upend the political order. While Budapest liberals wanted to win arguments, he wanted to win elections. His passion for football taught him that what matters in any contest, be it politics or sports, are killer instincts and unwavering loyalty. What matters especially is that your followers stick with you when you occasionally lose. The exemplary leader is not the one who is judiciously fair to everybody but the one who inspires and mobilizes his own team or tribe.

To rally his supporters, Orban harps single-mindedly on the standard list of liberalism’s sins perpetrated, he claims, by the servile imitators of liberal democracy who misgoverned Hungary for two decades after 1989. First, the liberal picture of society as a spiritually empty network of producers and consumers cannot capture the moral depth and emotional solidarity of the Hungarian nation. Liberals are basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation. In Orban’s boilerplate anti-liberal rhetoric, liberalism’s language of human rights, civil society and legal procedures is described as cold, generic and ahistorical. Liberals are so blasé about immigration because they divorce citizenship from ethnic descent and replace the ideals of substantive justice and the public good with bland and abstract notions of procedural justice, the rule of law and individual utility. From the populist perspective, cosmopolitan distrust of ethnic bonds makes members of the vast ethnic majority in Hungary feel like foreigners in their own country. This is how universalism destroys solidarity. If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child. That is why Hungary’s reactionary nativists claim that no principled liberal can take a genuine interest in the fate of Hungarians living outside the country.

This is how all anti-liberals talk. But Orban’s recitation of the anti-liberal catechism also reflects some region-specific concerns. For example, liberalism’s focus on individual rights obscured the principal kind of political abuse in post-communist Hungary, namely the privatization of the public patrimony by former regime insiders, a kind of industrial-scale corruption that violated no individual rights and was indeed consolidated by the creation of individual rights to won private property. This is what Orban means when he says that “in Hungary liberal democracy was incapable of protecting the public property that is essential in sustaining a nation.” Liberalism, he also claims, ignored the social question and withdraws the state’s paternalistic protection from the citizenry, arguing that “fee” individuals should shift for themselves. This is why, in the two decades after 1989,

We constantly felt that the weaker were stepped upon … It was always the stronger party, the bank, which dictated how much interest you pay on your mortgage, changing it as they like over time. I could enumerate the examples that were the continuous life experience of vulnerable, weak families that had smaller economic protection than other during the last twenty years.

Krastev and Holmes go on to explain something that most Americans don’t realize. In the immediate aftermath of Communism’s fall, it was the regime insiders who made out the best. They refashioned themselves as small-d democrats, and took advantage of the money, position, and connections they had to get rich in the chaos after Communism ended. Krastev and Holmes said that liberal democracy and meritocracy got a bad name because it was widely seen as an ideological justification for defending the privileges acquired by the old communist elites.

They also explain that Orban’s hatred for liberalism has mostly to do with his resentment at the EU, which he believes (correctly, in my view) cares nothing for Hungary’s national identity, and wishes to dissolve it into a soulless megastate. You hear this all the time from populists in other countries. A couple of weeks ago in Budapest, I heard a visiting Italian passionately denouncing the EU for forcing farmers in the far south of Italy who have been growing oranges and olives since time out of mind to stop doing so, because the abstract economic planners in Brussels had other ideas. The technocrats of the EU only saw these farmers and those people are widgets and numbers. The Italian said that oranges and olives are at the basis of an entire way of life.

Anyway, I’ll stop. The point is that if you rely on David Frum and his sort of intellectual to tell you what’s happening in Hungary, and what it means, you will be badly informed. You don’t have to love Hungary or its democratically-elected ruler, but you should make your judgments about Hungary based on what is actually going on in this country, the good and the bad (for there is both).

Meanwhile, the stupidity and bad faith of the Hungary haters is made manifest:

They announce Hungarian democracy dead while also closely covering Hungarian elections hoping the right side wins. pic.twitter.com/Kgs0yekVao

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 3, 2021

I feel like we should all talk more about how conservatives’ dream is to make America more like this much poorer, rinky-dink little country in Central Europe. pic.twitter.com/oWkvHmGUB1

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 3, 2021

But this is a solid point:

WRT to Hungary and so much else, the central problem is that the ruling class has confused their policy consensus of the last 30 years with “liberal democracy”

— Inez Stepman (@InezFeltscher) August 3, 2021

Orban doesn’t want Hungary to be woke, because he sees what that is doing to America. He doesn’t want to open the borders to migrants, because he fears that a country as small as Hungary could lose itself. He doesn’t want Muslim immigrants because he looks at the problems the rest of Europe has assimilating them, and says, “No, thanks.”

I was present at a 90-minute interview he did with a group of visiting journalists and intellectuals back in 2019. None of us had prepared for the session, because we didn’t know we were going to meet the Prime Minister. I wrote about it here. Excerpt:

Orban begin our session with extended remarks about Hungarian and European politics, and the role of his Fidesz Party in them. He said that when he was elected in 2010, he had one mission: to save Hungary from economic ruin. By the time Orban’s 2014 re-election bid rolled around, the economy was stable, and he described the mission of his second terms as “to say what I think.”

“I realized in 2014 that I was the only free man among the prime ministers of Europe,” he said, explaining that by “free,” he meant that he had a strong, united parliamentary majority behind him. He added, “In Western political life now, you can’t say what you think.”

When the migration crisis hit Europe in 2015, Orban famously shut Hungary’s borders to Middle Easterners. Orban said that Hungary’s was the only government in Europe to respond to the crisis in its own interests, and in the interests of Christianity in Europe. With a population of only 10 million, and as a country where Christianity, as elsewhere on the continent, is fragile, the Hungarians concluded that allowing large numbers of Muslims to take up residence here would mean the death knell of Christianity in time.

This scandalized the European political class. Orban doesn’t care. He told our group that he understands that he is dealing with elites who believe that being a post-Christian, post-national civilization is a great and glorious thing. Orban rejects this. He said the main political question in the West today is how fractious pluralities can live together peaceably. He said, “Here the most important question is how not to have the same questions as them.”

Orban pointed out that the UK and France were once colonial powers in the Middle East. He added, “But Central Europe was colonized by the Middle East. That’s a fact.” He’s talking about the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, from 1541 to 1699. Orban told our group that the room we were sitting was part of a Church building that had been turned into a mosque during the occupation.

Explaining his decision to shut the borders to Muslim refugees, Orban said what tipped the scales was consulting the Christian bishops of the Middle East. Orban: “What did they say? ‘Don’t let them in. Stop them.’”

Middle Eastern Christians, said Orban, “can tell you what is the [ultimate] end of a society you have to share with Muslims.”

Sitting at the table listening to the prime minister was Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS. Archbishop Nicodemus spoke up, thanking Orban for what Hungary has done for persecuted Christians. Nicodemus said that living with Muslims has taught Iraqi Christians that they can expect no mercy. “Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body,” he said.

“The problem is that Western countries don’t accept our experience,” the prelate continued. “Those people [Muslims] pushed us to be a minority in our own land and then refugees in our own land.”

Under the Orban government, Hungary frequently extends a helping hand to persecuted Christians.The archbishop exhorted Orban to stay the course in defense of Christians. For 16 years, he said, Iraqi Christians begged Western leaders to help them. Addressing Orban directly, Nicodemus said, “Nobody understands our pain like you.”

Philip Blond, the British political economist, suggested to the prime minister that he has a mission to re-Christianize Europe. Orban, who is 56 and part of the country’s Calvinist minority, said that his generation’s mission was to defeat Communism. Religious rebirth is a task for Millennials, he said.

According to 2017 Pew research, though 59 percent of Hungarian adults say they believe in God, only 16 percent pray daily. As Hungary-based writer Will Collins wrote in TAC earlier this year, only 12 percent of Hungarians go to church — a number that is no doubt much smaller among Hungarians under 40. In my on the record interviews and background conversations with Hungarian Christians these past few days, there is an acute sense that the Christian faith is fast fading among the young, who, like their co-generationalists across the former Soviet bloc, are far more drawn to Western materialism.

Orban spoke frankly about the post-communist religious state of his country. “It’s still not a healed society,” he said. “It’s still not in good shape.”

I asked the prime minister if he saw evidence of a “soft totalitarianism” emerging in the West today, and if so, what are the main lessons that those who resisted communism have to tell us about identifying and resisting it.

He said that the Soviets and their servants in Central Europe tried to create a new kind of man: homo Sovieticus. To do this, they had to destroy the two sources of identity here: a sense of nationhood, and the Christian religion. In order to survive, said Orban, “we have to strengthen our national identity and our Christian identity. That’s the story.”

Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.  For Orban, re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project. It’s an attempt to reverse the damage done by Communism. The danger, obviously, is that Christianity becomes emptied of its spiritual and moral content, and is filled with nationalism. On the other hand, if a pro-Christian politician like Orban can at least keep the public square open and favorable to the ancestral religious beliefs of the nation, religious leaders can step into the space politics creates, and do their work of recovery.

Orban said that he wants Westerners and others who share these values to come to the Hungarian capital, where they will be free to speak their minds, and establish a base. “I’m trying to create a free place in Budapest,” he said. “Please consider Budapest as a kind of intellectual home.”

Last week, Orban’s government played host to a demography summit here. Reporting on it, the Guardian, as usual, called Orban a politician of the “far right.” Orban is certainly nationalist and populist (and popular here), but smearing him as some kind of right-wing extremist only demonstrates how cut off the liberal Western media are from common sense. One can certainly take issue with Orban’s illiberal methods of pursuing his policy goals — and the prime minister does not deny that he is an illiberal democrat — but the man understands his small country to be in a fight for national survival against globalist, anti-Christian multiculturalism coming from Brussels and other Western capitals. How, exactly, is he wrong?

Look, whether you are on the Left or the Right, or somewhere in between, if you have a chance to visit Hungary, you should. I can’t say it enough: the reality on the ground is very different from what you read in the US media, or hear from American and Western European talking heads. I had three months to go wherever I wanted here. Nobody told me what to see, or what to say. I wouldn’t have come if that were the deal.

UPDATE: Reader Peter Balogh, who is Hungarian and who lives in Hungary, comments:

Thank you, Mr. Dreher. It irritates me to no end when, some self-appointed Western “experts” on Hungarian affairs call Orbán as President; or when in their report on Hungary everything begins in 2010, and not a single word is uttered to describe how and why the “liberal-social” opposition as direct continuation of Soviet puppet system servants have gained influence, including their media connections. Look at former PM Gyurcsany’s net – himself a high-ranking former member of Communist Youth organization (and as such, an informer who had denounced his university classmates for their anti-Soviet peace activism in in the early 1980’s); wife is the granddaughter of one of Kadar’s henchmen; mother-in-law an influential figure of a bank, providing preferential loans for privatization of Kadarist clientele (that is, free robbery), and the nicest of all, the whole family lives in a villa confiscated from its wealthy Jewish owner first by the Nazis, then by the Stalinists. These people feel that they have a naturally guaranteed entitlement for wealth, political influence and power at the same time. And they have had to put up with Orban’s streak of winning and winning and winning…. you can only imagine their frustration and simmering hatred.

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European Christian Resistance Network Forming

On my final Sunday afternoon in Budapest, I went to a meeting of some young Christians — mostly, but not exclusively, Catholics — who are organizing networks for the resistance ahead. This was the organizing meeting for a Budapest chapter of an established pan-European Christian fraternity. I’m not going to give any detailed information, because I don’t know how closed this meeting was (it was invitation-only), but man, did it ever lift my spirits. Here are believers taking the message seriously, and getting active now, while we still have the freedom to do so.

Our hosts were an older couple (that is to say, they were about a decade older than I, and I was about two decades older than everybody else in the room) who had escaped communist Hungary for Canada during the Cold War. They have an apartment here now, and split their time between Canada and Hungary. They read Live Not By Lies, and told me that it exactly captured their experiences.

“We thought when we arrived in Canada that we would never have to lie again,” said the wife, in a tone that conveyed, and here we are today, having to live by lies.

The husband told me that he expects that the United States will become the first liberal democracy to turn into a police state. His wife took slight issue with that, saying that there is a deeper spirit of resistance in the US than in Canada, “where it is wafer-thin.”

I had several conversations with the younger attendees, a few of whom were from other European countries. They all see very clearly where things are headed. One French man with whom I spoke said that a quiet exodus out of the cities has begun by French Catholics, all of whom are seeking some form of the Benedict Option.

This is not a political group. It’s religious and cultural. It’s about standing firm in the faith, even in a time of persecution and hardship. The leader of the group gave an inspiring talk in which he said that we must not confuse patriotism with nationalism. He defined patriotism as a love of what is one’s own, but said that nationalism implies defining oneself primarily against others — that is, not so much out of love for what one has as rather out of resentment for those not like oneself. Nationalism, he said, brought so much destruction to Europe in the last century. Patriotism is what we should stand for. And, he said, there will be so many people of other religions and creeds vying for the souls of Europeans in the years to come. We Christians have to be present to make a strong case, by our words and through our deeds, for the truth of following Christ. The leader urged us to establish real fellowship with each other, throughout the networks now being built, and to deeper our understanding and practice of the faith.

Like I said, an inspiring afternoon. They asked me to say a few words. I told them about Father Kolakovic, and how he is a model for us in our time. As I establish e-mail contact with some of these folks, I hope I can have permission to tell you more about their mission. For now, it’s enough to say that I had a feeling this afternoon of what it must have been like when Father Kolakovic first started organizing the Slovak underground Christian resistance. It’s the kind of thing I’ve hoped to see, and now it’s here! If you are a Christian in Europe and would like to know more, e-mail me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and I’ll pass your letter along to the organizers.

Wherever you live, don’t wait to get started building the networks. I hope to be able to tell you more about this particular group before much longer. One of the Europeans present asked me what’s happening in America along these lines. I told her I had no idea. Maybe nothing. If you, reader, are involved in something, let me know either by e-mail or in the comments — if you want me to publicize it, that is.

 

 

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CNN Host Lies About Tucker Carlson & Hungary

You see this smear passed on by the CNN media show host?:

“Fox News host Tucker Carlson is billed as a speaker at a far-right conference in Hungary on Saturday, according to a flier for the event. The appearance will come days after the Fox host met with the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.” https://t.co/tT46DyIqzm

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 2, 2021

It’s the usual bullsh*t from the American media when it comes to Hungary. It’s a youth festival sponsored by a conservative college, MCC. Here’s the website in English. Check out the program. See much far right content there? Of course you don’t. It’s mostly about academic topics, music, culture, career advice, and self-help stuff. I’m going to be speaking there, sharing the stage with Peter Kreko, one of Hungary’s most prominent Orban critics. Yep, that’s what the Viktator’s realm is like: allowing one of Orban’s leading critics to have a platform at a youth festival, with no restrictions placed on what he can say (I know this, because I’ve been involved with Peter in planning our discussion). Here is a screenshot of the festival program:

 

Why, it’s a veritable Nuremberg Rally, ain’t it?

I’m telling you: do not believe a thing. you read in the Western media about Hungary. It might actually be true — this is a real country with a real government, not a Magyar version of  The West Wing — but the media bias against Hungary and its government is so overwhelming that you cannot be sure. And if you are in or near Esztergom later this week, come to MCC Fest and see for yourself. It’s actually an interesting story that Tucker Carlson is here in Hungary — but if you think it’s because of some crackpot progressive idea that he’s here to appear at a “far-right conference,” you’re a fool.

I hope other journalists, conservative and otherwise, will follow Tucker’s lead and come to Hungary to see for themselves what’s really going on here. Just come and look around, with an open mind. Talk to people — and not just the Budapest elites. You won’t find the Garden of Eden, but you will find a country that’s very different from what you have been told by our media.

 

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