American Orbanism
Well, the New Yorker‘s piece on why American conservatives are interested in Hungary is out today, and I am disappointed in it, because it’s a standard liberal media account. I thought that the Hungarians were making a mistake by keeping liberal Western journalists out of CPAC Hungary, but maybe they knew better than I did.
I didn’t expect a Western liberal media account of Hungary under Viktor Orban to be positive, but I had hoped that the New Yorker would at least try to explain to its readers why Orban remains popular, not only with his people, but increasingly with American conservatives like me. Instead, it’s the usual stuff: Orban only wins because he’s gamed the system, he’s a closet anti-Semite, he hates liberal democracy, etc.
I know that the reporter Andrew Marantz had a long dinner with Mark Bollobas, a friend of mine whose parents escaped communist Hungary, and settled in the UK. Mark was born and raised in Cambridge and in the US (when his father did academic stints in the US), but some years ago, moved to Budapest to raise a family. A few years back, Mark wrote on this blog why he left Britain for Hungary. Excerpt:
I consider London to be Chelsea, Kensington, Covent Garden. Places close to the river, areas with amazing architecture, reasonably central. But how much would I have to earn to live there? Millions. Impossible. I’d always be the guy who walks by the shop window and sees what he can’t afford. It would be a lifetime of unhappiness.
And culturally, the most important of all, the England of today is so far removed from the England of my youth that it feels like a different world. What makes England great is the nonchalant English attitude to everything. Stiff upper lip. Humor. The genuine lack-of-interest in what other people do, as long as they’re not interfering. The moral strength to play fair, be a good loser, etc.
But over the last few decades this has been eroded by non-English immigrants who have moved to the UK permanently and brought their culture with them, aggressively. Usually the children are far more aggressive than the parents who actually made the move. And the English let this happen, because that’s how they are. Now the politeness is gone.
I ran a bar in Finsbury Park. My schedule was the same. Open at noon, close at midnight. I would go to work at around 10am, and walk home around 2am. You have the same schedule, and you walk past people who share that schedule. In England, 20 years ago, if you did this for a few weeks you’d eventually strike up a conversation, or create a little bond. That couldn’t happen in Finsbury Park because it was full of Somalis, north Africans and others (Abu Hamza was a personal favorite, hawking his vitriolic sermons on CDs to anyone that passed).
They all hated me and looked at me with distrust and disgust. The women walked past in their veils, clothing that sends the message of “f-ck off, don’t dare look at me or talk to me.” I walked those streets for two years and made not one connection. Visitors have come, have brought their culture, and they stick to it (I loved whichever day it was when they say you have to slaughter a goat; blood literally ran in the streets). It is their identity. Meanwhile the beautiful, accepting element of being British is abused, its kind culture allowed Trojan horses of all sorts to settle in.
Aside from that, there was the dreaded question, “Where are you from?” that every Englishman asks. Even from me. It’s the most unpleasant question because you hear it over and over again, and it’s like a death from a thousand cuts. Because it means, you’re obviously not from here, so where are you from? I shudder at the thought of having to answer that question in Britain. Because I am from there.
So, not England. The second choice was Hungary. True, it’s not a wealthy country, and true, it suffers many of the same problems that afflict other nations. And yes, salaries here are very low. As editor-in-chief for English language news at a national TV station, and ironically the only Hungarian TV station that was on the local Memphis cable network, I made $1,200 per month, before tax. And even on that salary in Budapest I could live and do things like dine out and take advantage of all the positive things a city like this offers: theatre, concerts, museums, sporting events, parks, nightlife, etc. Most of all, it was where I really felt at home.
Like many children of immigrants, I was raised to know that I have to work harder, and be better everywhere than those who were “local” to get ahead. And it’s all true. But I was also raised in a Hungarian household. While my parents made every effort to assimilate, I was raised in a household that took pride in being Hungarian. I didn’t support Hungary in sports or anything tribal like that, but I was proud when Hungary did well. I appreciated the poetry, the folk music, the heritage, the history, and so forth. And every time I went back to Budapest, I felt so so comfortable. No one asks “where are you from?” because although I don’t sound like I am from here (I have a British accent in Hungarian), I am from here, and people recognize that.
My decision to move back here to Hungary — I say that even though I wasn’t born here — has been reinforced by this fact: Hungary understands that holding on to its cultural identity is essential to its existence as a society we can understand.
Culture changes over time, of course, but it normally does it slowly as we creep towards a more civilized future.
England doesn’t feel more civilized — quite the opposite. It feels more feral. And the UK has just accepted its fate.
The lack of an American culture means Hungarians don’t know what’s missing, because they never had it. But there is a gaping hole in America: something is obviously broken. America is collapsing on itself.
It’s been nine years since I moved back. I can’t count the number of days I’ve thought to myself, or told others, “It’s just great to be here.” It still is.
I don’t know what Mark told the reporter, Andrew Marantz, at dinner, but it pretty clearly didn’t fit the Hungary Bad narrative. It wasn’t in the New Yorker story — even though it is crucial to understanding why Hungary matters to a lot of us. You read the piece and think that the only people who are interested positively in Hungary under Orban are bad people who hate democracy.
I talked to Marantz for the piece, and am quoted several times in it (accurately). For example:
When I was in Budapest, Dreher, seven time zones away and in the midst of a messy divorce, texted me assiduously, including before 5 a.m. his time, trying to steer my story. “I really do care about Hungary, and I want to help you do a good job,” he wrote. “God knows it’s not paradise, but it’s important to understand Hungary as it is.” That’s the sort of P.R. that money can’t buy.
I texted him at 5 am because he had sent me a text saying that he had not been able to get into CPAC, and that someone had threatened to call the police on him. I thought this was a really bad move on CPAC’s part, and wanted to help him talk to people who could give him insight into the story he was there to report. By “steer the story,” I was simply trying to help him get the quotes I thought he wanted. I wasn’t trying to get him to write a story about Hungary as Magyar Disneyland (“God knows it’s not paradise”), but it’s a complex and interesting country (“but it’s important to understand Hungary as it is”). I come across in that quote as a fanatic trying to puppet-string the journalist, when in fact I thought that the New Yorker could be counted on to go deeper than the standard liberal media gloss.
I was wrong. Useful thing to learn.
Again, no one expects a liberal magazine like the New Yorker to write a positive piece about Orban’s Hungary. But the fact that there is no nuance or insight in the piece is telling. And what does it tell? The the Left is incapable of understanding why a politician like Viktor Orban appeals to American conservatives. I’ll give you a couple of examples:
There are more than a few Americans who think the Boy Scouts marching in an LGBT Pride phalanx is horrifying. These Americans can’t find many Republican politicians who will say anything about this. Viktor Orban will. He doesn’t care what the liberal media, and the respectable establishmentarians say. He’s going to defend the family, and the Judeo-Christian social order.
In Hungary, gay people can contract civil partnerships. They can walk down the street holding hands in Budapest, and nobody cares. But you know what they can’t do?
And you know what else? You don’t see this in Hungary:
An entire city block in London, flying the banner of a conquering tribe.
You know what else they don’t have in Hungary? Women and their babies reduced to breeders and accessories for gay men:
Another thing they don’t have in Hungary:
According to a different German media report:
In Essen -Altendorf, dozens of people fought on the street on Saturday evening.
Several hundred people are said to have been there, two people were injured. The Essen police were on site with a large contingent. And also on Sunday there were clashes again.
At 7:35 p.m., the police were called to a kebab shop on Altendorfer Strasse. Dozens of people are said to have fought there. The officers arrived with a large contingent of patrol cars. In fact, a large crowd had gathered on the street.
You can watch video of the street fight between Arab clans here.
I mentioned in one of my interviews with Andrew Marantz that going to Paris last summer from Hungary, and listening to so many French people talking about how afraid they were of immigrant street violence, I realized that Viktor Orban had been right to keep the immigrants out. And I also mentioned to him that when anti-Semitic violence flared in major Western cities — including New York and Los Angeles — I was shocked to discover that there was no police presence in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest, even though Jews were walking the streets with their families. Why no violence? Because the Hungarian government doesn’t welcome Jew-hating immigrants.
None of that made it into the story. It violates the canons of liberalism to point out that if you want to keep a liberal society, you had better not let in certain peoples. Marantz doubled down on the “Orban hates Soros, therefore he must be a dog-whistling anti-Semite” canard. This, even though Soros, a non-observant Jew, advocated opening Europe’s borders to the migrant wave in 2015.
And so on. I also pointed out to Marantz that late last summer, many Fidesz people expected the party to lose the spring election. They were telling themselves that twelve years in power was great, but you can’t really expect more than that. And then came the opposition with a truly terrible candidate, Peter Marki-Zay, who kept making gaffes. I told Marantz that I heard over and over, asking people in the city who they were voting for, that they were sick and tired of Fidesz, but they couldn’t trust the opposition with power, so they were voting Orban.
European liberals were sure that after the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, Orban’s relative closeness to Putin would mean defeat for him. In fact, it was a plus. Orban condemned Russia’s invasion, but he also refused to allow Hungary to be dragged into the war many fellow NATO nations wanted. In my own experiences there, I met not one Hungarian who had anything good to say about the Russians — but I didn’t meet one who believed Hungary had any business risking war on its own territory to satisfy Brussels.
Viktor Orban was exactly where the Hungarian people were this spring, which is why his party won re-election by a landslide. Yet puzzled Western liberals, including liberal journalists, console themselves with the conviction that he must have done this by playing dirty, somehow.
You don’t learn anything from the New Yorker story that you didn’t already know from a dozen previous stories about Hungary. This is disappointing; I expected better from that magazine. Another massive, massive miss by Marantz is that American conservatives are drawn to Orban because unlike most of our own right-of-center politicians, Orban understands that the Left is no longer liberal at all, and is willing to fight them without tying one hand behind his back.
One story I told Marantz that didn’t make it into the piece was about the encounter I had (which I related here many times, so I won’t go into it again) with the liberal Budapest academic and Orban critic. When he said that he could say whatever he wanted in his classroom, and nobody from the government would bother him, I told him that is also true in the US — but the persecution would come from students and activists who, for whatever reason, are offended by what you say. For example, I told him, if you fail to affirm transgender ideology, you could find yourself the target of mob action on campus, and may even be out of a job. Joshua Katz lost his job at Princeton on trumped-up sexual harassment charges, when everybody who didn’t fall off the organic turnip truck yesterday knows that it’s because he spoke out against extremely illiberal racial proposals.
Here’s what Viktor Orban knows: that “liberalism” has produced a society and a culture that despises itself, and is committing suicide. It hates the traditional family. It hates Judeo-Christian religion and moral norms. It hates the history and traditions of the countries where it governs. It hates certain people because of the color of their skin, and loves others because of the color of their skin — in both cases, irrespective of the content of their character. It has no respect for free speech, freedom of religion, and other traditional liberties. It believes that it has the right and responsibility to spread its beliefs globally. It has conquered every institution in the West — most importantly, Big Business — and is using soft power to silence and marginalize the “deplorable” people who disagree. The news media lie by commission and omission in order to prop up the Narrative.
This is not liberalism. This is illiberal leftism, which wears liberalism like a skin suit.
Orban understands that if conservative people don’t understand what’s actually being done to them by the illiberal-Left ruling class, and use the only institution within which they have a fighting chance — the State — then they will be totally demoralized and defeated. He would rather not go gently into that Brave New World.
An increasing number of us American conservatives think he’s onto something, and want to know what his vision of faith, family, tradition, and sovereignty — and his political strategy for implementing it over and against the Goliaths of illiberal leftism — has to teach us.
One more bit from Marantz’s piece:
In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed” was admired by David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.” J. D. Vance has voiced admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism, against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”
In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs (civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself). “The central insight of twentieth-century conservatism is that you work within the liberal order—limited government, free movement of capital, all of that—even when it’s frustrating,” Andrew Sullivan said.“If you just give away the game and try to seize as much power as possible, then what you’re doing is no longer conservative, and, in my view, you’re making a grave, historic mistake.” Lauren Stokes, the Northwestern historian, is a leftist with her own radical critiques of liberalism; nonetheless, she, too, thinks that the right-wing post-liberals are playing with fire. “By hitching themselves to someone who has put himself forward as a post-liberal intellectual, I think American conservatives are starting to give themselves permission to discard liberal norms,” Stokes told me. “When a Hungarian court does something Orbán doesn’t like—something too pro-queer, too pro-immigrant—he can just say, ‘This court is an enemy of the people, I don’t have to listen to it.’ I think Republicans are setting themselves up to adopt a similar logic: if the system gives me a result I don’t like, I don’t have to abide by it.”
Conservative readers are shaking their heads at that and laughing. This is what American liberals do all the damn time! For example, the State of California declared itself to be a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants, defying federal immigration law. How many examples like this do you want? We’ve got ’em. In 2015, when the State of Indiana passed a state version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a coalition of Very Big Businesses came down like a ton of bricks on the state, and forced shocked and spineless GOP lawmakers (and Gov. Mike Pence) to repeal the legislation. Seven years later, having learned a thing or two about woke capitalism, and when the Walt Disney Company tried to bully the State of Florida into doing the same thing over LGBT primary school propaganda, Gov. Ron DeSantis punched back hard.
That’s an Orban move. More, please.
Liberals, and liberal journalists, are blind as bats to how insanely illiberal they have become. They change the rules all the time, and denounce anyone who objects as bigots, illiberals, authoritarians, and so forth. Meanwhile, ordinary people are starting to wake up. Just yesterday, I received an email from a friend, who said [I’ve slightly redacted this for privacy]:
A good friend just called to lament that her two middle and early teenage daughters—who have both had crushes on boys—have announced they are lesbians. She is in a secular household.
A very Christian man I know is gob smacked that his young adult son just left the Church and announced he is a woman. Changed name and taking hormones. He was home schooled. Of the 10-12 home schoolers he associated with—all from conservative Christian families of differing denominations—at least 8 have announced they are on the LGBT spectrum.
A family member’s daughter told her she is “pansexual.” Conservative Catholic family, parochial school. It took 9 months of family disputation and removing her smart phone to get back to her admitting she is a girl. Family relations still wounded.
This is civilization destroying stuff.
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It is. Viktor Orban knows that he’s fighting to save what’s left of our civilization from the postliberal liberals who are tearing it apart. If you don’t want an American Orban, you had better be prepared to pay your respects to the Brave New World. The truth that is hard for most of us — certainly for me — to accept is that liberalism is all but dead. The future will either be between illiberal left-wing democracy, or illiberal right-wing democracy. Don’t accept the media Left’s framing of the problem. Even the honest journalists among them can’t see what’s happening.
Read the New Yorker story, not to see Hungary as it is, both good and bad, but to see a classic American liberal journalist’s account of the place. My friend Andrew Sullivan is quoted in the piece twice, critical of Hungary. I challenge him to ring up his old friend John O’Sullivan at the Danube Institute, and arrange to go over for a month, to see for himself what it’s like. He will be surprised. I told Andrew Marantz how shocking it is for American and Western European intellectuals to meet Orban, spend time with him, and learn how intelligent he is, and how willing he is to engage in debate and critical discourse with visitors. I’ve been present twice when it happened. I gave Marantz the names of some American journalists and intellectuals who were there this spring when it happened. I don’t know if he reached out to them or not, but they weren’t in the story.
A lesson I have learned from this: don’t make big efforts to open doors to Western journalists to Hungarians who won’t confirm the Narrative.
