Defender Of The Normies
I’m still pissed off by that crap New Yorker story about US conservatives and Hungary. All of us who know anything about Hungary know that we should not expect a positive story about Viktor Orban’s government in the Western media. The best we can hope for is something that is fair and nuanced. Based on past experience with other New Yorker writers, I thought I could expect that from the New Yorker. That’s why I went out on a limb to open doors for the writer that wouldn’t have opened otherwise, because the pro-Orban Hungarians have learned from painful experience not to trust journalists. No, I said, the New Yorker is serious. Yes, it’s liberal, but I think they will be open to reporting things that don’t fit the standard left-wing narrative. I put my credibility on the line, and boy, do I feel stupid. Never again will I help any Western journalist with the Hungarians.
“I’m disappointed in what he wrote,” texted one of my Hungarian sources, who talked to the reporter. “He could have written the same shit staying in NY.” True. You don’t have to like Viktor Orban at all to recognize that the Orban phenomenon is a lot more interesting than what the ideologically-driven liberal Western journalists say. You might be tired of me writing about Orban, but I’m telling you, the things in play here matter a lot to the US political scene, and will increasingly do so. From my perspective, the things that make Orban interesting and instructive for US conservatives are:
- He recognizes that “liberalism” is not liberal anymore, and that the left-controlled institutions have no interest at all in playing fair with those who disagree with them. And he doesn’t give a rat’s rear end what they say about him. He fights, and he fights intelligently. Which is why he’s effective.
- He is socially conservative but economically more to the Left than Republicans. That is, he’s a real populist.
- He believes in national sovereignty, not globalism. He’s not opposed to transnational alliances and organizations, but he believes that it’s important for people to keep and defend their own traditions and ways of life. That entails controlling immigration.
The core of it, I think, is that Orban realizes that the deck is stacked against the deplorables, and makes himself their champion. European leaders went berserk last summer when Orban’s government enacted a law preventing LGBT propaganda aimed at children and minors. But Orban looks at what’s happening in the West, where so many kids are calling themselves queer, and demanding hormones and surgery, and where all of this came about amid a propaganda blitz, and he says NO, we will not have this in our country.
A reader writes:
American conservatives have to go to Hungary looking for authentic conservative leadership because too many of our own are grifters (see Trump, Donald J.), carnival barkers, or controlled opposition (see Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson’s strange new love for Pride, or Bush speechwriter David Frum’s opposition to actually overturning Roe v. Wade, which I believe was a stated goal of the administration her served). This is why the populist Right in Europe is sucking all the energy out of the established Right parties in Europe, e.g., France.
Notice how all the “world order” types are in rigid lockstep denouncing the end of Roe, calling it a threat to democracy, and all the rest. Social and religious conservatives really are strangers in a strange land now. What most of us knew already is now completely undeniable: abortion and LGBT are now absolutely sacrosanct, and any social conservative who opposes them must be shouted down and marginalized. Name just one area where it would be acceptable to draw limits, just one! You can’t. As far as they are concerned, this is what the Western world order stands for, and what it must now uphold and defend: abortion, sodomy, and sex changes, including for children.
To which my own view is: good luck with that. You have now raised several generations on hating the West. You have a completely atomized society, and are basically running on money and branding as the vultures gather. You will notice how all of the easy-win triumphalism on Ukraine has gradually faded as Western interest has waned and Russia’s gradual gains have continued. Expect to see a lot more of that in the coming years.
Here’s the thing that you never, ever read about Hungary in the Western media, but that you notice as soon as you spend any time there: the whole country seems like a middle-American city circa 1985. If you are a liberal person, you might find that unpleasant, but it ain’t fascism. I had introduced the New Yorker writer to Mark Bollobas, who grew up in the UK and US, the son of Hungarian parents who fled Communism. He moved to his parents’ homeland a decade or so ago, because he wanted to start a family, and he had lost faith in a future for him in either America or Britain. He hated the inequality, the violence, and the instability of the US and the UK (including the speed with which the culture in the UK was changing because of mass immigration). In Hungary, though he is poorer than he would have been back home (salaries here are low), he is much happier. He now has a wife and two kids. He spent an evening explaining to the reporter why he made the move.
It’s not a move for everybody, but Mark’s perspective — which I know, because he’s a friend of mine, and because he wrote about it at length here — is really interesting. Shouldn’t a reporter trying to figure out why conservatives like Orban be interested in that sort of thing? Last summer when I was here, I talked to a young woman, at the time a Danube Institute colleague (she has since moved on), who is not religious, and was living with her boyfriend. She was 100 percent behind Orban in part because, as she put it, “I don’t want to raise kids in a country where they are told that they might be of the opposite sex.” Simple as that. Many liberals today cannot fathom a world in which parents might find it horrifying that their sons could claim to be girls, and the entire established order — the state, the media, medicine, corporations, law — is lined up to sever the child from his given sex, and from his parents.
Viktor Orban says no, not on my watch. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw the enacting of the law forbidding discussing sexuality with little children in Florida public schools, and punched back hard against the groomer Walt Disney Company when it tried to raise hell about it — that was pure Orban. Imagine a Republican governor daring to stand up to woke capitalism and the LGBT media colossus! DeSantis 2022 is not Mike Pence 2015, who, as Indiana governor, collapsed on the religious freedom restoration law when woke capitalists roared in opposition.
I’ve mentioned in this space before that a visiting American friend told me, after two weeks in Budapest, that as best he can tell, Orban’s Hungary is a lot like Mayor Daley’s Chicago. It’s run by a political machine dominated by a charismatic leader, but it is certainly a machine that can be voted out of office when it stops delivering for the people. The Pendergast family in Kansas City ran a similar machine a hundred years ago; it’s how Harry S Truman got his start in politics. Huey P. Long ran a similar machine in Louisiana.
My late father was a conservative voter all his life, but he wouldn’t hear a bad word said against Huey Long. Born in the Great Depression into rural poverty, my dad told me that if it hadn’t been for Gov. Long and his successors — crooks though they were — poor people like his family would have continued to be screwed by the oligarchs that ran Louisiana. The choice they had was not between good government and bad government; the choice they had was between crooked government that looked out for the interests of the poor and working class, or crooked government that benefited the rich.
Similarly today: there is no such thing as clean politics in the former Communist bloc, of either Left or Right. Corruption is just how things get done. The question is, does the government deliver overall for its people? Had the New Yorker reporter bothered to talk to people who didn’t share his views, he would have had no trouble finding people here who are fed up with what they consider to be the Orban clique helping each other out, but who vote Orban anyway because they believe he has the best interests of Hungary in mind, and actually delivers for them. These are people who do not want Brussels to tell them that they have to subject their children to genderqueer propaganda, and that they have to open their borders to foreign mass immigration. As one young female voter told me last summer, she doesn’t like the Orban-style corruption, but she planned to vote for him anyway in the next election, because the moral and intellectual corruption that comes from western Europe (she was talking about gender ideology) is the kind that will destroy a people. She’s right.
One more thing. Jeremiah Daws is an Evangelical Christian who worked for years as a creative at Walt Disney. He lived in the closet there — in the closet as a Christian — because he feared what would happen if people in that oh-so-tolerant, diversity-and-inclusivity company would do if they knew what he really believed. He left the company not long ago, and when the Dobbs decision came down, overturning Roe, he went public on social media with his profession of faith.
I did not go well for him. Read on:
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You want to know where Viktor Orban comes from? He speaks for — and defends — people like Jeremiah Daws. People who are sick and tired of being pushed around by the powerful people in this society, told that they are horrible people for the views they hold, and deserve contempt and punishment, no matter how kind and compassionate they might be.
He’s for the normies, in other words. He’s for the people who are tired of being told that they should be ashamed of their country and its traditions, and that things would be so much better if foreigners immigrated here to improve it by displacing the original “bigots” whose ancestors settled here. He’s for the people who are sick and tired of woke Big Business, and woke educators, trashing the normies. A young Hungarian woman told me recently that at university in Budapest, all her professors went on and on about how horrible the Orban government is, even if it had nothing at all to do with the subject of the class. She couldn’t grasp their obsession. Told me it’s all they wanted to talk about. She is a practicing Catholic who actually approves of the government, but she was too intimidated by the bullying of her professors to say anything in class.
But the voting booth is private. This is why Orban wins. And this is why a Republican presidential candidate who can figure Orban out and deduce how to apply his insights to the American scene — which is significantly different from Hungary, which is mono-ethnic — will win in 2024. And this is why the American and western European journalistic class will continue to be shocked. They don’t see what they don’t want to see. I’m never going to help another one see it, either. The Hungarians at CPAC didn’t want to let western media in, because they didn’t see any reason to help out the people they knew would come in and write lies about them. I thought they were mistaken. They weren’t; I was.
