Into a void of ignorance about the country, liberals and conservatives project frightening or hopeful things.
Into a void of ignorance about the country, liberals and conservatives project frightening or hopeful things.
S o Tucker Carlson is in Hungary this week. He had a brief meeting with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and he seems to be using the August lull in the news cycle to teach his audience about Orbán’s form of politics, which are conservative, nationalist, and activist. Orbán’s party talks about preserving Hungary’s Christian character, it opposed mass migration into Hungary in the middle of the last decade, and it has tried dramatic experiments in state inducements to childbirth.
The occasion of Carlson’s presence there is one that will be used by liberals and some conservatives to say a lot of insane things about Hungary.
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
Three years ago, @zackbeauchamp outlined how Hungary lost democracy and noted that Trump and the Republican Party were using the same playbook. Chilling tonight, as Carlson broadcasts from Hungary. https://t.co/Ueo58RnBZ8
— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@HC_Richardson) August 3, 2021
The most important thing to understand about Viktor Orban is that he’s a huge crook. https://t.co/5cbEp2Sz2G
— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 3, 2021
This is just the beginning of it.
I’m going to be perfectly blunt. I don’t think most people commenting on Hungary know what they’re talking about, and almost every foreign commentator is happy to be used by partisan actors in Hungary itself. And that’s sort of the point. Ignorance allows people a void in which they can fill in deeper spiritual and moral meanings where a little knowledge would instantly reveal the everyday political realities. There are a lot of reasons for this ignorance. Hungary is sufficiently obscure, sufficiently “east” in European terms, and relatively powerless on the geopolitical stage. Few newspapers keep resident foreign journalists there. Fewer still who learn to speak the difficult Hungarian language. The “Eurasian” folk memory and identity of ethnic Magyars has struck other Westerners as exotic and vaguely threatening going back to the first millennium. One common liturgical petition of God in Italy was A sagittis Hungarorum, libera nos Domine — “From the arrows of Hungarians, spare us, O Lord.”
It’s also easy to become enchanted with the same. Budapest is one of the most seductive cities in Europe, a grand lady along the Danube. Its parliament building is a romantic, even hubristic, statement of grandeur. This is the same protest-too-much architecture one sees in Stormont in Belfast.
Into this void of ignorance, people project frightening or hopeful things. This mismatch leads to funny outcomes. Cosmopolitan liberals want to use Western governments to pressure social networks to suppress “misinformation” — about politics, or the pandemic. Orbán’s emergency powers had just such a law against spreading disinformation. In his hands they viewed it as an attempt to destroy political opposition. And yet, while two arrests were made, nobody was charged under this law — quite unlike the speech laws in the U.K. and Germany, which do result in criminal cases. When cosmopolitan liberals talk about Hungary’s constitutional reforms and electoral process, they sound like Tucker Carlson on 2020. They say the election wasn’t “fair” because of problems of representation in various institutions, especially the media that nationalist conservatives have tried to dominate. Western liberals want to limit the influence of billionaires on domestic politics, but they want George Soros to have freer hands to take on Orbán from his home in Westchester.
But overall I come to deflate. My view is that Orbán’s politics have been overweighted by foreign conservatives and progressives with a meaning they can’t quite hold. Central European countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia have occasionally landed on a similar form of populist conservative nationalism. And there are perfectly legible reasons for this — namely the challenge that relatively poorer, smaller European states have as members of the European Union in a globalized economy.
The type of politics that would be urged on these nations by Brussels, or by the nexus of NGOs and progressive judges, would abscond policy areas from democratic oversight. But these states need precisely those tools to survive.
The one that Orbán most dramatized was immigration. I wrote last year:
Orban certainly used the migration issue of 2015 to political advantage. But there was a chimerical aspect to it. The idea that Muslim migrants from Iraq and Afghanistan want to settle permanently in nations such as Hungary or Poland, known for emigration, was always fanciful, even if some Europeanists claimed to believe it. In such countries those migrants, who would have been allocated from Italy, would have to be settled somewhere. Because there are no preexisting communities for them to join, the process would be quite visible and disruptive. Not to mention highly unpopular. Any government that had tried it would have been thrown out. And the migrants themselves, after sufficient time, would likely have left anyway, making their way to the richer cities with more-established Islamic communities in Western Europe.
But Orban used the issue, to dramatize himself as standing against the great powers in the European Union, but also to dramatize the long struggle of the Hungarian people to survive the political domination of outsiders.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, we tend to think of mass immigration as one of the main drivers of populism. But in Central Europe the primary driver is emigration, which is worse. The precondition for a successful immigrant society is being a “land of opportunity.” But in Poland, Hungary, and increasingly in Italy and Spain, opportunity for the young lies elsewhere, beyond the borders. Watching your children emigrate and lose their connections to their communities, families — their homeland — while being told to accept outsiders who didn’t even choose your nation as their preferred destination drives voters toward populists who would vow to stop both things from happening.
Orbán’s philosophy is that the state needs to be nimble to contend with foreign multinational corporations and the big beasts of Europe, who would happily see the Hungarian culture, the language, and the state disappear if there were an extra nickel in it.
Conservatives tend to like Orbán because he rejects the view that progressive social reform is the certain future, he supports family formation, and perhaps most of all because he attacks the liberal clerisy. They think he shows a political path forward out of the strangulation by NGOs, judges, and journalists.
Internationalist liberals hate him most of all for that very same reason. He has worked to disrupt nonprofits; Central European University, which was funded in part to produce a political class molded by donor George Soros; and journalism, as Orbán’s allies have moved deeply into the media business.
Orbán reminds me of other European nationalist politicians of the 20th century, the peculiarly canny ones. Éamon de Valera rewrote Ireland’s constitution, and his party set up its own newspaper and helped encourage state-run media outlets. That party did dominate the state for decades but was genuinely popular until it was replaced by rivals. Maintaining overwhelming domestic popularity gives the nationalist leaders of small states better bargaining power on the international stage. Orbán’s ability to evade the discipline of Brussels demonstrates that.
Orbán’s critics may be right that the Orbán family’s graft is worse than usual. Certainly his property holdings look garish when compared with that of people such as the notably austere de Valera. But Hungarians may be distressingly inured to such corruption. While many Western liberals have recently discovered their great affection for the Socialist Party of Hungary from 2004 to 2009, Hungarians may remember that Ferenc Gyurcsány managed to enrich his allies even as he imposed policies of austerity. We may also be inured to it. Don’t our politicians get rich very quickly? Hungarians may not buy in to Western accusations that Orbán is distressingly close to Vladimir Putin when Gyurcsány’s main foreign-policy goal was establishing the now-abandoned South Stream pipeline project. It might just be that many of the things that outsiders freight with ominous ideological meaning turn out to be the permanent interests of this small state, which will be served regardless.
To pick another current example, Ireland, which is not ideologically committed to hyper-capitalism as an idea, remains nonetheless fanatically attached to its low tax rates as a matter of national economic strategy. You would misunderstand Ireland if you thought the country’s tax policy meant it was dominated by anarcho-capitalists.
But, at the same time, I think foreign conservatives need to be realistic about Central Europe. Populist nationalist governments have dedicated serious resources to family formation. They reaped increased popularity and ancillary benefits from these policies, such as a decline in child poverty. But the aims of these remain totally unachieved: Birth rates remain way below replacement level in the countries they govern. Emigration has slowed in Poland — due to economic growth. There’s some turnaround in Hungary, too. All to be welcomed. But a collapse of the birth rate means a wave of secularization is on the way and likely the weakening of whatever civil society has grown up in these nations after communism.
Many foreign conservatives want to see in these governments the first of many attempts to successfully reverse a post–Cold War liberal consensus that worked against them. Perhaps!
Orbán is a canny politician. He used to run right through the middle of his opposition — socialists on one side, fascists on the other. Now that opposition has united in an unstable but formidable anti-Fidesz coalition. I would expect Orbán to try to split it by highlighting the cultural issues that divide such a coalition.
But it also could be that these Central European nations have a very specific history and position in the world that allowed populist nationalism to come to power. And, as they fail to achieve their highest ambitions and succeed in imposing unexpected costs on the public, democratic peoples will tire of them and throw them out. I think we may be nearer to that day than most people currently imagine.
I am rooting for the survival of these societies and the states that guard them. But I can’t yet see how it will work, and I’m still searching for a reason for optimism.