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There’s a long tradition of Americans seeking Heaven on Earth overseas, notes Anne Appelbaum. But historically it’s been left-wingers telling us the USSR/China/Cuba/Nicaragua/Venezuela is the future, not conservatives trying to sell us on the greatness of Hungary:
Just as Hungary now sponsors English-language think tanks designed to promote Orbán’s illiberal ideas, so did the Soviet Union once create phony “institutes for peace” designed to promote Soviet Communism. The idea in both cases was and is the same: Lure in foreigners who are bored, disgruntled, or underpaid at home; offer meals, attention, and sometimes more.
During its existence, the USSR was particularly attractive to intellectuals and journalists who were disgusted by capitalism and democratic politics, and who believed the Soviet Union’s lies about its own prosperity. George Bernard Shaw celebrated his 75th birthday in Moscowin 1931 with a lavish banquet held at the height of a horrific famine created by Stalin’s disastrous collectivization policy. As a gesture of faith in the Soviet system, he told the audience that although friends had given him tins of food to take to Russia, “I threw all of the food out of the window” before arriving. One journalist in attendance recalled how the audience “gasped”: “One felt the convulsive reaction in their bellies. A tin of English beef would provide a memorable holiday in the home of any of the workers and intellectuals at the gathering.”
The aggrieved Americans who now find their way to Orbán or Vladimir Putin also dislike their own country, albeit for different reasons. They cannot abide its racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press. Those who dream of a white-tribalist alternative—one that also puts pressure on gay people and uses anti-Semitic tropes in its propaganda—believe they have found this nirvana at dinners and think-tank events in Budapest. In reality they, like Shaw, have found a Potemkin village: a “Christian” country where, as in Russia, only a minority go to church; a “Western” country that expelled an American university and tried to get a Chinese one to build a satellite campus instead.
Orbán’s visitors serve the same end as Stalin’s. Soviet leaders wanted to prove to their compatriots that their system is better than Western democracy, and to provide an answer to foreign criticism. Orbán’s purpose is identical. When Carlson—or Rod Dreher, Christopher Caldwell, or any of the other American commentators who have made their pilgrimage to Budapest—sings the Hungarian leader’s praises, that helps bolster Orbán’s image at home. It also gives him ammunition against the growing chorus of outside criticism that has already gotten him kicked out of the European-wide Christian Democratic movement—he is now well to the right of what used to be Hungary’s “far right” party—and may eventually get him kicked out of the European Union too.
Rod Dreher has been living in Hungary for the past few months, and when I read his lengthy dispatches from that country I’m struck by their similarity, in tone and structure, to lefties writing about Community Cuba or Huge Chavez’s Venezuela. There are some infringements upon civil liberties, but you have to remember that the country faces serious existential threats from outside. I’m not saying I’d have policies like this in my country, but Hungary is a sovereign state that should be allowed to chart its own course. People say it’s an authoritarian country, but everyone I spoke to seems happy.
Elsewhere in his tweetstorm, [David] 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.
From all indications, Hungary is a beautiful country and I’d love to visit someday. In fact, I had planned to go to Budapest as part of my trip to Europe in 2020, before…you know. It’s not even close to Cuba or even Russia yet.
But it’s definitely trending in the wrong direction.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary has similarly dropped any pretense of respecting democratic institutions. After centralizing power, tilting the electoral playing field, taking over much of the media, and harassing critical civil society organizations since 2010, Orbán moved during 2019 to consolidate control over new areas of public life, including education and the arts. The 2020 adoption of an emergency law that allows the government to rule by decree indefinitely has further exposed the undemocratic character of Orbán’s regime. Hungary’s decline has been the most precipitous ever tracked in Nations in Transit; it was one of the three democratic frontrunners as of 2005, but in 2020 it became the first country to descend by two regime categories and leave the group of democracies entirely.
As David French argues, it’s not about any actual policies. It’s about owning teh libs, just like in America.
…Hungary is the new right’s Denmark. Except that Hungary is a much worse place to live than Denmark. At least when progressives were lauding Scandinavia, they were lauding countries that enjoyed higher standards of living than the United States.
Hungary’s median household income, by contrast, is a fraction of America’s.
Yes I know money isn’t everything, so let’s look at other measures of national well-being. Hungary’s life expectancy is lower than America’s. Its birth rate is lower—lower, in fact, than the EU average. It’s less free than the United States. Corruption is endemic.
And if you think the new right might love it because of its religiosity, Hungary is far, far less religious than America’ least religious state. Only 33 percent of New Hampshire residents are “highly religious” according to Pew Data (Alabama is our most religious state with 77 percent of its citizens highly religious). Hungary, by comparison, is a religious wasteland. A mere 17 percent of its citizens are “highly religious.” Only 14 percent say religion is very important to their lives.
One measure of national well-being is the extent to which your own citizens want to leave. Hungary has a profound problem with emigration, so much so that it’s contributed to a worker shortage that’s required the Orbán regime to quietly welcome more immigrants, a reality somewhat at odds with the regime’s anti-immigrant past. (Prior to the current wave of new right enthusiasm for Orbán, he gained considerable right-wing praise for shutting his borders to people he called “Muslim invaders.”)
So what’s the source of the affection? I’m unconvinced that it’s rooted all that much in Hungary’s pro-natalist social policies. Carlson, for example, trumpets Hungary’s policy of granting a $35,000 low-interest loan to young women when they marry, to be forgiven when they have three children. But that’s not more generous than, say, Biden’s direct payments to families (much less the Romney child allowance plan). And multiple European countries less adored by the right have extremely generous family leave and social welfare policies that make child-rearing far more affordable than in much of the United States.
Orbán, however, is a very effective culture warrior. Much more effective, in the eyes of many on the right, than the hated “GOP Establishment.” Hungarian press freedom is far more constrained than in the United States. Its press is among the least free in Europe. The regime doesn’t recognize gay marriage. Only heterosexual couples may adopt. And the regime just passed a law sharply limiting any promotion of homosexuality or gender transition to children. He has banned gender studies programs at Hungarian universities.
While Hungary’s policies would be flatly unconstitutional in the United States, they’re consistent with the new right philosophy of wielding government power to aggressively confront your culture war opponents—and with the new right's fascination with such power even when it’s entirely unattainable in the United States.
The culture war is the point. It’s been that way at least since 2016.
Give it some time and it might be Orban wondering why he’s associating with these guys, not the other way around:
Speaking of Westerners propping up authoritarian governments, I’m sad to say that no country has helped the Cuban dictatorship stay afloat more than my own:
Cuban-Canadian activists say many Canadians are not aware of the extent to which the survival of Cuba's one-party regime depends upon the foreign currency tourists bring into the country, or the lengths the Cuban government will go to keep Canadians coming.
And an even smaller number realize just how many of their dollars are going not to Cuba's undemocratic government, but to a group of companies controlled by a small group of well-connected generals in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.
[…]
Some tourists choose to avoid big hotels and resorts in Cuba, preferring private homes and B&Bs. Even then, it's hard for them to avoid enriching Cuba's military. It operates the banks through which tourists make credit card payments to individuals. It operates the stores that sell imported food and goods.
The Cuban military dominates hotel building in Havana and five years ago took over control of Habaguanex, the consortium that operates Old Havana's stores and restaurants, previously run by the city's official historian Eusebio Leal.
As U.S. hotel company Marriott discovered last year, it is virtually impossible to operate on the island today without enriching what is already the country's richest institution: the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Opinions are divided on whether Canadian tourists might, by staying away, hasten the fall of Cuba's one-party state. Cuban-Canadians like Felix Blanco say they believe it would help.
Feinberg, meanwhile, said he's skeptical of "the idea that if we could only reduce the number of stays at these hotels we could somehow starve out and shrink the Cuban security apparatus."
The Cuban government would ensure that resources flow to that apparatus one way or another, he said.
I’ve known some Canadians who went to Cuba and came back shaken by the obvious repression, but for most of us, it’s just a cheap, beautiful beach holiday. That Cuba pokes evil America in the eye is just an added selling point.