Hungary & American Conservatives

[Kamaji]

Hungary & American Conservatives

By Rod Dreher
February 3, 2022

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Now, to business. Ross Douthat has a typically incisive analysis on our two political parties and their relationship to democracy. Here’s how it starts:

“There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”

The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.

So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.

Douthat explores how neither party can claim to be fully “on the side of democracy” as Ben Rhodes means here. This is a classic Douthat analysis column, and he criticizes Republicans too. But I want to focus on this part of his take, because it explains something important about why Hungary matters, or should matter, to American conservatives:

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What does this have to do with Hungary? As you might have heard (see above), CPAC is coming to Budapest in March, one month before the national election which could turf out Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been in power since 2010. Orban completely mystifies Western liberal observers, particularly in the media. If you’ve been a follower of mine over the past year, you’ll know that I came to Budapest on a fellowship a year ago, and was startled to discover after being here for only a short time how far from the truth the standard Western narrative of this country and its (democratically elected!) leader is. Mind you, I’m not saying that the Orban government is completely unproblematic, but I am saying that it is far, far better than the way it is routinely portrayed in US and western European media. And not only that: the Fidesz government here is in many ways an example of successful national conservatism/populism.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hungary-american-conservatives-cpac-viktor-orban-tucker-carlson/