Are There Any American Orbans?By Rod Dreher
April 5, 2022
More Hungarian election fallout. Here’s a great analysis by Jeremy Carl, who spent five weeks in Budapest this spring on a research fellowship. Excerpts:
Simply put, Orbán offers the most prominent example in the world of a conservative politician who has unapologetically and effectively used the state for right-wing ends, something that the American Right has been almost wholly ineffective at accomplishing, and is often unsure it even wants to try.
While much of the GOP establishment (and establishment think tanks) talk airily of our high principles, the Left has run roughshod over us, subjecting traditionalist Americans to indignities that could never even have been imagined by our forefathers. If we are being brutally honest, we could not have imagined these indignities ourselves just 10 or 20 years ago.
As a result of his success, the Left and our left-wing media brands Orbán a “strongman” a “dictator” and an “authoritarian,” though Hungary regularly conducts free elections and Orbán is subject to scathing criticisms in many press outlets freely available in Hungary. The lists of the so-called abuses by Orbán from the Left are amusing because, for the most part, they amount to left-wing frustrations with being unable to achieve the things they have carried out so effectively elsewhere.
He points out, correctly, that what the Left sees as Orban’s hatred for democracy is just restoring some semblance of ideological balance to public life in a country whose cultural institutions and media were thoroughly dominated by the Left. When I was here last summer, I asked a public media reporter about the charge that Orban unfairly used his power to force conservatism on the media. He told me that if not for Orban, there would be zero chance that any conservative voices would ever be heard in media that is paid for by the Hungarian taxpayer. In his excellent election wrap, National Review‘s John Fund, who is definitely not an Orban fan, said:
Critics claim that coverage of the election campaign was dominated by a pliant media. Tortoise Media claims “80 per cent of (Hungary’s media) is controlled by the state or oligarchs close to Orban.” But opposition figures privately admitted to me that when one measures media influence by the size of its audience rather than the number of outlets, the opposition had plenty of access.
This is something you never see in the Western media reports: the anti-Orban media reach far more people than the pro-Orban media do. American liberals pull the same stunt when they act like the existence of Fox News somehow matches the media firepower of all three networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and other national media.
More Carl:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/are-there-american-viktor-orban-jeremy-carl/
