America: Land Of Broken WindowsBy Rod Dreher
June 10, 2022
Sometimes, it’s the little things. Yesterday I had to go into a pharmacy in Vienna. I was immediately struck by the fact that none of the products for sale were locked away. It was all out there for sale, even the razor blades, like Austria is a normal country … like America used to be, before this:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1534557955529396227Earlier this week, voters in San Francisco recalled (with a 60 percent majority) that city’s loony-left DA, Chesa Boudin, under whose reign crime, especially violent crime, has gotten out of control. It’s interesting to see how the voting went by demographic. From New York magazine:
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Good. But I live in a city where the district attorney is no liberal at all, and where you don’t see the kind of open thievery that has become a staple of social media. Still, the city is more violent than it has been in a long time, with violent crime moving into areas that once were peaceful. And if you don’t see shoplifters brazenly filling sacks in stores, you still see consumer items that you used to be able to buy easily now behind locked cases. Somebody is doing the stealing.
Meanwhile, how is life in Hungary, which our media and our foreign-policy elites have assured us is an authoritarian hellhole? Let’s see:
https://twitter.com/BalazsOrban_HU/status/1534841432770494464Chesa Boudin is literally a George Soros poster boy. They can’t stand George Soros in Hungary, because PM Viktor Orban believes the kind of world that Soros spends lavishly to bring about would destroy the possibility for a decent, normal life for ordinary people. He’s right.
Of course Hungary is a very different society than the United States is, so comparisons can only go so deep. You don’t get the feeling when you’re in Hungary that you have to be afraid of the police. Hungarians are naturally more law-abiding than we Americans are, overall. What’s interesting, though, is how Orban is constantly condemned by Western intellectuals for being “authoritarian” because he attempts to save Hungary from the same diseases destroying the West.
For example, the views of globalist progressive billionaires like Soros. Most people know that Soros favors, and funds candidates who advocate, progressive policies on crime — of that sort that just got Chesa Boudin kicked out of office by the most liberal electorate in the country. Most people also know that Soros is for open borders. Back in 2018, when Orban shut down parts of the Soros-funded Central European University in Budapest, I wrote that I wasn’t going to support the move as a matter of principle, but that I wasn’t going to be quick to judge Orban about it. I blogged then:
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I talked earlier this week with an American magazine reporter, who wanted to know what I, as a conservative, would like to see an American conservative president, or conservative politicians, bring to our country from Viktor Orban’s governance. I emphasized that Orbanism is not plug-and-play; America is a very different country from Hungary, and what works there is not necessarily going to work for us.
Nevertheless, there are a few general things. First, I would like a US president who was serious about defending our borders. Relatedly, I would like a US president who could speak in robust terms about the American nation, emphasizing what binds us together, not what is tearing us apart. This is why I would want an American president who fights identity politics not just rhetorically, but in terms of strong policies. Fourth, I want a president who understands that part of maintaining unity is allowing for some diversity — and that means respecting local sovereignty within a broader unity. Let Massachusetts be Massachusetts, and let Alabama be Alabama — within reason.
All of these things are fairly anodyne conservatism. What I also want — and this is where Orban has a lot to teach us — is a president who is willing to fight the culture war as hard or harder than the Left. This requires a systemic understanding of how progressive elites and their fellow travelers on the Right use their power within networks to institutionalize destructive ideals, like gender ideology and Critical Race Theory. I want a president who, like Viktor Orban, is a small-d democrat who understands that liberalism, in its current form, destroys the conditions under which a healthy society can develop and maintain itself.
For example, Orban banned gender studies in the countries universities, not by executive fiat, but by withdrawing accreditation and funding for those programs. He wasn’t going to have this corrupt discipline injecting its poison into his country. Like a good classical liberal, I have thought for most of my adult life that the state should keeps its nose out of the affairs of universities. But now that the entire country has become a college campus, and college campuses have become extraordinarily illiberal places, the source of ideas and practices that, having spread widely throughout middle-class American life, are wrecking the nation, I would consider backing the state intervening in some situations. Maintaining liberalism cannot be a suicide pact.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/america-land-of-broken-windows-soft-totalitarianism/
