American OrbanismBy Rod Dreher
June 27, 2022
Well, the New Yorker‘s piece on why American conservatives are interested in Hungary is out today, and I am disappointed in it, because it’s a standard liberal media account. I thought that the Hungarians were making a mistake by keeping liberal Western journalists out of CPAC Hungary, but maybe they knew better than I did.
I didn’t expect a Western liberal media account of Hungary under Viktor Orban to be positive, but I had hoped that the New Yorker would at least try to explain to its readers why Orban remains popular, not only with his people, but increasingly with American conservatives like me. Instead, it’s the usual stuff: Orban only wins because he’s gamed the system, he’s a closet anti-Semite, he hates liberal democracy, etc.
I know that the reporter Andrew Marantz had a long dinner with Mark Bollobas, a friend of mine whose parents escaped communist Hungary, and settled in the UK. Mark was born and raised in Cambridge and in the US (when his father did academic stints in the US), but some years ago, moved to Budapest to raise a family. A few years back, Mark wrote on this blog why he left Britain for Hungary. Excerpt:
I consider London to be Chelsea, Kensington, Covent Garden. Places close to the river, areas with amazing architecture, reasonably central. But how much would I have to earn to live there? Millions. Impossible. I’d always be the guy who walks by the shop window and sees what he can’t afford. It would be a lifetime of unhappiness.
And culturally, the most important of all, the England of today is so far removed from the England of my youth that it feels like a different world. What makes England great is the nonchalant English attitude to everything. Stiff upper lip. Humor. The genuine lack-of-interest in what other people do, as long as they’re not interfering. The moral strength to play fair, be a good loser, etc.
But over the last few decades this has been eroded by non-English immigrants who have moved to the UK permanently and brought their culture with them, aggressively. Usually the children are far more aggressive than the parents who actually made the move. And the English let this happen, because that’s how they are. Now the politeness is gone.
I ran a bar in Finsbury Park. My schedule was the same. Open at noon, close at midnight. I would go to work at around 10am, and walk home around 2am. You have the same schedule, and you walk past people who share that schedule. In England, 20 years ago, if you did this for a few weeks you’d eventually strike up a conversation, or create a little bond. That couldn’t happen in Finsbury Park because it was full of Somalis, north Africans and others (Abu Hamza was a personal favorite, hawking his vitriolic sermons on CDs to anyone that passed).
They all hated me and looked at me with distrust and disgust. The women walked past in their veils, clothing that sends the message of “f-ck off, don’t dare look at me or talk to me.” I walked those streets for two years and made not one connection. Visitors have come, have brought their culture, and they stick to it (I loved whichever day it was when they say you have to slaughter a goat; blood literally ran in the streets). It is their identity. Meanwhile the beautiful, accepting element of being British is abused, its kind culture allowed Trojan horses of all sorts to settle in.
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I don’t know what Mark told the reporter, Andrew Marantz, at dinner, but it pretty clearly didn’t fit the Hungary Bad narrative. It wasn’t in the New Yorker story — even though it is crucial to understanding why Hungary matters to a lot of us. You read the piece and think that the only people who are interested positively in Hungary under Orban are bad people who hate democracy.
I talked to Marantz for the piece, and am quoted several times in it (accurately). For example:
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Again, no one expects a liberal magazine like the New Yorker to write a positive piece about Orban’s Hungary. But the fact that there is no nuance or insight in the piece is telling. And what does it tell? The the Left is incapable of understanding why a politician like Viktor Orban appeals to American conservatives. I’ll give you a couple of examples:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-new-yorker-american-orbanism/
