Defender Of The NormiesBy Rod Dreher
June 29, 2022
I’m still pissed off by that crap New Yorker story about US conservatives and Hungary. All of us who know anything about Hungary know that we should not expect a positive story about Viktor Orban’s government in the Western media. The best we can hope for is something that is fair and nuanced. Based on past experience with other New Yorker writers, I thought I could expect that from the New Yorker. That’s why I went out on a limb to open doors for the writer that wouldn’t have opened otherwise, because the pro-Orban Hungarians have learned from painful experience not to trust journalists. No, I said, the New Yorker is serious. Yes, it’s liberal, but I think they will be open to reporting things that don’t fit the standard left-wing narrative. I put my credibility on the line, and boy, do I feel stupid. Never again will I help any Western journalist with the Hungarians.
“I’m disappointed in what he wrote,” texted one of my Hungarian sources, who talked to the reporter. “He could have written the same shit staying in NY.” True. You don’t have to like Viktor Orban at all to recognize that the Orban phenomenon is a lot more interesting than what the ideologically-driven liberal Western journalists say. You might be tired of me writing about Orban, but I’m telling you, the things in play here matter a lot to the US political scene, and will increasingly do so. From my perspective, the things that make Orban interesting and instructive for US conservatives are:
1. He recognizes that “liberalism” is not liberal anymore, and that the left-controlled institutions have no interest at all in playing fair with those who disagree with them. And he doesn’t give a rat’s rear end what they say about him. He fights, and he fights intelligently. Which is why he’s effective.
2. He is socially conservative but economically more to the Left than Republicans. That is, he’s a real populist.
3. He believes in national sovereignty, not globalism. He’s not opposed to transnational alliances and organizations, but he believes that it’s important for people to keep and defend their own traditions and ways of life. That entails controlling immigration.
The core of it, I think, is that Orban realizes that the deck is stacked against the deplorables, and makes himself their champion. European leaders went berserk last summer when Orban’s government enacted a law preventing LGBT propaganda aimed at children and minors. But Orban looks at what’s happening in the West, where so many kids are calling themselves queer, and demanding hormones and surgery, and where all of this came about amid a propaganda blitz, and he says NO, we will not have this in our country.
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Here’s the thing that you never, ever read about Hungary in the Western media, but that you notice as soon as you spend any time there: the whole country seems like a middle-American city circa 1985. If you are a liberal person, you might find that unpleasant, but it ain’t fascism. I had introduced the New Yorker writer to Mark Bollobas, who grew up in the UK and US, the son of Hungarian parents who fled Communism. He moved to his parents’ homeland a decade or so ago, because he wanted to start a family, and he had lost faith in a future for him in either America or Britain. He hated the inequality, the violence, and the instability of the US and the UK (including the speed with which the culture in the UK was changing because of mass immigration). In Hungary, though he is poorer than he would have been back home (salaries here are low), he is much happier. He now has a wife and two kids. He spent an evening explaining to the reporter why he made the move.
It’s not a move for everybody, but Mark’s perspective — which I know, because he’s a friend of mine, and because he wrote about it at length here — is really interesting. Shouldn’t a reporter trying to figure out why conservatives like Orban be interested in that sort of thing? Last summer when I was here, I talked to a young woman, at the time a Danube Institute colleague (she has since moved on), who is not religious, and was living with her boyfriend. She was 100 percent behind Orban in part because, as she put it, “I don’t want to raise kids in a country where they are told that they might be of the opposite sex.” Simple as that. Many liberals today cannot fathom a world in which parents might find it horrifying that their sons could claim to be girls, and the entire established order — the state, the media, medicine, corporations, law — is lined up to sever the child from his given sex, and from his parents.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-defender-of-the-normies/
