I talk with David Baer and Dalibor Rohac about Viktor Orban’s authoritarian system in Hungary, its use as a model for American conservatives, and how the system has actually worked out for Hungary.
Watch it here.
For more on how the American right has embraced Orban, see a good overview in the New York Times. See also a history of conservative support for illiberal regimes in The Atlantic. This second piece is a bit one-sided and superficial, but it hammers home its point. An occupational hazard of the political activist is the temptation to wish for the power to wipe away all opposition and impose one’s own vision of the ideal society.
This leads some people to seek out places where this has supposedly been done, to uphold them as models, to defend them as superior to our own society, and to attempt to imitate the new model. The left has had its unhealthy fascinations with tyranny, from Stalin’s Russia to Chavez’s Venezuela, and so has the right.
I’m working on a forthcoming article of my own that defines the version of the Orban model that has filtered through to the American right, as reflected in recent attempts to put that model into practice. The discussion above was part of my research for that article. But one of the themes that emerges from it is the extent to which events elsewhere in the world tend to be distorted to fit into our own domestic political obsessions.
The Orban model as practiced by Orban is somewhat different from the version being promoted in America—and fortunately, it will be much harder to put in practice here in a larger, better informed, and more diverse nation.
The Orban Model