Another excellent piece by my favorite UnHerd writer.
Quotes:
Under his leadership, the ruling Fidesz party has placed its thumb on the electoral scales, ensuring that while elections are free, the government enters them at an advantage. Opposition candidates are given significantly less airtime on state broadcasting networks than government figures, with the result that Fidesz narratives dominate the airwaves
This is how you play the game. You rig it in your favor. This is something Anglosphere "conservatives" will never understand. They're constitution cucks.
It is precisely these same innovations, which make Orbán’s Hungary anathema to Western liberals, that make the country so attractive to so many Western conservatives — particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. Where conservatives in Britain and America can win elections but find their governance impeded by a liberal powerbase in the media, NGOs and the judiciary
Which is ironic because these same Anglo-Saxon "conservatives" refuse to copy this strategy in their own countries.
in Orbán’s Hungary the liberal intelligentsia’s political powerbase has been dismantled and replaced with a confident new conservative elite. A wealth of glossy conservative magazines, universities, think tanks and NGOs are the lavishly-funded product of Orbán’s Gramscian conservativism.
Again, this is how you get shit done. You actively replace the liberal elite whit a new elite. And yes, you use "authoritarian" state power to do it. The long march through the institutions requires an ideological vanguard that isn't impeded by Western Enlightenment myths.
Rather than the vulgar 20th-century authoritarianism with which his more excitable critics charge him, Orbán’s dominance of Hungary’s politics is a subtler, more postmodern exercise. A product of George Soros’s attempt to nurture an elite governing class in Central Europe, the disaffected liberal reformer has adopted and inverted the same methods that produce liberal hegemony towards distinctly post-liberal ends.
Subverting the subverters. I absolutely love it. It proves yet again that the right is always at its best when it learns from the left. Postmodernism should be ruthlessly used by us to subvert, and eventually destroy, our enemies. Petersonian anti-postmodernist "philosophy" is a dead-end.
“The point about Fidesz,” Tóth told me, “is that they’re against this liberal Deep State, NGO elite, whatever you want to call it. But they are mesmerised by it, and they are trying to replicate it along their own political lines. So they will have their own NGOs, their own think tanks, their own societies and international influence, modelled after this Atlanticist elite.” This creates a system, Tóth claims, where “I don’t think there is a level playing field now in elections. There’s kind of a controlled press in which there’s very little administrative measures against the opposition press, but on the other hand, pro-government media is very heavily rewarded, even from state funds… [This means] there is an economic and political power centre that is overwhelming and couldn’t really make another power centre come about.”
Compare this to the failed Reaganite "starve the beast" and "government is the problem" nonsense that has crippled the American right for over 40 years now. The results speak for themselves.
Before her election as Hungary’s first female president last month, the then Fidesz Vice-President Katalin Novák suggested to me that Western European politics is itself undemocratic, as government policy is driven by a “very, very powerful NGO network, which drives this kind of ongoing aggression against those countries who would like to step out of line in migration and all these big liberal trends dominating European policy today”. In Hungary, due to the government’s use of direct referendums to enshrine policy (such as the question on LGBT education in schools, which is also on the ballot on Sunday’s election), Novák claims politics is more democratic in practice than the European mainstream: “I don’t think that in Western Europe politicians would dare to hold a referendum about migration.”
This is an obvious Schmittian axiom. More "authoritarian" forms of government are often more democratic than liberal ones. Liberalism is actually antithetical to democracy. Ezra Klein recently wrote an op-ed in the NYT about the enemies of liberalism. He identified the consent of the governed as a fundamental aspect of liberalism, which is of course totally false. The opposite is true. Where is there more consent of the governed? In the US, or Hungary?
“Two thirds of the country,” she claimed, “are only receiving propaganda media, so they only get a reality built up by the government. And in that reality, they are the best and we are monsters. I can’t blame people for that. They don’t even want to ask questions anymore, because… the system has polarised society on such a level that we cannot even start talking to each other right now.”
These people have no self-awareness whatsoever. I don't even know whether to laugh or yawn anymore...
Article:
https://unherd.com/2022/04/has-the-ukraine-war-saved-orban/
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