Authoritarian Orban to speak in Texas at CPAC

It’s not “Boomers” even if some Boomers are that way. So are many others. Many Boomers do have a distrust of government dating back to the lie that was the Vietnam War. From the Tonkin Gulf lie to the casualty figures reported to the Lady Bird’s family’s defense investment. Watergate. Then the lie that got us into the second Iraq War. Iran Contra. It isn’t from success or boredom.

 

Didn't mean to imply it was all "boomers." Just a subset (and it wasn't meant as a generation war post either, just triggered by the older crowd gathered around that exhibit and the role people in their late 50s to early 70s have had on mainstreaming conspiracies). There are some common personal features that define the conspiracy subgroup relatively well. You tend to see this stuff take off amongst people who had good and stable jobs that didn't require much in the way of education but troubled home lives characterized by often bitter divorces. Often either politically conservative to start or relatively apolitical but socially conservative.

I do agree that there is a level of distrust in government in the generation as a whole, but I don't think that is all that relevant (somewhat surprisingly). This group is pushing authoritarians. They are characterized by very high levels of trust in "their" government figures (they trust Trump almost reflexively).

Maybe the history has some impact on "establishment knowledge" trust, which helped lead them down this path (as it becomes difficult to dispute their "knowledge"). But a search for existential meaning seems to fit as a core motivation with some of this stuff like this little "exhibit" as it appears to be trying to turn every event into some sort of contest between good and evil. I can't help but think about some of the stories from January 6, where you had people in their 50s and 60s that smashed their way into the capital, did things like get their pictures taken in offices, give interviews or pose for pictures, then go back to hotels and go out to dinner and posted about it online. It was like it was something to do on a Monday for many of these folks, and they seem genuinely stunned that people treated it like it was more serious.

Trump truly energized this group by giving them stuff to do, whether it was posting crazy stuff online or going to rallies or boat parades or the like. A vastly underrated part of the Trump movement is how much entertainment it provides its adherents.

 

I'm not sure why you'd be unable to say whether it's right or wrong. It's wrong, full stop. It's racist and wrong.

 

IMO, to justify their behavior and the bad things they want, there has to be some greater evil that makes them the heroes of the story.

 

So it's wrong to have a desire to further your own distinct culture and ethnicity? As someone in an interracial marriage who does not care about that I also see no problem with someone who does.

I hate to tell you, but you can appreciate and value your own culture and ethnicity without being "prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.", which is the definition of racism.

If I were Mexican and wanted a Mexican family with Mexican heritage, culture and traditions that doesn't mean I dislike white or black people, simply that I value certain things in my personal life.

 

Reminds me of the right calling black voters racist for overwhelmingly supporting Obama.

 

That is nuts. why does maga depict themselves as victims?

 

The crazier the better.

“We Are At War”

 

This isn't even a close call. This is what you're defending:
“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race,” said Orbán on Saturday. He added that countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were “no longer nations."

And it is racism. You can put whatever innocuous-sounding label you want on it. It's actually no different than the "separate but equal" arguments and anti-miscegenation stances of the segregationists.

"I am proud of my French heritage" or "I am proud to be an indigenous Mexican" is being proud of your ethnicity. "I don't want any of us marrying Black people because they'll taint our bloodlines" is racism.

 

That isn’t how I read it. He is saying that non-ethnic Hungarians can never be Hungarian. No melting pot. It is far more racist than what you said.

 

I'll accept that interpretation too. No matter how you slice it, it's racist. This isn't about pride. It's about supremacy, white supremacy.

 

Damon Linker has a very insightful couple of Substack postings on Orban. Fo those unfamiliar with his work, Linker was formally at First Things and was a very conservative Catholic, he has since moved left and has reembraced his secular Jewish heritage. Much Of his earlier piece with a dialogue with Rod Dreher, who was also at First Things and he has been an unabashed Orban supporter.


How? In part by reversing the story liberals like Soros like to tell about the unfolding of the 20th century. The rise of totalitarianism, they claim, was a product of Christianity and nationalism run amok. To bring about the triumph of freedom, it was necessary to defeat them both—and that struggle continues today, in the fight against right-wing anti-liberal populists like Trump and Orbán.

But Orbán flips the narrative: Totalitarianism was made possible by—indeed, it is synonymous with—the defeat of Christianity and nationalism.

The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on western values, and create a New World, a post-western world. Who is going to stop them if we don’t?


The great advantage for the right of this alternative narrative is that it deprives progressives of both the presumption of ultimate victory and the moral high ground. The triumph of progressivism wouldn’t be the culmination of world history or the achievement of justice on earth. On the contrary, it would be a return to totalitarian tyranny. Those who want to improve the world therefore need to bolster the strength of Christianity, the traditional family, and the nation in order to smite the progressives.


Just as the right in the U.S. is abandoning its innate libertarian hostility to the administrative state in favor of a call to seize its formidable powers for its own ends, so Orbán wants social conservatives everywhere to become counter-progressives working to bring about the final defeat of liberalism. This isn’t standing athwart history yelling, “Stop.” It’s throwing history into reverse and calling that true progress.

I think Linker Is on to something and it is really capture the core part of the worldwide conservative minoritarian totalitarian backlash. Dreher famously wrote The Benedict Option about 15 years ago, advocating a figure girl return to the desert for cultural conservatives and removal from the pluralistic gay marriage society that they felt they could not be a part of. That was popular until Trump and now Orban, which led them to believe retreat was no longer necessary.

Two observations I will add. First, I’ve now come to understand that gay marriage was much more of breaking point for this constituency than I realized. I felt that much of the seemingly inexplicable reaction to Obama was based on race, and that certainly part of it. But I think there was also an underappreciated level of reactionary cataclysmic reaction to gay marriage, not just that it happened, but that it was so popular. It’s one thing to imagine some rogue state Supreme Court imposing a result that could quickly be reversed after mobilizing the populace; it’s another to try to accept the fact that the populace has left you and actually supports a change what you think is unacceptable.

That helps explain why Obama was viewed as an especially insidious, bringing about this result, but also why there was the belief that they had to resort to antimajoritarian totalitarian tendencies. They could no longer depend on mobilizing at the ballot box.

And it was necessary to create a so-called other. Immigrants are scapegoated but also any urban liberals. That’s why they have so many fantasies about mass executions. And it helps explain why the Supreme Court jurisprudence supporting voter suppression, because they realize that the solution is no longer through legitimate democratic processes.

But also add that it explains a lot of the obsession with falsifying history, which DeSantis greatly epitomizes. It’s no longer enough to simply say that we should not to harshly judge our ancestors as men of their times that we have progressed from. To do so is to concede a narrative that supports progressivism.

It’s now necessary to simply change history to say that what was up is down, and vice versa. What we think was wrong about our history was not in fact wrong; it’s the progressives that were wrong all along. I see a lot of arguments pointing out the fact that the racialist were Democrats during the Civil War (True), or that Nazis were socialists, playing on the name. But this is serious revisionism, imposed by the state.

I think that Linker’s analysis, while sound, also overlooks that this reactionary movement also requires revising the Cold War, which Putin is pursuing. Orban seeks to change the narrative of World War II. Before you could always argue that the pluralistic armies of democracy had ultimately prevailed over those who wanted racial purity, and make the argument that however much an individual might be bothered by pluralism, it’s ultimately the superior form of government, pace Lee Kwan Yew’s prediction that the West will ultimately defeat China because China is also based on Han Chinese exclusionary superiority, whereas the West can draw on the greatest minds from all over the world, those seeking freedom and creating stronger societies. In fact, the strong argument can be made that the most dominant empires through history in terms of being long-lasting were usually the most open, emphasizing trade and openness to ideas and others that profess loyalty, pace the Treaty of Westphalia.

But you also have to explain the Cold War away. Again, the polyglot democracies prevailed. The ethnically pure did not. Putin tries to explain it away by rejecting Bolshevism as flawed, too open to Third Worlders. He has now embraced Russian Orthodoxy after being a Godless Communist, blaming the Cold War loss on the Bolshevists and going back to values of the Russian Empire, with oligarchs instead of the proletariat.

Interesting.

Viktor Orbán’s Message for Social Conservatives