Viktor Orbán, heroically engaged in crusading against phantoms
Friend-of-illiberal-antidemocracy Viktor Orbán is another Donald Trump, but he's a capable Trump. Republicans positively adore the autocrat who as Hungary's prime minister has successfully killed press freedom, undermined judicial independence, sabotaged multiparty democracy, opposed immigration and sympathized with Putin.
Although Trump excelled in only two of Orbán's triumphs, he equaled Orbán in industrious grift. Both have kleptocratically helped to enrich family, political allies and themselves through instruments of their chief-executive power. Trump, as we know, now hopes to regain his position as the U.S. Treasury's pickpocket.
Anne Applebaum's extraordinarily readable Twilight of Democracy analyzes Hungarian, Polish and Trumpian-American politics objectively and nightmarishly, as the work's title suggests. Twilight is as much a warning about a gothic tomorrow as it is commentary on the firmly established crypto-fascism of today. And Orbán is the star of the pyrotechnic show.
Thursday, at Republicans' "Conservative" Political Action Committee's annual coven, feudal liege Orbán fêted himself before the peasantry as the "leader of a country that is under the siege of progressive liberals." With exemplary Trumpian inconsistency, he also said the U.S. and Hungary are the world's preeminent mentors — the "siege" appears to be a weak one — in how to battle globalists, communists, "fake news" and the aforementioned progs.
"The West is at war with itself," said Orbán. "The globalists can all go to hell; I have come to Texas,” he added in a poor plagiarism of Davy Crockett. Globalists, communists, progressives and fake newsers, however, were more interested in how he would handle widespread denunciations of his recent, "mixed race" speech, which, upon resigning, a close adviser called "pure Nazi." Orbán countered by saying that Europeans prefer not to cohabitate with nonEuropeans and that "a Christian politician cannot be racist." No comment.
America's Father Coughlin3, Fox News' Tucker Carlson, took to the airwaves on Orbán Eve, asking, "So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?" No, rather, he's a Nazi because he has killed press freedom, undermined judicial independence, sabotaged multiparty democracy and sympathized with the bloodthirsty Vladimir Putin.
The Washington Post notes that "Carlson helped raise Orban's U.S. profile with a special broadcast from Budapest last year," which is half correct. Carlson raised Orbán's profile but CPAC's curia regis in Budapest was held in May of this year, which The Washington Post covered. The Post's Dave Weigel and Isaac Arnsdorf might want to start reading their own paper.
And of course Trump did his part to further elevate Orbán in the pin-wheeling eyes of America's fascists, hunkered down in the Republican Party's fortress of delusion — you know, hunkered because of the nonexistent progressive siege.
Trump hosted the Hungarian Nazi at his Saudi Arabian golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, releasing a statement addressing Orbán as his "friend." One supposes that a man who knows nothing about the world would see such a friend in the vein of: "Few people know as much about what is going on in the world today," as the clueless former president wrote.
Orbán's most splendid moment came when he attacked the fascistically commonplace — enemies everywhere. "They did not want me to be here.... They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you." Trumpian Republicans get a weird kind of kick from feeling persecuted and victimized, so the Hungarian's misconceived whining was a nice touch.
Orbá wrapped up his dismal polemics with some early yearning for the U.S. and European Union's 2024 elections. "These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization," he said. "Today we hold neither of them yet. We need both. You have two years to get ready."
As we do — and as we must.
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