Surprised To See US Republicans Cozying Up To The European Far Right? Don't Be
- The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2021. Cas Mudde, Opinion. -Ed.
Before Trump, only relatively fringe American conservatives had open connections to the international far right. Today, the ties have mainstreamed.
This weekend Texas senator Ted Cruz spoke about how “we all face the same challenges, including a bold and global left, that seeks to tear down cherished national and religious institutions”. Nothing to see here, you might think – except that he was not addressing a local branch of the Republican party in Texas, or a conservative US media outlet. He was speaking on screen to an audience of thousands in Madrid, at a meeting of the Spanish far-right party Vox. It was one of many recent outreaches to the global far right by US rightwing figures, which seem to have increased since the ouster of Donald Trump.
Is the so-called “Populist International”, so often foretold but never realized, finally taking shape? And will the US conservative movement play a leading role in it? Or is this more about domestic politics than global domination? Unsurprisingly, given that the US conservative movement, like the GOP, covers a broad range of different shades of often far-right ideology, different people have spoken to different types of far-right groups. There are at least 4 major strands of far-right international networks in which US “conservatives” of all levels participate. The first and most important is the global Christian right.
The US Christian right has long been a global player and has been particularly active in post-communist Europe – as is captured well in the Netflix series The Family.
They have found influential supporters in Russian president Vladimir Putin and, more recently, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. It was at Orban's invitation, at the bi-annual Budapest Demographic Summit in Budapest, that Mike Pence recently spoke, together with a broad variety of academics, church leaders and politicians from around the globe, including the French far-right, maybe-presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. Budapest has also been the new promised land for the 2nd strand, the so-called “national conservativism” movement – the brainchild of the Israeli think-tanker Yoram Hazony.
National conservatism is a kind of far right for people who read, to put it dismissively – an attempt to merge the already ever-overlapping conservative and far-right ideologies and create a far-right movement fit for the cultural, economic & political elite.
Tucker Carlson gave a keynote at a 2019 natl. conservatism summit in DC and recently took his Fox News show to Budapest and raved about Orbán & his regime. The Conservative Political Action Conference -CPAC 2022 mtg. could be held in Budapest too. The 3rd strand is long-standing ties between some far-right Republicans & Europe's far- right groups the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) or French National Rally (RN), which share views of nativism, authoritarianism & populism. The far right in Europe & GOP Congress members go back decades to Steve King of Iowa, Dana Rohrabacher of Ca. It was largely with these groups that Steve Bannon created “the Movement”, mostly media hype. Spain's Vox party has been building a conservative-far right network in the Spanish-speaking world mostly in Latin America with the long-standing fight against “communism” & for conservative Christianity.
These international networks overlap on many issues, notably opposition to the “global left” but also, in different gradations, to immigration, Islam and “gender ideology”. But they also disagree on central issues...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/15/us-republicans-european-far-right
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- Why it matters that Tucker Carlson is broadcasting from Hungary this week. Vox, Aug. 5, 2021. The country has become a model for a rising kind of authoritarianism.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/8/5/22607465/tucker-carlson-hungary-orban-authoritarianism-democracy-backsliding
- Tucker Carlson & Viktor Orban, Hungarian Premier in Budapest, Hungary, Aug. 2021.
* In Budpest, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary “if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family- and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
(Vox, Aug. 5, 2021).. Make no mistake: Fox’s marquee host [Tucker Carlson] is aligning himself with a ruler who has spent the past 11 years systematically dismantling Hungary’s free political system. A 2021 report from V-Dem, the leading academic institute assessing the state of global democracy, found that Hungary crossed the line into autocracy in 2018. In March, Orbán’s Fidesz party was pushed out of the EPP, an alliance of center-right European parties, because its European peers felt it had strayed too far into authoritarian territory.
Despite the increasingly clear evidence that Hungary has abandoned democracy, many conservative intellectuals in America have come to see the Orbán regime as a model for America.
- 'Viktor Orban has done a tremendous job,' said the president. May, 2019. What a disgrace.
These right-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán’s willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz’s authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it’s necessary to defeat the left- a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on U.S. democracy, using tactics eerily Carlson’s visit, a follow-up to previous pro-Orbán coverage, shows that this authoritarian envy is no longer confined to a fringe.
-> Authoritarianism, Hungarian style: To understand why the American right’s admiration for a small Central European state is so concerning, understand exactly how democracy in Hungary died. For roughly the first 2 decades of it’s post-communist history, 1990 to 2010, Hungary was a young but stable democracy. When Orbán was elected PM the first time, in 1998, he governed as a relatively conventional European conservative; when Fidesz lost the 2002 elections, a new prime minister from the rival Socialist party took over.
But though Orbán stepped aside, he and his followers never really accepted the 2002 defeat as legitimate.
When Fidesz returned to power after the country’s 2010 election, winning a 2/3rds majority amidst the Great Recession and incumbent corruption scandals, the party set about seizing complete control of the Hungarian state- turning it into a machine designed to subtly lock the opposition out of power without having to formally abolish elections. > > Orbán and his allies gerrymandered parliamentary districts and packed the Constitutional Court. They seized control over the national elections agency, the civil service, and over 90% of all media in Hungary. They used economic regulation to enrich themselves and punish their opponents- persecuting a major university, for example, until it was forced to leave the country altogether.
> “Hungary is not a democracy anymore,”.. "The parliament is a decoration for a one-party state.” Fidesz justified its power grabs by demonizing a series of outgroups and external enemies. If you read the state-aligned press, you’ll learn that only Orbán can save Hungarian civilization from the threat posed by Muslim immigrants, liberals in the European Union, the LGBT community, & the Jewish billionaire George Soros.
Orbán won reelection in 2015 & 2018, in votes that were formally free but in no sense fair. Fidesz benefitted from massive resources, backing from government-aligned media, & rules designed to tilt the playing field. >Though Orbán’s party won less than 50% of the vote in the 2018 election, it still won a 2/3rds majority in parliament- thanks in part due to *gerrymandering.
Hungary is seen as a textbook example of something called *“competitive authoritarianism”*: a kind of autocratic system where elections happen & aren’t formally rigged but are so heavily stacked in the incumbent party’s favor that the people don’t have real agency over who rules them.“The sad thing is that the government can do whatever it wants,” an activist told me.
-> Competitive authoritarian regimes survive, in part, by tricking their citizens- convincing enough of them that democracy is still alive to avoid an uprising. Orbán claims his government is just a different kind of democracy- he calls it * “illiberal democracy” or, alternatively, *“Christian democracy”- that’s being persecuted by Western liberals who hate its socially conservative governance.
> This democratic facade is easier to maintain at home thanks to a pliant press. What’s more surprising, and depressing, is that American conservatives like Carlson are choosing to help him out...
More,
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/8/5/22607465/tucker-carlson-hungary-orban-authoritarianism-democracy-backsliding
