Viktor Orbán delivers a speech during in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, Oct. 23.
Photo:
attila kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The
political project suffered such a whopping blow in this month’s midterms that perhaps you haven’t noticed the collapse of a big part of its accompanying intellectual project. Which is why recent events in Hungary, of all places, bear watching.
Remember Hungary? For a brief moment back in April, a certain kind of American conservative was gaga for the small central European country. Prime Minister
Viktor Orbán
had just won a stomping re-election victory and secured passage of a ballot initiative akin to Florida’s ban on age-inappropriate sex education in elementary schools. He had done so, America’s “national conservatives” raved, by rallying sensible and fed-up Hungarians against an intellectually dishonest, culturally outlandish left-wing elite in the European Union.
You might ask why American conservatives would care. The details of Mr. Orbán’s running palaver with Brussels are abstruse. In the broadest terms, Brussels insists Budapest adopt various legal and anticorruption reforms before disbursing billions of euros from various EU funds to the Hungarian government. Mr. Orbán resists, either as a principled defense of sovereignty or to avoid oversight of how his government is spending Dutch, German, Swedish and other taxpayer money.
From this unpromising straw, the American natcons tried to spin the political gold of an all-out culture war. Mr. Orbán encouraged them, with an assist (witting or otherwise) from the EU elites he claims to despise. Mr. Orbán’s strategic forays into social legislation, especially targeting sexual ethics, sparked feuds with leading European liberals, allowing Mr. Orbán to present himself as a victim of the elites’ cultural preening.
He picked a fight with billionaire philanthropist
George…
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