Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 26
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I noticed that Scott Alexander recently published a political treatise entitled Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don't Have A Perfect Word For His Badness which ponders the thorny question where we draw the dividing line between democracy and dictatorship. The related discussion on the SCC subreddit is available here. I don’t claim to have the answer to this dilemma but I’m fairly sure Orban’s perceived badness in the eyes of his Western critics is almost entirely the result of the triggering factor that is his overt anti-wokeness. Without this there would be scarce incentive to even notice his actions.
The reason, I think, is that anti-wokeness is normally a fringe political phenomenon even in Central Eastern Europe (or the European former satellite states of the USSR). Anti-woke politicians do exists but they are, again, normally fringe and insignificant.
I’d quote observations from two commenters in the Reddit thread:
Orban was a culture war pioneer and very influential culture warrior. He wrote the playbook that Trump and his allies used, the anti-immigration stuff, the anti-woke stuff, etc. He funded think tanks across the world to spread the far-right populist propaganda. He spoke at CPAC and encouraged a right-wing takeover of the media.
Orbán imported all of his anti-woke ideology from the US. (It didn't really work because woke isn't really a thing in Hungary.) He did volume-boost anti-immigration somewhat (he took most ideas from the European far right, but he was the first mainstream leader to embrace them), it was mostly kayfabe though. The only thing he seems to have true convictions on is allying with Russia rather than the West (which isn't really popular even in postliberal circles).
Hungary is basically playing the same role for postliberalism as Venezuela for socialism: the country is going to shit, opponents like to point that out, and proponents feel compelled to defend it and pretend everything is peachy because otherwise they'd have to admit that every single attempt to make postliberalism the governing ideology ended detrimentally. (Plus there's the extra layer of attention he was able to get by abusing the EU's generous and somewhat naive veto/consensus rules.)
Well, at least in the US the answer is clear - where the DNC decides to draw it. And if that line looks like a gerrymandered district boundary in Illinois, that's by design. You can do every single thing that Orban did, and still remain a hero and a defender of Our Democracy, provided you did it in the service of and with approval of the Party. In fact, it won't be to hard to find an example for pretty much every item - maybe with minor tweaks - Scott charged Orban with, from recent proposals by Democrats, arguing this is absolutely necessary to prevent the death of Our Democracy.
Well, maybe not the child porn accusation - they used the accusation of holding secret documents instead. The pedophilia accusations came later, and did not result in search warrants.
I mean I am not to say Orban is a good guy. He's probably very corrupt, quite autocratic (not to the level where the moniker of "dictator" is appropriate, but he's no Voltaire) and likely a lot of bad stuff said about him is true, and he did not play nice. But the problem Scott has - and refuses to address it - is that in his own country, in his own state, in his own city, the politics is full of people who also don't play nice, in pretty much the same way, if not literally then directionally - and as long as they don't play nice to achieve the goals he wants to achieve, he'd been fine with it. That's normal, if politicians are not doing something outrageously stupid (which unfortunately is the filter not many in California politics pass), moreover, if they do what I want them to do, I wouldn't dig too much into how exactly they got there and wouldn't spend too much of my time on getting familiar with all dirt there is on every single one of them. I want clean politics, I prefer clean politics, but I know some amount of dirt is inevitable.
But to pretend there is some way to define "dictatorship" or any other term, so that Orban would fit, and Obama/Biden/DNC would not, and that if that definition exists, this is why the mainstream press is calling him a "dictator" (or any other term), is pure bullshit. It's always tactical, always motivated, always "who whom".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link