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.
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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.)
A major element of Orban's perceived badness was his alignment with Russia. He has more recently attracted attention in the US because a number of conservatives put forward Orbanism as a template for Republican governance.
A trait that Chavista Venezuela (pre-Maduro, who turned into an old-fashioned dictator) and Orbanist Hungary share is being illiberal democracies, a perennial favorite of people trying to challenge liberal globalism. You end up defending these illiberal governments because the alternative is to admit that your ideology is not fit for purpose (or you go mask-off authoritarian, but that's pretty unusual in developed countries).
Orban's a hero to his country, IMO. Of course the west and especially the EU dislike him. Their priorities run orthogonal to his own. Illiberal movements come and go but they rarely directly translate into political power, although you have guys like Martin Sellner trying to change that. In a lot of ways I wish we had an administration more like his own.
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