America’s Future Is Hungary: MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.
Posted by UnscheduledCalendar
America’s Future Is Hungary: MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.
Posted by UnscheduledCalendar
6 Comments
Also literal hunger
> The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeed” if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
-Jon Schwarz
Wait isn’t Applebaum famously the one who said America’s future was Russia in 2018, who then said America was the only thing standing between Russia and the free world in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine? I guess Hungary is an upgrade to Russia though, so there’s that.
> he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished
Ah, but have you considered that [this is a price worth paying to keep trans kids from getting the medical care they need](https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/opinion/hungary_normality_us-around-1995_gender-madness_woke_opinion_rod-dreher/)?
> The point is this: even in culturally and politically conservative states, American families are not safe from those who would use the power of the state to sexually mutilate children.
> It is a horror that would have been inconceivable in 1995 America.
> But now it’s normal.
> Can you imagine such a grotesque thing coming to Hungary? Probably not—and that is because this country is for now governed by people who refuse to allow this kind of monstrosity to exist. But Hungarians need to start imagining such things, if only to learn how to protect themselves from it, politically and otherwise.
> It is impossible to overstate how relentless the pro-trans propaganda is in American society, at every level—especially targeting children. In the summer of 2021, when I was in Hungary doing my first fellowship at the Danube Institute, I had a formal meeting with Katalin Novák, then the family minister. When she and her team came into the room, she apologized for being late, and said that Prime Minister Orbán had just informed the cabinet that Fidesz would soon introduce a bill into parliament that would outlaw LGBT information directed at children and minors.
MAGA would rather be poor and pure than rich and subjected to the scourges of black people, LGBT people, and liberated women.
Turkey is an apt comparison as well. I’ve been a Turkey fan for a long time and used to think of it (positively) as the “Muslim America.” Now I think America might be the “Turkey of the West” (derogatory).
Honestly? My doom and gloom view right now is that we are one worldwide instability event away from the final blow in the liberal democracy era. In the last 20 years, we had the 2008 crisis, Covid and the Ukraine War generating significant global instability and pressing down purchase power. Depressed purchasing power often leads to authoritarians getting to power with popular support.
Social media helps prop up those autocrats but also to prop up political resistance. Will this survive if something happens until 2030 that tanks the global economy again? The US just elected Trump due to egg prices and brown people walking around and the US was supposed to have the strongest institutions in the democratic world.