Tucker Carlson has been trying to make a conservative hero and role model out of Hungary’s dictator, Viktor Orban. Carlson
broadcast his fawning Fox interview direct from Budapest, hailing Orban’s achievement of ethno-nationalism via dictatorship.
Orban is also a hero to Carlson because he has achieved what Trump could not—and what Republican state legislatures still want. Hungary retains the nominal forms of democracy, but elections are so rigged that the opposition can never come to power.
Orban has destroyed much of Hungary’s free press and dissenting organizations. This is what Carlson aspires to for America.
Carlson, however, is a little beyond the pale of respectability, even for many conservatives. So his Orban gambit needs a mainstream conservative validator.
Enter Ross Douthat.
In The New York Times stable of conservative columnists, who include the lame Bret Stephens and the stumbling David Brooks, Douthat passes for the thoroughbred. He’s something of an intellectual, with a cagey knack for making the preposterous sound almost reasonable.
In his
Sunday Times column, Douthat tried to rescue Carlson’s embrace of Viktor Orban by claiming an equivalence between the Orban dictatorship and the pressure that some conservatives feel to accept liberal social norms. Say what?
For the last few years, Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, has occupied an outsize place in the imagination of American liberals and conservatives. If you think the American right is sliding toward authoritarianism, you cite Viktor Orban’s nationalist government as a dark model for the G.O.P. If you think an intolerant progressivism shadows American life, you invoke Orban as a figure who’s fighting back.
Got it? There is an equivalence between the sovereign power of a dictatorial state and the diffuse power of, oh, the LGBTQ movement or the Black Lives movement, to pressure snowflake conservatives to be a little more tolerant.
Douthat then cherry picks polls and anecdotes, in a sly effort to claim that conservatives and moderate liberals are intimidated by campaigns for political correctness, that some even fear for their jobs—and this equates to the daily fear that one has living under a dictatorship.
Then, in closing, in a feint intended to rescue his credibility, Douthat dings Trump and Orban (just a flesh wound, sir), adding that the impulse to embrace strongmen sometimes unfortunately leads “conservatives to tolerate corruption, whether in their long-distance Hungarian romance or their marriage to Donald Trump.”
Nice touch. But it doesn’t rescue the tortured logic of the rest of the column. Given the immense cultural pluralism, and tribalism, of American society today, the idea that pressure for ideological conformism in any way is the counterpart of government dictatorship is pure BS.
We know what Tucker Carlson is. Shame on the Times for giving space to a cleaned-up
version of Carlson.
Oops, did I just engage in an act of ideological intimidation, like a liberal Viktor Orban? Douthat seems to be able to take care of himself, not to mention Carlson, Fox, and the entire Trumpian money and media machine.
