No Matter the Question, Hungary Isn’t the Answer
If forced to choose between Hungary and Sweden, I don’t think the pre-liberal Right is going to be happy with the choice the American people make.
The “post-liberal” Right seems to have found themselves a new beau ideal in the person of Hungary’s authoritarian strongman Viktor Orbán. I would like to offer my sincere condolences to the other contenders including thugs like Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro. That the competition included such throwback reprobates should tell you all you need to know about the crypto-authoritarians in the so-called “new Right.”
For a group that calls themselves “post”-liberal and the “new” Right there’s not much innovative in their political philosophy. There’s nothing new about tribalism and division. Using the state to reward your friends and punish your opposition is damn near the oldest political idea in the world (just ask Polemarchus). Their theories of trade find their roots in mercantilism, again an old and abandoned idea. And their ideas about immigration and multiculturalism seem to be echoes of millennium-old prejudices and bigotry. Whatever you call them, and whatever they wish to call themselves, it shouldn’t suggest that they’re moving forward.
Their ideas aren’t post-liberal, they’re pre-liberal. They aren’t the new Right, they’re a throwback to the nativist paleo-conservatives of yesteryear.
Any “conservative” who thinks Hungary is the answer to any question about how America ought to be governed is no conservative in my book. I thought we on the Right had immunized ourselves against the idea that the politics of small, homogenous European countries had any meaningful application to a Nation as large and diverse as ours. If forced to choose between Hungary and Sweden, I don’t think the pre-liberal Right is going to be happy with the choice the American people make.