Another day, another character in the headlines that it would appear quite literally everybody else is intimately familiar with except for me, so now I gotta learn more about him. May our flags fly at half-mast for Joe Kent’s promised 15. I hadn’t hardly a ghost of an idea of who Viktor Orbán was say a month ago. Sure as hell ain’t know of him back in 2010, when he was POPULARLY elected. And yet here I am, supposed to be having opinions, reactions, predictions… Or at minimum be able to recite a Xeet that I read.
Even before doing a shallow-dive, what I did know about him is that I can’t stand him, his friends, his party, his sympathizers, those who he represents, those who wished he were successful. This is all of course on account of my strict media diet consisting of liberal institutionalists. Hardly a chorus of glowing endorsements in my neck of the woods.
So, since I had to learn more about Orbán, here’s what I learned. It would appear that Hungary became the model of what some so desperately want to see in their home countries: an illiberal “Christian” democracy. Which raised the question (for me): what the H even is a liberal democracy? In sum, an illiberal democracy is one that does not have independent court systems, where the media is owned by supporters, and the electoral map is gerrymandered to such an extent that rural areas are given disproportionate voting power so that all those childless and alone city slickers stop forcing us into societal suicide. That societal suicide comes in the form of… allowing women in the workplace… Separating Church from State… Widespread suffrage… The gist I hope is gotten. If you are at all curious about the ways in which Orbán accomplished the above, please consult Anne Applebaum and Kim Lane Scheppele’s coverage. Unless, of course, you are sympathetic to the Christian illiberal democratic mission and lament women having jobs. In which case, I’ll refer you to Timothy Snyder. Unless, of course, you blanket distrust those that occupy the Academic Elite wing of the, in this case, Canadian Cathedral… I’m afraid not even God can help you.
I mentioned earlier that Orbán was popularly elected… Being popular, however, doesn’t make something right. And that of course cuts both ways. What I mean to say is that liberal democracies have shown their fair share of troubles. A failure to convincingly handle mass immigration, acceptably distribute the gains of globalization, and, ironically, treat the poor disenfranchised white religious “conservative”. What puzzles (infuriates) me is that the people driving toward illiberal democracy have no bones with tossing aside the great conservative thinkers who all arrived at the same (convenient in my case) truth: Don’t never tear down a fence till you know why it was built in the first place. That bit was from Chesterton. Tearing things down requires negotiating a social contract with the dead, honoring the accumulated decisions of people who are no longer here to defend themselves. That, from Burke. And even then, the dead, when alive, couldn’t fully articulate what existed within institutions. There is knowledge inside things that simply exists. Think of it this way, let’s say you wanted to get rid of grandma’s recipes. Even if they were written down, there’s gonna be something missing. Most of that from Oakeshott, the recipe was from me. And look, there’s something quaint about an idealist revolutionary wanting to burn things down to start anew. That’s easily dismissed by adults. But what’s particularly insidious in Orbán’s case is that rather than tear down the proverbial Chestertonian fence, they poured a Moscow-manufactured-and-supplied chemical agent all along and over them. The fences were still standing, after all. Elections were elected. Courts courted. Media… mediumed. The posts were just rotten. And when the posts eventually fell under the pressure, that was further evidence of the rottenness from the beginning.
Now look, I never would’ve imagined finding myself such a staunch defender of institutions. I spent enough of my younger years (I’m still young dammit) poking at fence posts, taking the odd hack or two at the thing. I suppose that hobby dies rather quickly once you see the goblins and ghouls appearing over the horizon (I don’t mean immigrants). Things I’d been seeing, conversations that didn’t add up, positions that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate (pardon the obliqueness). Maybe Chesterton and his ilk serve only as a motte and bailey that I (we, y’all) deploy when we don’t like the ways the winds of change are blowing. If that’s the case, then sure I’m not really conservative. But neither are they. To be continued…