Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, EPP Summit, Salzburg, 19 September 2018
In The American Conservative, Rod Dreher explains Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s efforts to preserve Hungary and to save it from the “Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology.” He writes (abridged):
Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.
For Orban (PM Viktor,) re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project.
Orban said that he wants Westerners and others who share these values to come to the Hungarian capital, where they will be free to speak their minds, and establish a base. “I’m trying to create a free place in Budapest,” he said. “Please consider Budapest as a kind of intellectual home.”
The man understands his small country to be in a fight for national survival against globalist, anti-Christian multiculturalism coming from Brussels and other Western capitals. How, exactly, is he wrong?
Put in terms of contemporary American conservative politics, it seems to me that Viktor Orban’s party and movement is what you would see if Sohrab Ahmari’s side of the Ahmari-French debate actually won a mandate to govern. Ahmari’s integralism — as distinct from French’s classical liberalism — is a very hard sell in the United States, which is a truly pluralistic nation.
Hungary, however, is far more culturally and ethnically homogeneous. As Orban told us, one of his goals is to make sure that the kinds of questions that are breaking multicultural Western polities never arise here.
Is he wrong to want to protect Hungary from the disintegration that comes with Western-style liberal identity politics? Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.
Read more here.
