Viktor Orbn laid out his dark worldview to the American right -- and they loved it

Link to tweet

https://www.vox.com/2022/8/5/23292448/orban-cpac-dallas-2022-speech-trump

About two weeks ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gave a speech in which he declared “we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.” On Thursday afternoon, he gave the opening speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, a bookend to former President Donald Trump’s closing address this weekend at the influential right-wing gathering.

That Orbán took the marquee spot at American conservatism’s most prominent jamboree despite his recent mask-off moment — one that led a longtime Orbán adviser to resign, calling his speech “worthy of Goebbels” — is a testament to his country’s place in the US right’s imagination. Under Orbán, Hungary has become for them something like what the Nordic countries are for some progressives: an idealized model of what they hope America could become. The most important difference is that the Nordic countries are firmly democratic, while Orbán’s Hungary very much is not.

Orbán was careful to reject charges of both racism and authoritarianism in his CPAC speech, mocking such accusations as “fake news” produced by “idiots.” Yet if you listened to his speech carefully, the dark heart of his project was plainly apparent: a conspiratorial belief that “globalists” were driving the West to the brink of cultural suicide, paired with an open acknowledgment that conservatives “cannot fight successfully by liberal means.” The mask was back on, but it was gossamer thin.

The purpose of the speech was simple enough: to tighten the bonds linking Orbánism with the Trumpism that dominates the American right. The Hungarian populist sees the potential in that connection. His closing lines called on conservatives across the Atlantic to “coordinate our troops” in the fight against liberalism, exhorting them to gear up to remove Joe Biden from office (“you have two years to get ready”). The stakes, in his telling, are the very future of our civilization.

*snip*