To research or not?

[minoanmiss]

Generally: world news. Specifically: Hungary. So I haven't been following the news lately because it feels like watching a beautiful mansion on fire. Yes, I feel guilty about this, especially since some of this news affects me and lots of it affects many people I care about. But, limited sanity.

I took a Lyft this morning due to ... events ... and because it's not a taxi I don't feel I can ask the drivers to turn off what they listen to. This driver listened to Democracy Now, which was educational and dismaying. After a smattering of dismal updates the broadcast focused on Hungary.

I feel like the uninformed American I am to find out that Hungary's leader, Viktor Orbán, is a despot of twelve years' tenure who has, among other things, gamed Hungary's electoral system so it's almost impossible to oust him. Hungary has also had a lot of anti-immigrant discussion in its politics, and passed many anti-LGBTQ laws lately (undoing and banning legal recognition of trans and intersex people's lived genders, banning queer content in narrative works and in school materials, etc).

Guess what? US Republicans think this is AWESOME. Mike Pence attended a "family" conference a couple years ago which was all about anti-abortion efforts. Tucker Carlson broadcast from Budapest for a week with Mr. Orban his special guest. and the CPAC is having their conference there in the next few weeks, again with Mr. Orban as keynote speaker.

At least that's what the broadcast said (I did confirm some details with brief Googling just now). I got all this from one source, of course. As a responsible citizen I should do some research. As a horrified person I kind of want to flee in the opposite direction.

Ah, politics.

Comments

[bikergeek]

I think we have enough to do to fight the fascists in our own country. There is, unfortunately, a growing trend of right wing strongmen taking over in many countries: Duterte, Bolsonaro, Putin, Orban, Trump.

[amaebi]

Yes, a blogger on LJ who had plenty of other difficulties on their plate wrote a lot about Orban's progress over the first few years. Periodically I worry about them and wonder how they're getting on: they were vulnerable in a number of ways.

[tamsin]

Hungary is a neighbouring country to mine and so is in our news quite a bit. What you wrote about Orban and his actions is true.
Can't comment on the US Republicans, but Orban used to be very closely allied with Poland's president Andrzej Duda who shares those views. Their relationship has been strained lately though because they have differing opinions on the Ukraine war.

[princessofgeeks]

Everything you summarized here is true. Don't feel like you have to research it.

What I can't figure out is what it's going to take for the EU to kick Hungary out again. Since he is breaking ALL THE RULES about being, you know, a DEMOCRACY and everything.

[oracne]

I didn't know about the Fox and CPAC stuff, but the rest is all true.

[trailer_spot]

Like other commentators above, I can also confirm that what you wrote is true. The Hungarian, as well as the US part. At this point it has become difficult to decide if the extremist right in the US inspires Hungary, or the other way around.

Orbán is also Putin's wedge to split the EU. Orbán and his cronies are also milking the European subsidy system.

[amberdreams]

No doubt Pence and co really love Putin too, and whatshisname in Belarus. I have to ration my exposure to the news these days as so much makes me unutterably and helplessly angry.

[jadelennox]

totally accurate, and he's also an islamophobe and anti-semite.

He is actually relevant here -- fox loves him, cpac will be there, and he's basically the inventor of the george soros antisemitic canard -- but that doesn't mean you need to research. Now that you've become aware of him you'll start noticing him everywhere.

(He's more relevant globally in Europe, where the question of how anti-democratic you can be before they boot you out of the EU is increasingly relevant.)

[sabotabby]

These shitheads all love each other. It's quite disturbing because it's not like there weren't authoritarians in the past but they used to at least sometimes disagree.

[anna_wing]

Generally Asian leaders (and polities), whether authoritarian or otherwise, can very rarely be characterised using the Left-Right axis that the US uses, or even the ones that different European countries use.

For instance, as President of the Philippines, Duterte only gets one term, which is ending very shortly, and there is quite strong competition to succeed him, and his worldview would not necessarily fit the US "right-wing" template either (he is not, for instance, religious, or particularly allied to the Catholic Church). Similarly, Vietnam and Laos are ruled by Communist parties, and therefore would traditionally be considered Very Left Indeed, but probably would not fit well into the US "progressive" ideological mould either.

[lemonsharks]

I was very close friends with a first-gen Hungarian-American a few years ago (we drifted mostly-amicably apart), so I have a bit of different perspective here due to learning about Hungarian politics from her and her Hungarian-immigrant mom.

To make a long and extremely complicated story long and oversimplified: after the USSR broke up, Hungarian politics took a hard reactionary turn to the right and has been spiraling in that direction, with resistance, ever since.

The legitimate national trauma of having been a soviet satellite state left a significant streak of mistrust in anything considered too-leftist, too-socialist, too-progressive in the Hungarian people such that their left-to-right political spectrum overlaps our own almost entirely, except instead of being a true horizontal overlap it's slightly ajar.

Hungary's right is more catholic; our right is more evangelical; Hungary came out of the cold war escaping the worst leftist authoritarianism had to offer; America came out of the cold war, as ever, resistant to politicians offering lower taxes and then delivering higher taxes. And then you were here and politically savvy for everything from GB1 to present so I'm not going to go over it.

We got lucky that Eugene Goodman protected the voting box and that Mike Pence grew a sprout of conscience and counted the votes on January 6th, even though he searched for justification to just not do the count. Hungary didn't get lucky with Orbán's influence on their electoral system; he'll be there until he gets bored or dies and Hungary will have to pick up the pieces.

Ultimately: nothing you can do will change the situation in Hungary and you're better off filing it away in the same place you file other items of, "well that sucks but I only have so many hours in the day"