The European Union’s only autocrat came to CPAC Dallas and sold American conservatives on a vision of a Western civil war.
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.
“The West is at war with itself. We have seen what kind of future the globalist ruling class has to offer. But we have a different kind of future in mind,” Orbán told the crowd. “The globalists can all go to hell. I have come to Texas.”
The Hungarian prime minister’s outreach to the American right is longstanding, intentional, and very well-informed. He has met with prominent conservatives in academia and the media, even offering state-funded fellowships in Budapest, and is quite familiar with the language and tropes of the American right. His speech contained deft references to their ideas, like attacks on defunding the police and support for a flat income tax, that he occasionally sounded less like a foreign dignitary and more like a GOP candidate for office. He repeatedly pandered to the Texan audience, calling Hungary “the lone star state of Europe” and saying “we decided we don’t need more genders, we need more Rangers; less drag queens and more Chuck Norris.”
If Orbán has been courting the American right for years, his speech in Dallas was a marriage proposal — one that seems to have been accepted. The dangers of this ideological coupling should not be underestimated.What Viktor Orbán told CPAC
Typically, foreign leaders who travel to the United States try not to get involved in American partisan politics. Addressing CPAC, an avowedly conservative organization, certainly doesn’t fit the mold.
While Orbán did pretend to be diplomatic at the outset, saying “we respect the government of the United States,” he also noted that “we are not the favorites of American Democrats” — and that the feelings were very much mutual.
