U.S. Conservatives Set To Applaud Viktor Orbán’s Paranoid Anti-Americanism

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a pariah in Europe and darling on the American right, is set to deliver an address Thursday titled “How we fight” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, two weeks after drawing international condemnation for a speech railing against the mixing of European and non-European peoples.

“Migration, which you could call population replacement or inundation,” Orbán said July 23 in Transylvania, Romania, to an audience of ethnic Hungarians, “has split the West in two. One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations: they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples. I could also say that it is no longer the Western world, but the post-Western world. And around 2050, the laws of mathematics will lead to the final demographic shift: cities in [that] part of the continent…will see the proportion of residents of non-European origin rising to over 50 per cent of the total.”

Europeans concerned about these demographics, Orbán continued, “are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race….Today the situation is that Islamic civilization, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realized…that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe….[N]ow the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West….The time will come when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us from there and integrate them into our lives.”

Orbán’s remarks drew an unusual amount of criticism inside Hungary, where in April he won a landslide election to a fourth term as prime minister. Hungarian Chief Rabbi Róbert Frölich compared Orbán’s words to various “onion-headed theories of race.” The Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities said in a statement that the speech “triggered serious concerns within the Jewish community.” And Orbán’s longtime envoy for social inclusion, Zsuzsanna Hegedüs, wrote in a blistering resignation letter that his “openly racist speech” was a “pure Nazi text worthy of Joseph Goebbels.”

In American political discourse, the speech was quickly boiled down to the essence of white nationalism, and lassoed around the neck of domestic conservatives. “A hero of the Trump right shows his true colors: Whites only,” went the headline on Dana Milbank’s piece in the Washington Post. Predictable (and predictably endless) back-and-forths ensued between domestic Trump critics and indefatigable Orbánologists. As I wrote a year ago, “The pattern is eye-glazingly familiar by now in the age of Donald Trump: Politician does or says something provocative…an appalled political class overreacts; the anti-anti brigades man their battle stations; and around we go, dumbly, until the next controversy.”

Mostly lost in this hubbub, however, are two interlocking points of policy significance. Orbán is stoking the possibility of dangerous instability on the European continent, in ways that have very little to do with skin color. And he’s doing so while promoting a paranoid anti-Americanism of the type that conservatives used to reject.

Like many of his most incendiary orations, the prime minister’s speech was delivered abroad in front of some of the more than two million ethnic Hungarians who live in the bordering states of Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Austria, and Slovenia. Those Magyars were left stranded outside of Magyarország after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon lopped off two-thirds of Greater Hungary’s ahistorically swollen land-mass after the end of World War I.

For Hungarian nationalists—Orbán’s base ever since he engineered his party’s decisive pivot away from liberal cosmopolitanism in the early 1990s—Trianon is the Original Sin, the crime perpetrated against the once-proud Hungarian nation by a vindictive and possibly jealous world order. Concern over Hungary’s Trianon-fueled fantasies of restoring old maps is why NATO made as a precondition of its first post-Cold War expansion that prospective entrants first enshrine their existing borders in treaties while also guaranteeing basic rights to national minorities.

The single most destabilizing thing Orbán has ever done has nothing to do with his controversial views on migration, or his kleptocratic corruption, or even his consolidation of power over Hungary’s shrinking civil society. Rather, it’s the law, passed a decade ago, g