'4 Legs Good! 2 Legs Bad!' Conservatism

On Simplistic Thinking Masquerading As Moral Courage

This Newsweek piece about how Hungary’s Viktor Orban is no friend of America irritated the crap out of me. I thought I wouldn’t respond, but you know me. Anyway, it is a perfect illustration of the conceptual blindness of a certain kind of Western thinking. It’s just so bloody simplistic and self-righteous.

The conservative writer, John Mac Ghlionn, calls out Tucker Carlson and me for having praised Orban, in light of the fact that Xi Jinping just made Hungary a stop on his European tour, and that the Hungarian government is drawing closer to China. China is making big investments in Hungary. Mac Ghlionn concludes that Carlson and I, as critics of the Chinese government, must therefore be hypocrites. He writes: “Which begs the question: How can these men square the Orbán-shaped circle?”

Mac Ghilionn’s essay is a fine example of the cartoon logic that drives Western strategic thinking.

For one thing, I do not like the Chinese government, and though I very much like the Orban government, I am suspicious of how friendly it has become with Beijing. You know what else? So are some people in Orban’s Fidesz party. So what? What kind of childish mindset requires one to agree wholeheartedly with everything a political leader or party does in order to support them? That wouldn’t be a political party; that would be a cult. I am generally not a fan of Donald Trump, but I can and do praise the good things he’s done, and if I were back in the US, would vote for him this fall, even though I don’t have much faith in him. The alternative — Biden — is worse.

As I’ve written many times in this space, I adhere to the wisdom of the young Evangelical woman who told me in late summer 2021 that she intended to vote Fidesz in the early 2022 elections. When I asked her why, she said that she had big problems with this or that thing the Fidesz government does (specifically, what she said is a high tolerance for corruption), but in the end, she recognizes that the kind of corruption a left-wing government would bring would be much worse for Hungary. Specifically, it would capitulate to Brussels’ demands to open borders, normalize LGBT, even for children, and more. That’s the kind of corruption that is worse. People who live in the real world cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good enough. This is a lesson I first learned when I had to vote for the spectacularly corrupt Gov. Edwin W. Edwards in 1991, so that his opponent, former KKK leader David Duke, did not come to lead my state. Some corruption is worse than others.

This leads naturally to the question: what is it about the alternative to Orban that makes his embrace of China tolerable to conservatives like me?

I don’t really know Viktor Orban, but my impression — my strong impression — is that he is a man of the West. In fact, I think he is more devoted to Western civilization than most of his critics among Western leaders. His passionate defense of strong borders comes in large part because he sees borders as defending the West; his opponents within Europe (and in Washington) see this as a kind of bigotry, one that interferes with free markets.

Yesterday at a taverna in old town Rhodes, the young male Greek waiter said to me, “You’re from Hungary? I love Orban.” Why? I asked. Migration was the answer. So, ask yourself: if the choice is between a leader (Orban) who has uncomfortably close relations with Beijing, but who protects borders (and protects religious liberty, and the traditional family); or one who is all-in with China skepticism, but who backs open borders and the rest — which one is better for you, in your country?

China doesn’t give a damn what Hungary does with its borders, or with LGBT policy. That’s not to say that China doesn’t have and pursue its own interests. The Chinese are not altruists. It’s just that dealing with them, countries can preserve sovereignty in ways the West makes harder and harder to do.

Talk to African diplomats and lawmakers, and you’ll hear from them deep exasperation with the way Western countries constantly push feminist and LGBT ideology on them, as a condition of foreign aid. I invite you to spend just a little bit of time googling “LGBT”, “feminist” and “foreign policy”. Western institutions are as militantly evangelical about these ideologies as the Church was about religion in the Age of Discovery.

If your country wants and needs development aid, but wants to maintain cultural sovereignty, you’re going to look to China. To be very clear, Chinese support also has strings attached! But they are different strings. My point is simply that mindless cheerleaders for the Western establishment, like the Newsweek essayist, should make the effort to see what things look like to people outside the Greater American Empire.

If I were Viktor Orban, I would have serious doubts about whether or not “Western civilization” was going to make it. To be a conservative looking westward from the banks of the Danube in Budapest is to see countries that seem to have lost their will to live at worst, and at best have lost their will to defend basic sanity. No country, culture, or society that wishes to survive can have open borders, especially an open-borders policy that opens the city gates, so to speak, to foreign peoples who wish to destroy it. None wishing to survive can embrace the kind of sexual free-for-all that is now normative in the West. And so on.

Hungary is a western country, and a modern one, which means it has these problems too. Its birth rate is below replacement, like everybody else’s. Orban is above all a Hungarian patriot. He’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do to guarantee the survival of Hungary, and the Hungarian people. Period. There are no guarantees there, either. But ask yourself: if you were the prime minister of Hungary, would it really be unthinkable to conclude that securing Hungary’s future requires finding economic partners outside the declining West?

Newsweek Guy displays the same primitive mindset when he duns Orban a sellout because Orban does not support NATO’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war. It cannot be the case in the minds of ideologues like John Mac Ghlionn that the US and EU leadership are wrong about this war. I was in Budapest when the war started, and have lived there for most of the war period. I cannot think of a single critical thing that Orban said about this war that was not bang-on accurate, and that has proved to be so — even though Western cheerleaders hated hearing it.

As I have said all along, this is not because Orban loves Putin, or Hungarians love Russians. I don’t know what Orban’s feelings about Putin are, but Hungarians very much do not love the Russians. Russian military involvement on behalf of the Habsburgs crushed the 1848 nationalist revolution in Hungary, and of course the Russians occupied Hungary for forty years after World War II. But it’s like a Hungarian explained to me once: We are a small country that lives in the shadow of a large country, and always have. The bear (Russia) is a big part of our reality. We have to learn how to live with the bear.

Or, as an older Hungarian who fled Communism in the late 1960s, defecting to the West, told me a couple of years ago, as bitter as he is towards Russia for what it did to his homeland, today he has far more fear of what the West, to which he escaped seeking freedom, is doing to his homeland, via its open-borders mania and woke ideology. For him, the question is not so much, “Why isn’t Hungary a friend to America?” but “Why isn’t America a friend to Hungary?” That is, why does the US keep trying to break Hungary’s balls over migration, LGBT, and Ukraine? Does being America’s friend require you to open your borders, queer your children, and support a foolish and unwinnable war in your region — one that could easily spread?

You can judge people like the old Hungarian mistaken in their conclusions. That would be fair. But you must concede that their arguments are reasonable. That is something that seems beyond the imagination of Mac Ghlionn. He writes:

Orbán isn't the only China-friendly politician that Carlson and Dreher have lavished praise on. There's also Nayib Bukele, a man who Dreher said was—and one assumes, still is—"serious about saving civilization." The president of El Salvador may or may not be serious about "saving civilization," but he is certainly serious about China. Specifically, securing huge investments from China.

Oh for pity’s sake. Nayib Bukele inherited a country that had the world’s highest murder rate.

You know what the homicide rate per 100,000 in Baltimore was? Are you ready for this? In 2023, it was 46.15 per 100,000. In El Salvador, 2.4 per 100,000. He achieved this by throwing gang members in prison. Western institutions have wailed and gnashed their teeth about “democratic backsliding” in El Salvador, but ask yourself: how would you feel if you lived in El Salvador, and had seen your country go from being run by the violent gangs, into being a good place to live, to raise families, and to do business?

Would you really give a damn about Bukele’s deals with China?

I don’t live in El Salvador. I’m an American, and of course I care very much about the Chinese gaining a strategic presence in Central America. I’m against it. But guess what? I praised Bukele for his approach to crime-fighting. It is possible to support the policies of a leader in one area while disagreeing with him in another area. It’s what grown-ups do. To put it another way, if I say I enjoy the music of the Rolling Stones, that does not imply that I approve of the way Mick Jagger and Keith Richards live their private lives. Who on earth thinks this way? Besides John Mac Ghlionn, I mean.

I have no knowledge of El Salvador’s relationship with China, so I can neither praise nor condemn it. But if the Chinese are telling Bukele that he can do what he wants to do to stop the crime, and that in any case it won’t negatively affect their investments in El Salvador, but the US and other Western governments are complaining about “democratic backsliding” on the part of the man most responsible for returning the possibility of normal, peaceful, orderly life to El Salvador — well, can you understand why the Salvadorenos might be immune to such gripes?

More Mac Ghlionn:

Dreher has also been quick to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguably Xi Jinping's closest political ally. In truth, the writer has been praising him for well over a decade. Meanwhile, Carlson recently flew to Russia, sat down for a softball interview with the Russian president, then essentially went around promoting the virtues of living in the world's largest country (the shopping carts, I hear, are incredibly futuristic).

It's not possible to be pro-America, pro-Putin, pro-Bukele, pro-Orbán, and anti-China. It's a disingenuous and deceitful stance. It's akin to being a vegan with a penchant for porterhouse steaks. Viewers of Carlson and readers of Dreher's work deserve better. It's time for both men (and other Orbán sympathizers on the right) to be a little more consistent in their critiques.

Look, I think Putin is a bad man, overall. But if you click on that first link provided by young Mac Ghlionn, I praised Putin for having said these words:

“The preparedness of the so called social progress believe that the bringing a new conscience, a new consciousness to humanity, something that is more correct,” Putin said. “But there is one thing I would like to say: The recipes they come up with are nothing new. Paradoxical as it may seem, but this is something we saw in Russia. It happened in our country before after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks followed the dogmas of Marx and Engels. And they also declared that they would go into change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society. They were trying to destroy age and century long values, revisiting the relationship between the people, they were encouraging informing on one’s own beloved, and families. It was hailed as the march of progress. And it was very popular across the world and it was supported by many, as we see, it is happening right now.”

More:

“Incidentally, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of other opinions, different from their own,” Putin continued. “I think this should remind you of something that is happening. And we see what is happening in the Western countries, it is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind in distant path, the fight for equality and against discrimination turns into an aggressive dogmatism on the brink of absurdity, when great authors of the past such as Shakespeare are no longer taught in schools and universities because they announced as backward classics that did not understand the importance of gender or race.”

Putin’s speech, then, intersects perfectly with the message of my book Live Not By Lies, in which I quote people who survived Communism as warning that wokeness is a version of what they fought back in the day. If you follow the link that Mac Goof provides, you’ll see that the context in which I quoted Putin was like, “Can you believe that even the Russian president sees wokeness as a form of totalitarianism. Why don’t we?” In fact, the headline was “Putin Gets It? Why Don’t We?”

The second instance of my praising Putin was from a 2013 piece faulting me for saying Putin is right on LGBT rights and religious liberty. Author Cathy Young, a liberal emigre from the USSR, correctly cites me as giving “1.5 cheers for Putin,” and goes on to say:

Dreher concedes Putin is "a cynic"; however, he argues that at least in Putin's Russia, "religious institutions are not facing a threat from liberalism in power" as he believes they are threatened by the advance of same-sex marriage in the West.

I still believe that, though because of the experience of the Ukraine war, I would agree with Young from 2013, when she asked, “But what about the way religious institutions are threatened by servility to corrupt authoritarianism in power?” She is correct that I didn’t see that as clearly back then as I should have … but again, it’s not an either/or situation. Putin can have been right on LGBT ideology, especially vis-a-vis the Church, even though he was hostile to the Church in terms of imposing state ideology on it.

So, to return to Mac Ghlionn’s core claim:

It's not possible to be pro-America, pro-Putin, pro-Bukele, pro-Orbán, and anti-China.

Um, yes it is … depending on how you define your terms. First of all, what does it mean to be “pro-America”? Does that mean agreeing with whatever Washington wants? I think US foreign policy has mostly been a disaster this century, and has hastened America’s decline. As an American who considers himself patriotic, I would like America to be strong. The leadership class, across both parties, have acted in ways that have weakened America.

Because I am pro-America, I admire certain things that Putin has done (opposing wokeness, especially in sexual orientation and gender identity [SOGI]). Because I am pro-America, I admire what Bukele has done to get serious about fighting crime, in ways that we Americans have not (yet) done. Because I am pro-America, I have been encouraging for the last three years American conservatives to come to Budapest to study Orban and Fidesz governance, and take what good they can from what they learn, and see if they can adapt it to the US political landscape. One does not have to approve of the Orban government’s approach to China in order to support it overall.

I don’t know this John Mac Ghlionn. Maybe China is the be-all and end-all for him, in terms of defining the geopolitical Goodies and Baddies. It’s not that for me. In Live Not By Lies, I describe the Chinese system as totalitarian, which is to say, doubleplus undesirable. But I do this in an argument showing how we in the supposedly liberal democratic West are trending the same way, but cloaking our soft-totalitarianism in the rhetoric of liberty, progress, social justice, well being, and the like.

I wonder if John Mac Ghlionn can comprehend that the badness of Beijing doesn’t automatically place haloes on Washington and Brussels. Does he really think it is a smart and sustainable way of seeing the world, to judge entire nations on the rigid binary, by whether or not they seek relations with China and/or Russia?

I also wonder if he can comprehend the extent to which the constant hostility of Brussels and Washington to the democratically-elected Hungarian government — even to the point of an emissary from Washington (Samantha Power) coming over a couple of years ago to bring money to fund a Color Revolution! — is driving the Orban government into the arms of China.

That older Hungarian I spoke to about Russia and Hungary? He built a highly distinguished academic career in the West after his defection. Now, at the end of his career, in which he faced an utterly insane formal accusation from a woke student, he told me that unlike me, he doesn’t mind it if Fudan University establishes a campus in Hungary. He said Fudan is a highly respected institution worldwide, and anyway, after the radical politicization of Western universities, which he has lived through as a refugee from Communism, he would be more worried about an outpost of an Ivy League school setting up shop in Hungary than Fudan.

He might be wrong. But if you don’t at least stop to ask yourself why a man who once risked his life to escape Communism has come to believe this, you will keep making stupid ideological mistakes in judging the geopolitical situation — and keep hurting America’s position in the world.

Warren Smith, Professionally Martyred By The Woke

Remember Warren Smith, the high school teacher who rocketed to Internet fame by brilliantly showing his students how reasoning works — this, in a Socratic discussion of J.K. Rowling and her stance on transgenderism? It was an incredible short clip of a teacher at the top of his game. Well, they fired him this week. Click here to listen to him say how they did it: