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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDoes Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future?
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/does-hungary-offer-a-glimpse-of-our-authoritarian-future
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https://archive.ph/Np12u
The Republican Party hasnt adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achievewhat, exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made great againyoull need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump, the Partys de-facto standard-bearer, except that nobody seems to have a handle on what his policy goals are, not even Donald Trump. You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, but this would reveal less about what theyre for than about what theyre against: overeducated élites, apart from themselves and their allies; wokeness, whatever theyre taking that to mean at the moment; the overzealous wielding of government power, unless their side is doing the wielding. Besides, one person can tell you only so much. A more efficient way to gauge the current mood of the Party is to spend a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as cpac.
On a Friday in February, I arrived at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort, in Orlando. It was a temperate afternoon, and the Party faithful were spending it indoors, in the air-conditioning. I walked into a rotunda with potted palm trees and chaotically patterned carpeting. Shabbat services were about to begin, and a minyan of young men, give or take, roamed around in maga-themed yarmulkes. The cpac dress code was big-tent: pants suits, sweatsuits, bow ties, bolosanything, pretty much, except for an N95. A merch kiosk near the entrance sold Nancy Pelosi toilet paper, gold-sequinned purses shaped like handguns, and Trump 2024 T-shirts in every size and color. Even the staircases were sponsoredone by Fox News and another by Gettr, a social-media platform founded by Trump-campaign alumni. If you aligned yourself with it at just the right vantage, you could parse Gettrs slogan, Making Social Media Fun Again! Otherwise, it looked like red-white-and-blue gibberish.
Political rallies are for red-meat applause lines; think-tank conferences are for more measured policy discussions. The American Conservative Union, the group that organizes cpac, tries to have it both ways. On Saturday, I spent a while in the main ballroom, watching a panel called Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border. Him referred to Joe Biden, the hair-sniffing dementia patient in the White House; the first her, of course, was Hillary Clinton; the second was Kamala Harris, who was lambasted as both an empty pants suit and a wily Cersei Lannister. That afternoon, Trump arrived, hosted a V.I.P. gathering featuring a spread of Big Macs under heat lamps, and took the stage, giving a ninety-minute stump speech to an ecstatic crowd, all but confirming his intention to run for President again.
The policy discussions were mainly tucked away upstairs, in conference rooms with a tiny fraction of the foot traffic. One panel, on European populism, was called More Brexits? The moderator, an American named James Carafano, introduced the first speaker: Miklós Szánthó, the director of a Hungarian think tank called the Center for Fundamental Rights. (According to Átlátszó, an investigative-journalism outlet in Hungary, the Center for Fundamental Rights is secretly funded by the Hungarian government.) Hes a real European, Carafano, a foreign-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said. I know that because I saw him in Europe!
*snip*
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Does Hungary Offer a Glimpse of Our Authoritarian Future? (Original Post)
Nevilledog
Jun 2022
OP
TheRealNorth
(9,497 posts)1. Well, there is a reason CPAC was in Hungary
History tidbit - Hungary was pretty much a willing ally of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He didn't need to invade them like Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland.