WTH: Conservatives ❤️ Victor Orban?
Matt Continetti on "conservative nationalism," Reaganism & the Right
Three things from this week’s pod with Matt Continetti, in which there is sturm, drang, and some disagreement about “nationalism” and the Right…
There’s a dividing line in the GOP between Reaganites and Orbanites. And there’s leader to bridge the gap.
There’s an important part of the American Right that now embraces European ideas about nationalism, culture, and immigration.
There’s also an important part of the American Right that thinks the cause of Ukraine is a waste of time.
For 12 hours, a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) tweet graced the internet before being pulled down, with CPAC leadership explaining it was written by a low-level CPACker, with the boss in Australia. Here’s it is:
So… Ukrainians are fighting Russia — one of America’s major strategic adversaries — with no U.S. troops. Russia is attacking Ukraine with drones from Iran — one of America’s major strategic adversaries — and the U.S. is supplying arms for Ukraine to defend itself. This, to some self-labeled “national conservatives,” is a bad thing, a “gift” to Ukraine. Because, apparently, Putin is an ok guy.
That’s nuts.
But this is where part of the conservative movement, and part of the GOP, is headed. And the explicit evidence was CPAC’s extraordinary choice not simply to host Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban (one of Putin’s few backers in Europe), but to also head off to Hungary for another conference there.
Where did this all begin? Arguably during the Obama administration, when rule of law, respect for checks and balances and the odious “woke” era began in earnest. Incredibly, from the Right, however, the response has not been to right the ship of state, but to embrace exactly the tactics of the Left. The problem is not the power of the administrative state, it’s the power of that state *not* in the service of natcon ideals. And so on.
Not all Republicans have gone over to the CPAC side, and the party is roughly split. So who’s going to heal that split and actually stand up for constitutional principles and American leadership in defense of freedom? Good bloody question.
HIGHLIGHTS
What does Victor Urban at CPAC tell us about the American right?
MC: …the Conservative Political Action Conference. So it's been going on since about 1973, annual gathering of conservative activists. And normally heads of state from other countries don't come and address CPAC, much less ones as controversial as Viktor Orban. And I use that speech, it's kind of the entry way to explore the changing American right here at home. And what I found is that the American right today is resembling more and more it's European cousins in terms of their nationalism, their focus on the culture war, focus on immigration and lamentably in particular their foreign policy.
Why the foreign policy?
MC: The American right, since World War II, has typically stood for individual freedom and liberty, a strong national defense in furtherance of those aims overseas. Now about half the American rights still believes in that. It's about freedom, protecting the constitution, individual liberties, economic freedom, peace through strength. {W}e can call that the Reagan conservatives. But over the last seven years there's been this new energetic force, which we might call the Trump populists, which have a different view of the role of the right. They're much less concerned about the size and scope of the government. They're much more interested in defining the borders of the nation and of citizenship. They're less interested in economic freedom. They're more interested in using government to further their cultural ends.
And they're much less interested in a peace through strength policy that also has an assertive component of American leadership and freedom. And they're more interested in what they call America first, which is that America should not be involved in entangling alliances. America should really kind of keep to a nationalist unilateralist path. And America should respect the claims of a country like Russia when it talks about having a sphere of influence.
So where’s the GOP?
MC: So I'd say the party, the Republican party and the conservative movement are split between the Reagan conservatives and the Trump populists. And in today's right, Orban has become a symbol of the potential of the Trump populist wing. He's not Trump, right, but he's what I think a lot of Trump populists would like in a leader. And he shares those characteristics I just described.
So what’s the difference between the Orban right and the American right?
MC: I consider American conservatives, people who are interested in defending the principles and institutions of the American founding. The European right has always kind of stood for defending the inherited institutions of the monarchy, or the established church, or the nobility, right, the aristocracy. And we have none of that here.
But is the American right still the “right” you describe?
MC: What I think is interesting is that the group of conservatives who are most interested in Orban and Trump populism call themselves the National Conservatives. And over the summer they released a manifesto that was very revealing because one, it didn't talk about those universal ideas of freedom that you would find in the Declaration of Independence. And two, it had a very, very different attitude toward religion in the public square than most Americans do. Most Americans believe in religious liberty. I think most American conservatives believe that religious arguments should have a hearing in the public's sphere, but no religious argument should be privileged over another because we have freedom of religion and religious liberty and no establishment of religion in this country.
Well, if you look at the National Conservative manifesto, they basically toss all that aside and they say in their manifesto that whatever the majority happens to be, that majority's religion ought to be expressed and honored in the government. And that is a very European understanding. And that's why this battle between these two wings of the right is so ferocious and also why it's so important.
When did things start changing?
MC: Post-financial crisis, the world has changed. The left is becoming much more determined to implement it's agenda in non-democratic ways. And what's necessary then is to basically leverage the political power you have to undermining the cultural power of the left. And that's Orbanism. And that's basically the strategy that he is imparting to the national conservatives and the Trump populists.
Where’s the sense of unity with Europe coming from? And when did this start?
MC: I do think though the populist right, the Trump populists, have reacted to a similar crisis of legitimacy that you saw in Europe with the EU crisis and ramming down all these economic measures on the Southern European countries and opening the border to the Muslim migration in 2015 that many countries in Eastern Europe rebelled against. Of course, Italy's politics is still being rocked by that. That is during the Obama years, there was a sense that the bureaucracies and the judges were, and the president, the executive, were operating independently of any democratic checks. I mean, I'll just go through the list really quickly.
Pre-Obama, pre-financial crisis, if the race to replace Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion in the Senate, was waged on one issue, which was the president's healthcare proposal. Ted Kennedy's party, the president's party, lost that seat to a guy whose campaign ads featured him driving around in a pickup truck simply saying, "Stop this healthcare bill," the Democratic president probably would've stopped his healthcare bill, probably, or at least changed it so that, "Oh, I got to deal with this public rebuke, which is happening in Massachusetts even before the midterm elections." Obama didn't do that. They rammed it through anyway on this partisan vote.
Then Obama wins a second term and it gets even wackier. Obama says dozens of times that he lacks the authority to expand his Dreamers program, but then he does it anyway after the 2014 election, which was an even better election for the Republicans than 2010 had been. I mean, in 2010, they picked up a massive number of House seats. But in 2014 they held the House and they got the Senate, finally. Obama didn't care.
So Obama was the beginning of this fight? And the courts?
MC: Then there was a series of bureaucratic and court decisions that were happening at the same time. We were talking about our current Supreme Court and its efforts basically to force the Congress to legislate when it comes to what the EPA ought to do to combat climate change. The EPA prior to this past summer, was basically doing whatever it wanted regardless of what Congress was saying because it felt it had that authority. Especially for religious conservatives, the very touchy subjects of gay rights, trans rights were being utilized by the judiciary or being determined by the judiciary and the bureaucracy.
Late in Obama's term, you had the directive saying that schools should have gender-neutral bathrooms. It just came out of the bureaucracy. Of course, in 2015, you had the legalization of same-sex marriage with the Obergefell decision nationwide. I think that sent the right, the religious right in particular, into this mode of deep concern and panic, where one, they wanted someone who would be a strong man and fight back against this stuff and not listen to the liberals. Two, they wanted a stronger state in the form of their political power to go after these progressives who were furthering this cultural and moral agenda that they found distasteful.
[T]hink of it in terms of President Biden's decision to bail out the student loan program. He certainly doesn't have any authority to do that. Then they changed it. Once they realized that they would face a stiff legal challenge last week, oh, the bureaucracy just, "Oh, change it. Forget about that what we just said." That again, that gets to this crisis of legitimacy. These bureaucracies are just operating completely independently of democratic accountability.
So who’s going to wear the mantle of Orbanism in America?
MC: Take Ron DeSantis, who I think is the closest, and this will be a controversial statement, and I say it purely neutrally, he is the closest America has to an Orbán in the sense that he is going to take on the institutions of the left wherever he sees them. Now I think he's done it in a way that synthesizes a lot of Reagan conservatism with it. But, you take Disney. He'll go after Disney. He will go after vaccine mandates. That's been wrapped up in this as well. He'll go after the companies. People feel as though they're pushed into that type of corner. When they see a leader acting like this, they respond positively.
Is this end of Reaganism and American global leadership?
I would say the one big difference continues to be foreign policy. Here Orbán is interesting because he's a longtime ally of Putin. When Orbán went to CPAC, this gathering of conservatives over the summer, that actually was the final, I'd say, sixth of his speech. The final paragraphs were all about we need a strong leader to come in and force the parties, i.e. Ukraine, to the negotiating table so we can get an immediate ceasefire. I think most American conservatives still are not there when it comes to Putin. They still see reality for what it is. They're still supportive of assistance to the Ukrainians.
So what does the future of the GOP look like?
MC: Well, I think that Governor Youngkin of Virginia also is interested in doing that probably, but in a very different manner than DeSantis. So DeSantis, when he's not being a crisis manager, like he is as we speak with the Hurricane Ian aftermath, plays a tough guy. He plays that kind of Chris Christie, Donald Trump. Now Ron DeSantis, I'm a big wide shoulder guy, I'm going to tell you like it is. I'm going to talk back to the media. Youngkin is, I actually think more Reaganite in the sense that he's always smiling, rarely goes on an attack in the same way that DeSantis or Trump does, but yet understands that these cultural issues are extremely important to his coalition, and he's going to take on the educational establishment in Virginia. He's doing that right now and he also has a positive approval rating.
What's interesting about DeSantis is he's able to do a lot of different things. Just being able to transition from the culture warrior, sending Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard one week into, I'm the crisis management guy, I'm getting us ready for the hurricane. I'm serving up breakfast to first responders at the Waffle House. Not everybody can do that.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
David Frum tweet: CPAC “Salute to Putin’s war of conquest” (Twitter, October 1, 2022)
Putin annexes four regions of Ukraine in major escalation of Russia’s war (The Guardian, September 30, 2022)
Putin Didn’t Think He Would Fool Anyone (Atlantic, September 29, 2022)
CPAC backpedals on pro-Russia tweet as some U.S. conservatives back Putin (Washington Post, October 1, 2022)
Joe Scarborough tweet response (Twitter, October 1, 2022)
Viktor Orban: An Improbable Hero for the American Right (Continetti, WSJ, August 18, 2022)
Why Viktor Orbán’s Racism Matters in the U.S. (The Atlantic, August 3, 2022)
Victor Orban, Rod Dreher, and Me (Eyes on the Right, July 29, 2022)
The GOP is Viktor Orban’s party now (Washington Post, August 7, 2022)
Orbán gets warm CPAC reception after 'mixed race' speech blowback (Politico, August 4, 2022)
Viktor Orbán tells CPAC the path to power is to ‘have your own media’ (The Guardian, May 20, 2022)
‘Reason to worry’: Italy's Meloni holds a mirror to Trump's GOP (Politico, September 29, 2022
The American right’s future involves waging a 'religious battle' against the left, leaders say at a conservative conference(NBC News, September 23, 2022)
The Great Senate Stalemate (The Atlantic, September 28, 2022)
Trump’s GOP represents return to Old American Right (Straight Arrow News, May 20, 2022)
Is there a Right Left? (Commentary, May 2022)
How the Right Misunderstands Its History (National Review, April 28, 2022)
The Return of the Old American Right (WSJ, April 8, 2022)