A
fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the
Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country’s constitution.
To
progressives across the West, this was disturbing news.
For
the bete noire of Orban’s campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orban’s
commitments were to halt any further surrenders of Hungarian sovereignty and
independence to the European Union, and to fight any immigrant invasion of
Hungary from Africa or the Islamic world.
Why
are autocrats like Orban rising and liberal democrats failing in Europe? The
autocrats are addressing the primary and existential fear of peoples across the
West — the death of the separate and unique tribes into which they were born
and to which they belong.
Modern
liberals and progressives see nations as transitory — here today, gone
tomorrow. The autocrats, however, have plugged into the most powerful currents
running in this new century: tribalism and nationalism.
The
democracy worshippers of the West cannot compete with the authoritarians in
meeting the crisis of our time because they do not see what is happening to the
West as a crisis.
They
see us as on a steady march into a brave new world, where democracy, diversity
and equality will be everywhere celebrated.
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To
understand the rise of Orban, we need to start seeing Europe and ourselves as
so many of these people see us.
Hungary
is a thousand years old. Its people have a DNA all their own. They belong to a
unique and storied nation of 10 million with its own language, religion,
history, heroes, culture and identity.
Though
a small nation, two-thirds of whose lands were torn away after World War I,
Hungarians wish to remain and endure as who they are.
They
don’t want open borders. They don’t want mass migrations to change Hungary into
something new. They don’t want to become a minority in their own country. And they
have used democratic means to elect autocratic men who will put the Hungarian
nation first.
U.S.
elites may babble on about “diversity,” about how much better a country we will
be in 2042 when white European Christians are just another minority and we have
become a “gorgeous mosaic” of every race, tribe, creed and culture on earth.
To
Hungarians, such a future entails the death of the nation. To Hungarians,
millions of African, Arab and Islamic peoples settling in their lands means the
annihilation of the historic nation they love, the nation that came into being
to preserve the Hungarian people.
President
Emmanuel Macron of France says the Hungarian and other European elections where
autocrats are advancing are manifestations of “national selfishness.”
Well,
yes, national survival can be considered national selfishness.
But
let Monsieur Macron bring in another 5 million former subject peoples of the
French Empire and he will discover that the magnanimity and altruism of the
French has its limits, and a Le Pen will soon replace him in the Elysee Palace.
Consider
what else the “world’s oldest democracy” has lately had on offer to the
indigenous peoples of Europe resisting an invasion of Third World settlers
coming to occupy and repopulate their lands.
Our
democracy boasts of a First Amendment freedom of speech and press that protects
blasphemy, pornography, filthy language and the burning of the American flag.
We stand for a guaranteed right of women to abort their children and of
homosexuals to marry.
We
offer the world a freedom of religion that prohibits the teaching of our cradle
faith and its moral code in our public schools.
Our
elites view this as social progress upward from a dark past.
To
much of the world, however, America has become the most secularized and
decadent society on earth, and the title the ayatollah bestowed upon us, “The
Great Satan,” is not altogether undeserved.
And
if what “our democracy” has delivered here has caused tens of millions of
Americans to be repulsed and to secede into social isolation, why would other
nations embrace a system that produced so poisoned a politics and so polluted a
culture?
“Nationalism
and authoritarianism are on the march,” writes The Washington Post: “Democracy
as an ideal and in practice seems under siege.” Yes, and there are reasons for
this.
“Our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” said John Adams.
And as we have ceased to be a moral and religious people, the poet T. S. Eliot
warned us what would happen:
“The
term ‘democracy’ … does not contain enough positive content to stand alone
against the forces you dislike — it can be easily be transformed by them. If
you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects
to Hitler and Stalin.” Recall: Hitler rose to power through a democratic
election.
Democracy
lacks content. As a political system, it does not engage the heart. And if
Europe’s peoples see their leaders as accommodating a transnational EU, while
failing to secure national borders, they will use democracy to replace them
with men of action.
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