What do Tucker Carlson and Viktor Orban have in common?
by digby
Tucker Carlson recently made a bit of a splash by adopting a sort of right-wing populism that a fair number of progressives found intriguing. I’ve been watching Carlson for a very long time and I don’t see anything but malicious trolling in virtually anything he does so I’m not the best judge of his “ideas.” Maybe this is the first time he’s ever been sincere about anything in his life, but I doubt it.
Anyway, I thought of these comments of his in a recent Salon article this morning:
I know you said you’re not trying to advocate specific policies, so let’s be a little more abstract. What type of society would you view as ideal, in terms of how a human being should be able to live from birth until death? What should the function of government should be in nurturing that human and protecting them from harm?
This is all a fairly delicate balance between freedom and coercion and central planning and organic growth. All the intentions that are inherent in life and certainly that are inherent in policy. OK, so there’s never any kind of bumper sticker that solves the problems. What I’m arguing for is a reorientation of the way we think about this stuff.
Formulation of policy needs to begin with a clear-sighted picture of what the goal is: What do we seek to achieve by doing this? What’s the final stage of awesomeness we’re hoping to get to? In the final stage, in my opinion, it is a society in which most families — which is to say married couples with children — can subsist and thrive to some extent on one income, because one thing that no one ever mentions, which is a defining factor in people’s lives, is raising your kids, and people kind of want to do that themselves.
There’s been a huge debate over how much money we should give people to hire someone else, usually from another country, to raise our kids. Without even weighing in on that debate. I would just make the obvious point, which is that we’re falling pretty far short of where most people would like to be, which is how can parents stay at home and raise the children? If you allowed people the freedom to do that, if you said, I’m going to give you enough money so that when you have kids, a parent can stay home and raise them while they’re little? My sense is that an awful lot of people will take advantage of that. An awful lot.
Like everything, it would be a trade-off. I mean, there are certain perks that you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home. I mean, I get it. OK, but I’m just saying if the average person has the choice, I sincerely believe that a very large number of people would take that option, and I think they should be allowed to. By the way, I’m with Elizabeth Warren on this. She wrote a whole fucking book about it. She wrote a whole book on this called “The Two-Income Trap,” and she made the case that when our society changed in such a way that it took two incomes to support a family, everybody got poorer and less happy. I agree with that.
“There are certain perks you get from working that you don’t get from staying at home.” Yes indeed. It’s called financial independence which is what freed women from having to stay married for economic reasons. But whatever. No biggie, right?
If you want to see the Tucker Carlson model in action look at right wing populist hero Viktor Orban:
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called for larger Hungarian families to combat the country’s low birth rate and shrinking labor force.
In exchange for all the baby-making, he’s willing to provide financial benefits and programs for women. Benefits include loan expansion programs, subsidies for cars, and for women with four or more children, no required income tax.
Related: These women are challenging Hungary’s ‘men in suits’ politics
“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West to this is migration. They want as many migrants to enter as they are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up,” Orbán said in his annual state of the nation address. “We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.”
Orbán and his wife have five children.
The World’s Marco Werman sat down with Kim Lane Scheppelle, an expert on Hungary and a professor at Princeton University, to chat about the motives behind Orbán’s latest pro-baby policy (this is not the first time) and how women fit into Hungarian society.
What do you make of Orbán’s announcement over the weekend that women with four or more children won’t have to pay income taxes? What’s that about?Orbán has backed himself into a corner and he’s using a way to get out of that corner that we’ve seen before. So the corner he’s in is that Hungary really has a failing economic model. His policies have driven, some say, up to a million Hungarians out of the country and yet he’s also come down very hard against any form of immigration. So, the question is: “How [can] Hungary maintain a labor force if it’s losing its population?” And his answer is: “Let’s get women to have more kids so that there will be Hungarians to actually hold up the economy.” Now, it’s all very familiar because Orbán has a terrible track record on women and so the idea that women are going to bail him out of this problem is something that I think is familiar to a lot of us who watched him in action for a long time. So, women are going to bear the burden of Orbán’s failed economic policies.
I mean, it’s obviously oppressive for women. Is Orbán also trying to create kind of, Hungarian human facts on the ground, kind of an anti-immigrant policy?Yes. Well, this is part of his policy to shore up Hungary for the Hungarians. I mean Hungary, like many of the countries in Eastern Europe and, for that matter, like many advanced democracies around the world, is having a declining birthrate. And if they don’t have immigration or some other way of bolstering the population numbers, they’re going to be a declining country and now that Orbán has come out so strongly against immigration, this is his way back. One thing I think it’s important to say about Orbán and his policies about women is that he’s long been an advocate of big families. He himself has a big family. This is something that very much comes with the territory of Hungarian nationalism. And right now, the group in Hungary that has the largest families are the Roma minority who have really taken a hit under the Orbán government. So it’ll be interesting to see whether his policy really applies universally or whether it applies only to the Hungarians.
How does Hungary’s treatment of women in 2019 compare to the Communist era?Well, in the Communist era, of course, women were recruited into the workforce and were actually promoted at much higher levels than they are now. So, in some ways, the Communist era was a golden age for women. Now, it was a golden age and it wasn’t — since it was so awful for everybody — having a great fate in a golden age means that you’re not so well-off. So, you know women were overwhelmingly all of the all of the judges, all of the doctors, some professions that we think of as relatively prestigious professions were actually completely dominated by women during the Communist time. Now, of course, they were dominated by women because they weren’t such high-status professions then. But still, women have really had a lot of education and a history of great accomplishment in Hungary. The post-Communist period saw women really getting knocked back into very traditional roles.
Job ads started being highly gendered. So, you know there would be an advertisement for a manager and it would literally say “we want a man for the job” or “secretaries with flirtatious abilities.” And those would be jobs for women. So this kind of segregation of men and women has happened throughout the post-Communist time and Viktor Orbán’s party has simply made that worse.
Right-wing “populists” are snakes and progressives should beware of being seduced by their alleged economic determinist rhetoric into ignoring their underlying agenda.
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