QOTD:
He’s right. I could add a few more names to that list. Orban in Hungary, for instance who is getting a whole lot of love from certain quarters. This latest paean comes from Rod Dreher in The American Conservative:
For those with eyes to see, Orban’s moves only reveal the illiberalism of those on the Left who still think of themselves as proper liberals. They can’t, or won’t, see how they have discarded pluralism for woke hegemony, but Orban understands that, and is not prepared to play by their rules. With the Left having become so illiberal, and exercising hegemonic power across society, the only effective pushback to it seems to be right-wing illiberalism. The only conservatives who will be spoken well of by liberals today are those who surrender. The liberals — including conservative liberals (e.g., UK Tories and establishment Republicans) — believe that everybody accepting their view of the world is in the natural order of things. Magyar Man, for all his flaws, is an extremely tough and competent politician who is not for surrendering. If we in America are not to be absorbed by the Cathedral, we are going to need our own version of Magyar Man. Given how deep our own Deep State goes, it is unreasonable to think that a single political leader, no matter how brave and skilled, can turn things around. But at least we would have a fighting chance.
The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.
UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.
Well ok then.
If you want to read Dreher’s full screed, it’s easily googleable. But I think that excerpt gets to the nub of it. He thinks the left’s “wokeness” is totalitarianism so we need authoritarianism to stop it.
In other words it’s Stalin vs Hitler, pick your poison. Except that Joe Biden isn’t Stalin any more than Roosevelt was but there were plenty of Hitler-curious types who said he was.
We’ve seen this movie before.