Where at least they’re “partly free”
The Guardian scans the cast of speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held this year, this weekend, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary:
A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.
Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.
There are, of course, plenty of venues for holding the largely Republican conservative event in the United States. The usual cast of young, low-level extremists at CPAC cheer their heroes, take selfies, and purchase “in your face, lib” merch. But the conservative elite needed to make a statement this year, even if it meant excluding the hoi polloi. The statement? “Partly free” is where they wish to take the United States (per Freedom House).
Orbán, like many American Republicans, has embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which involves promoting the belief that the white population is being deliberately reduced by leftist policies and diluted by immigration.
CPAC, which is organised by the American Conservative Union, did not respond to a request for comment on Bayer’s participation. Matt Schlapp, the CPAC chairman, complained on its website that: “Leftist media launched a coordinated smear campaign” on the event.
“Our mission is to increase freedom and opportunity across the globe, including for those living under socialist and Communist regimes,” Schlapp said.
CPAC proclaiming its embrace of “freedom and opportunity” in what has become an authoritarian state is like ingesting Ivermectin as an inoculant against charges it has rejected democracy.
Orbán said in his opening speech to the conference, “We have to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find allies in one another and coordinate the movements of our troops.” That includes ensuring the right has its own media and that shows like Tucker Carlson’s run “24/7”.
David Rothkopf responded on Twitter, “The main take-away from the CPAC hatefest in Hungary should not be the overabundance of racists or authoritarians, it should be that it underscores that the movement currently attacking US democracy is global in scope & represents a worldwide threat.”
“CPAC in Hungary demonstrates that, precisely as intended, Putinism is a cancer that has spread through the political systems of democracies worldwide and is now metastasizing,” the professor of international relations added.
Schlapp’s twinning of freedom and opportunity recalls the warning Steve Fraser gave Bill Moyers in 2014 about “the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom.”
“It is axiomatic in our current political culture,” said Fraser, “that when we say freedom we mean capitalism.”
In the aftermath of the first Gilded Age, Fraser added, Americans created a social safety net, a “civilized capitalism that protects people against the worst vicissitudes of the free market.”
But if Putinism is metastasizing in democracies worldwide, so is corporate capitalism. Conjoined, the result tends toward fascism. Democracy becomes mere window dressing and freedom a shibboleth. In Orbán’s Hungary, Freedom House reports, constitutional and legal changes made by his Fidesz party “have allowed it to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions, including the judiciary.”
American white nationalists are not tiptoeing around where they mean to take this country. By holding CPAC in Hungary, they are broadcasting it.
Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”
Nor are we fated to live in the authoritarian mockery of democracy Republicans, white nationalist authoritarians, autocrats, and oligarchs mean to spread across this continent.
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