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mariacallous · 7 months

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The former US president’s return is dreaded in many European capitals, but not in Budapest. Orban is openly praying for a Trump victory to give himself greater room to manoeuvre on the world stage and a more decisive role in the Western Balkans.

A warm reunion is expected on Friday when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meets Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. With the former president riding high in the polls and his Republican nomination all but assured after the Super Tuesday primaries, Orban could well be sitting down with the next US president.

“We would very much like president Donald Trump to return to the presidency and make peace here in Eastern Europe. It is time for a ‘Make America Great Again’ presidency in America,” the Hungarian leader said during his recent state of the nation address in mid-February.

Last week, at Turkey’s Antalya Diplomatic Forum, Orban reiterated his belief that if Trump had been in office, there never would have been a war in Ukraine, and that Trump is the only person who can broker peace and stop the bloodshed. “Trump’s return is a precondition for a strong and quick peace on the European continent,” not only in Europe but also in Gaza, where the former president “understands the conflict”, claimed Orban.

The Hungarian leader has invested a lot in this particular political love affair. Orban supported Trump even before his surprise victory in the 2016 general election, and did not turn his back on him when the Republican lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

In the last four years, Orban and Trump have become ever-closer political allies, praising each other for their right-wing, anti-immigration policies, and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder against progressive, woke ideologies. Orban even endorsed Trump publicly when multiple criminal charges were filed against him. “Keep on fighting,” he encouraged the former president on Twitter.

Now it’s payback time, many in Hungarian government circles are hoping.

“The political climate between Hungary and the US would certainly change if Trump was elected, and the pressure on Hungary would soften: ambassadors would not micromanage and differences would not be discussed in public,” says Tamas Magyarics, US historian and professor emeritus at Budapest’s ELTE University, alluding to the current US ambassador David Pressman, who is never shy of criticising Hungary’s democratic backsliding under Orban’s government, and who has also waged a fierce social media campaign that often mocked its members.

Gladden Pappin, the US-born director of the Hungarian Institute of Foreign Affairs, whose recent interview to Unherd was titled “Why Does the American Right Love Viktor Orban?”, is even more outspoken. “Let’s face it, Hungary is under quasi-sanctions from the US. The Democrats funded the Hungarian opposition, Washington cancelled the tax treaty and rolled back the visa waiver program. These are distressing and harmful measures. With Trump back in office, relations will normalise,” Pappin predicts in an interview with BIRN.

While the lectures on democracy and liberal values will probably cease, no one is yet talking about big deals or investments. Defence purchases from the US are on hold, especially after Hungary extended its lease on Swedish Gripen fighter jets instead of switching to US jets like the Czech Republic.

Big in the Balkans

Trump’s return to the White House is unlikely to elevate Orban’s status much on the world stage, but it could increase his influence in the Western Balkans, some in government circles expect.

“Peace in the Western Balkans could be high on Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” Agoston Samuel Mraz, director of the conservative Nezopont Institute think tank, tells BIRN.

Trump’s former Balkans envoy, Richard Grenell, could make a return to the US administration, bursting with ambition, he predicts. “A lasting peace – a peace agreement between Serbia and Kosovo – could be a historic achievement for Trump, who wants to leave his mark on history,” says Mraz.

Orban’s expertise and close personal ties with most of the region’s political leaders could prove invaluable to this effort, while he could even act as a go-between between Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and a Trump administration.

Playing to Orban’s strengths is the conviction that democratic values will take a back seat as Trumps follow a similar realpolitik– and transaction-based strategy to the Hungarian government, which looks to prioritise business deals over anything else.

A diplomatic plus for the Hungarian government is that the US presidential election will take place during Hungary’s six-month stint as president of the Council of the EU. As one the few European leaders who has a direct channel to Trump, Orban could gain some extra heft from this in EU political circles, suggests Mraz.

Dragon in the room

A potential stumbling block to all this is China. In 2023, China became the largest foreign investor in Hungary with the arrival of the world’s second biggest electric carmaker BYD and leading battery manufacturer CATL. Orban openly promotes the idea that Hungary, as an EU and NATO member, could form a “meeting point” of Western and Eastern businesses.

Some experts in Hungary wonder how far Trump would be prepared to tolerate such an idea. Yet those consulted by BIRN insist that a “pragmatic approach” will eventually win out. Mraz from the Nezopont Institute is counting on “perhaps a few rough months in the beginning”, but does not believe that Hungary’s friendship with Beijing will be a major problem in the long run.

Magyarics also plays down the potential danger, arguing it is rather Berlin and German industry that have the most to fear, not Budapest. “If Trump had introduced a 50 per cent tariff on Chinese products, as he promised in 2016, he would have lost most of his voters. The US, like Europe, cannot completely cut itself off from China. But if there is pressure on Europe to align itself with the US, it will be a problem for Germany and Brussels, not for Hungary,” Magyarics says.

Pappin, the director of the Hungarian Institute of International Relations, shares this optimism. “Trump’s main agenda will be to rebuild US industry. He is a dealmaker and will not put pressure on other countries,” Pappin says with conviction.

Yet he also admits it is too early to predict what a Trump 2.0 foreign policy will look like exactly. “The world has become much more complex than it was in 2016, when Trump was governing in peacetime. But it is almost certain that the main focus will be on Ukraine, the Middle East and Asia,” he says.

For Europe, the biggest challenge will not be China, but how or whether to continue financing Ukraine in its war with Russia. “The US pocketbook will not be open forever,” Pappin warns, referring to diminishing US aid to Kyiv.

Shared Heritage

The policies Trump will campaign on are currently being drafted with the help of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington DC-based conservative think tank that also plays a central role in US-Hungarian relations.

Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, is set to host Orban for a panel discussion on Thursday, the day before his meeting with Trump. Heritage, which is positioning itself as a pro-Trump think tank, is already training civil servants for a future Trump administration, with rumours that up to 12,000 bureaucrats will be laid off. And pro-Hungarian government organisations, such as the Centre for Fundamental Rights and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) training centre, are regular guests of Heritage.

Orban’s political director, Balazs Orban (no relation to the prime minister), who also acts as a key foreign-policy adviser, spent last week touring Washington DC, including the Heritage Foundation, while promoting an English translation of his new book, Hussar Cut – The Hungarian Strategy for Connectivity.

Budapest will also again host in April the European iteration of the Republican Conservative Action Conference, or CPAC, one of the largest international gatherings of conservative to far-right thinkers and politicians. “Hungary’s soft diplomacy is strong, the country is back on the map,” reckons Pappin.

Likewise, during the US election campaign, Hungarian campaign advisors could share know-how with Republican colleagues who are mainly interested in how to create “effective government” that will ensure long-term governance and a sufficient majority. “The Republicans are aware that it is not enough to promise lower taxes, more needs to be done to protect conservative values and traditions,” says Pappin.

In fact, Orban shared his playbook for power at the CPAC conference in Budapest in 2022, which to many critics sounded like an autocrat’s guide to power. Advice included – among other things – building a strong media empire to control the narrative, creating (or rather taking over) institutions, and building a strong national and international conservative community. All these are measures that have led inexorably to the eradication of much political competition in Hungary and a highly polarised society.

Of course, there are legions of critics in Hungary who warn about Orban putting all his eggs in one basket, and if Trump loses the election in November, Hungarian foreign policy and wider diplomacy could find itself in a dark hole. With Biden (or any other Democrat) in the White House, US-Hungarian relations would sour even further, while Orban could even lose friends in the Republican camp as it jettisons baggage and looks for fresh faces to reinvigorate the party.

“In politics you have to take risks, just like Orban did in 2016,” says Magyarics. “It worked then; it could work this time.”

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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In 2016, voters on both sides of the Atlantic shocked the political establishment by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump. In the eyes of their critics, these movements represented the resurgence of dangerous forms of populism and nationalism. Combined with earlier “nationalist-populist” victories in central Europe, and rising support for populist parties elsewhere, commentators at the time predicted—or, in most cases, feared—that a populist wave could soon sweep across the West and beyond.

Four years later, such a wave has not materialized, though populism has hardly disappeared. Andrzej Duda recently won reelection in Poland, while Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has held on to its supermajority in parliament, and populist parties represent significant voting blocs in legislatures around the world. After a three-year interlude, the United Kingdom has moved forward with Brexit under the premiership of Boris Johnson.

Today, as another U.S. presidential election approaches, it is worth taking stock of the transformations that have—and have not—occurred within American conservatism during the last four years. If Trump goes down to defeat this November, some will suggest that any attempted reconfiguration of the American Right provoked by his 2016 election was a misbegotten effort, and that, after a four-year hiatus, global liberalism can now safely resume. But a closer examination of right-wing populism’s trajectory, both within and outside the United States, suggests that such a return to Bush-era conservatism is unlikely. Regardless of what happens in the November election, the gaps between conservative ideology and practical realities will continue to push right-wing parties in postliberal directions and will continue to favor political, if not necessarily partisan, realignment.

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Michael Lind has described the situation as a new class war. “A transatlantic class war has broken out simultaneously in many Western countries,” he writes, “between elites based in the corporate, financial, government, media, and educational sectors and disproportionately native working-class populists. The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and outsiders.”3 Lee Drutman’s much-discussed analysis of the 2016 electorate in the United States indicates how this reconfiguration has begun to unfold. Comparing the social and economic views of voters for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Drutman found, not surprisingly, that traditionally conservative voters favored Trump and traditionally liberal voters favored Clinton. What propelled Trump to victory was his three-to-one win over Clinton among populist voters—those liberal (i.e., Left) on economic issues and conservative on social questions and matters of identity. Most strikingly, populists made up 28.9 percent of the American electorate in 2016, whereas libertarian voters—those conservative on economics and Left or liberal on social questions—were only 3.8 percent of the electorate.4

It was Trump’s performance among the large number of populist voters and Trump’s disregard of libertarians that shocked the American Right in particular. Ever since Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley patched together “fusionist” conservatism in the 1950s and ’60s, the American Right has combined social and cultural traditionalism with a broadly libertarian economic outlook. The terminology has long been confusing, as American conservatives have typically held views called liberal or neoliberal in the European context: they argue for a small state with minimal intervention in the private sector; they favor (at least in theory) the privatization or elimination of many government services; and they are suspicious of public benefits as well as public services, but they make an exception for a strong military. This alliance was driven by the turn of the Democrats toward the Left, although the Democratic Party had previously been home to socially conservative Catholic immigrants who favored the corporatist agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s.

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One additional factor is needed before explaining how the Republican Party and American conservatives responded to Trump’s victory. Tocqueville was correct when he observed that America was a society full of associations, with citizens constantly forming new groups to push for political and social changes of every variety. Over the second half of the twentieth century, however, many of these associations changed from organic expressions of citizen concern to large foundations which advanced the agendas of their donors. On the right, this change meant that conservative think tanks, activist groups, and the like adopted an almost universally libertarian viewpoint—as the donors endowing these foundations held libertarian views on economics—albeit under the banner of “fusionism.” Consequently, at typical conservative conferences for university students, socially conservative students are imbued with libertarian free market doctrines (though rarely any serious empirical study of modern markets and firms).

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The end of the Cold War and the success of Bill Clinton’s neoliberal presidency—during which he incorporated welfare reform, free trade, and stricter criminal justice policies into the Democratic platform—convinced libertarians and neoliberals on the right and left that their moment was at hand. The Republican Party came to power in the U.S. Congress in the 1994 elections on a mission to slash government spending and welfare benefits. “The era of big government,” said Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union, “is over.” While the GOP did not achieve all its dreams (it had also hoped to eliminate numerous federal agencies like the Department of Education), free trade agreements such as nafta and Chinese accession to the WTO were signed with bipartisan support. During this period, the United States conceived of a future economy that would combine the monetization of internet technology and a transition from heavy manufacturing employment to a service-sector economy (hospitality, etc.). With a few exceptions, American conservatives had little or nothing to say about this change, even as the manufacturing core of the American economy was hollowed out. Fusionist conservatives had outsourced the economic portion of their thinking to libertarians, and they mostly professed their desire to “allow market forces to work.”

In the absence of an economic policy that would help middle- and working-class Americans, however, conservatives’ insistence on conserving traditional family structures became hollow and moralistic. Many otherwise socially conservative black and Hispanic voters have avoided the Republican Party for precisely this reason. But socially conservative white voters, even those whom Republican economic policies do not help, have stayed with the party in the hopes that Republican presidents would appoint socially conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts. A tipping point during the 2016 campaign was Trump’s decision in May of that year to release a list of possible Supreme Court picks in order to reassure pro-life voters of his sympathy with socially conservative causes.

Yet Trump’s appointees have largely disappointed social conservatives with their recent rulings. It seems increasingly clear that, over a period of four decades, the conservative legal movement’s primary success has been to keep Republican voters engaged in a Sisyphean task. America’s underlying liberalism, as Adrian Vermeule put it recently, has meant that “in critical cases, involving central commitments of the unwritten constitution, it is highly likely that one or more of the middling conservative justices” will defect.5 Conservatives have pinned their hope on institutions designed to fail them in critical moments.

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Following the shock of 2016, American conservatives have divided into three main categories: (1) those who opposed Trump, still oppose him, and hope to regain control of the Republican Party on the standard pro-business, laissez-faire platform of recent decades; (2) those who were initially skeptical about Trump but have rallied around the cause of nationalism; and (3) those who have used the occasion of the Trump presidency to push for a new Right. Let us take a brief look at these three groups.

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The great hope of the Never Trumpers seems to be that a Trump loss in November, especially a decisive one, will revive their fortunes within the Republican Party. But their political prospects seem limited even in this scenario. Despite advertising themselves as responsible centrists, they have shown essentially zero interest in serious policymaking, focusing almost entirely on Trump’s character, personal scandals, their preferred vision of “American values,” and so on. Meanwhile, the few areas of potential bipartisan collaboration have shifted, for the foreseeable future, mainly to issues of industrial policy and technological competition with China—issues the Never Trumpers have totally ignored, both during the last few years and throughout their entire careers. It was Republicans like Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley who recently cosponsored the American Foundries Act with Chuck Schumer, for example. And now that Democratic nominee Joe Biden has made issues like industrial policy and “Buy American” key aspects of his campaign, any Republican cooperation with a Biden administration will likely be led by the economic populists. The Never Trumpers are simply irrelevant on these issues, and their actual records when in government remain glaring liabilities for anyone associated with them. Donors and media outlets might have some use for them, as they apparently do today, but neither the Biden administration nor the post-Trump Republican leadership are likely to have much interest in these figures.

Unlike the Never Trumpers, the second group of conservatives have embraced Trump’s “nationalist” rhetoric, but they have otherwise left traditional (anti-statist) American conservatism intact. Among voters, these were Americans who gravitated to Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” along with immigration restrictions and a rejection of globalism in economic and foreign policy. Some conservative intellectuals embraced the nationalist framework from the beginning, such as Michael Anton, whose article “The Flight 93 Election” starkly contrasted the options of Trump and Hillary Clinton. Writing in 2016 at the ironically titled blog Journal of American Greatness under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus (a blog to which I contributed as well), Anton excoriated “checklist conservatives” for having stuck with free market ideology and neoconservative foreign policy even in the face of repeated failures. This group of nationalist conservatives have congregated around the Claremont Institute and its Claremont Review of Books and affiliated publications. Aside from becoming generally more nationalist on foreign and immigration policy, however, this group has had little to say about the implications of broader political realignment.

In summer 2019, the Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony launched a conference in Washington under the name “National Conservatism,” aiming to gather intellectuals and politicos who reject the Never Trump framework. Hazony’s own defense of nationalism, published in the 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, is itself sui generis. In Hazony’s account, nations are the permanent opposition to empires, against which they always find themselves locked in struggle, though it is difficult to fit into this framework nations that became or acquired empires (what would anti-imperial nationalism say about Algeria, for example?). Hazony’s view of nations is based heavily on the Old Testament and the experience of Israel and England, as well as a peculiarly English view of conservatism as subrational and traditionalist. National Conservatism is also markedly Protestant in an old-fashioned way, as Hazony has promoted the view that Henry VIII’s actions constituted the first Brexit in resistance to ecclesiastical imperialism. While openly aligning itself with European populists and nationalists, however, National Conservatism has had little to say about the sources of continental right-wing thought, from Roman law to the Catholic Church, or about the conservative use of the state.

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The difficulty facing National Conservatism, however, is that it is primarily oriented toward rethinking conservatism itself rather than thinking primarily about the challenges of contemporary politics. National Conservatism and (anti-Trump) Principled Conservatism are both arguments over the content of conservatism. In the Anglo-American context, National Conservatism, as Hazony frames it, highlights historical empiricism (or traditionalism), nationalism (i.e., against imperialism), religion, and limited executive power. While the “nationalism” element of National Conservatism is transferable to other countries, historical empiricism and limited executive power are not the most pressing political concepts, particularly in times of economic crisis and emergency.

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Thus most of the conservative activists wearing MAGA hats at Trump rallies or conservative political conventions are simply anti-immigration libertarians. Talk to them about the need for the state to support domestic manufacturing, or the need to boost family formation through a Hungarian-style benefit program, and they will probably call you a socialist. In general, aside from opposition to immigration and support for the American military, they have no vision of how the government is to be used at all. In different circumstances, they would revert to an anti-government stance along with opposition to increases in federal spending.

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The third group of conservatives are those who take Trump’s election, Brexit, and the rise of populist political movements in Europe to demonstrate that the configuration of political ideologies immediately prior to 2016 had fallen out of step with conditions on the ground. As it is to this group that I myself belong, I transition here from describing the circumstances of American conservatism to outlining, however briefly, an argument for this vision of the Right.

American conservatism has been anti-statist since it coalesced in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansionary New Deal during the Great Depression, and particularly in its formulation after World War II. Even among conservatives who are not anti-statist per se, hostility to and skepticism of the federal government runs deep. The state is considerably less visible in daily life in America than elsewhere: health care is privately administered, public universities are not free, taxes are not suffocating, and labor is more lightly regulated. Yet most American conservative intellectuals, activists, journalists, think tank staff, and the like still act as though the primary enemy is the federal government, or use alarming rhetoric about taxation that has not been changed since the days of much higher tax rates before Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 and 1986.

From the standpoint of the postliberal Right, the liberal view of the state as a keeper of the peace and preserver of individual liberties—the view of most American conservatives before Trump—is not an adequate answer to the present situation. A correction in the direction of the state is needed. On this point the American Right has much to learn from the European Right. And as discussed above, the constituencies that delivered the Republicans to power in 2016 would likely agree. According to a major March 2019 survey of U.S. adults, pluralities of respondents favor increased federal spending in almost every category: education, veterans benefits, rebuilding highways and bridges, Medicare, environmental protection, health care, scientific research, Social Security, assistance to the needy, domestic anti-terrorism, military defense, and assistance to the needy in the world. Only in the category of assistance to the unemployed did respondents favor keeping spending the same (43 percent) rather than increasing it (31 percent).6 Trump’s victory additionally suggests that there is a majority of Americans who favor increased state intervention to align economic production with the national interest, and who favor an end to the increasingly punitive and destabilizing form of cultural progressivism dominant at present, and a correction in favor of the family.

The way to view this movement is that a maintenance or increase of state power in the United States is going to continue. The question is simply whether the Right is willing to use power when it has access to it, and use it for the sake of the common good. Twentieth-century conservatives’ devotion to unregulated markets and libertarianism has now contributed to a series of financial crises, the loss of U.S. manufacturing, and a completely demoralized society. Yet many conservatives continue to speak as though libertarianism is the solution.

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If we consider the policy areas that can and should drive political change in the United States, two areas stand out for the new American Right: family policy and industrial policy. On the first, merely speaking about the cultural pressures that families face, as American conservatives have typically done, is not enough. Too many families cannot afford children, and all the factors hindering the choice to raise children are only becoming exacerbated in the post-Covid-19 world. The United States has the fiscal resources for a family policy, like that pioneered in Hungary and elsewhere, that would meaningfully support the formation of families—and the creation, for conservatives, of a stable electoral base. In the fall 2019 American Affairs, I outlined what a FamilyPay proposal should look like in the United States, centered on an annual $6,500 benefit for married couples with one child, $11,500 for two, and so on. As the response to coronavirus shows, rapid political change is possible under extreme circumstances, and the Right must be ready to go with spending plans that buoy American families during a time of severe economic distress.

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The second area of advance in conservative thinking concerns industrial policy. In the United States, industrial policy largely disappeared from public discourse after the end of the Cold War and the worldwide trend toward liberalization. During that time, though, the United States arguably implemented a different kind of industrial policy—of moving labor offshore and transitioning to a digital and service-sector economy. Since 1990, China in particular has rapidly increased its share of value-added in high-tech manufacturing, while U.S. manufacturing productivity growth has stalled. American companies have become less innovative, not more; they do less investment, not more; and many spend a significant portion of their profits boosting their own stock prices. The result is that the number of low-wage, low-productivity service sector jobs has increased, while many critical manufacturing sectors have slumped.

Politicians like Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton, in particular, are putting industrial policy back on the map, arguing that national security requires us to maintain industrial capacity, not only through Trump-style trade actions but through directing American investment toward strategic sectors. Government reports from Rubio’s office have emphasized the need to counteract China’s plan to dominate world manufacturing by 2025, a view which has since become something of a bipartisan consensus. While industrial policy has often been thought to be more appropriate for developing economies, the frightening reality is that Western economies are or soon will be merely “developing” compared to Chinese advances in 5G communications, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. The coronavirus crisis has also highlighted American dependence on Chinese-manufactured pharmaceuticals and medical equipment; the pressing need for an American industrial policy can no longer be ignored.

Moreover, the postliberal priorities of industrial policy and family policy are complementary. A comprehensive family policy will give statesmen on the right the stability from which to implement an ambitious industrial policy (and pursue concomitant goals of stronger labor policy and workforce skills development).

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What the Right has not yet found is an ideology through which to integrate these elements of a new politics that takes advantage of the state for the sake of the common good. Indeed, the Right has implausibly convinced itself that modern conservatism is not an ideology at all. As the reaction against liberal democracy’s system of separations implies, however, majority or potentially majority constituencies across the West want their nations to be integral wholes: to have control over their borders, an economy put in the service of the common good, the ability to raise successful families, and the capacity to maintain their strategic advantage in the face of rising adversaries.

The discovery in 2016 of voters with morally right-wing and economically “statist” views has been mirrored elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, this group turned out in force, both in the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the December 2019 elections that were in effect a second referendum on Brexit. The same voter group has kept Victor Orbán in power in Hungary, and has established and expanded a right-wing majority in Poland—most recently sending Andrzej Duda to a second presidential term, even in the face of a concerted international campaign to delegitimize his election in advance. Countries previously thought to be immune to populism, like Spain, show growing movements in this direction. Italy has grown even cooler toward the European Union since the EU effectively hung it out to dry during the Covid-19 crisis earlier this year. And while the French Right is politically divided, a union of right-wing forces there would be politically formidable. While the circumstances are different, each of these changes follows a similar path. At some point along the way, an enterprising right-wing party realizes that liberalism has become an exhausted ideology—exhausted because it is incapable of clearly articulating what the common good is, and incapable of inspiring the loyalty and shared sacrifice that nation-states require to function.

Everywhere that the Right is successful, it is shifting toward a postliberal political stance to reintegrate society, economy, and the state. To do so, it must begin with a base of socially conservative voters, since voters split more strongly on social issues than on economic ones. Instead of trying to turn these voters into economic liberals, the Right should give them what they want: an economy oriented toward the nation by employing the means of state, and a society that is supportive of family life. Internally, this move will require the Right to change itself markedly. However important the traditions of Anglo‑American conservatism may be for some strains of conservatism, the moment is one in which politics and the state must reassert themselves against the attempt to dissolve them into markets and a borderless globalism. That will require the Right to become more corporatist in its approach to directing business activity in the national interests, and more integralist in its view of the link between government and the common good. The word integralism has come back into vogue in English, not to posit some immediate union of church and state, but to argue that the liberal separation of politics and the common good is unsustainable and must be reintegrated. Whatever word we use to label it, the policies of the next Right are already in evidence: it will use the power of the state to coordinate business and industrial enterprises toward the common goods of peace and strength, while pursuing macroeconomic policies that shore up the cultural base required for any functioning polity. In doing so, moreover, the Right’s focus will inevitably shift from internal debates over the content of conservatism to external coalition building and effecting a larger political realignment.

#gladden pappin #american affairs #read the whole thing

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collapsedsquid · 4 years

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I am not the first person to point out that conservative political coalitions are mostly just collections of losers, but the point nevertheless bears repeating. Today’s conservatism is merely the name used to categorize the rejects of the post–Cold War order: this includes a few oddball financiers who can’t play nicely with others, extractive industries and other declining sectors, the small businesses most reliant on low-wage, low-skill labor, and a group often referred to as social conservatives who have been almost totally marginalized from mainstream culture. At bottom, nothing holds this gang of misfits together except exclusion from the dominant group of big tech oligarchs, more respectable financial rent seekers, and the leading cultural tastemakers in media and academia.

[...]

As Gladden Pappin, deputy editor of American Affairs, has argued, contemporary conservatism is an attempt to articulate the role of non-state institutions rather than a serious approach to wielding political power. The result is an abundance of platitudinous books on Tocqueville and treacly essays on civility, but little serious study of how today’s economy actually works or how to coordinate diverse interests across complex institutions. Thus, even when conservatives happen to win office, typically all that they can imagine doing is reducing their own capacity to exercise power. Conservative foundations and donors have plowed millions into producing mind-numbing Adam Smith documentaries—last year, they even created a virtual pin factory, along with an absurdist farce featuring the Dalai Lama—but they have shown little interest in, say, planning for economic and technological competition with China or understanding the effects of financialization. In part, this may be owing to the fact that conservatism has become nothing more than an ideological gloss retrospectively applied to the machinations of lobbyists and grifters. Yet on a deeper level it seems that the conservative corpus is simply no longer capable of anything but reflexive spasms.

Tried to figure out how this piece could be so ridiculous, thinking that conservatism is a body of ideas. Oh that Julius Klein

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javierpenadea · 3 years

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"Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party" by BY SOHRAB AHMARI, PATRICK DENEEN AND GLADDEN PAPPIN via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2KWO9Vv

#NYT #news

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jgmail · 3 years

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Orbán ha amplificado las políticas neoliberales y las desigualdades

Por Marton Vegh

Fuentes: Viento Sur [Imagen publicada en Contretemps]

Personalidades conservadoras como Tucker Carlson, presentador estrella de Fox News, elogiaron al primer ministro húngaro Viktor Orbán por aliar el conservadurismo cultural con medidas económicas proteccionistas. Sin embargo, a pesar de sus ataques demagógicos a las finanzas, las políticas de Orbán favorecieron a las y los oligarcas locales y aumentaron en gran medida las desigualdades sociales, destacando la debilidad del llamado conservadurismo pro-trabajadores de sus propios fans estadounidenses.

El 10 de diciembre de 2020, Gladden Pappin, profesor de teoría política en la Universidad Católica de Dallas, tuiteó sobre su reunión con la Ministra Húngara de la Familia, Katalin Novák. El tuit de Pappin elogió las políticas familiares húngaras, que tienen como objetivo revertir el declive demográfico en un país con una de las tasas de natalidad más bajas de Europa. La ministra Novák también es vicepresidenta del partido Fidesz del primer ministro Viktor Orbán. El entusiasmo de Pappin puede parecer inusual a primera vista. Después de todo, en sus tres mandatos consecutivos desde 2010, el Sr. Orbán ha ocupado con más frecuencia los titulares por colocar al pequeño país postsocialista a la vanguardia de la derecha radical mundial que debido a su política económica.

Esa misma semana, el Texas Monthly publicó un artículo sobre Pappin, describiéndole como un partidario de la refundación del Partido Republicano para ser más conciliador con las demandas de la clase trabajadora y el gasto público. Fuera del aula, Pappin también es el editor adjunto de American Affairs, un periódico conocido por su llamamiento a la derecha estadounidense a dar un giro «económico populista» con más política industrial, protección de la gente asalariada y un aumento de los impuestos.

Pappin no es el único editor de American Affairs que ha expresado recientemente su fascinación por la Hungría de Orbán. Durante su visita a ese país, el editor Julius Krein participó en una mesa redonda organizada por el Mathias Corvinus Collegium en Budapest, una institución educativa y un centro de estudios financiado por el gobierno. En su discurso, Krein felicitó a la derecha húngara por no ser seducida por el liberalismo reaganiano, en su opinión el mayor obstáculo para la introducción de «políticas económicas populistas» bajo Donald Trump.

Pappin tampoco fue el primer eminente conservador social autoproclamado en elogiar la política familiar de Orbán: en 2019, Tucker Carlson mencionó los generosos planes de apoyo familiar establecidos en Hungría para alentar a las parejas casadas a tener hijos. Patrick Deneen, teórico político conservador y autor del ampliamente leído Why Liberalism Failed, expresó opiniones similares después de una reunión privada con el Sr. Orbán durante su visita a Budapest en 2019.

Sin embargo, mientras estas personas elogian a Hungría como un país conservador que todavía se preocupa por las y los ciudadanos comunes, el régimen de Orbán contradice sus afirmaciones sobre cuestiones clave. Los nuevos programas de apoyo familiar, que son la firma de las políticas sociales de la era Orbán, están diseñados deliberadamente para excluir a las familias de bajos ingresos. Para ello, la mayor parte de la asistencia a las familias con hijos e hijas solo está disponible en forma de beneficios fiscales y préstamos comerciales e hipotecarios subvencionados públicamente. Estos productos financieros solo están disponibles a través de bancos comerciales que aplican los criterios de solvencia habituales, excluyendo los bajos salarios.

En realidad, las hipotecas solo se pueden utilizar para comprar casas de un tamaño fuera del alcance de la mayoría de las familias necesitadas. Mientras tanto, el monto del subsidio familiar universal en ayudas se ha mantenido sin cambios desde 2008. Estas medidas han perjudicado claramente a las y los trabajadores pobres y desempleados, incluida la abrumadora mayoría de las y los romaníes, que representan alrededor del 8% de la población húngara.

Estas políticas contrastan fuertemente con la Ley de Seguridad Familiar recientemente propuesta por Mitt Romney [senador republicano ultraconservador pero opuesto a Trump], que promete pagos mensuales directos universales y beneficiaría a las familias independientemente de su situación profesional. Sin embargo, en su artículo publicado recientemente en el New York Post, Gladden Pappin continúa abogando por este proyecto de ley haciendo referencia a las políticas familiares húngaras.

Esta admiración persistente parece aún más extraña teniendo en cuenta que no habría tenido que mirar demasiado lejos de Hungría para encontrar un país en el que las ayudas a la infancia también son accesibles para las familias de bajos ingresos. En 2016, el partido populista de la derecha polaca, el Partido de la Ley y la Justicia (PiS) -un aliado cercano de Orbán- introdujo un nuevo sistema universal de subsidios familiares que redujo la pobreza infantil.

Pappin, Krein, Deneen y Carlson ilustran el creciente interés de un grupo particular de conservadores estadounidenses por la Hungría de Orbán. Estos hombres son parte de los post-liberales, un vago movimiento intelectual y político que va desde el columnista Rod Dreher hasta los miembros del Congreso Josh Hawley y Marco Rubio. Lo que en última instancia les une es su posición crítica hacia la política identitaria liberal y la ortodoxia de libre comercio de los republicanos del establishment, un enfoque presentado como un rechazo del liberalismo tanto cultural como económico.

Mientras que muchas de estas personalidades elogiaron el populismo económico de Steve Bannon, los recortes de los impuestos sobre las empresas proseguidos por la presidencia de Trump y la falta de compromiso concreto con las preocupaciones económicas de la clase trabajadora decepcionaron. Para ellos, Hungría puede aparecer como la utopía post-liberal: la tan cacareada represión de Orbán contra la corrección política, sus estrictas políticas de inmigración y sus ataques al secularismo y los derechos de las minorías se han combinado con lo que, al otro lado del Atlántico, podría parecer un programa económico dirigido a las clases trabajadoras y orientado a la izquierda.

Es posible pensar que no todos los republicanos sociales tienen una opinión favorable de Orbán: figuras clave en esta corriente, como Michael Lind y Oren Cass, hasta ahora se han abstenido totalmente de elogiar públicamente a Orbán. Mientras Marco Rubio firmaba una carta pública expresando su preocupación por el estado de la democracia húngara, según los medios húngaros, los directores de campaña de Fidesz pudieron previsualizar su campaña senatorial de 2016 durante su visita sobre el terreno.

Sin embargo, la visión favorable de Orbán es cualquier cosa menos un reflejo exacto de la realidad política húngara, donde la lógica de exclusión subyacente a las políticas familiares no es un error, sino una característica del programa económico del gobierno. El generoso apoyo dado a las y los oligarcas nacionales, en nombre del fortalecimiento de la propiedad nacional en sectores estratégicos, hace que la política económica de la Orbanomics sea más intervencionista de lo que prescribiría la política Reaganiana convencional. Pero ha permanecido esencialmente unida al credo económico neoliberal. Sin embargo, mientras que el lamentable balance del régimen en materia de Estado de derecho, de libertad de los medios y de corrupción ha sido ampliamente discutido en la prensa estadounidense, el mito de su economía antineoliberal persistió.

La realidad de la orbanomía

Después de la transición a una economía de mercado, la ortodoxia económica de manual ha reinado absolutamente en el bloque del Este. La coalición socialdemócrata y liberal que gobernó Hungría antes de 2010 adoptó plenamente el fundamentalismo de mercado: el entonces Primer Ministro, Ferenc Gyurcsány, fue calificado incluso de Tony Blair húngaro. La comparación ha resistido la prueba del tiempo sorprendentemente bien, ya que tanto el Nuevo Laborismo como el Partido Socialista de la Reforma Húngara han logrado perder a sus votantes de la clase trabajadora durante décadas.

En relación con ellos, el énfasis de Orbán en la soberanía económica y su feroz crítica al FMI y al capital internacional podrían confundirse con un rechazo al neoliberalismo. Su gobierno ha introducido regulaciones financieras estrictas y logrado reducir la vulnerabilidad financiera mediante la reestructuración de la deuda pública, de modo que ahora se mantiene principalmente en moneda nacional en lugar de en divisas extranjeras. Los propios miembros del gobierno también coquetearon con la idea de una política económica estatal de izquierda: en 2012, György Matolcsy, entonces Ministro de Finanzas y actual Gobernador del Banco Central, describió la política económica húngara como keynesiana, mientras que el Secretario de Estado de Estrategia Economica, László György, a menudo habla de Hungría como un Estado intervencionista [que actúa a favor del desarrollo].

Esta imagen también dominó la recepción de las políticas económicas húngaras por parte de los postliberales estadounidenses: en el retrato de Christopher Caldwell publicado en Claremont Review en 2019, Orbán es retratado como un comandante feroz, ayudado por políticas económicas radicales que luchan con éxito contra la voluntad de los inversores internacionales y los burócratas no electos.

Sin embargo, los modelos políticos de Orbán permiten caracterizar su política económica de manera más realista. Mientras su predecesor era un fan de Blair, las verdaderas simpatías de Orbán van a Margaret Thatcher. Fue uno de los pocos jefes de Estado extranjeros de fuera de la Commonwealth que asistió a su funeral en 2013 y todavía cita con frecuencia a la Dama de Hierro en sus discursos. Su gobierno también financia generosamente el Instituto del Danubio, un centro de estudios neoconservador con sede en Budapest, dirigido nada menos que por el ex escritor de discursos de Thatcher, John O’Sullivan. La noción de thatcherismo ha sido utilizada por personas como el antropólogo social Kristóf Szombati para explicar el régimen neoliberal de política social de Orbán, oficialmente llamado sociedad de trabajo:

«Orbán adoptó la opinión de Thatcher de que la mejor manera de revitalizar una economía en dificultades, además de aplicar restricciones presupuestarias, es liberar el poder creativo de la empresa privada reduciendo los impuestos y alentando la inversión productiva y extraer la máxima cantidad de mano de obra de la fuerza laboral reduciendo drásticamente los subsidios de desempleo, estigmatizando y castigando la ociosidad y recompensando a quienes aceptan trabajo en sectores mal pagados de la economía».

En nombre de restaurar la dignidad del trabajo y de la represión de los parásitos de la asistencia social, una de las primeras medidas de política social del gobierno del Fidesz redujo el período para recibir beneficios de desempleo a tres meses, el más corto de la Unión Europea. La elegibilidad tampoco se amplió en respuesta al shock de covid-19. Además, la nueva constitución adoptada por la supermayoría parlamentaria Fidesz en 2011 omitió las referencias precedentes a los derechos sociales. Por lo tanto, no es sorprendente que, a pesar de su popularidad entre postliberales, las y los ídolos estadounidenses de Orbán no vinieran de sus filas. Por el contrario, bajo su mandato, se erigieron estatuas de Ronald Reagan y George Bush padre en una plaza central de Budapest.

En algunos aspectos, la política económica húngara desde 2010 ha seguido la receta de la ortodoxia Reaganiana mucho más fielmente que en la década anterior. Fidesz ha introducido un impuesto fijo sobre la renta (incluido un impuesto sobre el salario mínimo) y el tipo impositivo efectivo más bajo de Europa para las multinacionales, que también se benefician de generosas ventajas fiscales especiales. Como resultado, varios importantes fabricantes alemanes se han beneficiado en Hungría de subsidios estatales mucho mayores, por trabajador, que en su propio país, lo que contradice los feroces ataques retóricos de Orbán contra el capital internacional.

Aunque el régimen de Orbán haya criticado duramente las medidas de austeridad de los precedentes socialdemócratas, desde 2010 sus propios recortes impositivos y su prudencia fiscal han mantenido en la práctica una política de austeridad. Mientras que los posliberales simultáneamente elogiaron a Orbán y presionaron a los republicanos a adoptar el gasto público, la proporción del gasto social y educativo en el PIB ha disminuido en Hungría desde 2010. Si bien la propaganda del gobierno solo habla de éxito, el crecimiento general de los salarios ajustados a la inflación en los últimos diez años no ha sido particularmente impresionante en comparación con otros países de la región y Europa, mientras que los salarios del sector público han perdido gran parte de su valor real.

Según el economista político Gábor Scheiring, esto equivale nada menos que a un sistema perverso de protección social para los ricos:

«El gobierno no solo ha reducido el gasto social, sino que lo ha hecho de manera muy desigual, redistribuyendo recursos a las personas de altos ingresos. Entre 2009 y 2017, el componente social de los ingresos individuales, por ejemplo, las prestaciones sociales, pensiones, subsidios, disminuyó espectacularmente para la gente de ingresos más bajos y aumentó significativamente para la gente de ingresos más altos».

En efecto, a pesar de las afirmaciones de Krein, editor en jefe de American Affairs, Hungría no es un gran ejemplo de un Estado fuerte. Por el contrario, como señaló, entre otros, el crítico social marxista Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Fidesz ha deconstruido la capacidad administrativa del país, mientras que el deterioro de la calidad de los servicios públicos ha llevado a la clase media a optar cada vez más por los servicios privados, en particular la atención médica y la educación.

En Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen se basa en gran medida en el teórico socialista Karl Polanyi para deplorar la destrucción de los lazos sociales por parte de las fuerzas desenfrenadas del mercado. Pero las relaciones de trabajo bajo Orbán contrastan fuertemente con las visiones de los conservadores «sociales» estadounidenses. Además de las reducciones de impuestos, el régimen de acumulación desde 2010 se ha construido sobre la restricción de salarios y la represión de la autoorganización de los trabajadores. El nuevo Código Laboral adoptado en 2012 ha vaciado de su sustancia a las instituciones de negociación salarial tripartita, ha prohibido las huelgas en el sector público y generalmente se considera uno de los más favorables a la patronal en Europa.

En 2019, el Parlamento también aprobó la tristemente célebre «Ley de Esclavitud», que garantiza la autoridad de las y los patronos sobre la asignación de horas extras y licencias. En respuesta, el país experimentó una gran ola de protestas de los sindicatos. No es sorprendente que Hungría esté a la zaga de casi todos los miembros de la UE en términos de derechos laborales: según el Índice Mundial de Derechos de la CSI 2020 publicado por la Confederación Sindical Internacional, los derechos de las y los trabajadores en Hungría se violan regularmente, colocando al país en el mismo grupo que Sudáfrica y Rusia.

Como resultado de estas políticas, en los últimos once años del gobierno de Orbán, Hungría ha visto cómo la desigualdad de ingresos se disparó a pesar de que estaba disminuyendo en los países vecinos. Si el nivel absoluto de desigualdad aún no alcanza el del mundo de habla inglesa, es preocupante observar que Hungría tiene el nivel más bajo de movilidad social de todos los países desarrollados: según un estudio de la OCDE de 2018, actualmente requeriría siete (!) generaciones a una familia de bajos ingresos alcanzar el nivel de ingresos promedio.

Coeficiente de Gini de renta disponible. Desde que Orbán regresó al poder en 2010, la desigualdad de ingresos en Hungría se ha convertido en la más alta de Europa Central y Oriental, mientras que se estanca o disminuye en otros lugares. (Fuente: Estadísticas de la Unión Europea sobre Ingresos y Condiciones de Vida).

Las y los responsables del gobierno generalmente explican las frecuentes intervenciones a favor de sus amistades como tentativas de lograr la «soberanía económica», haciendo hincapié en la necesidad de mantener sectores estratégicos como la banca y la energía en el seno de la propiedad nacional y el objetivo de crear empresas húngaras competitivas a nivel mundial. Aunque este argumento puede atraer a postliberales que exigen una política industrial a gran escala, más de una década de política de desarrollo bajo los auspicios de Fidesz no ha producido ningún éxito comparable a los de países como Corea del Sur. A pesar de las afirmaciones de que Hungría está creando un nuevo Estado intervencionista – y la alusión de Orbán al éxito de Singapur en su infame discurso de 2014 sobre la democracia iliberal – no hay evidencia de que Hungría haya progresado en las CVM (cadenas de valor mundiales).

Mientras tanto, los cazadores de rentas cercanos al poder han acumulado enormes fortunas en sectores de bajo valor añadido como la construcción y la agricultura, que también son los que reciben más inversión y subsidios de los fondos europeos. Aunque Hungría ha experimentado altas tasas de crecimiento en los últimos años, va a la zaga de la mayoría de las economías regionales con un perfil similar. En general, las promesas de la política industrial se vacían de su sustancia por el hecho de que las pequeñas y medianas empresas nacionales están sujetas a tasas impositivas efectivas más altas que las multinacionales. La desinversión en la formación de capital humano en general, y en la educación en particular, tampoco es la forma habitual de crear una ventaja comparativa.

La peregrinación a Budapest

En un momento en que expertos de todo el mundo han anunciado el fin del neoliberalismo en respuesta a esfuerzos sin precedentes para mitigar la crisis de covid-19, la Hungría iliberal debería servir como advertencia. Como muestra la última década del país, la ortodoxia del libre mercado y las disposiciones punitivas de protección social se pueden combinar rápidamente con intervenciones económicas específicas sin dar paso a un régimen político keynesiano y militante que tenga como objetivo principal elevar el nivel de vida de las y los trabajadores. A pesar de algunos gestos retóricos, Fidesz no es amigo de los trabajadores húngaros y su búsqueda de la «soberanía económica» son esencialmente intentos de subvencionar a oligarcas locales.

Las y los apologistas de Orbán no se equivocan cuando afirman que su electorado principal está compuesto por personas en situación de inseguridad económica. Según un estudio reciente, el apoyo a Fidesz es inversamente proporcional a los ingresos, las clases desfavorecidas son las que tienen una opinión más favorable del partido. Sin embargo, como en los Estados Unidos de Trump, estos votantes muestran su apoyo a un gobierno del que han recibido pocas ventajas materiales. Como dice Gábor Scheiring en Hungría, «las prácticas autoritarias se utilizan para promover el enriquecimiento de la élite, mientras que los discursos populistas autoritarios se utilizan para hacer que la redistribución de los recursos de abajo hacia arriba sea más aceptable para las masas».

Aparte de Boris Johnson y Benjamin Netanyahu, pocos políticos actualmente en el cargo han recibido más aplausos de la derecha estadounidense que Viktor Orbán. Sin embargo, a la luz de las políticas reales del régimen, el amor de los posliberales por Orbán es solo una ilusión. No es casualidad que Orbán asumiera el papel de verdadero heredero de Reagan en la conferencia del Conservadurismo Nacional en Roma en febrero de 2020. Para él y sus aliados, la aprobación de eminentes conservadores estadounidenses con simpatías proobreras ayuda a blanquear su imagen. Pero cuando hay mucho en juego, siempre tendrán afinidades con los republicanos de las grandes empresas y los conservadores de la vieja escuela. Los post-liberales pueden criticar el apoyo hipócrita de los marxistas occidentales a los regímenes represivos del antiguo Bloque Oriental. Pero su incapacidad para reconocer las realidades de la Orbanomía les condena a un destino similar.

Sin embargo, algunos apologistas estadounidenses de Orbán pueden no hacer la peregrinación a Budapest por ingenuidad, sino porque el verdadero atractivo del régimen radica en su conservadurismo cultural y no en las medidas económicas «pro-obreras» que tanto saludan. En esto, no serían tan diferentes de Steve Bannon: a pesar de su imagen cuidadosamente cultivada como un «populista económico» ejemplar de la derecha estadounidense, no se preocupó por hacer muchos esfuerzos para poner en práctica sus ideas una vez llegado a la Casa Blanca. Como dijo Joshua Green, «trató durante unos pocos días de obtener apoyo interno para un aumento de impuestos para los multimillonarios», consagrando su energía más bien a movilizar el sentimiento antiinmigrante y construir el muro en la frontera mexicana.

Los partidarios más reflexivos de Orbán, como Sohrab Ahmari del New York Post, han reconocido con razón que las políticas sociales y económicas húngaras «no hacen que el país sea popular entre los progresistas», mientras que otros, como Rod Dreher, siempre han destacado el compromiso de Orbán con los valores cristianos. En efecto, con medidas que van desde la construcción de un muro fronterizo hasta la abolición de los departamentos de estudios de género y la prohibición de la adopción por parejas del mismo sexo, Orbán se ha dedicado mucho más a una guerra cultural que a un cambio económico. La sinceridad de la adhesión de los conservadores postliberales a una economía solidaria ya ha sido cuestionada. Hoy, su actitud hacia la Hungría de Orbán es una prueba de sus verdaderos compromisos.

Marton Vegh es estudiante de master en ciencias políticas en la Universidad de Europa Central en Viena. Es oriundo de Budapest.

Texto original en francés: https://www.contretemps.eu/hongrie-orban-economie-inegalites-neoliberalisme/

Traducción: Faustino Eguberri para viento sur

Fuente: https://vientosur.info/orban-ha-amplificado-las-politicas-neoliberales-y-las-desigualdades/

#economía #pensamiento #conservadurismo #hungría

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