Opinion | Why Hungary Inspires So Much Fear and Fascination – The New York Times

For the last few years, Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million people, has occupied an outsize place in the imagination of American liberals and conservatives. If you think the American right is sliding toward authoritarianism, you cite Viktor Orban s nationalist government as a dark model for the G.O.P. If you think an intolerant progressivism shadows American life, you invoke Orban as a figure who s fighting back.

In this running debate, sharpened by the recent Tucker Carlson visit to Budapest, I was struck by an observation from The Atlantic s David Frum, a fierce critic of the right s Orban infatuation. As part of a Twitter thread documenting corruption in Orban s inner circle, Frum wrote: I visited Hungary in 2016. Again & again, I witnessed a gesture I thought had vanished from Europe forever: people turning their heads to check who was listening before they lent forward to whisper what they had to say. They feared for their jobs, not their lives but still &

This is a useful tweet for thinking about the fears motivating Hungary-watching Americans, left and right. On the one hand, there s the fear that Trumpian populism will someday gain enough power to make its critics fear for their livelihoods. On the other, there s the fear that progressivism already exerts this power in the United States, and that what Frum describes in dire terms, the cautious sotto voce conversation, is an important part of American life right now.

via www.nytimes.com

I hope to get over the Hungary and Poland while they’re still interesting. My son is still in Ukraine and its a short trip to Warsaw. I don’t think they’re really a model for the US as they are hardly vast, multi-ethnic empires. But they’re still interesting.