Tucker Carlson is not much to look at. A little man with a face screwed into the scowl of a junior manager passed over for promotion, you might walk by him in the street with barely a glance. Only when he describes how “the elite has turned against its own people” should you take notice. Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.
Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975. Fox News built its audience and Orbán built his power by creating paranoid fears of an enemy so dangerous, any tactics can be justified to defeat it. Usually, it is the globalised liberal elite that turns against its own people by allowing mass immigration. Orbán has added a fascistic twist to the great replacement conspiracy theory by blaming the Jewish financier George Soros for plotting to flood Christian Hungary with Muslims. If it is not migrants, it is the gay men he implies are paedophiles, and if it is not gay men, it is the European Union. The name of the enemy is incidental. The point about modern far-right politics is that there must always be an enemy.
For a long time, people who should have known better took authoritarian regimes at their own valuation and described Hungary, Turkey and, until it became too embarrassing, Vladimir Putin’s Russia as “illiberal democracies”. I can see why the idea appealed in theory. By ultra-progressive standards, all democracies, including ours, follow illiberal policies on crime and immigration. There is no necessary conflict between illiberalism and democracy. On the contrary, traditional conservative policies are often what a majority of the electorate wants.
But illiberal paranoid politics can never be compatible with democracy. Paranoia turns opponents into traitors engaged in an evil plot against “the people”. The only way to deal with traitors is to crush them and if the crushing entails the destruction of democracy and the perpetuation of the ruling elite’s power, that is a price the elite is happy for others to pay.
Like the unforgivably overrated Roger Scruton, Trump’s mentor Steve Bannon, that part-time defender of free speech Jordan Peterson, and until recently the leaders of Europe’s nominally anti-dictatorial Christian Democrat parties, Carlson was comfortable with his own hypocrisy. The right he represents says it believes in freedom of speech when liberals threaten it. Yet in Hungary, freedom of the press is in its death agonies. Regime supporters control state and most private TV stations and newspapers, while the rest must fear a government-appointed media council that can issue heavy fines for “immoral” reporting. Conservatives who cheer on Orbán are against cancel culture it appears but only when their opponents are doing the cancelling.
The right says it believes in free societies, yet in Hungary higher education is under state control so “liberals” cannot pollute the minds of the young. It says it is on the side of the people. Yet in Hungary corruption runs from Orbán’s elevation of a childhood friend into a billionaire to the everyday bribes ordinary Hungarians must pay to receive healthcare. Elections are gerrymandered and judges and state bureaucrats are chosen for their loyalty rather than their competence.
The next election in 2022 will be worth watching. If somehow the opposition manage to beat a rigged system, many are asking if Orbán would concede power. Like Putin and other thieves in office, he must fear he will go to prison if he does.
To Michael Ignatieff, the willingness not just of Fox News but of a stream of conservative intellectuals and politicians to abase themselves before Orbán, as leftists abase themselves before the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes, raises what he calls the most important question in politics today: will conservatives abandon the principles of constitutional government? Ignatieff is well placed to ask it. He was the rector of Central European University in Budapest. When I last interviewed him, in 2017, the Hungarian opposition felt he could fight Orbán’s attempts to drive the university out of the country. Ignatieff was a former opposition leader in Canada rather than an anonymous academic. He mobilised a global protest movement and the hope was it would force Orbán to respect academic independence. Today, he and the Hungarians who supported him are far gloomier. Dictatorial states brook no resistance and Orbán forced the university to move to Vienna in 2019.
The US Republicans have already made their choice. At the next election, they will not just suppress votes but have state election officials in place who will declare their opponents’ victories fraudulent.
The British right is harder to define. Boris Johnson is not an Orbán or a Trump. Outside the pages of the worst Tory newspapers there is no Johnson personality cult. He doesn’t terrify Conservative MPs into line as Trump intimidates Republicans. Privately, and increasingly in public, they show they neither respect nor fear him.
Yet I find it too easy for comfort to paint a picture of the Orbánisation of the UK. The attempt to exclude 2.5 million voters without ID cards from the franchise, the rise of property developers and Russian oligarchs exploiting their links to the Conservative elite, the attacks on the BBC that have culminated in state appointees attempting to politically vet journalists, the suspension of parliament and threats to the judiciary are symptoms of a system heading towards decadence.
After Hitler’s defeat in 1945 and the fall of the rightwing dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, western conservative parties committed themselves to observing liberal democratic rules. But the 70s are a long time back and the 40s further still. The lesson of recent history is that the right can abandon the constitutional order and be rewarded rather than punished. It is not too paranoid a response to paranoid authoritarianism to imagine that one day Tucker Carlson will be broadcasting live from London and heaping sycophantic praise on Boris Johnson as he heaps it on Viktor Orbán.
By: Nick Cohen
