Readers who have grown weary of my Magyar encomia will be pleased to know that I am at an airport hotel in Milan tonight, preparing to fly home to the US on Monday. The amount of Hungary posting here will dramatically decrease. But not just yet.
For me, the most important thing about Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed visit to Hungary is that it will prompt many American conservatives who either never heard of the place, or accepted as received wisdom the idea that it is a “fascist” country, to start paying attention to it. (Nota bene: yesterday in Esztergom I shared a stage with Peter Kreko, one of the best known liberal critics of the Orban government. Peter said from the stage that whatever his and my political differences are, we both agree that it is absurd to describe Hungary as “fascist”. So if you won’t take it from me, take it from a Budapest professor who publicly criticizes Orban and his Fidesz party.) Anyway, I published a piece last week in The Spectator making a “two cheers for Orban” case for the Hungarian leader’s relevance to Anglo-American conservatism.
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