‘The Week’’s mistake

Today, a journal called The Week said in an article titled ‘Tucker Carlson joins the right-wing pilgrimage to Budapest’:

“All of which means that Hungary looks to be for populist conservatives in the 2020s what the Soviet Union was for the international left a century ago: a foreign model of a morally and politically edifying future.”

There are serious problems with author Damon Linker’s idea. The most important is that conservatives have always had far more political models available for them than the international left. As Jacobin Magazine notes here and here, it has been very rare than the industrial working class has had the political power to create regimes so much as acceptable to the academic Left, and no other group but large industrial working classes in tradable heavy industry has the power to do so. The academic Left has typically had either zero models to work upon or a small choice from:

• revolutionary Russia in the fleeting moment before the Civil War
• revolutionary Spain in a similarly fleeting moment before its own Civil War
• certain Stalinist regimes, chiefly Cuba
• less often, European social democratic regimes (which tend to be rejected when dealing with much more conservative electorates like Australia or the United States)
  

Contrariwise, conservatives have available models dating back to the establishment of Christianity or even earlier, although in practice almost no conservative academics advocate regime types dating back further than the eighteenth century. Even Politically Incorrect Guides that praise the Middle Ages (especially the Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen) do not offer medieval society as a serious model. Corresponding to this far greater choice of political models for conservatives, there has typically been competing conservative models of an edifying future, which can indeed be opposed to each other as firmly as conservatism is opposed to liberalism and to socialism.

One could argue that looking to foreign models is relatively new for conservatives, or at least new for conservatives since World War Two. Since 1945, conservatives have typically looked to pre-World War One Western societies for models, although even this gives considerable choice between constitutional oligarchies and a variety of diverse authoritarian regimes. However, in the interwar period, many foreign conservative models were available for the ruling and middle classes of surviving democracies, and although many gained virtually zero adherents, there were many foreign admirers of and sympathizers with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and even Engelbert Dollfuß’ and Kurt Schuschnigg’s Austrian Ständesstaat or Salazar’s Portugal.

Linker is also wrong about Orbán’s regime being any sort of pariah. It has had conflicts with the remainder of the European Union, but that is totally unlike revolutionary Russia, which constituted an existential threat to every single coexisting ruling class. Both anti-Communist Paul Kengor and Trotskyist Peter Binns note that Lenin said in March 1919 that:

“We are living, not merely in a state but in a system of states and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time [any length of time] is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states would be inevitable.”

Until after the Russian Civil War, no country anywhere in the world recognised Bolshevik Russia – for a ruling class that would be signing its own death warrant as the Bolsheviks – alongside Europe’s industrial working classes – were committed to the overthrow of every existing ruling class. Contrariwise, regimes incomparably more repressive and reactionary than Orbán’s – the Gulf monarchies for one, or even Putin’s Russia or Lusashenko’s Belarus – are not regarded as pariahs anywhere in the world because they support the power of the global ruling class.