Hillbilly JD Vance went to Hungary to support Viktor Orbán's failed racist government. But Hungarians voted for Tisza Party led by Peter Magyar

Why Orbán’s Loss Was So Devastating to the New Right

J.D. Vance went to Hungary to defend the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and western civilization itself. (Maine Writer: Hillbilly Vance failed again❗ So, former Marine Corps corporal JD Vance is delusional.  He believes he is an accomplished politician and an amateur philosopher. But, actually, he is a self confessed Hillbilly)

Marine enlistee JD Vance achieved the rank of corporal. Adolf Hitler also achieved this same rank when he served in the German army during World War One.

Echo essay published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Sarah Jones.

“Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy❓” he beseeched a crowd in Budapest last week. “Will you stand for western civilization❓ Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the god of our fathers❓” Defy “the bureaucrats” of the European Union, he told them; go to the polls and stand with Orbán.  (Maine Writer:  But, Vance conveniently forgot to ask, "Do you stand for racism❓")

Thankfully, the Hungarian people did not listen. 

So, they ended Orbán’s 16-year-long rule and handed power to Péter Magyar, a onetime Orbán ally who ran on an anti-corruption message. Magyar’s party, Tisza, has won two-thirds of the country’s parliamentary seats, ❗a supermajority that allows it to reverse Orbán’s most autocratic assaults on the constitution and the rule of law. Vance told Fox (Fake❗) News that he was saddened, though not surprised, by the result. 

Orbán’s polling had been terrible, but the campaign speech was “the right thing to do” for such a loyal friend of the Trump White House, he added.

Orbán’s loss is a blow to Vance, who has aligned himself with the departing prime minister and his party, Fidesz. 

Also, there are similarities between the two men. Both had a Christian awakening when it was convenient, both are obsessed with fertility and both scapegoat immigrants. 

Orbán once said that Hungarians “do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” a kind of bigotry Vance echoed when he smeared Haitian immigrants in Ohio. 

Resentment is part of the Vance brand and has been since Hillbilly Elegy, (a biography about the former Marine Corporal now Trump's VP) which makes him a natural counterpart to Orbán. Both act and speak like they are populist heroes at war with the elite.

Still, Vance is one player in a much bigger game. As Orbán concentrated power, he built a sophisticated, transnational infrastructure to prop up reactionaries around the world. In the process, he became an intellectual and political hero to the American new right — a nativist and profoundly illiberal movement.

Orbán reserved his generosity for certain ideas and certain people. The conservative writer Rod Dreher abandoned the U.S. for Hungary and a role at the Danube Institute, created in 2013, to facilitate “the transmission of ideas and people” throughout Europe and the English-speaking world, including the U.S. The Orbán government funds the institute through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, which also supports The European Conservative, where Dreher often writes. “Many contributions” to the journal try to legitimize illiberal democracies like Hungary, scholars Valentin Behr and Eve Gianoncelli have argued. TEC’s chief editor defended Augusto Pinochet and his “necessary” coup in Chile, which overthrew a democratic government and sent death squads after critics. In the world of TEC, immigrants are a danger to women, “transgender ideology” inflicts “terror” on the West, and Charlie Kirk was right about, well, everything. The journal now shares an address with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, which also gets funding from Orbán.

Dreher is full of praise for Orbán, whom he considers “a real visionary” and with whom he shares an appreciation for The Camp of The Saints,🤢 a 1973, novel by Jean Raspail that depicts “little monsters” with “dark skin” who overtake the West. The book is “repulsive,” Dreher wrote in 2015, but he said it offers some valuable insight; Orbán went one step further and cited it when he decried “race-mixing” in 2022.

He is hardly alone. A Hatewatch investigation found that American conservatives Christopher Rufo, Michael O’Shea, and Jeremy Carl signed contracts with the Batthyány Lajos Foundation in 2022, thus committing themselves to defending Orbán’s pronatalist policies, among other subjects — possibly while violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. 

Pronatalist summits in Budapest attract American conservatives worried about our own U.S. national birth rate. The U.S.-born post-liberal theorist Gladden Pappin leads the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-owned entity. The Orbán government has become such a beacon for the American right that the Danube Institute’s István Kiss has addressed the Tennessee legislature; State Senator Rusty Crowe introduced a resolution praising the “estimable” Hungarian think tank for its “respectful conservatism.” Magyar claimed on Monday that the Orbán regime has funded CPAC’s conferences in Hungary❗

Orbán showed allies what is possible, and they admire him for his audacity, since they know their goals can only succeed under illiberal conditions. If the press questions policy or investigates corruption, muzzle it and flood the market with propaganda. 

If the goal is hierarchy and racial purity, reproductive coercion must become a national policy. 

As the new right flexes its strength here, it pivots toward Orbán or an Orbán-like strategy. The chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, often threatens to censor the press.  Florida 

Governor Ron DeSantis is transforming the New College of Florida into a reactionary bulwark — his own version of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, perhaps. The new right understands, as did Orbán, the importance of a brain trust. Someone has to write the policy and skew the data.

But, pseudointellectualism can only take a movement so far. 

Orbán had not completely destroyed Hungarian democracy, so his ambitions were riskier than his allies understood. Orbánism didn’t work either as policy or as an illiberal strategy. Hungary’s birth rates are falling again. The GDP per capita is “well below” the OECD average. Corruption further weakened whatever political or moral authority the Orbán regime might have had with voters. And, Orbán could not buy true popularity for the journals and media outlets he funds. TEC is still “niche,”as Euronews put it, and the regime’s investment in Dreher never made much sense. His most influential period is long over, and he seems ready to move on. After Orbán’s loss, he said he may move to Vienna. Then he complained about his ex-wife and her “ambush divorce.”

The new right will survive Orbán. It might leave Budapest or start a new think tank, but it still has patrons, and ideas are notoriously hard to kill. For Americans, there’s always the Claremont Institute or the Heritage Foundation — a domestic ecosystem that is more durable than the Orbán regime. 

An army of fellows and contributing editors will pump out white papers and commentaries and graphs for decades to come. But, guess what ❓ They can’t make people agree, or even respect them, and that matters — for now, anyway.

Illiberalism tends to lose its shine. Vance spoke at a TPUSA event in Georgia. The arena was nearly empty. “Although I did vote for Trump,” a young Catholic told the Associated Press. “I am not a Trump supporter anymore.”

Orbán is no philosopher, sprinkling reactionary thought like fairy dust on the people of Europe and North America. His efforts have been strategic. As he financed the global right, he assaulted the Hungarian public sphere and became more and more autocratic. Reporters Without Borders calls him “a predator of press freedom” for his efforts to squeeze independent media out of Hungary and says that Fidesz and its supporters control roughly 80 percent of the country’s news outlets. Fidesz rewrote the Hungarian constitution, allowing the party to expand and then pack the constitutional court with allies, and it reshaped electoral law so it could more easily control Parliament. The Orbán government targeted the Central European University over its links to George Soros, the liberal Jewish philanthropist, and forced it to leave the country. To raise the country’s birth rate, Orbán restricted abortion rights while passing financial incentives for childbearing — but only for heterosexual couples. The government banned Budapest’s annual Pride parade, or tried to; Hungarians turned out anyway.

Orbán showed allies what is possible, and they admire him for his audacity, since they know their goals can only succeed under illiberal conditions. If the press questions policy or investigates corruption, muzzle it and flood the market with propaganda. If the goal is hierarchy and racial purity, reproductive coercion must become a national policy. As the new right flexes its strength here, it pivots toward Orbán or an Orbán-like strategy. The chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, often threatens to censor the press. Governor Ron DeSantis is transforming the New College of Florida into a reactionary bulwark — his own version of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, perhaps. The new right understands, as did Orbán, the importance of a brain trust. Someone has to write the policy and skew the data.

But pseudointellectualism can only take a movement so far. Orbán had not completely destroyed Hungarian democracy, so his ambitions were riskier than his allies understood. Orbánism didn’t work either as policy or as an illiberal strategy. Hungary’s birth rates are falling again. The GDP per capita is “well below” the OECD average. Corruption further weakened whatever political or moral authority the Orbán regime might have had with voters. And Orbán could not buy true popularity for the journals and media outlets he funds. TEC is still “niche,”as Euronews put it, and the regime’s investment in Dreher never made much sense. His most influential period is long over, and he seems ready to move on. After Orbán’s loss, he said he may move to Vienna. Then he complained about his ex-wife and her “ambush divorce.”

The new right will survive Orbán. It might leave Budapest or start a new think tank, but it still has patrons, and ideas are notoriously hard to kill. For Americans, there’s always the Claremont Institute or the Heritage Foundation — a domestic ecosystem that is more durable than the Orbán regime. An army of fellows and contributing editors will pump out white papers and commentaries and graphs for decades to come. But they can’t make people agree, or even respect them, and that matters — for now, anyway.

Illiberalism tends to lose its shine. Vance spoke at a TPUSA (Turning Point USA) event in Georgia. The arena was nearly empty. “I did vote for Trump,” a young Catholic told the Associated Press. “I am not a Trump supporter anymore.”