[I had here an Andrew Sullivan quote about the recent right-wing fascination with Viktor Orban and Hungary, but while I agree wholly with Andrew’s views, the matter deserves more than a quotation. I hope to spell out my thinking in more detail later.]  

Okay, I’m back. 

When I read the writings of the current enthusiasts for Viktor Orban, the first thing I note is how evasive they are. They won’t quite exonerate Orban. They admit that he’s “not perfect” — as though that’s a significant concession — but in each particular case his authoritarian decisions are either justified or dismissed as insignificant. Any sort of positive vision is hard to find. The evasiveness brings to mind the comfortable British Marxist in Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” who doesn’t dare say “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so” and so, instead, says, 

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement. 

Of course, Orban isn’t a mass murderer, only a would-be tyrant. But if you take that sentence and substitute “Orban” for “Soviet” and “Hungarian” for “Russian,” you have a neat summary of the characteristic rhetorical approach of the Orbanistas.  

Orwell famously says that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” but I don’t think insincerity is the problem with the Orbanistas. The problem is that critics keep wondering about policies and the Orbanistas don’t care about policies. What they care about is hating the right people. They get impatient if you point out to them Hungary’s poverty, or its exceptionally low level of religious observance, or its unfree press, or the high numbers of young Hungarians fleeing the country, not because they think those developments are good, but because they find them insignificant in comparison to the great virtue of effectual hatred. (Donald Trump’s problem, in this light, is simply the ineffectuality of his hatreds.) 

In a thoughtful essay, John Gray describes the work of Eugene Lyons, who wrote in Assignment in Utopia (1937) about the three major types of Western admirers of the Soviet experiment: 

1. Those who have a “professional” interest in being on good terms with the regime (Walter Duranty of the New York Times being the most famous of these); 
2. Those for whom association with the regime offers the opportunity to display their wit and intelligence, to épater le bourgeois; 
3. The “useful idiots,” who suffer from a kind of motivated blindness: according to Lyons, “they were deeply disturbed by the shattered economic and social orthodoxies in which they were raised; if they lost their compensating faith in Russia life would ­become too bleak to endure.” 

I think this is a useful taxonomy to apply to the Orbanistas also. There are clearly some in each camp.