Authoritarianism, an Ominous Backlash to an Imperfect Neo-Liberal Globalism
Parikia, Paros Island, Greece, February 11th, 2020
Salaroche

Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian politician who barely two years ago won a third consecutive term as Prime Minister of his country (his fourth term overall), seems to have been the star speaker at the International Conference of National Conservatism celebrated in Rome this past February 4th.

Other notable speakers included Marion Marechal, niece of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, the French far-right Political Party previously known as Le Front National, whose co-founder and leader used to be Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Also in attendance was the Italian ultra-conservative catholic writer Roberto de Mattei, the Austrian far-right catholic activist Alexander Tschugguel and the American writer Rod Dreher, editor at The American Conservative magazine.

The conference was sponsored by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which has bases in the United States and the Netherlands, whose main purpose is to strengthen the principles of national conservatism across the western hemisphere and beyond.

At the core of the Conference’s grievances was the fear of a perceived totalitarian threat posed to the world by “Globalist” neoliberal forces of the kind often ascribed by far-right characters to George Soros. “The era of liberal Democracy is over”, declared Orban during his acceptance speech in September 2018, thereby opening, in his view, an era of national conservatism.

Issues pertaining to Muslim immigration also played a central role in the conference’s agenda, with Orban declaring there isn’t one single Muslim migrant in Hungary at the moment. In contrast, conference speakers expressed their high approval of Brexit, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, while Ronald Reagan and the Polish Pope John-Paul II were lavished with praise.

Orban’s brand of politics clearly resembles that of Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey, while those of Andrzej Duda in Poland and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil don’t trail far behind. Orban’s main belief is that nations don’t have to be Democracies to be successful, citing Singapore, India and China as clear examples.

No doubt Orban’s ideas aren’t anything new, what is salient about them is mainly the echo those ideas find in the leaders of other countries, including the United States, where the largely go-it-alone, decidedly pro-white and clearly anti-immigration policies of Donald Trump are very much in line with those of Orban’s.

Obviously, the far-right regimes presently ascending around the world represent a clear backlash to the global, triumphalist, very imperfect neoliberal policies of the 1990’s and beyond, of which Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” seems to have been some sort of anthem.

The European Union is an exponent instance, if only limited to 27 countries, of such globalist, borderless thrust, that over the long run has only served to accentuate socioeconomic divisions within the different nations, thereby alienating the local populations, predisposing them to xenophobia, among other social maladies.

No easy way out of this political maze, as there is enough reason on the side of both the right and the left to pursue their own agendas. The problem becomes increasingly serious when extreme versions of those agendas become main stream. No need to go too far to witness how some extreme-right views have become a strong magnet pulling the political center towards them, thereby decimating centrist ideologies of a good number of their proponents.

As a case in point, just take a closer look at what’s happening today in the United States, where the members of the Republican Party have become like members of a cult at the service of their idol, Donald Trump, to the servile point of staging a blatant cover up to acquit him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in the recent Impeachment trial. In the face of such shameless mockery of American justice, can anyone assert with much credibility that there still is a clear difference of autonomy between the US Senate and the Russian Duma?

We have to hand it to Trump, though, as through his nationalistic, vindictive, insulting and intimidating tactics, he has managed to unify the Republican Party behind him like not many other presidents have in the past, which only comes once more to prove that, in spite of the lessons we should have learnt from the experiences the world went through during the 1930’s and 40’s, demagoguery tied to nationalistic fervor is still a very powerful political force.

There is, however, a few very simple questions arising from this ominous situation: Where is all this pseudo-revolutionary quasi-global conservative movement leading to? What is the goal of it all? What is the end game the world conservatives are pursuing? China-style one-party strong authoritarian regimes in every corner of the world?

Such end game may crystalize in some countries and for some time, but if history has anything to teach us in this respect, it will all end up being just one more dialectical cycle in the perennial come and go of progressive forces versus conservative ones and just a few years down the line we may find ourselves again in the middle of another backlash, this time against the conservative authoritarian forces that will have by then failed only by an inch to wreck the whole world one more time.

Actually, therefore, the real question in all of this is much simpler than the ones previously stated, although it is one equally difficult to answer: Will we ever learn?

Salaroche

====================================================================================== For references please click on the following links:
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/02/04/world/europe/ap-eu-italy-nationalists.html
https://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/news/the-prerequisite-to-conservative-politics-is-economic-success  https://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/viktor-orban-at-the-international-conference-national-conservativism
https://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28/viktor-orban/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/world/middleeast/israeli-cabinet-backs-nationality-bill-that-risks-wider-rift-with-arab-minority.html