I'm the Orbán placeman baby

The NatCons' Hungarian connection

The former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest

Readers of my previous posts on National Conservatism will have seen that the main purpose of the Edmund Burke Foundation of Yoram Hazony is the dissemination of an ideology that – among other things - justifies the nationalist far right in Israel and gives an intellectual superstructure to support the religious backers of Trump in the US. There is, however, another player involved.

If Edmund Burke is the distant deity for the National Conservatives, the British political philosopher Sir Roger Scruton is their recent martyr - and more so in Hungary it seems than anywhere else. In his last days Scruton was lauded as a hero figure by the authoritarian Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. At a ceremony in 2019 at the Hungarian embassy the dying Briton was awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by Orbán. According to the website Hungary Today “Orbán said Sir Roger was a man of practice and not of abstractions who didn’t blindly support open societies but was awake enough to see their flaws and warn about their dangers. And he was forward-looking enough to see the threat of illegal migration. The philosopher had recognized that freedom was based on nation states and Christian civilization.” Which is one in the eye for Japan, say, and India. And Israel, come to that.

“In his reply”, Hungary Today reported, “Professor Scruton highlighted that Hungary has been an example by preserving its valuable identity, even in times when everywhere else there is pressure to accept global uniformity and eliminate national differences.”