Republicans embracing one of world’s worst leaders

This week, he has a high-visibility time slot on the opening day of CPAC Texas, the once annual conservative conference that’s become such a successful grift for Republicans, it’s now held multiple times a year.

While he’ll be warmly welcomed there, the list of his anti-democratic intrusions is long, and alarming: Attempts at obstructing free and fair elections. Undermining democratic institutions, including the media. Expanding executive powers. A far-right politicization of the highest courts. Exerting political influence over education. Bans on speech pertaining to gender and sexuality. Marginalizing minority groups. Promoting ethnonationalism and white pride. Corruption and graft at the highest levels of government. Use of propaganda to mislead the public. Embracing world dictators and autocratic regimes.

This list could easily describe former President Donald Trump’s remaking of the American right. But it also describes Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s remaking of Hungary’s political system over many years as the country’s populist head of state.

So it’s probably no coincidence that Orban was invited to speak at CPAC. Pro-Trump Republicans and right-wing nationalists have embraced Orban and his hold over Hungary — what Zack Beauchamp calls his “soft fascism.”

The things that have made him a fixture in right-wing circles here at home are the same things that prompted Freedom House, the oldest American organization devoted to the defense of democracy around the world, to downgrade Hungary to a partial democracy in 2020 — existing somewhere in the “gray zone” between democracies and autocracies.

Nonetheless, Trump has praised Orban repeatedly, as have commentators such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Carlson has lauded the leader for not allowing “this nation of 10 million people to be changed forever by people we didn’t invite in and who are coming here illegally.”

Orban has returned the favor, telling a CPAC Hungary (yes, that happened) crowd that the key to power for the American right was to have their own media — or, in other words, propaganda outlets. He then proceeded to call Fox just that.

Steve Bannon, freshly convicted on contempt of Congress charges and also appearing at CPAC, once called Orban “the most significant guy on the scene right now.”

Despite his detestable recent comments, where Orban said of Hungary, “We do not want to become peoples of mixed-race” or join in Western Europe’s “mixed-race world,” CPAC will all too happily host him.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, has justified his appearance by sheepishly hiding behind nonexistent threats of cancel culture, saying his appearance gives people a chance to decide whether they agree or disagree with his point of view.

The funny thing is, the new far right never does go ahead and disagree with people like Orban, because they don’t. The point of these invitations is to elevate Orban and other terribles, not warn voters off their bad ideas.

Orban isn’t the first or only strongman CPAC is cuddling up to. In 2021, Brazil’s socalled “Trump of the Tropics,” President Jair Bolsonaro, spoke at CPAC Brasil, where Donald Trump Jr. also livestreamed in from the U.S. At the 2022 event, his son, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro spoke alongside Trump aide Jason Miller. The younger Bolsonaro is also speaking at the Texas CPAC this week.

What’s next? A CPAC Russia? A Vladimir Putin address at the next CPAC Texas? With the right’s growing embrace of dictators and autocracies, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.