XPost: alt.atheism, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.usa.republican   
   XPost: alt.politics.democrats.d, alt.politics.trump, alt.religio   
   .christian.roman-catholic   
   XPost: alt.politics, alt.politics.democrats, alt.politics.republicans   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: js@phendrie.con   
      
   Extolling the virtues of Viktor Orbán's culture war over a sumptuous meal in   
   Budapest is next-level cognitive dissonance.   
      
   Matt Welch | 8.11.2021 1:13 PM   
      
   Though much of the great August 2021 debate over the aspirational role Viktor   
   Orbán's Hungary plays in America's still-fermenting National Conservative   
   movement has amounted to a willful misconflation of politics with policy, it's   
   still worth lingering for a moment on Tucker Carlson's fondness for Magyar   
   architecture.   
      
   "Here's what I like about the landscape of Hungary, a few Soviet remnants   
   notwithstanding," the top-rated cable news anchor said in a speech Saturday.   
   "It's pretty. It is pretty, the buildings are pretty, the architecture uplifts.   
   So this is another third rail in American politics: You're not allowed to note   
   that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing. Why are they bad? Because   
   they are ugly, and ugly dehumanizes us…'dehumanizing' is the act of   
   convincing   
   people that they don't matter, that they're less significant in the larger   
   whole."   
      
   Well, about that. Budapest—and the nearby upstream cliffside town of   
   Esztergom,   
   where the Fox News host was delivering his remarks—are indeed lovely to look   
   at,   
   if you don't mind the shabby bits lurking just off-camera in the postcard   
   shots,   
   and otherwise avoid venturing out to the concrete panel housing units that scar   
   all formerly communist metropolises.   
      
   But what pleases the foreign eye in the Hungarian capital is often a Potemkin   
   grandeur, the projection of insecure nationalism, the architectural equivalent   
   of fin de siècle bling, dating from that all-too-brief half-century   
   (1867–1914)   
   when Hungary was not just a small-population serial loser of wars, but rather   
   the dual (if junior) monarch of imperial Austria's last Habsburg stand. For a   
   brief window, Budapest got to dress up as Vienna, and boy did it ever.   
   [...]   
   The thick roots of 21st century Hungarian nationalism are no mere tangential   
   offshoots from the allure of Orbánism; they anchor the whole enterprise.   
   Though   
   you will usually hear Orbán's GOP fan club enumerate exactly three of the   
   prime   
   minister's tangible accomplishments—he pays Hungarians to reproduce, he   
   limits   
   immigration, he tells Western elites to get bent—the hiding-in-plain-sight   
   attraction to the Fidesz leader is about politics far more than policy. And   
   those politics spring directly from a paranoid sense of historical grievance no   
   self-respecting American should want to experience, let alone emulate.   
      
   https://reason.com/2021/08/11/no-self-respecting-american-should   
   aspire-to-hungarian-style-nationalism/   
      
   Trump, an Orbán admirer and wannabe, and Carlson are not self-respecting   
   Americans.  They are scum, and they should be hanged.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)