Hey Viktor, What Time Is It? - The American Conservative

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

68% : Hungary's most acute present-day problems are partly the result of its four decades under Communism, including the Soviet Union's bloody suppression of its 1956 uprising.
66% : But, like contemporary Russia, the country suffers just as much from the excess of faith it placed in Western expertise during its botched transition out of Communism.
61% : When Orban said to the Dallas CPAC crowd that in their experience liberalism is communism, he was not simply making a red-meat remark.
60% : Nevertheless, I find it hard to relate to conservatives who can plainly see how insane our woke institutions have become, how implacably hostile they are to conservatives (even conservative Democrats), and what the stakes are for our future (e.g., we now have the Left pushing for the state to stand between parents and their children, in public schools and elsewhere, for the sake of transitioning children to the opposite sex), and not understand what time it is.
59% : There's a direct line between what Legutko and Orban see, and the ability of people who escaped Communism to see that we here in the West are falling into a softer form of totalitarianism, though most of us don't know it.
55% : That description was exactly accurate -- provided one understands human rights as global philanthropists, political activists, and the United Nations have defined it in recent decades.
52% : That Europe's ancient nation-states would serve in this way as the first line of defense for the continent's external borders, such as the one between Hungary and Serbia, was exactly what had been assumed two decades before in the founding treaties of the European Union, the 28-nation federation-in-embryo centered in Brussels and dominated by Merkel's Germany.
52% : As a Hungarian friend told me when I first came to the country in 2018, Orban spent a lot of his time and effort during his first term trying to repatriate major Hungarian industries that had been sold off to Western investors after Communism collapsed, precisely because he knew that as long as the country's industries were controlled by foreigners, Hungary was not the master of its own fate.
52% : Whenever thwarted in local political give-and-take, it summoned imperial help from outside the constitutional system: from the European Union and (when Barack Obama was in office) the United States.
49% : The very rich can shelter from taxation much of the money they use to influence politics.
45% : (In Orban's Hungary, same-sex marriage is not permitted, nor is gay adoption, but civil partnerships are recognized, and one often sees gays and lesbians holding hands in the streets of Budapest.)
44% : The Polish statesman and philosopher Ryszard Legutko has made the same point eloquently in his excellent book The Demon in Democracy, in which he explains how it was that savvy Communist apparatchiks managed to refashion themselves in the wake of 1989 as Brussels-oriented technocrats -- and how it was easy to do, because it turns out that the Brussels idea of liberalism has a lot in common with Communism.

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