Should We Even Support Orban now?

I'm not sure I am ready for this, but in any case don't re-write history

“[As] Orbán’s state secretary for communications, Zoltán Kovács, recently noted the “press in Western Europe is monolithic and …” in favor of left-liberalism,” or that is the report by Chris Rufo, who seems to do good work. Rufo’s article, written after a six-week stay in Hungary, does read nicely; he writes like an honest individual. This is the well-executed journalism that we need today. Yet reading him has been strange; I want to like it. To state it bluntly, his writing seems good to me because I want to find a correspondence with my own views. I want to believe that it aligns with some of my own views, views that I will just say are, Well—“different.” Let just leave it at that. Read any of my Economics Substack articles. (Now getting their own tag, which I suppose you will see on screen in the future, as ECONO.)

But then I look again, and, upon giving the text a second glance, Well—something is not quite right. I don’t agree with writing that makes leftism retroactively “wrong.” It was a desperately needed remedy to much that was wrong with American at that time. In New York, in the fifties, not to mention the early sixties, nearly all the intellectuals in New York (e.g. in cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s memoir) were more or less in the “left” camp. It was like a rock for drowning people to swim to and clamber on.

When these new conservatives (who are quite up to date on liberal values by the way without knowing it) talk about history they do not mention the importance of a “left” perspective for the comprehension of what happened in U. S. history. No one really talks about it, but without the “left” perspective this country would simply not have been able to breathe. And all the major institutions were presumably in hands of conservatives! Or am I wrong? This gets to the heart of the matter, because now it turns out there is and there always was another possibility. What if some newspaper in the early sixties was found to be “liberal”? Would that be ominous or refreshing?

So what happened? How can the European press be monolithic “in favor of left-liberalism”? Well I will not quarrel with the term “left-liberalism,” but it isn’t the same as the left, which a historical cultural movement repressed by every Western country. I still need to have it explained to me how this change occurred. It was not a left social movement. It was a sneak attack. We woke up one day and all these queer rainbow-headed people were all over. This is not the left at all, so I would call it provisionally a fake left, or the faux left. Not so much “left” per se, it is a new thing, with definite divergences from what had been called the left or leftist social movement. I can only provisionally call it “fake left.” It is not even recognizably “left” to me. It looks more like psychosis. It is like some elements of leftism were taken with a forceps and lifted from one petri dish to another. What the hell kind of an animal do we have here? Something needs to get unsorted.

Leftism, historically, involves a lot of overly-stimulated hyper-intellectuals debating, each one outdoing the other with their radical stance or originality of view. Everyone had his or her own viewpoint. But this “fake leftism” is not based on that discussion. Because it is conformism; it is ideology, meaning something pre-configured at the factory level subsequently disseminated to every person, to people who now have to repeat it verbatum. And don’t add anything unauthorized.

Lemme tell ya something; that is not leftism, man. Although it is embarrassing, I have to mention that Leftism had factions. Too many, but in any case, this new version of it — also called “left” — has none. You just wear any kind of clothing with a rainbow on it, and the brainwashed “leftists” (whomever “they” are) kiss and hug you. Everyone believes that the worst thing is not the working class but that you interfere their pet project, n this case the medical gender modification-for-teens program. We do not want the transsexuals to be oppressed. This completely absurd issue is now the market of political correctness and I do not see any members of Congress who are able to see clearly on such a simple issue. There is not transsexual crisis. It doesn’t even make sense. This is sheer madness. It becomes as marker of correct political views, and something none of them can see their way past. It means people believe whatever they are told. They have not reasoned it out, thinking for themselves.

There are some important defects in the left point of view. We saw Stalinism — but dismissed it. Now this new fake leftism. It is pre-eminently a cultural phenomenon, no longer intellectual at all. It makes them feel safe and hug-worthy so they feel like they are among friends. (Think of “Friends of the U.S.S.R.” as a group you read about from the fifties or sixties, or “friends of Cambodia” under the circumstances of Pol Pot. Those people thought they were doing the right thing. What, I wonder is “Monthy Review” doing today, for the times certainly have a-changed.)

So, it is not that we have to rewrite the history of the Left. It is the matter of making the effort to write history, to remember it correctly. What role did it have? How did it save people who had to live in a country full of anti-communist and anti-negro and even anti-Beatles phenomena? As I came of age, in 1968-9, I had to find out what to say about these morons! So yeah: I took inspiration from the left. What the hell else was I supposed to do?

Many, many people took to the “left” just in order to survive and feel human. We needed it like water, just in order to survive. That is the real story of the “left.” Let us hear more about that, and don’t let us fall into the memory hole.