{"id":2557,"date":"2012-01-10T14:42:05","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2557"},"modified":"2012-01-10T14:42:05","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:42:05","slug":"dilettantish-but-determined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2557","title":{"rendered":"Dilettantish but determined"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s now the Washington Post’s turn<\/a> to denounce Prime Minister Orban’s increasingly autocratic government in Hungary, and rightly so: they say things such as “the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban now more resembles the autocratic regimes of Russia and Belarus than fellow E.U. democracies”, and I couldn’t agree more.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, I see fewer and fewer voices from Hungary denouncing such outbursts in Western media as the work of some internationally financed (a code phrase for Jewish) liberal bolshevik cryptocommunist conspiracy.<\/p>\n

I find watching Mr. Orban’s performance especially painful. For starters, I expect more from people whose first name I share. He is also almost exactly the same age as I am. For all I know, we may have run into one another in Budapest several times in the 1970s or early 1980s. I am trying to make sense of his autocratic tendencies, and the only explanation I can come up with is that he truly distrusts anyone who thinks differently. Since he views himself as a democrat, people who disagree with him must be antidemocratic by definition; therefore, paradoxically, in order to protect democracy he must silence his opposition. But who protects democracy from democrats? A stable system of institutions, that’s who, but unfortunately it’s precisely this system of of institutions in Hungary that Mr. Orban has very effectively dismantled in the past two years.<\/p>\n

The damage will be lasting: even if Mr. Orban’s party were swept from power tomorrow, it will take decades to rebuild what he destroyed, grossly abusing his extraordinary parliamentary supermajority. I do not envy Hungarians who must suffer the consequences of Mr. Orban’s dilettantish by determined (a phrase attributed<\/a> to a former Hungarian PM, Gordon Bajnai) economic policies, but I also do not envy future leaders of Hungary who will face the nearly hopeless task of rebuilding what the Orban government destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s now the Washington Post’s turn to denounce Prime Minister Orban’s increasingly autocratic government in Hungary, and rightly so: they say things such as “the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban now more resembles the autocratic regimes of Russia and Belarus than fellow E.U. democracies”, and I couldn’t agree more. Surprisingly, I see fewer and […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hungary","category-politics","category-21-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}