[The Hungarian Conservative] Culture Warriors on the Danubian Stump

At the third CPAC convened on European soil this month, Hungary will again become the theater of world-historical mutations.

It may be pointless to attempt tracing when exactly our socio-political imaginary turned this unsettled, but ever since that fateful hinge, all received wisdom on our fundamental public truths seems in perma-flux, with new suppositions heralded as truisms before turning veritably axiomatic.

This protean state of indefiniteness is nowhere in clearer display than in our liquified left-and-right divide around the weakening of the nation-state and the sundry shapes of post-national governance piloted in its looming wake. No longer is old-school chauvinism — if it ever truly was — an electoral liability in transnational races, instead spurring parties of the euro-skeptic right to amalgamate their sovereigntist platforms even across ethno-linguistic boundaries. This emergent “take-back-control” bloc may have once deemed beyond repair the hemicycles, backrooms, and pulpits that populate the EU bubble. Less than two decades ago, these loci of supranational power in Brussels and Strasbourg may have seemed, to this crowd, ripe for dismantling. Yet the movement’s current leaders are now devising shared strategies to conquer them, resignify them — and subvert their purpose. Literarily inspired by our American allies, we at the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights have taken to describing this mission as “draining the swamp”.

Continue reading the entire piece at The Hungarian Conservative here.