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Personal symbol of Marshall Petain.
There’s one overriding theme I’ve heard over and over and over again, and that is: We’re fed up. We’re fed up with seeing young mothers and fathers who can’t find baby formula for their newborns. We’re fed up with $6 gasoline and $6 diesel; we’re fed up with the shortage of fertilizer for our farmers and a supply chain that had been broken by the incompetence of our federal agencies. . . We’re fed up with critical race theory,” We’re fed up with boys competing in girls’ sports. We’re fed up with the radical abortion industry, and those extremists who are willing to destroy the Supreme Court to prevent us from being able to protect life.
Harriet Hageman.
Really?
Hageman is actually an establishment Republican, strongly associated with the successful farming class of southeastern Wyoming, and probably darned near 100% in agreement with Cheney on most things. If that's true, it makes her campaign cynical in that the same things she's "fed up" with Liz Cheney is probably also "fed up" with, save for liberal democracy itself, which Cheney is going out on a limb for, but Hageman is willing to work against if it puts her in office. [1].
But, in the Ford Center where she delivered her speech, many of those who are "fed up", are fed up with liberal democracy itself.
That explains a lot about the January 6 insurrection.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party won the Hungarian election a few weeks ago by a surprising margin, returning Orban to a fourth term.
Eh? So what?
Well, it's more significant, for strange reasons, than a person may think.
Fidez was founded in 1988 as a center left party that opposed the ruling Communist party. It registered officially as a party in 1990, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing, and Orbán was its first leader and, of course, remains its leader. It entered the National Assembly of Hungary that year, at which time it adopted liberal-conservatism as its plant form, causing its left-wing members to depart. It's since became a nationalist conservative party and moved increasingly to the right.
Since that time, it's become one of the most notable political parties of its type. Orbán himself described its existential philosophy as "Illiberal Democracy" rather than "Liberal Democracy", the latter being the type of government which generally describes true democracies. You know, think Edmund Burke and John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and those fellows.
Fidesz describes their philosophy, more specifically, as a "Christian illiberal democracy", which would explain the color orange in their banner, orange being the color of Christian democracy. Whatever it may be, they definitely aren't the same as Germany's Christian Democrats or the American Solidarity Party, two other Christian Democratic parties. Orbán and his followers regard liberal democracy as having undemocratic tendencies as they are, they assert, "intolerate of alternative views". His party is nativist, nationalistic, Hungarian ethnocentric, and self asserted as Christian, although like other governments in the past that have claimed the same, particularly in Catholic countries, some of the policies of the government have found disfavor with the country's presiding Bishops. Orbán himself is a member of the Presbyterian Reformed Church of Hungary which means, oddly enough, like Admiral Horthy of the 1920s through 1940s, who held similar views, he's a Protestant, and a Protestant in a largely Catholic country.
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Like a lot of similar movements, and there have been similar ones in the past, they're difficult to describe from an American prospective. They are not easy to compare to the German Christian Democatic Party or Catholic Centre Party, as noted, two historic mainstream Christian democratic parteis. They're more comparable to some branches, but not all, of the Spanish Phalangist or to Francoist in general, to some degree. Perhahps the best comparison might be to Ireland's Christian democratic party, Fianna Fáil, during the DeValera era,
Indeed, the original Fianna Fáil would be a quite good comparison, as it was all of those things just noted, for the most part, and that had a major impact on the constitution and culture of Ireland before the Celtic Tiger era. It might also, it might be noted, have sewn the seeds for a collapse of its political views that came in that era. Culturally and politically, Fianna Fáil worked to make Ireland an institutionally Catholic republic, vesting education, for example, in the Church, over the Church's original objection. Indeed, much of the institutional Catholicism that Fianna Fail created was opposed by the Church and churchmen, who thought that newly independent Ireland should be a conventional parliamentary democracy instead.
Still, Fianna Fáil always existed in the context of parliamentary democracy, and it acceded to defeat when it lost, which it frequently did, and Ireland had and still has a vigorous parliament. So irrespective of its massive influence, and that of its founder, maybe the example isn't a good one, as the first principal for it turned out to be democracy, once it had turned to democracy in the first place.
Another example would be the Union Nationale of Quebec, which was extremely similar, and whose history and fate tells much of the same tale.
The Union Nationale was a fiercely Québécois party, seeking no favor for or from English-speaking Quebecers at all. Like Fianna Fáil, it was aggressively Catholic, and it was also aggressively agrarian, something that Fianna Fáil was also early on. It sought a Francophone enclave within Canada that had little to do with the rest of the English-speaking nation, and it often took positions diametrically in opposition to the rest of the nation, at a time in which the rest of Canada was aggressively English. Also like Fianna Fáil, in the highly federal Canada, it worked to institutionalize this by incorporating the Church into civil roles, such as education, by also health.
The result there, of course, was ultimately the Quiet Revolution, which destroyed the Union Nationale and put in its place an aggressively secular Francophone view. Often missed, the Church initially was one of the backers of the Quiet Revolution, although ultimately it got far out of hand and lead to a sort of collapse of Québécois culture, seeing the times as evidence that it should separate itself from roles better fulfilled by government.
And we should note, the party wasn't always in power, and when it wasn't, it accepted that. So again, maybe it isn't the best example.
Maybe Vichy France is.
Petainist France rejected, by fiat, the ideals of the Revolution, which were often honored frequently in the breach rather than the observance, and in France the Revolution itself had never really been fully accepted by a large percentage of the population. A sort of democracy lived on, but only one that was strictly confined within Petainist ideas, which were summed up by his motto "Work, Country, Family". A very secular man himself, Petain's conservatism was much like pre-war German conservatism, in that it was based on a set of social ideals, but not on religious ones. Like the German variant, they were social in nature, and highly nationalistic. And like the pre Nazi German variant, they were willing to endure some democratic institutions, but only to the extent that they were controlled within that context.
And next, perhaps, you have Franco's Spain, where no democracy was tolerated at all.
All of which takes us to Patrick Deneen.
Eh?
Deneen is a political science professor at the Notre Dame. He came into prominence in 2018 when he authored Why Liberalism Failed, a major work criticized heavily by the mainstream press and deeply studied by conservatives. Yale's snippet on the book states:
Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?
"Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."—President Barack Obama
"Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order."—David Brooks, New York Times
Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
Apparently Dineen takes a really dim view of things, noting that, as this states, "centripetal forces now at work. . . are generating their own failure". To put it mildly, his adherents, and probably Dineen himself, feel what might basically be described as a sense of doom about things as liberalism is inherently anti-democratic at the point at which it begins to attack its own culture's foundational principles.
This in fact was recently apparently a topic on First Things, the notable journal, and that resulted in a Catholic Answers Focus podcast on the topic, entitled:
It's subtitled:
A debate is raging within Catholicism over the legitimacy of modern liberalism. R.R. Reno, editor of First Things magazine, stops by to help us understand the stakes in the debate. Cy Kellet: Modern ideas about freedom are not setting people free.
re debating what to do about it. .R. Reno is next.
Heavy stuff.
Inside the covers of First Things, and elsewhere, there are in fact debates on this. Apparently the hardcore Dineen followers feel things are hopeless and are headed in the Fidesz direction. In contrast, individuals like George Weigel feel that things are messed up, and it's hard to disagree with that, but that this can be corrected with in the foundations of the liberal democracy itself. Weigel, I'd note, just authored The Fragility of Order, which I do have, but have not yet read. It's related to this topic, apparently.
And then there's a generally disgusted George F. Will.
Huh?
Will is, of course, the most prominent of the remaining Buckleyite conservatives, and is generally disgusted with everything right now.
During a recent episode of Meet The Press, Will was one of the panelists and in response to a question about why some elements of the GOP, albeit a minority, have had a love affair with Putin, he spouted off, in a somewhat angry tone, that it was "because they loved Orban first". He was clearly mad and upset about it, but a little bit of explanation would have been helpful.
In fairness, he did expand a bit, but the expansion was oblique and probably nonsensical to all but the most informed. Basically, he was making the point that American conservatives admire Orbán, or at least some do, as he's maintaining a certain very conservative line on things that they wish to maintain here. By extension, they see Putin in the same light.
And indeed Orbán is an open ally of Putin, although it's certainly worth questioning if they are in fact anything really alike, politically. While critics of Hungary have labeled the country's current commitment to democracy imperiled, it does in fact function democratically if in a semi authoritarian way. Orbán could have lost the recent election. To a degree, those who criticize Orbán do so as they feel that his policies are anti-democratic, but what they really are is anti-liberal. It is different.
Putin, on the other hand, is anti-democratic and where he fits on the conservative/liberal scale is pretty hard to figure out. He's made a point of being aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church, and vice versa, and some of his policies, such as his policies on homosexuality, square very much with Orbán's views on the same things. It seems, however, that what Orbán is, is an Illiberal Democrat, and what Putin is, is an Illiberal Authoritarian. They aren't the same thing.
And that takes us to CPAC.
What?
Yes, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
CPAC used to essentially be the political equivalent of Comic Con, quite frankly, and wasn't taken much more seriously than a big Star Trek convention. That's really changed in recent years, and all the hopefuls on the right who are hoping to gain traction show up at it and give firey far right speeches. In recent years, CPAC has had the impact of taking the GOP further and further into the right wing camp. It's also had an impact on the states, as various organizations with very specific goals hand out predrafted legislative bills that state legislators pack home and submit to their state legislative bodies. There have been several that have been introduced in the Wyoming legislature in recent years. It's having quite an impact, even though most have failed.
This year, there's going to be an event called:
And that's no small deal.
Essentially, CPAC is going global and it's endorsing Fidesz.
And that's where things tie together.
But not before we consider Rod Dreher.
Readers of this august cyberjournal may recognize Dreher as he's the dour social critic and conservative who, a few years ago, issued a book called The Benedict Option. I've not read it, but the gist of it is that Christians should take a page out of the history of St. Benedict, as Dreher understands it, and essentially form Christian enclaves in what he regards as a Barbarian sea.
Lots of modern Christians have taken up seeing the world sort of this way, in a "post-modern" or "post Christian" way, but frankly their points are very much over done. Christianity fundamentally and irrevocably changed the Western world, but it frankly simply is not the case that after the year 450 thigns were just completley Christian until 1968.
And this is an important fact, as it forms much of the central world view of those who are now on the far right.
In reality, adherence to Christian morality waxed and waned over the centuries, with there being eras in which the tide seemed to be going out, and others when it came back in. Much of the Age of Englightment, from which Liberal Democracy comes we should note, was a freaking moral sewer, at least to the degree that classes with some means were involved. There's a delusional group of people who believe that monarchy upheld the moral standards, for example, but they hardly did, with royals leaping out of various people's beds so quickly that its a wonder they had any time for affairs of state at all. Even in the high Medieval Age, the offspring of monarchs usually is divided into legitimate and illegitimate, with a long list for both.
As noted, the Age of Englightment was a real moral sewer. Often poorly understood, this was exhibited by at least some of our "Founding Fathers", who were part of that age. Benjamin Frankly was a self-confessed practitioner of "wenching" when he was young. Thomas Jefferson had children by his wife and his wife's half sister, the latter who a product of a union between a slave and his wife's father, and who was held in bondage herself.
Pretty icky.
This is "Pride Month".
So, you may ask?
Well, it relates more than a person might suppose. Let's consider one of Hageman's "fed ups" once again.
We’re fed up with boys competing in girls’ sports.
Truth be known, a lot of rank and file average people are fed up with just that, and much of what's related to it, even those who aren't saying so. At a deep down level, a lot of people who are socially conservative are reeling with the thought that things that were regarded as deeply abnormal, and indeed perverse, just recently are now celebrated with "pride". And this is forcing a social view down the throats of a large section of the population. Indeed, just as the left decries the right for acting anti democratically, the left is fueling the fire by acting massively anti democratically itself. It's mostly just tearing down, with no guardrails at all as to what is left up.
And this hits people at all sorts of different levels, and not just those who are universally conservative on all of their views. That's because big portions of the country are forcing a social construct on traditional beliefs, even if they have to counter science to do it.
That this was going to create a massive problem in society was obvious at the point, ironically now given the left wing displeasure with the Supreme Court, when the Supreme Court issued the Obergefll decision. As long ago as that, which isn't all that long ago really, we predicted that this would be a massive turning point in acceptance of the status quo in the country, and we've proven right.
It isn't the only one. Things have been slow in building. And populism, which is a separate movement, but one which is feeding into this, and vice versa, has its roots in a lot of other issues, including massively high immigration and the loss of blue collar jobs, both of which are tied to together and feed into each other.
All of these together, however, are a poisonous brew that we've been adding ingredients into since the 1960s.
So now we have a Republican Party that's split between populism, establishment conservatism, and illiberal democracy conservatism. It's an odd mix. It's like mixing, in one Uber ride, Huey Long, Mitt Romney and Rod Dreher, with Donald Trump trying to tell the driver where to go.
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Something to consider here, however.
Fianna Fáil, which dominated early Ireland, but never lost its democratic principles, evolved and ultimately Ireland went through a large, and frankly tragic, shift. I think the Ireland before the Celtic Tiger was a better Ireland, but as at least one prominent American Catholic churchman noted at the time, the system was setting Ireland up for later social problems.
Quebec underwent a Quiet Revolution, which the Church supported, but with equally tragic social results. In some ways, Quebec has become pathetic among the Canadian provinces due to what it experienced, which can in part be argued that this was due to the revolution coming too late.
Vichy fell with Nazi Germany, and the French right has never recovered. Only now is there a serious right wing in France, and it continues to struggle with the legacy of Vichy.
The point is that, generally, bad ideas die in the sunlight. Times do change. The United States is going through a massive period of internal turmoil, and it seems, only just now, 50 plus years of the United States Supreme Court being a quasi legislative branch of government are ending, to much left wing ire. [2].
Imposing an illiberal democracy in its place probably stands, ultimately, to arrest the return to real democracy, and to sanity as well, and to damage the very principals that those now enamored with it espouse.
Footnotes:
1. Hageman makes missteps in what she's pitching to. Is the average Wyomingite fed up with the "shortage of fertilizer for our farmers"? No, most of us know nothing about that whatsoever. That reflects the southeastern Wyoming agricultural view that everyone has the exact same concerns that they do, a common affliction for most people. Not that it doesn't matter, but it isn't something most people spend much time thinking about.
2. It may be worth asking, as part of this, how much of a return those showing up in these crowds really want.
Hageman's list of offenses list some, but how much further beyond that would people really wish to go? Before the Courts and Legislatures really started down the current path, a lot of things now taken for granted were illegal.
A person can argue on moral bases that perhaps many are still bad ideas, and people do, but do people want the law to return to these topics? For example, no-fault divorce was not a thing. Cohabitation was illegal in many states. Homosexual activity was illegal in some states. Birth control was illegal in some states.
I'd note this as I suspect in any crowed of people cheering for those who are pondering illiberal democracy there are, for lack of a better blunt way to put it, cohabiting birth control users.
Of course, that highlights once again that the rank and file of the far right camp isn't really in touch with some other aspects of this far right movement. Hageman is an establishment Republican, or was. She's espousing a set of ideas that fit into the illiberal democracy book, however. But then many of these ideas cross over.
Anyhow, it's pretty hard to imagine Rod Dreher being comfortable with tattooed Trump rally goers. Would he be comfortable with Frank Eathorne?
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