Results for “fascism”
49 found

The roots of fascism in Italy, namely communism

In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and the subsequent emergence of Fascism in Italy. We first develop a source of variation in Socialist support across Italian municipalities in the 1919 election based on war casualties from the area. We show that these casualties are unrelated to a battery of political, economic and social variables before the war and had a major impact on Socialist support (partly because the Socialists were the main anti-war political movement). Our main result is that this boost to Socialist support (that is “exogenous” to the prior political leaning of the municipality) led to greater local Fascist activity as measured by local party branches and Fascist political violence (squadrismo), and to significantly larger vote share of the Fascist Party in the 1924 election. We document that the increase in the vote share of the Fascist Party was not at the expense of the Socialist Party and instead came from right-wing parties, thus supporting our interpretation that center-right and right-wing voters coalesced around the Fascist Party because of the “red scare”.

That is from a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, Giacomo De Luca, and Gianluca Russo.

No, American fascism can’t happen here

Politico is running an excerpt from my essay in the new Cass Sunstein book.  Here is one opening bit:

My argument is pretty simple: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical groups, to seize control of. No matter who is elected, the fascists cannot control the bureaucracy, they cannot control all the branches of American government, they cannot control the judiciary, they cannot control semi-independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and they cannot control what is sometimes called “the deep state.” The net result is they simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.

…Surely it ought to give us pause that the major instances of Western fascism came right after a time when government was relatively small, and not too long after the heyday of classical liberalism in Europe, namely the late 19th century. No, I am not blaming classical liberalism for Nazism, but it is simply a fact that it is easier to take over a smaller and simpler state than it is to commandeer one of today’s sprawling bureaucracies.

…the greater focus of the night watchman state, for all its virtues, is part of the reason why it is easy to take over. There is a clearly defined center of power and a clearly defined set of lines of authority; furthermore, the main activity of the state is to enforce property rights through violence or the threat of violence. That means such a state will predominantly comprise policemen, soldiers, possibly border authorities, Coast Guard employees and others in related support services. The culture and ethos of such a state is likely to be relatively masculine and also relatively martial and tolerant of a certain amount of risk, and indeed violence. The state will be full of people who are used to the idea of applying force to achieve social ends, even if, under night watchman assumptions, those deployments of force are for the most part justified.

Do read the whole thing, the article has points of interest, and the essay in the book even more.

*Fascism: 100 questions asked and answered*

That is the 1936 book by British fascist Oswald Mosley, and it is arguably the clearest first-person introduction to the topic for an Anglo reader, serving up less gobbledygook than most of the Continental sources.  Mosley actually makes arguments for his point of view, and thinks through what possible objections might be, which is not the case with say Marinetti.  Beyond the basics, here are a few points I gleaned from my read:

1. Voting still will occur, at least once every five years, because “The support of the people is far more necessary to a Government of action than to a Democratic Government, which tricks the people into a vote once every five years on an irrelevant issue, and then hopes the Nation will go to sleep for another five years so that the Government can go to sleep as well.”

2. Voting will be organized by occupation, not geographic locality.

3. If an established British fascist government loses a vote, the King will send for new ministers, but not necessarily from the opposing party.

4. The House of Lords is to become much more technical, technocratic, and detailed in its knowledge, drawing more upon science and industry.  The description reminds me of the CCP State Council.

5. A National Council of Corporations will conduct much of economic policy, and as far as I can tell it would stand on a kind of par with Parliament.

6. “M.P.’s will be converted from windbags into men of action.”

7. A special Corporation would be created to represent the interests of women politically.  Women will not be forced to become mothers, but high wages for men will represent a very effective subsidy to childbirth.

8. The government will spend much more money on research and development, with rates of return of “one hundred-fold.”

9. Wages will be boosted considerably by cutting out middlemen and distribution costs.  The resulting higher real wages will maintain aggregate demand.  Cheap, wage-undercutting foreign imports will not be allowed.

10. Foreign investment abroad will be eliminated, as will the gold standard and foreign immigration into Britain.

11. “…foreigners who have not proved themselves worthy citizens of Britain will deported.”  And “Jews will not be afforded the full rights of British citizenship,” as they have deliberately maintained themselves as a distinct foreign community.

12. Any banker who breaks the law will go to jail, just as a poor person would.

13. Inheritance will not be allowed, but private property in land will persist and will be accompanied by with radically egalitarian land reform.

14. To restore the prosperity of coal miners, competition from cheap Polish labor and Polish imports will be eliminated.

15. The small shopkeeper shall be favored over chain stores, especially if the latter are in foreign or Jewish hands.

16. All citizens, rich and poor, are to have the right to an education up through age 18.  Overall there is considerable emphasis on not letting human capital go to waste, and a presumption that there is a lot of implicit slack in the system under the status quo ex ante.

17. Hospitals will be coordinated, but not nationalized.  That would be going too far.

18. Roosevelt’s New Deal is distinct from fascism because a) the American government does not have enough “power to plan,” and b) it relies on “Jewish capital.”

19. The colonies will sell raw materials to Britain, and produce agriculture for themselves, but will not allowed to compete in manufactures.  And this:  “If we failed to hold India, we should be 1/100th the men they were.”

20. By removing the struggle for foreign markets, fascism will bring perpetual peace.

Mosley was later interned from 1940 to 1943.

Franco Modigliani and the history of Italian fascism

What is often missed—and, frankly, it would seem deliberately misrepresented in his own autobiographical works—is that in Italy, Modigliani, by age 20, was a well published fascist wunderkind, having received in 1936 an award for economics writing from the hand of Benito Mussolini himself. Further, in 1947, at age 29, Modigliani published a 75-page article whose title in English translation would be “The Organization and Direction of Production in a Socialist Economy” (Modigliani 1947), an article that affirms socialist economics. In 2004 and 2005 there appeared English translations of five fascist works by Modigliani originally published during 1937 and 1938 (all five translations are collected by Daniela Parisi in Modigliani 2007b). The socialist paper of 1947 has never been translated in its entirety, though the  Appendix to this profile contains excerpts selected and newly translated by Viviana Di Giovinazzo, to whom we are very grateful.

That is from Econ Journal Watch, by Daniel B. Klein and Ryan Daza, with Viviana Di Giovinazzo, and here is the broader page on the ideological histories of the Nobel Laureates (interesting throughout).  The point here is not to trash Modigliani, but rather to point out how thoroughly fascist ways of thinking can seep into a society.  Furthermore, fascism and other forms of authoritarianism rule are a massive tax on human creativity, as it is unlikely Modigliani could have turned his career around had his life under Mussolini’s regime persisted.

What I’ve been reading about fascism

1. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War.  A vivid and entertaining look at a major European fascist who remains neglected by Americans (I don’t even think this book has a U.S. edition).  I was surprised how readable this book was, given its length and subject matter.  The words “rollicking” and “psychopath” come to mind.  He was nonetheless one of the most influential European writers of his time.

2. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945.  One of the classics, readable and comprehensive and one of the best places to start.  One thing I learned from this pile of books is how hard some of those leaders worked to have the mid-level bureaucracy on their side.  The centralization often occurred at higher levels, for instance Mussolini had 72 cabinet meetings in 1933, but only 4 in 1936.  The Italian Fascist party, by the way, was disproportionately Jewish, at least pre-1938.

3. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism.  Along with Payne, one of the core books to read, stronger on analysis while Payne has more historical detail.  He is especially clear on how the fascists built up and refined their political coalitions over time, and the conflicting roles of party and nation in the history of fascism.

4. R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship.  I’ve only read parts of this one, but it seems to be the best detailed historical account of a non-Nazi fascist regime.  If you wish to know, for instance, how and why the Italian fascists reformed Italian public holidays, this is your go-to source.

5. Alexander de Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origin and Development.  Highly focused and to the point, also has an A+ quality annotated bibliography.  It considers regions of Italy, demographic issues, looks at the arts, and for such a short book gives the reader a remarkably broad and multi-faceted perspective.  Overall this book emphasizes how deeply rooted fascism was in so many other Italian institutions and ways of life.

6. I’ve also been reading plenty of Benedetto Croce, including his history of Naples and History, its Theory and Practice.  He is oddly boring and non-concrete, but was a consistent opponent of the Italian fascist regime, except for the first two years of Mussolini’s rule (he later claimed that was for tactical reasons).  In any case, the reader learns that the opposing side doesn’t always have a good ability to articulate why bad events are happening.  I can recommend Fabio Fernando Rizi’s very good history and survey, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism.

7. Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  This beautiful short novel (also a movie) is especially good on anti-Semitism in Italy, how youth process political collapse in their countries, and how events can outrace your expectations and leave you in a haze.

Some books on Italian futurism are coming in the mail.

Overall I did not conclude that we Americans are careening toward fascist outcomes.  I do not think that notion is well-suited to the great complexity of contemporary bureaucracy, nor to our more feminized and also older societies.  Furthermore, in America democracy has taken much deeper roots and the system of checks and balances, whatever its flaws, has stood for a few hundred years, contra either Italy or Germany in their fascist phases.

Still, I did not find this reading reassuring, as people will support many bad things in politics.  The Italian war in Ethiopian was remarkably popular, but exactly why?  We Americans could (again) do something quite bad, but without being fascists.

Less directly on fascism, but by no means irrelevant to the topic, I can recommend two new books:

Andrzej Franaszek, Milosz: A Biography. Long, thorough, but readable treatment, focusing on more on his poetry than the political writings.

And I have been enjoying my ongoing browse of Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life.

Liberal Fascism

Here is Henry Farrell on the book.  Here is Matt Yglesias.  Here is Fred Siegel.  Here is Arnold Kling.  Here is another review.  Here is Megan McArdle on the BloggingHeads version.  Here is the Amazon link.  I am closest to the CrookedTimber commentator who wrote:

Jonah’s book, at its heart, is geared toward popularizing the arguments of smart intellectuals/academics, from John Patrick Diggins to A.J. Gregor to Hayek to Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Or try this excellent book, or for that matter John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching.  I divide the arguments of Liberal Fascism into three categories:

1. The oft neglected but obviously true: For instance Mussolini really was a precursor of the New Deal and he was initially regarded with fondness by many on the American left.  This sort of claim is the core of the book and it does stand up after you take all the criticisms into account.  I am pleased to see it upend traditional "feel good" narratives of politics.

That said, a "who cares?" response might be in order from a social democrat.  Good people can have bad ideas, so can’t bad people — namely the fascists — have had some good ideas?  After all, George Lucas borrowed from Leni Riefenstahl.

2. The false claims: Contrary to what Goldberg argues, it simply isn’t true that Hitler and Nazism were essentially left-wing phenomena.  Not all right-wing ideas are Burkean, and the mere fact that the Nazis were "revolutionary" does not make them left-wing.  Furthermore the Nazis busted labor unions and used right-wing emotive tricks for their racism and authoritarianism.  When all those old Nazis popped up in South America, where did they all find themselves on the political spectrum?  Overall fascism has much stronger roots in the Right than Goldberg is willing to emphasize.

I also would have put more weight on the aestheticization of politics than did Goldberg.  That would help us see why supporters of the War on Drugs, while they favor very violent and possibly unjust means, should not be regarded as fascists.

3. The true but possibly misleading claims.  Goldberg writes for instance that Hillary Clinton is not a fascist.  OK, but simply to write that she isn’t a fascist is reframing the terms of the debate, and not in a way I am fully comfortable with.  I’m sure it bothers many Clinton supporters more than it bothers me.

Goldberg insists he only wants to stop the slander of the Right and its long-standing identification with fascism.  I am fully behind this goal of tolerance, and I might add I recall fellow Harvard econ grad students calling Martin Feldstein (and perhaps me!) a fascist on a regular basis.  That simply shouldn’t happen.  The problem is that Goldberg’s book will be interpreted by its buyers and readers as a call to do the same to the left.  Take a look at the cover and the title, both of which Goldberg distanced himself from on Comedy Central (I can no longer find the YouTube link).  But they’re on the book nonetheless.

Is Goldberg "to blame" for how his book will be interpreted, especially if he requests an interpretation to the contrary?  That’s a moot point.  But it gets to the core of why I don’t like the book more than I do. 

The bottom line: As Arnold Kling recommends, all parties involved should read Dan Klein’s "The People’s Romance," and start the debate there.

Addendum: Some of the critical web reviews admit they have not read the book, but they rely heavily on Goldberg’s (apparently controversial) web writings.  I’ve never read Goldberg before, so I am coming at this book "fresh."

More on *Sith* and fascism

…get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited…

The two best entries to this film, and to Star Wars in general, are Milton’s Paradise Lost and the popular fascist art of the Nazis and Soviets.  The portrayal of the Jedi shows that the fascist temptation is far stronger than Milton ever believed, which is saying something. 

Most of the other episodes also should be viewed with fascistic traditions in mind.  (Otherwise you may think of them as stupid and maudlin, esp. I and II.)  Is this deliberate, or rather picked up through Buck Rogers, Joseph Campbell, and other intermediate sources?  It doesn’t matter.  Lucas’s final message is supremely anti-fascistic, and at the end of "Return of the Jedi" he presents entertaining story-telling as his preferred alternative means of enthrallment (remember the ewoks reenacting the whole story?).  But of course only a director himself enthralled with the fascistic aesthetic could make such a convincingly anti-fascistic series of movies.  That is precisely what makes the whole thing interesting, and is what most critics miss.  At least Lane gets half the picture.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK takes a step toward us

To escape our predicament, we cannot just cling to multi-party liberal democracy. Rather, we must find new ways of building social consensus and establishing active links between political parties and civil society. The immediate task is to oppose the new left-right populists, and that may require aligning with exponents of capitalist liberal democracy – just as WWII-era Communists fought alongside Western “imperialist” democracies against Fascism, knowing full well that imperialism was their ultimate enemy. These were strange bedfellows, but they at least could see what was really going on.

Here is the full piece, via Arthur Wright.

What I’ve been reading

Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.  This book bored me, but here I mean that as a positive statement.  It bored me because I knew a lot of the content already, and that is because this is such important content that I have put a lot of time into trying to know it.  Both the author and I thought it was very important to know this material.  AI and the military is right now is a critical issue, and this is the book to read in the area.  Whether or not you are bored.

Perry Mehrling’s Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System is a definitive biography, and also a good look at the “rooted in academia but mostly in the policy world” branch of macro and finance that was so prominent in the postwar era.

I read only a small amount of Philip Short’s Putin, at more than 800 pages.  It seemed entirely fine, and useful, and surely the topic is of importance.  Yet I didn’t find myself learning conceptual points from it, or even new details of significance.  In any case it is now the biography of Putin, and some of you will want to read it.

Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, and Other Living Treasures is a series of short, fun takes on strange animals including the wombat (runs faster than Usain Bolt) and the pangolin, among others.  Good for both adults and children.

When I first saw the title of Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, I thought it was some kind of satire, or perhaps GPT-3 run amok.  Nonetheless some of the book is a serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it out of hand.  That said, mechanisms such as the supposed “logic of capital accumulation” are assigned too much explanatory power.  The book also will convince you that “austerity” is almost always poorly defined.

There is Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s.  Somehow this book felt naive to me.  Yes, many Chinese paths were discussed in the 1980s, but the system nonetheless had an underlying logic which reasserted itself rather brutally…

Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500.  I thought I would love this lengthy tome (913 pp.), and it is quite a catalog, and impressively objective to boot.  Yet something is missing, and I skipped around and ended up putting it down with few regrets.

Michael Pritchard, FRPS, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras is very useful and very good, exactly what it promises, good photos too (better be good!)  I think of photography as one of those innovations that started 20-30 years earlier than I might otherwise have expected, had I not known the historical record.  1839 for basic daguerreotype, that is impressive.

Roger D. Congleton, Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics, and Prosperity is a good book on classical liberalism and how it is embedded in stories of the historical evolution of cooperation.

Where I differ from Bryan Caplan’s *Labor Econ Versus the World*

One thing I liked about reading this book is I was able to narrow down my disagreements with Bryan to a smaller number of dimensions.  And to be clear, I agree with a great deal of what is in this book, but that does not make for an interesting blog post.  So let’s focus on where we differ.  One point of disagreement surfaces when Bryan writes:

Tenet #6: Racial and gender discrimination remains a serious problem, and without government regulation, would still be rampant.

Critique: Unless government requires discrimination, market forces make it a marginal issue at most.  Large group differences persist because groups differ largely in productivity.

I would instead stress that most of the inequity occurs upstream of labor markets, through the medium of culture.  It is simply much harder to be born in the ghetto!  I am fine with not calling this “discrimination,” and indeed I do not myself use the word that way.  Still, it is a significant inequity, and it is at least an important a lesson about labor markets as what Bryan presents to you.

But you won’t find much consideration of it in Bryan’s book.  The real problems in labor markets arise when “the cultural upstream” intersects with other social institutions in problematic ways.  To give a simple example, Princeton kept Jews out for a long time, and that was not because of the government.  Or Princeton voted to admit women only in 1969, again not the government.  What about Major League Baseball before Jackie Robinson or even for a long while after?  Much of Jim Crow was governmental, but so much of it wasn’t.  There are many such examples, and I don’t see that Bryan deals with them.  And they have materially affected both people’s lives and their labor market histories, covering many millions of lives, arguably billions.

Or, the Indian government takes some steps to remedy caste inequalities, but fundamentally the caste system remains, for whatever reasons.  Again, this kind of cultural upstream isn’t much on Bryan’s radar screen.  (I have another theory that this neglect of culture is because of Bryan’s unusual theory of free will, through which moral blame has to be assigned to individual choosers, but that will have to wait for another day!)

We can go beyond the discrimination topic and still see that Bryan is not paying enough attention to what is upstream of labor markets, or to how culture shapes human decisions.

Bryan for instance advocates open borders (for all countries?).  I think that would be cultural and political suicide, most of all for smaller countries, but for the United States too.  You would get fascism first, if anything.  I do however favor boosting (pre-Covid) immigration flows into the United States by something like 3x.  So in the broader scheme of things I am very pro-immigration.  I just think there are cultural limits to what a polity can absorb at what speed.

If you consider Bryan on education, he believes most of higher education is signaling.  In contrast, I see higher education as giving its recipients the proper cultural background to participate in labor markets at higher productivity levels.  I once wrote an extensive blog post on this.  That is how higher education can be productive, while most of your classes seem like a waste of time.

On poverty, Bryan puts forward a formula of a) finish high school, b) get a full time job, and c) get married before you have children.  All good advice!  But I find that to be nearly tautologous as an explanation of poverty.  To me, the deeper and more important is why so many cultures have evolved to make those apparent “no brainer” choices so difficult for so many individuals.  Again, I think Bryan is neglecting the cultural factors upstream of labor markets and in this case also marriage markets.  One simple question is why some cultures don’t produce enough men worth marrying, but that is hardly the only issue on the table here.

More generally, I believe that once you incorporate these messy “cultural upstream” issues, much of labor economics becomes more complicated than Bryan wishes to acknowledge.  Much more complicated.

I should stress that Bryan’s book is nonetheless a very good way to learn economic reasoning, and a wonderful tonic against a lot of the self-righteous, thoughtless mood affiliation you will see on labor markets, even coming from professional economists.

I will remind that you can buy Bryan’s book here, and at a very favorable price point.

“But are you short the market?”

“But are you short the market?” That is my favorite rejoinder to expressions of radical pessimism. It came to mind recently when I read an opinion piece suggesting that “the United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.”

…Besides, shorting the market does not have to be impossibly risky. Just buy some unleveraged market puts each year until that position pays off. That’s not a great investment tactic for most people, but it makes sense for diehard pessimists. Are they even asking around about how to do this, the way you might ask for recommendations for a good restaurant or a masseuse?

I do have friends and acquaintances who work in finance who short particular assets. If they short the entire market, it might be in frothy times — when things seem good and indeed are good, albeit not as good as sky-high prices indicate. That trading tactic, whether prudent or not, is hardly an indicator of mega-pessimism.

There are committed pessimists in the world. Argentina, for instance, is full of pessimists about the Argentinian economy. Typically they have dollar-based bank accounts abroad, which take time and trouble to set up. So there are ways of expressing true pessimism, if you mean it.

Another curious response I hear from pessimists is that they aren’t short the market because the death of democracy in the U.S., or the birth of fascism, isn’t going to be bad for the stock market. That is at least a consistent view — but it is wrong and oddly anti-democratic.

I for one think that America’s biggest and best companies will do better in an era of stability, freedom and economic growth. Fascism is too terrible to succeed for very long.

That is from my latest Bloomberg column, I conclude that very few Americans are truly pessimistic.

That was then…

Here is an excerpt from Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the guy who coined the term “The Third Reich” (hint: he wasn’t against it):

The Left has reason.  The Right has wisdom…Masculinity is the essence of wisdom.  It takes character not to succumb to self-delusion.  The conservative man possesses this character as well as the physical prowess and moral determination to act in accordance with this character…He has the innate ability to pass judgement, and to make deductions, to recognize reality…Conservatism is based on an understanding of human nature.

That is from the new and excellent book Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance, by Stephan Malinowski.  This book builds on themes from Arno Mayer’s old and excellent The Persistence of the Old Regime.

It is an interesting question why these sentiments — some of which are cliched rather than offensive per se — are as correlated with fascism as they are.  In my oversimplified model, feminization is the key variable.  Van den Bruck saw the feminization of society coming, and opposed it, but I believe he was more interested in Nazism and fascism per se.  Many current commentators also oppose that feminization virulently, and that leads them to take up with strange and rather unfortunate bedfellows, namely fascists, as fascists do in fact have modes of discourse for opposing or criticizing feminization.  Often fascism per se is not the main interest of today’s right-wing thinkers, and if you started lecturing them on Speer’s building plans for Berlin, or earlier German cartel policy, their eyes would glaze over.  They are more interested in the current cultural wars, but they don’t always have the intellectual equipment to fight them, and so they look to fascists, a badly mistaken choice.

I say feminization is here to stay, we need to find workable versions of that — how’s that for a challenging intellectual project?  Those of us looking backwards to “the nasty people” are going to find themselves staring down a dead end, intellectually and otherwise.  Hungary and Salazar are not the future, people.  You should be jumping on better bandwagons, or if need be building them yourselves.

“My favorite things Hungary” — my revisionist take

Way back in 2011, when I was visiting Hungary, I did a post in typical MR style: My Favorite Things Hungary.  I had no particular political point in mind, and indeed the current disputes over Hungary did not quite exist back then.  Nonetheless, if you survey the list, just about every one of my favorites listed ended up leaving Hungary.  The one exception, as far as I can tell, is film director Béla Tarr, but he is a critic of both nationalism and Orban.

All the rest left Hungary.

And while I cannot give you exact numbers, a large number of them were Jews or half-Jewish, hardly examples of Christian nationalism.

You should note that Hungary has a longstanding tradition of flirting with fascism and indeed going beyond mere flirting, for instance as exemplified by the Horthy government of the interwar years.

Once you get past all the polemics and name calling (not to mention the reality), here is the lesson I draw from the current debate over how parts of the Right are embracing Hungary.  It is genuinely the case that liberal societies often draw upon less liberal societies for a good deal of their cultural vitality, most notably the United States recruiting various creators from Central Europe — including Hungary — during the 20th century.  (Or the blues drawing some of its depth from the history of slavery.)  That point should be appreciated, even though we all should recognize it is not worth Hungary’s history, including its feudal and conquered past, for being able to say your country produced Bartok and Solti.

The current Hungary, sadly, has nothing remotely like the Hungarian cultural blossoming that ran from Liszt through Ligeti.  Instead it is giving us an empty huff and puff of rhetoric, “owning the Libs,” having “the right enemies,” gender role polemics, and so on.  It is not producing great buildings like the Budapest of times past, and it is not developing a significant Christian tradition of the sort that might have marked the 19th century Hungarian Church (however you might feel about that, I can tell you it is not my thing, though I can appreciate the liberal elements in it).

These days we have a U.S. television show host visiting Hungary and serving up thin polemics which are then debated on Twitter.  There is only a thin veneer of culture behind the whole thing, and a lot of unearned borrowing against earlier Hungarian creative traditions.

Don’t fall for it.  If you wish to respect Hungarian culture, listen to Bartok’s “Out of Doors” [Im Freien], or Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.  What is there now is the straggling remnant of a cultural destruction led by both fascists and communists.  Current commentators can spin the current situation all they want, but it hasn’t worked out for the better, and Hungary is lucky to be in the EU at all.

Even American cultural borrowing from Central European traditions peaked some time ago.  George Szell brought Beethoven to the Cleveland Orchestra in 1946, and it was adored and financially supported by conservative Midwestern businessmen, as it should have been.  Szell passed away in 1970.  Ligeti himself stretches improbably late into Hungary’s cultural golden run.

If you think the current right-wing Hungary fandom is going to restore or revitalize either Hungarian or American culture, there is a bridge I would like to sell you, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge in fact…