I spent a few hours updating
an old post on the intellectual disputes of the last
century which now lead off the draft book
which has occupied me these past couple of weeks – but aware that an article on “the
new practice of public problem-solving” awaits my
attention.
It’s by a couple of Americans who presented it recently in Berlin but, worthwhile as it is, it completely fails to recognize that it reflects a
“community-control”
model which many of us were struggling to
put into practice in the 1970s.
And it raises the fundamental question of how exactly the insights and
experience so many of us had in those heady days were so easily and quickly trashed by the
managerialism which took over our minds in the 1980s.
I will get round to that post eventually but got distracted by this
superb
interview by the infamous French journalist celebre - BHL - with Victor Orban
– which reminds me of
Oriana Fallaci
at her best
Because I am preoccupied with memories and am
reluctant to ask Orbán right at the start how a former anti-totalitarian
militant discovered conservatism and ultranationalism on his way to Damascus
(or rather Moscow), or how the recipient of a Soros grant was able to make his
former mentor public enemy No. 1 (with Soros’s caricature plastered all over
the streets of the capital a while back), and because I did not wish to begin
with the mystery of a true dissident who somehow relearned the Stalinist
technique of retrospective reinvention of biographies (in this case, it is his
own memory that he is purging), I begin benignly with a polite question, simply
to buy myself a little time to let everything settle in.
“Why did you choose this monastery? Why such an
austere site?”
But his response is curiously intense and sets the
conversation in motion.
“Because my old offices were in the Parliament
building down the hill on the other side of the Danube, and that wasn’t good
from the point of view of the separation of powers.”
He would have been more truthful had he
said, Because I wanted to dominate this town, which is the only part of
the country that is still resisting me.
But no.
The inventor of illiberalism, the man who uses
democracy to torpedo democracy, the autocrat constantly engaged in gagging the
Hungarian Parliament, bringing judges to
heel, and controlling the media,
tells me baldly that he left his former offices out of concern for democratic
processes.
I let it go.
I have no idea, at the moment, how much time he is going to give me.
I have no idea that Hungary’s free press is going
to observe, the next morning, that I spent with him, in the course of an
afternoon, more time than they, collectively, have spent with him in nine years
of demotatorship—a term I use to mean a democratic dictatorship. So I prefer to
push on.
“You have become the leader, in Europe, of the
illiberal strain of demotatorship—”
The term illiberal seems to take him
aback.
“Let me stop you there. Because we should agree on
our terms. What is the reality? Liberalism gave rise to political
correctness—that is, to a form of totalitarianism, which is the opposite of
democracy. That’s why I believe that illiberalism restores true freedom, true
democracy.”
This time, I feel obliged to tell him how specious
I find this line of reasoning.
