Connecting this piece to your ongoing series on Rorty, it seems like Hungary is a country where "attempts to forge a moral identity" through the telling of "stories about what a nation has been and should try to be" are very much in play. It's possible to overstate the power of this rhetoric, of course, to place too much importance on Orban's revisionist histories of Hungary and too little on the more concrete power grabs he's engaged in to undermine Hungarian democracy. But I can't help but feel that Orban's political acumen in reorienting his own politics in order to tell the nation a story it wanted to hear after the collapse of the USSR has a lot to do with the durability of his regime and its political project.
“The continued success of the far right today depends partly on this distortion of the historical record made possible through the intellectual class’s combination of deliberate illiteracy, hazy memory, and hair-splitting pedantry.” That slaps.
I promise to stop posting after this, but I think that this needs to be highlighted:
> I will just add that since race has no actual biological basis, it is always a “symbol:”
> an ideological category, a way of organizing politics and society.
The racists would generally disagree: they are not telling their followers to live by (and if not yet, soon to kill for) some abstract quality pointing the way to something else, but a fact as solid as, well, blood-soaked soil.
Fortuitously, without then having heard anything of this latest excrescence of
Orbán's, I just this morning for the first time I read the below in the Wikipedia article on 'Nazi racial theories':
'
After the Nuremberg Laws (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law) were passed in September 1935, Nazi Party lawyer and State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry Wilhelm Stuckart defined "related blood" (artverwandtes Blut) as:
So, when we speak of related blood, we mean the blood of those races that are determinative for the blood of the peoples who since time immemorial have a closed settlement area in Europe. Therefore, the members of the European peoples as well as their pure descendants in other parts of the world are essentially of related blood. However, one has to exclude the foreign-blooded, who can be found among every European people, such as the Jews and the human beings with a Negroid blood-impact.
Dreher seems to invert the original pyramid of 'essential' vs 'accidental' properties in the case of Trump, always considering Trump's essential nature regrettable but secondary and approving of all seemingly all but all of his observable acts.
This essay, combined with Linker's discussion of Dreher, makes it clear that Dreher is an apologist for overt, explicit, fascism. And fascism with an explicitly racist tinge, spiced up with a dash of anti-semitism ("it's not so much that we hate the Jews per se, of course -- we're not antisemites! -- but if they *will* insist on flooding our shores with Untermenschen in order to impose a world government, then of course we're within our rights to defend ourselves!")
But I gotta say: Linker's many tributes to Dreher's honesty and moral character feel like...Linker is in danger of becoming an apologist for at least one overt, explicit fascist, namely Dreher.
Okay, they were pals way back when, and it's hard to disavow a friend. But that stuff Linker says about what Dreher must do, now that Orban has crossed a line? Well, Dreher has crossed a line.
You're just extremely good at this specific kind of analysis.
Connecting this piece to your ongoing series on Rorty, it seems like Hungary is a country where "attempts to forge a moral identity" through the telling of "stories about what a nation has been and should try to be" are very much in play. It's possible to overstate the power of this rhetoric, of course, to place too much importance on Orban's revisionist histories of Hungary and too little on the more concrete power grabs he's engaged in to undermine Hungarian democracy. But I can't help but feel that Orban's political acumen in reorienting his own politics in order to tell the nation a story it wanted to hear after the collapse of the USSR has a lot to do with the durability of his regime and its political project.
“The continued success of the far right today depends partly on this distortion of the historical record made possible through the intellectual class’s combination of deliberate illiteracy, hazy memory, and hair-splitting pedantry.” That slaps.
I promise to stop posting after this, but I think that this needs to be highlighted:
> I will just add that since race has no actual biological basis, it is always a “symbol:”
> an ideological category, a way of organizing politics and society.
The racists would generally disagree: they are not telling their followers to live by (and if not yet, soon to kill for) some abstract quality pointing the way to something else, but a fact as solid as, well, blood-soaked soil.
Fortuitously, without then having heard anything of this latest excrescence of
Orbán's, I just this morning for the first time I read the below in the Wikipedia article on 'Nazi racial theories':
'
After the Nuremberg Laws (Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law) were passed in September 1935, Nazi Party lawyer and State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry Wilhelm Stuckart defined "related blood" (artverwandtes Blut) as:
So, when we speak of related blood, we mean the blood of those races that are determinative for the blood of the peoples who since time immemorial have a closed settlement area in Europe. Therefore, the members of the European peoples as well as their pure descendants in other parts of the world are essentially of related blood. However, one has to exclude the foreign-blooded, who can be found among every European people, such as the Jews and the human beings with a Negroid blood-impact.
'
Dreher seems to invert the original pyramid of 'essential' vs 'accidental' properties in the case of Trump, always considering Trump's essential nature regrettable but secondary and approving of all seemingly all but all of his observable acts.
This essay, combined with Linker's discussion of Dreher, makes it clear that Dreher is an apologist for overt, explicit, fascism. And fascism with an explicitly racist tinge, spiced up with a dash of anti-semitism ("it's not so much that we hate the Jews per se, of course -- we're not antisemites! -- but if they *will* insist on flooding our shores with Untermenschen in order to impose a world government, then of course we're within our rights to defend ourselves!")
But I gotta say: Linker's many tributes to Dreher's honesty and moral character feel like...Linker is in danger of becoming an apologist for at least one overt, explicit fascist, namely Dreher.
Okay, they were pals way back when, and it's hard to disavow a friend. But that stuff Linker says about what Dreher must do, now that Orban has crossed a line? Well, Dreher has crossed a line.