"the Tragedy of Orbanism: Budapest Baroque Extended"

The playwright Arthur Miller understood tragedy as being caught between the possible and the impossible. The hopefulness that accompanied the establishment in 1989 of the liberal Republic of Hungary with an open market economy has foundered on the tribal rocks of nationalism and xenophobia. According to its Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary is beset by corrupt liberal values emanating from a Western Europe that has "forgotten about white workers." Orban's "over-the-top-in-your face twistedness" (to use a Deleuzian metaphor) envisions building a "illiberal democratic" state based on labor. It denouncess proceduralism as unheroic and liberal individuation as the consequence of the parliamentary politics unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. Orbanism stresses: (1) Kulturkampf as Magyarization; (2) an embourgeoisement based on protectionist trade policy that abhors foreign investment; and (3) the resurrection of nationalist sentiments.

   Orbanism has become an extension of a Budapest Baroque -- a political culture that is a overdetermined transhistorical sensibility and cultural signifier confronting  memory of futility and a sense of melancholia and fatality. It is more than ideological consolation (Adorno's words); it is a calculated seductiveness intended to dazzle, denigrate, distract and disorient -- producing a sense of vertigo out of the Hungarian people's apprehensiveness. It is an ideological facade of antiliberal populist nationalism that is normatively self-confirming in its ambiguousness, rather than self-validating as a tradition or a creed. To what extent is this latest form of Hungarian illiberalism an extension of an instinctive and irredemable national sense of fatalism?