Thread by @henryfarrell

1. A thread on this comparison by @michaelbd of Orban's Hungary with De Valera's Ireland nationalreview.com/2021/08/hungar…. As said earlier, I don't think that the comparison works. Here's why- for the huge audience for 20th century Irish history/ 21st century Hungary politics crossovers.

2. Dougherty's argument is that Orban - like De Valera - is the leader of a small country trying to preserve itself in the face of a big hostile world. And that explains much of Orban's strategy and his appeal. There are some things that explains - but much more that it does not.

3. First - as Dougherty says, Orban is genuinely popular, as Dev was. And he could go further. One reason for Dev's success was that he offered a different and more populist conservatism as an alternative to the then frugal "Treasury View" type Cumann na nGaedheal government.

4. Orban's rise to power was not entirely dissimilar. Another point of comparison - which Dougherty doesn't mention - is that both were excoriated by international elites. IR scholars who've read Angell's Great Illusion may have been mystified by references to sinister De Valera.

5. But Angell wasn't the only one. If you read contemporary issues of The Dial or other publications, you will find pieces worrying that De Valera's success heralded a new and worrying kind of politics (which seems ridiculous in retrospect).

6. The dissimilarities are far greater. Dougherty notes that both Orban and De Valera rewrote constitutions. Both constitutions imposed conservative Christian values. But the Irish constitution, unlike Orban's, was introduced by popular referendum.

7. It didn't look to cement the ruling party's power, as Orban's has, and it requires a referendum to amend it. This, for example, meant that later proposals by De Valera's party, Fianna Fail, to change Ireland's voting system in ways that would favor it failed to get support.

9. Orban, in contrast, just needs a two thirds majority in Parliament - and has used it to introduce further changes intended specifically to stifle criticism and disempower his opponents.

9. Dougherty draws a comparison between Orban's efforts to suppress independent media, and De Valera's founding of a party line newspaper, the Irish Press. The two aren't comparable. At no point did Fianna Fail try to exercise general control over Irish media.

10. Opposition newspapers, like the Irish Independent and Irish Times continued to publish, without harassment. Irish national broadcasting was a state monopoly until relatively recently - but it was never a Fianna Fail fiefdom.

11. As Dougherty acknowledges, Orban's Hungary is corrupt on a far more spectacular scale than De Valera's party was (there was a lot of croneyism, but large scale economic corruption only got properly going after the era of De Valera's domination).

12. Ireland's civil service was relatively free from corruption, and competent within its limits, although hidebound and small-c conservative (with notable exceptions such as T.K. Whitaker).

13. The point of this is that Dougherty is looking to normalize Orban's Hungary, as not dissimilar to another poor small state that turned to more populist politics. But Orban's efforts to remake Hungary are far more ambitious than De Valera's.

14. Moreover, Orban is internationally focused. In speeches, Orban has made it clear that he wants to remake Christian Democracy (before he got kicked out of the European Christian Democrats) and European politics on religious-nationalist lines.

15. De Valera, in contrast, was quietly willing to accept Irish politics as they were (and quietly to acknowledge that his predecessors and rivals had done a good job at statebuilding).

16. Another, wider point is that mid-20th century Ireland is plausibly the most democratically legitimate vision that conservative Christian nationalists have to offer. That is why Dougherty is making the comparison that he is. It was a genuine and stable democracy,

17. and one where conservative Christianity commanded an apparent consensus. The problem is that it was not even in the kindest interpretation a great place to live. It was economically stagnant. The bright people mostly left, or drank themselves into oblivion like Flann O'Brien

18. who soured on Irish politics after the notorious Cavan Orphanage Fire, which he investigated as a civil servant, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavan_Orp… . Ireland was a country of silences and cover-ups where no-one dared challenge the religious authorities, and abuses flourished.

19. On all of this, see Tom Garvin's Preventing the Future, passim kennys.ie/history/PREVEN…. It's a center right perspective, but one that is extremely clear on the enormous social and economic costs of Ireland's effort to hold modernity back.

20. As Jamelle Bouie suggests nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opi… today, American conservatives use imaginary versions of foreign countries as a way of fantasizing about alternatives to our corrupt age of sophists, economists and calculators.

21. The problem is that the actual countries fit badly with the fantasies, whether it is the squalid and corrupt illiberalism of Hungary today, or the democratic, but cramped and soul starved reality of De Valera's Ireland eighty years ago. Finis.