A thread about the implications of last Sunday's election in Hungary and the French presidential election coming up over the next few weeks (first round this Sunday, second round on April 24). 1/17
Earlier this week I wrote a column about Viktor Orban's sweeping victory. My argument: This is bad, but this isn't mainly a story about a stolen election, the consolidation of authoritarianism/dictatorship, etc., as many liberals are claiming. 2/17 theweek.com/democrats/1012…
As with their reaction to Trump's election in 2016, liberals are too quick to point to evidence of cheating: In the US, it's Russian interference, Comey's idiocy, bias against Democrats in the electoral system; in Hungary, Orban's media consolidation, gerrymandering, etc. 3/17
There is some truth to all this. Republicans have certain marginal advantages in our system, just as Orban has done some things to give his party an edge. But none of them come into play unless the vote is already quite close, which means they each need considerable support. 4/17
Both get this support from outside of cities. This pattern has been reproduced across the democratic world in recent years: the provinces are uniting politically against urban-progressive establishments. 5/17
This electoral configuration is what first brought Orban to power in 2010, obviously before he'd done anything to give himself an edge. He won then with 53 percent of the vote, w his party winning 2/3 of the seats in parliament. The outcome was much the same last Sunday. 6/17
My point is that Orban is what he says he is: an antiliberal democrat. He's good at winning elections, not primarily because he's stealing them, but because he has persuaded more than half the population of Hungary to support him and his antiliberal agenda. 7/17
For evidence, consider what's happening in France, where no one would claim the electoral system is rigged in favor of the far right. Marine Le Pen has been surging in the polls and is now just a few points behind the centrist incumbent president Emmanuel Macron. 8/17
Regardless of whether Le Pen wins a plurality of the vote on Sunday, neither she nor Macron are at all likely to win a majority, which means there will be a second round run-off between them two weeks later. Head-to-head polls currently show them tied. 9/17
Why is this happening? I'd say it's obviously because growing numbers of French voters are drawn to the far-right's vision for the future of the country -- and that points to the need for liberals to offer a more compelling vision of their own. That's how democracy works. 10/17
But in an op-ed for the NYT, author Harrison Stetler offers another take: French debate is being molded by the media mogul Vincent Bolloré, whose Fox News-inspired outlets shape public debate in a rightward direction. 11/17 nytimes.com/2022/04/07/opi…
So there we go: It seems there *are* systematic biases in favor of the right, even in France. But wait: Is it really "bias" to offer right-leaning programming that ends up being successful and influential? Isn't that an example of how a free society is supposed to function? 12/17
Is there something inherently unfair to liberalism about the fact that when American consumers of news are given a choice between Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, a plurality choose to watch Fox? 13/17
Isn't it up to liberals to offer an alternative set of ideas that can prevail politically? If that effort fails, does it really mean the system has been rigged against those liberal ideas? Or is it more accurate to say that democracy is delivering antiliberal outcomes? 14/17
I say the latter: Urban-progressive establishments are struggling to prevail democratically against antiliberal movements rooted in less densely populated regions of free societies. That points to the need for a redoubled effort at crafting messages that *can* win. 15/17
If that effort fails? In that case, I don't have a great alternative to offer. But I'm also not convinced liberals have done anything close to everything they can to win. You can call this my personal variation on the case for "popularism" if you like. 16/17
In any event, here's my most recent column, about the upcoming French elections. Thanks for reading. 17/17 theweek.com/world/1012289/…
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