In a first assessment of the January 6, 2021 congressional hearings on the storming of the Capitol, which are increasingly showing that Donald Trump has not acknowledged his election defeat and is pulling out all the stops to stay in the White House, the New York Times headlined: “Trump is portrayed as a would-be autocrat who wanted to hold on to power at all costs.” What many observers consider to be the most serious accusation ever made against an American president is not a problem in circles of right-wing conservative intellectuals, but chic: people talk openly supports autocracy and expresses admiration for heads of government such as Hungary's Viktor Orbán.
Last year, Orbán, who has used his Fidesz party's two-thirds majority in Hungary's National Assembly to dismantle democracy in his country, became the darling of America's right-wing conservative scene after a high-profile visit from Fox News' Tucker Carlson in October.
The trip was arranged by journalist Rod Dreher from The American Conservative magazine, who had a research grant at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
He is an advocate of Orbán's "illiberal democracy" with "Christian beliefs and a commitment to the nation," as Orbán once characterized.
Orbán as a right-wing superstar
Orbán showed Carlson the right-wing dream: a country that keeps migrants out with barbed wire, where public money goes to conservative-run universities, and where it's illegal to expose people under the age of 18 to books that "advertise" homosexuality or transsexuality.
Orbán is now the superstar of the American right: an autocrat who imposes his ideas instead of having to compete with other forces in a pluralistic society.
The Hungarian autocrat was so stylized as a heroic figure that in May the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held abroad for the first time: in Budapest, where Donald Trump, connected via video, and Viktor Orbán were allowed to pay homage to one another as great statesmen.
Orbán, isolated in Europe, is right that America's right-wing stylizes his country as a conservative utopia, in which he decides the much-cited culture war between right and left with an iron fist for the conservatives.
Role model Deng Xiaoping
In a portrait of America's "new right," Vanity Fair describes a rather diverse group of people.
They are neither Trump fans nor QAnon supporters, but self-declared "dissidents" and "neo-reactionaries" with a common "project to reverse the thrust of progress".
Along with Rod Dreher, the idols of this movement include Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, who acts as a kind of sugar daddy for the movement;
author J.D. Vance ("Hillbilly Elegy"), who calls for "de-wokeification" of American institutions;
and blogger and "philosopher" Curtis Yarvin.