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**August 9, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

**BS Alert for Today: Ross Douthat**

Tucker Carlson has been trying to make a conservative hero and role
model out of Hungary's dictator, Viktor Orban. Carlson broadcast his
fawning Fox interview direct from Budapest
,
hailing Orban's achievement of ethno-nationalism via dictatorship.

Orban is also a hero to Carlson because he has achieved what Trump could
not-and what Republican state legislatures still want. Hungary retains
the nominal forms of democracy, but elections are so rigged that the
opposition can never come to power.

Orban has destroyed much of Hungary's free press and dissenting
organizations. This is what Carlson aspires to for America.

Carlson, however, is a little beyond the pale of respectability, even
for many conservatives. So his Orban gambit needs a mainstream
conservative validator.

Enter Ross Douthat.

In

**The**

**New York Times** stable of conservative columnists, who include the
lame Bret Stephens and the stumbling David Brooks, Douthat passes for
the thoroughbred. He's something of an intellectual, with a cagey
knack for making the preposterous sound almost reasonable.

In his Sunday

**Times** column
,
Douthat tried to rescue Carlson's embrace of Viktor Orban by claiming
an equivalence between the Orban dictatorship and the pressure that some
conservatives feel to accept liberal social norms. Say what?

For the last few years, Hungary, a country of fewer than 10 million
people, has occupied an outsize place in the imagination of American
liberals and conservatives. If you think the American right is sliding
toward authoritarianism, you cite Viktor Orban's nationalist
government as a dark model for the G.O.P. If you think an intolerant
progressivism shadows American life, you invoke Orban as a figure
who's fighting back.

Got it? There is an equivalence between the sovereign power of a
dictatorial state and the diffuse power of, oh, the LGBTQ movement or
the Black Lives movement, to pressure snowflake conservatives to be a
little more tolerant.

Douthat then cherry picks polls and anecdotes, in a sly effort to claim
that conservatives and moderate liberals are intimidated by campaigns
for political correctness, that some even fear for their jobs-and this
equates to the daily fear that one has living under a dictatorship.

Then, in closing, in a feint intended to rescue his credibility, Douthat
dings Trump and Orban (just a flesh wound, sir), adding that the impulse
to embrace strongmen sometimes unfortunately leads "conservatives to
tolerate corruption, whether in their long-distance Hungarian romance or
their marriage to Donald Trump."

Nice touch. But it doesn't rescue the tortured logic of the rest of
the column. Given the immense cultural pluralism, and tribalism, of
American society today, the idea that pressure for ideological
conformism in any way is the counterpart of government dictatorship is
pure BS.

We know what Tucker Carlson is. Shame on the Times for giving space to a
cleaned-up version of Carlson.

Oops, did I just engage in an act of ideological intimidation, like a
liberal Viktor Orban? Douthat seems to be able to take care of himself,
not to mention Carlson, Fox, and the entire Trumpian money and media
machine.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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