Like so many other taken-for-granted pleasures, magazine reading has been disrupted by the pandemic and supple chain havoc. Here is Regina, Saskatchewan, the one good magazine store has sharply curtailed business, operating now merely as a kiosk for lottery tickets & cigarettes. The city’s only bookstore, an outlet of the Indigo chain, has ever shrinking magazine racks. You can’t buy, as you could only a few years ago, the New York Review of Books or the New Left Review off the stands in Regina.
Within this ever constricting world, I was surprised to find a new magazine on sale at Indigo, one with a seemingly esoteric audience: Hungarian Conservative can be bought in Regina, as it can (I’ve been told) in New York and London. The excellent distribution it is receiving in the English speaking world is surely due to the fact that it’s supported by the Hungarian government as part of an extensive effort to build up the reputation of Victor Orbán’s government.
Hungarian Conservative is a curious bridge between East and West, featuring articles of concern surely only to the most obsessive victims of Magyar-mania (much about the legal disputes between the Orbán regime and the European Union). But also stuff that is standard American right wing fair, including Rod Dreher complaining about Walt Disney being “anti-white” as well as an article warning of the rise of trans rights.
To get a grip on what’s going on, I turned to my friend Martin Lukacs, editor of The Breach Media. As his name indicates, Martin’s family is from Hungary. He speaks Hungarian and has spent much time there. We had a wide ranging talk about not just the Orbán regime but also wider trends in the global right, especially in the United States.
I learned a lot from talking to Martin, whose a wise guide into the thickets of East European history and culture. In addition to educating me on Hungarian politics, Martin spent the entire podcast correcting my roughshod pronunciation of Hungarian words.
As a companion to this podcast, I can also recommend this New York Times article, this New Yorker article, and this excellent episode of Know Your Enemy.
This post is part of a series on the American right’s affinity for foreign autocracy. Previously in this series: Tucker Carlson and Authoritarian Tourism, Right-wing Junketeering: Funding a Cruise through Autocracy, Sarah Posner on the Hidden History of Religious Authoritarianism, Tilting at Franco, Nationalist Internationalism, Then and Now, and MAGA Meets Magyar.
(Podcast produced by Julia Elinore Peterson)
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Podcast: Orbán's Outreach