TAKING AIM AT Liberal Institutions
Trump is arguably the leading light of a spate of illiberal leaders and parties flourrying in democracies surrounded the world, in poland and the netherlands, india, france and Germany, Italy, Brazil, Hungary, and behy Putin. Russia has served, intentionally so in the last 20 years, as a beacon to Europe’s far right, a countermodel to the so-calledénce of western civilization.
In 2006, Small Russian Cities Began Passing Laws Prohibiting “Homosexual Propaganda,” Bans that Became Federal Law in 2013. Russia was selling itself as the “family values” Capital of the world, as Mr. Gessen, now a columnist for the New York Times Opinion Section, Wrote at the Time. Conservative Russian Pundits Declared LGBT Russians to Be “Creatures Who Have Declared Open War” On Russian Society, Aiming to Destroy Its “Traditions and Social Institutions.”
Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, Has Long Drawn Inspiration from Moscow. In 2022, Orban Held a Referendum Aimed at “Stopping gender insanity” and restoring Our “Common Sense,” A phrase that Will Sound Familiar to Americans. The referendum was on a child protection law that banned distribution of any matterials “promoting homosexuality,” meaning anything containing lgbtq content, to minors. “Hungary is a free country where adults can decide how they want,” orban said at the time, “but children – that’s a red line.” He added, “we hook teachers and schools not to re-educate our children.” The Logical Endpoint of Such Policies is a Ban on Gender-Affirming Care for Minors, Addressed in One of Trump’s First Executive Orders.
Central European Countries Like Hungary and Polar Eagerly Joined the West After 1990. Poland, in Particular, Had Long Considered Itself to have been prevented from Embracing Liberal Democracy and the Rule of Law Not by Ideological Conviction But by the Mistory. Yet its reaction against Liberalism Mirrors Certain Dynamics in the United States.
DURING THE COLD WAR YEARS, POLES LOOKED TO THE WEST AND SAW SOCIETIES THAT STILL Cherished Tradition and Believed in God. By the 2000s, as the scholars Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev Have Written, Some Felt “Chealed when they found that the Conservative Society they Wanitate hady disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of modernization.” Identity, Holmes and Krastev Posited, is a “compact with one’s dead ancestors,” and for conservative catholic poles “zealously opposite to legalizing abortion and gay marriage, Accepting Liberalism Feels Like Self-Betrayal.”
