The radical right's ongoing love affair with Hungarian dictatorship

Radical right Republican activist Christopher Ruffo writes:

Budapest Diaries

Can Hungary’s state-driven cultural policy serve as a model for American conservatives?

In recent years, Hungary has become a hub for conservative intellectuals. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has established a constellation of right-leaning university programs, think tanks, research centers, and even a café franchise named after the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Orbán has proposed an alternative to the Brussels consensus, devoting significant resources to reforming the education system, revitalizing the country’s religious institutions, subsidizing healthy family formation, and reviving the classical architectural style.

This is not popular with everyone. The European Union has punished Hungary for bucking the trend of liberal technocratic governance, turning the small, landlocked nation into a scapegoat, much in the same way that America’s elite institutions have denigrated working-class conservative voters in the country’s heartland. Because of this, there is an immediate affection between Hungarian and American conservatives, both of whom feel besieged by the establishment and in need of a new strategy for managing the relationship between state and society.

That touches on a lot of what America's anti-democracy authoritarian radical right claims to see, feel and want. It claims to see and feel disrespectful liberal technocratic governance. It claims the democracy killing and dictatorship that Orban has established in Hungary as a role model for what authoritarian radical right Americans want to do to American democracy. That is clear.

It is also clear that elites like Ruffo know they are lying through their teeth. They know they are pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy.

So who is besieging whom here? Does real or imagined disrespect justify the overthrow of democracy and its replacement with a corrupt dictatorship-Christian theocracy-plutocracy? What about all that disrespect, lies and slandering the radical right routinely hurls at the left?[1] Does that justify the overthrow of democracy? (no, it doesn't)

Who is the more hypocritical group here, the radical right or the center and left, radical or not? 

Also note the standard propaganda technique that Ruffo relies on. He does not call Orban a dictator and he does not say that Orban destroyed democracy, which he in fact did. Ruffo does not call his radical right movement anti-democracy or pro-tyranny. Instead he blandly but falsely refers to his dictatorship movement as being merely "conservative" and "right leaning." Ruffo and his ilk are far merely conservative or right leaning. They are full-blown radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats, fascists in my opinion.

Footnote: 

1. For example, Vox writes: The right’s moral panic over “grooming” invokes age-old homophobia -- “Groomer” accusations against liberals and the LGBTQ community are recycled Satanic Panic.

Bloomberg Law writes: Combative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones doubled down on his claim that defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 26 children and educators gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School are part of a liberal plot to destroy him. “I think this is a Deep State situation,” Jones told jurors Thursday during the second week of a civil trial in Connecticut. When asked if his credibility is the most important thing to him, the Infowars host replied: “No, crushing the globalists.”

The New York Magazine writes: Why Republicans Are Smearing Everyone As Pedophiles Now -- Conspiracy theories work on different levels.