It wasn’t a great week for the far right’s self-appointed crusade to reconquer Europe as a fairytale paradise of whiteness and Christianity. Maybe that’s because that whole idea is vaporware, rooted in a nonsensical social and historical vision and devoted to a losing battle against economic and demographic reality. But that quality of noble, doomed struggle toward impossible goals is both the far-right movement’s fundamental weakness and the source of its power and danger.
Viktor Orbán, the pudgy poster boy for “illiberal democracy” and object of a mysterious man-crush by legions of American conservatives, suffered a catastrophic electoral defeat in Hungary that felt, at least for a day or two, like the global MAGA movement’s Waterloo moment. As for Donald Trump, what is there to say? The entire world is over him, big time, and it’s the unique curse of America’s narcissistic self-regard that we’re still stuck with him, dominating the headlines day after day with his empty, contradictory and randomly-punctuated blather. Trump heads into the latter stages of his presidency as a damaged and toxic figure, a human AI meme desperately trying to spin his way past the massive humiliation of the Iran war he chose to fight and the global energy crisis he single-handedly created.
