Hungary’s leader and Fox News are natural bedfellows in peddling paranoia politics
Tucker Carlson is not much to look at. A little man with a face screwed into the scowl of a junior manager passed over for promotion, you might walk by him in the street with barely a glance. Only when he describes how “the elite has turned against its own people” should you take notice. Carlson is the dependable voice of the dominant force on the right that will destroy democracy in the name of “the people”.
Last week, Carlson’s Fox News beamed an admiring show from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, even though there is every indication that Orbán will make it Europe’s first rightwing dictatorship since the fall of Franco’s Spain in 1975. Fox News built its audience and Orbán built his power by creating paranoid fears of an enemy so dangerous, any tactics can be justified to defeat it. Usually, it is the globalised liberal elite that turns against its own people by allowing mass immigration. Orbán has added a fascistic twist to the great replacement conspiracy theory by blaming the Jewish financier George Soros for plotting to flood Christian Hungary with Muslims. If it is not migrants, it is the gay men he implies are paedophiles, and if it is not gay men, it is the European Union. The name of the enemy is incidental. The point about modern far-right politics is that there must always be an enemy.