By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 12th, 2012 
I am concerned. There is a significant threat to democracy in Hungary and few are paying attention in this country. A member state of the European Union may be transitioning from democracy, as Andras Bozoki warned here months ago, but there has been almost no reporting about the developments in the serious press in the U.S., let alone in the popular media, even though it’s a big story in Europe.
I did hear a report on National Public Radio the other day about the economic problems Hungary is having in its relationship with the European Union, but not about the disturbing political developments that a distinguished group of former dissidents criticized in their public letter, which we (along with many other sites) posted last week. There have been reports of mass demonstration in Budapest. But these provided little explanation and no follow up. It just fit into the year of the protestor story line.
I suppose that this may just be an indication that Europe is becoming a small corner of the new global order, not necessarily demanding close attention. Am I being Eurocentric in my conviction that this is an important story? Yet, very important issues are on the line, important for the Hungary and the region, but also of broader significance. The slow development of authoritarianism is a global theme with local variations, which need to be deliberately considered.
I have been informed by a circle of young Polish intellectuals working at the on line weekly, Kultura Liberalna. They recently published a special issue posing the question: “Should Hungary be excluded from the European Union?” They provide different perspectives and insight. Here are some highlights. The complete pieces now can be read on the weekly’s site in English.
The European controversies started with changed media law, at the center of the anti-democratic developments. Dominika Bychawska–Siniarska in her piece, “Attempt on Democracy,” highlights the basic problem as seen from Poland:
“Freedom of speech is the fundamental element of democratic society. The post-communist states are particularly obliged to respect and . . .
Read more: Should Hungary be Excluded from the European Union?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 12th, 2012 
The primary results in New Hampshire Tuesday night point toward the general election campaign. Romney will be the (uninspiring) Republican candidate. As he runs against “Obama’s failed presidency,” many conservatives will wonder whether there really is a choice. Ron Paul will probably not run as an independent libertarian, but his supporters will have to judge, in their terms, whether a big government Republican is really preferable to a big government Democrat. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will dutifully follow the leader, but working class Republicans, or as they used to be called Reagan Democrats, will harbor their doubts concerning the representation of their economic or moral interests. Republican unity, if not enthusiasm, will focus on the negative, the rejection of Barack Obama, but the 2010 Republican emotional advantage, which is very important in politics, as Jim Jasper has explored here, is finished.
To comment on this post, click on the title.
By Martin Butora, January 10th, 2012 
Martin Butora co-founded Public Against Violence, the major democratic movement in Communist Slovakia, in November 1989, and served as Human Rights Advisor to Czechoslovak President Václav Havel (1990–1992). Between 1999 and 2003, he was Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the US. He is the honorary president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a public policy think-tank in Bratislava. His most recent books are Druhý dych (Second Wind), 2010, and Skok a kuk (Jump and Look), 2011.
Everyone knew it would happen one day and many sensed it was going to be soon – and yet, speaking about it, every word weighs a ton. The fact that he stayed with us this long was a miracle. Right until the very last moment, with extreme effort, he made sure his voice was heard wherever human dignity was at stake, wherever hope needed to be instilled. He did so with his characteristic sense of duty and responsibility.
As someone born into a wealthy family, he was ashamed of his position and privileged upbringing and longed to be like other children: he felt “an invisible wall” between himself and the others. His family background heightened his sensitivity to inequality, his distaste for undeserved advantages.
Hope as an orientation of the heart:
Vaclav Havel understood hope as an anthropological quality that pertained not only to politics. Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world, he used to say. Either we have hope within us or we don’t: “It is a dimension of the soul. It’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.” Hope is not prognostication, he emphasized, “it is an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
In this sense, hope for him was not synonymous with optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of the outcome. This is an extraordinarily strong message in a . . .
Read more: Vaclav Havel: The End of an Era
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 9th, 2012 
Recent posts and discussions at Deliberately Considered have been about fundamental problems in contemporary democratic culture: the need to engage in political discussion beyond clichés, the consequences of the persistence of modern magical political thinking, and the danger of transition to dictatorship from democracy. It makes me think about the state of the right and the left and the ideal of a contested political center.
Ideology has not ended, to my dismay (as I reported in my New Year’s post). People believe that they have the truth in politics in a variety of different forms, on the left and right, in the U.S. and globally. In a strange mirroring of Socrates, who confirmed that he was the wisest of men because he “knew that he didn’t know,” contemporary ideologues know that their opponents don’t know. Opponents don’t only think differently but incorrectly, politically incorrect. Material interests, character, moral failure and ignorance are used to explain the other’s mistaken position. Alternative views are dismissed instead of confronted. True believing market fundamentalists know that the problem of the economy will be solved through de-regulation. They will not pay attention to the arguments and evidence of those who explain how such de-regulation is the cause of our global economic crisis. Those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil won’t pay attention to those who examine how all attempts to construct a systemic alternative to capitalism in the last century have ended in economic and political failure. It is not the convictions that I find disturbing. It is the unwillingness of people to actually take into account the insights and evidence of those with whom they disagree.
Thus, I think that Gary Alan Fine’s imagined magazine is not only a matter of idiosyncratic taste. As he put it in his recent post:
“I hold to a somewhat eccentric contention that there are smart liberals (neo- and old-timey, pink and pinker), conservatives (neo- and paleo-), progressives, reactionaries, socialists, libertarians, and more. Is my generosity so bizarre?”
No, not at all bizarre. I think there is a pressing need for . . .
Read more: Between Left and Right: The Contested Center
By Gary Alan Fine, January 5th, 2012 
We have just experienced the season of gifts, a moment at which images of plummy consumption dance in our heads. And I had a gift in mind. A magazine, or perhaps, a certain website.
I am a serial reader, and, sometimes, a reader of serials. As the Deliberately Considered audience knows – because I have admitted in cyber-print – I have ogled Glenn Beck: less as harassment or flirtation, and more as an imagined discourse. I promiscuously read conservatives and progressives – and others in left, right, and libertarian venues. I live by The New Yorker, I conserve the Weekly Standard, I reason with Reason, and Mother Jones is Mom. However, I have long regretted that I cannot get a daily dosage of civic nutriment in a single journalistic bowl. I hold to a somewhat eccentric contention that there are smart liberals (neo- and old-timey, pink and pinker), conservatives (neo- and paleo-), progressives, reactionaries, socialists, libertarians, and more. Is my generosity so bizarre?
It has been argued that one of the fundamental problems in American political culture is that citizens tend to read narrowly. Those who consider themselves conservatives will not squander their lives reading liberal intellectuals, and the same is true of liberals, should they even admit to such a creature as a conservative intellectual. The divide between red and blue is as evident in the library as in the voting booth. This argument was made most compellingly by the ever diverting Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book, Republic.Com. Sunstein argued that we feel comfortable in segregated domains of knowledge in which:
“People restrict themselves to their own points of view – liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazi, neo-Nazis.”
People reside in gated communities of knowledge. This is what the sociologist David Maines, referring to epistemic divisions between blacks and whites, described as racialized pools of knowledge. Our pools, suitable for private skinny dipping, are political. But if we are truly interested in the play of ideas, this chasm is a dispiriting reality. Of what are . . .
Read more: My Magazine
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 4th, 2012 
It’s déjà vu all over again, a nursery rhyme with a political twist.
“The Republican Party sat on the wall. The Republican Party had a great fall. All the Party horses and all the Party men couldn’t put the Party back together again.”
Last night in the Iowa caucuses, the Reagan revolution died before our eyes, and no one seems to be noticing. The fundamental components of the Republican Party, forged together by Ronald Reagan in1980, are no longer part of a whole, ripped apart by the Tea Party and its unintended consequences. The only thing that may keep the party going is hatred of Barack Obama.
“Reaganism” was never a coherent position. It involved tensions that were unified by the power of Reagan’s sunny televisual personality.
In 1991, in The Cynical Society, I observed:
“The ‘conservative mood’ was not a … natural creation. It was constructed … by Reagan himself…his package brought together a new combination of symbols and policies…Fetal rights, a balanced-budget amendment, advanced nuclear armaments, tax and social-welfare cuts, and anti-communism do not necessarily combine. Reagan combined them.
As the satirical columnist, Russell Baker glibly put it, some supported Reagan so that he could be Reagan (the ideologues – this was the well-known refrain of the New Right), others supported him so that he could be the Gipper (the nice guy) he portrayed in an old Hollywood football film. But both sorts of supporters, who were fundamentally in conflict, created the new conservative mood. They constituted the Reagan mandate. Reagan did not represent a diverse constituency. He created it as the political majority.”
Neo-conservatives concerned then about the Communist threat, now are concerned with Islamofascism. Christian moralists, libertarians and corporate conservatives conflict on many issues. Reagan minimized this through his media presentation of self in political life.
The coalition persisted through the one term presidency . . .
Read more: Iowa: The Republicans Fall Apart
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 2nd, 2012 
Minutes ago I received this open letter from prominent critical Hungarian intellectuals via Andras Bozoki (author of an earlier post on the transition from democracy, who will present an update in the coming days). The message speaks for itself, warning of a looming European political crisis. -Jeff
The decline of democracy – the rise of dictatorship
The undersigned, participants of the erstwhile human rights and democracy movement that opposed the one-party communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s, believe that the Hungarian society is not only the victim of the current economic crisis, but also the victim of its own government. The present government has snatched the democratic political tools from the hands of those who could use these tools to ameliorate their predicament. While chanting empty patriotic slogans, the government behaves in a most unpatriotic way by reducing its citizens to inactivity and impotence.
The constitutional system of Hungary has also sunk into a critical situation. As of the 1st of January 2012, the new constitution of Hungary along with several fundamental laws came into force. Viktor Orbán’s government is intent on destroying the democratic rule of law, removing checks and balances, and pursuing a systematic policy of closing autonomous institutions, including those of civil society, with the potential to criticise its omnipotence. Never since the regime change of 1989 when communist dictatorship was crushed has there been such an intense concentration of power in the region as in present-day Hungary.
Institutions with the authority to hold government activity in check have met a similar fate: Fidesz continuously deprives such institutions of their autonomy, blackmails them for survival, discharges professional management, takes unlawful decisions and moulds these institutions so that they can no longer control and correct government activity but, in sharp contrast to their original function, they serve to augment unbridled autocracy. With the removal of the checks and balances, the whole state has become subservient to the government, or rather to the prime minister. The Parliament and the president obediently comply with the dictates of the cabinet. By having their staff radically reshuffled and implementing laws curtailing their competence, the Chief . . .
Read more: New Year’s Message Sent by Former Hungarian Political Dissidents, Budapest, 2nd of January, 2012
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|