Know Your Enemy: The American Right’s Hungary Hearts, with Lauren Stokes and John Ganz

Know Your Enemy: The American Right’s Hungary Hearts, with Lauren Stokes and John Ganz

Historian Lauren Stokes and writer John Ganz unpack the American right’s ongoing embrace of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Matt and Sam are joined by historian Lauren Stokes and writer John Ganz to unpack the American right’s ongoing embrace of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, from Rod Dreher’s springtime junket there, to Tucker Carlson’s broadcast from the country, to the adoring attention it receives from an assortment of “post-liberal” intellectuals. What gives? Your hosts and their esteemed guests break it down. Topics include what the U.S. right gets from Orbán and what he gets from them; the twentieth-century history of Hungary that provides the backdrop to its current politics; the long history of U.S. conservatives admiring authoritarians abroad; John’s visit to a Nazi bookshop in Budapest; and more!

Sources and further reading:

Elisabeth Zerofsky, How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary, New York Times Magazine

Benjamin Wallace-Wells, What American Conservatives See in Hungary’s Leader, New Yorker

David Baer, translation/Twitter thread of Rod Dreher’s interview with Klubradio, Twitter

John Ganz, Anti-Democratic Vistas, Part I: The Right Goes to Hungary, Unpopular Front

Ganz, Anti-Democratic Vistas, Part II: Reflections on the Revolutions in Hungary, Unpopular Front

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