The American right is whitewashing Hungary’s nasty, autocratic regime | Jan-Werner Mueller

US conservatives are signaling their commitment to authoritarianism loud and clear by holding this year's Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest - the first-ever outside the US

In political analysis, sometimes the hardest thing is to see what's staring you right in the face. Putin put in writing what he was going to do this spring - we just could not believe it, or we thought we'd prove our savviness by identifying some completely counterintuitive twist to the story of an invasion foretold. A similar challenge is posed by American conservatives communicating their commitment to authoritarianism loud and clear by holding this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Budapest - the first ever outside the US: the autocratic leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, is the main attraction, with plenty of European far-right party leaders as supporting acts. Could these American ingenues abroad just be duped by a leader intent on selling his kleptocratic autocracy as the last bastion of authentic conservatism or, as he likes to put it, real Christian Democracy"? Maybe there's some twist? Or perhaps, as Cpac's hero Trump once proclaimed, it is what it is: from Tucker Carlson down, these figures are aware that Hungary has exited the democratic world; they just repeat the Orban regime's talking points when confronted with evidence for it. They end up cheerfully endorsing Vladimir Putin's closest ally in Europe.

Orban has long tried to promote his regime internationally as a model of illiberal democracy." The idea is that the leader enjoys overwhelming support from the people, while implementing a decidedly anti-liberal agenda in matters of immigration and social policy: rewarding people financially for procreation, legally cementing traditional notions of marriage and affirming the supreme value of the nation-state against globalists" allegedly opening all borders." Such a stance has resonated with conservatives who felt that the right kept suffering endless culture war defeats in western Europe and North America; the ideology espoused by the self-proclaimed plebeian" Orban has also provided a template for a newly fashioned national conservatism" that seeks to combine nationalism with state intervention in economy and morality.

Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules