opinion | Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbans visit to CPAC shows how far conservatives have strayed from American values

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an autocrat astride a country whose GDP is more meager than that of Kansas and whose population is smaller than Michigans, has become a role model for Americas right-wing populists who admire his blueprint for dismantling democracy. Shunned in Western Europe, he naturally goes where he is appreciated and next week will arrive at what is likely to be an adoring welcome at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, in Dallas, where he will deliver a keynote address.

US conservatives who lionize Mr. Orban appear unfazed by his racist, retrograde rhetoric. After all, his part and parcel of his brand as what he calls an illiberal democrat his adherence to democratic norms is tissue-thin, at best. Now they are shrugging at his latest jeremiad, in which he attacked the United States for its sanctions against Russia, joked about Nazi gas chambers and, borrowing a page from Nazi ideology, warned that Europeans must not become peoples of mixed race.

Mr. Orbans words, in the course of an anti-immigration diatribe, triggered outrage across Europe. One of his longtime confidants, Zsuzsa Hegedus, who is Jewish, resigned, saying the speech would appeal to the most vile racists.

And yet, there was little upset among CPACs organizers, who treated the uproar over the Hungarian leaders bigotry as if it were a tiff over regulatory policy. Lets listen to the man speak, Matt Schlapp, CPACs chair, told an interviewer. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.

In fact, most of the CPAC crowd, whose ranks are heavily populated by former president Donald Trumps supporters, is unlikely to raise objections. To the contrary, many of Mr. Trumps adherents, like those of Mr. Orban, are enamored of great replacement theorists, who regard immigration, pluralism and diversity as existential threats to Western and White civilization and a menace to what they consider the ethnic essence of the United States itself. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News pundit, is among the exponents of that view, and a devotee of Mr. Orban.

More broadly, the Hungarian premiers stock in trade, and his apparent appeal to many on the American far right, is his deft dismantling of democratic institutions, a crusade he has undertaken in the cause of championing Christian civilization and attacking woke culture which includes LGBTQ communities . He has scrapped the quaint idea that elected officials should represent all their constituents, while locking in a suite of laws, and a new constitution, that marginalize his opponents in what amount to rigged elections. Those maneuvers have left them with little chance to gain traction in campaigns or even be heard in national media outlets effectively controlled by the state.

Mr. Orbans racism, embodied by his attack on the mixed-race threat he sees in Europe, is the antithesis of American values. He should get him disinvited from CPAC. Instead, there is every indication he will arrive in Dallas to cheers.

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Editorials represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.

Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Deputy Editorial Page Editor Karen Tumulty; Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus; Associate Editorial Page Editor Jo-Ann Armao (education, DC affairs); Jonathan Capehart (national politics); Lee Hockstader (immigration; issues affecting Virginia and Maryland); David E. Hoffman (global public health); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Molly Roberts (technology and society); and Stephen Stromberg (elections, the White House, Congress, legal affairs, energy, the environment, health care).

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