Greetings from Budapest, on a beautiful spring day that is also Election Day. The US/Iranian talks have come and gone, as was to be expected. So I am going to soak up the local colour pregnant as it is with a faint air of menace. An Hungarian civil servant tells me that his car identifies him as a government employee, so his boss has ordered him not to bring it to work tomorrow morning as violence of one sort or another is expected. The polls have tightened, and Viktor Orbán has survival skills beyond most politicians. When I ask around whether he has simply stayed an election too far (as, say, John Howard did Down Under) or whether this is a repudiation of his Fidesz party's natalist and anti-migrant policies, I am offered a third possibility - that from across the border Zelenskyyy has somehow managed to deploy his intelligence and other services to interfere with the entire business.
I wouldn't entirely rule it out. Zelenskyyyy sat in his tedious sweater in the Oval Office and was assured by Trump and Vance that he had no cards to play, and here we are a year later with the Z-man touring Araby selling Ukrainian drones to the Gulf monarchies. There's a plot twist I didn't see coming.
Mr Orbán's opponent, a man with the lab-concoted appellation of "Péter Magyar", is not exactly the regime-changing Khamenei Jr to the Senior Ayatollah, but he was once, more or less: among the Eurocrats, Magyar was known as "Baby Orbán". Then Brussels decided to turn him to their own purposes, rather successfully it appears. Cruella von der Leyen, the soi-disant "president" of Europe, is currently denying Mr Orbán's ministry its rightful allocation of EU moolah. Cruella assures us she's just "safeguarding democracy"; JD Vance says it's part of "one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen".
Well, we shall see what tomorrow brings, other than vehicular damage. The only unalloyed good news around the world is that Sir Keir Starmer has been reported to the UN for "crimes against humanity". A class-action suit by his under-tipped Ukrainian rent-boys? No, a complaint by the Attorney-General of the Government of the Chagos Islands, which is a little bit of after-hours moonlighting by a London barrister called James Tumbridge, the "Government of the Chagos Islands" not really being a thing. However, he's filed his complaint on behalf of the four Chagos Islanders whose deportation the Supreme Court of the British Indian Ocean Territory recently overturned. Donald J Trump can threaten to end civilisation, but it's Keir Starmer who goes down for war crimes. There's another plot twist I didn't see coming.
So, for the moment, I am enjoying a country that still feels the way countries used to feel: My waitress (in a restaurant I played a small part in restoring to its pre-Communist glory - long story) is a charming young lady from a small town just west of Budapest called Kartal, where I once filmed for the BBC - thirty-five years ago, long before she was born. I cannot remember the last time I was in an equivalent situation in a western European capital. But in Budapest one is still served by Hungarians, as in London and Paris and Brussels one was once served by English, French and Belgians. Not anymore, alas. "So what part of Somalia are you from?" is a conversational topic with minimal appeal to me.
Best of all, I ran into a Spaniard who last encountered me at an event with the former prime minister José María Aznar two decades ago in Madrid, and says that America Alone changed his way of looking at the world. All kinds of bigshots told me that - from Dick Cheney to Joe Lieberman - but Mr Orbán, on issues from fertility to migration, is one of the few politicians who tried to do anything about it.
Which brings us to this week's episode in my ongoing audio adaptation of the aforementioned America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. It starts with a quotation that my book helped put back in general circulation:
In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of 'suttee' – the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
'You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.'
India today is better off without suttee. If you don't agree with that, if you think that's just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don't think you really do believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced western society.
Yet here we all are, becoming remorselessly less western - and, after that, rather less advanced.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Thirty-Two of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to nearly eighty gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Thirty-Three of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
