Snowmageddon: Budapest Gets Six Inches
Weekly briefings on the life of The New European Capital of Conservatism.
Events This Week
Don't miss Yuan Yi Zhu at MCC. Zhu has become a prominent British Twitter personality in recent years, an acerbic wit, and a true Based Patriot In Control. He is perhaps most famous for his amusing book reviews, notably his skewering of the gadfly liberal barrister Jolyon Maugham. By day, though, he is a top legal scholar at Oxford. At the MCC he will be telling the assembled crowds about how the ECHR first began to burst the banks of its mandate. 20 January, 5:30PM.
Thursday, Balázs Orbán and Rodrigo Ballester are in conversation on the problems with EU migration policy, and why these issues should be devolved to the nation state. 5PM. 22 January. MCC.
How can the Middle East and Israel build on a tentative peace? Anyone looking to answer that should attend A Pivotal Year: Israel, the Middle East, the US, and Europe Come 2026, the comprehensive if not exactly catchy title of the DI's one-day conference, on Wednesday, 10AM at the Villa. The event will be preceded by Tory bigwig Sir Liam Fox giving a 'fireside chat' from 5PM the day before, at Ludovika University. Rumours that Sir Liam will be bringing his own fireplace are unsubstantiated.
Based in Brussels? It happens. The Liszt Institute there will be hosting a double bill of Danube: Director of Research Calum Nicholson and super-intern Max Keating talking about the future of cultural diplomacy. Friday at 6PM.
Around Town
Perspectives and people from the week
Visiting Fellow Sean Nottoli has shrunk. He lost some 50 pounds (22kg, to metric system observers) by... not eating in America. This has been easily done, as Sean is not in America. He credits better food regulation in Europe with cleaning up his diet: no artificial hormones, no hidden sugars and corn syrups. Trumpism's pro-EU turn will be closely watched. Last week, Sean presented his medical findings to the wider world, via a piece in the Spectator. This is against conventional wisdom: in the diplomatic corps, the regular diet of langos, sour cream, pork knuckle and egg pasta makes Hungary a notorious '20 pound posting'.
None of which showed up on the waistlines of the US diplomatic corps, who were up at Aranybastya mid-week for a three course lunch with DI top brass. István Kiss, Melissa O'Sullivan and Kristóf Veres met the impressive US attaché, Caroline Savage, along with the Embassy's political and economic counsellor, Richard Heater; and Daniel Lawton, the 'Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Central Europe and Southern Europe in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs' (a title which belies his importance). Talk was of pages turning, new collaborations, after the fall of ex-Ambassador David Pressman. Lawton was particularly interested in recent troubles with the historical Beneš Decrees. And of course our coming election. We put him straight.
What's worse than the Third Reich? Must be the Fourth Reich. In his forensic new piece for Tablet Magazine, Adam Lebor has traced what would have been Reich #4: Germany's plans for continental dominance after the war. The piece is based on his original research on The Red House Report, a secret memorandum drawn up after high ranking Nazis met the banking fraternity in Switzerland. These would have included a customs union and currency pegging, underwritten by a European central bank, controlled from Berlin. Any parallels to today are somewhat coincidental.
Winston Marshall was in town at the start of snowmageddon: part of a posse of Anglo journalists and media personalities being given the full tour. For the lowdown, Winston made his way to the Star Bar, off Deák Ferenc, along with his fellow influencer and fiancé, Melissa Chen. Melissa gave a nuanced perspective on democracy in her native Singapore, unusually Rod Dreher brought up civil war, while several attendees confessed they'd never actually listened to Mumford & Sons. Later that night, as big tufts of white continued to drop on Budapest, one Fellow disgraced himself by falling over in the snow, and had to be helped to his feet by the kindly niche celebs.
Snow was certainly a theme at the inaugural Erdély Essay Club, held in a cabin in the highest hills of Székelyföld, with no WiFi, and no phone reception. It was somewhere between The Secret History, Dead Poets Society, and Piers Paul Read's Alive. Take eight top-ranking MCC Transylvania students. Add two Danube Fellows: Calum Nicholson and Gavin Haynes. Then get ten essays designed to feed up the next generation: everything from David Foster Wallace's What Is Water, to Joan Didion's On Keeping A Notebook. A weekend of intense seminars and snowball fights ensued, concluding with a pleasing sense that the kids are gonna be alright - even if the lecturers won't.
Paper of the Week
Conservative Realism and the Consequences of the Managerial Revolution
It's been about six years since James Burnham and his 'Managerial Revolution' theory became voguish in Conservative circles. Burnham first published his book, The Managerial Revolution in 1941, but its rediscovery has illuminated modern discourse about 'populism' and 'elite theory'. In a world of data and bureaucracy, the class struggle, Burnham says, is between a managerial class and the people it manages. Cool idea, but it has generated more heat than light so far: how are we supposed to react to this insight? DI Visiting Fellow Markus Johansson-Martis is taking on the challenge. In his new paper, he argues that conservatives must change in order to conserve: there should be a restoration of our institutions to their primary purpose; rather than serving the needs of the managerial class, they must be brought back under democratic control. He calls this new mode Conservative Realism, and dips into the lively work of Samuel T. Francis to back up his claims.
“In his 1993 essay Message From Mars, Samuel Francis outlined what he saw as the future base of conservatism: the Middle American Radicals, or MARs. This group, largely excluded from the prosperity of the managerial elite, consists of the broad swath of Americans living outside metropolitan centers. The same demographic is present in most western countries and have a similar attitude toward politics. Francis’s vision reads like a populist manifesto—one that could easily align with the rhetoric of the MAGA movement or other New Right currents across the West today.”
Comings & Goings
Coming: Raymond Ibrahim Raymond is our biggest fellow to date: a former Mr Los Angeles (ask him to show you his bodybuilding era pics). While no longer the colour of a mahogany commode, he still has biceps you could fire from a Napoleonic cannon. Rumour has it he subsists entirely on a diet of hamburgers. By trade, Raymond is an author on the clash between Islam and the West, and presently holds the top three slots in that Amazon category (only briefly disrupted by Tom Holland). In the last year, his YouTube account blew up to over 100 000 subs, despite him claiming he 'doesn't know how YouTube works'. His chat with Winston Marshall alone has over a million views. Raymond is still getting his head around Budapest, so if you want to help him ground, or just fancy five Big Macs, let us know.
Alex Lefebvre
Our most difficult to spell fellow to date, Alex is a Canadian philosopher, a self-confessed liberal, who is researching a project on the politics of 'the good life': post-liberalism, what does it really mean? He is the author of 12 books, and Kind Of A Big Deal in his space.
Alex is on a five-city tour of places that map onto that conception, so he is with the DI as an observer-interviewer: Jane Goodall to the rightist wonk classes.
As such, if you think you have insights into the Hungarian experience with post-liberal politics, please do get in touch. He'd love to interview you. Going:
Alexander Pelling-Bruce
Alexander has been with us since September as a Visiting Fellow. He's the very model of the modern major-general: unflappable, loquacious, and a hardcore Westminster obsessive. His passion for music was such that when he arrived, he arranged for a piano to be installed in his apartment so that he could keep on kicking out the jams. We suspect we've not heard the last of him.Michael O'Shea
Finally, Michael O'Shea's has had possibly the longest fellowship in our history. Though based in the US, he's a specialist in the CEE, who taught himself Polish, a bit of Slovak and Hungarian. Michael is passionate about the region, owing to his half-Polish roots, and has worked doggedly to bring its story to the wider world via his journalism. We'll miss his dapper charm. Dates For Your Diary
Budapest Global Dialogue — 9 - 10 FebruaryMunich Security Conference — 13 - 15 February “Bort iszik, vizet prédikál"— Drinks wine, preaches water (He/she is a hypocrite)"