HUNGARIAN NATIONALISM IS A DEAD END.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: POLITICS

FOR THE GROWING majority of Americans who do not approve of Joe Biden's job performance as president, scanning the landscape for potential successors reveals a depressing reality: The road to the GOP presidential nomination apparently now runs through Budapest. It's a lovely city but a revealingly inappropriate setting to locate inspiration for the new American nationalism still being workshopped by the professional political right.

In September, hot on the heels of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former Vice President Mike Pence became the latest high-profile American conservative to trade bon mots with the proudly "illiberal" Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on his home turf. "I want to applaud Prime Minister Orban for choosing to make family the central focus of Hungary's government policy," the former veep said at the fourth-ever Budapest Demographic Summit.

The "demographic" concern that brought together elected populists, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, was the insufficient number of native-born residents from the dominant tribe within each relevant nation-state.

"Within 30 years Nigeria--just one African country--will have more inhabitants than the entire European Union, more inhabitants than the United States of America," warned Serbian President AleksandarVucic.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, three weeks before losing reelection, lamented that within 30 years, Irish people will be a minority in Ireland: "It is just not right that we should look on idle and see how indigenous populations are becoming a minority and are under pressure."

Milorad Dodik, a Serb, is the current rotating president of Bosnia and Herzegovina--a country he has long worked to dissolve, for which he was individually sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in 2017. "Who will live in Europe 50 years from now?" Dodik wondered. "Will there be Europeans? I live in a region only four and a half hours from here, where migrants come from the Middle East. Do you think it is far from Europe? No, it is not."

Such zero-sum notions of who should and should not be considered fully fledged citizens of a country used to be anathema to most on the American right. Our "nation" was creedal, not ethnolinguistic or religious, and open to all "who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage," including "those later immigrants who were willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the language was unknown to...