Evan Sandsmark

Last week Tucker Carlson was in Hungary singing Viktor Orbán's praises, thrusting the aspiring authoritarian into the headlines again, so I wrote a piece for Haaretz  exploring the American Right's embrace of Hungary, which is often coupled with a condemnation of the United States. Basically, American conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, want the U.S. to be more like Hungary. This is bizarre for run-of-the-mill economic reasons: ...considering the matter only from a detached and coldly analytic perspective, it is a bit odd for the richest and most powerful country in the world (at least for now) to look with envy on a far less prosperous country that emerged from behind the Iron Curtain only a few decades ago. In many fields and industries, American institutions and companies lead the world in prestige and innovation, and many of the technologies that are key to humanity’s future, from electric cars to mRNA vaccines, are largely developed in the United State