BUDAPEST, Hungary — Conservatives are increasingly forging global ties, sharing cutting-edge practices, ideas, and strategies to conserve local traditions, ageless wisdom, and the nation-state itself against those who seek to condemn the past in order to impose a global order based on cultural erasure.
This much at least was clear from meetings and conferences l attended this week in Budapest and last week in Washington, D.C., during which government leaders, professors, students, and ideas entrepreneurs held multiple exchanges.
The purpose was to figure out how to resist, and in time defeat, a global Left not shy about using state power to smother dissent against new transnational rules and mandates driven by climate extremism and sexual and racial identitarianism.
“I don’t think parents like their children being taught that they are the beneficiaries of white privilege, which is being enforced by the state regulatory bureaucracy in England,” Anthony O’Hare, professor at the University of Buckingham, told a conference of experts from across the West organized by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Hungary’s largest private educational institution.
What we are facing, according to Carlos Hoevel of Argentina’s Center of Studies in Economies and Culture, is nothing less than a “universal project of redesigning human nature,” a “technocratic project.” He added that “the only place of real resistance we can find is the family.”
To be sure, striking global alliances to defeat this nebulous global governance — and exploring new technologies such as artificial intelligence to save and transmit to future generations the eternal truths of the classics, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment — may sound contradictory.
But the conferences and meetings across the Atlantic do attest that, yes, it’s supremely important to compare notes with conservatives here in Europe, the United States, and, increasingly, Ibero-America, to safeguard and then pass on what is particular to each.
The contingents from Ibero-America (as conservatives from the Hemisphere and the Iberian Peninsula are self-consciously terming themselves) were large in Budapest and Washington, perhaps because of the election last year of Javier Milei as president of Argentina.
The libertarian economist took office in one of South America’s most important countries in mid-December and, after slashing government spending, ministries, and the government’s entire diversity, equity, and inclusion office, has already turned in a balanced budget in his first month in office.
Milei traveled to Washington last week and regaled the folks assembled at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference with an economic dissertation on how socialists embrace the idea that capitalism produces “market failure” because it gives them an opportunity to expand state control of the economy. This, as he put it, “facilitates the progression of socialism, ultimately hindering economic growth and the fight against poverty.”
The prime example, he told the crowd, is Argentina. About a century ago, it was so rich that it attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from across Europe, including many members of my own family who left northern Spanish villages to make a living there. “Countries like Argentina, once among the world’s richest, have fallen drastically due to excessive regulations and state interference,” Milei warned.
Some of the most interesting meetings came on the sidelines of CPAC. The Heritage Foundation hosted for lunch the leader of Spain’s Vox Party, Santiago Abascal, who told former U.S. officials and journalists that though they come from different traditions, what conservatives from across the West have in common was “love of country, of family, and of God.”
Milei’s minister of security, Patricia Bullrich, was as bold as her boss as she addressed a VIP lunch in Washington, hosted by the Center for a Secure Free Society, that included members of parliament from across Europe and South America, former members of the Bush and Trump administrations, as well as think-tankers.
Without such gatherings, life as a conservative in a country that has been run down by the Left for decades, and surrounded now by Marxist leaders in neighbors such as Brazil and Chile, can feel “isolated,” she said. But Argentines strongly back what Milei and Bullrich are doing: “We have support, and that support is the population.”
“We don’t have a reverse gear,” she said.
Argentina’s new, brave leaders face incredible challenges, from narco-trafficking cartels that have taken over other Ibero-American countries, such as Mexico and Ecuador, and hostile powers such as Russia, China, and Iran, U.S. adversaries that are loath to have lost Argentina to the U.S. sphere.
You would think that the Biden administration would be grateful. But in fact, Biden officials threw a hissy fit about Milei and Bullrich coming to Washington to address conservatives, canceling meetings and even fatuously accusing the Argentine leaders of “election interference,” sources told me.
This is rich from an administration that greenlighted sending Democratic Party politicos Dan Restrepo and Robert Gibbs to Buenos Aires last year in a vain attempt to defeat Milei at the elections.
This is why it is so important for global conservatives to network. “We need to have more international experiences. … We learn from others’ mistakes,” Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of parliament from Brazil, told my friend Juan P. Villasmil of the Spectator at the Bullrich luncheon.
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Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, is a former president being threatened with prison by the legal machinery acting at the behest of his successor, the Marxist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. A German academic here in Budapest told me that law enforcement was being equally activated in Germany to hound conservatives there.
Sound familiar? Yes, Argentina, Spain, Hungary, Germany, and Brazil may all be very different societies, but we seem to be facing strikingly similar challenges.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.
