The defeat of Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary’s parliamentary elections may usher in a new era in Western commentary, when neither conservatives nor liberals will be tempted to draw sweeping lessons from a small landlocked country with a population smaller than the state of Michigan.
But before the temptation recedes, let me give in to it just once. And since the obvious lesson from Hungary for the Republican Party — an attempt to build a new conservative order will fail if it’s perceived as authoritarian and corrupt — probably comes too late for the Trump administration, I want to focus on realities that liberals might consider as they cheer Orbanism’s defeat.
The first lesson is that Western democracy under populist conditions is more resilient than a certain kind of anxious analysis suggests. There is a very important distinction between having a leader who makes authoritarian moves and actually being an authoritarian state, and the road from the first scenario to the second is not a simple matter of flipping a switch labeled “autocracy.” Orban ruled Hungary, a country with a thin democratic tradition, for 16 long years, and yet despite the power his circle wielded over industry and media, his rise and fall tracked the rise and fall of his popular support. Hungary had a mostly pliant press and a gerrymandered Parliament, but it was not East Germany or Putin’s Russia; when the people tired of Orban, he was gone.
This is not an argument that it would be perfectly fine if an American president (of either party) consolidated as much power as Orban enjoyed. It’s merely a case for not living inside worst-case scenarios where the United States — a society not at all like Hungary, with a vast array of competing power centers and centuries of democratic tradition — is one election or one Caesarist chief executive away from permanent dictatorship.
This leads to the second lesson of Hungary for liberals, which is that the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the establishment no matter what.
Peter Magyar, the incoming Hungarian prime minister, ran against Orbanist corruption, but otherwise he promised his own form of nationalism and even tacked to Orban’s right on immigration. In the process he vindicated the most basic theory of how to respond to a populist era: Move to the cultural right, especially on immigration.
It’s a simple admonition but one that establishment leaders in both Europe and America have found nearly impossible to follow, preferring to treat their periodic electoral victories as opportunities to return — as the Biden administration did, to its own destruction — to the very policies that prompted populist rebellion in the first place.
That temptation remains powerful, with various autopsies on Orbanism doubling as epitaphs for the entire post-liberal era, casting its intellectual scene especially as a Potemkin village funded by Hungarian largess. This brings me to the third point I wish liberals would internalize: The crisis of the post-Cold War order exists independently of would-be “post-liberal” intellectuals, including the writers and thinkers whom Orban’s government supported.
Shutter the Budapest cafes named for Roger Scruton, purge the conservative university Orban built up, and it won’t have any effect on the prospects of right-wing parties in the rather more important nations of France, Germany and Britain. That’s because the phenomena of populism and nationalism are organic reactions to an age of mass migration, collapsed birthrates, deindustrialization and digital anomie. Conservative intellectuals have attached themselves to the reaction, but they did not create it. You will not reckon with the post-liberal era by defunding right-wing academic conferences.
Finally, you also will not reckon with this moment until you see that it is not only the populists who can be antidemocratic or illiberal. Orbanism emerged initially as a popular reaction to the impositions of the European Union, a political arrangement that is sometimes bloodlessly described as suffering from a “democratic deficit,” which is to say that it often allows a bureaucratic caste to ignore public opinion and trample national sovereignty. And Orban has shared a continent for the last decade with governments that in the name of liberalism perpetuate their own soft tyrannies, their own traducement of human rights and human dignity.
It is not Hungary but Britain that regularly arrests and imprisons its citizens for social media posts. It is not Hungary but Finland and Iceland where Christians can face legal harassment for expressing traditional views on sexuality and marriage. It is not in Hungary but in the Netherlands that young people suffering from psychiatric conditions can be euthanized.
And it is no brief for the place Orbanism ended, in corruption and defeat, to suggest that many institutions that imagine themselves to be treating an illiberal infection somewhere out there, among the hoi polloi, badly need to heal themselves.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post What Liberals Should Learn From the End of Orbanism appeared first on New York Times.
