An Improbable Hero for the American Right --- Hungarian leader Viktor Orban's policy stances and pugnacious defiance of liberal critics have endeared him to U.S. conservatives.

 

"Viktor Orban, Hungary's prime minister, was defiant. "The globalists can all go to hell," he said during the opening day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on August 4. "I have come to Texas!" The small but energetic audience let out a cheer inside the cavernous ballroom of the Hilton Anatole in Dallas.

Mr. Orban looked pleased, and rightly so. For Europe's longest-serving and most controversial head of government, this month's CPAC offered more than a chance to defend his record. It also confirmed his place at the vanguard of the nationalist-populist Right.

Philosophically sophisticated and politically astute, Mr. Orban has either anticipated or latched on to the issues that most animate social conservatives. Since 2015, when Mr. Orban, then in his third term, closed Hungary's borders to unauthorized migrants from the Middle East and Africa, his combination of religious traditionalism and nationalism has earned him increasing respect and emulation from antiestablishment figures in the U.S. Hungary "offers a lot of lessons for the rest of us," Tucker Carlson said from Budapest last year. Steve Bannon told one journalist at CPAC that Mr. Orban is "one of the great moral leaders in this world." Donald Trump calls him a "friend."

Criticism of Mr. Orban's methods and rhetoric -- including his inflammatory statement last month that "we do not want to become peoples of mixed race" -- has not dulled his appeal. Quite the opposite: For those drawn to his ideology and style, the censure that Hungary receives from progressive nongovernmental organizations, Democratic presidential administrations and U.S. media outlets is evidence of his success. "What the Left and the neocon Right are trying to do to Orban is police the discussion," wrote Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, in the days after CPAC.

It is rare for the leader of any foreign country, much less one the size of Kentucky, to become the object of such intense American scrutiny. Mr. Orban looms large in debates over democracy, authoritarianism and liberalism not just because Hungary is a political outlier compared with other members of NATO and the European Union. It is also because Mr. Orban's career reveals the full extent to which conservatism has been transformed in the first decades of the 21st century. Mr. Orban exemplifies the combative spirit and scornful attitude of a Right that sees itself as culturally belittled, isolated, dispossessed and under siege from forces undermining Western civilization from within. Mr. Orban is not a Trump wannabe. He is the leader that populist-nationalists hoped Mr. Trump would become.

This is not the first time that Mr. Orban has been part of a worldwide conservative network. "You should know that I am an old-fashioned freedom fighter," he told CPAC. Born in 1963, he became famous in his 20s as an opponent of Hungary's Communist ruling class. He studied at Oxford on a scholarship endowed by George Soros, his future nemesis, before co-founding Fidesz, his political party. His heroes and allies included Vaclav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl and Natan Sharansky. They all participated in what the political theorist Ralf Dahrendorf once called "the revolution of 1989" -- the demise of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe that commenced with the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

In 1990, after the collapse of communism in Hungary, Mr. Orban was elected to parliament. He never left. In 1998, as a center-right "classical liberal," he won his first four-year term as prime minister and oversaw Hungary's accession to NATO. Four years later, he lost to a socialist coalition. In 2010, on the heels of the global financial crisis and the 2007-09 recession, Mr. Orban regained power. He lowered taxes and launched government programs to encourage marriage and fertility in the face of Hungary's startling decline in population.

More significant, however, was that his two-thirds supermajority in parliament allowed Mr. Orban to revise the Hungarian constitution in 2012. The new document limited the power of the judiciary and restricted same-sex marriage and gay adoption. At a time when most liberal democracies were expanding LGBT rights, Hungary went in the other direction. The Obama administration noticed, as did the religious right. U.S. liberals blamed Hungary for departing from what they assumed was a consensus on human rights. Conservatives praised Hungary for the same reason.

Mr. Orban may have been the first politician in either Europe or the U.S. to recognize that the global financial crisis was as historically significant as the revolution of 1989. The financial crisis ruptured more than American pre-eminence and globalization's legitimacy. It also overturned the basic categories and lexicon of politics. In its aftermath, the primary argument was no longer over the size and scope of the state. The argument turned to the boundaries of that state, who counted within it, and the exercise of its sovereign power abroad.

In 2014, Mr. Orban told a gathering of students that he wanted to build a "new state," "an illiberal state, a non-liberal state." This illiberal democracy, Mr. Orban stipulated, "does not deny foundational values of liberalism, such as freedom." But it would repudiate contemporary liberal positions on multiculturalism, migration and the family. Defending his immigration policy the following summer, Mr. Orban echoed the language that Mr. Trump was using on the campaign trail: "The first thing which must be said is that a country with no borders is not a country at all."

By 2018, "illiberal democracy" seemed to be on the march. Mr. Orban won a third consecutive term. The like-minded Law and Justice Party ruled Poland, the British electorate had voted for Brexit, Mr. Trump had been elected president, and the anti-immigrant firebrand Matteo Salvini ran Italy. For nationalist-populists in America, Mr. Orban provided the intellectual coherence and policy architecture that Mr. Trump would not or could not supply on his own. "National conservatives," led by Yoram Hazony and Christopher DeMuth of the Edmund Burke Foundation, lauded Mr. Orban's defense of strong borders and the national interest. "Postliberal" Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame and Gladden Pappin of the University of Dallas praised Mr. Orban's public support for Christianity and generous family benefits.

Mr. Orban's critics were just as numerous -- and just as impassioned. Freedom House rated Hungary just "partly free" for its "antimigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies" and laws that "hamper" opposition groups and independent media. The Anti-Defamation League said that Mr. Orban's "chilling" vilification of Mr. Soros played off anti-Semitic tropes. U.S. media frequently referred to Mr. Orban as an "authoritarian."

None of this diminished his boosters' enthusiasm. Some even embraced the "strongman" label. "Why are autocrats like Orban rising and liberal democrats failing in Europe?" asked syndicated columnist Patrick J. Buchanan. "The autocrats are addressing the primary and existential fear of peoples across the West -- the death of the separate and unique tribes into which they were born and to which they belong."

Fear does play a role in Mr. Orban's appeal to the nationalist-populist Right, but not quite in the way Mr. Buchanan says. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis, the northward movement of peoples from the global South, and court decisions affirming same-sex marriage and transgender rights shattered the confidence of many of the anti-Communist freedom fighters with whom Mr. Orban once marched. Today's Right sees itself as outmanned and outgunned in a war with the Left for cultural supremacy. Fear of losing this war is behind the Right's embrace of Mr. Trump, Mr. Orban and their epigones, who promise to use the power of the state to resist or subvert institutions captured by the progressive left.

Mr. Orban also shares the American Right's hostility to liberal internationalism and an idealistic foreign policy. He devoted a significant part of his CPAC speech to the events in Ukraine. While calling Russia's operation unjustified, and declaring that Hungary stands in "full solidarity" with Ukrainians, Mr. Orban also said that "the globalist leaders' strategy escalates and prolongs the operation and decreases the chance of peace." A longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, Mr. Orban has opposed efforts to isolate Russia and arm Ukraine. Lately he has called for Washington to bypass Kyiv and engage in direct talks with Moscow to end the conflict. "Only strong leaders are able to make peace," he told CPAC.

The most important word in Mr. Orban's recent speeches is "hegemony." A term popularized by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci -- who figured prominently in Mr. Orban's master's thesis -- "hegemony" refers to the dominant worldview in society. To the American Right, this worldview is uniformly liberal. It guarantees conservative defeat. At an earlier gathering of CPAC that took place in Budapest in May, Mr. Orban promised to teach American conservatives how he and his comrades broke "the hegemony over opinions enjoyed by the returning communists and liberals," and how they could do it again. To replace liberal hegemony, according to Mr. Orban, the Right must reject the Left's standards of discourse and norms of behavior. "Play by your own rules!" he said at CPAC in Dallas.

This is especially the case when it comes to sex and gender education in schools. "The mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone," Mr. Orban said. "Full stop! End of discussion!" It was the most popular line of his speech.

Hungary is not the U.S., to say the least. Its unicameral parliamentary system is far more open to radical shifts in governance than America's federal constitutional republic, with its separation of powers and checks and balances. Hungary has a relatively homogenous population and a history of blood-and-soil nationalism. It is not a continent-spanning multiethnic and multiracial country with more than 300 million people from every corner of the Earth. Nor would most American conservatives find Hungary a paradise. Abortion is legal. Gun licenses are hard to obtain. Its sales tax (VAT) is among the highest in Europe. And Mr. Trump, who has long denounced Europe for failing to pull its weight in NATO, wouldn't be happy to learn that Hungary spends less than 2% of its GDP on defense.

Moreover, Hungarian-style nationalist-populism is not readily transferable to the U.S. America's indigenous agrarian populism is more individualistic and evangelical and is imbued with the cultural mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of the South. Viktor Orban is more of an intellectual than a rabble-rouser. His audience at CPAC was politely enthusiastic. Mr. Trump's was uproarious.

Even so, Mr. Orban's increasing profile on the American Right should not be dismissed. It is a sign that the ascendant forces within the conservative movement no longer look to the Anglosphere for guidance, but to continental Europe. They no longer hold the line at limited government but are interested in using state power to advance what they consider to be traditional cultural values. They no longer privilege individual rights over communal ones. They are no longer unified around opposition to an external enemy but wish to arrest or reverse the causes of perceived internal decay. They no longer seek leaders who earn the respect of the opposition but want to be led by people who give voice to their apocalyptic fears and who take the fight to the other side.

Mr. Trump is no Orban. But the American Right is beginning to speak with a Hungarian accent.

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Mr. Continetti is the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- An Improbable Hero for the American Right --- Hungarian leader Viktor Orban's policy stances and pugnacious defiance of liberal critics have endeared him to U.S. conservatives.
Continetti, Matthew. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 20 Aug 2022: C.1.