Post - liberal reality: The four lessons for liberals from Hungary

The defeat of Viktor Orban provides a crucial window for introspection. Beyond celebrating his exit, liberals must reckon with the resilience of populist demands and the inherent illiberalism surfacing within their own established orders.

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. Since the obvious lesson for the Republican Party that building a new conservative order fails if perceived as authoritarian and corrupt probably comes too late for the Trump administration, I want to focus on realities liberals might consider as they cheer Orbanism’s defeat.

The first lesson is that Western democracy under populist conditions is more resilient than anxious analysis suggests. There is a vital distinction between a leader making authoritarian moves and actually being an authoritarian state; the road between the two is not a simple matter of flipping a switch labelled "autocracy." Orban ruled Hungary, a country with a thin democratic tradition, for 16 years. Yet, despite the power his circle wielded over industry and media, his rise and fall tracked his popular support. Hungary had a pliant press and a gerrymandered Parliament, but it was not Putin’s Russia; when the people tired of Orban, he was gone.

This is not an argument that an American president consolidating such power would be acceptable. It is merely a case for not living inside worst-case scenarios where the United States a society with vast competing power centres and centuries of democratic tradition is one election away from permanent dictatorship.

This leads to the second lesson: the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a "democratic emergency" requires backing the establishment regardless of performance. Peter Magyar, the incoming Hungarian prime minister, ran against Orbanist corruption, but he promised his own form of nationalism and even tacked to Orban’s right on immigration. He vindicated the basic theory of how to respond to a populist era: Move to the cultural right, especially on immigration. It is a simple admonition that establishment leaders in Europe and America find nearly impossible to follow, preferring to treat electoral victories as opportunities to return to the very policies that prompted the rebellion in the first place.

The third point liberals should internalise is that the crisis of the post-Cold War order exists independently of "post-liberal" intellectuals. Shutter the Budapest cafes or purge the conservative universities Orban built, and it will have no effect on the prospects of right-wing parties in France, Germany, or Britain. Populism and nationalism are organic reactions to an age of mass migration, collapsed birthrates, deindustrialisation, and digital anomie. Conservative intellectuals attached themselves to the reaction, but they did not create it. You will not reckon with this era by defunding academic conferences.

Finally, one must recognise that it is not only populists who can be antidemocratic. Orbanism emerged as a reaction to the impositions of the European Union a political arrangement often described as having a "democratic deficit," meaning it allows a bureaucratic caste to ignore public opinion and trample national sovereignty.

Orban has shared a continent with governments that, in the name of liberalism, perpetuate their own soft tyrannies. It is not Hungary but Britain that regularly arrests citizens for social media posts. It is not Hungary but Finland and Iceland where Christians face legal harassment for expressing traditional views on sexuality. It is not in Hungary but in the Netherlands that young people with psychiatric conditions can be euthanised.

It is no brief for the place Orbanism ended, in corruption and defeat, to suggest that many institutions imagining themselves to be treating an illiberal infection "out there" badly need to heal themselves. The fall of a populist leader does not signal the end of the concerns that raised him to power. If the liberal establishment continues to ignore the structural causes of discontent, the defeat of one Orban will only pave the way for the next.

The New York Times