5 min Click here to listen to this article

Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print

Copy Link URL Copied!

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend.

Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail or is failing to get his works published.” This was simply not true. The still young regime had already imprisoned, tortured or executed scores of intellectuals. (Sontag later recanted.)

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez still talk about Nordic countries as if we have much to learn from them, despite the fact the Nordic model heavily depends on taxing the poor and middle class, not soaking the rich. Now, distinctions matter. The Nordic systems are democratic and decent. Cuba is a Marxist basket case and police state. But the one thing uniting both fan clubs is the tendency to see the countries they imagine them to be rather than the reality.

President Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance (most recently while campaigning for Orban) have all lavished praise on Hungary. Patrick Deneen, a leading New Right intellectual saw in Orban’s Hungary “a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says, ‘There’s a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies.’”

The Heritage Foundation, a once respected conservative think tank that has shed its devotion to the Constitution and traditional conservatism, agrees. Its wayward president, Kevin Roberts, in 2024 called Orban’s Hungary a “model for conservative governance.”

This mirrors Orban’s own explanation: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed,” he explained in 2014. “And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”

Don’t be put off by the word “liberal” here (or by Deneen’s and Roberts’ tendentious use of “conservative”). Orban and his fans........

© Los Angeles Times