What Americans Should Learn About Hungary

Over the past few years, American “conservatives” have doted on, if not kissed the feet, of Hungary's Orbán. This I have never understood. To be so enraptured by a foreigner whose ideas are antithetical to American ideals left me distrusting these conservatives. Add Orbán's hanging onto Putin only increased my dislike. Americans should follow Russia's lead? Only morons like Trump, J.D. Vance, and Tucker Carlson would think we should.

But a larger question remains unanswered for me - something hidden between the slogans of MAGA and social media tirades - how does illiberalism, Trump's autocracy, John Yoo's unitary executive, benefit Americans?

Reclaiming the Small Circles of Liberty (Los Angeles Review of Books) reviews the history of Orbán's Hungary, and it provides what I think are things Americans really should think about regarding Hungary.

The Hungarian story of the last 16 years does not conform to “the end of liberal democratic politics,” nor is the victory of Tisza in any way indicative of the demise of global illiberalism. Rather, these developments might teach us some lessons about the nature of the clash between liberal democratic and neoconservative autocratic projects.

The first such lesson is that resistance is never in vain as it is impossible to predict when certain disparate streams converge into a river, like Tisza, that ends up overflowing the dams of autocratic lawfare. Another lesson is that autocracies and autocrats age badly; they tend to fossilize and react to unexpected challenges with increasing stiffness. Orbán sincerely believed that his successful anti-Ukrainian campaign of 2022 could be recycled, in an even more primitive and aggressive way, in 2026. Eventually, he managed to convince about 60 percent of his voter base that Ukraine posed a greater threat to Hungary than Russia, but only seven percent of the supporters of the opposition were convinced. He reacted to every new challenge with less and less energy and more and more self-deception, and eventually became trapped in the virtual reality he himself had created.

In hindsight, and this is another important lesson, every protest movement, every teacher who refused to implement the imposed curriculum, every theater director who refused to modify the program in response to the demands of the policymakers, everyone who made donations to independent media, every journalist who kept up the ethos of his or her profession and kept investigating corruption cases, every activist who defended a disabled Roma tenant from being evicted from his or her flat, every one of them fought the mafia state while at the same time defending “the small circles of liberty.” (The latter phrase comes from István Bibó, perhaps the most important Hungarian political thinker of the 20th century, condemned to life imprisonment for his involvement in the 1956 revolution.)

sch 5/14