Would it be an exaggeration to say that Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is more often the object of censure by Democrats and NeverTrumpers than Communist China’s Chairman Xi? If that is the case, it is not because they particularly care about a small country in Eastern Europe. Their concern, rather, is that Orban’s example has given the wrong type of American the wrong ideas.

Orban had the temerity to oppose the tumultuous demographic change occurring in Western Europe and America as a result of immigration from what still is called the “Third World.” He made what Matthew Continetti, writing in the Wall Street Journal, called an “inflammatory statement” when he said, “’we do not want to become peoples of mixed race.’”  Orban also proved an impediment to the LGBTQ agenda, opposing same-sex marriage and gay adoption. He says that he favors “illiberal democracy,” by which he means democracy without the trappings of woke politics, for the moment ascendant in NATO countries. And above all, his governance constitutes a rallying point for the hated race of “national conservatives” in the United States.

The alarming transformation of American conservatism from its halcyon days of anticommunism, defense of individual liberty, and Reaganite optimism is the theme not only of Mr. Continetti’s piece but also of one by William Galston, again in the Journal.  According to Galston, Continetti disabuses those “who believe the commentariat is unduly fixated on Victor [sic] Orban.” He shows that “Hungary’s prime minister has become the touchstone of a world-wide populist-nationalist social-conservative movement -- and the leader some of Donald Trump’s supporters hoped Mr. Trump would become.”

Galston’s extensively hyphenated current conservative movement is to be contrasted with Ronald Reagan’s. Now on the one hand, says Galston, Reagan’s vision of America was bogus. He depicted America as a shining city on a hill, which “elided a multitude of ills on which his critics rightly focused.” You cannot call this country a shining anything, Galstoninsists, without acknowledging that it was founded on the genocide of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans and is something of which to be ashamed.

Though falsely exonerating America of its crimes, Reagan nonetheless struck Galston as a nice fellow: he had “an optimistic and inclusive vision of what the country at its best could be.” Furthermore, he didn’t let “evangelical Protestants and other social conservatives… dominate his rhetoric or agenda,” even though they were in his coalition. Evangelical Protestants and other social conservatives do not quite make it into Galston’s “inclusive vision.” Anyway, Reagan was not one of those noxious social conservatives. That is good to hear, because while he was President, the Left made Reagan out to be a murderer -- he did not sign on to the gay rights movement and gay people were dying of AIDS -- Q.E.D.

In place of Reagan’s conservatism, which was “dominated… by economic hope,” says Galston, we have today “a different vision, dominated not by economic hope but by cultural fear.” And “[a]ccording to this new vision, Western civilization is being attacked from within by liberalism run amok.” We can only wonder at the source of so bizarre a superstition.

Galston accuses national conservatives of rejecting freedom as equivalent to license and of advocating repressive measures of the kind that he attributes to Orban: assaults upon a free press and an independent judiciary.

Liberals have some culpability, in Galston’s account -- they tend to identify their cultural beliefs with the “requirements of a liberal polity.” There is no question that their cultural positions are sound, however. They “challenge traditional hierarchies, including race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, and religion.” They have accomplished, “the inclusion of those previously excluded from the mainstream.” Furthermore, it clear that harm has not resulted from the woke cultural revolution, since, for example, there is no evidence that same-sex marriage has weakened the traditional kind.

Of course, all that is missing from Galston’s analysis is a particle of evidence that national conservatives have curtailed anyone’s civil liberties and some acknowledgment of the increasingly vindictive censorship imposed upon anyone who ventures to question the Left’s challenge to “traditional hierarchies” or its inclusion of certain kinds of person in the “mainstream.”   

The harm wrought by the gay rights and transsexual movements does not particularly relate to their weakening the institution of marriage, already weakened enough by the evisceration of its religious basis and the gradual substitution of personal hedonism for devotion to children. The harm, rather, is the professional and personal ruination of anyone daring to oppose those movements -- the baker who does not wish to sell a cake celebrating same-sex marriage, the military commander reluctant to populate infantry units with men who think they are women, etc.

Does Galston really see no basis for what he calls “cultural fear” -- not in the foregoing circumstances, not additionally in the sexualization of children, or in their surgical mutilation to rectify some supposed gender dysphoria?

Continetti also presents Orban as the inspiration for what he sees as the American Right’s despotic turn. His prominence “is a sign that ascendant forces within the conservative movement no longer look to the Anglosphere for guidance, but to continental Europe.” They have abandoned the natural right tradition for “blood and soil,” you see. Continetti continues, “They no longer hold the line at limited government but are using state power to advance what they consider to be traditional cultural values.” Moreover, conservatives “no longer privilege individual rights over communal ones.” And “[t]hey are no longer unified around opposition to an external enemy [presumably, the Soviet Union] but wish to arrest or reverse the causes of perceived internal decay.” (emphasis added) Finally, “[t]hey 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 take the fight to the other side.” (emphasis added)

Not a lot of time need be wasted chronicling the tendentiousness of all this. Whatever anyone thinks is the solution, the ruination of towns and cities by unregulated immigration, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young people by drugs accompanying the invasion, the soaring violent crime in the cities, the hollowed industrial base, the cognitive impairment of children by the COVID lockdowns, the diminished labor force -- all of these things do not represent any “perceived” decay.

When Continetti yearns for “the respect of the opposition,” does it matter to him who the “opposition” are or what they want? Does he care whether they have any interest in garnering his respect? Does it bother him if they actually seek to destroy American constitutional liberty, by removing the livelihood of citizens promulgating political opinions that they dislike, or even by sending the FBI crashing through their front doors with guns drawn? Whose fears are “apocalyptic” and whose justified -- Galston’s and Continetti’s, relating to what they think national conservatives might want to do, or those harbored by persons (some of them quite obscure) made targets of Merrick Garland’s Justice Department?

All these accounts of American conservatism’s metamorphosis and decline since the “good old days” have in common the same deficiency. Their authors never consider how the Left changed first. They ignore the accelerating campaign to accomplish the “fundamental transformation of America” to which conservatives have had to react. Whether their reaction is extreme can only be judged in light of the assault on the nation’s liberty and traditions that prompted it. Has it not been extreme, even in comparison to the supposed depredations of Victor Orban and Donald Trump? 

Image: European People's Party