By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Viktor Orbán, 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 health care 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 depends
heavily 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 a police state. But the one thing uniting both fan
clubs is the tendency to see the countries as they imagine them to be rather
than the reality.
President Trump, Tucker Carlson, and J.D. Vance (most
recently while campaigning
for Orbán) have all lavished praise on Hungary. Patrick Deneen, a leading
new-right intellectual, saw in Orbán’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 Orbán’s Hungary a “model for conservative governance.”
This mirrors Orbán’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”). Orbán and his fans
aren’t talking about mere left-wing policies. The “liberal” here is the
liberalism of liberal democratic capitalism, John Locke, Adam Smith, and the
American Founding Fathers.
“Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some
reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” Orbán claimed. The
concept of checks and balances is not actually an American invention.
But it is a vital liberal bulwark against authoritarianism and corruption.
When the U.S. Supreme Court said that President Biden
couldn’t, on a whim, forgive student loan debt or ban evictions, or when it
ruled that Trump couldn’t unilaterally tariff the world or indiscriminately
deploy troops to American cities, that was checks and balances at work.
Claims that Orbán was an authoritarian could be
overblown. But he was moving in that direction, larding the courts, universities,
and state media with political loyalists and, until this weekend, rewriting the
election laws to stay in power.
But his corruption was not exaggerated, and his
corruption is why he lost. Orbán steered state resources to his cronies, family, and hometown friends on a massive scale. But that doesn’t mean
he broke the law. He wrote—or interpreted with the help of crony judges—the law
to make favoritism legal. That sort of favoritism, it turns out, is incredibly
bad for the economy because it distorts the market, misallocates scarce
resources for self-serving political objectives, and discourages investment.
It’s fine to say Orbán lost because the Hungarian economy and health care
system was a mess. But that mess stemmed from Orbán’s corruption.
In America we tend to think of corruption as illegal:
taking bribes, pilfering taxpayer money, etc. But in many parts of the world,
that’s neither illegal nor even corrupt. It’s the way business is done. In many
developing countries—and throughout most of human history—government is run
like a family business. Special treatment for relatives and allies is natural.
What’s unnatural is the modern liberal way of putting contracts out to bid and
treating taxpayer money as sacrosanct.
No country is perfect at this, which is one reason we
have checks and balances. Each branch is supposed to be on the lookout for
abuses by the others, and everyone is supposed to be subordinate to the rule of
law, not the law of rulers.
Orbánism is not a new model, or “wave of the future.” It was a tide of the past. And it’s
good news that it’s receding.
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