By Josh Appel
Sunday, June 07, 2026
In April 2026, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was voted out
of power in Hungary, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in
over a decade. A sober assessment of Orbán’s Hungary, alongside other
postliberal regimes, should finally put to rest the imagined utopia of
postliberalism. We can now say plainly that real postliberalism has been
tried, and the results were far from perfect.
I am here evoking the longstanding notion in Marxist
circles that regimes aligned with Communist ideals have fallen short only
because “real socialism hasn’t been tried yet.” The endurance of that idea has
been vital for those who still believe in the overall Marxist ethos. In this
view, socialism’s dark history is due only to the corruption and wickedness of
people like Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, not to socialism or Communism itself.
But 109 years after the formation of the Soviet Union and 36 years after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, it is nearly impossible to argue with any honesty that
the failures of socialism were not aberrations but features. Food shortages,
economic stagnation, corruption, and repression are inherent to collective
ownership and centralized social planning. The failure to grasp such basic
cause and effect is due to the romanticization of Communist utopia and the
demonization of democratic capitalism. In this imagined world of perfection
where socialism can work, everything good from our current order can
remain the same while we simply fix the inequality of capitalism by
superimposing socialism on top of it.
The “hasn’t been tried yet” fantasy is an attempt to have
your cake and eat it too, to avoid the atrocities of socialism by keeping the
parts of society that are good while doing away with the unfairnesses. What
socialists refuse to grasp is that oftentimes those very good things they value
are by-products of the system they so loathe.
A similar problem plagues those who self-identify as
postliberal and/or integralist. Postliberals, such as the political philosophy
professor Patrick Deneen, and integralists, such as the law professor Adrian
Vermeule, successfully identify genuine cultural problems—and then issue
sweeping and sensationalist solutions. Seeing a world bereft of order and
virtue—as evidenced by alternative forms of marriage, the collapse of the
nuclear family, the abandonment of the factory-working everyman, the proliferation
of drugs and pornography combined with weak communal and religious
institutions—postliberals then turn and blame the problem on liberalism itself.
For Deneen, liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy and rights
has deemphasized the necessities of obligation, tradition, and community. But
instead of noting the difference and calling for a revival of the mediating
structures that try to set individualism within the framework of
communitarianism, Deneen and others throw out the baby with the bathwater. The
only way to rectify such issues, they argue, is through “regime change,” which
happens to be the title of Deneen’s second book on the topic. Deneen concludes
it with a call to action: “It is time to abandon the ruins we have made, seek
shelter, and then build anew.” But what postliberals get wrong is that they
believe they can maintain the “good” parts of liberalism while abolishing the
parts they contemn.
Just like the Marxists, the postliberals refuse to make a
cost-benefit analysis that ignores perfection as a possible end; instead, they
rely on a utopian conception of the way things ought to be, and from which we
are currently separated, to make value judgements on the way things currently
are. This failure to appreciate the successes of liberalism in the first place
is why they fall into a fatal trap—the belief that historical novelties such as
the rule of law and economic prosperity are simply inevitable. In other words,
for the post-liberals, all that we prize in society can exist absent
liberalism; while at the same time, liberalism is holding us back from the way
in which things can be even better.
This is where the postliberals have their own form of the
“hasn’t truly been tried” myth. Instead of admitting that centralized,
religious autocracy inevitably leads to all sorts of intended and unintended
consequences—of which there is adequate proof—postliberals seem to believe that
real religious autocracy, or real postliberalism/integralism, hasn’t been tried
yet. But the truth is it has been tried and the results left much to be
desired.
Three contemporary examples show us how postliberalism
greatly weakens economic stability, hollows out authentic religious adherence,
and does little to help the family grow.
***
The first is António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime between
1932 and 1968 in Portugal. In the aftermath of the First Republic of Portugal,
Salazar created the Estado Novo, the New State, which combined Catholic
social doctrine, nationalism, and economic corporatism. Salazar’s Estado
Novo has in recent years received praise in the pages of the American
Conservative and First Things.
That praise was unearned. Salazar’s corporatist system
produced stagnation and peasantry. In 1962, the New York Times referred
to Portugal as an “impoverished, backward, feudal country… the poorest and
worst administered nation of non-Communist Europe.” The report continued, “Dr.
Salazar has managed to keep law and order, the two primary aims of all
dictators. Little else can be said for the regime.” By rejecting both free
market dynamism and genuine competition, the Estado Novo further
entrenched a poor, agrarian working class that was kept deliberately isolated
to preserve control. Industries were organized into state-supervised guilds
that suppressed innovation and protected incumbent owners. Almost half of the
population worked the fields in abject poverty. Despite moderate GDP growth,
Portugal remained one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. The economic
gains that did materialize, often cited by postliberals, were a product of
capitulating to “globalization”: the benefits of the Marshall Plan, extractions
from African colonies, joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) and European Free Trade Association in 1960, and a trade
agreement with the European Economic Community in 1972. While other European
nations further industrialized rapidly after World War II, Portugal lagged.
The regime also failed in its professed commitment to the
family. While Salazar championed traditional family structures, his economic
policies made it difficult for families to thrive materially. Although Salazar
rapidly expanded the number of schools, illiteracy rates remained among the
highest in Europe. The combination of low wages and limited opportunity led to
significant emigration to France. By 1969, more than 100,000 Portuguese
citizens had fled there.
In addition to the economic consequences of corporatism,
Salazar—as all authoritarians must in order to uphold control and
“order”—relied on harsh censorship and domination. The PIDE, Portugal’s secret
police, often engaged in extrajudicial torture and execution. The suppression
of dissent created a culture of fear, not virtue.
Ultimately, Salazar was plagued by the same malady that
tends to destroy all repressive uniparty regimes: Life is unpredictable, and no
central authority—no matter how disciplined or well-intentioned—can anticipate
every social, economic, or political contingency. When pressures arose in
Portugal over its imperialist policies in Africa, the regime could not adapt
without undermining its own foundations. Salazar was forced to respond by
intensifying control, expanding the mandatory military draft, and diverting
scarce resources to preserve order. The result was a precarious cycle in which
each effort to suppress instability only deepened it, leaving Portugal poorer,
more isolated, more unstable, and less capable of genuine renewal. The Estado
Novo was upended by the Carnation Revolution in 1974 without a single shot
being fired.
If Salazar’s Portugal was marked by economic stagnation
and widespread peasantry, Francisco Franco’s Spain was far worse. Yet, American
Reformer writer Josh Abbotoy once quipped that “basically, America is going
to need a Protestant Franco”—later qualifying, but not fully retracting, the
remark in First Things.
Franco came to power at the end of a bloody civil war and
ruled from 1939 to 1975 over a regime that was both more authoritarian and more
explicitly religious than Salazar’s. Franco’s autocracy was not subtle, and
neither were its consequences. He vowed to root out what he called
“Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik” influence, and he styled himself El Caudillo por
la gracia de Dios, leader by the grace of God. His Falange movement had
been backed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini during the civil war, and
absent Spain’s internal devastation, he may well have joined them in World War
II. The civil war itself was catastrophic: More than 500,000 died, with roughly
200,000 victims of mob violence and torture. During the war, the Nationalists
imprisoned hundreds of thousands in concentration camps. Upon taking control,
Franco abolished all political opposition, centralized legislative power in his
own hands, and executed more than 20,000 political enemies, ensuring that
dissent would not reemerge.
Economically, Franco initially pursued autarky—an attempt
at total economic self-sufficiency—and it proved disastrous. Famine spread, and
civilians collapsed in the streets. Beggars reportedly lined the roads as
Franco’s motorcade passed, hoping for scraps of bread. By some estimates, as
many as 200,000 people died from starvation in the postwar years…in Spain.
Like Salazar, Franco ultimately had to abandon his ideological commitments to
preserve his regime. By 1950, Spain was taking loans from the United States,
and the 1959 Plan de Estabilización opened the country to international
capital, IMF assistance, and American military bases. Tourism surged, forcing
the regime to tolerate cultural changes—including bikini-clad tourists on
Mediterranean beaches—that sat uneasily with its professed Catholic moral
order. By the 1960s, Spain had joined institutions like the OECD and integrated
into global trade, effectively abandoning autarky. Yet even with foreign
investment, Spain was the poor relation of its Western European neighbors. A
regime that had promised economic independence and moral virtue ended up
compromising both.
Beyond economics, Franco’s fusion of church and state did
not strengthen Catholicism; it weakened the faith’s potency. By presenting
himself as a divinely sanctioned ruler and suppressing any religious pluralism,
the regime bound the fate of the church to its own repression. The association
between church and state, combined with harsh repression, made way for an even
stronger anti-Catholic backlash in the inevitable collapse of the Franco
regime. Today, Spain is more secular than half of the countries in the European
Union, ranking 16th out of 34 in religiosity, according to Pew Research. Only
around 20 percent of Spaniards identify religion as “very important in their
lives” and say they attend services at least monthly. Supposedly secular
strongholds such as Poland, Ukraine, and Greece all rank higher than Spain.
This is no surprise. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed as
early as 1835, the separation of church and state is not a boon for
secularization but for religious authenticity and piety:
When a religion
founds its empire upon the desire of immortality which lives in every human
heart, it may aspire to universal dominion; but when it connects itself with a
government, it must necessarily adopt maxims which are only applicable to
certain nations. Thus, in forming an alliance with a political power, religion
augments its authority over a few, and forfeits the hope of reigning over all.…
The Church cannot share the temporal power of the State without being the
object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.
According to Tocqueville, anticipating our current
debate, by standing apart from the ephemeral and political state, the church
strengthens true faith and virtue.
The same phenomenon is evident in Orbán’s Hungary. While
touting itself as a postliberal Christian country, Hungary ranks even lower
(20th) in religiosity than Spain. In the latest Hungarian census, 57 percent of
Hungarians declined affiliation to any faith. Membership in the Catholic Church
dropped by 30 percent—an estimated 1.1 million people—since 2011. Hungary’s
Catholic demographic shrunk from 50 percent in 2001 to a lowly 28 percent
today. This, despite the fact that large swaths of state funds have been poured
into churches.
In addition to falling religious association, Hungary’s
pro-natalist policies have done little to curb declining birth rates across
Europe. Hungary’s birthrate (1.41) trails both France’s (1.61) and England’s
(1.55).
***
And, just as Salazar and Franco were undone by economic
trouble, the same is true of Orbán. Despite adopting free market policies
between 1998 and 2002 during his second tenure as prime minister, Orbán later
took a more corporatist stance, or what he deemed an “unorthodox economic
policy.” He levied heavy taxes on banks, energy, and telecommunications, in
addition to nationalizing private pensions. The Fidesz party took control of
hundreds of corporations and businesses and invested greatly in Chinese lithium-ion
batteries and electric-car plants. The investment did not pay off and left the
economy in free fall. Orbán raised the minimum wage and put price caps on a
number of products including gasoline, making the economic problem even worse.
In 2025, Hungary’s growth in GDP was 0.4 percent, third to last among EU
countries. As was the case with his postliberal predecessors, Orbán was forced
to give in to his chief populist foe, the European Union. According to Johan
Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, EU funds to Hungary “totaled up
to 4%… similar to what East Germany received from West Germany after
reunification.” An economic plight of Orbán’s own making, combined with
pervasive corruption—rivaling that of countries like China and Cuba—helped sow
the seeds of the regime’s demise.
What these case studies show us is that removing the
pillars of the liberal democratic order doesn’t fix systemic inequality or stem
the proliferation of pornography. It has a much more wide-ranging impact. Were
we to follow these examples, as the benighted postliberal philosophical
apologists for Orbán would have us do, we would risk upending the foundations
of a prosperous society that allow us to have basic needs met in the first
place. Autocratic regimes aren’t repressive because they have a depraved leader—although
they oftentimes do—but because autocracy doesn’t govern by popular or
republican consensus. Widespread poverty and a poor working class aren’t a
coincidence but a consequence of corporatism, protectionism, and anti–free
market policies. And the idea that they foment virtue is a proven absurdity.
When you fuse church and state, you get a less authentic, more alienating
religious order.
Instead of seeking utopia, postliberals, just like
socialists, would be better served spending their time thinking about how
liberalism has made our lives comparatively better than those of our
predecessors while working on ways to fix whatever drawbacks come along with
it. Winston Churchill said as much when he quipped, “Democracy is the worst
form of government, except for all the others.” Maybe that’s why postliberals
hate him so much.
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