Viktor Orbán’s Message for Social Conservatives
If they play to win, they can overturn the "globalist" understanding of progress
I have to admit, I kind of liked Viktor Orban’s speech at CPAC last Thursday afternoon.
I didn’t agree with it. Neither would I vote for any of the Orbán wannabes coming up within today’s Republican Party. I mean merely that, for the first time, I kind of “got” his appeal, in much the same way as I finally grasped the Donald Trump phenomenon during the GOP primary debate in early 2016 when the candidate first went after George W. Bush for the “disaster” of the Iraq War, while Bush’s brother Jeb squirmed on the stage beside him and the crowd of Republican voters roared with approval. So this guy is willing to tear everything down, even the most sacred pieties of the GOP? I can see that catching on.
I guess you could say that my response to Orbán’s remarks is a good example of empathetic imagination in action. I think I may have become capable of that empathy because of my recent exchange with Rod Dreher over Orbán’s “mixed-race” speech in Romania a couple of weeks ago. No, Rod didn’t convince me that Orbán praising the horribly xenophobic novel The Camp of the Saints was merely a silly blunder, any more than I was persuaded by Orbán’s risible assertion in Dallas that “a Christian politician can’t be racist.”
Yet that exchange—or rather, Rod’s side of it—helped me to grasp what it feels like to be a social conservative who thinks abortion is murder, gay marriage is an oxymoron, and the cultural left is about to impose a form of totalitarianism on conservative Christians, who will soon be facing persecution that turns them into the equivalent of Soviet dissidents living under the bootheel of communist tyranny.
When “the Narrative” Defines Winning as Losing (and Vice Versa)
Being a social conservative can be hard. The progressive side of our political divide draws on, and continually falls back on, a belief in the ideology from which its name derives: progress. A semi-secularized version of Christian providentialism, it can be a powerful force for keeping spirits high. We are bound to win! is a formidable pick-me-up for all kinds of occasions and momentary setbacks.
Social conservatives live in a culture saturated with that assumption. You know you’re going to lose, right? Just as you didn’t think women should vote or work outside the home, and assumed blacks were inferior, and wanted to exclude Jews from your schools and businesses, and taunted and imprisoned homosexuals. At each step you fight for your archaic, bigoted views, and then after a while, those views get left behind, recognized by all—and sometimes even by you yourself—as appalling. Eventually you come to see, not only that you’ve lost, but that you deserved to lose. Because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and your views were/are unjust.
The religious right from the late 1970s through the Bush 43 era had an alternative form of providentialism. It assumed that America was founded in piety; that its present-day secularism was a fall from that state of prior perfection; and that all the moral majority needed to do is show up to vote for Republicans and the country would get back on track—back to the way it used to be, and the way it was always meant to be.
The setbacks of the Obama era—from the president’s 53 percent win in 2008 to the Obergefell decision of 2015—killed that faith, leaving social conservative vulnerable to despair in the face of seemingly inevitable losses. But Trump’s rise pointed in a new direction.
A New Way Forward
Orbán is much better than Trump at elucidating that new direction. That’s what I heard the Hungarian president doing in his speech in Dallas. It was a full-spectrum pep talk for a spiritually demoralized right. Don’t believe them when they say you are bound to lose! You aren’t—if you fight back hard enough!
The speech was charming and funny in its way. Seeing the Hungarian president waddle out on stage to kitschy guitar rock, with his too-short orange tie resting on his middle-aged belly, really set the mood—and provided a good laugh right off the bat. Then came the perfunctory graciousness to his CPAC hosts, and flattery for the United States, all delivered through a thick but understandable accent.
Once he got to substance, the structure of the address became clear: Orbán was here to tell the audience that it’s possible to beat the liberals/communists. (“Progressive liberals and communists are the same,” he asserted early on.) One only needs to fight and play to win. If little Hungary could push back against the big, bad globalist bureaucrats of the European Union and the insidious money and influence of George Soros (“Uncle Georgie”), certainly American conservatives can do the same right here at home.
How? In part by reversing the story liberals like Soros like to tell about the unfolding of the 20th century. The rise of totalitarianism, they claim, was a product of Christianity and nationalism run amok. To bring about the triumph of freedom, it was necessary to defeat them both—and that struggle continues today, in the fight against right-wing anti-liberal populists like Trump and Orbán.
But Orbán flips the narrative: Totalitarianism was made possible by—indeed, it is synonymous with—the defeat of Christianity and nationalism.
The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on western values, and create a New World, a post-western world. Who is going to stop them if we don’t?
The great advantage for the right of this alternative narrative is that it deprives progressives of both the presumption of ultimate victory and the moral high ground. The triumph of progressivism wouldn’t be the culmination of world history or the achievement of justice on earth. On the contrary, it would be a return to totalitarian tyranny. Those who want to improve the world therefore need to bolster the strength of Christianity, the traditional family, and the nation in order to smite the progressives.
Just as the right in the U.S. is abandoning its innate libertarian hostility to the administrative state in favor of a call to seize its formidable powers for its own ends, so Orbán wants social conservatives everywhere to become counter-progressives working to bring about the final defeat of liberalism. This isn’t standing athwart history yelling, “Stop.” It’s throwing history into reverse and calling that true progress.
A Mandate to Reverse Course
And there we see the key to social-conservative success: refusing to let the left define what counts as “getting better over time.” Once the right cedes that ground to the left, as it has for decades, all that remains for conservatives to do is keep tapping the brakes and continually accommodating to the endless series of progressive victories.
Orbán thinks the right can do more and better than that. Indeed, he points to his own success in defying Brussels in 2015 on accepting “400,000 illegal migrants” from the Middle East who massed on his country’s borders (“almost three times as many as Genghis Khan had when he invaded Europe”). He also highlighted his success in rejecting gay marriage and the teaching of gender ideology in schools. Both inspired applause from the crowd, with the second bringing what sounded like the most rapturous response to anything in the speech. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis knows exactly what he’s doing.)
Viktor Orbán is playing to win, and he wants American social conservatives to do exactly the same. No wonder they love him.
Well, we can't let them win. We would go back to an age that is pre-enlightenment, ruled by church and kings with few rights and a meaner lot in life. No thanks. The USA is too diverse for this Orban's "fixes". I think there would be a break up of the union before anything like that could happen at a national level.