The normal thing to say is that the liberal world order is in crisis. But just saying that doesn’t explain why. Why are people rejecting liberalism? What weakness in liberalism is its enemies exploiting? What is at the root of this dark century? Let me offer one explanation.

Liberalism is a way of life built on respect for the dignity of each individual. A liberal order, John Stuart Mill suggested, is one in which people are free to conduct “experiments in living” so you wind up with “a large variety in types of character.” There’s no one best way to live, so liberals celebrate freedom, personal growth and diversity.

Many of America’s founders were fervent believers in liberal democracy — up to a point. They had a profound respect for individual virtue, but also individual frailty. Samuel Adams said, “Ambitions and lust for power … are predominant passions in the breasts of most men.” Patrick Henry admitted to feelings of dread when he contemplated the “depravity of human nature.” One delegate to the constitutional convention said that the people “lack information and are constantly liable to be misled.”

Our founders were aware that majorities are easily led by ambitious demagogues.

More:

While the Constitution guarded against abuses of power, the founders recognized that a much more important set of civic practices would mold people to be capable of being self-governing citizens: Churches were meant to teach virtue; leaders were to receive classical education, so they might understand human virtue and vice and the fragility of democracy; everyday citizens were to lead their lives as yeoman farmers so they might learn to live simply and work hard; civic associations and local government were to instill the habits of public service; patriotic rituals were observed to instill shared love of country; newspapers and magazines were there (more in theory than in fact) to create a well-informed citizenry; etiquette rules and democratic manners were adopted to encourage social equality and mutual respect.

And:

Will the liberals of the world be able to hold off the wolves? Strengthen democracy and preserve the rules-based world order? The events of the past few weeks have been fortifying. Joe Biden and the other world leaders have done an impressive job of rallying their collective resolve and pushing to keep Putin within his borders. But the problems of democracy and the liberal order can’t be solved from the top down. Today, across left and right, millions of Americans see U.S. efforts abroad as little more than imperialism, “endless wars” and domination. They don’t believe in the postwar project and refuse to provide popular support for it.

The real problem is in the seedbeds of democracy, the institutions that are supposed to mold a citizenry and make us qualified to practice democracy. To restore those seedbeds, we first have to relearn the wisdom of the founders: We are not as virtuous as we think we are. Americans are no better than anyone else. Democracy is not natural; it is an artificial accomplishment that takes enormous work.

Then we need to fortify the institutions that are supposed to teach the democratic skills: how to weigh evidence and commit to truth; how to correct for your own partisan blinders and learn to doubt your own opinions; how to respect people you disagree with; how to avoid catastrophism, conspiracy and apocalyptic thinking; how to avoid supporting demagogues; how to craft complex compromises.

Read it all.

Look, David is a friend, and I sincerely respect and care for him, despite our political disagreements. Any criticism I ever make of his writing (or that of any other personal friend, ever) is done within the bounds of friendship. In a better world, I wouldn’t have to say that, but I do.

That said, Brooks did not bring up Orban, but I think it’s safe to say that the criticism he makes of Putin — who is a rather different figure from Orban — he would apply to Orban. In the eyes of many Western liberals (right-liberals like Brooks, and left-liberals too), there are no essential differences between any of these figures. So, one thing that is missing from the Brooks column is any reflection at all on why so many people have abandoned liberalism (“liberalism” in the sense of our Western model, not strictly speaking the views and policies of the Democratic Party).

The basic answer is in Hammer’s line here: “Hungary under Orbán rejects the illusion of liberal neutrality, recognizing, as this column has previously phrased it, “that a values-neutral liberal order amounts to a one-way cultural ratchet” toward leftism and progressivism.”

I told an audience last night at MCC that I, personally, am torn about all this. In theory, I would prefer to live in a liberal democratic polity, but that I can’t escape the conclusion that the choice for that is not on the table in the real world of 2022. The liberals of both the GOP and the Democratic Party have done little or nothing to protect those values, and that order, from the aggressively anti-liberal Left. For Americans, “liberalism” is a one-way ratchet to Critical Race Theory and gender ideology. Most conservatives — including me — have no real problem accepting gay people into the mainstream. But that is not enough for the Left today: we are compelled to affirm every new thing the sexual left comes up with, including teaching little children about gender fluidity, sending our kids to schools that do this, then set up formal structures of deceiving parents when their children come out as transgender in schools, and so forth. It is not enough that gays have the right to marry; the rare Christian baker or florist whose conscience will not let them participate in same-sex weddings must be professionally destroyed. That’s liberalism? Today, yes, it is.

Most conservatives have accepted that America used to be a racist society, and have absorbed the liberal Martin Luther King position that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. But that was yesterday’s liberalism. Today, if you do not affirm the malignant, illiberal ideology that entails Critical Race Theory, you are labeled a racist. If you do not want your children to be taught that (if they are white) they are an oppressor by virtue of their skin color, or, if they are a racial minority, that they are a perpetual victim, and that all their all-too-human failings are not reflexively the result of white bigotry, then you are either a white supremacist or a fellow traveler of white supremacy.

Liberalism used to stand for freedom of thought and expression. This week in Budapest, we heard the conservative essayist Heather Mac Donald talk about how on many college campuses, she has only been able to give speeches there if she is given heavy police protection against left-wing student mobs. This is what liberalism has led to. Left-wing atheist professors like Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying tell harrowing stories about how they were driven out of their universities by both mob action and by Kafkaesque harassment by their woke university administrations,, simply because they defended liberal principles in the face of the mobs. The men and women whose duty it is to defend old-fashioned liberalism have capitulated.

Liberalism in practice has meant that our collective cultural and artistic heritage is being viciously dismantled. Mac Donald writes about how the progressive administration of the Art Institute of Chicago is destroying the museum to make it ideologically correct, according to the ideology of wokeness. Who is standing up to defend museums from this assault? Where are the Brooks columns denouncing this kind of thing? Or any of the stuff I’m talking about here?

Nowadays, to work for a major corporation, or to get into law or medicine, you are at a serious disadvantage if you are not a racial or sexual minority, no matter how competent you are at the actual job you would do. You will be forced to accept and affirm leftist cultural dogmas that you do not believe, and if you fail to do so, you put yourself at risk of unemployment. And what has liberalism done to oppose this, or roll it back? Nothing. The Democratic Party affirms this stuff, and the GOP remains too sleepy to fight it (or, as in Trump’s case, satisfies itself with lazy lib-owning, while the woke consolidate power within the institutions).

Back when Donald Trump was first running, establishment conservatives couldn’t get over how a figure like that became popular with the conservative base. I was one of those establishment conservatives — not a Never Trumper, but one who was baffled by Trump, and troubled. It took reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to give me a better sense of the dispossession many working class Trump supporters felt in this country — in particular, how the free-market fundamentalism the GOP had been pushing for a generation had not worked out well for many of those people. I don’t believe Trump was the answer, but virtually nobody else on the classical liberal side even saw that this was a serious problem. Today, the very liberal, even woke, prime minister of Canada is invoking emergency legislation to fight protesting working-class Canadians, including threatening to take away their bank accounts, and calling them all filthy racist rabble.

This is liberalism? Yes, it is: actually existing liberalism, in the year 2022. And if it’s not actually liberal, then we can say that proper classical liberalism does nothing at all to defend itself. But oh, the old-school liberals sure do complain about leaders of the postliberal Right who are willing to pick up the fight that they have abandoned.

Here in Hungary, Orban remains popular in part because he believes that the globalist progressive bureaucracy in Brussels, and the NGO archipelago throughout the West, should not have the last word in how Hungarians are governed. That belongs to the Hungarian people. His economic policies would cause American free marketers’ heads to explode — but he believes there is nothing wrong with the state involving itself in the economy to protect the common good of the people.

I saw last night that the controversial Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore (also a friend I respect) attacked Hungary in his newsletter, saying:

Pay attention, though, to those who look behind the former Iron Curtain to find the future. Many religious conservatives—most notably Roman Catholics but some evangelical Protestants too—have allied themselves with Hungary’s authoritarian strongman, Viktor Orbán. As libertarian commentator Matt Welch notes, the Hungarian prime minister “makes for an odd champion of American-style Christendom.”

“Abortion is uncontroversially legal in Hungary, the people aren’t particularly religious, and Orbán has exercised kleptocratic control over churches that dare to dissent from his policies,” Welch argues. The key reason for the attraction to Eastern European strongmen, Welch concludes, is that they fight the right enemies and “win.”

If this were just a skirmish between those of us who believe in liberal democracy and those who find it expendable, that would be one thing. But the other, larger problem with this authoritarian temptation is the gospel.

If the church is a cultural vehicle for national stability and pride, then one can hardly expect dictators to do anything other than manipulate it. But if the church is made up, as the Bible tells us, of “living stones” brought in by regenerated hearts through personal faith in Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 2:4–5), then external conformity to “values” and “civilization” falls woefully short of Christianity.

“Authoritarian strongman.” Good grief. That’s ridiculous. What kind of authoritarian strongman puts himself before the people in free and fair elections every four years, and wins? Last year when I left Hungary, the Orban supporters in my circles were very worried that Fidesz, Orban’s party, would lose the April 2022 election. Orban has been in power since 2010, which is a long time. Now, though, weeks away from the election, they are more confident. The opposition candidate — chosen as the anti-Orban standard-bearer by opposition primary voters — has been terrible on the campaign trail, I have been told by both pro- and anti-Orban people. You watch: if Orban wins re-election, the Western media will be filled with accusations that he somehow must have cheated.

Anyway, Moore’s readers who don’t know any better may assume, from the way he has worded his column (which is mostly an attack on Vladimir Putin; on that, Moore is on stronger ground), that Orban is a Putin mini-me. It’s absurd. Here in Hungary, I know some Evangelical Christians, all of whom are Orban supporters. Why? Here’s Josh Hammer again:

 The Hungarian government under Fidesz is not “neutral,” furthermore, on basic questions of sexual morality and the Judeo-Christian tradition: Gender ideology is kept out of schools, marriage is vigorously defended as the exclusive union of one man and one woman and Christianity is woven into the very fabric of society and polity alike.

Fidesz has no appetite for policing bedrooms—and Budapest has its annual “Pride” parade—but the state decisively puts its thumb on the scale in favor of traditional Christian ethics. There are no “drag queen story hours” scandalizing innocent children here. On the contrary, the government’s public defense of European Christendom and the “illiberal” nature in which its policies prefer traditional religious ethics over alternative lifestyles represents a sort of “ecumenical integralism”—encapsulated by the fact Orbán himself is Calvinist, while his wife is Catholic. Hungary’s popular, elaborate and much-discussed family policy measures have also been successful in boosting the national birthrate.

I recall a conversation I had with a young Evangelical woman last summer, asking her about how she is likely to vote in the April elections. She said she will vote for Fidesz. I asked her about the most common complaint I heard from Fidesz supporters: that Orban is far too tolerant of public corruption. She said that she feels the same way, but that to vote in the opposition is to open the doors to a much more destructive kind of corruption: the surrender to gender ideology. Once that takes hold, she said, there’s no getting rid of it. Similarly, I talked to a 24-year-old female colleague who was not religious, and who lived with her boyfriend. She was planning to vote Orban, because she wants to have kids one day, and does not want to live in a society in which Brussels bureaucrats and their local allies have created a world in which schools and media teach her sons that they can be girls, and vice versa.

You can roll your eyes at that if you like, but these are real and important issues for ordinary people here. They are real and important issues for ordinary people in America too. Are the left-liberals and the right-liberals fighting for the integrity of natural families against the gender ideologues? No, they are not. Viktor Orban does.

Moreover, when it comes to protecting persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Orban opened a ministry within his office to offer aid, material and otherwise, to those communities. I wrote about that office here. In 2019, I sat in a meeting in which a senior Iraqi Christian leader thanked Orban. From my account of the meeting:

When the migration crisis hit Europe in 2015, Orban famously shut Hungary’s borders to Middle Easterners. Orban said that Hungary’s was the only government in Europe to respond to the crisis in its own interests, and in the interests of Christianity in Europe. With a population of only 10 million, and as a country where Christianity, as elsewhere on the continent, is fragile, the Hungarians concluded that allowing large numbers of Muslims to take up residence here would mean the death knell of Christianity in time.

This scandalized the European political class. Orban doesn’t care. He told our group that he understands that he is dealing with elites who believe that being a post-Christian, post-national civilization is a great and glorious thing. Orban rejects this. He said the main political question in the West today is how fractious pluralities can live together peaceably. He said, “Here the most important question is how not to have the same questions as them.”

Orban pointed out that the UK and France were once colonial powers in the Middle East. He added, “But Central Europe was colonized by the Middle East. That’s a fact.” He’s talking about the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, from 1541 to 1699. Orban told our group that the room we were sitting was part of a Church building that had been turned into a mosque during the occupation.

Explaining his decision to shut the borders to Muslim refugees, Orban said what tipped the scales was consulting the Christian bishops of the Middle East. Orban: “What did they say? ‘Don’t let them in. Stop them.’”

Middle Eastern Christians, said Orban, “can tell you what is the [ultimate] end of a society you have to share with Muslims.”

Sitting at the table listening to the prime minister was Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS. Archbishop Nicodemus spoke up, thanking Orban for what Hungary has done for persecuted Christians. Nicodemus said that living with Muslims has taught Iraqi Christians that they can expect no mercy. “Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body,” he said.

“The problem is that Western countries don’t accept our experience,” the prelate continued. “Those people [Muslims] pushed us to be a minority in our own land and then refugees in our own land.”

Under the Orban government, Hungary frequently extends a helping hand to persecuted Christians.The archbishop exhorted Orban to stay the course in defense of Christians. For 16 years, he said, Iraqi Christians begged Western leaders to help them. Addressing Orban directly, Nicodemus said, “Nobody understands our pain like you.”

What is the typical American conservative political response to the suffering of Middle Eastern Christians? In 2014, Sen. Ted Cruz went to a Washington summit where leaders of besieged and persecuted Middle Eastern Christians had gathered, and read them the riot act from the stage, saying that he will not support them unless they openly support Israel. As I wrote back then in response, it was a disgusting act of self-aggrandizement — and I say that as a supporter of Israel. Whatever the personal views of those bishops and priests about Israel, had any one of them gone to America and publicly supported Israel, they would have been murdered when they got back home. This was a case of an arrogant American politician trying to make political hay among his Evangelical and fundamentalist supporters by exploiting the life-or-death suffering of the most persecuted Christians in the world.

Who is a better friend to Christians, then: Ted Cruz, or Viktor Orban? What should American Christians think?

Until I saw that 2019 piece I wrote just now, I had forgotten about this exchange I had with Orban back then. It came after Orban admitted frankly that Hungarian society, which is not particularly religious, was stiff suffering from the hangover of Communist totalitarianism:

Orban spoke frankly about the post-communist religious state of his country. “It’s still not a healed society,” he said. “It’s still not in good shape.”

I asked the prime minister if he saw evidence of a “soft totalitarianism” emerging in the West today, and if so, what are the main lessons that those who resisted communism have to tell us about identifying and resisting it.

He said that the Soviets and their servants in Central Europe tried to create a new kind of man: homo Sovieticus. To do this, they had to destroy the two sources of identity here: a sense of nationhood, and the Christian religion. In order to survive, said Orban, “we have to strengthen our national identity and our Christian identity. That’s the story.”

Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not.  For Orban, re-establishing a sense of national identity and the Christian faith are the same project. It’s an attempt to reverse the damage done by Communism. The danger, obviously, is that Christianity becomes emptied of its spiritual and moral content, and is filled with nationalism. On the other hand, if a pro-Christian politician like Orban can at least keep the public square open and favorable to the ancestral religious beliefs of the nation, religious leaders can step into the space politics creates, and do their work of recovery.

There you go. If Christians think that voting for Orban (or Trump, or any other populist conservative politician) is sufficient to restoring Christianity, they’re deluded. What Orban understands, though, is that politicians have to use power to keep liberalism from destroying the sense of the nation and religious belief and practice. I do not believe that liberalism per se necessarily destroys either. Again, though, I believe that actually existing liberalism offers no protection, because it doesn’t even believe in its own classical principles enough to defend them from attack by progressives who have marched through the institutions — including capitalist institutions.

One may not like the way the Viktor Orbans of the world fight to protect national sovereignty, cultural conservatism, and religion in the face of the Left’s assaults, but I prefer the flawed work of defense that they do to the work of defense left-liberals and right-liberals are not doing.

One more thing: Viktor Orban manages to be both a friend to Christians and a friend to Jews. Hammer — who, once again, is Jewish — writes:

The combination here of nationalism, public Christianity and Soros-bashing leads many in the Western press to decry Orbán and Fidesz as antisemitic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving leader in the Jewish state’s history, considered Orbán his greatest European ally. Hungary routinely supports Israel at the United Nations and in its invariable border conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. Moreover, Jewish life itself in Budapest is thriving (at least based on the bleak post-World War II baseline for European Jewry). I spent half a day touring numerous gorgeous synagogues, walking through the historic Jewish ghetto and dining at a very fine kosher meat restaurant. (The goulash was delicious.) And unlike in Western and Northern European countries, which have taken a diametrically opposite stance on the issue of Islamic migration, Jews in Hungary are safe and secure. Armed guards outside synagogues are far from ubiquitous here—unlike, say, in Paris or Brussels.

You know why? Because Orban’s government has kept Muslim migrants out. That’s the reason. I explained this in depth last summer, in the face of widespread anti-Semitic violence in Western capitals, when I was shocked that the traditional Jewish Quarter in Budapest was totally at peace, without armed guards or police guarding synagogues and Jewish businesses. I cited survey data of Jews in a number of European countries, revealing that the one country in Europe that Jews feel most safe in is … Hungary, governed by George Soros’s arch-nemesis. In “Viktor Orban Was Right,” I wrote:

If you could wind back the clock fifty years, and show the French, the Belgian, and the German people what mass immigration from the Muslim world would do to their countries by 2021, they never, ever would have accepted it. The Hungarians are learning from their example. It is impossible to look westward from Hungary, and to see a desirable future in the models elsewhere in the European Union. Hungarians are European, but they see among the European left, and among the European establishment figures (of left and right), a death wish. They seem to believe that the only way to live in harmony with these imported peoples and cultures is to train new generations of European children to despise their own culture and traditions. In this sense, secular liberalism has become a suicide pact for Western nations.

The Left cannot bear to face this fact. Right-liberals can’t seem to do so either. But people who live in the real world can’t afford such illusions. Like my friend David Brooks, I would like to see the roots of classical liberalism strengthened, so we could defend a liberal conception of society. But those roots have badly eroded, for reasons that he and I would likely agree on, to a meaningful extent. I don’t know whether the Hungarians are going to make it through, in the long term. I am told that the younger generations here are fairly woke, or at least they are far more liberal than their parents and grandparents. They get a lot of their information from Western media, and Western social media. The trends do not look good. But at least Viktor Orban and his people are making a stand, and not apologizing for it. Good.

Meanwhile, I would love it if either my friends David Brooks or Russell Moore would come to Hungary, and see for themselves what it’s like. Meet Christians. Meet Jews. Meet anti-Orban liberals, and pro-Orban conservatives. Draw your own conclusions. I don’t expect either man will leave her as an Orban supporter, but at least they will have a better idea of what Orban supporters believe, and why they believe it, than they have now.

And, as Josh Hammer says about Hungary’s national conservative approach to governance, “Lessons for American conservatives are clear and legion.” In a few weeks, CPAC Hungary will kick off. If you are an American conservative, why not come over and see for yourself?

UPDATE: Sorry, but I’ve since learned that CPAC Hungary is not receiving international visitors, and only a limited number of domestic ones. Covid regulations, apparently. Still, you should come over sometime.