Good morning. I’m on the train to Prague with my son Matt, who goes back to the US on the weekend, but who wants to see the Czech capital first. Had a fantastic weekend on the Slovenian coast. It has been five years since I was last at the beach. I’m not much of a beach person, but boy, the Adriatic has its charms. The water was cool, the sun was warming, the people were lovely, and the grilled calamari and octopus were perfect. More people should know about Slovenia. More people should go there.

My friend John O’Sullivan and I came back to Budapest with a nice professional driver I’ll call Sandor. We talked all the way back. I really liked him, and learned a lot about Hungary from talking to him. He’s 40 years old, a former teacher who left the classroom mostly because the pay was lousy, and he can make more money driving clients around the region.

After we got to know each other a bit, Sandor said there was another reason he left the classroom. “I don’t want to offend you, but one of my jobs was teaching English. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I realized that I was teaching my students how to speak a language that would make it possible for them to get jobs elsewhere and Europe, and they would leave the country.”

It is true that Hungary suffers from an outmigration of its young. Salaries here are lower than in western Europe. Last night in a pub, watching the England-Italy match, I talked to the bartender, who is demoralized by the economic situation here. She said you have to work so much longer just to make ends meet than you do in the rest of Europe. Sandor resists English as the language of cultural imperialism. He didn’t use those words precisely, but that’s exactly what he meant.

Talking to him, I realized like I had not yet done in my three months in Hungary what it feels like to be a citizen of a small, beleaguered country — beleaguered not only by politics (the European Union is always at Hungary’s throat), but also by the sense of loss. Nobody else in the world speaks your language. Your population is shrinking, both from emigration and lack of replacement. It’s a rotten place to be in.

Sandor is angry at the Orban government. He believes it overinvested in football stadiums and underinvested in teaching. Yet he expects to vote for Orban’s party, Fidesz, in the 2022 election. He says the opposition has nothing to offer, other than that they are Not Orban. Besides, he sees Hungary’s identity at stake. Sandor has thought a lot about globalization, in ways that Americans, and people of bigger, richer countries, rarely do.

He doesn’t understand the people in Hungary who are eager to imitate the West, particularly the young. Don’t they know that if Hungary is dissolved and assimilated, there will be no getting it back? Why, he wonders, do they never think about what it means to have a home, a place where people speak your language, and share your own history? He didn’t think about this either when he was young, but now it means a lot to him. He could go abroad in Europe and look for a better job, but Hungary is home. There is no other Hungary.

Why does the West demand that Hungary imitate it? He says that Hungary has had to deal with this kind of thing for a long time. The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa, he says, ordered Hungarian schools to suppress history lessons that told the Hungarians about their pre-Habsburg ancestors — this, in an effort to control the cultural memory of the subject people, the Hungarians.

“If you don’t know who you are, it is easier for others to control you,” Sandor says. Yes, I tell him, I write about this in my latest book. Sandor’s words brought to mind this fascinating Harper’s magazine piece from 2019, about the contemporary move in Hungary to recover the Magyar people’s distant past for current uses. It begins at a big annual festival celebrating the barbarian history of the Hungarians. Excerpts:

Fidesz’s sponsorship is also why László Kövér, the speaker of Parliament, was addressing festival attendees in the conference tent shortly after I arrived. He began by welcoming the “heirs and worshippers of Attila and Árpád’s people,” the latter name invoking the chieftain who formed Hungary’s first royal dynasty, and in a few short minutes laid out his own version of the conspiracy preventing Hungarians from knowing their true past. Once upon a time, he explained, the Huns broke their enemies with their ferocious mounted archers. Today, the enemies of the homeland employ a more insidious strategy: they attack the mind. They falsify history and sow confusion about people’s “gender, family, religious, and national identities” until they don’t know who they are or where they are from. But Kövér knows. Hungarians are “the westernmost Eastern people.” Their real roots are on the battlefield, on the steppes, with the nomads. With Attila the Hun.

More:

Almost every country in Europe has a moment in its deep past that serves as its symbolic origin. These speculative beginnings are usually placed in the age of barbarians, where documentation is conveniently sparse. Along these lines, France has Clovis the Frank and “our ancestors the Gauls,” while the Germans celebrate Arminius, who beat back the Roman legions in the Teutoburg woods. Across the Atlantic, even the United States once flirted with the idea of Dark Age roots. Thomas Jefferson originally wanted to place Hengist and Horsa, the two ur-­Saxons who launched the post-­Roman conquest of Britain, on the Great Seal of the United States, arguing that they exemplified the “political principles and form of government we have assumed.”

The Hungarian version is only a little more extreme, although, as far as canonical history is concerned, Hungarian origins are already fairly spectacular. The early Hungarians appeared in ninth-­century Europe as a collection of migrating tribes who raised hell across the continent for a century before settling down in the flatlands of the Carpathian Basin. As a result of their migration from points far to the east, Hungarians speak a language that is virtually unique in Europe. (Their closest linguistic relatives are a handful of tiny tribes living in central Russia, and they also share a distant link with the Finns.)

However, the mythology on display at the Kurultáj posits that Hungarians, rather than being the orphans of Europe, are members of a great inter­ethnic brotherhood, whose heroes include everyone from Attila to Tamerlane to Genghis Khan and whose territory stretches all the way from Budapest to Manchuria. Huns are this brotherhood’s shared ancestors, as are Scythians, Parthians, and scores of other nomadic would-­be world conquerors. Thanks to this shared inheritance, the thinking goes, one can find traces of Hungarian kinship and influence in Turkey, in Mongolia, in Azerbaijan, even in Japan. This is why representatives of all these peoples and more were gathered in a field outside Bugac—to celebrate their common heritage as horse lords from the grassy heart of Eurasia, received history be damned.

Read it all. It’s pretty fascinating. There is some kitsch mixed in with this, some political nationalism, and some real history. The writer makes it clear at the end that the revival of Hungarian ethno-nationalism, rooted in a semi-mythical past, is all about trying to figure out if Hungary should lean into the West, and modernity, or into the East. I brought this essay up in conversation with Sandor, and told him that I strongly sympathize with the Hungarians who wish to resist the West, and its modernity, but that I also recognize that the Nazis leaned heavily on a mythologized pagan past to rally the German people around their rule. I don’t think that’s what Orban is doing (and in any case, as the essay makes clear, this kind of nationalism comes from the 19th century), but I think it’s worth bearing in mind.

Sandor did not realize that the Nazis had done this, and anyway he rejects the comparison. Again, I sympathize with him, though if we had had more time, I would have shared with him my concern that this project centers Hungary’s national identity in a pre-Christian, pagan past. Hungary has been Christian since St. Stephen received baptism around the year 1000, but today, most Hungarians are only nominally Christian. A Christian has reason to worry about where this might go.

Nevertheless, this discussion with Sandor resonated with me because of the way I’ve become much more defensive of Hungary, Poland, and other Central European countries and peoples who are under pressure from the globalist, post-Christian EU establishment to abandon their traditions and assimilate. Sandor is right to consider the EU, and the West more generally, to be a culturally imperialist power (though he bristled when I pointed out that Hungarians did this to non-Hungarian people’s under their rule in the “Magyarization” project of the late 19th and early 20th century). It seems to me that Orban’s outreach to China can only really be understood in light of his urgent wish to protect Hungary and Hungarian identity from EU assimilation, and more broadly from the annihilating aspect of liquid modernity. Any American religious or social conservative faced with the soft-totalitarian drive of wokeness should be able to understand how the Hungarians feel.

I finished over the weekend an excellent book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. They are forthrightly liberal academics who explore in its pages the reasons why liberal democracy has had such a rough go of it in Central Europe and Russia since 1989. They also discuss Donald Trump and Trump populism as part of the same anti-liberal phenomenon.

Krastev and Holmes talk about how liberal democracy, led by Americans, was a missionary project to the rest of the world. The Soviets, of course, saw Communism in the same way, as did Mao’s China. According to Krastev and Holmes, it was the fate of the world’s non-democratic countries eventually to embrace democracy, liberalism, and capitalism — this, according to the way Westerners see it. The world must be shown that the American way of understanding politics and culture was the correct way. This is why you see the EU coming down on Hungary like a ton of bricks over its recent law regulating LGBT education and speech aimed at kids. To the EU, this isn’t simply a matter of Hungary, which is more socially conservative, choosing how to educate its own kids in line with its own cultural values. This is a counterrevolutionary insurrection that must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Modern China is not like that. It is certainly an imperialist power, in that it wants to spread its influence around the world. But unlike America “in the heyday of liberal hegemony,” they write, China doesn’t care what kind of government its allies have. It only wants to know that they will act favorably to China’s interests. “The expectation that others should adopt Western-style liberal democratic institutions and norms seemed as natural as the rising of the sun,” they write. That day is over. The liberal hegemony of the European Union, with its demands that Hungary accept its policies regarding LGBT, migration, and the rest, is driving a Western country, Hungary, into the arms of China, as a means of assuring national survival.

There is something to learn here about how our own internal politics work in the US. We are all living right now through the internal colonization of our country by the woke, who control nearly all the major institutions of American life. The woke are ruthless missionaries determined to exterminate ways of living and seeing the world that conflict with their ideological model. We see what they are doing in schools, but consider also the immense power of woke capitalist corporations, accountable to no one, to nullify the decisions of democratically-elected state legislators when those decisions conflict with woke principles. And with respect to the ethnos, the woke and their powerful, well-funded soldiers are making war on the received history of the American people, and in particular on the histories and experiences of white European peoples, trying to inculcate shame and self-hatred so that whites will become demoralized and accept woke totalitarian rule. (Whites, of course, appallingly did the same thing to Indians they conquered in North America, as the Anglo-Americans did to the Cajun French; no conquering culture’s hands are clean.)

Anyway, my driver Sandor correctly understands that economic globalism and liberal cultural hegemony wish to dissolve nations and peoples, and make everyone into deracinated consumers who have cast aside religion, traditions, and all impediments to “diversity,” by which they mean whatever the progressive ruling class says diversity means today. I don’t know if the strategies by which Hungary’s political leaders have chosen to fight this are correct, or at least usually correct. But I admire that they are at least fighting. It is certainly true that nationalist-populist politicians can use these ideas, and histories (real, invented, or a mixture of both), for disreputable, even wicked, ends. But it is also true that the ruling ideology of the West — liberal, democratic, free-market, wokeness — is far too often the enemy of sovereignty, of tradition (especially European), of religion, and of national self-determination. Flawed though it sometimes is, I prefer the way Orban is fighting back to the way our own conservative American politicians are not fighting back. The Hungarians know, in the particular way that people of a small country do, how much depends on the answers to the questions, “Who are we? What are the stories we live by? Who gets to tell them?”