The other day, after one of the leaders of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol received a long prison sentence, my Twitter feed was peppered by comments about the sanctity of “our democracy” and “liberal democracy.” To which I thought, after a while: Really?
Don’t get me wrong: the January 6th riot was an assault on the American political order, one that deserves harsh punishment. We can argue over whether or not the heavy sentences being handed out to convicted rioters are proportionally just, but there’s not much real debate over the extraordinary villainy of the acts. Symbolically, they were a profanation of the temple of liberal democracy.
Defenders of the American political order deploy the term ‘liberal democracy’ as if it were uncontroversial, and that everybody knew what it meant. Once upon a time we did, maybe, but now, people use that word as if it had the power to chase away doubts and concerns about the political order that has been the governing model for most of the West since the end of the Second World War. In the mouths of everyone from presidents and prime ministers, down to teachers and traffic cops, the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberal democracy’ have had the approximate power that terms like ‘the Church’ and ‘the army’ once had: an assertion of a social fact whose fundamental reality and authority was unquestionable.
Growing up in the Cold War, kids like me learned that democracy was God’s gift to the American people, and that it was our sacred duty to defend it against Communism, as our parents or grandparents had done against Nazism. And what were we defending? The right of the people to rule themselves, most basically. But beyond that (and this was the ‘liberal’ part), we were defending freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the rule of law, and so forth.
You could not imagine any other way to live. All the teachers in my elementary school had hanging on their classroom walls a patriotic calendar featuring a portrait of all the U.S. presidents, which looked sort of like an Orthodox icon of a synaxis of saints. There was a drawing there of the last president, that Nixon man, whom we children knew was bad, somehow, but he was still a president, and we had to respect him. A people who would hate these things, like the Soviets, were alien, dreadful, and to be feared and loathed.
So deep and wide does all this go that even now, with liberalism (a word I use here interchangeably with ‘liberal democracy’) in crisis, it is all but impossible to think beyond the boundaries set by liberalism. Except for radicals of the Left and the Right—and there are more of them now—most of us are restrained by Winston Churchill’s famous line about how democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
We find it difficult to disentangle the words ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ without losing our heads. Almost a decade ago, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán explained in a speech that he wanted to create an “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. His critics have never let him live that remark down. If people in the West only know one thing about Orbán, it’s that he is a partisan of “illiberal democracy,” and therefore a Very Bad Man.
Nobody, of course, has read the full transcript of the 2014 speech in which Orbán made these infamous remarks. Speaking to a crowd at the annual Tusványos summer gathering in Transylvania, Orbán said:
When it comes to a relationship between two human beings, the fundamental view of the liberal way of organizing a society holds that we are free to do anything that does not violate another person’s freedom. The twenty years of Hungarian environment preceding 2010 was founded on this theoretical, conceptual starting point. It accepted a principle that is otherwise a general principle in Western Europe. In Hungary however, it took us twenty years to be able to articulate the problem, that this idea, besides being very attractive on an intellectual level, yet it is not clear, who is going to say at what point my freedom is violated. And as this does not come without understanding, then it has to be fixed and determined by someone. And as nobody was appointed to decide this, therefore everyday life experience suggested to us that it was the stronger party who decided this.
We constantly felt that the weaker were stepped upon. It was not some kind of an abstract principle of fairness that decided upon conflicts originating from a recognition of mutual freedoms, but what happened is that the stronger party was always right: the stronger neighbor told you where your car entrance is. It was always the stronger party, the bank, that dictated how much interest you pay on your mortgage, changing it as they liked over time.
Translation: the liberal way of organizing society centers on the rights of individuals, but in practice that worked out to privileging the powerful. Hungary felt itself to be at the mercy of wealthy multinational forces, as the liberal democratic concept robbed Hungary of its just sovereignty. In other words, “liberalism” was a philosophical cover for strengthening certain parties over the masses.
Orbán went on:
I could enumerate the examples that was the continuous life experience of vulnerable, weak families that had smaller economic protection than others during the last twenty years. Our suggestion for that, and we will try to build the Hungarian state on this, is that it should not be the organizing principle of Hungarian society. We can’t pass a law for this. These are principles that you are free to do anything that does not violate another’s freedom. Instead the principle should be do not do to others what you would not do to yourself.
Then he listed a number of things in which “established Hungarian liberal democracy” failed to produce a good outcome for society as a whole.
- it did not allow governments “to declare that they should serve national interests”—and even questioned the existence of national interests;
- it did not protect Hungarian “public wealth” from being bought up by private foreign investors;
- it did not protect Hungary from falling deeply into debt; and
- it did not protect Hungarian families from falling into “bonded labor”—Orbán’s term for debt slavery to foreign exchange loans
Now, you can certainly argue with any or all of Orbán’s particular examples here. But his overall point is a strong one, and worthy of debate: what is called ‘liberalism’ or ‘liberal democracy’ does not work for the common good of the Hungarian people.
Orbán is not anti-democratic. He prefers “illiberal” democracy, by which he means a democratic form of government that places greater interest on the collective, on the commons, than the current iteration of liberal democracy does. He went on:
[The] Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals, but a community that needs to be organized, strengthened and developed, and in this sense, the new state that we are building is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not deny foundational values of liberalism, as freedom, etc. But it does not make this ideology a central element of state organization, but applies a specific, national, particular approach in its stead.
This makes perfect sense to me. He does not reject liberalism’s foundational values, but he insists that the ideology of liberalism cannot be taken as superior to particular national interests. Orbán has been quite consistent on this. In defending his culturally conservative country’s defense of the traditional family, and the primacy of Christian values in public life (Orbán later said that a better way to understand what he meant by “illiberal” democracy is “Christian” democracy), the prime minister has said that he does not expect any other European country to govern itself according to Hungarian norms, because he respects their sovereignty.
Many Europeans, Britons, and Americans would agree with Orbán here. In the United States, for example, the ruling class—which includes the media, academia, Big Business, and the Democratic Party—insist that to oppose the current year standards on LGBT and race (for example) is to somehow be opposed to liberal democracy, or ‘democracy.’ We find ourselves in the Orwellian situation in which recognizing a people’s right to determine how they will be governed, well within historical U.S. constitutional norms, is denounced as a threat to democracy.
For instance, if one does not accept that certain racial minorities have a right to be treated differently under the law by virtue of their race—a negation of a fundamental liberal principle of equality under the law—then one will surely be denounced as anti-democratic. Such strategies intend to negate the claim, but instead end up undermining the legitimacy of liberal democracy. If being in favor of liberal democracy means that a child of a different race gets to attend a prestigious university whereas your child, despite having a better academic record, is turned away because of his race, then why should you support liberal democracy?
You could say that the problem is not ‘liberal democracy’ per se, but the way the concept has been corrupted by the powerful. There is no doubt something to that. But it could also be that liberal democracy is a victim of its own success. The political theorist Patrick Deneen pointed out in his bestselling book Why Liberalism Failed that liberalism is in trouble because it succeeded. That is, it succeeded so well in liberating the choosing individual from any restraints on his choice that now people find themselves without the wherewithal to build stable lives, and without the mediating institutions that help them to resist the powerful.
This is a political debate worth having. In America, when you hear media figures and politicians gassing on about “threats to democracy,” you should be aware that what they really might mean is “threats to a system that favors current elites and their prejudices, against the common good.” It is frustrating that the challenge that Viktor Orbán, a democrat who fought communism, puts to a globalist political and economic system that rolls over the small, the local, and the traditional, is waved away as mere authoritarianism.
There was once a time when the Left would have had sympathy for a politics that defended the small, the many, and the weak over the big, the few, and the strong—but those days ended when the Left decided to focus on racial and sexual minorities instead of economics and class interest. The mainstream Right is still not where it ought to be in terms of standing for the little guy and his small institutions, and traditional ways, but it is slowly moving there.
When I say that American conservatism has a lot to learn from Viktor Orbán’s approach to governance, this is what I mean. America is not Hungary. Nor is Great Britain, or any other country on earth—and they don’t have to be! Democracy can be saved, even re-invigorated, if it reforms itself in an “illiberal” direction—with “illiberal” understood as a rejection of tapped-out radical individualism that really serves the interests of the rich and socially progressive, not the common man and woman. At some level, the transatlantic globalists must understand this—which is why they are so keen on making sure that nobody takes Hungary’s challenge seriously enough to be discussed.
