Shining Cities and Sovereign Nations

At only 38 years of age, donning a Mitteleuropean moustache, a pair of bright-colored socks, newsman suspenders, and a gallant waistcoat, Miklós Szánthó has mastered the art of the Reaganite schtick. Speaking to an exuberant crowd at this March’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington D.C., the legal analyst and executive director of the Budapest-based Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR) pitched his native country as the new Mecca of conservative thought and activism. He did it with a storied phrase the audience immediately cheered to. “When it comes to conservative governance,” intoned Szánthó, “Hungary is the shining city on a hill.” He went on about Hungary’s 2011 constitution approved a year after Viktor Orbán took office in his second stint as prime minister: “Our fundamental law protects our Judeo-Christian heritage, our national identity, our state sovereignty, and the family as the fundamental unit of society.”

The applause signaled the crowd’s salute to Hungary as much as a recognition of the quote’s original author. In January 1974, greeted by what the New York Times called a “rousing, placard-waving welcome,” Ronald Reagan first deployed the quote in his opening speech at the very first CPAC in D.C. Six years before clinching the Republican nomination, the then-California governor was stress-testing a set of themes that would later become pillars of his governing philosophy. He impelled America to remain—in a dictum borrowed from Puritan colonist John Winthrop—a “shining city on a hill” by championing market capitalism and liberal democracy against a repressive and centrally planned Soviet Union. He also intoned that “the leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philly.” Since then, he went on, “God has placed into America’s hands the destinies of an afflicted mankind,” making it “the last best hope on earth.”

With only slight exaggeration, Hungary is currently the Right’s last best hope on earth. The country’s promise—regularly invoked by Szánthó, Orbán, and their allies—of becoming a shining lighthouse for a global conservative movement in disarray will be on full display at CPAC Hungary on May 4th and 5th, the second edition of the most successful international offshoot of the yearly gathering that Reagan launched in 1974. Much like last year’s edition, you can count on the global Left’s meltdown at such a multitudinous gathering of conservatives from around the globe in the heart of Budapest. The American Left in particular has seized on Hungary’s central role in the political firmament of Donald Trump’s GOP as an allegory of the degeneration of Reagan’s sunny optimism. Whereas the Gipper infused hope in the ideals of human dignity and limited government, they claim, America’s conservatives are forfeiting both by cozying up to a would-be autocrat.

However, if it is difficult to discern the echoes of Reagan’s idealism in Viktor Orbán’s policies, listen more closely. As the world’s longest-serving conservative statesman by far (ahead of Bibi Netanyahu), Orbán’s Fidesz party has approached power as a laboratory for testing policies that conservatives elsewhere are light years away from being able to implement. When droves of migrants threatened to illegally cross the Serbian border in the 2015 hubbub caused by Syria’s civil war, Orbán chose to protect the EU’s outer frontier by erecting a wired fence. Whilst the West flounders in the ‘demographic winter,’ Hungary has reversed those trends with pro-family tax breaks. First and foremost, CPAC will showcase Hungary’s success at values-based governance—and that to put their ideology into effect, conservatives aren’t doomed to LARP their way into redoubts of Christian practice (Rod Dreher, that approach’s architect, lives in Budapest). They can simply win elections.

It will also serve as a much-needed exercise in coalition building. Held under the slogan “United We Stand,” this coalescence of conservatives from the four corners of the earth will highlight unity around first principles amidst the division sowed by conundrums both foreign and domestic, primarily the Ukraine war. Szánthó calls this “realizing the liberals’ worst nightmare”: in effect, CPAC is about achieving an international coalition of nationalists, dispelling the Left’s claim that such a cocktail necessarily leads to war and inter-state conflict. Even those least inclined to indulge in a photo-op with Orbán—say, Romanian conservatives who resent Orbán’s stoking of irredentism in Transylvania—will see the interest of commending Hungary for advancing a vision in which they all ultimately believe: “God, family, and nation,” the Center for Fundamental Rights’ (CFR) motto. They will agree to leave cleaving topics for another occasion and focus on the agreed-upon essentials.

Granted, Reagan’s rhetoric doesn’t quite feel too appropriate—too utopian, almost naïve—for the kind of operation Szánthó is preparing. After all, today’s enemy for conservatives is a far more insidious one than the Soviet Union. It doesn’t pose as a malign state actor, but hides beneath the statements of many. It’s an enemy ensconced in the platitudinal pronouncements of supranational institutions like the EU, which keep invoking dubious ‘rule-of-law’ grounds to deprive Hungary of the funds it is owed, a practice recently taken up by the Biden administration. It is creeping into our culture’s every interstice in the form of transgenderism and LGBT propaganda. More largely, the enemy is our very own neglect of the values that for centuries have underpinned the success of Western nations. There’s no question that the Left will portray CPAC as yet another alt-right confab not worth paying attention to. It will be yet another proof of its unwillingness to deal with substance.