Who knew that Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are what is wrong with the world? I mean, everything was going along quite well, and then these two show up, and boom, now we are in a ‘Crisis of Democracy.’ How did that happen?
That was the general consensus at the Nexus Institute’s ideas festival last weekend in Amsterdam, where I was the lone conservative (I think) onstage with a group of distinguished intellectuals gathered to talk about the turmoil sweeping through the Western liberal democracies. To be fair, I exaggerate a bit about the Trump-Orbán business…but only a bit. It was astonishing to discover how profoundly disturbed so many of these intellectuals are by these two politicians, as if they were stinking beggars who wandered off the city street into a chic party at an art gallery, and nobody can figure out how to make them leave.
To be sure, the festival was terrific, the discussion was vigorous but polite, and I enjoyed it very much. But the preoccupation of some of my interlocutors with Trump and Orbán was telling. (“Northern European intellectuals really are obsessed with them,” a Dutch attendee at the event told me in the lobby.) You certainly can’t blame them for opposing the right-wing populists, whose very existence is a rejection of everything the liberal establishmentarians stand for. But what you need a psychiatrist to explain is why it is so hard for really smart people to reflect on the fact that Trump and Orbán are in power because they and their class failed.
St. Edith Stein, the Jewish-born Carmelite philosopher who died in Auschwitz, once said something to the effect of secular liberals rarely question themselves because they identify with the Good, and they believe, perhaps without being aware of it, that to question their ability to perceive the Good accurately is to question the Good itself.
This long pre-dates Trump, of course. The stories American conservative academics tell about being shunned, bullied, and even openly insulted by their colleagues, simply because they are conservative, could fill several volumes. (A 2020 survey of U.S. academia found that Democrats outnumber conservatives on university faculties by a ratio of nine-to-one. Liberal academics are exquisitely sensitive to the plight of “marginalized” people—racial and sexual minorities, women, and the disabled—but care nothing about those they push aside for ideological reasons.
Even some who acknowledge that this disparity on campus is problematic often console themselves by saying that conservative academics barely exist, and if they are unwelcome on campus, well, they deserve it because they supposedly reject the values of academia.
To be fair, the gross absence of conservatives in the humanities and social sciences might well have something to do with the relative lack of interest in those fields by conservatives—just as the absence of racial minorities in newsrooms, relative to their presence in the general population, could reflect a cultural lack of interest in journalism. Studies have shown a correlation between whether a journalism student grew up in a household where reading newspapers was common, and their later decision to study journalism; in the U.S., blacks and Latinos are historically much less engaged with newspaper-reading than whites.
But this does not prevent universities from working very hard to overcome these factors, in an attempt to diversify their faculties (nor does it prevent media institutions from hiring for the same reason). It is only when it comes to ideology that liberals and progressives on university faculties reject the principle of diversity. Conservative academics have plenty of anecdotes about faculty hiring discussions in which conservative or religious candidates for teaching positions were openly ridiculed, and later rejected.
J.D. Vance, the incoming vice president and a graduate of Yale Law School, delivered a speech at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, in which he declared that “universities are the enemy.” In it, Vance spoke in detail of the hostile climate on campuses to any ideas that contradict left-wing ideology, and explained how this behavior causes bizarre and destructive ideas to flourish within academia without challenge, and how those ideas make their way to society’s mainstream. He called American universities “fundamentally corrupt [and] dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth.”
Why do they do this? asked Vance. “It’s about power,” he said. Vance went on to explain that universities are sorting mechanisms for elites to perpetuate their own intellectual class, and to move those who hold elite biases into positions of power throughout institutions of both public and private life. Far from being places for the open and unbiased search for knowledge, said Vance, universities have allowed themselves to become political players—and for only one ideological side.
This doesn’t just happen in America, of course. In recent days, Balázs Orbán, the distinguished political director of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government, has been at the center of a scandal at the prestigious Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest.
Balázs Orbán (no relation to the prime minister) graduated summa cum laude from ELTE in 2009. He began his doctoral studies there before launching a career in politics. Orbán has been readying his formal defense of his Ph.D. thesis, titled, “The Constitutional Relations of the Free Mandate and National Sovereignty,” before a panel at ELTE’s Doctoral School of Government and Law.
Last week, the Hungarian opposition website 444 reported that of all the Ph.D. candidates this year, Orbán is the only one who did not receive unanimous support to advance the doctoral process. Though five of the eight judges voted to allow Orbán’s defense to proceed, two opposed it, and one abstained.
Citing three anonymous sources, 444 confirmed that Orbán’s thesis was entirely in order according to professional standards, but those professors who voted against the candidate did so on matters of ‘moral principle.’
In a vicious Facebook post, Gabor Polyak, who heads ELTE’s media and communications department tore into Balázs Orbán as a political actor who, in Polyak’s view, had no business studying at ELTE.
“Colleagues, where is our backbone?” Polyak wrote. “What kind of legal, professional ethos is this, what kind of citizenship? Why do we show the darkest past as an example for future intellectuals? Why are we vomiting on our faces?”
He concluded, “As a university professor at ELTE, I ask myself how it is that Balázs Orbán would obtain a Ph.D. degree at this institution.”
Again: one cannot begrudge Gabor Polyak his anger at the Fidesz government over university funding and administration. Whether he is right or wrong on the facts, the man is entitled to his opinion. Where Polyak crossed the line is in wanting to punish Balázs Orbán academically, despite Orbán’s having all his work in correct order, solely for the fact that Orbán is a conservative who works for a government Polyak hates.
I can’t pretend to be neutral in this matter. Balázs Orbán is a friend, and in a roundabout way my employer at the Danube Institute, a Budapest think tank. But he has never told me to say or write anything in my capacity at Danube, and he has not directed me to write this defense of him. I do so because for much of my career, I have identified and condemned injustices like this within media, academia, and other institutions where the Left dominates. That it is happening in a country governed by an alleged right-wing autocrat, to one of that autocrats most senior aides, tells you something not only about Hungary (something you won’t ever read in the European, British, and American media), but it also gives you a clue as to why despite its failings, the Fidesz Party keeps winning elections: lots of Hungarian voters understand perfectly well that the only defense they have against liberal institutional elites who despise them and their values is in an elected government that looks out for them.
Are universities the “enemy” in Hungary, as in America? I could not possibly say, as I don’t speak the language or understand the Hungarian system. And again, no fair-minded person could object to professors, or anybody else, rejecting conservative ideas and practices as a matter of principle. Universities are supposed to be places where one is free to dissent.
But when those academicians use their authority within supposedly neutral institutions to behave in a highly unethical manner, discriminating against a student solely on the basis of that student’s right-wing political views, what else are observers supposed to conclude? And what are conservative faculty and students at that university meant to think about their own positions, and prospects for professional advancement?
Donald Trump won the recent presidential election in part because many U.S. voters are sick and tired of being insulted and bullied by leftists who hold institutional power. Some film industry insiders, for example, complain that even though they are political liberals, the crushing intolerance and ideological conformity of Hollywood leftists in power made them not entirely sorry that Trump had won the election. Now it is reported that university administrators fear what the incoming Trump-Vance administration might do to interfere with their operations, in an attempt to roll back political bias and discrimination.
Republican politicians have complained about this problem for decades, but did little or nothing to combat it, even at publicly-funded universities, because they respected a classical liberal taboo against the state meddling in university affairs (this, despite the fact that Democratic administrations have saddled universities with any number of requirements to advance left-wing policy goals, such as permitting transgendered athletes to participate in college sports as the gender of their choosing). With the ascent to power of a president whose campaign the entire liberal institutional apparatus—including elite university professors—tried to thwart using lawfare, smears, and other dirty tactics, the days of GOP inaction are probably over.
If a policy backlash eventually comes from the new Trump Administration, universities have no one to blame but themselves. Nobody on the Right ever expected them to be mouthpieces of conservative politics and values. They only expected them to be fair. If publicly-funded professors and administrators consider fairness to conservatives to be a form of fascism, then they should not be surprised when the people who pay their salaries—taxpayers, ultimately—exact accountability.
Further, public intellectuals of the Left who wail and gnash their teeth over the rise to power, via democratic elections, of postliberal right-wing politicians like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán ought to spare a moment to consider how these men arose in part because voters had enough of being gaslighted by progressives in power who embraced illiberal practices—like seeking to deny a man the right to defend his Ph.D. thesis, because of his politics—while thinking of themselves as righteous defenders of liberalism.
It is often said that what happens in America eventually comes to Europe. Given the decadence of American culture in recent years, that can understandably be received as a dire threat. But in this case, it might well be cause for European hope.
Unprincipled Liberals & the Principle of Cause and Effect
Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest.
Who knew that Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are what is wrong with the world? I mean, everything was going along quite well, and then these two show up, and boom, now we are in a ‘Crisis of Democracy.’ How did that happen?
That was the general consensus at the Nexus Institute’s ideas festival last weekend in Amsterdam, where I was the lone conservative (I think) onstage with a group of distinguished intellectuals gathered to talk about the turmoil sweeping through the Western liberal democracies. To be fair, I exaggerate a bit about the Trump-Orbán business…but only a bit. It was astonishing to discover how profoundly disturbed so many of these intellectuals are by these two politicians, as if they were stinking beggars who wandered off the city street into a chic party at an art gallery, and nobody can figure out how to make them leave.
To be sure, the festival was terrific, the discussion was vigorous but polite, and I enjoyed it very much. But the preoccupation of some of my interlocutors with Trump and Orbán was telling. (“Northern European intellectuals really are obsessed with them,” a Dutch attendee at the event told me in the lobby.) You certainly can’t blame them for opposing the right-wing populists, whose very existence is a rejection of everything the liberal establishmentarians stand for. But what you need a psychiatrist to explain is why it is so hard for really smart people to reflect on the fact that Trump and Orbán are in power because they and their class failed.
St. Edith Stein, the Jewish-born Carmelite philosopher who died in Auschwitz, once said something to the effect of secular liberals rarely question themselves because they identify with the Good, and they believe, perhaps without being aware of it, that to question their ability to perceive the Good accurately is to question the Good itself.
This long pre-dates Trump, of course. The stories American conservative academics tell about being shunned, bullied, and even openly insulted by their colleagues, simply because they are conservative, could fill several volumes. (A 2020 survey of U.S. academia found that Democrats outnumber conservatives on university faculties by a ratio of nine-to-one. Liberal academics are exquisitely sensitive to the plight of “marginalized” people—racial and sexual minorities, women, and the disabled—but care nothing about those they push aside for ideological reasons.
Even some who acknowledge that this disparity on campus is problematic often console themselves by saying that conservative academics barely exist, and if they are unwelcome on campus, well, they deserve it because they supposedly reject the values of academia.
To be fair, the gross absence of conservatives in the humanities and social sciences might well have something to do with the relative lack of interest in those fields by conservatives—just as the absence of racial minorities in newsrooms, relative to their presence in the general population, could reflect a cultural lack of interest in journalism. Studies have shown a correlation between whether a journalism student grew up in a household where reading newspapers was common, and their later decision to study journalism; in the U.S., blacks and Latinos are historically much less engaged with newspaper-reading than whites.
But this does not prevent universities from working very hard to overcome these factors, in an attempt to diversify their faculties (nor does it prevent media institutions from hiring for the same reason). It is only when it comes to ideology that liberals and progressives on university faculties reject the principle of diversity. Conservative academics have plenty of anecdotes about faculty hiring discussions in which conservative or religious candidates for teaching positions were openly ridiculed, and later rejected.
J.D. Vance, the incoming vice president and a graduate of Yale Law School, delivered a speech at the 2021 National Conservatism conference, in which he declared that “universities are the enemy.” In it, Vance spoke in detail of the hostile climate on campuses to any ideas that contradict left-wing ideology, and explained how this behavior causes bizarre and destructive ideas to flourish within academia without challenge, and how those ideas make their way to society’s mainstream. He called American universities “fundamentally corrupt [and] dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth.”
Why do they do this? asked Vance. “It’s about power,” he said. Vance went on to explain that universities are sorting mechanisms for elites to perpetuate their own intellectual class, and to move those who hold elite biases into positions of power throughout institutions of both public and private life. Far from being places for the open and unbiased search for knowledge, said Vance, universities have allowed themselves to become political players—and for only one ideological side.
This doesn’t just happen in America, of course. In recent days, Balázs Orbán, the distinguished political director of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government, has been at the center of a scandal at the prestigious Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest.
Balázs Orbán (no relation to the prime minister) graduated summa cum laude from ELTE in 2009. He began his doctoral studies there before launching a career in politics. Orbán has been readying his formal defense of his Ph.D. thesis, titled, “The Constitutional Relations of the Free Mandate and National Sovereignty,” before a panel at ELTE’s Doctoral School of Government and Law.
Last week, the Hungarian opposition website 444 reported that of all the Ph.D. candidates this year, Orbán is the only one who did not receive unanimous support to advance the doctoral process. Though five of the eight judges voted to allow Orbán’s defense to proceed, two opposed it, and one abstained.
Citing three anonymous sources, 444 confirmed that Orbán’s thesis was entirely in order according to professional standards, but those professors who voted against the candidate did so on matters of ‘moral principle.’
In a vicious Facebook post, Gabor Polyak, who heads ELTE’s media and communications department tore into Balázs Orbán as a political actor who, in Polyak’s view, had no business studying at ELTE.
“Colleagues, where is our backbone?” Polyak wrote. “What kind of legal, professional ethos is this, what kind of citizenship? Why do we show the darkest past as an example for future intellectuals? Why are we vomiting on our faces?”
He concluded, “As a university professor at ELTE, I ask myself how it is that Balázs Orbán would obtain a Ph.D. degree at this institution.”
Again: one cannot begrudge Gabor Polyak his anger at the Fidesz government over university funding and administration. Whether he is right or wrong on the facts, the man is entitled to his opinion. Where Polyak crossed the line is in wanting to punish Balázs Orbán academically, despite Orbán’s having all his work in correct order, solely for the fact that Orbán is a conservative who works for a government Polyak hates.
I can’t pretend to be neutral in this matter. Balázs Orbán is a friend, and in a roundabout way my employer at the Danube Institute, a Budapest think tank. But he has never told me to say or write anything in my capacity at Danube, and he has not directed me to write this defense of him. I do so because for much of my career, I have identified and condemned injustices like this within media, academia, and other institutions where the Left dominates. That it is happening in a country governed by an alleged right-wing autocrat, to one of that autocrats most senior aides, tells you something not only about Hungary (something you won’t ever read in the European, British, and American media), but it also gives you a clue as to why despite its failings, the Fidesz Party keeps winning elections: lots of Hungarian voters understand perfectly well that the only defense they have against liberal institutional elites who despise them and their values is in an elected government that looks out for them.
Are universities the “enemy” in Hungary, as in America? I could not possibly say, as I don’t speak the language or understand the Hungarian system. And again, no fair-minded person could object to professors, or anybody else, rejecting conservative ideas and practices as a matter of principle. Universities are supposed to be places where one is free to dissent.
But when those academicians use their authority within supposedly neutral institutions to behave in a highly unethical manner, discriminating against a student solely on the basis of that student’s right-wing political views, what else are observers supposed to conclude? And what are conservative faculty and students at that university meant to think about their own positions, and prospects for professional advancement?
Donald Trump won the recent presidential election in part because many U.S. voters are sick and tired of being insulted and bullied by leftists who hold institutional power. Some film industry insiders, for example, complain that even though they are political liberals, the crushing intolerance and ideological conformity of Hollywood leftists in power made them not entirely sorry that Trump had won the election. Now it is reported that university administrators fear what the incoming Trump-Vance administration might do to interfere with their operations, in an attempt to roll back political bias and discrimination.
Republican politicians have complained about this problem for decades, but did little or nothing to combat it, even at publicly-funded universities, because they respected a classical liberal taboo against the state meddling in university affairs (this, despite the fact that Democratic administrations have saddled universities with any number of requirements to advance left-wing policy goals, such as permitting transgendered athletes to participate in college sports as the gender of their choosing). With the ascent to power of a president whose campaign the entire liberal institutional apparatus—including elite university professors—tried to thwart using lawfare, smears, and other dirty tactics, the days of GOP inaction are probably over.
If a policy backlash eventually comes from the new Trump Administration, universities have no one to blame but themselves. Nobody on the Right ever expected them to be mouthpieces of conservative politics and values. They only expected them to be fair. If publicly-funded professors and administrators consider fairness to conservatives to be a form of fascism, then they should not be surprised when the people who pay their salaries—taxpayers, ultimately—exact accountability.
Further, public intellectuals of the Left who wail and gnash their teeth over the rise to power, via democratic elections, of postliberal right-wing politicians like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán ought to spare a moment to consider how these men arose in part because voters had enough of being gaslighted by progressives in power who embraced illiberal practices—like seeking to deny a man the right to defend his Ph.D. thesis, because of his politics—while thinking of themselves as righteous defenders of liberalism.
It is often said that what happens in America eventually comes to Europe. Given the decadence of American culture in recent years, that can understandably be received as a dire threat. But in this case, it might well be cause for European hope.
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