Orbán and the Collapse of the Trump Intellectuals

You might ask why American conservatives would care. The details of Mr. Orbán’s running palaver with Brussels are abstruse. In the broadest terms, Brussels insists Budapest adopt various legal and anticorruption reforms before disbursing billions of euros from various EU funds to the Hungarian government. Mr. Orbán resists, either as a principled defense of sovereignty or to avoid oversight of how his government is spending Dutch, German, Swedish and other taxpayer money.

From this unpromising straw, the American natcons tried to spin the political gold of an all-out culture war. Mr. Orbán encouraged them, with an assist (witting or otherwise) from the EU elites he claims to despise. Mr. Orbán’s strategic forays into social legislation, especially targeting sexual ethics, sparked feuds with leading European liberals, allowing Mr. Orbán to present himself as a victim of the elites’ cultural preening.

He picked a fight with billionaire philanthropist

George Soros.

Natcons cheered since Mr. Soros funds a lot of objectionable progressive causes in the U.S., not admitting that in Europe his activism tends toward benign civil-society promotion. Mr. Orbán fed natcons’ isolationist appetites by cozying up to

Vladimir Putin,

helping some conservatives pretend Mr. Putin is mainly a defender of Christian values in Europe while the Hungarian leader obstructed a united European response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Don’t underestimate the extent to which this is all bound up in Trumpism in America. Mr. Orbán probably isn’t a deeper thinker than Mr. Trump, but he is possibly more cynical and certainly more effective. His successes, at winning elections and stoking a European culture war of sorts, allowed putative intellectuals among Mr. Trump’s American supporters and others in the natcon sphere to claim the Trump phenomenon was part of a broader and well-thought-out fight against the left in defense of Western civilization, or something. And that there existed a broad electoral constituency for this.

Too bad for them, then, that Mr. Orbán is taking Europe’s money after all. While Americans were fixated on the drama of the impending midterms and then their fallout, the news from Europe this autumn is that Mr. Orbán is negotiating the terms of his surrender with Brussels. Budapest appears to be prepared to implement a raft of rule-of-law changes to its domestic legal system in return for at least €7.5 billion in European taxpayer money—as was more or less foretold in this space in April.

The main explanation for Mr. Orbán’s turn is his apparent suspicion that there is a limit to Hungarians’ support for his culture warring with Brussels. The limit being that Hungarians might not believe strongly enough in Mr. Orbán’s breed of conservatism to forgo all that cash. You could deride this as greed or crass materialism, but only at your peril. Voters everywhere routinely make decisions not in their economic best interests in service of competing principles. It is telling that Mr. Orbán thinks his voters wouldn’t be prepared to make such a choice here.

There has always been a whiff of the fake about Mr. Orbán’s war on Brussels. That he never proposed the obvious solution to this impasse—Hungary’s exit from the European Union—exposed the limit of his gamesmanship. More fool the American conservatives who didn’t notice this sooner.

None of this is meant as a counsel of despair for Western civilization. While natcons have been organizing conferences in or about Hungary, ordinary American voters have racked up some big wins. The most important of those is the continuing parental drive to wrest back control of America’s schools from a cabal of teachers unions, radical gender theorists and progressive race-baiters.

This has happened the old-fashioned democratic way, via education, explanation and grass-roots persuasion. And it has happened with nary a Trumpish or Orbánist strongman in sight. This is bad news for the class of wannabe court scribes who hoped to carve out careers whispering in such a strongman’s ear, but it is good news for America.