Why Do US Conservatives Like Hungary?

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers interviews Gladden Pappin

Gladden Pappin

Below is a highly informative interview between Freddie Sayers of UnHerd and Gladden Pappin, the American academic who now lives in Budapest and heads up a government-aligned foreign policy institute:

The interview was adversarial, but in a good way, meaning that Sayers asked the kinds of critical questions that a lot of Western people have about Hungary, and Pappin did a good job explaining the Hungarian position in a careful, clear way. I strongly recommend watching the 48-minute interview if you want to get a better idea of why Hungary matters. I especially recommend it because it is so rare to find truthful, balanced views of Hungary presented in the Western media.

For example, just this morning I read this fascinating essay in Tablet by a Jewish writer meditating on why her late CIA analyst mother did not want her (the mom’s) children to be raised Jewish. It contained this swipe at Hungary:

When I asked [former CIA director John] Brennan why he thinks my mother begged me not to raise my kids Jewish, he shifted the conversation northward: There’s been a global uptick in right-wing extremism and white supremacy, he said. Orban, Putin, Modi. Anti-democratic forces are on the rise, making Jews a target.

Now, the piece goes on to highlight the author learning about what she regards as anti-Semitism pervading the ranks of the CIA, an institution that her mother served with distinction. Yet she accepts Brennan’s characterization of Viktor Orban as a right-wing extremist, white supremacist, and anti-Semite who targets Jews! This, even though the Orban government has been philosemitic in policy, and energetically pro-Israel. Here in Budapest, Jews are safe — unlike in Paris, London, and Brussels. Because most of the city’s Jews are politically liberal, they don’t like to deal with the fact that Orban has been a reliable protector of Jews. The anti-Semites of Hungary’s far right actually hate Orban as a liberal squish.

If you believe the Western media’s characterization of the Orban government as “far right,” you will not understand the on the ground reality of Hungarian politics. The actual far right party joined in the left-wing coalition in the 2022 elections, hoping to oust Orban. This led to the hapless left-wing standard bearer, Peter Marki-Zay, bragging on the campaign trail that his coalition was truly diverse, because it contained both “communists” and “fascists” — which was true, but not the kind of thing you want to admit in public.

Did you know that? I bet you didn’t if you rely on the Western media to tell you about Hungary.

I hope you’ll read the Tablet piece, which is really interesting. Yet notice that its author, Justine el-Khazen, doesn’t question that Indian PM Narendra Modi, certainly a problematic figure, can hardly be called a white supremacist. Some in Modi’s movement have been anti-Jewish, but others have been affirmatively Zionist. But there is John Brennan, the former CIA director, making sweeping, ugly accusations — and this American writer just accepts them as true. I suppose it’s hard to blame her, given that most Americans know very little about the world outside of the US, and tend to trust the authorities. But Brennan is lying here, and lying for a reason.

I bring this up to give context to the Pappin interview. We US and UK conservatives who live here in Hungary wage an uphill battle just to get Hungary’s story heard. I have no particular problem with people in the West criticizing the Hungarian government. If you are a liberal, you will naturally oppose its policies. What I object to is the straw man that the Western media, Western governments, and Western institutions create of Hungary and the Orban government. The UnHerd interview with Pappin goes a long way to counter this misinformation.

UnHerd is a British conservative online magazine that generally takes the right-liberal line. In the interview, Freddie Sayers and Gladden Pappin talk generally about the meaning of classical liberalism. Sayers points out that liberal societies exist as a way to allow diverse societies to govern themselves in ways that maximalize individual liberties, without resorting to violence as a way of solving conflicts. Pappin doesn’t disagree with this, but the two men disagree repeatedly over whether or not liberal neutrality is possible.

For example, Sayers says that in Hungary, which allows for same-sex civil unions, but not for same-sex marriage or adoption, gays would feel excluded from full membership in the political community. Pappin pushes back.

“Every society has a norm at some point,” Pappin says. In the contemporary United States, he goes on, if you are a traditionalist Catholic, you are going to find yourself facing lots of obstacles, even discrimination. This is because the powers that be in American society are not neutral on certain matters — and when traditional Catholics bump up against those limits, they lose.

Sayers says he doesn’t doubt that this is true, but if so, then this is wrong. Why not try to reform liberalism to make it a more neutral place that is open to all, as opposed to trashing liberalism tout court?

Because, says Pappin, this is not realistic. There is no such thing as a truly neutral society. “Some sort of vision is going to prevail,” Pappin says. “From my standpoint, there is nothing tyrannical about the traditional vision of human life.”

He explains that we all know, or should know, that there is no way to sustain any society over time without strong families. Therefore, it is reasonable to establish political and legal norms around the goal of protecting traditional families, their formation, and their flourishing.

Pappin is right, of course. You may argue that the standard should allow for families constructed on the basis of same-sex unions, but if so, you have conceded that it is in the interest of the state to pursue policies that favor families.

Later in the conversation, the men discuss the issue of discharging student loan debt as an example of different US vs Hungarian approaches. Pappin says in the US, conservatives got angry over Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt, saying that these young people took on this debt freely, so why should they be given a way out? In Hungary, by contrast, the state follows a policy of suspending repayment of student debt by young female college graduates who have a child, and by forgiving half the debt if they choose to have a second child. The idea is to incentivize family formation — and important goal in a country with below-replacement fertility.

Sayers counters by saying that a childless female college graduate might feel unfairly treated by that policy. Well, yes — but politics requires these tradeoffs all the time. It is impossible to be entirely neutral. A government that decided that it had no interest in promoting or discouraging family formation has not decided to remain neutral on the question, but has declared a position, whether it thinks so or not. This is the point that Pappin keeps pushing.

Sayers asks why it is that conservative governments who declared themselves to be pro-family often have sex scandals. Years ago, a prominent Fidesz politician and theorist was found in Brussels trying to escape from a gay orgy. More recently, the Fidesz president resigned in a scandal in which she quietly pardoned a man from an allegedly politically connected family, who had been convicted of assisting in a pedophilia cover-up.

Pappin says there’s no cause-and-effect here — that it’s not the case that being conservative on family policy causes sex scandal. Societies are made up of humans, and humans are frail creatures. We have to allow for the fact that human beings will fail. The question is, what will we do when their failures become public?

In Hungary, in both those cases, the downfall and punishment of both those Fidesz politicians was swift and sure. Says Pappin, “When I look at the American elite, I see no accountability for bad decision-making.”

Sayers goes on to criticize Orban for advocating anti-liberal norms in public life. Pappin says this kind of talk is “strange and surreal” to him, given how incredibly narrow the bounds of discussion in the United States are. As someone who has lived in Hungary for about as long as Gladden has, I completely agree.

It is very hard to make Americans and western Europeans understand that the field of discussion in Hungary is far more permissive than in countries where woke hegemony runs things. I’ve told many times the story about how in 2021, when I was first here, I interviewed an academic who is one of the staunchest and most principled critics of the Orban government. When I pointed out that he has more freedom in Hungary to say exactly what he thinks about any number of issues, he was surprised to hear it. But it’s true.

He can advocate, for example, for gay rights (which he believes in), or against them, and he doesn’t have to worry about his job. Not so in the US — and not because the government would involve itself. The norms and practices within American higher education have become extremely intolerant and illiberal. He did not know this.

Peter Boghossian, the anti-woke, left-wing atheist philosopher, discovered the same thing when he did a fellowship in Hungary at the Matthias Corvinus Collegium. Though MCC is generally conservative, they encouraged Boghossian to say whatever he wanted, and to challenge MCC students from the perspective of leftist politics and atheism. Boghossian told me that he discovered to his great surprise that he had far more freedom to have open and productive critical discussions in Hungary than at his progressive US state university.

Sayers brings up the common charge that the media in Hungary is controlled by Viktor Orban. It’s not true. Maybe half the media outlets are pro-government, but the most influential ones are aligned with the opposition. Anyway, Pappin explains to Sayers that when the current Fidesz government came to power in 2010, something like 80 percent of the country’s media was owned by Germans. Imagine, Pappin says, 80 percent of the media in the US owned by foreigners. (Pappin might have brought up that in the UK right now, there’s a huge controversy over a bid by the United Arab Emirates government to buy the Daily Telegraph. Clearly the British are concerned about foreign ownership of their major media, and they should be. So why should Hungarians not be?)

Here is where Pappin really excels in this interview. He explains to Sayers that Orban has realized what very few US conservative politicians — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a notable exception — have. Namely, that the old-fashioned idea of liberal neutrality is a phantom that allows the Left to control and weaponize publicly funded institutions. For example, the Left controls public education in the US, and in many cases shamelessly treats it as a means of indoctrinating students into a progressive worldview. Though they do this with public funding, conservative politicians decline to perform any oversight. Orban doesn’t play that game. He understands that the Left has “hijacked” these institutions, and he does not concede their right to run them on the taxpayer’s dime.

“So the solution is to hijack them back for conservatives?” asks a skeptical Sayers.

No, says Pappin. The point is to make public institutions that are paid for by the public accountable to the public’s values. Hungary is not Sweden. Texas is not New York. It is not at all undemocratic to make these institutions answer to the people who pay for them, and whose interests they are supposed to serve.

But, says Sayers, don’t you worry about freedom? Isn’t the level of involvement of the state in the education system, and the media, that we see in Hungary a betrayal of conservative views?

Pappin responds by saying that these classical liberal ideals extolled by Freddie don’t exist in the real world anymore. It’s simply a false choice to say that you must pick between authoritarianism and an ideal form of liberalism. What is called “liberalism” today is often quite authoritarian and illiberal; what these liberals criticize as “authoritarian” can be a form of liberalism that simply draws the lines in different places, e.g., Hungary’s idea of “Christian democracy.”

It’s a hugely important point, made very well by Gladden Pappin. It often takes coming to Hungary for Americans, Britons, and western Europeans to see for themselves how shallow and deceptive the monotonous critique is from the establishment Left. The main thing one notices about this country is how blessedly normal it is. Budapest feels like a more sophisticated version of a major Midwestern city in 1995, with much better architecture. That is to say, it’s secular and tolerant, but still has a baseline of cultural conservatism that the US left behind decades ago. To put a fine point on it: Budapest is quite liberal by Hungarian standards, but Budapest’s liberalism will strike many, even most, American conservatives as ideal.

This is certainly not to say that Hungary is any kind of paradise. I hear from a number of Hungarians who favor the government that the system here is too corrupt (this is a problem in all of the former Soviet bloc countries). I don’t speak the language, but I hear this often enough to believe there must be truth in it. Nevertheless, it would be good if those who criticize Hungary would take on the country as it actually is, not as it exists inside some morbid progressive dystopian fantasy.

The truth is — and this is something Pappin and Sayers touch in at the very end of their illuminating discussion — the era of Western crusading for global liberal democracy has come to an end. Now what? Hungary’s approach is not going to be the approach that all Western countries take, but it is certainly one from which right-wing parties can and should learn.

The national-conservative government in Budapest administers the state from a position advocating national sovereignty, national interest, and advocacy of Christian family values. If Hungarians don’t like this, there are free and fair elections, and they can vote the government out. For the last four elections, they have come out in favor of the Orban government.

What do Hungarian voters know that consumers of US and UK news do not? Watch the Pappin-Sayers interview to start learning.