The Return Of The Moral State

BUDAPEST, Hungary — It was a blustery February afternoon when I arrived at Central European University (CEU). The building is a vast, gleaming atrium of glass and light in the middle of the city. But what was once Eastern Europe’s leading English-language university now sits mostly empty.

Roughly seven years ago, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government forced out CEU’s degree-granting operations, and so the university’s students and most of its faculty moved to Vienna. What remains in Budapest today is a skeleton crew of researchers, along with a library kept open for the public — enough life to keep the place from feeling abandoned, but not enough to disguise what has happened.

I was in a seminar room off the grand atrium, with an audience of two dozen academics, to talk about my latest project on illiberal and post-liberal states. These regimes, I suggested, are too often understood mainly in terms of the bad stuff — corruption, social control, fear, prejudice — when they make more sense if grasped through the ideals they promote and the specific conceptions of human flourishing that they advance. China, for instance, has a clear idea of what it means to be a good Chinese person and is willing to use state power to realize it. The same, I claimed, is true of India, Russia, Turkey, Israel, MAGA America, and yes, Hungary.

They were in no mood to entertain my argument.

Many in the room had stayed in Hungary because it was their home — or because they refused to let Orbán have the last word. As my talk progressed, I watched people fold their arms and lean back. Smiles and polite laughs grew scarce. When question time came, almost everything I said was met with headshakes, and each objection with uniform nods.

Afterward, over dinner, we recovered a kind of civility. But, probably foolishly, I wanted to give my argument one more try. I began with some basic questions: 

Do you think it’s plausible that China has a sense of what it means for its citizens to lead a good life, grounded in values like harmony (héxié) and humaneness (rén), however selectively or strategically applied? Sure, they said. What about MAGA? Aren’t they trying to do something similar? We don’t like those guys, they replied, but fine, maybe.

Now, what about the ruling Fidesz party, led by Orbán, in Hungary? “No way,” came the immediate answer. “Not those assholes.”

The Return Of The Good Life

Most of us raised in liberal democracies carry an unspoken image of what a normal state does. It protects rights, maintains order, grows the economy and arbitrates disputes. But when it comes to life’s deepest questions — what makes a life worth living, what sort of person one ought to become — a decent state is supposed to show restraint. It shouldn’t privilege one vision of human flourishing over another. Such matters should be left to individuals, families, churches and associations.

That posture of restraint feels natural to us. Historically, it is anything but. For most of political history, from Plato and Aristotle onward, the point of political community was understood in teleological terms: The city exists not merely to secure life, but to specify what a good life is and make it possible. Politics was about ends. It was about shaping character, cultivating virtue, honoring certain forms of excellence and discouraging others. Liberalism, in this longer view, is an anomaly and represents a hard-won attempt to step back from authoritative answers to the question of how to live well.

An anecdote is relevant. A few months ago, on X, I posted a poll asking what I should call the book I’m writing. I offered three options: my preferred title, “The Good Life State”; an earlier contender, “Soulcrafters”; and a third that riffed on the mantra of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist volunteer organization closely tied to Narendra Modi’s BJP: “We Make Man.” The results were evenly split, and I would have forgotten about the poll but for one development: it was reposted with a comment by one of the sharpest minds of the MAGA world, Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

“How about you call it,” he wrote, “What Everyone Except for the Last Two Hundred Years Has Thought Political Philosophy Is About.” Teasing though he was, Vermeule was also perfectly correct.

“When it comes to life’s deepest questions — what makes a life worth living, what sort of person one ought to become — a decent state is supposed to show restraint.”

My Trip To Hungary

My six-week trip to Hungary in early 2026 was hosted by the Danube Institute, a right-leaning think tank established by the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, a publicly funded body closely tied to the Orbán government. The institute is closely connected to the regime in more ways than one. Lavishly funded, it serves as a major hub for right-wing international visitors to Budapest; physically, it is built into the old castle walls on the Buda side of the city, amid a maze of tunnels and underground passages, one of which is said to run to the prime minister’s office. You could hardly ask for a better metaphor to describe the institute’s place in Orbán’s Hungary. 

It was open-minded of the Danube Institute to invite me, given my reputation as a liberal political philosopher. Their generosity enabled me to conduct 25 interviews with the regime’s political and cultural elites, including leading thinkers such as András Lánczi; government spokesmen like Zoltán Kovács; constitutional architects, including István Stumpf; foreign advocates such as Rod Dreher; as well as critics and dissidents like János Kis, Michael Ignatieff, and Gábor Iványi.

In a different year, I might have secured an interview with the prime minister himself. But Hungary faces a national election in April, and after 16 consecutive years in power, Orbán is locked in a close race to retain control. After a brief stint as prime minister from 1998 to 2002, his party has governed with repeated parliamentary supermajorities since 2010, enabling it to rewrite the constitution and significantly reshape the country’s institutions.

Under Orbán’s rule, liberal critics have used various descriptors for Hungary, from democratic “backsliding” or “defective democracy” to calling it a “hybrid regime” or straight up “autocracy.” Others, mocking Hungary’s most famous cultural export, call it an “operetta dictatorship.”

I propose a different label: Hungary under the Fidesz party is best understood as a teleological regime, one ordered toward a substantive vision of the good life. It is, in other words, prepared to use state power to rank and promote those forms of life it deems worthy of honor. And it does so not only to ensure Hungary flourishes collectively, but also because it believes this is the best way for individual Hungarians to thrive.

To call Hungary teleological is not to deny its corruption or authoritarian tendencies. Fidesz’s inner circle has grown enormously rich, and the party has excelled at constitutional capture, seizing every lever of power it can. Orbán’s taste for grandeur and spectacle is well known. The zebras are real. So too is the hypocrisy, whether at the personal level — as when a pro-family Fidesz politician was caught at a gay orgy in Brussels during Covid — or in the gap between the regime’s pro-life rhetoric and the shabby healthcare it provides. 

But kleptocracy and coercion alone are poor explanations for a regime’s durability or appeal. They cannot explain the slow, patient, expensive work of long-term institutional design: rewriting a constitution, refashioning public law, rebuilding an education system and pouring money into a supportive intellectual class. There are easier ways to steal.

Love, Loyalty & Faith

Orbán’s 2010 landslide, which gave Fidesz a two-thirds parliamentary majority, marked the beginning of the regime in its current form. He used that mandate to draft and rush through a new constitution — the Fundamental Law — in April 2011, on a timetable that the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, criticized for its lack of transparency and weak public debate. The new constitution significantly reduced government oversight, and the commission warned that its heavy reliance on so-called “cardinal laws” — which require a two-thirds majority to pass or amend — would lock in Fidesz policies that should remain open to ordinary politics.

But more interestingly, the regime did not use its constitutional moment only to entrench power. It used it to moralize the state. The new text opens with a “National Avowal,” declaring that Saint Stephen made Hungary part of “Christian Europe” a thousand years ago and affirming “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood.” It defines marriage as “the union of one man and one woman” and casts the family as the basis of the nation’s survival. Above all, it names the three values meant to bind Hungarian life together and orient it toward a common end. “We hold,” the text proclaims, “that the family and the nation constitute the principal framework of our coexistence, and that our fundamental cohesive values are loyalty, faith, and love.”

“Kleptocracy and coercion alone are poor explanations for a regime’s durability or appeal.”

Don’t get me wrong. Love, loyalty and faith are admirable values. But to a liberal eye, it is deeply weird to see them enshrined in a constitution. Love cannot be commanded; faith should not be prescribed; and if the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that states shouldn’t elevate loyalty to a highest good. What, then, was going on?

If anyone could tell me what Orbán’s constitutional revolution was meant to do, it was István Stumpf, who had been there from the start. In the early 1980s, Stumpf founded and ran the Bibó College in Budapest, the elite residential college that incubated the young Fidesz generation, Orbán among them. Over the decades, he became a sort of Fidesz consigliere: not the movement’s public face, but an avuncular, steady, academic figure who moved between ideas and institutions. He later served as the minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office in Orbán’s first government and then as a justice of Hungary’s Constitutional Court. We met in January at his office and sat on a couch beneath a sentimental landscape painting of his home village, Hercegkút, to which he kept glancing as he spoke.

The Fundamental Law, he explained, was not meant simply to allocate powers or codify rights. Its goal is to shape a people. In his words, it was “a guideline for life — for the life of the new generation, for the life of the people.” When I pressed him on whether he had in mind the life of the country or the lives of individual Hungarians, he answered: “I think both of them.” The constitution “provides a bridge between the past and the future,” preserves Hungary’s “European culture and religious heritage,” and includes “some kind of things which connect the new generation with these values.” As he said this, he gave a little nod to the painting above him.

To me, this sounded like the language of the “common good,” a now-fashionable term on the American post-liberal right for a teleological approach to law, legislation and judicial interpretation. Stumpf agreed at once: “That’s right.” He told me that when he traveled around Hungary lecturing judges, they would ask him: “What’s the common good? How can I do that?” His advice was not to retreat into procedural neutrality, but to follow the language of the constitution. The National Avowal’s thick moral language was there to furnish a framework of interpretation, to help guide courts and officials in their readings of it. Judges, in other words, should adjudicate disputes and interpret laws according to the constitution’s vision of the good life, distilled in the values of loyalty, faith and love.

Stumpf was not an outlier. János Csák, another member of the constitutional committee, surprised me by being even more direct: “Our constitution,” he told me, “is Aristotelian — including Aquinas and St. Augustine.” For the contemporary right, those names are something of a shibboleth, a quick signal that one is evoking the common good tradition. András Lánczi, the most philosophically minded of the Fidesz elite, argued that the constitution aims at a “spiritual rejuvenation” not only of the country but of its individual members. And the same thought runs through Orbán’s public statements. In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, he reframed Carlson’s suggestion of the fault line between Hungary and Western Europe being ideological as “anthropological” — a clash between liberals for whom the self stands at the center of the world, and those who believe that higher goods of family, nation and God come first.

When the leader of Hungary says that he is engaged in an anthropological revolution — or, more precisely, a counter-revolution — liberals would be wise to take him seriously, especially as he inspires imitators around the world. This deeper ambition may unlock the key to his appeal, at home and abroad.

What Hungarians Want

Orbán and Fidesz are darlings of the MAGA world. At CPAC in Dallas in 2022, Orbán received a hero’s welcome, casting Hungary and the United States as twin fronts in a civilizational struggle and urging conservatives to “take back the institutions.” President Trump returned the favor in a 2024 video message to CPAC Hungary in which he called Orbán a “great man.” Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has praised Fidesz’s pro-family policies and his assertion of control over universities as object lessons for the American right.

“Judges, in other words, should adjudicate disputes and interpret laws according to the constitution’s vision of the good life, distilled in the values of loyalty, faith and love.”

What do these two movements — MAGA and what we might call MHGA — share? Above all, one enemy: liberalism. To hear Orbán and his admirers tell it, liberalism is a hegemonic moral order that claims to leave people alone while quietly saturating institutions, culture, education, media and everyday life with its own values. Hence, the great conservative fear: liberalism is coming for traditional ways of life.

Now, it is one thing for Americans to say this. But given the size of their country, the dominance of their language, their sheer military, economic and political power, and the absence of any regional or international authority to which they are meaningfully subject, it can be hard to take the claim entirely seriously. You can only cry “Flight 93 election” — meaning, “charge the cockpit or die” — so many times before it sounds panicky.

But when Hungarians raise the alarm about liberal hegemony, the claim carries a different weight. The country is tiny, its language is in equal parts lovely and difficult, and it is a small fish in a European Union that can be interventionist on core national questions such as migration and education.

To get a better sense of the national psyche, I concluded each interview with the same question: What is the best thing about Hungarians? I had intended it as a warm way to finish up, and the typical reaction was a small burst of laughter, then a pause, then some version of, “OK, that’s a good question.” People would go quiet and think, feeling their way toward an answer of their own.

The remarkable thing was how often they arrived at the same one. More than two-thirds of my respondents offered a version of this: We’re still here. That is, after 500 years of conquest and trauma — after the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the dismemberment of Hungary after World War I, the successive rule of Nazis, communists and now liberals — we have endured as a nation. That, they said, is the best thing about us. And correspondingly, the great fear among the Fidesz supporters I spoke with is that, should liberals and the European Union have their way, Hungary would lose its distinctiveness. “Magyar Sweden” is the epithet the Danube Institute uses for this prospect.

This fear gives so much of Fidesz policy its shape. The remedy, as they see it, is not simply to lament liberalism but to build a state willing to advance an alternative conception of the good life.

How far are they willing to go? My Fidesz interlocutors were emphatic that direct compulsion was unacceptable. The state should not force people to marry, have children, or live according to a traditional script. Its role, rather, was to reward and honor what it took to be the best way of life. 

Favoritism, in short, is good and necessary. The state should express what Zsolt Németh, chairman of Hungary’s Foreign Affairs Committee, called “a clear value preference.” There should be, he insisted, “positive discrimination for marriage, positive discrimination for family.” Those who choose a certain “lifestyle and a model of life” should receive honor and public resources, while those who choose differently should suffer “no negative consequence.” Stumpf made much the same argument, comparing such policies to forms of affirmative action in liberal states: not the punishment of alternatives, but support for the form of life the regime judges best. Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s longtime international spokesman and secretary of state for public diplomacy, put it plainly: “Nothing is obligatory. It’s not pressed or forced upon people. We don’t want to tell them how to live, but we like to show an example of what we think is the best way to live.”

Nowhere is this logic clearer than in Fidesz’s treatment of the family. If positive discrimination is the regime’s modus operandi, the traditional family is its chosen object: the form of life it lavishly rewards, honors and holds up as exemplary.

Love & Family

Whenever I tell people about Hungary’s pro-family policies, those who don’t know much about the country can hardly believe me. First, there is the scale. In 2026, government spending on family policy amounts to 5% of Hungary’s GDP, twice what the state spends on defense. Second, the range: there are programs teaching young people how to date and find a partner, tax breaks for newlyweds, subsidies for expectant parents, state-backed home and renovation schemes, subsidized mortgages, expanded IVF, modernized maternity wards, donor breast-milk payments, and continually increasing childcare and nursery support. This is no culture-war ornament. As Attila Beneda, deputy state secretary for Family Affairs, told me, this is “a lifetime story, from conception to death,” designed to make one form of life financially feasible, socially honored and politically central.

“If positive discrimination is the regime’s modus operandi, the traditional family is its chosen object: the form of life it lavishly rewards, honors and holds up as exemplary.”

The most striking benefits tie family formation to long-term material security. Tax policy is the clearest example. Mothers under 30 receive major income-tax exemptions. Since October 2025, mothers with three children have been exempt from personal income tax for life; the same benefit was extended to mothers with two children in January. Housing support is also expansive: subsidized mortgages of up to 50 million HUF (about $148,000), a down payment of just 10% and renovation support for traditional families in villages and small towns. And, no joke, from 2019 to 2022, families with at least three children could buy a minivan at half price.

But what makes this package of incentives so extraordinary is how prescriptive it is.

In my home country, Australia, a package like this would never fly. We might offer a baby bonus or pour public money into childcare. But we would do so on the assumption that support should follow the child, not a state-favored model of family life: single parents, gay parents, adoptive parents, unmarried couples, blended families, would all be eligible Down Under. Hungary’s system, by contrast, aims at a particular vision of the family: young, heterosexual, married, childbearing and nuclear. That means others fall outside the scheme: same-sex couples most obviously, but also single parents, unmarried partners with families, and adults whose lives do not follow the preferred script of marriage, homeownership or childbearing. This is positive discrimination, Hungarian style. No one, my Fidesz interlocutors reassured me, is compelled. But the right way of life gets a big stamp of approval.

Is the scheme working? Demographically speaking, the answer is no, not really, and that reveals something important. According to a government fact sheet provided to me by Beneda, Hungary’s total fertility rate rose from a historic low of 1.23 children per woman in 2011 to 1.38 in 2024, still far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Worse, the recent trend has been downward: live births fell from 90,335 in 2010 to about 77,500 in 2024. The government is right to note that the number of women of childbearing age has also dropped sharply, by 22.9%, which makes the decline less dramatic than it first appears. Nevertheless, after 15 years, fourfold higher spending and the most expansive family-policy regimes in Europe, Hungary is still not reproducing itself.

So then, what is Fidesz up to? To judge these policies solely by their quantitative results is to miss the point. They are formative and symbolic, as much about signaling and honoring as about raising the birthrate. The message to Hungarians is clear: marriage is good, divorce regrettable and having children — and lots of them — intrinsically valuable. As Balázs Hidvéghi, parliamentary state secretary in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, put it to me, the point is “to valorize, support and appreciate the service, the human decision, of a woman to bear a child.” Remember how the Hungarian constitution named love as a core national value? Well, while you cannot command love or prohibit it, Fidesz can do its best to teach Hungarians what it means to love, and what is most lovable.

Loyalty & Nation

Family is only half the story. If “love” names what Fidesz wants Hungarians to cherish most intimately, then “loyalty” names the community to which those attachments should belong. “There is no beating around the bush,” writes Balázs Orbán, Fidesz’s political director. “For Hungarian politicians, the nation is the supreme value, and its defense and strengthening are our most vital, most timeless duties.” 

That helps explain what happened to Central European University (CEU). Why did Fidesz go after the top-ranked university in the country? And how was it done? A regime reveals a great deal by the institutions it sets out to break.

I traveled to Vienna to get the backstory from Michael Ignatieff, who was CEU’s rector at the time of its expulsion and had relocated there with the university. A human rights scholar, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and one of the English-speaking world’s most prominent liberal intellectuals, he knows something about bare-knuckle politics. He told me that the decisive turn against CEU came in 2017, as Orbán was preparing for reelection. Through a trustee who had met Orbán privately, Ignatieff told me he had learned what was really driving the attack. The university itself, Orbán had told this trustee, was not the real target. He needed “an opponent” — indeed, “an opponent at my level.” In Hungary, that could only mean one man: George Soros, the billionaire liberal philanthropist and founder of CEU.

“The message to Hungarians is clear: marriage is good, divorce regrettable and having children — and lots of them — intrinsically valuable.”

What followed was an assault on all things Soros, very much including “his” university. Posters of his smiling face appeared above the slogan, “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh,” with some even placed on the floors of buses and trams so that passengers would walk over him — imagery that, Ignatieff noted, echoed the Nazi party’s official newspaper, “Völkischer Beobachter,” in 1933. Meanwhile, Fidesz pursued a textbook case of lawfare: rules crafted to appear general but aimed squarely at CEU, which were then reinterpreted whenever the university tried to comply with them. Or, as Ignatieff told me: “It looks like law, walks like law, talks like law, but it’s pure administrative arbitrariness.”

This isn’t just how the episode looked from the losing side. It’s also Fidesz’s perspective. As Lánczi, who at the time was rector of Corvinus University of Budapest, said in a 2021 interview, CEU “had and continues to have an unambiguous political creed, and if you cast yourself as a political or politicized entity, you must be prepared to be handled by political means.” Brutal but clarifying words.

When we spoke in person, he was candid about the larger principle at stake. “Within one half,” Lánczi told me, meaning the Fidesz half of a deeply divided country, “loyalty is not only mandatory, it’s the highest value.” You are free, he went on, “to believe in whatever you want. But if you give up your loyalty, you are no one.”

But even that understates the intensity of loyalty and disloyalty in Orbán’s Hungary. CEU was an outsider institution, hostile in the regime’s eyes, and so it was treated as an opponent: attacked, expelled, cast beyond the national pale. But Fidesz reserves the coldest contempt for insiders who stray. I caught a glimpse when I tried to reach Katalin Novák, once one of the party’s brightest stars: a rare top woman in Fidesz, former minister for Family Affairs, and later president of Hungary — exactly the kind of figure who might have illuminated the regime’s vision of the good life from within. After her resignation for pardoning a man convicted of helping cover up child sexual abuse in 2024, I asked a Danube Institute staffer to help put me in touch with her. The swift reply was no, I didn’t want to speak to her. She was “nothing,” I was told. Any idiot could be president. Then the staffer glanced at my water bottle and said I would get more out of interviewing an object.

After her fall, Novák was a nonperson to party loyalists. More than a constitutional value or a demand of party discipline, loyalty is the spirit of the regime. It sorts the world into insiders and outsiders, belonging and exclusion: this is who we cherish; that is what we cast out.

Faith & Church

The values and institutions we have considered so far — love and family, loyalty and nation — sit behind some of Fidesz’s most popular policies. The family incentives are central enough to the regime that it keeps expanding them at enormous expense. Migration and national sovereignty have been even more potent. In the 2016 nationwide referendum on whether to reject European Union refugee quotas, more than 98% of voters backed Orbán’s position. Even if the result was invalid because turnout fell short, that kind of number tells you something about a country’s instincts.  

Love of family and loyalty to the nation, in other words, are sentiments many Hungarians cherish. Faith is different. Fidesz calls Hungary a Christian nation. The truth, however, is that Christian belief and practice are in free fall. The 2022 census showed a 30% drop in Catholics since 2011, and for the first time, a majority of Hungarians either declared no religion or declined to state one. So, while Christianity is indispensable to the regime’s self-understanding, it is a shaky basis on which to legislate the good life. 

Banning abortion, for instance, would be a logical extension of Fidesz’s rhetoric. But Orbán won’t go there, and when his government introduced the 2022 rule requiring women seeking abortions to hear the fetal heartbeat, he quickly added there were no plans to tighten the law further. Similarly, in 2015, when Fidesz introduced a Sunday shopping ban in the name of Christian rest, he ultimately repealed it the following year due to public backlash. Hungary seems to have its own version of TACO (Trump always chickens out) when it comes to Christian policy: FACO (Fidesz always chickens out).

“The regime doesn’t need to lead Hungarians toward a Christian end. It just needs them to recognize that they already inhabit one.”

I raised these familiar points with Fidesz-aligned Christians. What surprised me was how unbothered many of them were. Sure, church attendance is down. But so what? Németh reached for Jesuit priest Karl Rahner’s idea of “anonymous Christianity”: people may reject the church and still live by intuitions that are Christian. Bertalan Kiss, a Catholic deacon and chief religious diplomatic adviser in the Prime Minister’s Office, made the same point in more forceful terms. When Fidesz calls Hungary a Christian nation, he told me, it is not under the illusion that most Hungarians are churchgoers or doctrinal believers. It asserts that the vast majority already inhabit a Christian moral world in terms of their values.

Fidesz, therefore, spells out the things Hungarians already believe about marriage, family and moral order: Christian truths one and all. Christianity in Orbán’s Hungary is something broader, vaguer and perhaps more ambitious than ordinary faith. Indeed, Kiss was ready to concede that, for him, falling rates of religious observance weren’t decisive. “It doesn’t really matter if you go to church, subscribe to a denomination, practice anything,” he told me. What matters is that “culturally Christianity is so ingrained that these core values — which provide the stability of our identity and our country — aren’t really threatened” by lack of church attendance. Fidesz’s ambition, then, is less to return Hungarians to church than to reflect latent Christianity back to believers and non-believers alike. The regime doesn’t need to lead Hungarians toward a Christian end. It just needs them to recognize that they already inhabit one.

Not everyone on the Hungarian right sees things this way. Some want Fidesz to be more explicitly Christian; others dismiss its piety as opportunistic or theologically illiterate. But the most interesting perspective came from Rod Dreher, who wrote “The Benedict Option,” an influential call for Christians to respond to an increasingly hostile liberal culture by building intentional communities of moral and religious resilience. I asked him whether Hungary might be understood as a kind of actual Benedict Option: a political attempt to create a protected moral world apart from Brussels, New York and liberal modernity more generally.

“I think Orbán has probably gone as far as any politician can to create the conditions by which the Benedict Option can flourish,” he told me. “But he can’t make it happen. And I think that will ultimately, unless something big changes, be the tragedy of Hungary and of Viktor Orbán. He did his best.” For Dreher, the tragedy is that Orbán tried and failed. For a liberal like me, the tragedy is that he tried at all.

A Young Woman Leaves Hungary

My wife and daughter accompanied me on my side trip to Vienna and CEU’s operational outpost. None of us had visited the city before, and on the train, we shared a compartment with just one other passenger: a young woman in her 20s, who sat and knitted quietly with a novel in her lap and a small pride pin fastened to her bag. She was chatty and told us a bit about herself. She had been studying in Amsterdam, returned home to Hungary for Christmas and was now heading back. It had been good to see her family, she said, but she was relieved to be leaving and expected to stay in the Netherlands for good once her degree was finished.

She told us, too, that she is gay and that Hungary no longer felt like home. Not because she felt endangered or even especially repressed. It was something quieter and more wearing: a sense that the country was no longer for people like her, and that she was tired of having to push back or fit in. When she asked what I was doing in Hungary, I explained my project and mentioned that I had been interviewing senior Fidesz figures. Then I asked, half seriously, if there was one question she would want me to put to them on her behalf. She gave a little laugh, then went quiet. She folded her hands, started to answer, stopped, and, after a long pause, came out with just one word, sardonic and sad: Why?

The obvious answer to her question — the liberal answer, the CEU answer — is power and wealth, those age-old goods of tyranny. For them, values talk is lipstick on a pig. Or, in the words of a viral 2025 protest song by rap artist Majka, widely understood as calling out Fidesz, “Do you know why we did all this? Why all the fucking fuss? What else is there, huh? Money, money, money, money!” There’s truth in that, and I’d be an idiot, a useful one for Fidesz, to deny it.

The money-power answer appeals because it is simple and partly true. But it misdiagnoses the conflict. It reduces a rival moral project to pathology — greed, cynicism, manipulation — and, in doing so, obscures what many of its adherents present themselves as doing: defending a vision of human flourishing, however exclusionary, illiberal or dangerous that vision may be. 

This essay will be cold comfort to the young woman on the train. But comfort isn’t the goal. The liberal task is to describe our opponents in terms they could recognize themselves in. This is partly for interpretive decency, but, more importantly, for descriptive accuracy. If we cannot see clearly what we are up against, we cannot respond. Only through understanding can we build a liberalism that isn’t just right, but one that is vital, attractive and good.