Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend.
Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail or is failing to get his works published.” This was simply not true. The still young regime had already imprisoned, tortured or executed scores of intellectuals. (Sontag later recanted.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez still talk about Nordic countries as if we have much to learn from them, despite the fact the Nordic model heavily depends on taxing the poor and middle class, not soaking the rich. Now, distinctions matter. The Nordic systems are democratic and decent. Cuba is a Marxist basket case and police state. But the one thing uniting both fan clubs is the tendency to see the countries they imagine them to be rather than the reality.
President Trump, Tucker Carlson and JD Vance (most recently while campaigning for Orban) have all lavished praise on Hungary. Patrick Deneen, a leading New Right intellectual, saw in Orban’s Hungary “a model of a form of opposition to contemporary liberalism that says, ‘There’s a way in which the state and the political order can be oriented to the positive promotion of conservative policies.’ ”
The Heritage Foundation, a once respected conservative think tank that has shed its devotion to the Constitution and traditional conservatism, agrees. Its wayward president, Kevin Roberts, in 2024 called Orban’s Hungary a “model for conservative governance.”
This mirrors Orban’s own explanation: “The Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed,” he explained in 2014. “And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”
Don’t be put off by the word “liberal” here (or by Deneen’s and Roberts’ tendentious use of “conservative”). Orban and his fans aren’t talking about mere left-wing policies. The “liberal” here is the liberalism of liberal democratic capitalism, John Locke, Adam Smith and the American founding fathers.
“Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” Orban claimed. Checks and balances is not actually an American invention. But it is a vital liberal bulwark against authoritarianism and corruption.
When the U.S. Supreme Court said that President Biden couldn’t, on a whim, forgive student loan debt or ban evictions, or when it ruled that Trump couldn’t unilaterally tariff the world or indiscriminately deploy troops to American cities, that was checks and balances at work.
Claims that Orban was an authoritarian could be overblown. But he was moving in that direction, larding the courts, universities and state media with political loyalists and, until this weekend, rewriting the election laws to stay in power.
But his corruption was not exaggerated, and his corruption is why he lost. Orban steered state resources to his cronies, family and hometown friends on a massive scale. But that doesn’t mean he broke the law. He wrote — or interpreted with the help of crony judges — the law to make favoritism legal. That sort of favoritism, it turns out, is incredibly bad for the economy because it distorts the market, misallocates scarce resources for self-serving political objectives and discourages investment. It’s fine to say Orban lost because the Hungarian economy and healthcare system were a mess. But that mess stemmed from Orban’s corruption.
In America we tend to think of corruption as illegal; taking bribes, pilfering taxpayer money, etc. But in many parts of the world that’s neither illegal nor even corrupt. It’s the way business is done. In many developing countries — and for most of human history — government is run like a family business. Special treatment for relatives and allies is natural. What’s unnatural is the modern liberal way of putting contracts out to bid and treating taxpayer money as sacrosanct.
No country is perfect at this. Which is one reason we have checks and balances. Each branch is supposed to be on the lookout for abuses by the others, and everyone is supposed to be subordinate to the rule of law, not the law of rulers.
Orbanism is not a new model, or “wave of the future.” It was a tide of the past. And it’s good news that it’s receding.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.