Tragic Nationalism: Hungary, the American Right, and Weaponizing Loss

Tucker Carlson’s recent trip to Hungary, complete with a schmoozing interview of Viktor Orbán, has launched more than a few headlines noting the inspiration that a raft of thinkers and pundits on the American right are taking from the man who’s boasted of his desire to create an “illiberal democracy.” There has already been some excellent commentary on how the Hungarian prime minister offers a model for a more radical conservatism here in the United States. These tend to focus on Orbán’s crackdown on the press and undermining of opposition parties, as well as the mixture of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant, and reactionary rhetoric and policymaking he has used to build his coalition. What I want to stress here is the commonalities between Orbán’s brand of Magyarism and American conservatism’s embrace of a sort of nationalism of defeat, a kind of lost cause mythos that defines the nationalist cause through victimhood. To see this connection, we have to turn to one of the most central events in Hungarian history and a core marker of the Hungarian national story.

Modern Hungarian nationalism springs not so much from a core founding myth as a gaping wound: the partition of the country in the wake of World War I through the Treaty of Trianon, in which Hungary lost 2/3 of its geographical territory and millions of ethnic Hungarians to neighboring states. Signed in 1920, the Treaty of Trianon went into effect in July of 1921. The last century of Hungarian politics has been deeply shaped by this event.

By Magyarorszag_1920.png: *derivative work: CoolKoon (talk)Hungary1910-1920.png: Original uploader was Fz22 at en.wikipedia(Original text : fz22 (talk))Austria_hungary_1911.jpg: William R. Shepherd, 1911derivative work: Qorilla (talk) - Magyarorszag_1920.pngAustria_hungary_1911.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11549596

Viktor Orbán, the chief architect of Hungary’s turn toward authoritarianism, was once a liberal anti-communist, consumed more with the task of bringing his country into the new millennium than with indulging a fantastical past. But loss teaches powerful lessons, even if they are misguided ones. Orbán emerged in his contemporary form after being voted out of office at the end of his first term as prime minster in 2002. His party, Fidesz, secured strong support in that election but not enough to fend off a coalition of rival parties entering government. At this, Orbán declared “the nation cannot be in opposition,” in what was a signal of the way he would govern when he returned to power. Reporting on Hungary and Orbán has tended to focus on these details—the story of the liberal anti-communist turned illiberal nationalist, undermining EU principles from within. But Trianon tends to get overlooked in this, and it is Trianon that Orbán has used time and again to make his case and to stress his commitment to the Hungarian nation. Speaking to commemorate Trianon’s 100th anniversary Orbán stated,

“The West raped the thousand-year-old borders and history of Central Europe. They forced us to live between indefensible borders, deprived us of our natural treasures, separated us from our resources, and made a death row out of our country. Central Europe was redrawn without moral concerns, just as the borders of Africa and the Middle East were redrawn. We will never forget that they did this.”

But Orbán did not invent this sense of grievance. He merely seized upon sentiments that were already commonplace among the Hungarian public. A 1991 Pew survey found “Hungary, among all the countries of Europe, East or West, has the largest majority claiming that pieces of neighboring territories belong to them: 68%, or more than two out of three.” These feelings have not subsided, and Orbán and his Fidesz government have played heavily upon the psychic wound of Trianon. In a 2020 survey by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 85% of respondents listed Trianon as the country’s most significant national tragedy. Orbán’s special brand of Magyarism, built in no small part on the legacy of Trianon, has been central to his illiberalization of Hungarian life. Since regaining power in 2010, Orbán and his allies have dramatically limited press and academic freedom, driven out the country’s leading research university (the Soros-backed CEU), revised the country’s criminal and asylum laws, and knee-capped the ability of political opponents to make future reforms. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp captured this transformation in succinct and elegant fashion, writing “Hungary’s civil society looks free and vibrant on paper, but a patchwork of nonsensical regulations makes it nearly impossible for pro-democracy organizations to do their work. The economy seems to be growing, but a significant number of corporations are controlled by Orbán’s cronies.” The shadow of Trianon is cast across the entirety of this anti-democratic project. The 2011 “Fundamental Law” (or Basic Law), the sweeping constitutional reform that established much of Orbán’s current power, proclaims in its preamble “We promise to preserve the intellectual and spiritual unity of our nation torn apart in the storms of the last century” and goes on to assert “We hold that after the decades of the twentieth century which led to a state of moral decay, we have an abiding need for spiritual and intellectual renewal. We trust in a jointly-shaped future and the commitment of younger generations. We believe that our children and grandchildren will make Hungary great again with their talent, persistence and moral strength.” As with Trump’s 2016 campaign, “Great Again,” is the language of some lost past, varyingly defined. In Hungary, that past is clearly identified as the pre-Trianon glory of the Dual Monarchy and, before then, the Christian kingdom of Stephen I.

By Unknown author - Stalna razstava, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7483921

For its part, the EU has been mostly powerless to stop what’s unfolding in Hungary, as well as in Poland, in large part thanks to the check each of the two illiberally-inclined states can put on any serious attempt to sanction the other. Instead, Orbán has become a source of inspiration and kind of model for illiberals in other member states. Rising illiberalism among state-level Republican Parties in the United States poses some similar problems. The American system is vulnerable to these kinds of incursions against what the national majority might want, and American history has obviously seen periods of significant regional variance in the access enjoyed to putatively shared rights. More to the point, this political moment is particularly important if we pay close attention to the contours of the nationalism being crafted on the Trumpian right. They mourn America as often as they celebrate it, decrying a range of losses, from cultural to military excellence, that appear forever lost to the distant past. This vision is often panned as a trip back to the 1950s, but it often reaches even deeper into American history, pulling frequently on Antebellum and Lost Cause myths of the 19th century and occasionally evoking the more theocratic aspects of America’s earliest colonial days.

More recently, the Big Lie of the 2020 election operates in a similar fashion: a mythical defeat that grows all the more powerful in the right-wing imagination because there’s no real way to avenge it. It’s the tragedy of it, the sense of betrayal and wronging, that matters most. In fact, that this wrong can’t be righted—not least of which because it never happened—makes it all the more useful. The emergence of challenges to American democracy at the individual state level, where the myth of a stolen election has taken root among many party activists also offers points of comparison. The challenges to American democracy are diffuse and, in many cases, dependent on the continued commitment of key sub-national level actors to the proper functioning of the system. Beyond the threat of political elites, public opinion presents a mixed bag at best. 61% of Republican respondents in a May 2021 Ipsos/Reuters poll either strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, with another 12% answering “I don’t know.” Moreover, the Big Lie has proven adaptable to new scenarios. In just the last week, Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren used her platform to claim that only voter fraud could save California Governor Gavin Newsom in his recall election. The California Republican Party has itself taken up a similar position. On Monday, with Newsom showing a clear lead in the final 24 hours of voting, the leading GOP candidate, Larry Elder, refused to commit to accepting the results should Newsom survive the recall. The challenge to confidence in future elections presents an obvious dilemma for America’s political health going forward.

It should be clear that tragedy and loss can be especially potent ingredients in nationalist politics, and they are exceptionally fertile themes for fostering the kinds of extreme and illiberal nationalist visions that continue to emerge from a cast of thinkers and provocateurs on the American right. In some ways, this resembles Orbán’s own strategies, especially among the new Catholic right, where neo-integralists like Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari talk about the need for “the good” to take precedence over trite liberal preoccupations like democratic legitimacy and individual freedom. This is the line of reasoning that led Vermeule to argue in the Atlantic that “unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” Other responses have been less philosophically coherent but no less extreme. Rod Dreher, the right-wing intellectual who has perhaps done the most to try and promote Hungary’s illiberal prime minister to the American public, recently wrote the following in response to Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to the country: “Hungary is ruled by a prime minister and a party that prioritizes defending the country’s sovereignty, its traditions, its way of life, and its moral conservatism — this, despite being under constant assault by the EU, globalists, and progressives.” What unites the great bulk of far right reactions to the 2018 and 2020 elections is the sense that Democratic wins, as well as the spread of liberal-minded cultural views, are illegitimate—ethically and, perhaps, legally. Democratic governments and majorities are presented not as setbacks to be overcome in the next election but as an anathema to the very idea of America. This is not unlike how Dreher describes Hungary’s relationship to the wider EU: “The Hungarians are not against the EU; they’re against the EU overstepping its mandate, and attempting to force a left-wing cultural revolution on countries that do not want it.”

As should be plain, this isn’t only a question of electoral fortunes. America’s right has become increasingly concerned with its status in the culture war. What I am interested in here is the way in which this is often framed in a resurgent fashion. Liberals are taken to have already won the culture wars, or at least The Culture Wars v1.0. Conservatives are always fighting uphill against a predetermined liberal status quo. In many ways, this assumption itself is questionable. But what’s of interest to the analysis here is the recurrence of loss as a weaponizing force. Thinkers like Vermeule have retreated to illiberal positions precisely because they no longer believe that conservatism—or at least their particular brand of it—can compete in a democratic marketplace of social norms. Republican efforts at restricting the franchise and increasing ruthlessness in the already ruthless practice of gerrymandering are tied to the idea that any given election could be the party’s demise. Even in the wake of wave elections, Republicans have largely framed themselves as insurgents, barely holding on to power and no more than one November away from permanent minority status. This is the essence of the Flight 93 election argument, wherein conservatives must do anything and embrace any means to prevent a Democratic win and the subsequent, inevitable slide into liberal decay. Taken together, we can see a conservative vision of the country in which the American right has lost the culture war and is always on the precipice of losing the political one.

As many others have observed, Orbán has been successful at turning the state into a tool of the culture war—a stark lesson for American liberals who might assume that such a conflict is irrelevant to the policy battles they presume really matter to voters. What those who dismiss the Big Lie and other grievance-as-politics talking points dominating contemporary Republican circles miss is just how central the culture war is to political success. More than one 20th century political observer understood this, from Antonio Gramsci to Lee Atwater. Trianon has been a key means of fusing Orbán to the very idea of Magyarism. His embrace of the tragedy of the partition and his refusal to let the issue drop has galvanized Hungarians who feel betrayed and insulted by the now-100-year-old treaty. Of course, no one assume Orbán is going to wage a revisionist land war in the heart of Europe., but why would he even if he could? The issue’s potency comes at least in part because nothing can really be done to salve to wound. Offering voting rights to ethnic Hungarians outside the country’s borders is a symbolically powerful act, but Hungary is already in a complex political union with many of its neighboring states—the EU. No, Trianon is simply the most powerful adhesive available for a politician determined to create as little distance as possible between his own personality and what it means to be Hungarian. And Republicans in the United States are following similar patterns. It should come as no surprise then that the emblem of the most famous American lost cause—that of the Confederacy—was marched through the halls of the Capitol on January 6, as protestors screamed that their country was being taken from them.