My friend (and Dispatch contributing writer) Adam White once said that the imperative with Donald Trump wasn’t whether you should take him “literally” or “seriously.” It was that you had to take him hypothetically. In other words, you start with the most appealing possible explanation for why Trump does or says something that is hard to defend either literally or seriously, and defend it on imaginary grounds that, if true, would reflect his brilliance.
That’s how I think about the pro-Hungary faction on the American right. Much like the Sweden-worshippers on the American left, they concoct a hypothetical case about a foreign country and pretend that it’s real. Then they take this fictional version of a successful egalitarian socialist welfare state or a successful illiberal nationalist welfare state and proclaim: We can do that here!
Hungary is a beautiful country with a rich history. It also kinda sucks, to paraphrase Johan Norberg’s excellent report on Hungary under the Orbán experiment. It’s the only European Union country that Freedom House rates less than “free.” Hungary’s economic growth in 2025 (0.4 percent) was third to last in the EU, well below the paltry EU average of 1.5 percent. Ireland—which politically has gone in the opposite direction, in good ways and bad—saw real GDP growth at 12.3 percent largely thanks to its embrace of demonic globalism.
For all of Orbán’s whining and bleating about the EU, Hungary gets more money from it per capita than any other member. And as Norberg notes, Orbán has never tried to pull out of the EU precisely because Hungarians wouldn’t want to leave it. He just likes to whine about it, often in furtherance of Russia’s political agenda.
Indeed, just this week, a transcript of a call between Orbán and Putin shows the Hungarian leader begging to be a “mouse” in service to Putin, the “lion.” “I am at your service,” Orban assured him.
None of this bothers Vance, of course, who spent considerable time as an Orbán surrogate peddling Russian talking points. This week, he railed against the EU for trying to raise Hungary’s energy costs and diminish its “energy independence.”
What independence? Hungary gets nearly all of its oil, gas, and electricity from Russia, and Putin has promised to keep the supply plentiful and cheap to help Orbán get elected.
But let’s get back to the shining example of Hungary—a relatively poor landlocked country with a GDP per capita roughly half of Mississippi—which we’re supposed to consider a model for the United States, a vast, continent-spanning country of 340 million.
The nationalists who fret over declining birth rates like to cite a momentary uptick in Hungarian birth rates—though still well below replacement level—which has now evaporated and is trending down further.
It doesn’t matter because at least Orbán said he wanted women to have more babies (I do too, by the way).
Indeed, so much of the case for Orbánism boils down to what Orbánists say, not what they do. “It’s one of the last countries that identifies as a nation built on Christian precepts … a big part of the population identify as Christians,” pronounced Tucker Carlson in 2024. And, according to Carlson, that’s what motivates Orbán’s critics. “It’s a Christian country and they hate that,” he said the previous year.
But as Norberg writes, it’s all hype:
But in fact, Hungarians seem to be turning away from religion as it is becoming increasingly politicized. According to the official census, between 2011 and 2022, the share of Hungarians who self-identify as Christians declined from 54.2 to 42.5 percent. The share calling themselves Catholics declined from 38.9 to just 29.2 percent, a drop from an estimated 3.7 million Hungarians to 2.6 million. In urban areas and among the young, secularization has gone the furthest. In Budapest, less than a quarter describe themselves as Catholics. Among 20–29 year olds, no religious affiliation is almost as common as Christianity.
Hungary’s religiosity is not the worst in Europe, but it’s not at the top either. It’s just fairly typical, but the trends Orbán and his fans claimed were turning around, aren’t.
This is a familiar story. Going back to Lincoln Steffens coming back from the Soviet Union to declare “I have seen the future—and it works!,” there have always been some people who look at illiberal (Orbán’s own word for his political project) or authoritarian, or even totalitarian countries and see what they want to see. In Liberal Fascism, I recount how many intellectuals looked at the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and even to a much more limited extent, Hitler’s Germany, and said, in effect, “We should be doing that.”
They couldn’t see the lies, the misery, or the cruelty of these “experiments” because they didn’t want to. What they wanted was an argument about power. Get rid of messy liberal democracy, shove chaotic capitalism and the rule of law aside, and put the right people in power who are unafraid to use it, and we can do all the wonderful things here, too.
This is what Vance & Co. find so useful about the ignoble lie of Orbánism’s success. Orbán is wildly corrupt. He’s stacked the courts, the media, the universities, and big business with loyalists. In pre-Trump America, conservatives readily recognized this as corruption. Now it’s a program for many on the right. Gussy-up favoritism, cronyism, and the politicization of rules and institutions by slapping some fancy lingo about industrial policy and reshoring and—ta-da!—you have some brilliant new model of political economy. It’s not working that well, but success is a secondary consideration. What matters is solidifying power. And if Orbán loses, it will make arguing that this is a popular people-powered movement just that much more difficult.
Which is why Vance is so shamelessly meddling in the elections of another country.
