At dawn last Tuesday morning, the police took a man named András from his home in northeastern Hungary. His alleged crime? Writing a Facebook post that called the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a “dictator.”

András has a point. After winning Hungary’s 2010 election, the prime minister systematically dismantled the country’s democracy — undermining the basic fairness of elections, packing the courts with cronies, and taking control of more than 90 percent of the country’s media outlets. He has openly described his form of government as “illiberal democracy,” half of which is accurate.

András’s arrest is an unusually naked display of what Hungary has become — a cautionary tale for what a certain kind of right-wing populist will do when given unchecked political power. Yet among a certain segment of American conservatives, Orbán is not viewed as a warning.

He’s viewed as a role model.

Orbán’s fans in the West include notable writers at major conservative and right-leaning publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the New York Post. Christopher Caldwell, a journalist widely respected on the right, wrote a lengthy feature praising the strongman as a leader “blessed with almost every political gift.”

Patrick Deneen, perhaps the most prominent conservative political theorist in America, traveled to Budapest to meet Orbán in his office, describing the Hungarian government as a “model” for American conservatives. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and right-wing cultural icon, also made a pilgrimage to the prime minister’s office.

Pro-Orbán Westerners tend to come from one of two overlapping camps in modern conservatism: religiously minded social conservatives (Deneen, for example) and conservative nationalists (Caldwell, Demuth).

Religious conservatives find Orbán’s social policies to be a breath of fresh air. Orbán has given significant state support to Hungary’s churches, officially labeling his government a “Christian democracy.” He provided generous subsidies to families in an effort to get Hungarian women to stay at home and have more babies. He launched a legal assault on progressive social ideals, prohibiting the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities and banning transgender people from legally identifying as anything other than their biological sex at birth.

Conservative nationalists focus on the Hungarian approach to immigration and the European Union. During the 2015 migrant crisis, Orbán was the most prominent opponent of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders approach; he built a wall on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia to keep refugees from entering. He has repeatedly denounced the influence the EU has on its member states, describing one of his governing aims as preserving Hungary’s national character in the face of a globalist onslaught led by Brussels and philanthropist George Soros.

For Western conservatives of a religious and/or nationalist bent, Orbán is the leader they wish Donald Trump could be — smart, politically savvy, and genuinely devoted to their ideals. Hungary is, for them, the equivalent of what Nordic countries are for the American left: proof of concept that their ideas could make the United States a better place.

Understanding the conservative case for Orbán

Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative, is one of a handful of influential Western writers courted by the Hungarian government. He’s met with Orbán and even had plans to take up a fellowship in Budapest before the coronavirus scrambled everyone’s lives.

“I want to be clear that I don’t want to be understood as approving of everything Orbán does,” he told me. “My approval of Orbán is general, not specific, in the same way that there are people who don’t agree with everything Trump does, but who generally endorse him.”

This “general endorsement” is rooted in a sense that the Hungarian leader challenges the liberal elite in a way few others do. In Dreher’s analysis, the dominant mode of thinking in the West is secular and liberal — a political style that suffocates traditional religious observance and crushes specific national identities in favor of a homogenizing, cosmopolitan ideal.

For people like Dreher, who has written that “my politics are driven entirely by fear [of] the woke left,” Orbán is Trump’s more admirable twin. The American president is, as Dreher once argued, “a small, ugly, godless and graceless man” — though one he’d rather have in office than a progressive Democrat. The Hungarian leader, by contrast, is in his view both a true believer and a much more effective head of state.

“What I see in Orbán is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment,” he tells me. “I find myself saying of Orbán what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbán is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.”

What I find fascinating about Dreher’s take — which largely typifies the pro-Orbán arguments among both religious conservatives and conservative nationalists — is that the issue of democracy plays a secondary role in the conversation.

Dreher doesn’t admire Orbán’s more authoritarian tendencies; indeed, he admits that the man has made mistakes, including in András’s case. “I have no doubt that Viktor Orban is not the philosopher-king of my Christian conservative dreams,” he tells me.

But whatever his concerns about threats to basic democratic principles like freedom of the press and fair elections, they don’t play a primary role in his thinking. His evaluation of Orbán centers culture war issues like immigration and religion in public life, an ideologically driven view that obscures the damning democratic deficit in Hungary.

"The mask is off, but their face was not the one I expected to be the one that was lied to and confused"

(Although this isn't unprecedented as seen below)

There are examples throughout history of people on both left and right blinding themselves to the faults of their ideological allies. The great British playwright George Bernard Shaw saw Josef Stalin as a shining example of Shaw’s own egalitarian values. Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the defining libertarian economist, defended Augusto Pinochet’s murderous dictatorship in Chile on grounds that the dictator was friendly to the free market.

Orbán’s crimes, of course, pale in comparison to Stalin’s or Pinochet’s. If such great thinkers in history can trick themselves into forgiving much more egregious assaults on human rights and democracy, it’s understandable that modern conservatives might fall prey to the same tendency to see the best in ideologically simpatico authoritarians.